"Bush was right"? MSM isn't biting yet though...Tierney speaking with God may be getting in the way

The discovery of the Saddam tapes indicating that everyone, including Bush, was right about Iraq having WMD is getting minimal press...

Two likely reasons why:

1) The media is thoroughly biased against anything that could help George Bush, and...

2) William Tierney and the "Intelligence Summit" where this information became public aren't exactly presenting themselves as entirely reliable...even if they're right. Click here for more info from Byron York at NRO.

"Tierney's methods of ascertaining this location were rather unconventional. "I would ask God and just get a sense if something was valid or not, and then know if I needed to pursue it," he said. His assessments through prayer were then confirmed to him by a friend's clairvoyant dream, where he was able to find the location on a map. "Everything she said lined up. This place meets the criteria," Tierney said of a power generator plant near the Tigris River that he believes is actually a cover for a secret uranium facility."

From NewsMax:

"Tape recordings released over the weekend show that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program at least as recently as 2000 - but the press has decided the bombshell development isn't newsworthy."

From CBN News:

"In one of the tapes, Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, said that a biological weapons attack would be the easiest to arrange, and that "anyone could do it. They wouldn't finger us." In another tape, recorded in 2000, an aide tells Hussein that a factory had been built to produce plasma. Plasma is used in making nuclear weapons.

The tapes were recorded during the mid-1990s and later, showing, Tierney says, that despite the damage inflicted on his regime by Operation Desert Storm and U.N. sanctions, Hussein continued to pursue an illicit WMD program, with a little help from his friends.

“Saddam and Tariq Aziz are on tape talking about France and Russia helping them. C'mon, it's time to stop being the world's sucker,” Tierney remarked."

From Pravda:

"If you think the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq came to nothing and that the pretext for the war was unjustified, then you would be mistaken. Saddam possessed a huge arsenal which he managed to smuggle out of Iraq with the help of Russian special forces. Indeed this story came to light several years ago. The source of this story is John Shaw, the former high-ranking Pentagon official. In October 2004 he announced to the world that Russian special forces had hidden the Iraqi dictator’s weapons in Syria and Lebanon. It is true that not even those in the organization itself believed him. Did the head of the Pentagon Donald Rumsfeld dream of finding WMDs in Iraq?"

From Investors.com: 'Bush Was Right' (Posted 2/21/2006)

WMD:

The quote above is that of a former UNSCOM member after translating and reviewing 12 hours of taped conversations between Saddam Hussein and his aides. So what's on the covers of Time and Newsweek?

The tapes were officially presented Sunday by former FBI translator Bill Tierney to a private conference of former weapons inspectors and intelligence experts in Arlington, Va. Tierney is an Arabic speaker who worked in the mid-1990s for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the agency responsible for overseeing Iraq's disarmament.

On one of the tapes, made in 2000, two years after Saddam kicked out U.N. weapons inspectors, two Iraqi scientists can be heard briefing Hussein on their progress in enriching uranium using plasma separation. If successful, their work would have given Saddam the fissile material he needed to make a nuclear bomb.

...Some highlights from the tapes were played last Wednesday night on ABC's "Nightline." The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Pete Hoekstra, has listened to some of the tapes and said they were "authentic."

In one exchange taped in April or May 1995, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamil al-Majid, briefed Saddam and his aides on his success at concealing Iraq's WMD from inspectors. "We did not reveal all that we have," he said. "They didn't know the extent of our work on missiles."

Skeptics will no doubt claim that this is merely a case of a sycophant massaging Saddam's ego, telling him of programs that didn't exist and progress that was never made. But many of these were programs and weapons the U.N. documented after Desert Storm and of which the U.N. itself demanded a full accounting in Resolution 1441.

So what happened to them? Both Israeli and U.S. intelligence observed large truck convoys leaving Iraq and entering Syria in the weeks and months before Operation Iraqi Freedom.

John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told the conference that former Russian intelligence boss Yevgeny Primakov went to Iraq in December 2002 to supervise WMD transfers into Syria.

According to Georges Sada, Saddam's No. 2 Air Force officer, two Iraqi Airways Boeing jets were converted to cargo planes and moved the WMD to Syria in a total of 56 flights six weeks before the war. The flights were disguised as part of a relief effort after a Syrian dam collapsed in 2002.

So what is on the media's mind? Not Saddam's secrets, but those of Vice President Dick Cheney — as evidenced by his failure to notify the Washington press corps immediately after his hunting accident. That subject graced the covers of both Time and Newsweek and preoccupied the weekend talk shows.

A better cover story would be Saddam's tapes, and a better headline was uttered by Tierney on "Fox & Friends" Monday morning: "President Bush was right."