Good synopsis, Chester. Thanks!
Correction (my fault - in a hurry): BILL Tierney.
Mea culpa. Good blogging, pardner!

Let me get this straight. We are keeping a lid on this information to get Russian cooperation on Iran?

Somehow, having them sell advance air defense systems to Iran does not sound like the kind of cooperation I would want for keeping a lid on information that would prove the anti war left has been wrong all along. I guess that kind of thinking is why the Russians are considering the sale of weapons to Hamas too.

If the Russians are just putting on an act of being on the other side in Iran and Israel, they are doing a pretty convincing show.

Russians? Plame works for those? Thats why Rice gets nutty about Syria and Iraq?

New scientists? Plame had Dr.WMD freed the day she posed for TIME magazine. Aziz? Probably worked for us.

Is there any reason to believe any of this?

We've had the whole top level of the iraqi government in Gitmo for 2 years. We got no useful information from them about WMD programs. Under coercion they each told us stuff, but none of it matched up with what anybody else told us. None of them knew anything about a recent WMD program.

Is there any reason whatsoever to suppose that this new stuff is anything other than just another disinformation campaign?

It's 4%. Four measly percent! In the meantime, 100's of Arabic speakers have applied in the last four years to help against the war on terror, and no one has so much as bothered to read their resumes. There's no wonder why no one really knows what is going on.

We've had the whole top level of the iraqi government in Gitmo for 2 years.

No chance moonbat J Thomas... Perhaps you should check your facts before you start accusing others of running a disinformation campaign, since clearly that is your game with claims of Gitmo coercion.

Both Kaye and Duelfer said their reports were based on the facts in front of them, and both said that Iraq had programs, a society in decline, and a in the words of Mr. Kaye "It was more dangerous than we thought."

Serious times demand serious people...

Voice of Disinformation, what reason do you have to consider this data at all credible?

The US public has repeatedly answered polls that *if* Bush was lying about the iraqi WMDs, then he should be impeached. So now we get new, very very soft evidence that implies perhaps there might have been some kind of super-secret WMD program after all.

Why am I not surprised?

But we can wait and see. Maybe something will come from it after all. Who knows, maybe we'll actually find evidence of a WMD program after all these years! Wait and see, unless you really want to gulp down the koolade real fast.

Shellie,

One thing I neglected to mention: my source said that Tierney stated that the US Arabic translation community was heavily infiltrated by Iraqi agents. Tierney had personally been involved in prosecuting some of them. So that's one reason why the delay in adding linguists, perhaps.

J Moonbat. You are factually WRONG on who is in Gitmo. The process for Guantanamo is capture of Al Qaeda or Taliban in Afghanistan (remember that country) and Al Qaeda in Iraq, and Al Qaeda in various other countries. We hold only Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda affiliated people in Guantanamo and the winnowing process is pretty severe. For example, the Afghans have quite a number of people at Bagram prison. Far more than at Guantanamo (where over a hundred have been released, only to see far too many return to Jihad).

Saddam and his regime are held in Iraq, by Iraqis. You may recall Saddam's ongoing trial?

Try to stick with the facts.

So far, all that has been reported out of the conference is consistent with the Kay and Duelfer Reports. Intelligence assessments of Iraq were CONSISTENTLY WRONG for a period of over TWENTY YEARS, and COVERING THE ENTIRE WESTERN COMMUNITY.

The Western Intelligence Community was surprised and shocked by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, and was shocked by his WMD aims which included the Osirak Reactor and forbidden missile technology and Gerald Bull's "supergun" capable of putting a warhead into low earth orbit.

After the cease fire, the entire Western Intelligence Community was shocked by Saddam's extensive Bio and Chemical WMD stocks, nuclear program, and after several years felt they had found everything.

Then Hussien Kamel (Saddam's son in law on the tape) defected (after Uday beat the hell out of him and threatened to kill him) and blew the whistle on Saddam's hidden nuclear efforts and various forbidden precursor chemicals for chemical weapons. No one had considered that Saddam would use obsolete calutrons to refine Uranium, but there they were. Shocking the entire West which had thought they'd caught everything.

So yeah, when Bush said he believed Saddam had WMD, that was the CONSENSUS view of the entire CIA, US intelligence community, Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin, Gerhard Schroeder, and more. Chirac and others simply wanted one more "deal" akin to the 12 other UN resolutions that Saddam ignored.

We had two and only two choices with Saddam: let him "win" and force a climb-down with the US over WMD and just hope he doesn't have them or get them; or decide it wasn't worth taking Saddam's word for it and invading and getting rid of him.

Go ahead, impeach Bush for not taking Saddam's word for it. That's the definition of Gutless.

A real opportunity to gain advantage over GWB is to push him to ditch the UAE company running port security in key US ports and out-hawk him on Iran. Muslims around the world make your kumbayah policy a non-starter. Signs like "Freedom go to hell" or "God Bless Hitler" while they rage and burn our Embassies world-wide make it clear. They ARE the enemy. Period. Full stop.

