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550 Metric Tons of Uranium Removed From Iraq
Orion Blastar tips us to an AP report that 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" uranium has successfully been removed from Iraq. The operation lasted three months, and it required 37 separate flights and an 8,500-mile trip by boat to reach a port in Montreal. Quoting:
"While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called 'dirty bomb' -- a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material -- it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment. The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp., in a transaction the official described as worth 'tens of millions of dollars.' A Cameco spokesman, Lyle Krahn, declined to discuss the price, but said the yellowcake will be processed at facilities in Ontario for use in energy-producing reactors."
... for at least keeping this ONE story under wraps until a prudent moment!
delicious
We can't let those French Canadians have nuclear weapons!
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
I would have waited until AFTER Dick Cheney left the White House to be seen buying Uranium....esp. with all that oil you have up there......
Monstar L
in iraq yellow cakes you
Mmmmmmmmm, Yellowcake.
According to Xemplar Energy, the energy in one pound of yellowcake is equivalent to the energy in 31 barrels of fuel oil. So that 550 metric tons could keep 30 nuclear reactors going for a year.
Since there is so much yellow cake in the world that they're literally tripping over it in a country everyone knew had none--the stuff must have been naturally occurring and just sitting around in "bunkers" eroded from underground water formations, since we all know Iraq wasn't importing the stuff or planning to use the stuff--it tells me there is more than enough uranium yellowcake in the world to power our needs virtually forever.
Now if we can just build a few more nuclear reactors...
So the primary hazard is mass panic.. exactly the same as a (uranium based) radiological dispersion device (dirty bomb) then. Also not too dissimilar to what the US have been doing for the last 5 years - shooting uranium all over the place.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Is there any radioactive material that is potent enough for a dirty bomb? Wouldn't blowing the material up just spread it out so that it's doesn't emit enough rem to do damage?
Even if you could find a material potent enough how would you store it? How would you move the bomb into a strategic position without killing yourself from radiation poisoning?
I think a dirty bomb is about the dumbest idea I've ever heard.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
So all the fuss about Bush lying about Saddam trying to get large quantities of yellowcake was pretty much blustering and arm waving on both sides of the political aisle over nothing, eh?
I mean, if the guy already had 550 tonnes of the stuff, why should the right make it a big deal that he's looking for more? I'm certain you can get enough fissionable material from 550 tonnes of yellowcake to make a good bomb or two.
Also, on the left, if the guy already had 550 tonnes of the stuff, why make this big deal out of the fact that it turned out to be a lie that he was trying to acquire more? If a guy already has a gun with half a clip in it, does it really make him less dangerous if he's not out looking for the rest of the clip?
It's been a long time.
I'm shocked.
Why do people always feel the need to stress that yellowcake could be made into weapons, no matter how far from being a weapon it presently is? It's like saying:
...though making a high quality steel tool from rust is significantly easier than making a weapon from yellowcake. The ubiquitous anti-nuke meme (it's radioactive, be afraid!)? Or just boilerplate like measuring energy use in average households equivalents or heavy things in adult male elephants?
-- MarkusQ
It is gratifying to hear we've disassembled the last remnants of Iraq's non-existent WMD program.
"I drank what?" - Socrates
Uhhh, we knew he had this stuff, from when the israelis blew up their nuke plane in the 80s. I take it you didn't RTFA?
proud to be an american, are you? 4 more years? are you insane?
Yellowcake nigga - http://www.spike.com/video/2795970/
So the yellowcake isn't a lie?
The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp.
OMGWTFBBQ! Canada has bought iraqi Yellowcake??
I guess we can't blame them anymore...
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Maybe because the lie was used to trick the American people into starting a war that has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, wrecked our economy, undermined our position in the world and put us in a far less secure position, killed hundreds of thousands of people, destabilized the middle east, and lined the pockets of the friends and supporters of the people who told the lie with money stolen from the US treasury on the basis of that lie?
The problem was it was a lie, crafted and used to achieve a specific dishonorable result. The fact that other claims that could have been made about superficially similar subjects were true (and were known to be true at the time) has absolutely no bearing on the situation.
--MarkusQ
Even if this yellowcake was a WMD, it wouldn't be harmful on its own. The only WMD we ever had to worry about is the "Death to America" attitude. All the physical WMD's in the world won't kill many people if they're not wielded with the motive to kill.
stuff |
If you consider half the world's population are blooming idiots (IQ 100) ......
it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast.
Hmm... I always tought that radiation on blast, would stir death and not panic...
This is AGAIN one f*ck* way try to control readers to get them fear someone.... Why someone dont shoot few people from U.S congress? Why people on control dont fear the people around them who are carrying guns, it is bigger change to get shot there than someone would get delivered dirty bomb to U.S! (actually, it is very easy to deliver, problem is just to get such thing ;)
Or did you also switch to the Euro-dollar?
Further: the reason Saddam had the Yellowcake was because he was actually putting together a nuclear reactor back in the 1980s. Thanks to bombings by Israel and the US, Saddam had no choice but to sit on the damaged reactors and fuel, and try to build a nuclear research program.
The fact that the nuclear fuel he'd had for years is completely unenriched just tells you how little cash he had to spend on the program. Simple fact: nuclear programs are fucking expensive, because enrichment is not a simple process. This is why I laughed my ass off when Bush claimed that Iraq might have a nuclear program to fear, even after we bombed them to the stone age in 1991, and then strangled their international trade for the next decade. Complete bullshit!
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
From TFA:
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.
This was old yellowcake from the first Iraqi attempt at a nuke plant (which the Israelis bombed in 1981). Saddam couldn't use it because there were UN inspectors watching it.
So it was plausible that he might want some, but not true that he tried to get it from Niger. That was concocted evidence.
so now we're led to believe that CANADA is pursuing nuclear weapons?
They just purchased 550 Metric tonnes of yellowcake uranium from a supposed Terrorist state and we're just letting them do it?
Canada is a ticking bomb here people!
We need to attack Ontario now!
Why isn't bush willing to protect us from these terrorists?
They're using their grammar skills there.
In order to keep up appearances, the American government will be forced to give Iraqis some sort of democracy, and they (as a Shia majority) will absolutely elect someone friendly to their neighbor Iran. This was probably pre-emptive move to get the uranium out the grip of Tehran.
As we all know, countries cannot be left to conduct business on their own terms, because it could possibly be harmful to the only interests that matter: ours.
That nation's name is enough to make trolls drool. But, of course, you should have misspelled it with an extra "g"...
AP is owned by The Washington Times, which, in turn is owned by the Unification Church - headed by Rev. Moon.
Murdoch-Moon / same coin different sides.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon
Sadam had declared this depot of uranium during the last Gulf War. It was put under U.N. jurisdiction and monitored for years.
Sadam had lots of weapons and stockpiles that were put under U.N. seals, and monitored by personnel and remote cameras. These depots were located all over Iraq and most were intact when the U.S. invaded. Fortunately, this nasty stuff stayed in the depot despite all the chaos.
Unfortunately, much of the material that was under U.N. jurisdiction did disappear right after the U.S. invasion. In one depot, the U.S. troops acknowledged that a long range rocket depot was still intact, left for the Battle of Bagdad, and when they came back, it was all gone. This particular depot was about 50 miles from the Iraq/Iran border, and there is some thought that maybe the Iranians saw their chance to grab some "Weapons o' Mass Destruction" before anyone noticed. Then again, Iraqis may have entered this compound and sold its contents for scrap. We will never know.
RTFA: "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."
But I guess many stupid/ignorant people will read the headlines and "understand" it the same way you did.
No wonder Bush got re-elected.
Nuclear bombs aren't like gunpowder. You can't build them by mixing uranium with charcoal in your backyard.
And that assumes you have uranium at all. The yellowcake would have to be heavily refined ("enriched") first, by spinning it in a centrifuge an unbelievable number of times to separate the heavier isotopes from the lighter ones. It takes years to produce any appreciable amount of weapons-grade uranium. So Yellowcake is about as easy to turn into nuclear weapons as raw iron ore can be turned into fighter airplanes: You need knowledge, manpower, technology and years of work.
