It’s official. There were WMD’s in Iraq. Not fully developed WMD’s, but the infrastructure, scientists, and supplies available waiting for sanctions to be lifted and voila, Saddam back to normal.
The LATimes reports:
The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached this Canadian port Saturday, completing a secret U.S. operation that included an airlift from Baghdad and a voyage across two oceans.
The removal of about 550 tons of “yellowcake” — the seed material for high-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Hussein’s nuclear legacy.
The Newsweek story has even more details.
It seems the presence of the yellow cake, which was not concentrated enough to make a bomb but could be used to make a “dirty bomb” was known to the US government and US Army and even the UN, but it’s presence was not publicized for fear that it would be looted. And there was quite a bit of the stuff lying around: 550 metric tons of it. It is now in Canada, sold to a company that will concentrate it for use in civilian nuclear reactors.
There will have to be a huge environmental cleanup of the storage area, as mentioned in the Newsweek AP story.
But in a year when politics rules, it is interesting to note that the Bush administration kept the presence of this site secret from the general public while taking hysterical criticism from the same far left groups who birthed the Obama campaign.
So the irony is that, to keep the presence secret from local thugs associated with terrorists until the huge amount of partially enriched uranium could be removed, the anti war left was allowed to repeat it’s lies that it didn’t exist at all.
And yes, the Newsweek/AP story does admit:
The yellowcake issue also is one of the many troubling footnotes of the war for Washington.
A CIA officer, Valerie Plame, claimed her identity was leaked to journalists to retaliate against her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who wrote that he had found no evidence to support assertions that Iraq tried to buy additional yellowcake from Niger.
Plame, was supposed to be an expert in nuclear proliferation, undoubtably knew that the uranium was there, yet allowed her husband to undermine the Bush administration case that Iraq was buying “yellow cake”, as if it didn’t exist. Now it turns out that maybe the Niger connection was untrue, but the Wilson editorial suggesting that no enriched uranium was available to Saddam was also untrue to the point of 550 tons. Did Ms. Plame know about these weapons when her husband insisted that they didn’t exist?
Perhaps someone in the press corps will now ask Ms. Plame and spouse some embarassing questions if the CIA was clueless, or if either she or the CIA was meddling in politics.
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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines. She writes about human rights in Africa at Makaipa blogÂ
29 users commented in " “Non existant” Yellowcake Uranium Moved From Iraq to Canada "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackYour conclusions are both anachronistic and genetically flawed. First, I ask you, where did you see a “the Wilson editorial suggesting that no enriched uranium was available to Saddam”? You take facts and turn them around. Then you conclusions make your shoes look like a hat.
Wilson’s mission to Niger was to find out if a sale had taken place. Intelligence reports had already said no, but the VPs office didn’t believe those reports. Ambassador Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick also said no sale had taken place and that it was very difficult to get uranium away from the Niger mines.
So why did you just make that up about Wilson “suggesting that no enriched uranium was available to Saddam”? Because you have preconclusion before investigation.
Why won’t people like you pay attention to the facts instead of this sort of revisionism?
We already had reports about the uranium Saddam had. This is old news. The reports of WMD are bogus. Yellowcake isn’t WMD. It isn’t even quality enough to make a dirty bomb. It would be a most ineffective weapon. And the processing to make it into anything was impossible for Saddam.
So, you have yourself some yellowcake, and yet egg all over your face because you haven’t the foggiest clue what that means. Keep to your concerns about human rights and do your homework next time you pop off suggesting that Joseph Wilson lied or engaged in any dishonesty in his reporting.
If you wish to debate any points related to the Niger/WMD/Plame affair, I’ll engage you in any forum.
If Iraq already had yellowcake, why did Bush go out of his way to bake up a false story about a Niger connection? Exactly where did this yellowcake come from? The story doesn’t fit together quite yet. Is it certain that the yellowcake “secretly airlifted out of Iraq” was even there to begin with? I’d like to see an interviews with ElBaradei and Scott Ritter on this.
Whoa, the n came out of the woodpile on this one. Whoops, I mean the whackoos/nut jobs. I think, there is a good point to be made here. Thanks for bringing the issue out of the msm, where it would die a quiet unlamented death.
