Bill Tierney is a former army intelligence man who now does freelance translations of Arabic documents. That's how he got a gig transcribing and translating some mysterious tapes said to be recordings of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen.

On "Coast to Coast AM" last week, Tierney claimed the tapes prove Iraq had a huge WMD program right up to the U.S. invasion of 2003.

A big supporter of the occupation and other American misadventures in the Middle East, he told host George Noory that his translations vindicated the White House's decision to attack Iraq. But Tierney seemed livid that nobody in the Bush administration seems to be interested in the transcriptions.

Tierney's resumé includes torturing Arabs in Baghdad and at Camp X-Ray, protesting outside the hospice where Terri Schiavo was being kept semi-alive with a feeding tube, and making bizarre pre-war claims about "underground uranium plants" in Iraq that he could drive to with his eyes closed.

Tierney actually spent a few years working for the United Nations' weapons inspectors in Iraq because he reads and writes Arabic, but he resigned under a weird cloud due to his evangelical Christian stunts.

He told the conservative magazine National Review that God gave him instructions and directions to various WMD sites in Iraq.

Unfortunately, God doesn't seem to be any smarter than the Americans or the U.N. inspectors -- years after Bush began the latest war in Iraq, no such WMD sites or factories have been found.

Tierney also followed the clairvoyant dreams of a friend, but those proved just as useless as God's directions.

God reportedly told him to join the Army in 1983.

In a speech last year, he said he enjoyed torturing Arabs but was furious that his prisoners "did not break."

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Bill Tierney Is BACK!

Jonathan Schwarz, A Tiny Revolution

February 16, 2006

Here are some Tierney highlights (mostly swiped from Billmon/WOC):

• He joined the army in 1983 because God told him to. In the late nineties he was detailed to UNSCOM, but was forced to retire early for a hazy incident involving praying with a Christian Iraqi defector.

• In 2002 he was a civilian interrogator at Guantanamo for two months until he "was dismissed when DIA officials once again felt he wasn't following established procedures."

• Before the Iraq war, he said in a radio interview he'd pinpointed a secret uranium enrichment facility in Iraq. How did he locate it? "I would ask God."

• After the war he went on CNN to explain how the terrfying WMD were on the verge of being found. He also called fellow guest Imad Khadduri "an agent of influence of the Baath Party." Until then Khadduri had cleverly concealed his fealty to the Baath Party by never joining and later fleeing Iraq with his family.

• The U.S. understandably wanted to benefit from Tierney's expertise, so he then spent eight months as an interrogator in Baghdad. As Tierney later explained at an "intelligence" conference:

''The Brits came up with an expression - wog...That stands for Wily Oriental Gentleman. There's a lot of wiliness in that part of the world.'' And when it comes to interrogating wily insurgents, Tierney explained, he favors ''smarts over smack.''

However:

After explaining his various psychological tactics to the audience, [Tierney] said, ''I tried to be nuanced and culturally aware. But the suspects didn't break.''

Suddenly Tierney's temper rose. ''They did not break!'' he shouted. ''I'm here to win. I'm here so our civilization beats theirs! Now what are you willing to do to win?'' he asked, pointing to a woman in the front row. ''You are the interrogators, you are the ones who have to get the information from the Iraqis. What do you do? That word 'torture'. You immediately think, 'That's not me.' But are we litigating this war or fighting it?''

• In March last year, he headed down to Florida:

Mr. Tierney, a former military intelligence officer in Iraq who works as a translator and investigator for private companies, cried as he talked about watching the Schiavo spectacle on television and feeling the utter need to be at the hospice.

Like many of the protesters, Mr. Tierney said he had experienced proof in his own life that God is real. He held out his left hand showing the traces of scars from injuries he suffered in a gas explosion in 1987.

"You can hardly see it anymore," he said, the tears cascading down his sun-darkened cheeks. "And I was burned all the way from my waist up. By the laws of physics, I should be dead. So I've seen miracles."

• In November last year he did an interview with Frontpage Magazine in which he described Judith Miller as "one of the few bright lights at the New York Times."

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What happens when you get a bunch of spooks, lawmakers, gadget geeks, and military interrogators together in a hotel conference room and ask them to talk - on the record?

By Patrick Radden Keefe | February 13, 2005

ARLINGTON, Va. --''If I'm leaning a little to my left side, it's because I left my right mind at home,'' Bill Tierney told listeners gathered in a basement conference room of a Pentagon-area hotel earlier this week. He had just returned from eight months working as an interrogator for US forces in Baghdad, and had come to talk, on the record, about torture.

