Uranium in Iraq

Twenty experts from DOE's national laboratory complex packaged 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium and roughly 1000 highly radioactive sources from the former Iraq nuclear research facility. The DOD airlifted the material to the United States on June 23 and provided security, coordination, planning, ground transportation, and funding for the mission.

I am not an expert in atom bombs, so I don't really know how much fissile material (I'm assuming it is fissile. I don't think plutonium can be extracted from uranium, and you need plutonium to make a fusion bomb) could be had from nearly two tons of uranium. If it is raw ore, probably not much, but I don't think it was ore.

Of course, there is no way of knowing completely is there since finding nearly two tons of the central component of a #@%$ ATOM BOMB in Iraq doesn't fit into the press's view that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

I have for the most part given up on the major press offering anything even close to decent coverage of the issues of the day. Recent research shows that they are overwhelmingly liberal, overwhelmingly Democrat, overwhelmingly irreligious and overwhelmingly cosmopolitan. Anybody who nods appreciably when Charles Rangel speaks, never voted for a Republican, never goes to church and has never lived outside a big city who tells you they are deluded.

Smaller market press, such as my friend Jeff's paper the Columbian-Progress in Columbia Mississippi do a better job. Jeff is now the publisher of that paper, and while it has a history of being conservative, Jeff is a crusty skeptic, and he won't allow his reporters to be spoon-fed or leave an angle unreported. However, the Columbian-Progress does not have the resources of the major media so issues of national import are left to the aforementioned left-coast hacks.

You can't make good decisions with bad information. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq will have impact far over the horizon. If the mainstream press through negligence put their thumb on the scale as we weigh the results of the Bush administration's leadership and decisions, how can we know that a decision to keep them or chuck them out was sound?

The same is true of social issues, like gay marriage, economic policy, abortion, law and order and the role of faith in society. A press corps whose analysis ends when they copy a quote from a Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays press release is not going to help society consider what deleterious impact, if any, gay marriage might have upon it.

This site is intended to be an outlet not just for what little writing talent I have, but an attempt to inform my friends of things that may not be getting much play and to provide some sort of analysis that goes undone in the mainstream press. It's a damn shame that reporters are lazy, biased or both. Thank God for the web.

Tim McNabb