Bush led; terrorists dead!
This is from the AP story. It sort of conflicts with CSampson’s view that uranium is a toy:
“[e]xposure carries well-documented health concerns associated with heavy metals such as damage to internal organs, experts say.
“The big problem comes with any inhalation of any of the yellowcake dust,” said Doug Brugge, a professor of public health issues at the Tufts University School of Medicine.
This aint silly putty, CSampson.
The reason this wasn’t classified as a WMD is because yellowcake is only a building block to a WMD. Also, this yellowcake was from the 1980’s, it was certified and tracked by the UN after the first Gulf War.
Everybody seems to have known about it. Well, except for the Bush apologists who are so deficient in memory they are susceptible to revisionist arguments. (“Hey, look out Grand-pa, bad guys at the door!”)
But Bush kept it secret even though the locals kept digging it up. It was so dangerous the Bush administration left in place for more than 5 years…blah, blah, blah…More propaganda spinning from the Bush apologists…
Yes, and mr.wilson was reccomened for that job by his supposedly “undercover” wife mrs. plame. it appears mr wilson did lie, or at the very didn’t tell the whole truth. i don’t know, and i don’t really care, which reports supposedly said no, but the British Butler report said it was absolutly true. And if were so untrue, why did the dems have to take the quote out of context? they talked about 16 words, but only compelled to print 10 of them.
csampson Debate? you’re mind is already made up.
Its been confirmed by British Intelligence that Iraq did attempt to purchase uranium from Niger. Its all in the Butler Report. The facts are that Iraq did not have the WMD capability that we thought they did, but that they fully intended to build one once the UN was looking the other way, and kept the knowledge and infrastructure to make it quickly happen. Even Sadaam didnt know what he had, as his scientists lied to him. And he made it look worse than it was to gain leverage.
If you are trying to argue that we shouldnt have gone to Iraq based on hindsight, good luck. At the time, the democrats were all for it, and they had the same intel.
Your post is riddled with errors and false assumptions. This stock of uranium, acquired by Iraq in the 1970s and early 1980s, was all declared to the IAEA and has been a matter of public record since before the first Gulf War. I’m no fan of the Bush administration, but they were hardly keeping this “secret.”
The yellowcake was also under IAEA seal, and was subject to IAEA safeguards inspections EVEN DURING THE PERIOD that Saddam did not allow UNSCOM and IAEA inspectors to go to other sites.
Most important, the material is not “partially enriched” … it’s processed from U ore, but not enriched. and if it’s not enriched, you can’t make a fission bomb out of it. Or an effective dirty bomb, for that matter.
And it’s an unsupportable convolution to claim Plame and Wilson were trying to cover this up. First, the intelligence community, IAEA and everyone else (except apparently right-wing bloggers) knew about this material. More important, its acquisition pre-dates the FIRST GULF WAR in 1991. It hardly provides support to Bush’s claim that Iraq was (present tense) trying to acquire yellowcake.
I suggest basic fact checks before subsequent posts.
From the LA Times:
“U.N. inspectors had documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the senior U.S. official said.”
The only thing about this story that is news is that the yellow cake is now out of Iraq. This is part of the WMD materials stockpile that was already known, documented, and inspected since before the 1991 gulf war.
It is commonplace to say that there were no WMD in Iraq, and this has always been known to be false. There was a large stockpile of WMD-related materials, much of which was sold to Saddam by the US during the ’80s. All of this material was under guard by the UN, and had already been inspected. It was not a problem, until the US invasion exposed it to looting.
The question of whether Saddam had WMD before the war should be rephrased: the relevant question was, did he have WMD _that we didn’t already know about._
Also note that the presence of this yellow cake is completely irrelevant to the Valarie Plame-Wilson story, which is presumably why she didn’t mention it even if she knew about it, which she surely did. Yes, Saddam had yellow cake, which everyone knew about. It was being inspected regularly, so if he tried to make a weapon with it, the IAEA would have known right away, thus it was completely harmless. If, however, he had been secretly acquiring _uninspected_ yellow cake from Niger, that would have been a big deal because it would have meant he was _restarting_ his nuclear program, which had been discontinued before the 1991 war.
