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You can connect the dots for yourself. But if true, it would tie in with Chirac selling Saddam the Osirak reactors at about the same time. My, what a strange series of sheer coincidences that would seem to be...

Does anybody else remember in the first few weeks after we took Bahgdad that the Army or Marines found a place that was soo hot with nuclear material that they had to shut it down? There were many rooms very "hot" underground. Then all the Iraqis came and dumped out the barrels of "yellow cake" and used the barrels for storage? What ever happened about that? There seem to be a lot of diss-connects that happened in the early days.

Does anybody else remember in the first few weeks after we took Bahgdad that the Army or Marines found a place that was soo hot with nuclear material that they had to shut it down? There were many rooms very "hot" underground. Then all the Iraqis came and dumped out the barrels of "yellow cake" and used the barrels for storage? What ever happened about that? There seem to be a lot of diss-connects that happened in the early days.

Yes, sounds like that al-Taiwaitha lab. Apparently, the guards and staff fled, probably fearing we'd bomb it. The place was well-known to IAEA and they had cataloged its contents in previous inspections. A lot of the material used for research and the waste were there. IAEA claimed they had documented the types and quantities stored in various places. It might even be true 'cause they really like sticking labels on things and producing tabular reports that nobody reads. At any rate, because of all the waste, there were a lot of 'hot' locations there. Kind of like our old Rocky Flats facility but worse. Not lethal to visit but you had to limit your time there if unprotected. So, after the staff fled, Iraqis were running all over the country trying to grab anything not nailed down. Apparently, there has been a shortage of containers to store water as it was in short supply before the war and the Iraqi civilians expected it would get much worse (and it did). So they grabbed a bunch of barrels from there (and air conditioners, furniture, etc.). They dumped waste out of some of them and then supposedly used them for storing drinking water. There was a fuss over trying to find them so they wouldn't kill themselves by drinking irradiated water but I never heard if they found the barrels or not.

At any rate, first reports from a junior officer who grabbed the entire facility and stopped the looting was that it was very 'hot' in there. There were never any reports from there during those days by any scientist or weapons inspector with adequate equipment. Just the reports of our young commander (a lieutenant or captain, I think) who was using their rather elementary radiation detection gear to see how 'hot' various spots were.

But the media, led by Fox, jumped all over these early reports even though the military command in Qatar was pretty reserved. After all, everyone had gotten really tired of the daily or hourly reports that we-finally-found-the-WMD only to have it fall through again.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.