Saturday, June 28, 2003
Lycos ran a story about another soldier dying in Iraq and the Army coldly calling the attack that killed that soldier "militarily insignificant". I was only called attention to that story because of a somewhat irrelevant, but probably more important photo that ran with the story, which shows an Iraqi holding up a clean water barrel that was traded for a barrel looted from the Tuwaitha nuclear facility emptied of uranium peroxide "yellow cake". (It was the intoductory photo that came up on the homepage. Let's just say it was an attention grabber.) That trade was made by Greenpeace, who's offer for the contaminated barrels was more sensible than the Army's $3/barrel offer. (The going rate for barrels is about $7, which is a pretty significant chunk of change if you only make $20/month.) No mention of what happened to the barrels afterwards. I did assume that Greenpeace would simply give them to the Army, and according to Greenpeace, that's the intention. Further perusal of Greenpeace's Iraq blog tells of the Army and Greenpeace working together to take away yellow cake barrels (at Greenpeace's initiative) from villages that grabbed them.
