Yes, everybody knew about -- or so they say. But strangely (almost) no one mentioned it. In any case, more than five years after the Iraq war started, the American military got around to removing about 600 hundred tons of uranium in its yellowcake form from a depository twelve miles from Baghdad. Destination: Canada.
According to the report in Monday's Times, the U.S. had already removed a small amount of other nuclear material. The International Atomic Energy Agency had previously -- that is, before the American intervention -- identified the uranium just now removed.
I mention this information so as to remind readers that Saddam Hussein did, indeed, have materials that in the wrong hands...well, you all know that, even if some of you want to forget the bitter truth.