Posted on 07/05/2008 9:14:43 PM PDT by Jo Nuvark
Again all I am saying is the orginal poster tried to link this find to the Libby / Wilson / SOTU address. This is dishonest.
This stash has nothing to do with Wilson or any other player in the Plame affair.
1. The stash in question was a known entity, bagged and tagged by the UN years ago
2. The Yellowcake mentioned in the SOTU was recent, this stash was not recent as it was known about and left there by the previous Bush admin.
3. Yellowcake does not equal, if we have found an “active” nuclear operation then yes.....so far nothing.
If Bush’s SOTU had said “Saddam has yellowcake....we know because we left it there, bagged and tagged by the UN”, then this would be the correct statement in this instance.
I’m sorry to say but this isn’t really a story.
Help me out here.
Iraq Survey Chief Duelfer: Saddam Was ACTIVELY Developing Nukes in 2003
http://www.e-thepeople.org/article/33983/view?viewtype=best&skip=10
FROM THE ARTICLE: Most of the recent nuclear research took place at Iraq’s notorious al Tuwaitha weapons facility, where Saddam had stockpiled over 500 tons of yellow cake uranium ore since before the first Gulf War.
The AP article spins this cache of yellow cake as “known” and secured by the IAEA in 1991 after the gulf war. I’m sorry, but...
1. Why would we allow a “known” cache of uranium to remain in Iraq?
2. How secure could the uranium have been if Saddam was using the 500 tons of yellow cake at his Tuwaitha facility in 2003?
In my mind the Deulfer (sp?) report was all the proof I needed. Plenty of evidence of the facilities, programs and people. The only thing not found were massive stockpiles of ready weapons.
Stockpiles aren’t the point. We know that some stock was spirited across the border to Syria. But Chem/Bio weapons are not the sort of thing that you just fill warehouses with millions of ready weapons. Ever. No world military has ever done so. Even the US or Russia. We’ve had stockpiles, but in reality, they’ve been fairly modest. They have a shelf-life. They’re a real hassle to store and manage.
The plain logistics of handling, storing and securing such weapons are truly nontrivial. Its not the sort of thing you ever really want to have a lot of, on hand, at any one time. Chem/Bio weapons are absolutely in the make-it-as-you-need it category.
There never would have been massive stockpiles in Iraq. It is the facilities, the components, the people with the expertise... And the known willingness to use the weapons and transfer them to terrorists that matters.
From my reading, this report is complete satisfaction of the need to intervene in Iraq on that basis alone.
There you go, you hit the nail on the head.
Looking to relate findings or non-findings of material is a waste of time.
Knowledge is the key, the real WMD. What could they have done, in a short time frame.
Never really been expressed by the MSM.
Oh well.
It wasn’t understood by the media at the time. But the right thing was done. That is what matters.
Your question answers itself.
IAEA was monitoring North Korea’s weapons program in one location while weapons were being developed at another location right down the road. In other words, IAEA monitoring doesn’t mean much. As a side note, despite Wilson’s comments to the contrary, IAEA monitors were not active in Niger (another of Wilson’s misrepresentations of the truth).
Saddam’s nuclear research continued apace. The yellowcake was tagged and documented outside, but so what? It was not removed, it was there ready for use if and when he should decide to abrogate his agreements with IAEA. And, as we have noted, he was looking for other supplies that IAEA wouldn’t know about. Not hard to do, IAEA is rather like Clouseau when it comes to investigating anything. They’ve never found anything yet that someone else didn’t find for them.
So, as you note, he has 500 tons of the stuff, his research continues, and he’s looking for more of the stuff.
Some have suspected Libya’s program was also Saddam’s program. When we went after Saddam it wasn’t long before Khadaffi squealed. And I have seen press reports that Iraqi engineers were working in Libya on their program. And, as I’ve mentioned, Libya’s public and their secret uranium caches both came from Niger.
Saddam did have yellow cake. When he had purchased it is immaterial considering the character we were dealing with taking National Security into account.
What really pisses me off, the damn CIA had to send the irresponsible Wilson over to Niger AFTER 9/11 to determine the facts on the ground. WTF, we are paying this agency $30 billion dollars per year and they have no freekin idea who is attempting to purchase yellow cake? And you are trying to determine the honesty of the Libby/Wilson BS????? Please, spare me. This issue ticks me off to no end.
