Canard wrote:
>Your timeline doesn't make sense.
Are we in agreement there was a 3-4 year period where the Iraqis went seriously back to work after the inspectors had been kicked out and that there was a great deal of new construction at the site in the period '99 - '02 ?
> The uranium at
>Al Tuwaitha was catalogued and sealed by the IAEA
>after Gulf War One. That was my point. As that
>uranium was already there, why negotitate
>to expensively import more of the same in the
>late 90s?
If it were just a simple matter of that being enough, I'd see your point, but evidence shows there are 2 reasons that wasn't enough: They needed more ore to sift out the increasingly miniscule fractions of high-grade uranium they wanted as bomb-grade precursor, and they had to keep two sets of books to obscure their activities from the IAEA.
Remember that the IAEA got snookered by the No. Koreans? And not that the IAEA regimen was itself really tough, w/ inspections only 2x/year, but there was more that the IAEA missed, lots more.
There was the 50 kg of bomb-grade uranium(!) the IAEA either missed or let Saddam keep (isn't that enuf to make 2 uranium bombs?) and an entire, highly radioactive underground complex at the site that the IAEA had missed. In Oct 2004 a shipment of 308 pounds of "weapons-grade" plutonium went to France for conversion to reactor-grade plutonium.
Understand that they were trying to continue all this work on the sly so as to not draw new attention on their nuke program, so that they could be ahead of the game when the sanctions were finally eased.
You can google for these quotes:
According to Charles Duelfer in his report to the United States Congress, he confirmed that the Al Tuwaitha laboratory "was intentionally focused on research applicable for nuclear weapons development." and that the research continued until the U.S. invasion in 2003. He also reported that Iraq was "preserving and expanding knowledge to design and develop nuclear weapons." (Source: Duelfer's testimony before the U.S. Congress.)
"The plutonium processing was dispersed on-site by the bombing in 1991," said Michael Levi, the Federation's director. "But the Iraqis started to rebuild it. And they continued building there after 1998, when the Iraqis ended the inspections. "
"...So far, Marine nuclear and intelligence experts have discovered 14 buildings that betray high levels of radiation. Some of the readings show nuclear residue too deadly for human occupation."
And... when dealing with a rogue state intent upon concealment and deception, why would anyone give them the benefit of the doubt? It has been demonstrated that Saddam's weapons apparats consistently deceived and fooled the IAEA, UNSCOM and other inspection teams time and time again.
Yet another example of the deceptions found in the early 1990's:
"...The vast amounts of electrical power required by the EMIS process were provided by an electrical substation, with underground power lines designed to mask the amount of electricity consumed at Al Tarmiya...."
http://tinyurl.com/95x7g