Friday, October 01, 2004

 

Nuclear Facilities In Iraq??

Kerry criticised the Bush Administration for securing the Oil facility first and not securing the nuclear facilities in Iraq.

"That's exactly where we find ourselves today. There's a sense of American occupation. The only building that was guarded when the troops when into Baghdad was the oil ministry. We didn't guard the nuclear facilities."

What is he talking about?
According to NTI,
(Mr. Turner and Senator Nunn founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) in January 2001. NTI is supported by a pledge from Mr. Turner and other private contributions.)
There are no known nuclear power reactors in Iraq; the following is a planned reactor that was never built.

Name: Underground nuclear reactor
Other Names: IAEC Reactor
Address/Location: NNW of Baghdad, Salah Al-Din province, 25km north of Samarra
Subordinate to: n/a
Primary Function: Plutonium production


Now we have Imad Khadduri, who worked with the Iraqi nuclear program from 1968 until his departure from Iraq in late 1998, writing in YellowTimes.org about what happened to the nuclear facilities:

What really happened to Iraq's nuclear weapon program after the 1991 war?

Immediately after the cessation of hostilities, the entire organization that was responsible for the nuclear weapons project turned its attention to the reconstruction of the heavily damaged oil refineries, electric power stations, and telephone exchange buildings. The combined expertise of the several thousand scientific, engineering, and technical cadres manifested itself in the restoration of the oil, electric and communication infrastructure in a matter of months -- an impressive accomplishment, by any measure.

Then the U.N. inspectors were ushered in. The senior scientists and engineers among the nuclear cadre were instructed many times on how to cooperate with the inspectors. We were also asked to hand in to our own officials any reports or incriminating evidence, with heavy penalties (up to the death penalty, in some cases) for failing to do so. In the first few months, the "clean sheets" were hung up for all to see. As the scientific questioning mounted, our scientists began to redirect the questioners to the actual technical documents themselves that had been amassed during the ten years of activity. These documents had been traveling up and down and throughout Iraq in a welded train car. Then the order was issued to return the project's documents to their original location. At that point, David Kay pounced on them in the early morning hours of September 1991. Among the documents were those of Al-Atheer and the bomb specifics.

In the following few years, the nuclear weapons project organization was slowly disbanded. By 1994, its various departments were either elevated to independent civilian industrial enterprises, or absorbed within the Military Industrial Authority under Hussain Kamil, who later escaped to Jordan in 1996 and then returned to Baghdad where he was murdered.


Now Kerry and Bush before the war said that there were WMD's in Iraq, but we didn't find any after the war.

According to the Guardian Unlited
No such weapons have been found, and arms control officials now worry the war and its chaotic aftermath may have increased chances that terrorists could get their hands on materials used for unconventional weapons or that civilians may be unknowingly exposed to radioactive materials.

According to ElBaradei's letter, satellite imagery shows ``extensive removal of equipment and in some instances, removal of entire buildings,'' in Iraq.

In addition, ``large quanitities of scrap, some of it contaminated, have been transfered out of Iraq from sites'' previously monitored by the IAEA.

In January, the IAEA confirmed that Iraq was the likely source of radioactive material known as yellowcake that was found in a shipment of scrap metal at Rotterdam harbor.


Now Iraq either had WMDs or they didn't! If they did have WMDs, then we were justified going in and that Iraq played games with the UN and the IAEA.

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