That's why the claim that Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake was not so much a big deal but rather ridiculous - whether or not it was true, he couldn't have done anything useful with that stuff for many years, during which he could not have kept his intentions hidden.
all the while - pumping the countryside full of depleted uranium... :-P
all the while, pumping the iraqi countryside full of depleted uranium... :-P
So Yellowcake is about as easy to turn into nuclear weapons as raw iron ore can be turned into fighter airplanes
Heh. I'd love to see the airplane you'd make out of iron. Iron is very very heavy. A better way to put it would have been "...as raw bauxite can be turned into fighter airplanes", as they are largely made of aluminum, not iron.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Nuts. Unless you've got some super secret enrichment technique that you haven't shared with the rest of us, you are quite simply dead wrong. Yellowcake is just a mix of uranium salts, and making it is no more complicated than any typical mining operation; drill some holes, crush some rock, and leach the minerals out with a suitable leaching agent. Dry the result and repeat. You don't need specialized equipment, or even a great deal of skill. It is a low tech, low precision step.
Enrichment, on the other hand, is a bear, requiring precision engineering, lots of finiky equipment, and a great deal of skill.
--MarkusQ
Proof that Saddam had calutrons that could be used to enrich yellow cake uranium to weapons grade. Someone in Switzerland tried to tell the UN about it, and cites independent research as well.
Bill Clinton said the same thing in 1998 so this is not made up.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Yes, Iraq did have a nuclear program, back in the 1970s and 1980s. It didn't go well. They couldn't get any of the separation processes to work. A mid-level physicist in the program defected to the US and wrote a book about it, which gives a view of the strange world of working for Saddam Hussein. If he was annoyed at a manager, he sent them to a torture camp to be tortured for a while, then put them back to work. If they did well, he gave them one of his ex-mistresses.
Iraq tried to build calutrons, which do isotope separation in one or two steps but can process only tiny amounts of material. So it's necessary to build a large number of them to enrich enough uranium for a weapon. The US built some sizable calutron plants during WWII, but they were too slow to be useful when fed with natural uranium. They were used as a final upgrade step for uranium partially enriched in the gaseous diffusion plants. None of the other nuclear powers ever bothered much with calutrons, except little research-sized units. Iraq never actually built enough calutron capacity to accomplish much.
Iraq's yellowcake (uranium oxide, unenriched) is left over from that era. Extraction of yellowcake from raw ore is an ordinary chemical process, usually performed somewhere near the mine. It's the first and easiest step of the process, and that's as far as Iraq got.
The yellowcake in question has been sitting there for close to twenty years, maybe longer. Sadam might have had dreams of making a weapon with it back in the 1980's, when he had (or thought he had) support from the US, but the program was shut down dead by the early nineties and never got going again. Nor would it have even without the US led invasion and occupation. To say that it "was being accumulated," etc. grossly misstates the actual situation.
--MarkusQ
"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."
Of course, they likely won't let the facts dissuade them.
Finally, George Dubya Bush has proof that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. All that yellowcake was just sitting around for Sadam to dig up and make a dirtybomb from it. :P
Well, nearly half of the people in the world are of below average intelligence...
The fact that the nuclear fuel he'd had for years is completely unenriched just tells you how little cash he had to spend on the program.
Nailed it.
Further, keep in mind Iraq's position during the time period. There was a big war with Iran that was never officially undeclared. Then there was the Kuwait invasion and withdrawal that decimated the military, followed by economic sanctions and UN inspectors watching every move. Additionally, purifying uranium into anything useful takes a lot of industrial output.
Under those conditions, we could only hope that Saddam would be stupid enough to pursue a nuclear program.
Not a typewriter
Carbonized iron (steel) is about three times the weight of aluminum but also nearly twice as strong, so you need less of it.
Here's what the plane would look like.
(The USSR didn't have much aluminum - or any way to import it - in WW2.)
. . . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poutine . . . Yellowcake gives it that extra super-heavy-massive feeling in your stomach, that a normal combination of greasy fries, cheese and gravy alone just can't match . . . seriously, it's yummy . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called 'dirty bomb' -- a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material -- it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast."
First off, my understanding is that a "dirty bomb" itself is a scare tactic: Only if a chunk of the bomb hit you would you be effected, and even then if all particles were removed you'd just have an increased cancer risk.
Second, if this yellowcake can't even be used in a dirty bomb, why all the fuss? Hell, a terrorist could probably wreak massive terror by setting off a conventional bomb and saying it was laced with some radioactive substance. Bonus points for detonating near someplace that would have slightly higher than normal radioactivity levels, such as a hospital or coal plant.
Couldn't believe that, but 6 months later there was a big expose in "The Observer"...
So aside from the OMG it's nuklear panic most laymen have about this stuff it's no big deal.
One interesting fact though - in facilities like that they have a novel system of alarms. Most of us are familiar with alarms which "go off" when there's a problem. Not so (at least in this one). The alarm went "beep bop" all the time. If it *changed* then you really really had to panic.
(You were supposed to run along the pavement (sidewalk) in the direction of the little green arrows and wait at the green painted area).
Big warning signs "Danger you are now entering a criticality evacuation area" all over the place.
Oh, and nice English "Bobbies" with sub-machineguns and a shoot first , ask later policy.
One of my more fun assignments :-)
Andy
At first I thought you were joking.
Bush, Cheney, et al told so many lies in the lead up to the Iraq war that it's difficult to keep track of them all. Just off the top of my head (and sticking to things we know):
To claim that they didn't lie about anything regarding Iraq is either a sign of coolaid overdose, sock puppetry, or terminal cluelessness.
--MarkusQ
But the explosion would have to make the radioactive particles small enough to be inhaled. It would also have to be inhaled in a high enough concentration to do significant damage. Otherwise alpha particles are mostly benign. They can't penetrate your outer layer of skin. A house -- a piece of paper even -- would be enough to protect you from alpha particles.
Also you didn't name a material you just described the popular fear of dirty bombs.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jan/27/iraq.davidhirst
It's old news, actually. Get back to your MTV before you accidentally learn something.
The US is DESTROYING its stockpiles of chemical weapons. It's taking time with the environmental issues associated with tons of VX nerve agent but it is happening now and should be done before too long. Didn't Iraq's UN sanctions come from invading Kuwait and USING chemical weapons? Did the US ever invade Kuwait or gas Kurds? It's apples and oranges.
No most are above average with a few very, very, very stupid people.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
If my memory serves me well, the bombing of the civilian dual use reactor Osirak triggered a hidden program for a bomb. Hidden means you can't use known stocks for it. The program was successful and close to making a working device before it got interrupted by the 1990 war. If i recall correctly Iraq could mine its own yellowcake too(sulphur with a pinch of uranium). After 1991 it was impossible to enrich uranium there.
Are you planing on paying Iraq for those 550 tons of highly value nuclear power plant fuel?
Please, somebody add "looting" as tag.
All of Fokkers WW I era fighter aircraft were made of steel tubing ... (chrome-molybdenum steel to be precise).
MP3 Search Engine
Call me when they find Urectium.
Of "wrong" and "lying", are we?
Stop. I never said "stupid." Take a deep breath and think about the math. Nearly 1/2 of any population, must, by definition be below average (i.e., "mean") in intelligence (and height, weight, strength, etc). My post was actually intended as a lighthearted joke, and I'm sure you're kicking yourself for letting it slip past you, since as a /. reader, you very likely plot on the right slope of the curve. However, on a more serious note, the standard distribution ("Bell") curve is real, and has real consequences in the real world.
Once again I am amazed at the willingness of many Americans to choose to believe Sadaam, a known terrorist. How many UN inspectors and American allies agreed that Iran possessed the capability for nuclear weapons? Oh, never mind. Don't let the facts confuse you.
Whether these items are WMD or not, these items were known about, they were not under dispute, inspections were ongoing, and Iraq was looking pretty much squeaky clean.
The Bush Administration seized the moment to invade a country it knew posed no imminent threat, knowingly using fudged intelligence, exaggeration, and hyperbole to sell its case to the American people.
The People of the US didn't really bite until Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had long-range nuclear weapons targeted at New York, and if we waited too long our first sign of trouble would be a mushroom cloud. At that time they also began using the name "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and stating the aim was to bring Democracyâ to Iraq, which created sympathy for the Iraqi people, whom you may recall were suffering terribly under our severe sanctions - sanctions that were killing children by the millions.
