Terence McManus is the victim of yet another Internet myth (letter, Feb. 25). There were large amounts of yellowcake uranium shipped from Iraq to Canada as reported in the press. They were not some “secret” cache, as his letter implies. The yellowcake had been purchased openly by the Iraqi government many years before. It was left over from the Iraqi reactors bombed by Israel in 1981 and by the United States in 1991.

Moreover, the fact that the yellowcake had been in Iraq since at least 1991 was clearly stated in The Associated Press and New York Times articles regarding the shipment to Canada.

The secrecy in shipping had nothing to do with some supposed previous Iraqi weapons-making intent, but with security of the shipment.

There was no secret made of Saddam’s murder of Kurds with poison gas. To imply from that inspectors were wrong in saying there were no more poison gas weapons left, or that our military was incompetent at finding these mythical stores, is simply allowing conspiracy theorism to go to one’s head. And to believe that the Bush administration would not have screamed to the rooftops about the finding of previously undiscovered millions of tons of potentially weaponizable uranium is silly to the point of childishness.

One must be careful to not accept some scurrilous e-mails at face value or trust every blog one comes across unless one is either willing to perpetrate further misinformation or do the work of really researching a story.

Chandler McGrew, Bethel