In short, this yellow cake is a red herring and is not relevant to the question of whether the invasion was justified.
Well once again, the President was telling the truth. It doesn’t matter when Saddam acquired the yellow cake uranium the fact is this, the uranium had the potetial to make a bomb, either conventional or dirty, that qualifies as WMD to any defense expert. David Kay, in his report, stated Saddam was biding time to let the sanctions drop and then he was going to produce WMD with money he was saving from the oil for food scandal.
It is also a truth that al Quaeda and Iraq had operational intelligence links all the way into back into the ’90’s. Let me provide evidence: Take, for example, the original indictment of bin Laden by the US Justice Department in spring 1998, which stated: “. . . al-Qa’eda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qa’eda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qa’eda would work co-operatively with the Government of Iraq.” Or how about this further evidence:CIA director George Tenet: “We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qa’eda going back a decade. Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al Qa’eda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression. We have credible reporting that Al Qa’eda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. Iraq has provided training to Al Qa’eda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.” I’ll add further: “Bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the IIS’s [Iraqi Intelligence Service’s] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden’s farm in Khartoum in Sep-Oct 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the director of Iraqi Intelligence Mani-abd-al-Rashid-al-Tikriti [to discuss] bin Laden’s request for IIS technical assistance” in making bombs.
I’ll give you so more evidence: bin Laden’s top deputy Ayman al Zawahiri “visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi vice-president on 3 February 1998. The goal of the visit was to arrange for co-ordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in al-Falluja, an-Nasiriya and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz.” Hayes says that visit coincided with a $300,000 payment from Iraqi intelligence to Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic jihad, which merged with al-Qa’eda.
Those of you who wish to deny we went into Iraq for the right reasons need to be reminded Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world and had to be stopped. He was the logical choice to use the military strategy, “defeat the enemy on ground of your choosing.” We chose Iraq and we are winning there. According to an AP story a year ago, we have killed 40% of the terrorists. Last year, USA Today estimated an Al Quaeda body count of 19,000 terrorists dead. This has been one of the most brilliant military operations in U.S. history. It is sad that we have lost 4,000 brave soldiers but when you compare them to the casulties lost in almost every other conflict (330,000 WW II, 624,000 Civil War, 58,000 Vietnam, 53,000 Korean War)it is important to make sure these soldiers didn’t die in vain. Those of you on the left like to point to the mistakes made in Iraq and try to claim this war has been a disaster, but we are defeating the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, Osama Bin Laden (if he’s alive) can only control some little cave in the rocky mountains of Afghanistan. Because we have been successful in Iraq Al Quaeda has become unpopular and is losing its influence throughout the Middle East. We have been very successful in Iraq and the bottom line is the President told the truth, did the right thing and it is Joseph Wilson and you minions of the left who have lied.
Why a story as important as this is not all over the main stream media only proves THE FACT that said media is thoroughly biased. It also proves that the left are willing to put the country at risk in order to move their agenda.
Joe Wilson lied when he said Bush’s 16 words were a lie. Obviously Bush was telling the truth, therefore making Wilson (and his ‘undercover’ wife) the real liars.
Bush’s 16 words:
“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Yet after reading these comments, teh Left is STILL making excuses. Jeesh! Get over it. The President DID NOT lie.
You all are naive! Yellow cake does exist and it did exist in Iraq.
[…] over 500 tons of the Iraqi yellow cake were just sold to Canada recently and shipped from Iraq. “Non existant” Yellowcake Uranium Moved From Iraq to Canada – Blogger News Network Iraq’s nuclear ‘yellowcake’ moved to Canada | Philadelphia Inquirer | 07/06/2008 You were saying? […]
The yellow cake uranium in Iraq has been known about since 1991. It’s not a recent discovery. However, the average person likely has no knowledge of this so it seems to have just popped up. Fact is, after Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear plant in 1981, it was placed in storage and has been there ever since. The UN inspected it after the 1991 Gulf War. This is common knowledge, albeit Joe Average never took notice of it, but you can bet the US government and half dozen others knew all about it. The fact that the US government claimed Iraq was trying to buy 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger sounds too close the 550 tons that was “found” (found my ass, they KNEW it was there for the last 20 years). The 500 ton number is just TOO coincidental. it sounds more like the groundwork to establish the “fact” that Iraq did buy it, except the story was busted before it was ever found.
