You Can't Have No Yellowcake and Stockpile It, Too

Yellowcake-gate is much more than a dirty trick played on the American public. It's about the Bush administration's pattern of deception as it pushed and shoved this country into a preemptive war -- from the much-advertised but nonexistent links between Iraq and al-Qaida to the sexing up of Saddam's WMD.
--Arianna Huffington, "Yellowcake-gate" July 16, 2003.

* * * * * *
The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program - a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium - reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" - the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment - was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.
--“AP Exclusive: US removes uranium from Iraq” July 06, 2008

You remember yellowcake. It’s the stuff George W. Bush was convicted in the press of lying about in his 2003 State of the Union address. That's when he uttered the “16 words” that earned him a moral status several levels below Pontius Pilate: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” It doesn't matter any more but it turned out the 16 words were true.

Then yellowcake played a key role in the career uptick of Joe Wilson and his bombshell wife, deep cover clandestine CIA Agent Valerie Plame, (codename, “Ms. Clairol”).

Wilson wrote an article accusing Bush, Cheney, and Condoleeza Rice of deliberately ignoring his well-documented report that Saddam never tried to buy yellowcake from Niger. It won't help Scooter Libbey now but it turned out that everything Wilson said was false.

Wilson also accused Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby of blowing his wife’s cover. (That is, her CIA cover, not her Vanity Fair cover. Mrs. Wilson's babushka blew that).

That accusation by Wilson turned out to be a lie, too. As even the Washington Post was forced to admit, “it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials.” (“End of an Affair”).

Now, today, it’s being reported by the AP, apparently for the first time, that Saddam had a stockpile of 1.2 million pounds of yellowcake. The “huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium,” the AP report matter-of-factly states, was “the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program.”

The nuclear program, that is, that he didn't have, because he never had any stockpiles of WMDs, and never had any yellowcake, nor even tried to buy any yellowcake, because Saddam was a good scout after 1991, and Bush just lied about the whole thing to get us into a war.

Now watch while the Left, hypersensitive enough to ban smoking in bars, trans-fats from restaurants, and carbon dioxide from Earth, suddenly starts defending yellowcake uranium as basically harmless.

Randall Hoven at American Thinker has some thoughts on all this:

Saddam Had Nuke Program
By Randall Hoven

The media have been telling us for years that Saddam had no WMD, so "Bush's War": was based on a "lie." And those who believed Saddam did have WMD or WMD programs were delusional or worse.

But today, on July 6, 2008, the Associated Press reports that

*Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program
*At the Tuwaitha nuclear complex just south of Baghdad
*Which included 550 metric tons (over 1.2 million pounds) of "yellowcake", or concentrated uranium
*And multiple devices that could be used in a nuclear weapon.

The AP does not say alleged nuclear program. It does not add "according to military experts." It simply says "Saddam Hussein's nuclear program."

That's pretty big news, isn't it?

For about five years now, those of us who thought Saddam Hussein probably had at least WMD programs, if not WMD themselves, have been called not only wrong, but illogical and insane.

One example was an article by Sharon Begley in the Wall Street Journal titled People Believe a 'Fact' That Fits Their Views Even if It's Clearly False . (Her article series is called, without irony, the "Science Journal".) Ms. Begley reported that "six months after the invasion, one-third of Americans believed WMDs had been found, even though every such tentative claim was discomfirmed [sic]." She cited psychologists to explain this strange behavior. They used terms like "world views" and "mental models."

Jim Lobe at CommonDreams.org (Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community) reported that "Three out of four self-described supporters of President George W. Bush still believe that pre-war Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or active programs to produce them." He went on to quote the director of the polling company as saying

"To support the president and to accept that he took the U.S. to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about pre-war Iraq."

These findings on people's beliefs were based on a survey that asked people if they believed Saddam had WMD or WMD programs . Apparently, Sharon Begley, Jim Lobe and a whole lot of other people not only believed Saddam had no WMD programs, but that anyone who did believe such a thing was clearly illogical or insane. In fact, the only interesting question to them was what is wrong with our minds.

Read the rest here.

Sneeze Alert: Political Progress in Iraq, and a Judge Wearing Plame-Proof Robes

It’s allergy season, and if you were in the middle of sneezing you may have missed some critical news in Detroit’s premiere news daily, the once-great Detroit News.

First, there was an in-depth, one-inch report, (or as in-depth as you can get in 31 words), in a teeny-weeny sidebar “Iraq update,” attached to a buzzkill article entitled “'Fear' dominates Iraq."

The tiny story reads in full:

Sunnis return to parliament
Sunni legislators returned to Iraq's parliament Thursday after a five-week boycott, raising hopes the assembly can make progress on power-sharing bills demanded by Washington before the lawmakers take a month's break.

Now, you may recall that, earlier this week, the US Senate shut down all normal business for some 36 or more hours in order to grandstand on an Iraq war funding amendment premised on the Democratic argument that there has been absolutely, positively no political improvements in Iraq to justify the continuing military surge.

This slogan of no progress was repeated approximately four times per hour for a day and a half. It wasn’t true, as these slogans never are true, but that doesn’t matter now.

I would expect that, even setting aside the other previous political progress that the Democrats flatly refused to acknowledge, that the return of Sunni legislators after a five-week boycott is both welcome and unexpected news of political progress. Even more surprising and welcome for Democrats, who are committed to the dogma that Iraq is embroiled in an intractable civil war between Sunnis and Shias, which should make it all the more remarkable and cheering that one side in the war would show up at parliament to work on legislation peacefully with the other side.

The other buried news was on on the back page of the front section, just below “Scientists say checkers-playing computer can never lose.” It's an AP story reporting that Valerie Plame’s lawsuit against the Bush administration was just tossed out of court. (“Judge dismisses CIA leak case suit.”)

Though I’m sure the disappointed couple left the courtroom without benefit of being frog-marched, I’ll bet Ambassador Wilson and his wife were hopping mad at Judge John D. Bates’s opinion.

This also deserved a bigger headline.

The legal and political saga of Valerie Plame has been with us for four years, and continues to be a rallying point for enemies of the President. Because of it, innumerable Congressional hearings have been launched, thousands of articles, and millions of inches of snotty commentary have been written smearing the President as “leaking” confidential information. Based solely upon the mythical crimes against Ms. Plame, Democrats have called for everything from impeachment of Bush and Cheney to the use of the guillotine for executive branch officials who anger Washington socialites.

So one would think it would be a bigger story than this, sort of as if Planet Earth were suddenly found to be rotating from east to west.

Yesterday the court dismissed the Plame case in part for a lack of jurisdiction. But the dismissal was also because the court found no merit in Ms. Plame’s claims that White House personnel violated her privacy rights by discussing her and her irritating husband after they insinuated themselves into the national debate over the invasion of Iraq.

The critical bit about the judge's opinion was left out of the AP/News story, but the Washington Post included it in their story. (“Plame's Suit Against Top Officials Dismissed”).

Judge Bates wrote “there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush administration's handling of prewar foreign intelligence, by speaking with members of the press is within the scope of defendants' duties as high-level Executive Branch officials."

There should never have been any doubt about this, and for those of us who have never sworn a blood oath against George W. Bush, it seems rather obvious. But once in a while it takes an adversarial process, a strict rational evidentiary standard, somebody on the other side raising objections to unfair arguments, and a judge with a gavel, to undo years of slanders amassed by false reporting in an unbridled press.

I love it when this happens.