Posted on 10/24/2008 9:27:50 PM PDT by zibbix
Slide show of items found at Al-Tuwaitha nuclear research facility in the fall of 2003.
In the fall of 2003 the US State Department along with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency undertook a mission to do cleanup at the Iraqi nuclear lab Al-Tuwaitha.
This lab was subject to UN inspections however the UN teams were not able to fully inspect the site during the Saddam regime. This lab was one of the places from which Saddam's men were video recorded by satellite moving WMD material to Syria.
The slide show shows what Saddam's men left behind in their haste to evacuate Al-Tuwaitha ahead of the coalition army forces and the subsequent looting by Iraqi citizens.
In the GSA report to congress link GAO 05-672 http://www.gao.gov/htext/d05672.html Much was omitted about the true nature of what was found at Al-Tuwaitha. Omitted in the report was the finding of old chemical weapons, discarded fire extinguishers that were used as chemical weapons delivery mechanisms, and highly radioactive materials in boxes with German markings.
Other interesting items omitted in the GAO report to congress is the fact that the Iraqi personnel burned out their offices before leaving. The finding of a machine shop with items that appear to be the shape of uranium bomb cores, and underground intact bunkers. The Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson associated (supposedly) non existent barrels of Nigerian yellowcake uranium were also located.
Other items shown are 2 scud missiles found at the Baghdad airport and a used Iraqi chemical protective suit found in the tunnels under the Baghdad airport complex.
The team shown in the photos was hired by the DTRA to do the hazmat cleanup process. The contractor was Raytheon Tech Services. This is the same contractor that was used by the USGOV to assist the Russians with nuclear hazmat cleanup after the end of the cold war.
Good Morning! : )
Bad idea.
There's still plenty of scum in this country who would love to find things like that...
...and use them against us.
You should have read the NDA more carefully. They don’t expire when you quit your job. Everything you saw is non-disclosable unless and until the government deems it so. The photographs or intelligence gathered while you were working for the Government still belong to the government and you are not entitled to release them of your own volition.
Correct-a-mundo.
There are very valid reasons for any information there might be about WMD not being made public.
Very valid reasons.
what are psychic? You seem to be an expert on contracts you have never read.
Read the GAO report. It is accurate but it has glaring omissions making the conclusions given to congress false. Your answers are there and many more qusetions to be asked.
Suits are not practical at 130 degrees. Everyone had rad monitors. Suits don’t stop radiation just make easier to wash off.
ping...
I have no criticism of the evidence....I believe it!
I apologize for not wording my post more specifically.
One way to put my criticism is that the presentation fails to hang together for those who do not have a technical appreciation of what a nuclear facility might look like, and/or belive that no nuclear WMD program existed.
The presentation, as it is, is fine for those of us that have not fallen for the leftwing propaganda machine saying that WMD did not exist in Saddam's Iraq. You did a credible job given that you did not have professional help with the presentation.
A more detailed presentation with subtitles, arrows pointing to items being described, and voices of some of the various experts doing the inspections, would have been convincing to a wider audience. Interviews with some of the key technical players would also have been effective.
The Bush administration has failed miserably in capitalizing on the truth of what we found in Iraq after the brilliantly waged decapitation of Saddam's terrorist government.
The job (not yours, but the US Government's) should have been to convince the general public that we went to war because Saddam posed a significant threat; in this case - nuclear.
Look, if you were in Iraq working for a private company collecting information on WMD the only customer your company could have had was the USG. No one else would have hired your company to do that kind of collecting, and your company would not have been allowed to conduct such collection without the government being the customer. The USG is in charge in Iraq. I don’t need to read any contract to know that whatever data you collected or photographs you took belong to the USG. Furthermore, I don’t know what government contract you are familiar with, but a non disclosure agreement does not end when you leave the company, otherwise it would be completely worthless. Do you suppose that if you had left the company and come back to the US you would be entitled to immediately release all the information you were privy to? It’s absurd.
I never liked Powell. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I just didn’t like him or trust him.
