Nuke component found in Iraq

[kenyg]

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/...uge/index.html

[shahani]

Sounds like reason enough to attack a country.

[kenyg]

"It begins to tell us how huge our job is," Kay said. "Remember, his material was buried in a barrel behind his house in a rose garden. There's no way that that would have been discovered by normal international inspections. I couldn't have done it. My successors couldn't have done it."

[GroundZero3]

the ones screaming "where are the weapons" are the ones who give Hussein to little credit. we being a superior country think we know and have everything figured out. We think with all the intelligence that we can gather we know everything. This is just the start of what is to come. The country is roughly the size of Texas and people expect us to everything NOW. they had 51 planes buried in the sands, that says a lot on what they have out there

[shahani]

I heard this saw this Breaking News on CNN a while back. I have a few comments:

1) The scientist who buried this stuff 12 years ago comes forth now. What was promised to him by the CIA? Money? Amnesty? US citizenship?

2) How come he waited for 3 months after the war to suddenly surface now when the noose around Bush's neck (figuratively speaking) is tightening?

3) How relevant are these components in the overall picture? Could they be for nuclear power generation also?

While I accept that it may well be for an aborted nuclear program, would this be relevant today? The scientist claims to have buried it 12 years ago. Does this imply that their nuclear program was in hybernation for 12 years? Doesn't this technology change? Is it possible to use this today?

Or is it possible that Saddam had, in fact, stopped all such programs and said so. Only to have no one believe him. These are relevant questions, in my view, and need answers before one can jump to conclusions.

Because remember it may just be yet another clumsy CIA step to protect itself and the President.

I just can't help but wonder whether Bush-Rumsfeld had a secret meeting with Tenet and threatened him to find something. Anything.

Just some thoughts.

[Toadman]

1) The scientist who buried this stuff 12 years ago comes forth now. What was promised to him by the CIA? Money? Amnesty? US citizenship?

He and his family gets to live now that Saddam is no longer in power. Anything else is a perk.

2) How come he waited for 3 months after the war to suddenly surface now when the noose around Bush's neck (figuratively speaking) is tightening?

Who knows? Bush's "noose" is only tightening in the int'l community and liberal media.

3) How relevant are these components in the overall picture? Could they be for nuclear power generation also?

Read up on how U-235 is converted to Plutonium and you'll have your answer to why a centrifuge.

Shahani, if you are so philosophically against Bush, US Foreign Policy and the Military, how can you live with yourself here selling out to your true beliefs? It's hypocritical. (No flame, just want an honest answer).

[Toddly]

Well I believe him, Sadaam was trying to build a bomb but I don't think they ever succeeded. I don't know what this discovery says about the future so I won't speculate. Could someone tell me who they are refering to when they say "liberal media".

[shahani]

Originally posted by Toadman
Shahani, if you are so philosophically against Bush, US Foreign Policy and the Military, how can you live with yourself here selling out to your true beliefs? It's hypocritical. (No flame, just want an honest answer).

1) Big assumption there. I am in fact not selling out to the corrupt and immoral Administration. I am voicing my concerns and opinions.

2) Probably half the people in this country would agree with me. They are, like me, biding time till Bush and his mob is thrown out.

3) I am not so philosophically against Bush. I am against any immoral, corrupt, and unethical regime. Clinton's was no better and I am against that regime too.

I don't understand how you infer what you say. Should people just have two options in a professed democracy:

1) Shut up and agree to all the crap the President gives out.

2) Else move to Iraq or Mongolia.

Is it sensible for you to suggest this? Don't you think this kind of thinking will point towards totalitarian regimes like Saddam's.

Just some thoughts. I figure your intolerance of any opinions/positions contrary to your own is driving you towards extreme positions of asking people to leave the country or shut up.

I don't normally address individual members and limit myself to addressing issues but in this case I strongly suggest deep introspection into your psyche over the weekend.

Perhaps it is you who should leave and settle in Iraq or similiar country more in tune with your inflexible attitude.

[Epidemic]

The most important part of this discovery is that it confirms what I have said. we have searched 235 known and suspected wmd sites and we have exhausted our search of government facillities.

Of course saddam had 12 years to find alternate facillities such as rose gardens and 26,000,000 other peoples houses, not to mention Millions of square miles of sand through out the country.

now I do not know if he had an active or even paused WMD program at the time of the last inspections. But it does prove that the sky is the limit for hiding materials. IMO it also proves that if the sanctions were ever lifted that there always would have been a threat of resumption.

Regarding the nuclear program I still remember in the early days of inspection an iraqi scientists house being raided and documentation regarding the development of nukes were found but that story faded away. Couple that with a centerfuge buried in the rose garden and tubes intercepted from germany and you have a ready made upgrade to their nuclear program.

Couple that with some mobile labs "for making hydrogen for weather experiments" yeah right burried in the desert, and you have ready made WMD program again.

Perhaps there was a WMD program perhaps not, alls I can say is time will tell who has egg on their face.

[Theophylact]

It's not a "nuke component". It's a component of an isotope separation facility. You need lots of gas centrifuges to separate significant amounts of U-235 from the 99.3% U-238 it's found with in natural uranium.

