Let us, for a moment, take on your very ungenerous assessment of Bush’s integrity, and accept that Bush is planting WMDs in Iraq for the purposes of displaying them later.

If he were planting bogus WMD programs, it still wouldn’t make sense to transport in large quantities of enriched uranium or plutonium. What we’ve found of Iraq’s nuclear program - the centrifuge under the scientist’s rose bush springs to mind - suggests that the program was in a state of repose. Suddenly turning up a big batch of bomb material buried in the desert would beg several questions: where did it come from? Where are the labs? Where’s the ancilliary equipment? Where was the U/Pu mined? Where are the scientists & technicians? Where did they train? What bomb design were they pursuing?

In short, it’s a bad lie.

Far better would be to plant a mock bio weapons lab. That stuff is just as scary, but a lot less of a pain to set up. A bio weapons lab would use mainly unremarkable equipment. The equipment required for such a lab is much smaller than an atomic bomb plant. A biosafety level-4 facility would take up less space than a nuclear bomb assembly area, and it would be easier to explain why the place had been “missed” until now. Fewer people would be required to run such a facility. In fact, one or two well-trained people could probably run a small facility making small amounts of product. And only small amounts would be required to produce a considerable amount of destruction. They could replay Powell at the UN holding up that little container.

The site could then be contaminated with scary, but not too terribly dangerous pathogens. And they might claim that more dangerous stuff like variola had been found in a test tube - but had been disposed of.

And if Bush really is so desperate as to plant WMDs, surely the stuff would be flown in. To Baghdad International or better yet, to the remote H-1, H-2, or H-3 airstrips near the Jordanian border. Why take the risk of discovery by sending the stuff over land?

But I don’t believe Bush is anywhere near this desperate. First, Kerry is awful. Second, the number of people who might blow the whistle is large. Third, he’s not in enough trouble with the American public that his re-election in serious doubt. Some doubt, yes, but not serious. Your label of “True Believers” is, I believe, accurate. Their vote is set already.

It seems to me that the arguments of some of the more stridently anti-war and anti-Bush crowd represent a kind of self-licking ice cream cone. The Iraq war was started on the basis of a lie: that there were WMDs in Iraq. If WMDs are indeed found in Iraq, it is evidence that Bush lied, because he planted the WMDs in Iraq in order to justify the war.

So what to make of this report? Now, it’s good to be careful with new information -- but some people are so careful with information that they throw out huge amounts of data as unreliable. It follows that these same people can’t embrace new ways of looking at things. **It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse-races.

So I for one am quite tolerant of information sources, however dubious they may seem at first glance. I find that people seldom make stuff up out of whole cloth. Rather, they take one fact and place it in an improper context. This is what the Tehran Times reporter has done.

Instead of focusing on the context the MNA wire has helpfully supplied, let’s look at the actual news. US truck carrying radioactive material crossing from Kuwait into Iraq. My guess is a nuclear warhead. Given the current situation in the region, the US is preparing for the worst, moving some stocks of small nuclear warheads into Iraq for possible use against Iranian targets.

In the above Bush lied scenario, I said they’d probably fly stuff in for concealment’s sake. But flying nuclear warheads as opposed to nuclear material is a risky thing - not so much the danger that it might be improperly used, but for the design secrets it might yield. I would think it’s done as seldom as possible, especially in that neighborhood. Far better to send the stuff by sea, where the US has firm control (even in the Persian Gulf). It would, though, not be prudent to sent the stuff up the shatt al-arab waterway, so therefore it would be off-loaded in Kuwait first.

What is the ROW? Rest of the world?

I am not familiar with the Twain quote you cite. But I have included one marked by a double asterisk above.