Uranium Stockpile Removed From Iraq in Secret U.S. Mission."

The Chattanooga ^ | 7-05-08 | Blogger Brian Foley

[Jo Nuvark]

For all those naysayers about Saddam not having WMDs, I just found this headline: "Report: Uranium Stockpile Removed From Iraq in Secret U.S. Mission." ***** Tell me what Saddam was going to do with 550 metric tons of yellowcake. He wasn't going to use it for lawn fertilizer.

[Marine_Uncle]

I don’t have a definitive answer for you.

[Marine_Uncle]

Regarding your question as to how "secure" the YC was after we invaded. It was not secure to the point where it was being protected by US or Coalition troops. There were reports that Iraqi where stealing the barrels for use as water storage containers. With the results of some of them becoming sick due to breathing the yellowcake dust.
Quite frankly I was under the impression that this stuff was shipped out to a south east weapon plant in the USA during 2004. So it is a bit of a surprise for me to now read that it was recently shipped to Canada, to be converted to usable fuel for reactors.
As a few other Freepers made note. It was not so much that their engineers where actively working at this nuclear site on a specific phase (manufacturing process) while the weapon inspectors where present, but the fact they did not disclose much of the nuclear program willingly.
Documents found and translated for instances from the Harmony Database before it was shut down to the public showed where say an East German company was known to have sold them special induction furnaces specifically designed to zone refine uranium from it's native ores, for subjugation to further required processing steps to finally reach a stage where UF6 (gas) was stored for eventual use in centrifuges to extract U235 in sufficient quantities.
These where sold to the Iraqi after Operation Desert Storm took place.
The composite of evidence produced in the past ten years or so point to the fact Saddam was hell bent on developing an atomic bomb. He wanted to be the first Arab nation to achieve nuclear weapon capability.
It was a matter of getting the sanctions lifted and all foreign elements out of his country before they would go full steam to resurrect their nuclear program. And the L/MSM and their willing demowits will continue to wherever possible spin off mis information in order to make this administration look bad, ignoring all that had been put to print prior to GWB taking office.

[Marine_Uncle]

I have so few hours to search closely these issues that I must defer to those that can follow the issues much closer. But the facility for nuclear research was not limited to only the Salman Pak facilities. There where bio/nuclear weapon labs attached to some of the air bases in al Anbar for instance.
So it is reasonable to conjure up where they may have had more then one holding area for this stuff. One thing never disclosed is to what level did they mine uranium ore from al Anbar province where Iraq had mining operations.
I had big plans a few years back into investigating just what was mined from the phosphate and other mines located east and north east of al Rutbah (some sixty miles south of the Syrian border, roughly between al Quim and the Jordanian border).
For all we know they may have been slowly obtaining uranium ore from their own country as well as seeking it elsewhere.
So your question regarding the 330 tons verse the 500 or so tons is not so easy to answer.

[4woodenboats]

As Douglas Hanson asked in 2004:

"Why did the IAEA allow Iraq to retain such massive amounts of nuclear material, when its three nuclear facilities had been destroyed over 12 years ago, and have never been repaired?"

I believe it was in 2004 that we removed a similar amount of yellowcake and brought it to the US, not Canada.

I think this is a different batch.

[marron]

I believe it was in 2004 that we removed a similar amount of yellowcake and brought it to the US, not Canada.

Thats interesting. I have a vague memory of this. So does this mean this is a "different" 500 tons? Or simply that they didn't get it all the first time?

Any chance of finding the old press coverage at the time?

I remember us bring some of Khadaffi's nuclear equipment to Fort Knox in about that time frame, could this be what we are remembering?

[MrB]

This is the biggest complaint I have with republicans in general and Bush in particular -

not taking it to the leftists when they get the opportunity.

Leftists are such vicious anti-American bastards that I want to see someone pound it in their faces with how wrong they are.

[MrB]

The state dept and the CIA are infested with leftists. That explains it.

[4woodenboats]

It wasn't in the news for long, that's for sure, and news like that tends to be erased.

Maybe there's something in the archives of globalsecurity.org or something similar. The wayback machine might, if you knew which news service, year, month, and had alot of time to kill.

I browsed a bit through the Duelfer report by way of global and didn't see it, though it may be mentioned in one of the other reports, or using a search engine other than google.

Skimming through Duelfer, and seeing the headlines from the driveby media in that timeline describing the report showed Bush adminstration being "Almost Completely Wrong On Everything", when the report actually backed up every pertinent issue the administration's - and the late 90s Toon's as well - presented as reason to take Saddam down...well, it made me almost as mad as I am joyful to watch the drive bys stock in a death spiral.

McClatchy itself has lost over 90% of it's net worth since then.

;~)

[Chgogal]

Yes, we did ship a large amount of yellow cake to Tennessee in 2004. I still have not found the article. It was posted on FR at the time. But I did fine theses three interesting links.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/10/covering_up_iraqs_quest_for_ur.html

“Iraq does indeed have a history of buying uranium from Niger, but that was decades ago, and it wasn't the only foreign source for nuclear raw materials. Two organizations provide us with a reasonably accurate inventory of Saddam's uranium and other related compounds: the IAEA and the Iraq Survey Group (ISG).

Iraq has imported hundreds of tons of yellowcake, highly enriched uranium (HEU), and Low—enriched uranium (LEU) from Europe, Russia and other Western countries. According to the IAEA, Saddam bought about 151 tons of yellowcake from Niger in 1981, and then made an additional purchase of 153 tons in 1982. [For some reason, Duelfer’s ISG report does not mention the second procurement from Niger in 1982. There are several other discrepancies in the ISG final report that will be discussed in a later article.]”

