Marines hold nuclear site

Pittsburgh Tribune Review ^ | Wednesday, April 9, 2003 | Carl Prine

[William McKinley]

Probably because of a lack of verification, which if the radiological readings mentioned here are correct, is not surprising right now.

The fun part about this, to me, is that if this pans out, it will be impossible for anyone to plausibly say that we 'planted' the evidence.

You can't 'plant' a building underground in an area with such a high water table. How long the building was there will be easily discovered.

[William McKinley]

Peter Arnett was rehired.

[AndyJackson]

Seegar promises to hold the nuclear site until international authorities can take over.

International!! If this portrayal is correct, then security at this site needs to be reinforced, and it should be held until U.S. experts and investigate and inventory everything, and figure out what to do with it. Until it is clear potential nuclear weapons materials or capabilities it should remain US/UK only.

[Carry_Okie]

You can't 'plant' a building underground in an area with such a high water table.

They do tend to want to "pop up" out of the ground... I can see the headlines now...

Nuclear Ractor Surfaces in Iraq

Surprise!

[Maigrey]

I'd hope that we can send in the mechanical Marines to inspect this site. I don't want any of our guys getting RADS from inspecting this place.

[meyer]

Interesting article. I want to know more!

[deadhead]

"consultant for Titan in Quincy, says 39 rods of uranium were hidden in a specially built swimming pool"

Wow, thanks for the link jw

[mvpel]

Amidst grinding poverty, where peasants eke an existence out of dust and river water, the Saddam Hussein regime built a lavish atomic weapons program. In a nation with some of the world's largest petroleum reserves, Saddam saw the need for nuclear energy.

This attitude bothers me somewhat - uranium is essentially a zero-emissions renewable resource, while oil is not. Just because someone might have huge stockpiles of oil doesn't mean they should just burn it to spin turbines, there are far better uses for oil than that.

[meyer]

Use the link above or use Google to Web search on "Al-Tuwaitha 2003" and you will see a slew of UN inspector pics with captions like this. When you use Google, you have to look at the "cached" copy because they are supressing the copy normally accessible through the links. I put a direct link to the cached page above.

The plot thickens! It looks like the inspectors had some kind of handheld measurement device, presumably a geiger counter pointed at one of the storage facilities. Somebody already mentioned it, but I wonder if the Iraqis scuttled their underground reactor resulting in the very high readings our marines are finding at the site. This would fit the pattern of the sarin and other gas contamination in the Tigress river last week. They're trying to destroy the evidence. Lets hope they miss some.

[demnomo]

This is incredible. Why aren't the news wires going ape? Hmmm. Maybe, the leftis media doesn't want to admit to any WMD finds because it might make the "illegitimate" war, well, legitimate.

I'd love to smack Blix and his sorry sidekick Mohammad. What a couple of morons. They're still in complete denial, too, from what I have read recently.

Marines make much better inspectors, IMHO.

[jwalsh07]

Read #140, it will turn on the lights.

[jwalsh07]

"A former Iraqi scientist says Iraq is hiding materials that could be used to make nuclear weapons. He knows this because he helped hide some of the materials more than 20 years ago.

Gazi George, who lives near Detroit, Mich., and does consulting work in Quincy, fled Iraq in 1981 after helping to hide 39 rods of enriched uranium — enough to build two nuclear bombs.

At the time, George was working for the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission. He was assigned to the Osirak nuclear power plant at Tuweitha when the commission received intelligence that the plant was being targeted by enemy forces during the Iraq-Iran War, which was then about a year old.

In an interview this morning with The Quincy Herald-Whig, George told how he devised a plan to remove the uranium from the nuclear plant’s reactor and hide it in a specially built swimming pool about a mile from the plant."

[try phecta tom]

over where?

[Dog]

It's an expression we use here... when someone wants you to see a thread..

[RippleFire]

bump

[Maigrey]

Maybe we, as a group-wide FReep, e-mail this en-mass, to the media agencies and remind them that they are to "cover the news..."

