No weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Oh yeah?
U.S. Marines may have found weapons-grade plutonium in a massive underground facility discovered beneath Iraq’s Al Tuwaitha nuclear complex, an embedded reporter told Fox News Thursday.
[ . . . ]
So far, Marine nuclear and intelligence experts have found 14 buildings that have high levels of radiation, Prine reported Thursday.
His report noted that some of the tests have found nuclear residue too deadly for human contact.
The Marine radiation detectors go “off the charts” a few hundred meters outside the nuclear compound, where locals say “missile water” is stored in enormous caverns, reported Prine, who is embedded with the U.S. 1st Marine Division.
If this does turn out to be a nuclear weapons facility, then the situation was even worse than most people imagined. It was assumed that Saddam had an abundance of biological and chemical weapons, but nobody thought he was actually nearing nuclear capability (though not for lack of trying), since the Israelis destroyed the Osirak reactor in 1981.
Was this strike to outst Saddam just in time? (Via LGF).
Careful about citing FOX…even when they post stuff you agree with, they are a totally unreliable source of news. In this case, FOX is “confirming” their own earlier reports. If this is true, it’s a godsend for the US…but I’ll wait to believe it until I hear it from someplace else.
Citing FOX when they agree with you on Iraq is sort of like citing Michael Moore when he agrees with you on gun control. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Quite true. The Fox article also says: This underground discovery could still test to be perfectly legitimate and offer no proof of
chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The CIA encouraged international inspectors in
the fall of 2002 to probe Al Tuwaitha for weapons of mass destruction, and the inspectors
came away empty-handed.
“They went through that site multiple times, but did they go underground? I never heard
anything about that,” physicist David Albright, a former IAEA Action Team inspector in Iraq
from 1992 to 1997, told the Tribune-Review.
“The Marines should be particularly careful because of those high readings,” he told the
paper. “Three hours at levels like that and people begin to vomit. That leads me to
wonder, if the readings are accurate, whether radioactive material was deliberately left
there to expose people to dangerous levels.
“You couldn’t do scientific work in levels like that. You would die.”
Capt. John Seegar, a combat engineer commander from Houston, is currently running the
operation in Al Tuwaitha. “I’ve never seen anything like it, ever,” he told the
Tribune-Review. “How did the world miss all of this? Why couldn’t they see what was
happening here?”