OLBERMANN: Good evening. First, an insider tips off the U.S. and suddenly there’s a shootout with his sons, then today a tipster inspired by their deaths drops a dime and as many as 10 of his bodyguards are captured in his home city of Tikrit. Our fifth story on the COUNTDOWN tonight: Are we getting warm, yet? Does the appearance of these informants auger the capture of Saddam Hussein? Is he even still around to be captured? First that news from Tikrit.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We’re still working through the intelligence with them and we’re really interrogating them, now. So, I don’t have any specific answers to your questions in terms have they been with him recently.

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OLBERMANN: But, capturing Saddam’s bodyguards is just one overnight success story for the 4th I.D. in Tikrit. And another informer led troops to a buried weapons cache, that included, among other things: 34 rocket propelled grenade launchers with 150 grenades, 28 sub-machine guns, 11 homemade bombs, and 45,000 sticks of dynamite.

Searches are also underway in other towns in the so-called “Sunni triangle,” north of Baghdad. Including one in Fallujah that turned this house upside-down. The homeowner’s son said the raiding party told him they had information Saddam was hiding inside. He wasn’t home.

Is he somewhere where are we getting close? An atypical expert for cable television news joins us now, from Tampa, Florida. John Loftus is a former prosecutor for the U.S. Justice Department, he’s an author, he has his own nationally syndicated radio show, “The Loftus Report,” and his insights about Iraq and security have often proved so far ahead of the curve as to seem implausible, only to later be proved absolutely correct.

Mr. Loftus, good evening to you.

JOHN LOFTUS, HOST "THE LOFTUS REPORT": Well, thanks, Keith. Actually, I have some good friends down here. I live in Tampa Bay where both Centcom headquarters and the Special Operations Command headquarters are.

OLBERMANN: Just a coincidence.

LOFTUS: Just a coincidence.

OLBERMANN: Do you read into the selling out of Uday and Qusay and now about these bodyguards that we are getting close to finding Saddam Hussein dead or alive?

LOFTUS: Well the story down here is that we're not even looking for Saddam Hussein because military intelligence is so convinced that he was killed on March 20. We had an observer that saw his body being dug out of the rubble, carted off and half an hour later we had a British wiretap intercept of an Iraqi doctor calling for a Russian doctor to help because a senior member of the regime is seriously hurt and his heart has stopped. So no one's seen or heard from Saddam since March 20, you know, and gee, I kind of thing the guy would have at least held up a newspaper at some point, you know, with the date on it so people would know he was still alive.

OLBERMANN: Why hasn't the government said anything about this, then?

LOFTUS: Well, you know the joke of the Pentagon is that they're not going to say Saddam is dead until they have concrete evidence; they want to haul his body out of the concrete. The problem is that the last thing that we heard about Saddam was some Russian doctor was treated him, there's some suspicion now, he might be buried at the Russian Embassy. So, nobody has the body, so nobody's confirming it. But everyone in -- that I've talked to in Centcom and Special Operations Command are so certain that he's dead that they're not even bothering to look. The "New York Times" was flatly wrong; Task Force 20 hasn't even been hunting for Saddam Hussein. They've been working on their weapons of mass destruction recovery project. No one's looking for him down here.

OLBERMANN: If he's dead and as you've often said on your radio program, if there are really weapons of mass destruction still on the ground, in or around Iraq -- why are more of the troops not yet home?

LOFTUS: Well, I think that you have a very serious guerrilla war going on and it's being funded by Iran. Iran is paying a bounty to out of work Ba'ath thugs and Fedayeen mercenaries and for every American soldier you kill, you get a bounty. I mean, it's profitable work for them. So, Iran is making sure the war stays hot.

OLBERMANN: This apparent rush to fink out the sons and the bodyguards, in this week -- does that signal that if Saddam Hussein is dead that the news is about to come out and people are trying to make deals, if you will before the window closes?

LOFTUS: Well, there's a lot of deals being made. My favorite one is "Abu Tiba" (PH), which I'm told means "father of rumor," and he was the alleged bodyguard that sold an exclusive to the "Times of London," saying, "Oh, yeah. I was with Saddam afterwards." And, a wonderful story about how the family survived, and it's kind of all fiction. We know that many of the videotapes that were shown during the war were prerecorded and one of them, for example, Saddam is walking by a building that was blown up on the first day of the war.

OLBERMANN: Oops.

LOFTUS: You know? And all of these guys are body doubles. Some of them are funny. This one body double, the cubby one, he's three inches shorter than Saddam and about 30 pounds heavier.

OLBERMANN: They don't have a good continuity director over there.

LOFTUS: No. No, they have a few problems.

OLBERMANN: Last question, getting back to your introduction of somebody who's very often well ahead of the curve. Why are there no major finds of weapons of mass destruction and when will we get those?

LOFTUS: Well, apparently they've located where the weapons of mass destruction are in neighboring countries. They were moved just across the boarder and they will be released, conveniently, in the middle of the election campaign. So, they're just sitting on the treasure, waiting for my democratic friends to embarrass themselves.

OLBERMANN: Good grief. Former Justice Department persecutor, radio talk show host, John Loftus, the host of "The Loftus Report," thanks for your time, sir.

LOFTUS: You're welcome.

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