[The Hon. Galahad Threepwood]

I think the purpose of seals was merely to ensure that the things had not been opened, not to physically prevent the opening.

I don't trust the UN either, but I do trust Jed Babbin:

The news that the Marines discovered Saddam's nuclear weapons--including weapons grade plutonium--under the old nuke site at al-Tuwaitha seems too good to be true. Like most things that do, it probably is. Dr. Khidir Hamza was the head of Saddam's nuclear weapons program for nearly two decades. He told me today that he's very skeptical. If he is, so am I.

Dr. Hamza worked at al-Tuwaitha for twenty-four years. The site, very close to the Tigris River, has a very high water table, making underground construction very hard, but not impossible. When you dig you get a well not a tunnel. When Dr. Hamza left there in 1994 no massive tunnel complex existed. It is possible that Saddam built a massive underground site for nuclear weapons development since then, but probably not at that site. Saddam is (was?) too clever to have undertaken such a project in a spot that is so closely watched. A big dig like the one required for such a big project would, as Dr. Hamza said, almost certainly have been detected by satellites or even by the U.N. inspectors who were very active there.

Dr. Hamza--the only guy I know who has had eyeball-to-eyeball and nose-to-nose contact with Saddam--doesn't believe the Marines found anything more than what may have been left behind by the U.N. inspectors. Even Chief U.N. Inspector Hans Clouseau, and his sidekick al-Baradei, couldn't miss radiation as intense as is being reported. We should wait for more to believe we have captured Saddam's nuke program.

[Minty]

I am starting to believe we will not find a thing. By the time we got there the guy had every track covered.

[algol]

The news that the Marines discovered Saddam's nuclear weapons--including weapons grade plutonium--under the old nuke site at al-Tuwaitha seems too good to be true.

Nobody, nobody in the original reports said anything about "weapons grade plutonium". That came from a silly-*ss "analysis" on Stratfor (on another thread here somewhere, which I debunked).

I wonder if it keeps being mentioned to make the real report seem silly when the final evaluation finds banned material the UN didn't know about, but no weapons grade plutonium.

(They also didn't discover "Saddam's nuclear weapons", just some unexpected rooms at a nuclear facility. Talk about leaping to conclusions.)