Replies

Mon July 7, 2008
From Brianna Keilar and Larry Shaughnessy
CNN

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Excerpt:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The United States secretly shipped out of Iraq more than 500 tons of low-grade uranium dating back to the Saddam Hussein era, the Pentagon said Monday.

The U.S. military spent $70 million ensuring the safe transportation of 550 metric tons of the uranium from Iraq to Canada, said Pentagon spokesman Brian Whitman.

The shipment, which until recently was kept secret, involved a U.S. truck convoy, 37 cargo flights out of Baghdad to a transitional location, and then a transoceanic voyage on board a U.S.-government-owned ship designed to carry troops to a war zone, he said.

The “yellowcake” uranium transfer was requested by the Iraqi government at the encouragement of the U.S. government, Whitman said.

*snip*

He said yellowcake uranium is a commonly traded commodity used for nuclear power generation. It is not enriched and cannot be used without first going through a complicated enrichment process, he said, but because of the unstable nature of Iraq, the United States and the Iraqi government decided it should be moved out of that country. Iraq has no nuclear power generating plants.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/07/iraq.uranium/index.html

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Separately US President George W Bush said looting could be one of the reasons why the former Iraqi regime’s suspected arsenal of weapons of mass destruction has not yet been found.

“For more than a decade, Saddam Hussein went to great lengths to hide his weapons from the world,” Mr Bush said in his weekly radio address.

“And in the regime’s final days, documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned.”

Inventory checks

IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told BBC News Online that a team of IAEA inspectors which began visiting the Tuwaitha facility earlier this month was continuing its work.

The seven-member team is checking nuclear material against the agency’s inventories.

They are expected to report by the end of next week.

Tuwaitha was heavily looted for a period during the war, and there has been particular concern about barrels which once stored low-enriched uranium, known as “yellow cake”.

The barrels were emptied and sold to local people for $2 each by looters. Many used the barrels to hold drinking water or food, or to wash clothes.

Limited mission

About 1.8 metric tons of “yellow cake” and 500 tons of unrefined uranium went missing as the Iraqis left Tuwaitha unattended during the war.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3009082.stm

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In Saddam’s and his sons’ demonic hands, his brutal regime and cohorts, it would’ve been impossible to predict what he may have attempted to do with it in the future.

We probably won’t know for years all that was discovered in Saddam’s regimes hidden caches, bunkers and hiding places.