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You know, 500 tons of yellowcake is a pretty startlingly large amount. That's about 250 elephants worth of yellowcake. Even if it was very very dense, how many elephants could you fit on a C130? Like, three maybe, right? It wouldn't have been easy for Iraq to slip shipments of that size undetected by satellite and other means. What's more: Iraq already had uranium. It was under IAEA seal at Iraq's Tuwaitha nuclear facility since the 1991 first Gulf War, until the US invasion last year. After that, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus reports, the US somehow shockingly let the facility get looted:
In April 2003, just days after the statue of Hussein in Baghdad was pulled down, a U.S. Marine engineering company took a close look at Tuwaitha, which is 30 miles south of Baghdad. There they found guards had abandoned their posts and looters were roaming the giant facility. At one storage building, which later was found to hold radioactive samples used in research, the radiation levels were too high to enter safely, although the entrance door stood wide open.
Now, Pincus reports, the IAEA is frowning on the US alerting the agency after the fact that it finally last month removed two tons of the low-enriched uranium samples that had been stored at the facility. Removing the "1.8 tons of uranium, 6.6 pounds of low-enriched uranium, and about 1,000 highly radioactive sources" required a major secret airlift, the LA Times reports. [Imagine the ingenuity it would have taken for Iraq to sneak in 250 times that amount from Niger during the sanctions days!] Meantime, even though the US let the facility get looted before it managed to get it back under IAEA control again, US Energy secretary Spencer Abraham is describing the secret airlift as "a major achievement."
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham on Tuesday disclosed the secret airlift from Iraq as "a major achievement" in an attempt to "keep potentially dangerous nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists."
Only this administration could claim a major achievement out of failing to have the competence to secure the nuclear facility in the first place.