''The Brits came up with an expression - wog,'' Tierney said. ''That stands for Wily Oriental Gentleman. There's a lot of wiliness in that part of the world.'' And when it comes to interrogating wily insurgents, Tierney explained, he favors ''smarts over smack.''

''It's the amateur who resorts to violence,'' he said. ''There's always a mental lever to get them to do what you want them to do.''

While onlookers from federal agencies and state and local law enforcement took notes, Tierney outlined what he described as some of his ''tailored'' psychological techniques. (He asked that they not be printed, suggesting that if they appear in a newspaper they might make their way to the handbooks of insurgents in Baghdad, tipping off future interrogation subjects.)

Tierney was one of the first speakers at the National Intelligence Conference, or INTELCON, a novel assembly of representatives from all 15 American intelligence agencies, Congress, the 9/11 Commission, private technology companies-and the press.

In fact, that journalists were admitted to the room at all was one hallmark of this unprecedented gathering. With 600 people registered, roughly half from American intelligence and half from private industry, the conference was a trial balloon of sorts: an effort to create open dialogue within an intelligence community riven by years of compartmentalization, inter-agency competition, and secrecy. William Saxton, a former intelligence officer who conceived of the conference three years ago, said that he wanted to create the first-ever ''nonpartisan informal get-together'' for all those involved in American intelligence ''to share ideas on a level playing field.''

''Intelcon is not about blame or pointing the finger,'' said John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor and another organizer of the conference. ''It's about 'How do we fix things?''' To that end Saxton, Loftus, and others convened 100 speakers, including two former CIA directors, current officials from the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA), congressmen, defense contractors, and intelligence experts from think tanks. (Given the low profile favored by many attendees, it was occasionally difficult to ascertain just what line of work some individuals were in, and under the ground rules of the conference speakers could only be quoted anonymously, unless they agreed otherwise.) Heeding the 9/11 Commission's suggestion that public discourse is ''democracy's best oversight mechanism'' and that too much secrecy has hampered the intelligence community, the organizers took the bold step of making the proceedings unclassified.

The result was three days of intense discussion on every issue confronting American intelligence, from the efficacy and legality of torture to the shortage of trained Arabic linguists to Iraq-related intelligence and the impending structural overhaul of the intelligence community. Presentations and panels included ''Improving the Interpretive Value of Demographic Data,'' ''Terrorism Task Forces: Band-aid or Solution?,'' and, intriguingly, ''Academia: Terrorist Battleground?'' Intelligence practitioners, from on-the-ground covert operatives to the heads of agencies, engaged in the kind of frank and probing conversation to which those without security clearance are rarely privy.

To the extent that the point of the conference was to demonstrate that various elements of the intelligence community could gather in one room, talk openly about the challenges they face, and exchange business cards and ideas, Intelcon was a success. On the other hand, the open forum showcased enduring, intractable divisions among intelligence professionals on fundamental issues like the war in Iraq and a prevailing cynicism about the current capabilities of American intelligence to keep the country safe.

In a trade show adjacent to the conference, high-tech companies hawked pattern-recognition and data mining software. But few present were optimistic about any kind of a quick fix for American espionage, whether in the form of new technology or a new National Director of Intelligence.

The greatest frustration was evident in rank and file intelligence and law enforcement officers. After explaining his various psychological tactics to the audience, interrogator Bill Tierney (a private contractor working with the Army) said, ''I tried to be nuanced and culturally aware. But the suspects didn't break.''

Suddenly Tierney's temper rose. ''They did not break!'' he shouted. ''I'm here to win. I'm here so our civilization beats theirs! Now what are you willing to do to win?'' he asked, pointing to a woman in the front row. ''You are the interrogators, you are the ones who have to get the information from the Iraqis. What do you do? That word 'torture'. You immediately think, 'That's not me.' But are we litigating this war or fighting it?''

Some listeners murmured in assent; others sat in rapt attention. In all the recent debates about the Bush administration's stance on torture, this voice, the voice of the interrogators themselves, has been almost entirely absent.

Asked about Abu Ghraib, Tierney said that for an interrogator, ''sadism is always right over the hill. You have to admit it. Don't fool yourself - there is a part of you that will say, 'This is fun.'''

It is that part, he continued, that a successful interrogator has to learn to identify and control. ''Right now the Army wants to get interrogators right out of high school,'' he said. ''A high school grad does not have the maturity to handle this job. There was a 19-year-old with me in Baghdad. What's going on in her head is what kind of fingernail polish she's going to wear. And she's sitting across from a guy from Yemen....'' His voice trailed off.