Now, just how dangerous is yellowcake uranium? Well, I was watching a show on PBS well over a year before the 550 tons was “found” (again, i’m larfing my arse off, they knew it was there for the last 20 years), and the scientist being interviewed said it wasn’t very radioactive at all and not really dangerous. He said they used it to block the doors open. It sounded a bit strange to me, but I did a bit of research and found out he is correct.
Here is a quote regarding it: Yellowcake is not very radioactive, a bit more so than the granite commonly used as a building material (and not considered a health hazard.) However, because yellowcake is a powder, it can easily be inhaled. This is dangerous in the long term. Even workers in uranium mines developed higher rates of cancer years later because they inhaled the dirt containing uranium.
So unless someone was going to make a point to sniff the yellowcake, it posed about as much of a threat as granite. Bwahahahahaha. Again, I’m larfing my arse off. Two words sum up the Bush administration: Bullshit and Moo. Bullshit because, well do i really need to explain? And Moo because like dumb cows that pay no attention to anything until the government tells them to, wouldn’t know for themselves anything. They’re to busy worrying about what Brittney Spears is up to, which is just fine with our Politicos who COUNT on the mass of moo-cow public not to know, not to care, not to study up on issues and not to think for themselves.
If anyone really wants to know what the invasion of Iraq was about (and people, it was NOT WMDs, which should be apparent to anyone with half a brain and one eye), read up (yes get up off your ignorant, indifferent ass and STUDY for yourselves) on the “the wolfowitz doctrine” the “clash of cultures” doctrine and the “democratization of the middle east” (and the rest of the world.
So, the story was about “removing” the yellow cake from Iraq, and you read “found” in Iraq. You may want to go back and do a bunch of re-reading because its pretty clear that your comprehension of the written language is pretty low.
Uranium conclusion
Nuclear expert Norman Dombey, a professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Sussex, has pointed out that the information relied upon by the Butler Review on the Niger issue was incomplete; as he noted, “The Butler report says the claim was credible because an Iraqi diplomat visited Niger in 1999, and almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports were uranium. But this is irrelevant, since France controls Niger’s uranium mines”.[6] Dombey also noted that Iraq already had some 550 tonnes of uranium compound sitting in its gutted Tuwaitha nuclear research center:
Iraq already had far more uranium than it needed for any conceivable nuclear weapons programme. … Nuclear weapons are difficult and expensive to build not because uranium is scarce, but because it is difficult and expensive to enrich U235 from 0.7 per cent to the 90 per cent needed for a bomb. Enrichment plants are large, use a lot of electricity and are almost impossible to conceal. Neither British security services nor the CIA seriously thought Iraq had a functioning enrichment plant that would have justified all the noise about nuclear weapons we heard before the war. When I read of the supposed Iraqi purchase of uranium from Niger, I thought it smelt distinctly fishy. … It was a gigantic red herring.[7]
When asked by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to discuss the conclusions of British intelligence, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin stated, “The one thing where I think they stretched a little bit beyond where we would stretch is on the points about Iraq seeking uranium from various African locations. We’ve looked at those reports and we don’t think they are very credible. It doesn’t diminish our conviction that he’s going for nuclear weapons, but I think they reached a little bit on that one point.”[8]
London’s Evening Standard daily newspaper dismissed the report’s findings, under the front-page headline “Whitewash (Part Two)”, saying Lord Butler had effectively thrown Tony Blair “a lifebelt” by claiming that Saddam was indeed trying to procure uranium from Niger in 1999 to build a nuclear bomb, and concluding that illicit “material may be hidden in the sand”.[9]
Omg. It always make me laugh untill I begin crying in sadness. There are so many out there that refuse to think about what there saying before they say it. “Yellow cake is not very radioactive, no more than granite, its only deadly if you inhale it.” Ok, heres a thought, thats how they tranport it. Could it be that instead of transporting a highly radioactive substance, it would be safer to keep it in a lower form till need, maybe that why there was 550 tons. Then maybe you concentrate it later when needed. Nope my bad, It was all a lie.
