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| Iraq |
| Marines hold nuclear site south of Baghdad |
| 2003-04-10 |
| Long, edited some, very interesting. SOUTH OF BAGHDAD â In a valley sculpted by man, between the palms and roses, lies a vast marble and steel city known as Al-Tuwaitha. In the suburbs about 18 miles south of the capital's suburbs, this city comprises nearly 100 buildings â workshops, laboratories, cooling towers, nuclear reactors, libraries and barracks â that belong to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission. Investigators Tuesday discovered that Al-Tuwaitha hides another city. This underground nexus of labs, warehouses, and bomb-proof offices was hidden from the public and, perhaps, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors who combed the site just two months ago, until the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Engineers discovered it three days ago. Fancy that! A secret Iraqi facility, one that the IAEA never found! Hey Hans, check this out! So far, Marine nuclear and intelligence experts have discovered 14 buildings that betray high levels of radiation. Some of the readings show nuclear residue too deadly for human occupation. A few hundred meters outside the complex, where peasants say the "missile water" is stored in mammoth caverns, the Marine radiation detectors go "off the charts." "It's amazing," said Chief Warrant Officer Darrin Flick, the battalion's nuclear, biological and chemical warfare specialist. "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." To nuclear experts in the United States, the discovery of a subterranean complex is highly interesting, perhaps the atomic "smoking gun" intelligence agencies have been searching for as Operation Iraqi Freedom unfolds. Last fall, they say, the Central Intelligence Agency prodded international inspectors to probe Al-Tuwaitha for weapons of mass destruction. The inspectors came away with nothing. I can't imagine! "They went through that site multiple times, but did they "We know nothing! Nothing!" "The Marines should be particularly careful because of those high readings. 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." Albright hopes the Marines safeguard any documents they find and preserve the site for analysis. That, say the Combat Engineers, is their mission. So that someone competent can review them. Nestled in a bend in the Tigris River, Al-Tuwaitha was built in the early 1960s. Nuclear experts believe the government began Iraq's nuclear weapons program there between 1972 and 1976. Satellite imagery shows dramatic expansion at the site in the '70s, '80s and '90s, according to the Institute for Science and International Security. Mindful of nuclear weapons inspectors, ISIS said the Iraqis developed methods to thwart them when they visited Al-Tuwaitha. "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 Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear engineer who defected from Iraq in 1994, testified before Congress last August that Iraq could have had nuclear weapons by 2005. Yesterday, Hamza expressed great surprise that the underground site could even exist. The ground there is muddy and composed of clay, he said. The water table is barely a foot and a half below the surface of the ground. During construction of one of the former nuclear reactors there, French engineers spent a fortune pumping water from the foundation area, only to see buildings crumble when the water was removed. Hamza said the French built a reactor at Al-Tuwaitha that Israel destroyed in 1981. The Russians built a reactor that was destroyed during the Gulf War. Both had the muddy ground to contend with. So the Marine's discovery makes the former atomic inspector wonder if the Iraqis went to the colossal expense of pumping enough water to build the underground city because no reasonable inspector would think anything might be built underground there. Nobody would expect it,â Hamza said. âNobody would think twice about going back there.â No one ever said Saddam was stupid when it came to deceiving others. Despite being destroyed twice by bombings, Al-Tuwaitha nevertheless grew to become headquarters of the Iraqi nuclear program, with several research reactors, plutonium processors and uranium enrichment facilities bustling, according to the Federation of American Scientists. "The plutonium processing was dispersed on-site by the bombing in 1991," said Michael Levi, the Federation's director. A more polite way of saying, "blown to hell and scattered all over." "But the Iraqis started to rebuild it. And they continued building there after 1998, when the Iraqis ended the inspections. "I do not believe the latest round of inspections included anything underground, so anything you find underground would be very suspicious. It sounds absolutely amazing." The nuclear scientists, engineers and technicians, housed in a plush neighborhood near the campus, have run away, along with Baathist party loyalists. Farmers in rags drive the scientists' Mercedes and Land Rovers across Highway Six, filled with looted color televisions, Help yourselves, boys! If you don't mind, however, let us run this handy-dandy Geiger counter over yer booty first! That's where the Marines see the grand irony. Amidst grinding poverty, where peasants eke an existence out of dust and river water, the Saddam Hussein regime built a lavish atomic weapons program. In a nation with some of the world's largest petroleum reserves, Saddam saw the need for nuclear energy. "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." The mayor of this high-tech city is, for now, Capt. John Seegar, a combat engineer commander from Houston, Tx. He trudges up the 10-story hillocks hiding the campus from the surrounding villages and, crossing near a demolished mud bunker, it all opens up, gleaming and swaddled in roses. "I've never seen anything like it, ever," said Seegar, who leads a company of combat engineers turned into combat grunts. "How did the world miss all of this? Why couldn't they see what was happening here?" Hans? Hans? Got an answer for the man? Seegar's biggest headache: Peasant looters, who keep cutting through the miles of barbed wire, no longer electrified because the war killed the power. He cradles in his arms blueprints in Arabic, showing recent construction, and maps in English, detailing which buildings test radioactive. Next to each, Seegar's placed an asterisk. "Three weeks ago, the scientists seemed to have abandoned the complex," said Seegar. "That's what the villagers say. The place was protected by the Special Republic Guard, but they deserted it, too. Four days ago, everyone was gone. Then we came." For him, Al-Tuwaitha is like a crime scene, and the next detectives on the atomic beat will be Army specialists. The offices underground, under unlit signs warning of "Gas/Gaz," are stuffed with videos and pictures, all showing how this complex was built, largely over the last four years after formal international inspections ended. The Marines haven't even mapped all the subterranean tunnels veining the site. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #4 Is this surprising? Pardon me, but I don't think so. We always knew we'd find an active nuke program. I'm more interested in having a good, long look underneath a certain mountain NE of Baghdad. |
| Posted by: mojo 2003-04-10 10:18:06 |
| #3 This is one of the sites used by Iraq's Group 4 & 5 nuclear development teams. http://www.douglasdebono.com/saddam2.htm is a link that suggests this has been going on a lot longer than 4 years. |
| Posted by: Douglas De Bono 2003-04-10 07:24:46 |
| #2 I'm sure we'll eventually turn up the dirt, although I'm guessing that a lot of it is already in Syria by now. But I will not get my hopes up just yet. A lot of preliminary reports about WMD and mass graves have turned out to be false alarms so far. Jumping all over these reports is burning some of the coalition's credibility (although it's the journalists jumping all over them while Centcom is always scrupulous about their reports). Let's wait and see. |
| Posted by: Tokyo Taro 2003-04-10 04:44:14 |
| #1 Many of the IAEA's "inspectors" are Arab graduates of the nuclear engineering program at Cairo University. Egypt, which has a grand total of one power reactor, is able to employ only a small fraction of the several dozen nuclear engineers that graduate from the university each year. Many go on to become IAEA inspectors. Slip a few jihaddis into the mix, lobby the IAEA to be sensitive to the ethnicity of the inspected country by allowing inspections to be carried out by fellow Arabs and this outcome isn't at all surprising. |
| Posted by: B. 2003-04-10 02:00:33 |