We got to meet Bill Tierney after his two-hour session this morning. Interesting guy. He makes a living as a non-native Arabic translator. He encourages others to review the tapes themselves - to a point. When Roger Simon of PJ Media asked him why more material of this kind wasn’t put out there for the blogosphere to vet, he expressed concerns (backed by experience and several anecdotes) that our Arabic translation capabilities, in addition to being inadequate, have been infiltrated by (first) Iraqi agents and (later) by various Islamofascist sympathizers.
[…] The overall picture he painted was one not of a single smoking gun out of Saddam’s mouth, but of a climate in which Saddam and his deputies were supremely confident of their ability to evade - and efficacy in having evaded UN inspections… all the way up to 2002. The tapes are subject to varying interpretations because so much depends on one’s interpretation of context, the nuance of particular words and guesses as to how to fill in blanks in the conversations.