Replies

Here's one version of the source of the yellowcake documents:

"Piecing the story together from two people directly involved and three others who were briefed on it, the tale begins at the end of 2001, when third-rate forged documents turned up in West Africa purporting to show the sale by Niger to Iraq of tons of "yellowcake" uranium.

Italy's intelligence service obtained the documents and shared them with British spooks, who passed them on to Washington. Mr. Cheney's office got wind of this and asked the C.I.A. to investigate."

Here's some more from a gent named Gordon Prather - nuclear weapons designer in New Mexico at the Sandia Corp - served in the Reagan administration as the Army’s chief scientist -appointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

"...What good would yellowcake -- a mixture of Uranium oxides -- have been to the Iraqis? Yellowcake contains less than 0.3% U235. You need uranium enriched to 90% U235 to make a nuke. You need to be able to convert yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride -- a solid at room temperature. Then you need to gasify UF6 and run it through cascades of gas centrifuges, tens of thousands of them. Iraq never had the capability of producing kilogram amounts of HEU, and what capability they had was utterly destroyed during the Gulf War and its aftermath and never rebuilt."

The documents themselves were so poorly forged that IAEA only took about 45 minutes after receiving them to pronounce them false.

One thing is sure now, no one wants to take responsibility for these documents. If I was head of the CIA I would be asking the Italians more about their source. As far as I know, there hasn't been any statement from them about the provenance of the documents.

Given the whole story and it's poor construction, I'll still put my money on Chalabi as the original source. Any attempt at forgery by a real player would probably have been of better quality.

Which brings up the whole question of the Iraqi National Congress...

Actually the smart money is on the French government or someone within French intelligence producing the documents.

As we all know the French have a very close relationship with Niger's uranium industry.

The fakes were poor quality and the French government seemed to know pretty much right away they were fakes.

Much as it is hard to believe that Saudi employee Wilson was sent by mere coincidence and coincidently came back toeing the Saudi's line, it is also hard to believe that
it is a coincidence that these fakes were produced in the perfect manner for the lead anti-war power to disprove them.

For what it is worth a number of anonymous British intelligence sources turned up when the documents were shown to be false suggesting that this was the work of the French as part of their rather broad anti-American efforts.

Certainly the quality of the fakes here indicates that they did not come from a pro-war source.

Hostility to the INC in the press has been an interesting phenomenon. One has to wonder if there were more Saddam flunkies in the west then we now know of from the recent list of Saddam's 270 bought and paid for retainers.

We have already seen this with Ritter and his Saddam sponsored movie - a fairly brilliant way, if you stop and think about it - to bribe someone with minimal exposure.

Do us a favor and please source your news clips by title/author or link. In this case, too much of what passes as news is based almost entirely on "anonymous" officials and as it happens, political sources, and way too much disinfo has already come from the same sources over and over, some of them regurgitating info which originally came from other news citing the fraudulent "CIA" source known as "T J Wilkinson," and most citing "anonymous" individuals who, judging by the cited language and word choice, are apparently just coming from Wilson or from his associate, Ray McGovern.

It helps to know in this case which reporter wrote what, because in this case, at least one of the journalists deeply involved int he story has a wife involved in the intelligence biz, as well as a very tight relationship with Wilson, and thus there are some severe conflicts of interest in the matter. Because of the political nature of the case, a number of reporters have been pursuing their own agendas and we need to keep track not just of data, but from who the data emerged.

"...What good would yellowcake -- a mixture of Uranium oxides -- have been to the Iraqis? Yellowcake contains less than 0.3% U235. You need uranium enriched to 90% U235 to make a nuke. You need to be able to convert yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride -- a solid at room temperature. Then you need to gasify UF6 and run it through cascades of gas centrifuges, tens of thousands of them. Iraq never had the capability of producing kilogram amounts of HEU, and what capability they had was utterly destroyed during the Gulf War and its aftermath and never rebuilt."

Maybe this source should ask himself why Iraq bought yellowcake uranium BEFORE. It did- this is an established fact. And it bought the stuff from various sources, in different quantities.

And of COURSE you have to enrich it, which is precisely why Iraq was trying to make more centrifuges, why Iraq had sought out expert help with centrifuge technology, etc. As Kay has pointed out - and as the Washington Post's reporter (Gelman?) totally misquoted him on- was that we still haven't found the high-tolerance tubes that Iraq had taken delievery on. We've found some of the low tolerance tubes- which apparently had the WashPost writer hot and bothered- but none of the higher tolerance orders have been accounted for. And Iraq's perpetual search for ever-increasing tolerances was what made the aluminum tubes so suspicious- the tolerances would only be worthwhile and neccessary if one were building centrifuges. That doesn't mean there aren't better materials out there for the task- it just means that's what Iraq could obtain.

(Note that these same sort of high-tolerance aluminum tubes have been one of the finds in the Iranian and Libyan WMD R&D programs, where no one is trying to explain them away as ridiculously overdesigned and expensive small rockets as they tried to do with Iraq.)

I do not know who is responsible.

However, Chalabi - Iraqi National Congress forging documents would have been outed by the Saddam supporters from the liberals in our government, French, Russia, Germany last certainly not least BBC.

I do not know why you see Chalabi as most likely, unless you know something you are not saying.

What I have discerned thus far is that President Bush hold his cards close to his vest and the rest that are against US play their cards from many different decks.