[Ditto]

Paging Michael Moore --- please pick up the glowing red phone.

[anymouse]

The mayor of this high-tech city is, for now, Capt. John Seegar, a combat engineer commander from Houston, Tx.

Another Texan taking charge.

[mabelkitty]

Stick the French in there. They sold it, they should protect it!!!

[Magnolia]

BTTT

[XJarhead]

It's possible that the inspectors actually did search this site, examined the stuff the Marines found, and concluded that it did not constitute an illegal weapons program. Just because radiation readings go off the chart does not mean its weapons-grade stuff.

My guess is this will require a lot more investigation before we can conclude that its evidence of an active nuke weapons program.

[HenryLeeII]

Uhhh, gee, maybe Hussein really wasn't complying with the U.N. But he was forced to develop WMD because of Republican aggression, yeah, that's it...

[steveegg]

BTTT

[Trident/Delta]

Hey over at Du they are sayng that this is a fraud. Dontchaknow the engineers came in pumped out all the water excavated the tunnels and brought in all the radioactive materials to "trump-up" charges of nuclear development....

Semper Delerious

[MikeD]

bump for later

[Robert A Cook PE]

OH SHIITE!

That much radiation, that much radioactive water, underground in unprotected DRUMS! ......

Can you smell "hot" (radiated, laden with plutonium!) fuel rods for reprocessing, and post-processing wastes...

They've got to be careful.

This is a no-shitter.

-----

Remember: Only Conservative Republican Presidents harm to the nvironment; murdering dictators are completly innocent.

[witnesstothefall]

16 hrs and running, the PPT has an exclusive on this story in America. What are the rest waiting for?

[philetus]

I sent this link to FOXNEWS.
Couple hundred more people send it and they might report it.

[Rocko]

No surprise to those of us aware of Hamza's book, Saddam's Bombmaker (published in 2000).

[polemikos]

That's where the Marines see the grand irony...In a nation with some of the world's largest petroleum reserves, Saddam saw the need for nuclear energy.

No need to color your story with your own bias.
Just assign it to an unnamed, unquoted Marine.
Who will ever figure it out?

Saddam saw the need for nuclear energy?
He was building a friggin' BOMB!

[enemy9oclock]

bump for later

[AndyJackson]

Seegar promises to hold the nuclear site until international authorities can take over.

International!! If this portrayal is correct, then security at this site needs to be reinforced, and it should be held until U.S. experts and investigate and inventory everything, and figure out what to do with it. Until it is clear potential nuclear weapons materials or capabilities it should remain US/UK only.

[meyer]

Interesting article. I want to know more!

[mvpel]

Amidst grinding poverty, where peasants eke an existence out of dust and river water, the Saddam Hussein regime built a lavish atomic weapons program. In a nation with some of the world's largest petroleum reserves, Saddam saw the need for nuclear energy.

This attitude bothers me somewhat - uranium is essentially a zero-emissions renewable resource, while oil is not. Just because someone might have huge stockpiles of oil doesn't mean they should just burn it to spin turbines, there are far better uses for oil than that.

[jwalsh07]

"A former Iraqi scientist says Iraq is hiding materials that could be used to make nuclear weapons. He knows this because he helped hide some of the materials more than 20 years ago.

Gazi George, who lives near Detroit, Mich., and does consulting work in Quincy, fled Iraq in 1981 after helping to hide 39 rods of enriched uranium — enough to build two nuclear bombs.

At the time, George was working for the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission. He was assigned to the Osirak nuclear power plant at Tuweitha when the commission received intelligence that the plant was being targeted by enemy forces during the Iraq-Iran War, which was then about a year old.

In an interview this morning with The Quincy Herald-Whig, George told how he devised a plan to remove the uranium from the nuclear plant’s reactor and hide it in a specially built swimming pool about a mile from the plant."

[RippleFire]

bump

[tutstar]

French engineers spent a fortune pumping water from the foundation area

Hamza said the French built a reactor at Al-Tuwaitha that Israel destroyed in 1981. The Russians built a reactor that was destroyed during the Gulf War.

hmmmmmm.....more than just the oil interests our foreign 'friends'