I suggest we had things under control, and Iraq was not an imminent threat. If we wanted to prosecute Saddam Hussein for war crimes in International Criminal Court, that might have been an option open to us. However, since the ICC has also charged several officials of the United States - including George Bush Sr. - with war crimes, joining the ICC has not been a popular option.
The true aim of all our efforts has been purely to secure control of the region and its oil. All the hullaballoo about WMD's and Democracyâ and the rest is just a bunch of noise to create the illusion of a humanitarian mission. Given what we now know you'd have to be pretty inured to the Superior American Way of Life to keep blabbing about WMDs any more.
-- thinkyhead software and media
we invaded and occupied a country, have allowed the pubs that did this to remain in office, and it appears that the dems are going to do nothing about it. All in all, it does not speak well of us Americans. I know that many other countries allow their traitors and criminal politicians to get off scot-free. But we are Americans. This is NOT suppose to happen. Sadly, we allowed reagan off with all that he did. Likewise, Clinton for lying (though it was a lie on a question that should never have been asked of him). And now this. Interestingly, pubs and dems made more of a todo about Clinton, than they have about W.. Supposedly, Obama will pursue this if he gets into office and has said that he will free up ALL previous president records (except those for national security). I just hope that he keeps his word. He has already broken the one about accepting public funding only.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The article talks about a "huge stockpile".
U235 is the "usable" stuff, most of natural (and most other) uranium is U238, which is radioactive, but not fissible -- i.e. not good to make Hiroshima-style little boys from.
Let's do the math.
Bush Senior dropped 2000 tons of depleted uranium on Q8.
2000 tons x 0.2% = 4000 kilos of U235.
The Iraquis had 500 tons of natural uranium.
500 tons x 0.72% = 3600 kilos of U235.
We'll just assume that both are oxide (yellowcake = U3O8), but that doesn't matter much because uranium is much heavier than oxygen or any other common element you'd bind it with chemically - the weight would be mostly uranium.
So the US gave them more than they had of themselves. Pre-processed, free for the picking.
Of course -- I'll say it myself before someone else does -- there's a fallacy in that reasoning: if getting that last 0.2% of U235 out of depleted uranium were easy, it wouldn't be there.
And number two: "little boy" contained only 64 kilos of uranium.
But still, if 500 tons is a huge stockpile, what is 2000 tons of soil-polluting radiactive material?
Their excuse is/was that U238 is less radiactive than U235 (and the 0.0055% of U234 that's also present) because of its longer half life, which allegedly made those bombs "harmless" (yuck), but depleted uranium still contains nearly a third of the U235 present in the natural stuff.
Saddam wanted Iran to think he still had WMDs for his own security. No credible person disputes that. No matter how many times you retards repeat it,
So, Saddam was able to simply lie about WMDs and cause the US to waste hundreds of billions of dollars as a result?
He may have lost the battle, but damn! did he win that war.
George W. Bush never blamed 9/11 on Iraq.
O'really? Perhaps you are right. He never outright blamed 9/11 on Iraq, but he sure as shit intimated it on a frequent basis, making at least 28 false statements about Iraq's links to al qaeda. But at least he has plausible deniability - it wasn't his fault the public heard "al qaeda" and thought "9/11" no, no, no, no!
The risk of Iraq engaging in a terrorist attack was very real and the scale could have been huge with state sponsorship.
Eh? Just where the hell did you get that from? Because it sure as shit don't follow from anything else ya said.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
So how long did it take the U.S. to plant the yellowcake there in the first place to make it look like this war was actually justified?
The stuff has been packaged and stored since before the last Iraq war. We've always known, the point is it's not a clip of bullets, to use the same analogy, it's a rock with some lead in it which you could theoretically with the right technology turn into bullets to load a clip, if you had one, and then load into a gun, if you could also make one of those... and about proportionately as useful.
Why do you believe Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear reactor for power, when his country was one of the three top oil producing nations?
After all, he was no environmentalist (notice how he deliberately ordered his army to burn fields of oil as it retreated at the end of the First Gulf War).
There was no need for it for peaceful purpose; the country didn't need it. That was probably the determination of Israeli and U.S. intelligence. Clearly it was a masquerade for building up sufficient supplies of nuclear materials for a nuclear arsenal.
President Bill Clinton signed the United States House Resolution 4655 in 1998. He stated the following words at the signing ceremony (February 17, 1998):
How come Slashdot doesn't have a "-1 Ignorant" mod option?
Come to think of it, "-1 Insignificant" would sure hit the spot, too.
If you can't get your hands on the oil, you might aswell get some other interesting resources...
Privacy is terrorism.
Too bad the facts directly contradict your storyline.
Oops - small correction: I thought I read about those 2000 tons of depleted U in an article about Bush sr and Kuwait, but it turns out to have been one about the current Bush and Iraq.
Other articles (a quick Google search) mention completely different numbers, ranging from 350 to 1500 tons.
You are aware of course the the normal natural background radiation in Iraq / Iran is way above Western safty limits. Resulting in the net effect of any possible DU cantamination negligable.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
That poor Saddam, truly history's greatest victim. Curse you america!
teh so-called "dirty-bomb" is no more destructive than the conventional explosives it may contain. Radiation levels would be insignificant and far less than a conventional nuke.
Dirty bomb = FUD from your friendly imperialist government.
However, the dumping of tonnes of DU in the middle east is tantamount to sterilising the area and making it unsuitable for human habitation.
It's hardly news. In fact, one of the reasons the CIA was skeptical about the claim (which Joe Wilson found to be false) that Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger was that Iraq was known to already have substantial stocks of yellowcake--just no way to process it, so there was no reason for them to be trying to buy more. This was just one of the pieces of information that was ignored by the media because it didn't fit with the "Iraq is actively seeking nuclear weapons" narrative that the Bush administration and much of the US media were promoting as a pretext for invasion.
Saddam had no choice but to sit on the damaged reactors and fuel, and try to build a nuclear research program.
Wow, those evil Israelis and Americans gave him no choice but to conduct nuclear weapons research?
Tell me another one!
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Actually mine was meant to be joke as well, I just forgot to add in "(politicians)" at the end. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Although going by the "mean" average it does mean that a few very low scores could skew the result towards the low end, I'm not saying this is the case just that it could be.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
And don't forget the MiG-25. Due to the high design speeds and expected thermal loads it couldn't be built of normal aircraft aluminum, so the Soviets built it largely of nickel-steel.
(Unlike the American high-speed planes the SR-71 and XB-70 which primarily used lighter titanium)
You are rooting for China to have no check on its human rights abuses? Oh, wait, the extremely effective UN "world government" will save the Tibetans and the Taiwanese.
Not.
You are very scary sir. You want everyone to be the same? You would have loved the Cultural Revolution.
slightly off topic, but, can anyone tell me why we (ie the world in general) don't build breeder reactors like the Integral Fast Reactor? according to this guy, they are (1) just as safe as the pressurized-water reactors we use now, but (2) hardly produce any radioactive waste at all, so no disposal problems, and (3) thereby also leave nothing to promote proliferation of WMDs. seems to me this reactor design addresses most of the problems people have with fission for electricity.
Joe Wilson went on a fact-finding mission to Niger and returned and reported that Saddam was likely trying to get more yellowcake from Niger in his report. Wilson said Cheney sent him on that trip to Niger (lie). Then Wilson wrote the opposite of his report findings in a NY Times Op-Ed, that Saddam wasn't seeking more yellowcake. So either Wilson was lying the first time or the second. Which was it?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Really, it just makes my arguement stronger. Why was the yellowcake such a big deal if it wasn't such a big deal? Who cares if Saddam was trying to get some from Iraq if he already had a tonne that he couldn't do anything with anyway? Who cares if Bush lied about it if it really wasn't all that important in the first place?
It's been a long time.
It wasn't a big deal, which is what the article states.
He's dead and his people are liberated. Helluva a victory! Just like Hitler won WWII...
"O'really? Perhaps you are right. He never outright blamed 9/11 on Iraq, but he sure as shit intimated it on a frequent basis, making at least 28 false statements about Iraq's links to al qaeda. [publicintegrity.org] But at least he has plausible deniability - it wasn't his fault the public heard "al qaeda" and thought "9/11" no, no, no, no!"
