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U.S. says more radioactive material than expected found at Iraqi nuclear site

Posted on 06/05/2003 10:50 PM PDT by LdSentinal

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. officials compiling an inventory of a looted Iraqi nuclear site found more radioactive material than they expected, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

It's unclear whether the discovery means the Americans' information was wrong or the Iraqis had moved material to the Tuwaitha site before the war, said three top military and defense officials who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

The officials didn't say how much material they expected to be at Tuwaitha or how much more they found.

They said they could not determine if any radioactive material had been stolen from the storage site about 30 miles southeast of Baghdad. Earlier, U.S. officials in Iraq said at least 20 percent of the site's tons of radioactive material was missing.

American forces have collected more than 100 empty metal barrels and five radiological devices by paying $3 bounties for items suspected of having been looted from Tuwaitha, the defense officials said Thursday.

A visit this week by the International Atomic Energy Agency could help clear up the confusion. The IAEA gathered the radioactive material and sealed it at the Tuwaitha storage site after the 1991 Gulf War and has inspected the facility once a year since then. A team of seven IAEA experts is scheduled to begin an assessment at Tuwaitha on Saturday.

The United States had resisted allowing the IAEA officials back into Tuwaitha, which had been the centerpiece of Iraq's nuclear program. Even now, Pentagon officials stress that the IAEA visit is a one-time event to enforce the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, not a weapons inspection that might set a precedent for future U.N. searches for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

American troops and weapons experts will accompany the IAEA officials wherever they go, an arrangement the Pentagon officials said was for safety.

Before the war, IAEA inspectors concluded Iraq didn't have an active nuclear weapons program -- a finding U.S. leaders blame in part for their failure to win broader international support for the war.

The tensions with the IAEA come amid persistent questions about the U.S. hunt for evidence of the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs President Bush said he went to war to eliminate. No such weapons of mass destruction have been found, although Bush says the discovery of two trailers crammed with germ-growing equipment proves Iraq had a biological weapons program.

American forces have visited all but a handful of the 20 to 30 other storage sites for radioactive materials in Iraq, but have no plans to allow the IAEA to visit them, U.S. officials said.

Tuwaitha obviously had been picked over by thieves. The fence and 12-foot concrete wall around the three storage buildings for radioactive material had huge gaps and U.S. Marines found the main gate open when they arrived April 7.

Inside, some radioactive material had been scattered around. Radioactivity measurements inside the three buildings found levels two to ten times background levels, a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad said, joining the news briefing via a satellite link.

Local Iraqis have told the Americans that Iraqi soldiers guarding Tuwaitha left on March 10, before the war started, and civilian guards abandoned the site March 20, the day before American ground forces entered Iraq from Kuwait.

Although reporters saw looters inside the radioactive material storage site after the Americans arrived, the defense officials said Thursday they had no evidence of any looting there after April 7. Other looters have been captured elsewhere on the sprawling, 23,000-acre Tuwaitha site, however, they said.

The looting has raised the possibility that terrorist groups could have obtained material for a radiological "dirty bomb" from the site. None of the material at Tuwaitha was of high enough quality to make a nuclear bomb.

Most of the uranium stored at the site is "yellow cake," a slightly processed form of uranium ore the color and consistency of yellow corn meal. Some low-enriched uranium also is stored at the site -- uranium processed to enhance the percentage of the element's isotope that is most useful for nuclear reactor fuel and weapons. That material is not the highly enriched uranium needed for a nuclear bomb.

Some people in the villages surrounding the Tuwaitha site have complained of health problems they blame on radiation exposure. At least some of the barrels looted from the site -- which had been used to store uranium -- were emptied and used to store drinking water.

None of the people who turned in the contraband showed more than background levels of radiation, the military officials said. And none of the equipment was emitting more radiation than slightly above background levels.

The five devices recovered by American forces included measuring equipment and other industrial gear which uses radioactive material such as cesium-137, a military officials said. He said that American officials couldn't be sure all of the recovered material was from Tuwaitha because some of it was unmarked and some had markings obscured.

The Pentagon is sending a medical team to the area to investigate any health effects of the looting.

And we have a transcript here:

IRAQ: Was Intelligence on the Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction Politicized?

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IRAQ: Was Intelligence on the Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction Politicized?
Fox News ^ | June 3, 2003 | Brit Hume interview of BILL GERTZ,

Posted on 06/06/2003 5:03 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach

Was Intelligence on the Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction Politicized?

Wednesday, June 04, 2003

This is a partial transcript of Special Report with Brit Hume, June 3, that has been edited for clarity. Click here to order the complete transcript.

