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Can somebody enlighten me on the 500 tons of Uranium. I have a vague recollection that this Uranium was under the supervision of the UN or the IEC prior to the war and was therefor a known quantity.

Is this true or not? If so, this is not much of a story. If not, then it is a very big deal.

...I have a vague recollection that this Uranium was under the supervision of the UN or the IEC prior to the war and was therefor a known quantity....

Your recollection is accurate. Saddam was conducting his nuclear program out of country. We captured a load of "newer" yellow cake from Lybia and took it to Oak Ridge where it sits today. Bush held a press conference standing in front of the captured U in barrels and the media reported along the lines of, "An embattled Bush appeared in Tennessee today in a desperate attempt to gain votes..." No mention of the Uranium.

We also know of Iraqi nuclear scientists in North Korea lending a helping hand.

Can somebody enlighten me on the 500 tons of Uranium. I have a vague recollection that this Uranium was under the supervision of the UN or the IEC prior to the war and was therefor a known quantity.

Is this true or not? If so, this is not much of a story. If not, then it is a very big deal.

For more info on the original Times report, go to the "500-ton uranium" link in the original NewsMax story.

Saddam's uranium stockpile was already known - just like it was known that Saddam had Chem and Bio WMDs. The main difference is, when we got there, that stuff was gone but the uranium wasn't.

A less important difference is that the UN/IAEA permitted Saddam to keep his 500 tons of uranium (200 tons of which he got from Niger, BTW) - and continued to "monitor" it with annual IAEA inspections.

So it wasn't tecnically a "banned" weapon. However, IAEA monitoring wasn't much of a reassurance. The IAEA was also in charge of monitoring the North Koreans - and we know how well that worked out.

Also, weapons inspectors had been tossed out in 1998 - and I'm not sure there were any subsequents inspections in 2002 and 2003 of the al Tuwaitha facility that definitively established that Saddam hadn't accessed some of his uranium stash.

More improtantly, what we didn't know was that Saddam had begun enriching (or was able to obtain already enriched) 1.8 tons of his uranium stash, which the US Energy Dept. deemed so dangerous that it moved it out of the country in June 2004.

We also didn't know that Saddam had hidden centrifuge parts and blueprints for future use when the coast was clear - which the US discovered when his chief centrifuge scientist, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, was debriefed.

There's simply no way that any objective observer could say that this set of circumstances combined with Saddam's known nuclear ambitions didn't pose a serious threat.

The bad news is, the Bushies are just as clueless as Frank Rich when it comes to utlizing the info thay have at their disposal.