Yes, I am right. That is why I said it. Can you name ONE person who thinks that it was Iraq behind 9/11? I live in Redneck Democrat Central where the most intelligent conversations about the War on Terror is not much better than "NUKE ALL THEM F***ING SAND N****RS!" and I still don't know ANYONE who thinks that Iraq was behind 9/11. You're just wrong, dude.
Most of your Center for Public Integrity quotes are intelligence failures, not lies. The same "lies" have been repeated by Clinton, Albright, and scores of senators.
Wow, 'tens of millions of dollars'. I didn't know companies even had that much money.
(Source: 'Cameco' on Wikipedia.)
On the other hand, that's a huge amount of money for Iraq, isn't it?. Makes the money the US government has spent there seem quite paltry.
What is your point?
Bush did not make an argument about Yellowcake that Saddam had. He said he was buying more... which ... was...a... LIE.
BULLSHIT.
The lying was done by Joe Wilson, who, you should note, has studiously avoided having all his and his wife's claims actually HEARD in a court of law:
Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission
Report Disputes Wilson's Claims on Trip, Wife's Role
Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.
Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.
Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.
The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.
The sanction were not working at all. Ever hear of the UN Oil-For-Food scandal?? Most likely the sanctions would have been dropped anyway and Saddam could develop whatever weapons he wanted at that time.
Bonus Uranium I thought we were just there for the oil ...
I agree with you for the most part, but you should note that you can't lie about speculation. If their estimates were wrong, then they were wrong, but by their nature you can't lie about something that hasn't happened yet that you don't have any real foreknowledge of.
The Intelligence estimate for Iran, released some time ago, shows the sort of lying that goes on. The intelligence community is saying one thing, the politicians are saying another.
So in other words, America just stole 550 metric tons of uranium from Iraq.
See? It wasn't JUST about the oil!
Heck of a job, Bushie.
Doesn't this prove that Iran was behind something? Let's go get 'em
I live in canadia, and this is the first I've heard of this. They brought 550 tonnes of nuclear weapon material into the country and nobody noticed? Good to see such transparency in government, Harper.
We've been blessed with the opportunity to dig up a long dead horse and flog it again.
FACT: Russia, Germany, Egypt, Israel, Iran, and Great Brittan, ALL warned the US that should it invade in 2003 the US would be met with chemical and biological attacks. MOST of the world thought the assclown HAD Weapons of an unconventional nature and the US responded accordingly.
FACT: 3 US soldiers were seriously injured (2 killed if memory serves) trying to disarm 2 IED's that were composed of nerve agent artillery shells.
FACT: Yellow cake, while not overly harmful CAN be made so with processing. Processing which Saddam was attempting to conduct. Not to mention, that even if he didn't/couldn't he could and would sell said materials to either rogue states or known terrorist.
FACT: we can not go back in time and change facts, or reverse decisions. I would agree that the organization of the event could have been much better. Hell, someday, maybe there will be an administration that will stop thinking of military troops as a well equipped police force, I doubt it but one can hope. The point is this, we need to make DAMN certain that Iraq has a regime that can fend for itself, I say this because Iran is already sowing the seeds of invasion.
One last FACT: the vast majority of US troops who are in Iraq and Afghanistan hate being there, BUT realize that there is a job to do and they are doing it. Re-enlistments are higher than is most peace time periods, enlistments are high but suffer from negative propaganda, the people who speak the most about wanting the troops out are by far proportionally highest among people who have never served and feel that the word "duty" is a four letter word.
I myself, am in the process of re-enlisting (seriously out of shape do to sitting on my ass staring at a monitor everyday for 15 years, that and too many Little Debbie snacks) and am on target for a September re-up. This will be a substantial paycut I might add but I feel strongly enough about it that I am willing to do something that 75% of this country is too afraid to do. That is put my ass on the line for something other than a bloody paycheck.
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
They must be building a bomb!
What sources are you referring to when you say: "a large portion of Americans who were listening to more than just the US administration", since virtually all the media was highly uncritical and passed on reports from the administration?
Foreign media. Most people who were cynical about the administration's motives long ago realized that the US media wasn't to be trusted to seriously contradict the President.
That's how I heard a lot about how the aluminum tubes that the administration was saying were for uranium centrifuges absolutely could not have been used for the purpose (instead before for rocket tubes). Foreign sources were also the biggest sources publishing Ambassador Wilson's logic for why Iraq wasn't getting yellowcake from Niger and were the ones who brought my attention to the fact that the "roving chemical weapons trailers" were actually for making hydrogen balloons to get artillery with. (The latter bit only came out after the war, though.)
The mainstream US media lost all credibility with me very early in the Bush administration when when went from hounding Clinton's every step to kissing Bush's ring pretty much within the span of a single year. I'm not the only person who feels that way by a long shot, and those of us who read the BBC and other foreign news were the ones who caught on pretty quickly that the causus belli was being manufactured.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Gah, that was a terribly written post. My apologies about the grammar. I guess I'm groggier than I thought.
I meant to say, "(instead *of* for rocket tubes)," and "making hydrogen balloons for artillery target practice." Sorry for the unintelligible post.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
WTF is this story doing in the 'hardware' section???
OK, most of you won't like this. I accept that. If you want to argue the point, go ahead. The sentiment here is decidedly left-leaning (I say that in a positive sort of way not intending to insult anyone.) but I'm expecting bricks and rocks. Nevertheless, here's the deal. Believe it or not, it's still the deal. This is not an attempt to flamebait or troll, but is a serious essay. The American invasion of Iraq was not a mistake. It was not done on false pretences. It was not an accident. It was and is a carefully articulated long range plan that has so far succeeded admirably well. This transcends party politics.
After 9/11 the US had several challenges to meet. First, it realized bin Laden was not just a thorn in the side, he was a serious threat, not so much as a person, but as a representative of a movement. How the US misjudged that movement is another story, but up until 9/11 the US had made half-hearted attempts to nab him. Clinton lobbed a few cruise missles at him and missed. It's arguable whether the Bush administration would have done the same thing, but its not arguable that the threat had changed and a few cruise missiles weren't going to cut it. They wouldn't have cut it if Gore or Kerry had been POTUS either. More or less the same thing would have happened. You'd just have blamed someone else.
First, the US went from a defensive position to an offensive position. Given the fact that the US controls the oceans of the world, it can send 5 acres of American soverign territory and 100,000 tons of American diplomacy anywhere in the world in a few days. Love em or hate em, a Carrier Strike Group cannot be ignored. That's simply a fact, and there are 11 of them.
There were two issues. One, the US had to take out the base of operations in Afghanistan and send bin Laden from the palaces of the Taliban into a cave. That was accomplished in fairly short order.
Second, the US had to prevent the formation of a pan-Arabic Caliphate that would have posed a serious threat to the power of the US. This was much more surgical because it had to be done in a way that inserted the American presence into the Middle East in a big way while not disrupting the flow of oil. Kuwait wasn't enough. Saudi Arabia was unthinkable. Iran would be too costly, yet sitting in the middle of this sandbox was Iraq. Not only was Saddam a bad boy of long standing, his militaristic threats were still no joke. Plus, nobody liked him. The invasion took him out for good and was hailed privately by Europe, which still got its oil without having to actually do anything, and even Iran, which had fought a bloody war with Saddam and needed him taken out as well. Best of all, they could celebrate privately and criticize publically, thus they could have their yellowcake and eat it, too. The Saudi's could breathe a sigh of relief not to have Iraq sniffing at its borders.
The whole thing almost fell apart due to American arrogance and insensitivity, but the surge and, more importantly, the change in tactics of the counter-insurgency, has turned it around to the point it is feasible to withdraw troops. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we had a token withdrawl before the election. Meanwhile, Syria has just signed an intelligence cooperation agreement with (wait for it) Israel that will increase the Syrian presence in Lebanon and undercut Hezbollah. This also has the effect of distancing Syria from Iran, which is, of course, potentially the next target.
