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Originally Posted by dartman51
I guess NBC was in the tank for the Bush administration.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25546334/n.../#.VELFUfnF-80
From the article:
The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions. |
More from the article:
"Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said"
Bush lied. Also from Snopes
http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/yellowcake.asp
Claim: The removal of yellowcake uranium from Iraq in 2008 proved that Saddam Hussein had been trying to restart Iraq's nuclear program.
Status: False.
After the American invasion in 2003, Tuwaitha was looted. Barrels used to store the yellowcake were stolen and sold to local people, who used them to store water and food and to wash clothes, according to a report by the atomic energy agency.
The claim above cites the July 2008 removal of yellowcake from Iraq as proof that Iraq had in fact been buying yellowcake in an attempt to restart its nuclear program (and ultimately produce nuclear weapons) before the U.S. invasion of March 2003, and that therefore the Bush administration was right and Joseph Wilson was wrong. However, that claim is erroneous.
The yellowcake removed from Iraq in 2008 was material that had long since been identified, documented, and stored in sealed containers under the supervision of U.N. inspectors. It was not a "secret" cache that was recently "discovered" by the U.S, and the yellowcake had not been purchased by Iraq in the years immediately preceding the 2003 invasion. The uranium was the remnants of decades-old nuclear reactor projects that had put out of commission many years earlier: One reactor at Al Tuwaitha was bombed by Israel in 1981, and another was bombed and disabled during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Moreover, the fact that the yellowcake had been in Iraq since before the 1991 Gulf War was plainly stated in the Associated Press article cited in the example above:
Tuwaitha and an adjacent research facility were well known for decades as the centerpiece of Saddam's nuclear efforts.
....The yellowcake removed from Iraq was not the same yellowcake that President Bush claimed, in a now discredited section of his 2003 State of the Union address, that Mr. Hussein was trying to purchase in Africa.
The U.S. did manage to ameliorate a substantial security concern by secretly shipping stored yellowcake out of Iraq in mid-2008, but that act was not, as claimed above, proof that Iraq had been purchasing uranium and attempting to restart its nuclear program prior to the U.S. invasion.
And...
In 1991, Iraq was discovered to have about 500 metric tons (~1 million lbs.) of yellowcake they'd 'forgotten' to mention. George Herbert Walker Bush, his coalition pals, and the International Atomic Energy Agency were so "alarmed"
that Iraq had yellowcake, they decided to leave it in Iraq. The "prudent" course of action as they saw it: put it drums, seal it up, and check the seals once a year. They knew an entire year was not long enough for Hussein to make anything dangerous out of yellowcake.
That yellowcake was inspected and remained untouched until Hussein barred the U.N. inspectors in late 1998.
On Oct. 6, 2002, the CIA sent a fax to the White House that stated
"the procurement [of yellowcake] is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide [yellowcake] in their inventory.
During Dec. 9-11, 2002, before Bush's SOTU claim that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake from Africa, U.N. Inspectors verified that the yellowcake from 1991 was in Iraq, undisturbed, and still sealed.
Q.E.D.
