Posted on 07/05/2008 6:00:55 PM PDT by Libloather
BUT, BUT, there was is absolutely NO evidence that sadam had anything like yellow cake. He was a peace loving type of person that was absolutely misunderstood. HUH?
Joe wilson and wife valerie said there was NO yellow cake...and they MUST be believed because they are who they are. He a former amb ass ador and she an under the cover agent of the cia. I know she was undercover, because joe said she told him, while they were undercovers. Read his book.
Actually, if the earlier thread is correct, this is yellowcake that was known and monitored for quite some time and is not the same yellowcake that has been the subject of debate.
Well .. I guess it’s not secret anymore.
they did not have that stuff!
nor will any democrat tv viewer believe them.
Is this correct - after Saddam surrendered in 1991 the United States allowed him to keep 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium in Iraq?
I know nothing about this.
Did Bush Sr. make that decision?
Does anyone know why?
Finally - if Saddam already owned a huge stockpile of yellowcake, why did anyone in the West give a rat's a** if he went out and bought more of it?
This is a great thread. A thread like this always brings the closet trolls out.
The Almoudis are Saudi/Ethiopian, not Saudi/Algerian, sorry.
They were involved in the Oil for Food scam, taking money from Saddam. And, as I say, Wilson was in their pocket.
They were also lobbyists with contacts into the elites of both parties, so it gets murky when you dig into their contacts.
But in my opinion, the fact that they have contacts with both parties doesn’t eliminate the opportunities for black-helicopter “conspiracy theories”, on the contrary, the game just gets that much more interesting.
In the end, though, the question is a simple one. How did Libya get its supply of yellow-cake? It had some it got before coming clean to the IAEA. How did it get it? It bought it from Niger. And it had a later supply that IAEA didn’t know about. How did it get it? It bought it from Niger.
There is a trick, though, in all of this, a sleight of hand which Wilson played, which is the assumption that IAEA was monitoring Niger’s yellowcake business. It wasn’t.
It wasn’t, for three reasons. #1, Niger hadn’t passed legislation allowing IAEA inspectors into the country. That didn’t come until two years after Wilson’s leap to fame. #2, IAEA themselves said they didn’t have personnel sufficient to do it. Strange thing to say, but thats what they said. And #3, IAEA doesn’t consider yellowcake as something requiring their attention. Its low-grade stuff. Yellow-cake sales are supposed to be self-reported. Voluntary self-reporting, thats how IAEA monitors yellow-cake sales.
Which means, in other words, they don’t monitor yellow-cake at all. Its not really smuggling; Libya can buy it and Niger can ship it and IAEA is only informed if someone bothers to file the paperwork with them, which is completely voluntary. Obviously, no one did.
But Wilson’s other case, which is that France and Niger would never make illicit sales of yellowcake is a bit disingenuous. Someone sold the stuff to Libya. Whether or not you consider it “illicit” depends upon how you decide to slice the matter. So the question is, was Wilson smart enough to know all that? Or not?
July 13, 2003
Niger Uranium - Why the Forgeries
During the lead-up to the Iraq war, documents surfaced which purported to show an attempt by Saddam to buy Niger uranium. These documents turned out to be forgeries.
Nobody is asking: Why were these forgeries made and who made them?
They certainly served a purpose: they cast serious doubt on any theory that Saddam actually was after the uranium. After all, how could one propose that theory when supporting documents were shown to be forgeries? What bureaucrat in the CIA would risk his career proposing further investigation of a theory supported by fraudulent documents?
Now, months later, many people are still confused by this ploy, believing that US assertions were based on those documents (they weren't, they were based on British intelligence), and that the US (and George Bush) made those assertions based on documents they knew were forgeries.
Thus these forgeries have been damaging to Bush and no doubt to US credibility, even though the US immediately detected the forgery and never took them seriously!
Meanwhile, the British are claiming they have other evidence of the connection, and that they never even saw the forged documents before advising the US of the Niger connection. They are standing by their assertion that Saddam sought to purchase uranium from Niger.
Disinformation, which is what these documents were, is a standard technique of both warfare and intelligence.
US sources now suspect that at least one of the British sources was SDCE, the French intelligence service, who would not allow British MI6 to share the information with the US.
Were the French playing a clever disinformation game, forging the documents to deflect US probes? Certainly the French were hostile to US intentions towards Saddam, and had in the past sold Niger uranium to Iraq.
Or could it have been the Russians, also hostile, who are certainly masters in the game of disinformation?
How about a US intelligence agency seeking to provide a case for the Iraq war? This seems unlikely, since the forgeries were sure to be discovered, and furthermore this would have been only a tiny little item in a very large body of evidence against Iraq.
The investigative news organizations in the US who are so earnestly looking for culpability by Bush should use some of their vast resources to investigate who was behind these forgeries.
Posted by John Moore at July 13, 2003 11:45 PM
http://www.tinyvital.com/BlogArchives/000203.html
After DESERT STORM The UN had the Tuwaitha stockpile pretty much under its observation, if not outright control.
The controversy with Joe Wilson and Niger was over whether Iraq was planning an additional future yellowcake purchase -
this did not occur but plenty of good reporting indicated the prospects were at least explored by Iraq
which would have been necessary to establish a secret fuel materiel stockpile not under UN observation, possibly not even in Iraq but possibly in a country cooperating with Iraq (Libya?)
that is inaccurate
The Wilsons disputed reports that Iraq was seeking a new SECOND large purchase of yellowcake, and Joe contended thatt Niger would NOT cooperate with Iraq if it did so and the the French were in control of the mines and would not allow this to happen anyway
As if people did not know how actively the french were involved in the Iraqi osirak project, which was fueled with Nigerien yellowcake purchased in the 1970’s and as if the french have changed their stripes in being anti-US and pro arab since then
There was in Iraq a large stockpile of yellowcake used in Iraq’s nuclear program of the 1970’s, at Tuwaitha. This was known and was under ostensible UN control after DESERT STORM
The secrecy of this reported US operation is (was) probably intended to avoid embarrassing the current Iraq regime which will now look “weak” and under US control, for giving up this material
it was probably UN and european and russian and chinese obfuscation which kept the US from cleaning out Tuwaitha after DESERT STORM and removing the material especially while Saddam was still in power- remember oil for food and how many UN (and euro socialist and russian and chinese etc) officials and votes Saddam bought and paid for?
Tuwaitha was a matter for the UN nuc proliferation/monitoring agency (Hans Blix and his successor)- The yellowcake at Tuwaitha had UN seals on it. However, security of the site was breached and I believe all bets were off in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion
Why would Saddam have sought a second yellowcake purchase? So that if and when his nuc program was getting in stage for for fuel enrichment, he would have established a new stockpile somewhere the UN would not be monitoring and controlling his activity, perhaps even at a facility somewhere outside of Iraq.
So why are that useless maggot and his dippy wife still walking around free?
In 1998 Saddam kicked the UN out and there was nothing preventing Saddam from reconstituting their nuke program if he wanted to just remove the seals and get the uranium.
Contrary to Wilson’s notion, President Bush only claimed British Intelligence claimed Saddam sought uranium from Niger. He never said they got it but it would have been reasonable that Saddam at the very least inquired being that his Uranium was under scrutiny.
I am still astonished.
We would never have allowed Saddam to build a reactor or a uranium processing plant, so his 550 tons of yellowcake was useless, except as seed grain for atomic weapons.
Allowing a violent sociopath to keep any amount of uranium, in any form, cannot be rationally explained.
And it is actually posted by the AP via MSNBC’s web site... impressive.
They’ll find a way to explain why this isn’t a WMD.
ping
awesome links dude..
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