BTW, Bush's statement in the SOTU 2003 only said that Saddam attempted to purchase yellow cake and he quoted British intelligence. His statement was absolutely true. Don't you know that? If now why not? Here is the exact quote:
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Don't forget Colin Powel’s and Richard Armitage’s place in this mess. They acted dishonorably.
Thanks Marron. You obviously understand this stuff better than I do. Not wanting to be accused of either drinking the koolaid or eating the yellow cake - I choose to strain for understanding.
QUESTION: Where else in the world can one find unmined enriched uranium in vast quantities other than Nigeria, Canada and Australia?
Yes, exactly. The Wilson affair revealed for anyone paying attention that CIA had apparently no one at all on the ground in a uranium producing country, a country in which Al Qaeda was trying to get a foothold, by the way.
If they had, they might have picked up on Libya's purchases, maybe.
Or maybe not. Do you remember from the 911 commission that Navy Intel notified CIA of a trader who supposedly wanted to come clean about uranium smuggling, and had a warehouse of the stuff at the port.
CIA never interviewed the guy. Their response was, "oh, were we supposed to?" And they waited a month before they sent anyone to look at the warehouse, and then found nothing.
And it might be worth reminding people that Wilson was in bed with a Saudi partner who was on Saddam's oil-for-food tab. So, where does that lead us?
CIA never interviewed the guy. Their response was, “oh, were we supposed to?” And they waited a month before they sent anyone to look at the warehouse, and then found nothing.
And it might be worth reminding people that Wilson was in bed with a Saudi partner who was on Saddam's oil-for-food tab. So, where does that lead us? “
No I did not know any of that. Do you have links? I would like to bookmark them.
Where would we be without the U.S. Military? When are we going to close down the CIA?
Can you imagine 4/8 years of Obama rule and the Dem's doing their nefarious business deals in the Mid East? I'm thinking Bill Clinton and his $20 million deal with Dubai. I'm thinking former Treasury Secretary Ruben flying to Dubai over Thanksgiving 2007 to save Citigroup's bacon. I'm thinking the Dem Congress agreeing with Saudi Arabia and not allowing the US to drill, mine and build new facilities. I'm thinking the Democrat leaning State Department with no Republican oversight. I'm thinking Obama’s way of dealing with terrorists, a copy job of Clinton's method. I think we are in deep trouble.
I recently found an article that said the UN had
accounted for 330 tons of “yellow cake” in 1991.
I can’t find that story now, but would appreciate
some help. If true, then Saddam had acquired an
additional 220 tons of enriched uranium from somewhere -
after 1991 and under the noses of the IAEA.
Yeah but Bush holding hand with the m&**fu#$%#$% (excuse me), never made me feel good either.
Understood.
thanks,
The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,376747,00.html
I’ll see what I can come up with. I have a stack of links on my home page I can go through...
Meanwhile, this is from our Fedora, who has done a lot of research and some of her stuff is footnoted...
A key thing to note as you research this stuff is Wilson’s Saudi connection (he also belongs to a Saudi-funded middle eastern think tank, I forget the name). The Almoudis have a lot of connections, but one interesting one to me is Delta Oil handling oil-for-food and Saddam’s oil vouchers... Wilson and I think the Almoudis have Sahel area mining connections meaning that Wilson may know a lot more about how Libya got its uranium than he acts like, but who knows.
quoting from Fedora’s article:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1256475/posts
In 1998 he left the State Department and began putting his diplomatic contacts to business use. He formed J.C. Wilson International Ventures Corporation, a business development and management company which ventured in gold, oil, and telecommunications and served clients in Africa, Western Europe, and Turkey. At this time new African markets were emerging due to the recent passage of an African trade bill Wilson had helped President Clinton promote. Wilson’s African investment interests included oil markets in several parts of Africa and the gold market in Niger.
