Saddam's Nukes

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, July 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT

WMD: Hear about the 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq? No? Why should you? It doesn't fit the media's neat story line that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed no nuclear threat when we invaded in 2003.

It's a little known fact that, after invading Iraq in 2003, the U.S. found massive amounts of uranium yellowcake, the stuff that can be refined into nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel, at a facility in Tuwaitha outside of Baghdad.

In recent weeks, the U.S. secretly has helped the Iraqi government ship it all to Canada, where it was bought by a Canadian company for further processing into nuclear fuel — thus keeping it from potential use by terrorists or unsavory regimes in the region.

This has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media. Yet, as the AP reported, this marks a "significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy."

Seems to us this should be big news.

After all, much of the early opposition to the war in Iraq involved claims that President Bush "lied" about weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam posed little if any nuclear threat to the U.S.

This more or less proves Saddam in 2003 had a program on hold for building WMD and that he planned to boot it up again soon.

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."

By the way, this should put to rest the canard peddled by the American left and by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson that "Bush lied" about Iraq seeking yellowcake from the African country of Niger.

Given what we know, including comments by officials in Niger's government, Iraq did make overtures to buy uranium. And it's quite possible all or part of the 550 tons came from there.

What's more, if Bush hadn't acted, we might today see a nuclear Iraq, an Iran on the way to having a weapon, Libya with an expanded nuclear program, and Syria — with its close ties to Saddam — on the way to having a nuke.

Of equal concern is why the media ignored this good news coming from Iraq. It seems to be of a piece with how they've treated other recent positive developments in Iraq (see editorial below).

We ask again — why aren't you seeing and hearing more about this? The reason is simple: The mainstream media find it inconveniently contradicts the story they have been telling you for years.

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folks would choose the buying of yellowcake from Niger to create some of their lies.

They should have picked something that wasn't so easy to prove that it was a lie.

Saddam may have had big dreams but he was in no position to do anything with them.

What the govt is not telling us is that it was secretly shipped IN to accommodate mccain's bid for protecting us if he is elected. Funny it wasn't found until such a convenient time as now, though you cons would never admit it.

It was not nuclear grade,the UN has known about it all along and could not be used to make bombs.

And You say,I do not have information.

Wilson:

Hehehe. You keep posting this in the hopes that gullible persons such as yourself will believe this is an important story and vindicate your hero.

Well, my dense little fellow, the press and anyone else who knows anything at all about yellow cake knows, it in itself means nothing. you can't make a bomb out of the stuff unless you spend lots of money and time working on it.Years in fact.

Everyone of our existing nuclear reactors used to generate electricity would be a better source for bomb material than that stuff.

You are simply grabbing onto straws trying to show he didn't misrepresent Saddams nuclear threat. I would bet he purchased the stuff to use to generate electricity in the plant under construction, that Israel bombed. It has been sitting there every since.

Wilson, you need somthing to do with your time. You are going insane.

TB,

Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, UN 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.
US and Iraqi forces have guarded the 23,000-acre (9,300-hectare) site — surrounded by huge sand berms — following a wave of looting after Saddam’s fall that included villagers toting away yellowcake storage barrels for use as drinking water cisterns.

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Until next time,

Zif.

Yes, you've spammed the hell out of the forum with this story already. People have already pointed out that nobody was questioning that Iraq had a nuclear program in the past. That's why it's not news today. This has been an old story since the 1980s. Just because you were programmed by some conservative outlet to believe this is suddenly newsworthy doesn't make it so.

This is part of what makes the Bush administration's Niger claims so damnable. It wasn't like they were genuinely taken in with the story they passed along. They had every reason to know better.

They knew the memo was a forgery -- and a lousy one at that. Therefore, they knew that someone out there was forging documents to try to trick America into starting a war. That, all alone, should have put them on their guard.

They also knew that, absent that memo, the only support for the supposed Niger connection was speculation that Iraq's decision to send its Vatican ambassador on a diplomatic tour of several African nations must necessarily have been a front for nuclear activities. But, since they knew Iraq had hundreds and hundreds of tons of yellowcake of its own, which it hadn't been able to do anything with, they knew there was plenty of reason to doubt Iraq would be prioritizing getting its hands on even more raw material.

It would be a bit like reasoning that someone was trying to build himself an illegal gun based on his supposedly trying to buy himself some iron-rich rock -- when he already had more iron-rich rock than he'd ever need to build a substantial arsenal of guns. Fortunately for the administration, roughly a third of the American public is just not capable of thinking this through.