Outside the gates yesterday, children on donkeys dragged air conditioners from the area, part of the ongoing looting of government offices, Iraqi army forts and Baathist Party headquarters.
The nuclear scientists, engineers and technicians, housed in a plush neighborhood near the campus, have run away, along with Baathist party loyalists.
Farmers in rags drive the scientists' Mercedes and Land Rovers across Highway Six, filled with looted color televisions, silk rugs and Burberry suits.
That's where the Marines see the grand irony.
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.
"It's going to take some very smart people a very long time to sift through everything here," said Flick. "All this machinery. All this technology. They could do a lot of very bad things with all of this."
The mayor of this high-tech city is, for now, Capt. John Seegar, a combat engineer commander from Houston, Tx. He trudges up the 10-story hillocks hiding the campus from the surrounding villages and, crossing near a demolished mud bunker, it all opens up, gleaming and swaddled in roses.
"I've never seen anything like it, ever," said Seegar, who leads a company of combat engineers turned into combat grunts. "How did the world miss all of this? Why couldn't they see what was happening here?"
Seegar's biggest headache: Peasant looters, who keep cutting through the miles of barbed wire, no longer electrified because the war killed the power. He cradles in his arms blueprints in Arabic, showing recent construction, and maps in English, detailing which buildings test radioactive. Next to each, Seegar's placed an asterisk.
"Three weeks ago, the scientists seemed to have abandoned the complex," said Seegar. "That's what the villagers say. The place was protected by the Special Republic Guard, but they deserted it, too. Four days ago, everyone was gone. Then we came."
For him, Al-Tuwaitha is like a crime scene, and the next detectives on the atomic beat will be Army specialists.
Seegar promises to hold the nuclear site until international authorities can take over. His men hunker down in sandbag bunkers, sleepless, gripping machine guns."
From the AFP (a non-friendly source), May 8, 2003:
"Coalition forces have secured the facilities that housed the natural and low enriched uranium that was at those sites," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Monday.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that a Pentagon team sent to examine a radioactive waste dump in Iraq found it so heavily looted they could not tell whether dangerous materials had been taken.
Pentagon experts have so far visited seven sites associated with Iraq's nuclear program since major combat ended last month. None of them are intact and two had been plundered extensively, it said.
The IAEA's Melissa Fleming said "tonnes" of natural uranium were at the Al-Tuwaitha site but that the material, known as yellowcake, was not suitable for so-called dirty bombs.
She said the IAEA had removed or destroyed highly enriched uranium, fissile material that can be used in a nuclear bomb, from Iraq before its inspectors left in 1998.
She said the current concern was over so-called "radioactive sources" and that there were over 1,000 of them in Iraq, "including large numbers that were stored in Tuwaitha."
The bottom line is that Al-Twaitha is a sprawling complex, both above and below ground -- nuclear waste and contaminated materials were dumped all over the site, and the materials that the UN alternately says they "removed and destroyed" or "sealed," (depending on the day of the week) are in an underground facility being guarded by U.S. forces -- a facility that was looted before the Marines got there.
It's all how you shape the news -- but, of course, a team of a couple of dozen UN inspectors -- the same inspectors who blithely whizzed through nuclear waste dumps that exposed the population to radiation -- can make everything alright, stop the looting and magically pronounce it's all the fault of the U.S., and so verify this MSNBC story. /sarcasm