Posted on 11/27/2005 2:42:47 PM PST by leebert
"...How can anyone ignore the evidence cited by a senior counter-proliferation official that meetings did in fact occur between Niger officials and would-be buyers from Iraq, North Korea and three other countries, and that the uranium was to be mined from abandoned - and hence unregulated and unmonitored - uranium mines in Niger?"
"...The US Army bomb team that investigated the device said it looked like all the other conventional munitions rigged as roadside IEDs, it bore only the markings of the conventional artillery shells they had been handling on a routine basis. It bore no unique markings to indicate it was in fact a chemical weapon: In other words it was disguised to appear as a conventional artillery shell."
(Excerpt) Read more at apognosis.com ...
The most convincing objection to the Niger Uranium theory is based in simple logic. Iraq had a large amount of unused Uranium which had been left in the country when the UN weapons inspectors pulled out. Why negotiate to buy something they had plenty of?
Got info on the Al Samoud 2 missle ?
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Now maybe you can convince the president, vice president, secretaries of state and defense, because they all say the intel was screwed up.
List of Items Iraq Must Destroy Saturday, February 22, 2003
Maybe the Iraq's were in Niger to by goats which they had plenty of.
The Left would ignore conclusive proof of Saddam's possession of WMDs just as the OJ jury would have ignored a video tape of OJ hacking away.
Looks fine in Firefox.
Maybe they didn't think they had enough....
Or possibly they wanted it to not be on the records that they had it and were working at refining it. The Uranium in country had already been tagged by the inspectors so if any turned up missing it would have been a major red flag.
Your posts of late are starting to smell a little like that ugly guy under the bridge...also known as a TROLL
Its based on wiki format. Which browser are you using? Thanks.
Which intel was screwed up? Feel free to cite me which officials are actually conceding which intelligence reports were wrong, why, and by what margin.
This isn't to deflect the question of bad intel, but there's good and bad intelligence, and the focus appears to be only on bad intel to the detriment of other compelling evidence.
Other posters have pointed out that Iraq's existing stores of uranium were monitored, but you also have to consider that Saddam's regime was looking forward to a post-sanctions era where they would no longer be under an inspections regime and they could resume -as the Dueffler Report clearly states - their latent weapons programs. As Chris Hitchens has pointed out, we didn't know they were negotiating for no. Korean missiles capable of larger/longer-range payloads.
We can nit-pick some of the evidence but the salient point shouldn't get lost in nay-saying when confronted with a genocidal regime known for lying, deception and murder.
I do not understand how in the face of mounting evidence we should deny Tony Blair or George Bush the same benefit of the doubt that some seem to suggest Saddam should've received.
But .. the Niger meeting with Iraq took place in the late 90's, and Wilson reported that Iraq didn't participate, when Niger was saying that Iraq did participate. Wilson was lying.
And since there was such a stockpile found in Iraq at Al Tuwaitha, I'd say Iraq was doing a lot of business with somebody .. if it was not Niger.
And there's no telling if they were working in concert with Pakistan's Dr. Nukes-r-Us Kahn and Libya's Col. Moammar Khaddafi.
75% of Niger's export trade is uranium.
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