You want to say that Saddam Hussein at one time -- perhaps even recently -- was trying to assemble the hardware to enrich uranium, fine. We knew that. The article makes it clear, though, that this guy stowed those parts away twelve years ago.

It's very easy to make a nuke if you have U-235, but it's hard to develop an enrichment program. It's much easier to extract plutonium from spent reactor fuel as North Korea has done, but rather harder (though, unfortunately, not nearly hard enough) to convert it into a bomb.

The Israelis destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981; that meant they had to go a much harder route. We stopped that in 1991, and UN inspectors hindered it thereafter; the best evidence is that even after the inspectors were kicked out, Iraq was several years away from a successful enrichment facility. Pressure on Iraq to readmit inspectors put an end even to that.

[Epidemic]

once again theo you miss the point.

This is not just about nukes. This is about how Iraqi's hide stuff. This opens the search to every square inch of the country not just labs and warehouses.

[Theophylact]

Epidemic, I think you're missing the point. A piece of a gas centrifuge that's hidden under one guy's rose bush is not an enrichment facility. You have to dig up a lot of rose bushes and assemble the equipment at a common site before you have enrichment capability; that's much harder to conceal, especially when inspectors and satellites are watching.

[Epidemic]

but where are all those rose bushes.

[shahani]

But, Theo, as Epidemic says, this will give a huge window to Bush in his contention that weapons are hidden. Now Bush will claim it will take 4-5 years for the search.

Or, well, till elections are over.

[josailor]

Shahani, I find it disturbing that you would even imply that Bush and Rummy would have to threaten anyone to find WMDs.

I wonder if Clinton and Cohen used the same 'threat' policy in December of 98' when they ordered strikes against the Saddam Hussein regime in order to rid the country of WMDs.

It didn't seem to bother you liberals then, why now?

[cyphen]

Shahani and Theo - you both seem quick to accuse and accept any explanation that puts the administration in a negative light, but very slow (if at all) to acknowledge or accept evidence that maybe the President and his administration is not in fact a war hungry profiteering mad evil genius (or dullard - depending on which description best suits your needs at the moment)

If your neighbor hated you, and admittedly was attempting to develop a cannon to blow up your house, but was stopped, the police take him into custody, and other neighbors cry foul because they play poker with him, and state that the charges were trumped up, that he no longer was pursuing the building of a cannon - and then it is discovered that in fact he had a cannon part buried in his yard to hide it from police investigators - wouldn't you come to the conclusion that he was building a cannon?

Right now you're being the poker playing neighbors, claiming that the cannon barrel was actually used for propelling his riding lawnmower.

The bottom line is that you despise the president to enough of a degree to believe a man like saddam hussein (a mass murderer, butcher, verified liar on the subject of WMD) over our own president. How sad is that?

[shahani]

cyphen, interesting post as always. I do, in all honesty, agree with some of the observations. Dullard? I'd even say devoid of common sense and common intelligence.

But the fact is that I have a deep down gut-feel that Bush is playing a very deep game and not transparently but with his own secret agenda.

And I fear its gonna blow up in his face because he doesn't understand the Arab psyche.

I write very plainly what I see and observe. I am not here to make friends or be likeable. You wouldn't believe the threats I have received. But that only reflects on the cowards who send them. I only want to give the other point of view and you can like it or ignore it.

Choice is yours.

[Epidemic]

Ahhh the old deep dark game conspiracy.

The dullard is fooling the world all the intelligence agencies of all nations. Playing a game so well that no one can define the secret plot for his oil buddies who have not been profiting from the oil fields which he fought the war for. Amazing you should have been a private dick.

[cyphen]

Originally posted by shahani
You wouldn't believe the threats I have received.

Sure i would, Jay - i wrote half of 'em!

Seriously though, i have no problem with questioning or exploring other avenues, as long as the motive is the search for truth. But this tirade against the president and the administration is anything but. It's transparently political mudslinging, and serves no purpose to the truth. I say that for the media, and half expect if from politicians, but from a community such as this, i find it a travesty when such a collection of great minds have no apparent interest in searching for truth. Calling the president a liar and a fool in one thread, blaming him for fabricating evidence in another, misleading the populous, waging war on a nation for no reason, and being blindly ignorant of facts and history to the contrary - it makes me gag.

So dissent, question, challenge - but have the integrity to quest for the unbiased truth. Left, right, whatever your political views.

[Epidemic]

I would say that you attacks rather than thought provoking force people into deeply defensive camps. Where one must avoid conceeding any impropriety so as to end the rediculous tyraid.

In other words Your extremism forces extremist response. Your baseless charges must be countered with baseless assumptions in the opposite direction.

The news stories we debate are rarely complete and the holes in these stories leave little hard fact yet we are often polarized by one or two extreme or judgmental responses.

Much like the checkpoint marines story, we do not know what those people were thinking, we do not know what that family was doing nor what the marines were thinking. In fact we do not even know what physical events actually transpired, general orders given. You argue cowardly act yet you do not know if the family ran the blockade on orders of the fedayin in a propaganda coup and or weather these marines had a history of shooting baby kittens and children for fun. Yet you try to speak with authority that the marines did wrong with intent.

your polarizing speak does little to promote thought IMHOOC.