True colors.....now showing..
ba
Nobodywould list to many of us old time active duty military ... colin Powell was an AFFIRMATIVE action General who rose on the old “Peter Princple”
Ask Gen. Swartkopf or Tommy Franks what they had to say about him and his ability to lead. Actually Norman is pretty graphic in his own book .. didn’t pull many punches.
But no ... the bushes loved the guy ... and he stabbed both of them in the back at every opportunity. the media loved him, Hannity thought he was neater than sliced bread .. but then again Hannity still thinks Giulianni and McClame are conservatives.
Thanks for posting. The failure of the government to bring this information to the public has caused our country great damage. I can only assume the silence was originally caused by a group of people in the CIA and military who like to keep secrets combined with at least a few moonbats in key positions who don’t mind damaging US credibility for their own political reasons.
Its too late now but Bush should have seen the bigger overall picture of international credibility and overridden secrecy concerns. I see no possible reason for withholding information about already captured weapons. If Bill Clinton was still President he would have held that press conference personally. Instead, we had Rick Santorum read notes from a one page declassified John Negroponte letter and it was picked apart by the partisan press and quickly forgotten.
You used a big word there “if” I was in Iraq collecting info on WMD on a contract. Well guess what, I was not there to collect Info on WMD. You then run along with a false assumption building more assumptions on more false assumptions.
I seriously doubt that you worked for RTSC by the way. You sound like a FOBBIT.
thanks faq for the eloquent post. I am not in the regular practice of writing long explanations for things.
Everything I can dig up stops at state department.
I even followed the money and who awarded the contracts.
However the why part still remains.
I am at a loss why someone says that a chem bomb is old means that it is not legit.
Saddam was not supposed to have any chem weapons. If the UN teams cleared tuwaitha previously, then where were the old bombs stored before they were moved to tuwaitha. Fact is there is no innocent explanation for the presence of chem weapons at a nuke lab that the Iraqis claimed was doing peaceful nuclear work.
The place was a high priority for saddam given the hundreds of small details in the photos I did not point out due to time limits imposed by YouTube.
“Well guess what, I was not there to collect Info on WMD. You then run along with a false assumption building more assumptions on more false assumptions.
I seriously doubt that you worked for RTSC by the way. You sound like a FOBBIT.”
So, then what was your non-disclosure agreement about? Was it to not disclose how you built mess halls in Iraq? You were the one claiming all kinds of inside information on WMD in Iraq.
I seriously doubt I worked for RTSC either, and I have no idea what a FOBBIT is, nor do I care.
“I am at a loss why someone says that a chem bomb is old means that it is not legit.”
Let me see if I can explain this to you. During the Iran/Iraq war the Iraqis were producing large amounts of chemical weapons and loading a lot of it into artillery rounds. One of the tactics of the Iraqis was to store it in underground bunkers up near the border of Iran. Some of the smaller bunkers which had only a few remaining artillery rounds in them were covered by sand and never recovered by the Iraqi army. Farmers in Iraq would occasionally come across these abandoned bunkers and call US forces in order to claim the reward that was available for information on WMDs. We would go and examine the rounds and sometimes discovered SARIN gas rounds. We would drill into them and remove some of the sarin gas for analysis. In every case the sarin gas was so old as to be totally ineffective as a weapon. You could only be harmed by ingesting it. We would then destroy them. Clearly, the WMD we went to war with Iraq over was not old abandoned WMD in a few dozen 15 year old artillery rounds.
In any case, it is totally irrelevant that we didn’t find WMD in Iraq. Iraq had the know how and the capability to resume production at any time, so going in was as much about stopping Saddam from making them as it was about finding already produced WMD. We know he was capable of using them and capable of giving them to terrorists, so as far as I am concerned our invasion was 100% justified.
Gee Sparky, the NDA I signed when I left Afghanistan forbid me from disclosing certain data for 50 years.
Despite what your contract said, the NDA still stands.
I never signed a government NDA. I had a commercial NDA only prohibiting me from speaking with the press without a company representative during my employment. I was also prohibited from having a blog.
You madam, are making assumptions based on wild speculation. You don’t know me or even know my nationality let alone the contents of a employment agreement you have never seen.
Let’s just have a look at Sparky here, folks.
Ever hear of a “commercial NDA”, which is voided upon termination of the contract?
SNIFF..
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