Jim Rockford, not to get into a long argument about the details just now, but the trouble is that the USA has two big enemies -- radical islamists and radical Republicans. In the short run the radical Republicans are the bigger threat, but that could change in a few years.

And we don't have a lot of foreign friends just now. It's a problem.

I linked thru to Kobayashi Maru's blog. I tried to comment on his fallacious profile statement that Jesus Christ trumps Ayn Rand.

Unfortunately, my comment must wait "moderation;" his word. I posted another comment stating that this amounts to "censorship;" my word. This second comment is awaiting "moderation" too. I shall see if either one of them actually gets posted.

Typical mystic; Christian.

Quasa, censorship on blogs is well-established, particularly on rightwing blogs.

It serves a purpose. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that any time you want a conversation you have to listen to hordes of crazy people ranting at you. If you have a purpose, then it makes some sense to remove posts that don't contribute to that purpose.

Various liberal blogs etc have wrestled with the problem. One approach was to make a Censored thread. The blogger wouldn't delete posts, he'd just move everything he didn't want over to there. People could still read it if they wanted to. This has the improvement (if you believe him) that at least you get to see what it is he doesn't like.

A second approach was "disemvowelment". A small program would remove all the vowels from offending posts. It's still possible to decipher the meaning if you want to, but the blogger has expressed his disapproval and most people don't bother. I consider that not as good.

A third approach was to let readers vote about how good posts are. Then you, the reader, get to set a level of filtering, you can ignore posts that are rated too low. My impression is that this has tended to fail -- only a small minority bothers to mark troll posts bad, and when there are multiple trolls the other trolls mark the same posts high.

Anyway, people tend to think they have the right to have a quiet conversation with people they want to talk with, without having a bunch of loud mean drunks constantly interrupting them. There are lots of blogs and you can find at least one where you won't get censored.

Lenin said, "Words are more dangerous than guns. You wouldn't let citizens oppose the government with force of arms, why would you let them criticise the government with words?" But blogs aren't the government.

Sometimes I look at a wingnut blog where the posters are having fun dreaming up really good tortures for muslim terrorists, and I want to try to bring a little reality to it. But I know it wouldn't be appreciated. It would just get censored.

And sometimes I look at a leftist blog where the posters are trying to plan some course of action, and some troll comes in and tells them they're all moonbats and the Republicans will have the Presidency from now on hahaha losers, and they quit what they're doing and argue with him for a few days.

Neither approach looks ideal.

J Thomas wrote: "but the trouble is that the USA has two big enemies -- radical islamists and radical Republicans. In the short run the radical Republicans are the bigger threat, but that could change in a few years."

I believe that Southerners were saying much the same in 1858.... and cetainly by 1861.

God, I LOVE Radical Republicans...especially because there never appears to be any other kind.

The Q of WMDs will be around for years. Someday we will probably find some buried in the desert or perhaps in Syria. But even if we found some now, the conspiracy nuts would say that Bush had them planted.

As for the Russians, they have quite the conundrum there. They would like to see the US further weakoned by Iranian subterfuge. They would also like to have close ties to the Iranians for weapon sales, oil deals, and for a warm-water port. . .the Russian dream for decades.

But an Iran armed with nukes presents some serious problems. Iran is a very radical Muslim countrwith a long history of supporting many terrorist groups. Would Russia really want them armed with nukes while the Russians are fighting Muslim terrorists in Chechnya and other Muslim provinces?

Hopefully, the Russians will see that a nuclear armed Iran is just as much a danger to them as it is to us.

Thewiz, it makes sense the russians would want to sucker us into attacking iran. If there is any threat of iranian nukes (which seems moderately likely) then we can pull their chestnuts out of the fire and we're the ones who get our paws burned.

On the other hand, they could be extra clever. Something like, they agree to a long-term mutual defense pact with iran, and they promise iran won't develop their own nuclear weapons. They spread stories that we were about to use nukes etc, and they get all the geopolitical goals they want plus we look like the bad guys to the rest of the world.

Iran might very well settle for a nuclear-free middle east, but nobody's making them that offer.

Radical Republicans is an oxymoron. It goes like this...

Radical...Liberal...Moderate...Conservative...Reactionary

but what the hell... LOL

I thank everyone who is posting audio of the tapes on line. Word needs to be spread about Sadamm's dealings, and fast.

I am getting the argument from Moonbats that since we have not found "enough" nuclear material, Bush is lying.

Has anyone heard of hydrogen bombs? Do Moonbats know how they work? Do you distrust my credibility - check above.

-The tapes contain the voices of senior Iraqi scientists, meeting with Saddam. Many of these scientists' identities were completely unknown to UNSCOM. Tierney implied that they were being hidden and were never interviewed in the search for WMD in Iraq.

-References are made on the tapes to "plasma programs" of some kind, which Tierney took to mean that Iraq was attempting to manufacture hydrogen bombs first, rather than more simple nukes.

But lemme guess...just the plain doubt and inability to stomach this information is not enough to remove sadaam from power and Bush still lied, right moonbats?