Want to know a secret?

They are even more inept than you ever imagined.

Washington has spirited 1.8 tons of enriched uranium out of Iraq for safekeeping, more than a year after looters stole it from a U.N.-sealed facility left unguarded by U.S. troops, U.S. and U.N. officials said on Wednesday.

  Iraq Net article

Unguarded? Excuse me. We guarded the oil fields, but not the uranium facility? Well, perhaps it wasn't weapons grade.

The slightly enriched uranium, which could be used in a dirty bomb, was airlifted to an undisclosed U.S. site after its removal from the Tuwaitha nuclear complex south of Baghdad, a one-time center of Iraq's nuclear weapons development program.

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham called the shipment to a secure Department of Energy facility "a major achievement for the Bush administration's goal to keep potentially dangerous nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists."

It might have been a major achievement to have guarded it in the first place, don't you think? For the love of Pete. I don't even want to think about it.

In June 2003, after repeated IAEA warnings that the looted materials could be used to make weapons, an embarrassed United States allowed an IAEA team to return to the site to try to gather them up.

Alarms had been raised as villagers near Tuwaitha, especially children, showed symptoms of radiation sickness.

Much of the material, the IAEA experts found, had been dumped on the ground by residents more interested in the containers than the materials themselves.

And just how much of it did they not recover? And where did that go?

Oh well.

The IAEA team managed to account for all but some 90 pounds of the 1.8 tons of uranium, which had been enriched to 2.6 percent uranium-235. That level of enrichment makes the material suitable for use in a dirty bomb or -- with further enrichment -- a nuclear weapon.

Well that is just great. At least they got most of it. How much damage could 90 pounds do?

The team wrote off the remaining missing material as so small an amount as to pose no security threat.

I feel so much better.

Actually, truth be known, I don't trust the U.S. with nuclear capabilities. I don't think anybody else is likely to be any more dangerous or untrustworthy. But I'm just amazed that they were so irresponsible, so incredibly stupid, as to fail to guard what they claimed they were going over there to secure.

We are living in a circus of insanity. And I am surprised we haven't blown ourselves to smithereens already. We are truly on borrowed time.

Enjoy yours.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.