Oooh.. did Iraq really have nukes after all? NO!

There is word getting around that the U.S. recently secretly removed nuclear material from Iraq. There is also word that the Bush administration may use a story regarding this in their convention, and for all I know, shock-jocks and Fox may be singing who-knows-what regarding this already. Before you get all excited, here's the deal:

After Bush War I, the center of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons effort 30 miles south of Baghdad, Tuwaitha Nuclear Center, was disabled at the direction of U.N. inspectors. Highly-enriched uranium was removed from the facility at that time and taken to Russia. The low-enriched uranium was placed under seal in storage at Tuwaitha but under the control of the IAEA, who inspected numerous times after that. The Iraqis clearly never used it for anything or gave it to terrorists, as the quantities we just removed matched the quantities in the IAEA inspection reports.

The recent, "quiet" removal of this stuff is basically just some late housecleaning. Concerns about the well-documented material were so low in the Bush Administration during the 2003 U.S. Invasion that they let looters over-run the facility; much in the same way they let looters empty the National Museum in Bagdad of 270,000 artefacts from the cradle of civilization.

If you start hearing "Aha!"s from Bush Pundits, please remind them that any "Aha" response to this must be based on propaganda. Not on accurate information.

Want to know more?

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1166775/posts
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32195-2004Jul6.html