Wilson also kept abreast of the gold market in Iraq, where the price of gold was exceptionally cheap, as Wilson observed in one of his lectures.10 Meanwhile his then-wife Jacqueline, whom he would soon leave for Valerie Plame, became a registered lobbyist for the Presidency of Gabon, where Wilson had a good relationship with President Omar Bongo.11
Wilson ran his company out of the offices of an investment company called Rock Creek Corporation. Rock Creek was controlled by Mohammed Alamoudi, whom Wilson had met in 1997 at a reception organized for the World Bank by Westar Group. Alamoudi was a member of the Saudi-Ethiopian Alamoudi dynasty, which was heavily invested in the segments of the African economy Wilson was seeking to penetrate. The Alamoudi-affiliated company Delta Services—a Swiss subsidiary of the Saudi company Delta Oil—handled Iraqi oil export contracts in 2000 and 2001 and was revealed in 2003 as a recipient of Iraqi Oil-for-Food vouchers channeled through Abu Abbas, a Palestinian terrorist with Iraqi connections. Delta Services also cooperated with Afghanistan’s Taliban regime in a project to build an oil pipeline from Afghanistan to Pakistan, prior to this project’s suspension in 1998. In 1999, Alamoudi was accused by USA Today reporter Jack Kelley of heading a bank which was being investigated for financing Al Qaeda. USA Today printed retractions of several details in Kelley’s article in 2004, after another member of the Alamoudi family—Abdurahman Alamoudi, a prominent American Muslim lobbyist—was indicted on terror-related charges involving a Libyan-backed conspiracy to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah. Abdurahman was ultimately convicted in October 2004 and sentenced to 23 years in prison.12 Under Mohammed Alamoudi’s direction, Rock Creek was chaired by Elias Aburdene, an Arab-American international banking advisor and lobbyist who had previously advised banks linked to organized crime and intelligence community figures involved in the S&L Scam. In 2003 and 2004 Aburdene donated to the Sandhills Political Action Committee, which was affiliated with Senator Chuck Hagel, 13 a leading Republican critic of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.14
As you know Niger’s uranium ships out of Cotonou in Benin. Apropos perhaps of nothing, ran across this when I was digging about the Navy intel thing (note the “Libyan mediation” thing):
http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/News/0,,2-11-1447_2288292,00.html
Gunmen attack uranium lorry
14/03/2008 17:54 - (SA)
Niamey - Gunmen have killed one civilian and wounded another in an attack on a lorry used for transporting uranium from north Niger to a port in Benin, authorities in the Agadez region said on Friday.
An armed group on Wednesday ambushed the truck - owned by the Niger National Transport Company (SNTN) - on the road to Arlit, where French nuclear giant Areva has been mining uranium for four decades.
The attack was the first since Tuareg rebels of the Movement of Nigeriens for Justice (MNJ), led by Rhissa Ag Boula, warned in January that they planned to start a “battle for uranium” targetting Areva facilities and property.
Ag Boula told a French newsweekly that his forces wanted to prevent the opening of new uranium quarries in the arid desert north of Niger and would attack trucks on the road to Cotonou, Benin’s port and economic capital.
Areva plans to open a new site at Imouraren, in the heart of Tuareg territory, and responded to the MNJ threat by declaring itself “nobody’s enemy” and a company that “values the stability of the country”.
The government of President Mamadou Tandja has extended until May a state of alert in the north of Niger, giving the security forces increased powers to crack down on the MNJ.
It dismisses the movement as “bandits” and drug traffickers.
On Monday, with Libyan mediation, the MNJ marked the first anniversary of its uprising by freeing 24 soldiers and a district official it had held hostage for several months in the north.
Though the government refuses negotiations, it declared that the release of the 25 men was a sign of improved prospects for peace with the movement, which is still officially reported to be holding six soldiers.
The MNJ is a splinter faction from the main Tuareg groups, which signed a 1995 agreement with the government to end a first rebellion.
The Tuareg are a grouping of nomadic tribes who roamed the Sahara for centuries before nations of the region gained independence from European colonial powers.
OK, got it. You’ll notice that the whole article poo-poo’s the idea of uranium smuggling, so the assumption is that this episode couldn’t be real. Still, Niger shipped uranium to Libya with no one’s knowledge, so you have to keep that in mind whenever you read that Niger, the French, Cogema, IAEA, would never let that happen. It happened.
quoting:
A month later, however, the Navy issued an intelligence report saying a large quantity of uranium from Niger was being stored in warehouses in the West African nation of Benin, and was destined for Iraq. The report included the name and phone number of a West African businessman coordinating the deal, someone supposedly willing to provide further information.
The Senate found that the C.I.A. never contacted the businessman. ‘’No one even thought to do that,’’ an agency official told the Senate committee. A month later, an American defense attaché finally went to the Benin warehouses and found only bales of cotton.
And how do you control Saddam's use of it?
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