Now, the yellowcake issue is really not important except as a symbol in American politics. You will remember that the Left delighted in pointing out that the Niger yellowcake 'couldn't be found' and used this in attempts to discredit the Bush administration. Now that tons of yellowcake HAVE been found it is, yawn, no big deal because you can't make bombs with it anyway, we knew about it anyway, and yeah it was in Iraq instead of Niger, but really, no big deal. That's disingenuous at best, but I actually agree with the current sentiment--it's not only no big deal--it's not the
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
In african elephants please, so we can calculate how many trips to the moon it'll take to transport all this stuff
Whoa. Dude.
First off, learn to read. I didn't say anything about Obama, or carbon caps, or global warming, or any of that stuff, and your assumptions about what I would have said are faulty.
Second, to the extent that your points are on topic they are generally illogical, and sound more like memorized talking points that rational responses to what I said. For instance, you try to justify Bush lying when the point in question is whether or not he did lie, not whether or not it was justified. And what congress did with the information they were given is irrelevant to the question of Bush's honesty in saying that the information they saw was "the same" as what he saw. The information was not the same, he knew it, he lied when he said it was the same, and the stupidity of the Democrats in not seeing this isn't germane.
Finally, when you do make an on topic factual claim, it's wrong. For example:
Not according to the recent pentagon report:
...which continues to agree with what the CIA was saying as far back as 1993, less than a month after the event. The fact that Clinton acted on the story says more about Clinton's judgment than the truth of the story. In any case, Clinton didn't "break up" the plan, or claim to; he just retaliated. And unless you are trying to argue something along the lines of "Clinton acted on this rumor, so it must be true" I think you'd better just give up.
--MarkusQ
P.S. If you are trying to argue that Clinton's actions are an unassailable proof that something is true, please let me know. I could have some fun with that one. Seriously.
How every wanker on slashdot is an expert in politics, chemistry, and virtually every other discipline on the planet? Not to mention how they seem to be able to be everywhere, at every time, and know everything. Guess the Atheists are wrong- Godhood is apparently sitting behind the keyboards of countless slashdotters.
It didn't help that he killed off his physicists as well when he found out they couldn't build him a bomb with what they had.
So, they blew up the Nuke plant, then stole all the raw fuel ores? Does this count as war booty or just plain theft? Then again, they probably burned more energy "Liberating" this than it was worth.
The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a neocon thinktank. wrote a letter to Bill Clinton, in 1998, demanding that the USA commence military action against Iraq. One of the signatories of the letter was Dick Cheney. Egg on your face, sir.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
After reading your post I was surprised to see that you didn't mention agent orange; for some reason I was expecting it. After looking at your post more closely I noticed that the words "agent" from the second sentence and "orange" from the last sentence align perfectly on the particular resolution my monitor uses.
I must have glanced over your post and subconsciously read the words. Funny, that.
Remember, Iraq had no WMD and no nuclear program. So basically that Canadian company just gave Iraq millions of dollars for something that did not exist. Right? That's what CNN told me, that there was no "smoking gun", and no nuclear program materials or other WMD materials were ever found.
So... Where did this stuff come from then? Did Pres Bush sneek it in last week?
yellowcake is not nuclear material. It's a rock, you know, like in the stone age.
Have you ever seen what burning oil fields look like? Ever wonder about the carbon footprint of burning geysers of crude oil - is that too inconvienient?
Ever wonder how Iraq was going to pay to rebuild all the infrastructure that was blown-up in the war to oust Saddam - the oil fields pump liquid gold to cover all damages and more...
Do you know who owns the oil fields in Iraq? The Iraqi government/people, not the U.S., not the coalition, not George Bush, Haliburton, etc... Protecting their single greatest asset is the best thing we could do for the Iraqi people.
It's fun to imply something evil, quite another to prove it.
Before you question why we went into Iraq, I suggest you review all the failed U.N. efforts to reign in Iraq, and also take a look at Saddam's actual statements about what he said he had/was planning to do... It's not so clear-cut, IMHO...
Ken
If you have 550 metric tons of anything that can't explode then it's really not worth mentioning that aspect. I mean, do news stories about sugar processing plants mention that 550 metric tons of sugar can't be used in a bomb. So the yellow cake can spread a feeling of panic if *seen* in an explosion. That's so lame. The fear of terrorism is turning the general populace into a bunch of rambling idiots conditioned to see terror in everything. It must be such a sad life.
As I seem to recall, Canada supplies 85% of the words uranium. We don't really need to buy any from Iraq. At least its going to be 'slowly cooked' producing electricity, likely at either Bruce or Pickering. Where I live they have been talking about building a Candu Twin. I suppose its better to cook it and make electricity than try to harm people with it. Although the idea of letting people overeat and then switch on the air conditioning to cool their fat bodies when the temperature starts to get a little warm can be considered harm too.
a metric fuckton. Then there could have been trouble.
As pointed out by the long post below, other sources include but are not limited to : a huge proportion of the foreign media, foreign countries, UN inspectors.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Well, they also built airplanes out of steel later. The Mig 25 was built out of mostly nickel alloy steel. It worried the West enough at the time, and was an official factor in why, say, the F15 got developed.
But the Soviets aren't the only ones. The XB-70 Valkyrie was built of steel too, with titanium only for the hottest areas like nose and engine intakes. What made the Valkyrie obsolete quickly wasn't the steel body, but simply that Soviet SA missiles got too good for a high-speed high-altitude bomber.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Thanks to bombings by Israel and the US, Saddam had no choice but to sit on the damaged reactors and fuel, and try to build a nuclear research program."
Actually if you read your link you'll see that it was the Iranians and then the Israelis that bombed the site in the 80's. The Iraqi's, at war against Iran, were "allies" of the US then, although the Reagan Administration was secretly (and illegally) also selling arms to their Iranian enemies. US and other "Allied" arms companies were selling weapons to Iraq almost to the day of the start of the first Gulf War and the US bombings didn't start until then.
Although I agree with you I didn't "laugh my ass off" at Bush's claims because it was horrifyingly clear that most people were willing to buy his claims. With the result we all [should] see now.
What is really alarming is continued plans by France, Russia and the US to build nuclear reactors in nations in the Middle East, including Libya, Saudi Arabia and even in Iraq. WTF?
The whole point of your entire argument is a giant lie, that's what I'm getting at. The entire reason for your trail of reasoning is to exculpate the Democratic Party from their support for the war.
The simple truth of the matter is, the entire country wanted to have a war with Iraq, for a million reasons, but, pretty much, people were sick of arabs in general and Saddam in particular. It's like, if there's a guy that's robbed twenty stores on a block, and then, he gets executed for killing someone, it's really not so bad that he gets executed for a crime he didn't commit because he was a bad guy anyway.
Reading this, the Democrats jumped onto the war bandwagon themselves, sold out their Hanoi Jane base and hopped on the Iraqi express. Yes, a few people out there said that "this would be like Vietnam....", but, they had said that Haiti, Iraq I, Panama and Kosovo would be like Vietnam and they were all wrong. For pretty much 20 years, the USA has had its way in interventions... so, why not go along with the war. If Bush -did- conquer Iraq and Afghanistan and put in a democracy in under a year, he goes down in history as not just one of the greatest Presidents ever, but one of the greatest leaders of any nation ever... when you look at territory gained, especially if successes in Afghanistan and Iraq translated into further invasions of Iran and Syria (on the drawing board at the time). So Democrats sold out and jumped on the Invasion of Iraq Express.
And, I'd be willing to bet, that, if Iraq began pumping a ton of oil, and it did lower oil prices, Democrats will, after having disowned the invasion, be reminding us that they were actually in favor of it....
That's not to say Bush is a saint and Dems aren't. For all we know, Bush may have even offered to tak e the Dem arrows in exchange for their war vote, preferring to roll the political dice and coming up well, not so good. And certainly, Republicans in congress, running so far away from the war, have not done themselves any favors by trying to put distance between themselves and Bush. Honestly, Republicans needed to stick with him even if his popularity did hit 15% ...
And Bush did screw up too, because he was so sure that it would be like Panama that he never thought through or even accepted the conseqences of it perhaps being something better.
This is my sig.
Baloney (unless by "giant lie" you mean "a set of undisputed facts that I don't like").
This is what I mean about you coming off like you are just spewing talking points without regard for how well they fit in the context. When have I said anything about exculpating the Democratic party? You're the one who keeps bringing them up. The only time I mentioned them was to say that they were stupid and that Bush's duplicity didn't have anything to do with that fact, the two being logically unrelated. So (unless by "exculpate" you mean "denigrate in a public forum") again I say baloney!
