There's a veeeeeeery interesting article at Investor's Business Daily today concerning 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
The piece says it was recently and quietly sent from Iraq to Canada for processing into nuclear fuel.
But I thought "Bush lied, people died?" I thought Bush just invaded Iraq for all that cheap oil (that's selling in the form of gasoline at over $4.00 a gallon)? I thought Saddam was peaceful, had gotten rid of all his WMD materials, and was blissfully tending to his flower garden?
Or was he just biding his time until the noodle-spined UN walked away completely, and he could resume his WMD program unhindered?
This is clear, since Saddam acquired most of his uranium before 1991, but still had it in 2003, when invading U.S. troops found the stuff. (The International Atomic Energy Agency seems to have known about the yellowcake in the 1990s, but did nothing to force Saddam to get rid of it. It's duplicating its error today with Iran and North Korea).
That means Saddam held onto it for more than a decade. Why? He hoped to wait out U.N. sanctions on Iraq and start his WMD program anew. This would seem to vindicate Bush's decision to invade.
The American Thinker Web site reported four years ago on the scary math behind Saddam's uranium hoard: 500 tons of yellowcake, once refined, could make 142 nuclear weapons.
But yellowcake wasn't all they found at Tuwaitha. According to the AP, the military also discovered "four devices for controlled radiation exposure . . . that could potentially be used in a weapon."
How did our "objective" "mainstream" media miss a story like this? How did they miss it in 2003? How did they miss it now?
Did it simply fail to fit the "Bush lied people died" motif favored by our "mainstream" "objective media?
Maybe it was just the media that failed to find WMDs...
4 comments:
Sorry to disappoint you Bob but this yellowcake was not weapons grade (though could be dangerous) and was known to exist by the UN Weapons inspectors for years
Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.
Sorry to disappoint YOU, Bob, but did you read the whole article you provided, are were you too busy hating Bush:
While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called "dirty bomb" _ a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material _ it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment.
Do you think Saddam would have turned it over if it had no use to him...or was he keeping it around to bake cookies with when the UN left?
And
Earlier this year, the military withdrew four devices for controlled radiation exposure from the former nuclear complex. The lead-enclosed irradiation units, used to decontaminate food and other items, contain elements of high radioactivity that could potentially be used in a weapon, according to the official. Their Ottawa-based manufacturer, MDS Nordion, took them back for free, the official said.
The yellowcake was the last major stockpile from Saddam's nuclear efforts, but years of final cleanup is ahead for Tuwaitha and other smaller sites.
Some folks couldn't see a threat if you rubbed their nose in it. Unless, of course, you told them it was "conservative," and then they'd be hysterical with fear.
"found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion."
VERY misleading wording. It wasn't "found" after the invasion...this material was acquired by Saddam in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was under IAEA safeguards. In fact, Saddam allowed IAEA inspections and verification of this specific material to CONTINUE up until the invasion, even at times when he was preventing UN inspectors from roaming the rest of the country.
Every US administration, every intelligence agency, every international nuclear agency knew about this stuff, and knew it couldn't be directly turned into weapons. This is news only to right-wing bloggers.
If this stuff was such an immediate threat, why did Bush's daddy allow it to remain in Iraq after Desert Storm?
And what was going to happen to this yellowcake when the UN finally lost total interest and left...as they had been desperate to do for years, before the invasion? Was the UN going to take it with them? If so, why hadn't they removed it already?
If it was going to remain in Iraq, would Saddam have made cupcakes with it...or pursued weaponization?
And how well was the UN able to keep track of this when Saddam threw them out of the country even before the invasion? Even before he kicked them out, they were having a very difficult time getting anything done because of Iraqi interference.
The IAEA, among others, admitted this material could be weaponized if Saddam got his WMD program back on track, which both common sense and documents captured after the invasion indicate he was intent upon.
Yet the Left is desperate to minimize, obfuscate and bury the mountain of evidence pointing to the danger of the Saddam Hussein regime in order to score political points.
In other words, the American Left considers national security a distant second priority after their political ambitions.
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