Watch Special Report With Brit Hume weeknights at 6 p.m. ET

BRIT HUME, HOST: That report that Carl just noted on the CIA's latest assessment of Al Qaeda (search) was written by the Washington Times national security correspondent Bill Gertz, renowned in this city for his contacts inside the American intelligence services. His latest book, by the way, is Breakdown; subtitled How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11 . Bill Gertz joins me now.

Welcome to you, sir.

BILL GERTZ, AUTHOR, BREAKDOWN: Good to be with you.

HUME: Weigh in for me, if you will, on this whole controversy about the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (search). You're hearing sort of tentative expressions of interest from Democrats. But it's much more aggressive than that in Britain and in Europe where you're hearing out right charges of falsification, lying by British and American leaders on this. You know the intelligence services. You must know something about the intelligence. What do you know?

GERTZ: Well, the issue is whether or not intelligence was politicized. That's usually what they say. And of course, it's politicized. Anytime that you make public information that you use for political purpose, it's politicization.

And that happened in February when Secretary of State Colin Powell (search) made his case. They decided they were going to release classified information on this and they made the case. They had good, solid information based on defectors, based on intercepts.

The question then is, well, where are these weapons? Not so much whether the intelligence was right, but what happened to them? There are reports that they've been moved out of Iraq. There are reports they could have destroyed them and, of course...

HUME: How credible?

GERTZ: Well, I think that there is probably something to that. There's reports that they may be in Syria, the Baca Valley in Lebanon or even as far as Libya. They also could have dumped them. And then again, I think it is going to take a minimum of six months before they can get to the bottom of whether or not they're still there.

HUME: Let me take you back to the question of politicization. Normally when you hear about politicization of intelligence, the unmistakable implication is that the intelligence is being distorted for political purposes. Is that what you're saying?

GERTZ: Well, I'm saying that policymakers use intelligence to make a political case. That's what I meant by that. Of course, the intelligence people will deny that they have anything to do with politicization. But you know, this is the idea that they're totally objective and just telling it like it is also somewhat of a myth within the intelligence circles.

HUME: You mean because intelligence agents themselves, as they're preparing reports, have a viewpoint they're trying to support.

GERTZ: Absolutely. And they're serving a consumer and they're not going to serve up stories to the consumer that's not going to help their career.

HUME: Well, I understand. But let's talk about this. Were you suspicious now that the intelligence on the existence on these weapons of mass destruction and their -- and the imminent threat that they posed to the United States and its allies was deliberately overdrawn by intelligence agents?

GERTZ: I don't think that it was deliberately overdrawn. I think that they saw that this was a good vehicle to make a public case and I think it was important to the administration to make a public case. I think they took information. We've all heard the stories about the secretary of state throwing some of information...

HUME: Let me stop you and ask you about that; because I think it's U.S. News & World Report had a report over the weekend that said basically that when the secretary was preparing to make the speech at the U.N., that you just mentioned a short time ago, he had a ream of material that was submitted to him. And a lot of it he flat discarded as being stuff that he wasn't confident enough to go with. And the suggestion in the story was that the vice president's office had tried to kind of pawn this stuff off on him. What do you know about that?

GERTZ: Well, I think he's already talked about this in several interviews over the last couple of days. He did admit that there was some information that he felt was not corroborated properly. And his point was he wanted to make you know, what we in the news business call a bulletproof case in front of the U.N. That is, they didn't want anybody shooting holes in his story.

I think he made add very convincing case. For example, on the issue of the biological vans, he talked about multiple sources. He talked about defectors who were actually involved in conducting tests with these mobile- biological weapons vans. They had intercepts; they played intercepts where Iraqis were talking about how to deceive inspectors.

Again, this is an unfolding story, but my guess is within the next several months, we're going to find more than just a few vans.

HUME: And your sense is we'll find what; the actual weapons themselves, the substances or what?

GERTZ: Or we'll find the remnants of what's left of them.

HUME: In other words, we'll find that it was destroyed somehow or...

GERTZ: Or moved. Yes.

HUME: Right. And what would be your best guess on which it will be?

GERTZ: I think we're going to find actual weapons. Now you take anthrax, we know that he has anywhere from 7,000 liters of anthrax...

HUME: Or had.

GERTZ: ... or up to 20,000 liters.

HUME: That's what the U.N. believes he had, right?

GERTZ: You figure what a liter of anthrax looks like, it is not a large -- it is not something that is going to be filling up a tractor- trailer. It is a very small amount. So, this is going to be a very serious hunt.

Also, the team that were in Iraq up until just recently, they were combat support teams. The teams that are going through now are intelligence people that are actually going to do the real searching.

HUME: So your sense is that the real search is really now getting underway?

GERTZ: Yes. They just dispatched a one-star general who is heading up that team.

HUME: Bill Gertz, nice to have you. Thanks very much.