First of all, no one thing started the war. It was many things. He did not have a current need for the yellow cake. I like the idea that the UN had it under control. It was working. How many times were the inspector not allowed into a area or delayed. That in itself was a violation of the UN agreement. For around 12 years that played patty cake with him. After we invaded, we still found missles and many othere things that violate the agreement. Those are just a start.
He killed hundreds of thousands of the people in his own country, had rape rooms, violated signed UN agreements, openly supported several terrorist groups-either with money or allowing them to group and train in his country or both.
I’m stopping for now because all of this will do no good. People have made up there minds and wont change it for any reason. Besides, I’m sure I’ve made some spelling error in this rant which mean everything I just said is wrong and I’m stupid. At least, I feel a little better now.
I especially like the coment by Dapper Dan about It being irrelavant since France controls Niger’s uranium mines. They control things so “well” they sold to iraq in violation of UN sanctions during the cease fire after Bush I. It was a cease fire, not a end to war. Sadam agreed to overflites and inspections, yet he continued to shoot at our aircraft. This alone was enough to TAKE HIM OUT. Forget about He murdered and raped thousands, but of course the Iraq’s loved him so much they “supported” him by trying to tear down his statue, accomplishing it with the help of a US tank. The UN “functions” so well they make the Three Stooges look like scholars. They did a “superb” job of inspections with all the obfucations fomented by Sadam. If thinksformyself “feels” yellow cake is no more hazardous than granite perhaps he would like to pave his driveway with it, it would make one hell or a nice YELLOW BRICK ROAD.I even have a recipe for yellow cake muffins I’ll give him. I also hear If you sprinkle it on your lawn, it’s a good fertilizer. “BWAHAHAHA” Question? What was he going to with it when we left? I know! He was going to “build” a YELLOW BRICK ROAD !
If any American’s can make an effort to talk to any of the service men or woman and ask them if we nee to be in Iraq they will tell you we need to be theirand we are making a difference, the fact that they found yellow cake is important and the fact that we let trucks with wmd’s go across the border to Siria is another reason we should be in the fight and if we dont stay tell the job is done we will have a bigger problem with a power vacum in the area which will cause more problem’s for U.S.and one question for all of us is since 911 have we been attacked by terriost in the us under Bush’s watch?
Lester Lee said “Forget about He murdered and raped thousands”.
So Saddam was a god–and quite the lady’s man.
Thanks for the info.
1st, the yellow cake demonstrates WHY there was such concern over the “dual use” techology and the so-called “aluminum tubes” which really were of little use other than for enrichment.
now, “Wilson” said something entirely in his book that what he said in frt of the media. Same thing with their hero Clark. Yet no one on the right used what they said in their books against them either. hmmmmm, Unfortunately the left who opposed the Iraq war solely because Saddams regime was a Socialist Regime and went to great lengths to destroy incriminating documents (Sandy Burglar) were never opposed with the truth in opposition. Consider the fact that Zibignew Brazinski (under Jimmy Carter) was the mastermind behind the SovietAfghan war (as well as facilitating the Ayatollah in his takeover of the once Democratis Iran and replacing it with a Socialist Islamic Revolution Party)and admitted as much as well as being behind setting up the Mujahadeen to oppose the Soviets (he is on record bragging about it). Now consider that Zibignew is and was behind Obama since his Occidental days, also that Obama’s Mother worked for Timothy Geithners Father in Indonesia, that Obama and Geithner were likely childhood friends, etc etc etc. Obama flat out LIED when he claimed his Mother was on Welfare, (notice they only rise up in opposition against removing socialists and when socialists are committing genocide they look away and smile, ie: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che, Ho ChiMihn, PolPot, Idi Amin, Mugabe, Rowanda, Socialist Marxist regime in Sudan, Ortega, Chaves, {whose name will fill this space?}, etc)
Lets not forget the Ikwan embraced Socialism, that “Hitler’s Mufti” embraced Hitlers Socialist Movement, that the Mufti’s nephew Yasser Arafat embraced Socialism, that the nephew of 1 of the Mufti’s close associates Saddam Hussein Al embraced Socialism, that one of “Hitler’s Mufti’s” students Ayman Al’Zawahiri and his Ikwan (Islamic Brotherhood) embraced Socialism’. That’s what is going on here, Mein Kamph translates directly to My Struggle which translates to My Jihad. There’s no Sleper call here, they’re wide awake and doing it in broad daylight, it’s just so ugly nobody wants to look at it.
