All news that's fit to print... on A10

"Bias entails a value-directed departure from accuracy, objectivity, and balance --
not just a distorted presentation of facts."
-- Stephen Klaidman

So... I just heard about this article. As you will note, it is from the New York Times May 22, 2004 and was buried reported on page A10. It isn't still available for free at the website, so here is the text that I copped from San Diego Union-Tribune.

U.S. considering moving 500 tons of uranium from Iraq
By James Glanz

May 22, 2004

VIENNA -- The United States has informed an international agency that oversees nuclear materials that it intends to move hundreds of tons of uranium from a sealed repository south of Baghdad to a more secure location outside Iraq, Western diplomats close to the agency say.

However, the International Atomic Energy Agency has taken the position that the uranium is Iraqi property and the agency "cannot give them permission to remove it," a diplomat said.

The diplomat said the United States was highly unlikely to be deterred by that position and that U.S. officials had contacted the agency on the matter this year, before the Iraq insurgency flared last month.

"I think that if the stuff had not gone up in intensity," the diplomat said, "they would already have moved on this."

An official with the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad confirmed that moving the uranium was under consideration.

"The story I've heard is that no decision has been made as yet," the official said. "That was some months ago. When it was discussed, the view was that it was just too expensive to ship. I doubt that anything has changed."

The official said keeping the material in storage, even amid the instability in Iraq, could be safer than trying to move it. Nuclear experts outside the government said that if the material were moved, it would probably be airlifted and placed in a repository in the United States.

A spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration at the Energy Department, Anson Franklin, declined to comment on any possible operation involving the Iraqi uranium. "We do not discuss potential future or ongoing operations," Franklin said.

The repository, at Tuwaitha, a centerpiece of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program until it was largely shut down after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, holds more than 500 tons of uranium, none of it enriched enough to be used directly in a nuclear weapon.

The repository was a target of widespread looting by villagers after the U.S.-led invasion last year. The villagers were for the most part apparently interested in using the barrels that hold the uranium for activities like cooking and storing water. They simply dumped out the uranium sludge and took the barrels.

Although most of the barrels and all but a small amount of the uranium were recovered, the episode was an embarrassment to the United States and left traces of radioactive contamination throughout the village.

Nuclear experts had mixed reactions to the possibility of moving the uranium. The president of the Institute for Science and International Security, David Albright, said officials had long privately discussed plans to take the uranium out of Iraq.

"I would say it's a wise thing to do," Albright said. "The idea of theft isn't crazy."

Of the uranium, 500 tons is naturally occurring ore or yellowcake, a slightly processed concentrate that cannot be directly used in a bomb. Some 1.8 tons is classified as low-enriched uranium, a more potent form but still not sufficient for a weapon.

Thomas B. Cochran, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the low-enriched version could be useful to a nation with nuclear ambitions.

"A country like Iran," Cochran said, "could convert that into weapons-grade material with a lot fewer centrifuges than would be required with natural uranium."

The New York Times reporting on 500 tons (500 x 2000 lbs = 1,000,000 lbs!) uranium found in Iraq? Does anyone see the absurd hypocrisy here???

Unbelieveable...

*SIGH* Stay cool and safe!