Homestead mailing list

["Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>]

http://www.msnbc.com/comics/nw.asp?vts=102520041017<http://www.msnbc.com/comics/nw.asp?vts=102520041017>

In 2002, News of the Weird mentioned a Wall Street Journal dispatch from 
Cuba, suggesting that Fidel Castro's 1987 vision of "apartment cows" was 
still a ways off. (Castro had pushed farmers to breed small cows, not much 
larger than dogs, that families could keep in small homes and that would 
supply their minimum daily quantities of milk.) Two months after that story 
ran, a farmer in Rockwell, Iowa, said he had bred such miniature cows but 
that they were not good milk producers. Cut to September 2004: An Associated 
Press dispatch from San Juan Y Martinez, Cuba, touted rancher Raul Hernandez, 
who has now apparently successfully created a small herd of 28-inch-high cows 
that can deliver about five quarts of high-quality milk. [Billings 
Gazette-AP, 9-12-04] 

Toni
>From tonihawr AT msn.com  Mon Oct 25 15:14:02 2004
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A picture is worth *more* than 1,000 words :  
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6276868/

 

and : 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6323933/

 

Vast explosives cache missing in Iraq, U.N. says

Nearly 380 tons of 'dual-use' explosives said to have vanished 

The explosives were looted from the al Qaqaa complex, a former Iraqi military 
facility south of Baghdad, shown in this undated photo, according to the 
International Atomic Energy Agency.

 

The Associated Press

Updated: 12:56 p.m. ET Oct. 25, 2004

 

VIENNA, Austria - Several hundred tons of conventional explosives are missing 
from a former Iraqi military facility that once played a key role in 
President Saddam Hussein's efforts to build a nuclear bomb, the U.N. nuclear 
agency confirmed Monday.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, 
will report the materials' disappearance to the U.N. Security Council later 
Monday, Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman, told The Associated Press, confirming 
a report published in The New York Times. 

"On October 10, the IAEA received a declaration from the Iraqi Ministry of 
Science and Technology informing us that approximately 350 [metric] tons of 
high explosive material had gone missing," Fleming said. The 350 metric tons 
is equivalent to 380 U.S. tons. 

Whereabouts a mystery
The Iraqis told the nuclear agency the materials had been stolen and looted 
because of a lack of security at government installations, said Fleming, who 
said the IAEA feared "that these explosives could have fallen into the wrong 
hands." 

At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said U.S.-led 
coalition troops had searched Al-Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the 
March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under 
IAEA seal since 1991, were intact. The site was not secured by U.S. forces, 
the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. 

The disappearance of the explosives quickly became an issue in the 
presidential race, with the Democratic candidate, Sen. John Kerry, accusing 
President Bush of committing "one of the greatest blunders" of his 
administration in failing to secure the materials. 

"George W. Bush, who talks tough ... and brags about making America safer, 
has once again failed to deliver," Kerry told supporters in Dover, N.H. 
"After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in 
Iraq, this president failed to guard those stockpiles." 

"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the greatest blunders of 
this administration, and the incredible incompetence of this president and 
this administration has put our troops at risk and this country at greater 
risk." 

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration's first 
concern was whether the material was a nuclear proliferation threat and had 
determined that it was not. 

"Remember, at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom there was some looting, and 
some of it was organized," McClellan said. "There were munitions caches 
spread throughout the country, and so these are all issues that are being 
looked into by the multinational forces and the Iraqi Survey Group." 

The probe will include finding out what happened to the weapons and whether 
they are being used against U.S. forces, he said. 

The New York Times report said the nearly 380 tons of missing explosives that 
could be used to build large conventional bombs disappeared from the former 
Al Qaqaa military installation.

The explosives included HMX and RDX, which can be used to demolish buildings 
but also produce warheads for missiles and detonate nuclear weaponry, the 
newspaper said. It said they disappeared after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 
last year.

Warning from the Iraqi government
Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed of the 
missing explosives in the past month, the report said. It said Iraq's interim 
government recently warned the United States and U.N. nuclear inspectors that 
the explosives had vanished.

Fleming, the IAEA spokeswoman, said the agency learned of the disappearance 
on Oct. 10. 

"We first took measures to authenticate it," Fleming said. "Then, on October 
15, we informed the multinational forces through the U.S. government with the 
request for it to take any appropriate action in cooperation with Iraq's 
interim government."

"Mr. ElBaradei wanted to give them some time to recover the explosives before 
reporting this loss to the Security Council, but since it's now out, 
ElBaradei plans to inform the Security Council today" in a letter to the 
council president, she said.

Before the war, inspectors with the Vienna-based IAEA had kept tabs on the 
so-called "dual use" explosives because they could have been used to detonate 
a nuclear weapon.

