Underground Nuke Complex Found?

[Mutt]

Posted: April 9, 2003
7:00 p.m. Eastern

? 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

U.S. Marines have located an underground nuclear complex near Baghdad that
apparently went unnoticed by U.N. weapons inspectors.

Hidden beneath the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission's Al-Tuwaitha facility, 18
miles south of the capital, is a vast array of warehouses and bombproof
offices that could contain the "smoking gun" sought by intelligence
agencies, reported the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

"I've never seen anything like it, ever," said Marine Capt. John Seegar.
"How did the world miss all of this? Why couldn't they see what was
happening here?"

Marine nuclear and intelligence experts say that at least 14 buildings at
Al-Tuwaitha indicate high levels of radiation and some show lethal amounts
of nuclear residue, according to the Pittsburgh daily. The site was examined
numerous times by U.N. weapons inspectors, who found no evidence of weapons
of mass destruction.


"They went through that site multiple times, but did they go underground? I
never heard anything about that," said physicist David Albright, a former
International Atomic Energy Agency inspector in Iraq from 1992 to 1997.

In a 1999 report, Albright said, "Iraq developed procedures to limit access
to these buildings by IAEA inspectors who had a right to inspect the fuel
fabrication facility."

"On days when the inspectors were scheduled to visit, only the fuel
fabrication rooms were open to them," he said in the report, written with
Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear engineer who defected in 1994. "Usually,
employees were told to take to their rooms so that the inspectors did not
see an unusually large number of people."

Chief Warrant Officer Darrin Flick, the battalion's nuclear, biological and
chemical warfare specialist, said radiation levels were particularly high at
a place near the complex where local residents say the "missile water" is
stored in mammoth caverns.

"It's amazing," Flick said. "I went to the off-site storage buildings, and
the rad detector went off the charts. Then I opened the steel door, and
there were all these drums, many, many drums, of highly radioactive
material."

Noting that the ground in the area is muddy and composed of clay, Hamza was
surprised to learn of the Marines' discovery, the Tribune-Review said. He
wondered if the Iraqis went to the colossal expense of pumping enough water
to build the subterranean complex because no reasonable inspector would
think anything might be built underground there.

"Nobody would expect it," Hamza said. "Nobody would think twice about going
back there."

Michael Levi of the Federation of American Scientists said the Iraqis
continued rebuilding the Al-Tuwaitha facility after weapons inspections
ended in 1998.

"I do not believe the latest round of inspections included anything
underground, so anything you find underground would be very suspicious,"
said Levi. "It sounds absolutely amazing."

The Pittsburgh paper said nuclear scientists, engineers and technicians,
housed in a plush neighborhood near the campus, have fled, along with
Baathist party loyalists.

"It's going to take some very smart people a very long time to sift through
everything here," said Flick. "All this machinery. All this technology. They
could do a lot of very bad things with all of this."

Marine Capt. Seegar said his unit will continue to hold the nuclear site
until international authorities can take over. Last night, they monitored
gun and artillery battles by U.S. Marines against Iraqi Republican Guards
and Fedayeen terrorists.

The offices underground are replete with videos and pictures that indicate
the complex was built largely over the last four years, the Tribune-Review
said.

Iraq began to develop its nuclear program at Al-Tuwaitha in the 1970s,
according to the Institute for Science and International Security. Israel
destroyed a French-built reactor there in 1981, called "Osiraq," and a
reactor built by the Russians was destroyed during the 1991 Gulf War.

In his 2000 book "Saddam's Bombmaker," Hamza revealed Saddam's secret plans
for the nuclear complex at Al-Tuwaitha:


From my office window in the Nuclear Research Center, I could see just a
slice of what Saddam's oil money had built in less than a decade: a
sprawling complex of nuclear facilities, scattered over ten square miles,
poised to deliver us the bomb. It was called al-Tuwaitha, in Arabic "the
truncheon."
. Below my floor was fifty thousand square feet of office space and
laboratories, sparkling with new equipment, where hundreds of technicians
were running nuclear experiments. Outside to my left was our chemical
reprocessing plant, where we would enrich fuel for a plutonium bomb. Down
the street was our domed Russian reactor, newly renovated with Belgian
electronic controls, which made it capable of generating radioactive
material for nuclear triggers. Past that was our French-supplied neutron
generator, and next to that our electronics labs, and then a four-story
building that handled spent nuclear fuel, full of hot cells and new
remote-controlled equipment overseen by platoons of white-jacketed
technicians. All this was a long, long way from the dining room table where
we'd scratched out our first memo for a bomb in 1972.

Rising up behind my office, however, was al-Tuwaitha's jewel in the crown,
the aluminum dome of the French reactor, glittering in the blue desert sky.
Osiraq was the most advanced reactor of its kind, crammed with such
up-to-date equipment and technology that visitors were amazed that the
French had ever agreed to sell it to us. Little did they know that the
acquisition of Osiraq, an incredible feat on its own, was merely a decoy:
Saddam wanted us to copy the French design and build another, secret
reactor, where we would produce the bomb-grade plutonium beyond the prying
eyes of foreign spies and inspectors - the same thing to him.

But it was not to be. On June 7, 1981, Israel sent eight F-16 warplanes
almost 700 miles over Jordanian, Saudi and Iraqi air space for hours without
detection. By flying in tight formation, they generated a radar signal
resembling that of a commercial airliner. Upon identifying the Osiraq
nuclear plant, and catching Iraqi defenses by surprise, the Israeli pilots
managed to demolish the reactor in one minute and 20 seconds.

At the time, Israel's audacious preemptive strike was almost universally
condemned, but later praised by many for helping thwart Iraq's development
of nuclear weapons.

Despite this and other setbacks, says Hamza, Saddam persisted in his quest
for a nuclear bomb. In testimony before Congress last August, Hamza - the
architect of Iraq's atom bomb program - said that if left unchecked, Iraq
could have had nuclear weapons by 2005.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=31966

[Hawkeye]

WorldNetDaily has even less credibility than Al Jazeera, if that's possible.

[KRL]

The Air Force is bringing MOAB's in theatre now. Wondering if they are going to just do the entire city of Tikrit. Everyone there is pro Saddam and they are saying he has his deepest underground bunker up there.

Ka Boooooom

[Mutt]

Originally posted by Hawkeye
WorldNetDaily has even less credibility than Al Jazeera, if that's possible.

I'm well aware what WorldNetDaily is. Read the story or are you one of those people who only read what fits into your little view on the world, the story comes from a daily newspaper, The Pittburgh Tribune. I am assuming it has some journalistic integrity.

[foe]

Good story, now just to wait until its confirmed by other sources