Unless by "simple truth" you mean "racist rant buried in a glib generalization and topped off with a bad analogy" this too is baloney.
The entire country demonstrably didn't want to go to war with Iraq, or anyone else. They wanted Osama Bin Laden captured and tried for his crimes. That was the whole reason for the big sell-job on going to war with Iraq (and the fact that the Bush administration themselves saw it as a sell-job is aptly demonstrated by the fact that they referred to the process as "selling the war" and to the war itself as a "product").
If you want to play dueling irrelevancies I can do that too. Chipmunks blah blah Democrats blah blah tungsten blah blah refrigerate blah blah Democrats blah blah ...baloney.
But of course the Democrats, great though there faults may be, did not cause the Bush administration to lie to the American people, and (unless you are claiming that they somehow control Bush and are just using him to distract the American people from their stipulated stupidity) I suspect you realize that repeatedly dragging them into this discussion is just more baloney.
--MarkusQ
Thank goodness Saddam didn't have a nuclear weapons program. Whew!
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///
You Yanks had better keep your eyes on Canada. What if they produce all that Nuclear power in one go over US soil? Why do you think you have Alaska? For the natural resources? Please. It is to keep those fuckers surrounded.
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
> Did the US ever invade Kuwait?
Ah - yes, in 1991. But we're OK with that.
And the US invaded France in 1944. Also OK.
But the 2003 war on Iraq is about as popular as the 1812 war on Canada.
What was it then? Beavers of mass destruction? (They hadn't even found oil in Alberta back then.)
The Israelis bombed the Osirak, which was a civilian reactor(and impossible to defend against attacks), but it could be put to dual use for making plutonium. Nuclear energy is important for the bigger oil producing countries but that's rarely emphasized. Right now, every oil barrel you have to use yourself is 140$ less of income. Having the dual use option is of course nice. Then after the bombing Saddam ironically decided he needed a hidden nuclear weapons program. It was advancing pretty well until Gulf War II cancelled it. After that things changed.
The official story doesn't have the cause and effect part, preferring the heroic interpretation instead, but I don't see how anyone can believe a story that lacks irony.
Apparently the yellowcake in the article dates from the Osirak. There should be similar stocks dating from 1991 too, under UN control as well. If i recall correctly the Iraqis even mined their own yellowcake, they have sulphurmines. Yellowcake is sulphur. The good stuff has a pinch of uranium.
We have managed to find WMDs finally!
Clinton admitted at other times that complying with the UN inspections wasn't going to make much difference. Saddam had to be removed. Clinton issued secret orders to have him killed. The Iraqis distrusted the UN inspections for very good reasons, they were heavily under US control.
I like the "it COULD be used to cause panic" line.
Cuz, you know, isn't that exactly what they're attempting to do with the way this blurb is worded?
If steel weighs 3 times as much but is only twice as strong, doesn't that then mean that you can get 33% more strength for a given weight by using aluminium?
I.e. for some specified strength, you'll need a greater weight of steel than aluminium, not less. (unless you're thinking in terms of volume).
??
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
The uranium in form of 4-inch, cone-tipped bars was hidden under a thin layer of soil and embedded in walls in and around several military complexes of Iraq. Photo of one of one of the uranium bars
This is another proof that Iraq attempted to produce nuclear WMD.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Let's tally the facts before we jump to conclusions:
1. Canada purchased yellowcake from an Axis of Evil nation.
2. Canada failed to support the U.S. in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
3. Canada has attacked the U.S. in past wars (stretching a bit here since 1812-1814 is pre-confederation, but stretching the truth and just making stuff up is kinda what caused this whole mess, so let's run with it!)
4. Canada has OIL! That kinda makes it a no-brainer to invade, perfect for Prez Bush.
Someone mod the AC parent up as "interesting" please.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
...U.N. efforts to reign in Iraq...
Actually laughing. thanks.
"Rein." I don't think the UN ever tried to take over Iraq.
Here's your sig.
It's frustrating to watch otherwise intelligent people go all emotional and cross eyed with anything remotely associated with Bush. Had Al Gore taken his rightful place as president and ordered the invasion we'd be lauding him for overthrowing a mass murdering, neighbor invading tyrant who was champing at the bit to resume WMD production. He didn't have any. So what? The day the sanctions ended he would have gone full steam back into it. When the NFZ patrols stopped he'd go back to shelling the Kurds. He would have rebuilt his military and gone after some other neighbor, and done so with money from the BILLIONS in oil concessions from France, Russia, Germany and China (who were uncoindentally the primary objectors to overthrowing Saddam). But don't let reality get in the way of that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you chant "No blood for freedom", i mean "No blood for oil".
Speaking of oil. When is all this oil we're stealing from Iraq going to get here? You pansies said we were invading so we could have cheap gas. So where's the cheap gas? i want the cheap gas you promised me. /voted for Clinton, Gore and Kerry, will vote for Obama
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Isn't that stuff radioactive, curious as to how it took them till July 2008 to find it. And lets not mention the DU (Depleted Uranium) that was rained down on the country by its liberators. And the US and it's best buddy EnglandLand was supplying arms related technology to Iraq, right up to the invasion of Kuwait. That included nuclear detonators supplied by Matrix Churchill.
PROTHERO
Do you believe this crap, Dascombe?
DASCOMBE
It's not our job to believe it,
Lewis. Our job is to tell the people --
davecb5620@gmail.com
Today, we bring you a special feature. A chose-your-own adventure of Ob. Ref:
Do you chose...
Just remember, no matter which one you chose, the answer is of course, +5 Funny. (Or Karma-stomp... depends on which mods have had their coffee)
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Someone mod the parent post up. If Bush is stealing Iraqi oil, I'd like to know where he's been stashing it... because we sure as hell aren't getting it.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Opps - happy accident.
I agree, the U.N. never tried to take over Iraq... Interestingly, I just read a news story about how the U.S. is obliged to stay in Iraq because of an agreement with the U.N. through December:
Source (third paragraph from top).
Ken
'Cause we don't love maple syrup as much as we love oil. Although... maple syrup goes much better with waffles.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I agree. He was a horrible person, and performed unspeakable atrocities. However, the major reasons we gave the international community for assaulting the country were complete and utter bullshit, which makes us no better. In the process, we've killed almost as many Iraqi civillians as he did.
Wars should not be undertaken lightly, no matter how "noble" the cause. Unfortunately, there are far too many issues planners brush aside, because a true discussion on accountability, or mentioning the possibility of TENS OF THOUSANDS of civilian casualties would stop the US public opinion (and therefore the US war machine) in it's tracks.
The sad fact is because of a careful lack of accountability, we can't impeach the other horrible person who performed unspeakable atrocities. It's amazing what you can do with a properly-shaped public opinion machine.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
"Clinton for lying (though it was a lie on a question that should never have been asked of him)."
No doubt Bush should stand for impeachment for what he does but please don't minimize what Clinton did whit a poorly masked excuse. A woman had a reasonable claim that she was sexually harassed and he lied at her trial thus squashing justice for her... F
Frankly I dont care who he is involved with but I do care that the rights of a woman were secondary to his need to have a clean image. He could have told the truth and still would not have been found guilty and that would (a) have not deprived her of her rights or (b) led to the whole impeachment mess.
"Supposedly, Obama will pursue this if he gets into office and has said that he will free up ALL previous president records (except those for national security)."
Obama has said that he *might* push this I *really* doubt he will as he seems to want to build a coalition and going after Bush will not accomplish this. Obama is plaing people when he allows them to hope he will go after Bush.
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
I suggest you take some of your own advice.
Like heck. For years they claimed that Saddam's Iraq and Al Queada In Irag were the same people who attacked us on 9/11.
Made the claim on several occasions as was reported in the news at the time.
No, I don't think that, and if you would learn how to read you would have realized that. The Bush administration passed the information on, as, again, has been widely reported.
Thank you, I do.
I would love to hate him for something semi-reasonable (I'd actually prefer even more not to hate him at all) but I am constrained by the fact that the only thing I have to judge him on is his conduct in office; if the un-American, inept, and dishonest things he says and does are not even semi-reasonable the fault is his, not mine.