IAEA inspectors pulled out of Iraq just before the 2003 invasion and have not 
yet been able to return despite ElBaradei's repeated urging that the experts 
be let back in to finish their work.

ElBaradei told the Security Council before the war that Iraq's nuclear 
program was in disarray and that there was no evidence to suggest it had 
revived efforts to build atomic weaponry.

Plastic explosives' components
Al Qaqaa, a sprawling former military installation about 30 miles south of 
Baghdad, was placed under U.S. military control but repeatedly has been 
looted, raising troubling questions about whether the missing explosives have 
fallen into the hands of insurgents battling coalition forces.

Saddam was known to have used the site to make conventional warheads, and 
IAEA inspectors dismantled parts of his nuclear program there before the 1991 
Gulf War. The experts also oversaw the destruction of Iraq's chemical and 
biological weapons.

The nuclear agency pulled out of Iraq in 1998, and by the time it returned in 
2002, it confirmed that 35 tons of HMX that had been placed under IAEA seal 
were missing. HMX and RDX are the key components in plastic explosives, which 
insurgents have widely used in a series of bloody car bombings in Iraq.

ElBaradei told the United Nations in February 2003 that Iraq had declared 
that "HMX previously under IAEA seal had been transferred for use in the 
production of industrial explosives, primarily to cement plants as a booster 
for explosives used in quarrying."

"However, given the nature of the use of high explosives, it may well be that 
the IAEA will be unable to reach a final conclusion on the end use of this 
material," ElBaradei warned at the time.

Fleming said Monday: "A large quantity of these explosives were under IAEA 
seal because they do have a nuclear application."

The IAEA has no concrete evidence to suggest that the seals were broken, 
Fleming said, but a diplomat familiar with the agency's work in Iraq said the 
seals must have been broken if the explosives were stolen.

FACT FILE<>

Iraq intelligence -- before and after the war

 

Chemical weapons
Before: Iraq was believed to have stocked up to 500 metric tons of chemical 
warfare agents. It was also said to have concealed equipment and other items 
needed for continuing chemical weapons production.


After: No chemical weapons have been found. Some sources say Iraq was 
conducting experiments to develop chemical weapons, but no physical evidence 
has been found. More time is needed to investigate. 

 

Biological weapons
Before: Intelligence agencies believed Iraq had biological weapons and 
facilities to develop more of them. Among the weapons believed to be in Iraq 
was anthrax, a deadly germ which could be quickly produced and delivered by 
bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers or covert operatives. Mobile laboratories 
were believed to be used for developing biological weapons.


After: No weapons have been found and Secretary of State Colin Powell said in 
a May 16, 2004 interview with 'Meet the Press" that the prewar intelligence 
on the existence of mobile biological weapons labs was based on sourcing that 
was "inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading." 
Powell originally introduced the threat of mobile labs during a February 2003 
speech in front of the United Nations. Former chief weapons inspector David 
Kay and other U.S. officials have said that one of the main sources of the 
mobile labs evidence was an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball." The 
defector was later identified as a brother of one of the top aides of Ahmad 
Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who was an important advocate for the U.S. invasion 
of Iraq.

 

Nuclear weapons
Before: There was no evidence Iraq had ever abandoned its nuclear program. 
Saddam was trying to get fissile material to produce a bomb. He also made 
repeated attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes that could be 
used as centrifuges. Iraq was unlikely to build a nuclear weapon until the 
end of the decade, but it could produce one within a year if it acquired 
weapons-grade fissile material abroad.


After: Iraqi scientists and senior government officials have made clear that 
Saddam still wanted to acquire nuclear weapons. It's not surprising that no 
evidence had been found of uranium enrichment facilities because no agency 
thought such a facility had been built. It is unclear whether the aluminum 
tubes were intended for nuclear or conventional weapons.

 

Missiles
Before: Iraq had a ballistic missile capability that exceeded the 
150-kilometer limit set by the United Nations.


After: Iraq had advanced design work for a liquid propellant missile with a 
range of 1,000 kilometers. Inspectors have also confirmed that Iraq was 
working on prohibited solid-propellant missiles and that Iraq was secretly 
negotiating with North Korea to obtain missile technology.

 

Unmanned aerial vehicles
Before: Iraq has been trying to modify the MiG-21 and the L-29 jet trainer 
aircraft into unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could be used for chemical 
or biological weapons. Iraq said in its Dec. 7 declaration that its UAVs have 
a range of only 80 kilometers. But one was detected that went 500 kilometers.


After: Although Iraq revealed some details of its UAV program in a 
declaration to the United Nations in 2002, important design elements were 
never revealed. A senior Iraqi official has now admitted that the UAVs were 
intended for the delivery of biological weapons.

 

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published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.