Muystang 6 writes “the uranium had the potetial [sic] to make a bomb, either conventional or dirty, that qualifies as [a] WMD to any defense expert.”
Duh…. Hell, any of the Scandinavian countries has that POTENTIAL, and thus Finland has a WMD?
And the rest of his “argument” is equally based on fantasy and wishful thinking.
Christ.
If it’s true that Saddam’s yellow cake was walled off and under no ongoing processing, then it was not an active threat, no matter what the residual knowledge.
So what that Saddam was playing blind man’s bluff with the inspectors? The a–hole was losing that game to the inspectors! His programmes were atrophying every year. Containing Saddam was like keeping a spider under an overturned glass. His power was waning, not waxing.
His bad intent was not a WMD in itself. By definition, a WMD has to be an operational gizmo.
I can appreciate the rightwing being a watchdog of sorts, barking at potential risks before they become actual ones, but a dog that never shuts up and daily misidentifies the postman, the neighbour going to work, kids laughing on the sidewalk becomes little more than a bloody nuisance to the community.
As for this Blogger News Network proud claim “High-quality English language analysis and editorial writing on the news”, I come to my final truly petty bitch, why do Conservatives has so many f—ing spelling and grammar errors? Is it indicative of their thought process? Jumbled syntax implies jumbled thought.
Even in the original blog, the author screws up the possessive pronoun “its” with the contraction “it’s”. The author forms plurals of eponyms with an apostrophe! And what is with “undoubtably” as an adverb? The adverb is “undoubtedtly”. And then there is “embarassing” with one “r”.
“High-quality English language analysis and editorial writing on the news” my ass.
A truly, petty, trivial bitch I know, but since virtually all of the conservative respondents typically savage the language, I cannot but wonder whether that is not a diagnostic measure of their minds.
Sorry.
I added up all the 1991 IAEA inventory list of Iraqi yellow cake and uranium they identified and tagged and it only came up to 229 tons. Canada bought 550 tons.
http://www.iraqwatch.org/un/IAEA/s-23283.htm
I could be wrong but that’s 321 tons to much.
NUCLEAR MATERIAL VERIFICATION ACTIVITIES
Table 2
Summary of Inspection Results
http://www.iraqwatch.org/un/IAEA/s-23283.htm
Page 2 lists a variety of hard to read compounds, liquids etc but that is only an additional 45 tons or so. If you add that to page ones results of 229 tons that still is only about 275 tons of verified materials.
Where did the extra 275 to 300 tons of yellow cake come from?
That`s all I`ve got. Thanks
You’re citing preliminary, way oudated 1991 estimates of their holdings. You may recall that Saddam didn’t declare everything to the IAEA and UN all at once?
The Iraq Survey Group (“Duelfer report”), the comprehensive post mortem of Iraq’s various WMD efforts, says
During the 1970s and early 1980s, Iraq bought uranium in various forms from the international market. These materials included about 486 tons of yellowcake, 33,470 kg of “natural” uranium dioxide, 1,767 kg of “low-enriched” uranium dioxide (2.6 percent 235U), and 6,005 kg of “depleted” uranium dioxide from Portugal, Italy, Niger, and Brazil.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/2004/isg-final-report/isg-final-report_vol2_nuclear-03.htm
Again, this material has been well known, and under safeguards, since it was purchased in the early 1980s. Bush SENIOR knew about it during Desert Storm. EVERYONE knew about it except right wing bloggers. W knew about it but did NOT cite it as an example of Iraq’s WMD capabilities. And those were NOT the WMD he sought. Put down Pete Hoekstra’s kool aid and face the facts already.
and before you say THOSE numbers don’t parse, be aware that the low enriched uranium was removed from Iraq long before the 2003 war. and we’re not talking about the depleted uranium stocks.
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