|
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
I was just waiting for you to post that so I could post up one of my favourite quotes from that "discovery"....
| quote: | If you check into this, you'll quickly find that the uranium a) was not weapons grade and b) was well known and already logged to the UN and IAEA and was being stored legally by Saddam's government prior to the original Gulf conflict. It was legally in Iraq according to international law.
I wondered if the right wing echo chamber would use this as "proof" that the WMD claims were true after all. I got even better than I hoped, as not only do they use it that way, but they reveal how dishonest they are by the way they have done this. |
lololololololol. So basically, they "found" something that they knew was legally there. lol, nice "proof". |
Actually, I was waiting for you to take the bait on that comment, knowing how you would react, so I could show you how misinformed you are, eager to snap up the headlines without reading the fine print.
| quote: | ...The fact that the material was under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for more than a decade opens an entirely different line of questioning: Is the entire group of United Nations bureaucrats running the IAEA legally insane?
These issues are somewhat separate from the Plame-Wilson-Rove dust up that's been roiling Washington recently, but nevertheless shed light on why Joe Wilson went to Niger in February of 2002 and why the bureaucratic tussle over those 16 words about the Iraqi-Niger yellow cake connection was so fierce.
The story begins at the end of the first Gulf War when inspectors found a 500 ton cache of refined yellow cake uranium at Iraq's primary nuclear research facility in Al-Tuwaitha outside of Bagdhad. The cache was part of a huge inventory of nuclear materials discovered by UN inspectors that included low-level radioactive material of the type used for industrial and medical purposes as well as a quantity of highly enriched uranium suitable for bomb production.
This Highly Enriched uranium was shipped to Russia where it was made relatively harmless by a process known as 'isotopic dilution' — but only after the Iraqis dragged their heels for more than 6 months following the cease fire by playing a cat and mouse game with the IAEA's inspectors. The history of those early IAEA inspections can be found here (http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Bo...Iraq/event.html) and is an eye opening look at both the gullibility of the IAEA and the lengths to which Saddam sought to keep as much of his nuclear bomb making capability as he could.
The IAEA placed a seal on the nuclear materials in November of 1992. From then until the fall of Saddam, the agency attempted to make sure that Iraq did not use the yellow cake to reconstitute its nuclear program, something the IAEA acknowledged could be done if the Iraqis were able to rebuild its centrifuges and gain access to additional fissile material. Keeping track of the material was made extraordinarily difficult by the Iraqis who regularly impeded IAEA officials from carrying out even the most routine inspections.
Flash forward to 1999 when British intelligence found out through multiple sources that representatives of the Iraqi government had met with officials from the Niger government.
This fact is not in dispute. The mystery is in what they talked about. A memo obtained by the British- later proven to be a forgery- purported to show the Iraqis were interested in purchasing 500 tons of yellow cake uranium from Niger's mines. Forgery or not, since Niger's exports are extremely limited, consisting largely of uranium ore, livestock, cowpeas, and onions, one doesn't have to be an intelligence analyst to figure out in which one of those items the Iraqis might be interested.
Both the Butler Review and the Senate Select Committee on Pre War Iraq Intelligence (SSCI) point to other efforts by Saddam to purchase uranium, most notably from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Butler Review states in 2002 the CIA 'agreed that there was evidence that uranium from Africa had been sought.' In the run-up to war in Iraq, the British Intelligence Services apparently believed that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium from Africa; however, no evidence has been passed on to the IAEA apart from the forged documents.
This then was the context in which Ambassador Joe Wilson went to Niger in February of 2002. Based on multiple sources and the best judgment of the CIA, Saddam Hussein was trying purchase uranium. Since there were no working commercial nuclear reactors in all of Iraq, his interest could only be based on his desire to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program.
There was no 'fixing' of intelligence or 'shaping' intelligence to fit some preconceived agenda. Despite UN resolutions and sanctions, Saddam was looking to build the bomb.
What about that 500 tons of yellow cake under seal at Al-Tuwaitha? As long as the sanctions were in place, the inspectors would be able to confirm, albeit with great difficulty, that Saddam would not be able to use the material for his bomb building program. But that fact doesn't answer the question: why would any organization charged with keeping a lid on nuclear proliferation allow that much fissile material to be kept by a bloodthirsty tyrant who had already demonstrated a desire to construct a nuclear weapon?
In an article that appeared in The American Thinker on July 20, 2004, Douglas Hanson draws some rather unflattering conclusions about the IAEA and their mission:
| quote: | The actions, or more appropriately, the inactions of the IAEA regarding Iraq since the end of Gulf War I, betray the agency's true agenda. Rather than inspect, report, and implement restrictions in accordance with the provisions in the treaty, the agency has in effect become an enabler of rogue nations who are attempting, or who have already succeeded in developing or acquiring special nuclear material and equipment. In other words, the IAEA is simply a reflection of its parent organization, which routinely delays and obfuscates the efforts of the US and the UK in controlling banned substances and delivery systems.
Time after time, the agency has either intentionally or naively bought into the lies and deceptions contrived by nations of the Axis of Evil during IAEA visits and inspections. In most cases, the IAEA avoids confrontation like the plague in order to maintain access to the facilities. If they are booted out, as was the case with North Korea, their impotence is on display for all to see. In other cases, the agency joins in the deception, thereby allowing these rogue states to level the nuclear playing field with the West and Russia. |
Clearly then, the IAEA was totally dependent on the sanctions to even carry out the limited inspections it was performing in the 1990's. But how long would the sanctions be in place?
It is an article of faith with critics of the war that 'Saddam was in a box' and there was no need for an invasion to remove him. It's a pity that many of those critics have such a short memory because a review of what many of them were saying about the sanctions prior to September 11, 2001 would show that they were eager to lift the very same sanctions that they now claim was keeping Saddam in check.
Thanks to a remarkable propaganda program that included funeral processions of Iraqi babies whose dead bodies were used over and over again in macabre effort to make it appear that the death toll of infants was higher than it was, the world community was, by 2001, agitating for the lifting of sanctions on the Iraq economy. And while the lifting of economic sanctions would not have meant a lifting of the arms embargo, given the limited resources available to both The United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the IAEA as well as Iraq's demonstrated ability to impede, obstruct, and deceive inspectors, it stands to reason that the continuation of the arms embargo would have been a sham. Even with the embargo, the Dulfer Report showed that Saddam's ability to evade the sanctions and purchase illicit weapons was extremely troubling.
All of this is important to remember when thinking about that 500 tons of yellow cake uranium sitting under seal at Al-Tuwaitha. How worried was the CIA that Saddam would someday be able to use that material to construct a bomb?
That question goes to the heart of the current controversy over not just who may have 'outed' a covert CIA operative, but whether the Administration was trying to discredit Mr. Wilson so that his charge that the White House manipulated intelligence to fool the American people into support for war would also be disbelieved... |
http://www.americanthinker.com/2005..._of_yellow.html
It goes on but you get the point. The devil is in the details.
|
I don't need the idiotic and misguided thoughts of people like you to reinforce my beliefs. The only thing you're doing is reinforcing my belief that the US is in the state of shit that it is right now because of 8 years of "your" thoughts (i.e. the wrong ones). I, unlike you, have the ability to recognize rational thought, no matter the political affiliation it sides with. It just so happens that nothing you're saying is rational.