--MarkusQ
Uranium was selling for $10 a pound in the 1990s, reaching $140 in 2007 before dropping into the $60s now. Its part of the worldwide commodities run-up. Like oil its a combination of demand and speculation. Post-cold war surpluses were pretty much used up by the mid-2000s.
Cameco is a Saskatoon (Saskatchewan, Canada) based company... about a 3 hour drive from here.
Now all I can so is hope it is put to good use. And pray the gov't taxed them in some way to maybe dispose of this extra tax they've got going on our Fuel Prices. I filled up yesterday and I paid $1.37/liter... roughly $5.19/gallon.
During the eighties the Iraqis mined uranium at the Akashat phosphate mine at Al Qaim.
Ack why here in Montreal
Were they too afraid to have all that stuff in the U.S.?
Now I gotta worry about 550 tons of uranium in our ports......
I always liked the Pottery Barn principle: you break it, you pay for it -- and who was it that was responsible for "all the infrastructure that was blown-up" again?
the yellow cake that Saddam had was under UN control. So how do you reconstitute a nuclear program when all of your yellow cake is in sealed drums and watched? Obviously Saddam needed to obtain a new supply.
The question Joe Wilson never answers, and which he was sent to Niger to find out, is 'What were the Iraqis doing in Niger?'. Their number one export is yellow cake, followed by livestock, chickpeas and onions. If they were there to buy livestock, chickpeas or onions, I would think that they would just announce it to the world.
You need to go back and look at the polls for going to war. When W first pushed that, he had about 20% support for it. It took him a year to build a case of lies for it. The nation did NOT want to invade Iraq. It was lies from W, Cheney, and Rove that convinced ppl to go along with these psyhopaths. Calling ANY of these 3 a fall guy is like calling Charles Manson a fall guy.
As to Clinton, the vast majority did not care about it UNTIL he was caught lying about his situation with lewinski. Until that point, the polls showed that Clinton was doing awesome. Once he was caught lying, then things turned.
> We really do not know what obama will do.
But you are supporting him? Does the phrase 'cult of personality' ring any bells? But anyway, since you appear to be one of the saner ones posting herelet me ask a question.
Can you name a single (or several!) accomplishment of Senator Obama that marks him out as deserving of the highest office in the land? Note that I'm looking for something especially noteworthy, not just getting elected to the Senate (after knocking out all viable challengers before the first ballot was cast) or making a couple of nice speeches, if those things make Presidential material we have hundreds of eligible candidates.
I loath Sen McCain, McCain Feingold vs the 1st Amendment, McAmnesty, etc., but he HAS done things. Even things that can only be 'bipartisan' in that both sides have hated his guts at various times for them.
> As such, I CAN NOT vote for him.
I'm having the same problem in reverse, although Obambi is really making me want to vate for McCain, right now I'm still stuck waiting for him to answer what part of "Congress shall make no law..." is beyond his english comprehension abilities.
> They are the ones that have ran up monster deficits, invaded
> countries for no reason literally
Could you stop the McCain == Bush talking points for a moment? 'They' didn't do anything of the sort, McCain has been a budget hawk since forever, voting against the rest of the Repubs when they were spending like drunken sailors.
And I find your use of the plural revealing. Only the most diehard kostards think Afganistan didn't need an enema so what country other than Iraq are you thinking of? And Iraq needed invading for any of a dozen sound reasons, not least of which being that we were still formally at war and Saddam had been flaunting the cease fire terms for a decade. And since every intelligence agency in the free world believed Saddam had WMD and was planning on more as soon as he got out from under the mostly toothless UN sanctions it is totally unfair to condemn Bush for believing the same intelligence Hillary Clinton was reading when she voted for the war.
> and are so incompetent that when given the best military of the
> world AND the best advice from said military STILL botches it by
> believing that they are more intelligent.
Eh? I do believe it was McCain who was so critical of the administration policy in Iraq it made him a pariah in his own party... until Bush finally took his advice and things turned around.
Look, there are plenty of reasons NOT to like McCain, starting with his bipartisanship, but his positions on Iraq aren't among them as they have been spot on.
Democrat delenda est
"Let them eat Yellowcake!"
Yes it does, which is why aluminum is favored over steel (also, since the strength of a beam is proportional to the square of its height, the thicker, less dense aluminum skin won't "give" as much).
All I was trying to point out was that the strength-to-weight ratio is roughly 1.5x (very dependent on what particular alloy and heat treatment you are comparing), not 5x or 10x or whatever ratio pops into your head when you think "very very heavy", and while it's not the best material, it works just fine.
And yes, the irony of calling iron "heavy" in an article about uranium is not lost on me.
How about south Africas nuclear weapons research? Supposedly they managed to build a gun type bomb spending an 8 digit amount of money in US$ equiv.
f you're going to dispute them, go ahead and do it. But do it by citing some sort of externally verifiable source (say, like a news report or a public document) cut out the creepy Democrats-are-everywhere paranoia, OK?
Lalala... I'm all paranoid.... lalalala....
You are listing talking points claiming that Bush lied. These talking points originated with, came from, and are being circulated by people within the Democratic Party and the left wing in general. Who else would do it? Do you suppose the NRA, the Republican Party or the Heritage Foundation are?
As for the Bush lying arguments, all you really have are a) statements by Democrats to that effect, b) evidence against those points which shows that, if Bush were aware of it, he had to lie.
Let's assume for a minute that Bush saw -every- piece of intelligence that said that Iraq did not have WMD and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Why would it be a lie for him to choose to ignore it, in favor of evidence that agrees with more of his gut feeling on the issue of the danger of Iraq? Let's recall that there was no real proof that OBL was responsible for 9/11 until -after- we invaded Afghanistan. All we had at that time was a bad guy with a known motive, and a few Korans left in the cars with the hijackers. That's it. Bush saw that, looked a ton of conflicting intelligence, rolled the dice, saw OBL, and turned out to be right.
So, why wouldn't he do the same thing again in Iraq? Yes, he might have thought it through more and realized that he sorta got lucky in Afghanistan, or his gut might have been saying all along that, absent any good intelligence on the middle east, that, maybe Saddam was a part of it. When he said Saddam was a part of 9/11, and Cheney certainly said it... why wouldn't they say what they believed, especially since they had just vindicated themselves with their bet on Afghanistan?
On the other side of the aisle, what if, it turns out that global warming isn't really happening, that the planet is going through cycles? Does that make Hansen, Gore, etc, all liars? Surely someone had presented something to either of those gentlemen suggesting some contrary view and surely they chose to ignore it!
The whole "Bush lied" argument, is just ridiculous, and the worst part of you're argument is that you have absolute no proof that he did not believe what he said, when he said. None. You are asking me to prove that Bush told the truth and refute all your dumb points is like asking someone to prove they are not a witch by drowning. It's a retarded game cooked up by political types, with political origins...and you've just bought into it completely. It's absurd.. you say that Bush lied by "cherry picking" information... well, since when do you present information that you do not believe in when asked to make decisions. Where's Al Gore talking about sunspot theory? It's a retarded process.
P.S. Do you honestly believe that the Democrats could ever get together and agree on a coherent set of talking points and get people to spread them? Seriously
Sure they can and they do, otherwise, they would not be one of two dominant political parties in the USA. They circulate talking points all the time to all of the media. Their allies in the media pick them up and echo them. They coordinate their national message. So do Republicans. They have their allies in the media too. It's pretty simple. Everyone engages in propaganda.
This is my sig.
Admittedly, I know even less about airplane engineering than about nuclear physics. ;)
First, a few points:
So being forced to stick to the facts is akin to drowning?
But seriously, there are two key points here, and you are (intentionally or unintentionally) conflating them. The first, I am not expecting you to prove that Bush told the truth, since most of the claims in question are now known to have been untrue, and even the Bush administration admits this. But the second, that they knew (or should have known) that the claims were untrue at the time they made them is where the thrust of our argument are actually directed.
To that end, the damning evidence against the Bush administration is that in each case they presented their false statements as if they came from some independent source (the NIE, our alies, the press, etc.) when in each case we now know (via leaks, sworn testimony, contemporaneous documents, etc.) that they had themselves fed the information to the sources they were supposedly quoting. Most of the cases follow the pattern:
This is lying, with a thin skin of grade school level frosting, no better than telling a judge that it wasn't perjury 'cause you had your fingers crossed.
