n Aug. 6, 2006, Rupert Murdoch's main British mouthpiece, The Sunday Times, reported that "Iran is seeking to import large consignments of uranium from Africa." It was a similar utterance, contained in a bogus 16-word claim by George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address that was used, in part, to justify America's and Britain's disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now, the same canard is being used to justify a U.S. attack on Iran. The Sunday Times chief source for its story was an unnamed Tanzanian customs official who claimed that Tanzanian customs intercepted in October 2005 an air shipment of uranium from near Lubumbashi in Congo's Katanga to Mwanza in Tanzania. The alleged uranium shipments from Congo to Iran were said to have started in 2002 and consisted of several alleged shipments. The alleged source of the uranium, the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga, was also the source for the uranium used in the U.S, atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The only problem with the Sunday Times story is that the Shinkolobwe mine is no longer in operation. "The Congo mine has been closed for decades," according to a very knowledgeable U.S. government who has dealt extensively with African uranium production. Congo's government claims the ore concentrator for Shinkolobwe has been shut down since 1961 and, therefore, cannot be concentrated into refined yellowcake uranium.

Resource-rich Congo, which is just emerging from a genocidal civil war encouraged by U.S., British, and Israeli elements using their surrogates in Rwanda, Uganda, and eastern Congo, is a lucrative target for the Bush administration and its criminal accomplices. Conveniently for the neo-cons, the story about Congolese uranium shipments to Iran is said to have involved trans-shipment points in Sudan and Syria and middlemen in Lebanon, all three countries targets of the Project for the New American Century operatives in Washington, London, and Jerusalem/Tel Aviv. Currently, the CIA, under the regime of General Michael Hayden, is cooking the intelligence to prove the Congolese-Tanzanian-Sudanese-Syrian-Iranian uranium smuggling connections. Just for good measure, the neo-cons are suggesting that Zimbabwe, a major target of the Bush administration, and Zambia, were also involved in the alleged elaborate uranium smuggling scheme. President George W. Bush is reported to have ordered Hayden and National Intelligence Director John Negroponte to do everything possible to prove a uranium connection between Iran and Congo.