Those amounts only add up to 303 tons. I am curious where the other 220 tons came from. This of course does not include the uranium/yellow cake found in Libya.

http://terryfrank.net/?p=1506
This article is very interesting. About a fifth of the way down she has included a “Summary of Remaining Uranium Materials Found at Location C”. This article was written in 2007.

And finally just for fun, the yellow cake found in Rotterdam in January 2004 that was deemed to be from Iraq.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-01-16-netherlands_x.htm

[Chgogal]

Interesting Draft report. Bookmark.

http://www-ns.iaea.org/downloads/rw/projects/iraq/documentation/wm07paper.pdf

[Marine_Uncle]

You did your homework well. Your comment regarding the 2004 YC transfers where clearly spelled out at FR. I remember the same postings.
Saddam certainly had many sources. And the oil for food program most likely helped him make purchases in those later years just prior to the invasion to get more of this refined ore from different sources you and others specify in the many URLs posted. And the French, Russians, Italians, Bulgarians, Rumanians, Yugoslavians and a host of other countries continued to supply him with all kinds of equipment, chemicals, and weapons in those later years.

[Jo Nuvark]

Good work chgogal...

You’re beginning to see that the yellowcake numbers are looking a little fuzzy.

Any other old guarde freepers out there who may be able to hunt this down for us?

[Jo Nuvark]

CONNECTING WILSON / PLAME - EXHONERATING SCOOTER LIBBY

Illicit sales of uranium from Niger were being
negotiated with five states including Iraq at least
three years before the US-led invasion, senior
European intelligence officials have told the
Financial Times.

http://www.alphapatriot.com/home/archives/2004/06/27/let_them_eat_yellow_cake.php

YOU ARE FREAKING NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS!!!

IRAQ: Evidence of Niger uranium trade ‘years before
war’ ...nuclear programmes. Niger officials were
also...uranium ore or the “yellow cake” refined
from it...was investing in Niger’s uranium industry
...refined uranium ore - “yellow cake” - in Libya.
However...accounted for in Niger records, even though...

IRAQ: Evidence of Niger uranium trade ‘years before war’
http://search.ft.com/ftArticle?queryText=NIGER+YELLOW+CAKE&y=1&aje=true&x=15&id=040628000877&ct=0&nclick_check=1
By Mark Huband, Financial Times - Published: Jun 28, 2004

[Jo Nuvark]

CONNECTING WILSON / PLAME - EXHONERATING SCOOTER LIBBY

Mr Wilson was critical of the Bush administration’s use of secret intelligence, and has since charged that the White House sought to intimidate him by leaking the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent.
But Mr Wilson also stated in his account of the visit that Mohamed Sayeed al-Sahaf, Iraq’s former information minister, was identified to him by a Niger official as having sought to discuss trade with Niger.
As Niger’s other main export is goats, some intelligence officials have surmised uranium was what Mr Sahaf was referring to.

IRAQ: Evidence of Niger uranium trade ‘years before war’
http://search.ft.com/ftArticle?queryText=NIGER+YELLOW+CAKE&y=1&aje=true&x=15&id=040628000877&ct=0&nclick_check=1
By Mark Huband, Financial Times - Published: Jun 28, 2004

[Salvation]

Oh! NO! You mean there really were WMDs?

[Jo Nuvark]

[... Oh! NO! You mean there really were WMDs? ...]

I’m just sayin’...

[neverdem]

Thank you!

[4woodenboats]

Interesting. I've never seen pics of the facility before.

Here's some articles discussing 1.7 metric tons found or removed in 2004, and 500 tons found in 2005.

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/11/12/103450.shtml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3872201.stm

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1187971/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1167175/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1166563/posts

[Chgogal]

Marron, thank you so much for the posts. Jo, this thread has some great links do not lose. Neverdem, thanks for the ping.

Marron, it is funny how the NTY cannot connect the dots. You would think an editor would put two of his best reporters on the case of “Accounting for the Yellow Cake, the Job CIA Couldn't Do” I still don't know how much Yellow Cake Niger sold during the Saddam Period and who the buyers were. Does anyone know how Libya got its supply?

The NYT has done much damage in this WOT. I'm beginning to think citizens of the free world need to file class action suits against the NYT starting with Eastern Europeans suing the NYT for Walter Duranty’s false reports. Duranty knowingly misinformed the Free World with purposefully filed false reports that made it easier for the US and Britain to give Eastern Europe to Russia. What makes it worse the NYT brass knew the reports were false. To this day, as the NYT lie, people by the millions die.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/791vwuaz.asp

“I would like to add another Duranty quote, not in his dispatches, which is reported in a memoir by Zara Witkin, a Los Angeles architect, who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. (”An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934,” University of California Press ). The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP’s Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:

Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.

And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day.

In his masterwork about Stalin's imposed famine on Ukraine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” Robert Conquest has written:

As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty’s denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.

What is so awful about Duranty is that Times top brass suspected that Duranty was writing Stalinist propaganda, but did nothing. In her exposé “Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s man in Moscow,” S.J. Taylor makes it clear that Carr Van Anda, the managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, an assistant managing editor, and Edwin L. James, the later managing editor, were troubled with Duranty’s Moscow reporting but did nothing about it. Birchall recommended that Duranty be replaced but, says Taylor, “the recommendation fell by the wayside.”