Posted on 07/17/2005 2:21:36 PM PDT by wagglebee
By April 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had stockpiled 500 tons of yellowcake uranium at his al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons development plant south of Baghdad.
That intriguing little detail is almost never mentioned by the big media, who prefer to chant the mantra "Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction" while echoing Joseph Wilson's claim that "Bush lied" about seeking more of the nuclear material in Niger. The media's decision to put the Wilson-Plame affair back on the front burner, however, may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for President Bush - giving his administration a chance to resurrect an important debate they conceded far too easily about the weapons of mass destruction threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
First, the facts - from a reliable critic of the White House - the New York Times, which covered the story long after the paper announced it was tightening its standards on WMD news out of Iraq.
"The United States has informed an international agency that oversees nuclear materials that it intends to move hundreds of tons of uranium from a sealed repository south of Baghdad to a more secure place outside Iraq," the paper announced in a little noticed May 2004 report.
"The repository, at Tuwaitha, a centerpiece of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program until it was largely shut down after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991, holds more than 500 tons of uranium," the paper revealed, before insisting: "None of it [is] enriched enough to be used directly in a nuclear weapon."
Well, almost none.
The Times went on to report that amidst Saddam's yellowcake stockpile, U.S. weapons inspectors found "some 1.8 tons" that they "classified as low-enriched uranium."
The paper conceded that while Saddam's nearly 2 tons of partially enriched uranium was "a more potent form" of the nuclear fuel, it was "still not sufficient for a weapon."
Consulted about the low-enriched uranium discovery, however, Ivan Oelrich, a physicist at the Federation of American Scientists, told the Associated Press that if it was of the 3 percent to 5 percent level of enrichment common in fuel for commercial power reactors, the 1.8 tons could be used to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a single nuclear bomb.
And Thomas B. Cochran, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Times that the low-enriched uranium could be useful to a nation with nuclear ambitions.
"A country like Iran could convert that into weapons-grade material with a lot fewer centrifuges than would be required with natural uranium," he explained.
Luckily, Iraq didn't have even the small number of centrifuges necessary to get the job done.
Or did they?
The physicist tapped by Saddam to run his centrifuge program says that after the first Gulf War, the program was largely dismantled. But it wasn't destroyed.
In fact, according to what he wrote in his 2004 book, "The Bomb in My Garden," Dr. Mahdi Obeidi told U.S. interrogators: "Saddam kept funding the IAEC [Iraq Atomic Energy Commission] from 1991 ... until the war in 2003."
"I was developing the centrifuge for the weapons" right through 1997, he revealed.
And after that, Dr. Obeidi said, Saddam ordered him under penalty of death to keep the technology available to resume Iraq's nuke program at a moment's notice.
Dr. Obeidi said he buried "the full set of blueprints, designs - everything to restart the centrifuge program - along with some critical components of the centrifuge" under the garden of his Baghdad home.
"I had to maintain the program to the bitter end," he explained. All the while the Iraqi physicist was aware that he held the key to Saddam's continuing nuclear ambitions.
"The centrifuge is the single most dangerous piece of nuclear technology," Dr. Obeidi says in his book. "With advances in centrifuge technology, it is now possible to conceal a uranium enrichment program inside a single warehouse."
Consider: 500 tons of yellowcake stored at Saddam's old nuclear weapons plan, where he'd managed to partially enrich 1.8 tons. And the equipment and blueprints that could enrich enough uranium to make a bomb stored away for safekeeping. And all of it at the Iraqi dictator's disposal.
If the average American was aware of these undisputed facts, the debate over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction would have been decided long ago - in President Bush's favor.
One more detail that Mr. Wilson and his media backers don't like to discuss: There's a reason Niger was such a likely candidate for Saddam's uranium shopping spree.
Responding to the firestorm that erupted after Wilson's July 2003 column, Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters:
"In case people should think that the whole idea of a link between Iraq and Niger was some invention, in the 1980s we know for sure that Iraq purchased round about 270 tons of uranium from Niger."
July 30, 2004
http://www.everythingiknowiswrong.com/2004/07/joe_wilson_stil.html
Joe Wilson still with Kerry Campaign
According to the New York Post, Joe Wilson, the amateur "CIA operative" and vocal Bush basher who's Saddam-never-sought-yellow-cake-uranium-in-Niger story was completely discredited by the 9-11 commission report and the British government's Butler report, is still a Kerry advisor.
New York Post
July 29, 2004 -- DEMOCRAT John Kerry's campaign yesterday gave a ringing endorsement to Bush-bashing Ambassador Joe Wilson — even though a bipartisan Senate committee just found so many holes in his story that even his own wife won't back it up.
Wilson claimed President Bush lied about whether Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger, and Wilson knew it because the CIA sent him there. The Senate report says, if anything, the truth is the opposite of what Wilson claimed.
But that doesn't seems to bother the Kerryites, who yesterday hailed Wilson's "integrity" and said he's still very much a part of the team that Kerry hopes will make him commander in chief. "Joe Wilson has served for many months as an informal adviser to the Kerry campaign and continues to do so," said Kerry foreign policy adviser Susan Rice.
In addition to Joe Wilson they have already indicated that similarly discredited Kerry advisor Sandy Berger is expected to come back into the fold.