--MarkusQ
Haha, you are a loser
If that were as far as it went I might agree with you. But, increasingly, we are discovering that the plums they "cherry picked" hadn't been in the pudding until they had them put there. They (esp. Cheney) went to great lengths to make sure that the spin they wanted was included in reports, news stories, etc. so that they could subsequently quote it.
That, IMHO, pushes it over the threshold into lying even by the abysmally low relativist's standard.
--MarkusQ
How about south Africas nuclear weapons research? Supposedly they managed to build a gun type bomb spending an 8 digit amount of money in US$ equiv.
Yes, according to this article that is correct, but:
1. You use "8-digit" to make it sound more like 10 million dollars, when the estimate is on the order of 70 million dollars (quite on the high side of 8 digits). Further, this is in early 1990s dollars. Today's dollars would peg the cost at around 110 million dollars per-weapon.
2. The article makes the note that the costs of the weapons DO NOT take into account the cost of designing and building the enrichmnent facilities, only the costs of running those facilities once all issues had been resolved. If you read the article I linked, you'll find that South Africa spent almost 10 years creating enough fissile material for their first bomb.
When you consider that the most expensive part of making a bomb is creating the highly-enriched uranium, and that those same facilities full-on could make enough material for one bomb every year, you get an idea of the high costs. Spending 10 years getting the plant to full efficiency probably made the first weapon 10x more expensive than those that followed. That puts the cost of fielding your first weapon in the 500 million range, a non-trivial amount for a country like Iraq.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
But, increasingly, we are discovering that the plums they "cherry picked" hadn't been in the pudding until they had them put there.
See now, here's where I have to ask... what is "we are discovering", and just "who" is doing this discovering.
They (esp. Cheney) went to great lengths to make sure that the spin they wanted was included in reports, news stories, etc. so that they could subsequently quote it.
Calling someone and saying you want a report colored a certain way is no different than a Phd student having his thesis get altered at the request of his adviser.
Where do you get this impression that people that work for you are entitled to write whatever they want? As the boss, you are perfectly entitled to get them to color whatever report they write as you believe the world to be. If you don't like it, then you can quit!
This is my sig.
We, the American people. The public. People whole follow the news, who watch C-SPAN or even The Daily Show, who look things up rather than just letting them slide by. By "we are discovering" I mean that, by paying attention, we are finding out things we didn't know before. To wit, that the things the Bush administration claimed they were being told by various sources were actually things that they told those sources to tell them.
Ah, but then if you try to paint the report as an independent source of factual information to which you are simply responding (rather than a contrived source of spin that you engineered to justify your actions) you are....wait for it...lying!.
I agree that they could pay (with their own money of course) for "reports" that said anything they wanted. But they could not then honestly claim (as the Bush administration repeatedly has) that they "learned" these things from these "reports."
--MarkusQ
We, the American people. The public. People whole follow the news, who watch C-SPAN or even The Daily Show, who look things up rather than just letting them slide by.
Oh look, a little lie of our own!!! "We, the American people", is a total fabrication. In fact, the vast majority of the American people care about one thing in this election - the price of gasoline. If all Americans were as involved, as you said, you wouldn't have a bunch of liberal blogs taking donations and ad revenue to, "get the message out".. ..
Ah, but then if you try to paint the report as an independent source of factual information to which you are simply responding (rather than a contrived source of spin that you engineered to justify your actions) you are....wait for it...lying!.
But that's not what they were doing. What they were doing is working to ensure that the reports being issued by those agencies followed a "Fairness Doctrine" and received proper information to help guide their analysis! You can't rely on a report made by one guy in a vacuum, you need to have somebody who is experienced, on the ball coordinating information across multiple agencies, bringing their own vast experience to the table... you really need someone like Dick Cheney!
This is my sig.
Oh get over yourself. By exactly that same reasoning you could argue that the Constitution was "a lie" because it starts with exactly the same formula. Of course, no reasonable person uses English that way. If I say "I ate grapes for lunch" no one expects the world grape supply to have vanished. If I say that "Americans like to play baseball" no one thinks that I mean that all, or even most, Americans play baseball. And no one expects that the statement that information was made public, learned by the public, in the public domain, known to the public, etc. means that all, or even most, of the people who have access to the information are even aware of it.
That is exactly what they were doing.
It isn't even remotely related to the Fairness Doctrine as I presume you know.
I would agree that you need someone like Dick Cheney to orchestrate a fiasco like this. But I don't think I'd call repeatedly forcing discredited claims into the channel to "guide their analysis" being "on the ball" (unless you're making a play on his code name, and mean it in a derogatory sense).
--MarkusQ
So the motivation to secure the oil fields was to stop an environmental travesty?
you move those goal posts well.
If I say that "Americans like to play baseball" no one thinks that I mean that all, or even most, Americans play baseball.
But you can say that Americans like baseball, because baseball is an extremely popular sport. On the other hand, reading the ins and outs of what you argue the crimes of the Bush administration are, is well, not. Look at it this way. If digging up and agreeing with all of your assessments were true, then you might think Air America would have had better ratings than a Phillies baseball game, and its not even close! Far more people like baseball than really anything else. Most fathers do not tell their children about how "Bush lied", but I guarantee you nearly every American father has, at least once, brought out some kind of a ball, and some kind of a bat, to play with his son, or heck, daughter. So, yes, you can say "Americans did this or that.", but, not in your case. It's simply not true, and if we go by your definition, its a total lie. If, on the other hand, you genuinely believe that -everyone- is as into reading about Bush stuff as you are, based on the news boards you hang out on, based on your own filtering of information, then you aren't lying. But you are doing the same thing Bush did, and that makes your charge even more ridiculous.
It isn't even remotely related to the Fairness Doctrine [wikipedia.org] as I presume you know.
It's entirely related to the Fairness doctrine. You claim that the Bush administration manipulates information to achieve political ends, and surprise, the Fairness doctrine is an attempt by the left wing to manipulate information, to well, political ends!
I would agree that you need someone like Dick Cheney to orchestrate a fiasco like this [latimes.com]. But I don't think I'd call repeatedly forcing discredited claims into the channel to "guide their analysis" being "on the ball" (unless you're making a play on his code name, and mean it in a derogatory sense).
Discredited by who? That's the thing. You have to trust the people doing the discrediting and if, in fact, they engage in politics on the side it automatically discredits him. But let's just go through a couple of these to illustrate this:
Richard Clarke - he was a Clinton boy and got pegged as such, and when the new people came in, things changed, he engaged in political shenanigans and the Administration, wrongly, lost trust in him about his line of expertise.
Sources from Germany and France which "discredited" various Iraq / 9-11 links, and that couldn't be trusted. I mean, its pretty hard when the head of Germany and France at the time are talking about the EU supplanting the USA, pushing to sell weapons to the Chinese, and then, all of a sudden, they say, "hey usa, we like you, so don't go to war because we know your report is crap".
In all honesty, if the French sent me, as President, any intelligence which might dissuade me from acting a certain way, unless I could get my own sources to corroborate, I'd be very inclined to throw it out - especially as much as NATO is split along the lines of the US+UK versus the Continent and has been since its founding.
At this point, too, you really can't call the war a fiasco, because, well, we've achieved all but the loftiest of our foreign policy goal from it, and we've just about won the thing. And yeah, I'd filter the LA Times right out as a source, and judging by the layoffs, I'd guess a lot of other people are doing it too, because LA Times can't get anyone to pay for their content. On the other hand, plenty of people pay to listen to baseball games online. So again, are you lying when you said that Americans all are researching to support your talking points, or, are you just saying what you believe, and just mistakenly so...
It's not a lie to throw out or manipulate information and be wrong for doing so.
This is my sig.
So then if you use aluminium, you use less (by weight, for same volume) than if you build from steel? Hence why many (most?) commercial aircraft are in fact made from aluminium? (i.e. I'm wondering if you mistyped this point in your original post..).
(I'm not sure, but where steel is used (wing 'boxes'?), is it not more due to the fatigue properties of steel than to its mechanical strength/weight?) /me curious..
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.