[tutstar]

French engineers spent a fortune pumping water from the foundation area

Hamza said the French built a reactor at Al-Tuwaitha that Israel destroyed in 1981. The Russians built a reactor that was destroyed during the Gulf War.

hmmmmmm.....more than just the oil interests our foreign 'friends'

[demlosers]

AP News

US Forces Go Tunneling

By:ROBERT TANNER, Asociated Press Writer April 09, 2003

After years of rumors about Saddam's tunnels, U.S. forces begin to venture underground
NEW YORK - The mysterious tunnels of Iraq are rumored to stretch for scores of kilometers (miles), linking palaces, military strongholds and safe houses concealing leaders, treasure or weapons of mass destruction.

For U.S. troops strapping on night goggles and venturing underground, the tunnels are a new kind of battlefield in this war. No maps, no light and no handle - yet - on what they might find.

"For the type of regime we're dealing with, the tunnels represent an ideal spot to conceal weapons and serve as a hideout and in some cases an escape route," said Lt. Mark Kitchens, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is said to have built so many tunnels that just about anything could be underground - troops, weapons or even the Iraqi president himself.

"There were all sorts of tips and rumors, `dig under this and you will find that,'" said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

Buchanan said U.N. arms inspectors in 1998 found a combination of bunkers and tunnels below some of Saddam's palaces, but not the sophisticated network that had been speculated about.

"But that doesn't say that they don't exist," he said.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Tuesday that U.S. Marines have secured a city south of Baghdad - Al-Tuwaitha - where a nexus of underground labs, warehouses and bomb-proof offices extends beneath a site owned by the Iraqi Atomic Energy Agency.

It said 14 buildings betray high levels of radiation and nuclear residue. Weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency recently toured the city, "but did they go underground?" the paper quoted David Albright, a former IAEA inspector in Iraq from 1992 to 1997 as saying.

On Tuesday, at the airport outside Baghdad, 150 soldiers of the 101st Airborne's 3rd Battalion, 3rd Brigade searched a 12-room complex inside a cave with white marble floors, 10-foot (3-meter) ceilings and fluorescent lighting. They found cigarette butts, tea bags and other signs of recent abandonment - but no Iraqis.

"We're going to have to try to figure out where they go," brigade commander Lt. Col. Lee Fetterman told The Associated Press at the airport. "There's no telling."

On Monday, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi colonel in one tunnel who was calling in artillery fire from his hideout.

Also at the airport, a Knight-Ridder news service report described 30 men from 1st Platoon Apache Company entering a tunnel through a "Staff only" doorway below the airport's baggage claim. They found a corridor six meters high and six meters wide (20 x 20 feet) that stretched for hundreds of meters (yards) in each direction - but no Iraqis.

Reports, some stretching back years, allege the existence of tunnels and bunkers built by Serbian, German or Chinese engineering firms, leading from palaces to secret hideaways and more.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeated those claims in December, arguing the futility of U.N. searches for weapons of mass destruction.

"They've got enormous miles and miles and miles of underground tunneling," Rumsfeld said. "I don't know how inspectors on the surface of the Earth can even know what's going on in the underground facilities."

Hussein al-Shahristani, a scientist who was imprisoned by Saddam and fled during the 1991 Gulf War, told CBS' "60 Minutes" in February that plans originally called for a subway beneath Baghdad.

Saddam "got all the drawings; he told his military, `Go ahead and do them but not for a metro, for our weapons of mass destruction. We can hide them, move them around,'" al-Shahristani said. "We believe now it is more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) of very complex network, multilayer tunnels."

But al-Shahristani never saw the tunnels himself, he said.

Few have, said Patrick Garrett of Globalsecurity.org, a military affairs think tank. "There is tons of conjecture on this subject right now," he said, but "there's been no official confirmation or official imagery."

After encountering the caves used by al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the rumors of tunnels here, the U.S. military took steps to ready their troops.

A site with kilometers (miles) of old mining caves in the Mojave Desert in Southern California was turned into a Tunnel Warfare Center in 2001, training U.S. troops in the challenges posed underground.



©Indiana Printing & Publishing Co. 2003

[meyer]

I sent this link to FOXNEWS. Couple hundred more people send it and they might report it.

I suspect that they will want to check it and possibly clear it before reporting it. They are being careful not to "cry wolf" and to avoid giving out sensitive information.

[New Horizon]

What are your names my dears?
"My name is Hansel."
"Unt mine's Gretel."
Cofused reply: Hansel? Hansel! Hansel...