San Francisco Chronicle
"Sandy Berger is my friend, and he has tirelessly served this nation with honor and distinction," Kerry said Tuesday. "I respect his decision to step aside as an adviser to the campaign until this matter is resolved objectively and fairly."
But...
Associates said they expected that he would probably try to rejoin the campaign after the FBI concludes an investigation that began in earnest in January, after the National Archives discovered that classified material Berger had reviewed was missing.
What can we learn from the fact that John Kerry has, as his most important national security advisors, these two bumblers (both of whom have been discredited by major bi-partisan reports in more than one country, and one who is under active investigation by the FBI for alleged theft of the most highly classified type of documents)? Just this: Kerry is not serious about national security.
Thank God for NewsMax!
ABC News Links Bin Laden and Saddam
http://archives.warroom.com/abcnews-1999.mp3
Here's a video of the ABC News report:
http://www.mediaresearch.org/rm/cyber/2004/binladen061704/segment1.ram
With shutters clicking and flashes popping, Wilson demanded anew that Rove be fired. "I made my bones confronting Saddam Hussein and securing the release of over 2,000 Americans in hiding in Kuwait," he said before a cluster of microphones beneath a portrait of George Washington. "Karl Rove made his bones doing political dirty tricks. This is not about Joe Wilson."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/14/AR2005071402023.html
'But Schumer, and Wilson, could not entirely resist the Republican bait. "I know that Karl Rove and his allies in the administration are eager to paint Ambassador Wilson as a politically motivated malcontent, but Karl Rove and the RNC accusing Joe Wilson of playing politics is like Homer Simpson telling Lance Armstrong he's out of shape," the senator fumed, with Wilson at his side.
When the questions inevitably turned to the GOP charges about Wilson's credibility and partisanship, Schumer continued, "It's Kafka-esque to turn the tables on this man," the senator said. "He served his country. I believe he was a Republican."'
I thought he had said the VP's office sent him. I don't see how this one is inconsistent with what he's said.
Its there own fault, this all brewed up because they were trying so hard to prove BUSH Lied.
Now, they find out Wilson and wifekyins had an agenda, she was Covert,HELLO, LOL, all the neighbors knew she worked at Langley.
No no. When he first came forward, he wrote and spoke in such a way as to leave no doubt that it was Cheney who sent him...but we haven't been able to find an instance where he actually said it. The reason we all remember it that way is because the Rats were all over TV and print saying it for him.
Then, when it became apparent his wife had sent him, he began declaring he had NEVER said Cheney sent him.
But, he had never done anything to counter the Rats' talking points.
Credit these to falpro:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1444877/posts?page=27#27
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1444238/posts?page=255#255
Re-Ping.
"And, UNSCOM and the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, have known for years that Iraq had uranium concentrate, or "yellowcake" – about 550 metric tons, in fact – and have monitored its inventory in Tuwaitha through regular inspections. Iraq acquired it before the first Gulf war.
That's nothing new.
What's new is the claim that Hussein recently sought an additional 500 tons – a huge amount – from Niger.
The alleged attempted acquisition (couched in final presidential speech drafts as "significant quantities from Africa") was critical to the administration's case that Iraq "has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons," as Vice President Dick Cheney claimed just three days before the war.
It takes hundreds of tons of unrefined uranium to produce enough weapons-grade uranium to make a single nuclear bomb. In addition, the refining process requires thousands of gas centrifuges to separate the isotopes. These centrifuges, in turn, require tubing to make the casings for the rotors that spin inside them.
In a one-two punch, Bush in his State of the Union accused Iraq of not only aggressively seeking uranium from abroad, but also thousands of aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons.
The tubing charge is now also under dispute.
Last October, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence concluded Baghdad could make a nuclear bomb in a year or less – but only if it "acquires sufficient fissile material from abroad." The judgment was published in the recently declassified summary of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq weapons, roughly 80 pages of which is still secret (this is not the same report as the 25-page unclassified white paper the CIA made public on its website last October).
"Without such material from abroad," however, "Iraq probably would not be able to make a weapon until 2007 to 2009," the NIE report continues.
That's a big difference: one year away from a nuke with large uranium imports, or five to seven years without them.
I.C. Smith, a former senior FBI counterintelligence agent who last decade helped prepare NIEs as a member of the National Foreign Intelligence Board, says that without the uranium allegation, the five-to-seven year scenario was not sufficiently alarming to justify starting a war.
It's clear from another part of the NIE the White House knew an Iraqi agreement to purchase 500 tons or more of uranium would "shorten the time Baghdad needs to produce nuclear weapons" – if the deal were true, that is, and the CIA had serious doubts that it was."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33753
Why would Wilson mention the yellow-cake that Saddam already had and that the International Atomic Energy Agency had already been monitoring? The issue was whether Saddam was trying to acquire more of it in order to re-start his nuclear program. Besides, the 550 tonnes of yellow -cake that was in Iraq was of little use to him. It's not like it can be used as a WMD its self.
The media has long history of forgetting things they have reported on in the past
I think it's call selective memory
Thank you for the confirmation.
They had it before the sanctions. It is not a secret, and it is not news.
Ask somebody who does not look at websites like this or listen to talk radio whether or not there was yellowcake uranium in Iraq. You will find out how few people are aware of this.
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