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MalevolentLight
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High Above
Jul 1999
time: 00:20
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quote:
NBC News: Explosives Were Gone When U.S. Troops Arrived
Susan Jones, CNSNews.com
Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004
NBC News reported Monday night that 380 tons of missing explosives were already gone when U.S. troops arrived at the Al-Qaqaa weapons installation in April 2003 – one day after Saddam's government was toppled.
NBC should know. It had a reporter embedded with the U.S. troops when they arrived at Al-Qaqaa in April 2003.
While the Kerry campaign blasted the Bush administration for "stunning incompetence" on Monday, many Bush supporters questioned the timing of the New York Times' report Monday about the missing explosives, just eight days before the presidential election.
NBC News correspondent Jim Miklaszewski suggested a political motive as well: In his report on the missing explosives Monday night, he quoted one official as saying, "Recent disagreements between the administration and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes this announcement appear highly political."
According to the Times, the IAEA said it had warned the Bush administration about the need to secure the Al-Qaqaa facility before and after the war.
Times' Bias Caught Again
In a follow-up report on Tuesday, the Times did not mention the fact that NBC had an embedded reporter on the scene when the missing explosives were discovered - the day after Baghdad fell.
Tuesday's report in the Times, headlined "Iraq Explosives Become Issue in Campaign," covers how the Bush administration "sought to explain the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that American forces were supposed to secure."
Bush's aides, Tuesday's article said, "tried to explain why American forces had ignored warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency about the vulnerability of the huge stockpile of high explosives, whose disappearance was first reported on Monday by CBS and The New York Times."
The Times' report portrayed the Bush administration as being on the defensive, trying to "minimize the importance of the loss" of the military explosives.
The report noted that President Bush "never mentioned the disappearance of the high explosives during a long campaign speech in Greeley, Colo., about battling terrorism."
"There are certainly some questions about when the explosives were missing," Kerry campaign adviser Howard Wolfson admitted on "Fox & Friends" early Tuesday. But Kerry's campaign is not expected to let the matter drop.
In a press release late Monday night, the campaign accused Bush's campaign of trying to cover up its "failure" to secure the explosives.
"Instead of distorting John Kerry's words, the Bush campaign is now falsely and deliberately twisting the reports of journalists. It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous," Kerry-Edwards senior adviser Joe Lockhart said.
Copyright CNSNews.com |
Reminds me of Rathergate.
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MalevolentLight
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High Above
Jul 1999
time: 00:20
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quote:
Little by little, most likely. |
Sounds like wishful thinking to me. You guys are so desperate to find something big but it's just not there. I do love the smell of desperation though. FOUR MORE YEARS!!!!
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Tingkai
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To find the Northwest Passage
Aug 2001
time: 13:20
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What's CNS News?
Conservative New Scoundrals?
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Drachasor
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Indeed GePap.
As I said, it basically boils down to U.S. incompetence at one point or another, wether in the intelligence, military, or both.
I still love how the administration 'defended' itself by saying they couldn't cover all the sites they needed to. Lack of manpower apparently:
quote:
Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country. |
quote:
Officials in Washington said they had no answers to that question. One senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex where the explosives were stored was listed as a "medium priority" site on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of more than 500 sites that needed to be searched and secured during the invasion. "Should we have gone there? Definitely," said one senior administration official.
In the chaos that followed the invasion, however, many of those sites, even some considered a higher priority, were never secured. |
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/i...html?oref=login
Oh, and naturally the Administration says elsewhere that they have and have had enough people on the ground.
-Drachasor
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Bosh
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Taehan Mingook
Jan 1970
time: 00:20
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Here's some more news and more nails in the coffin of the "they were gone when we got there" hypothesis.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/natio...=Iraq%20Weapons
Al-Qaqaa spokesman says no weapons search
By KIMBERLY HEFLING
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
One of the first U.S. military units to reach the Al-Qaqaa military installation south of Baghdad after the invasion of Iraq did not have orders to search for the nearly 400 tons of explosives that are missing from the site, the unit spokesman said Tuesday.
When troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa base a day or so after other coalition troops seized Baghdad on April 9, 2003, there were already looters throughout the facility, Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the unit, told The Associated Press.
The soldiers "secured the area they were in and looked in a limited amount of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present in their area," Wellman wrote in an e-mail message to The Associated Press. "Bombs were found but not chemical weapons in that immediate area.
"Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE type munitions, as they (high-explosive weapons) were everywhere in Iraq," he wrote.
The 101st Airborne was apparently at least the second military unit to arrive at Al-Qaqaa after the U.S. led invasion began. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The Washington Post that the 3rd Infantry Division reached the site around April 3, fought with Iraq forces and occupied the site. They left after two days, headed to Baghdad, he told the newspaper for Wednesday's editions.
Associated Press Correspondent Chris Tomlinson, who was embedded with the 3rd Infantry but didn't go to Al-Qaqaa, described the search of Iraqi military facilities south of Baghdad as brief, cursory missions to seek out hostile troops, not to inventory or secure weapons stockpiles. One task force, he said, searched four Iraqi military bases in a single day, meeting no resistance and finding only abandoned buildings, some containing weapons and ammunition.
The enormous size of the bases, the rapid pace of the advance on Baghdad and the limited number of troops involved, made it impossible for U.S. commanders to allocate any soldiers to guard any of the facilities after making a check, Tomlinson said.
Pentagon officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday night. A spokesman for the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga., said the unit was checking on whether any of its troops was at Al-Qaqaa.
The disappearance of the explosives was first reported in Monday's New York Times and has subsequently become a heated issue in the U.S. presidential campaign, with Vice President Dick Cheney questioning on Tuesday whether the explosives were still at the facility when U.S. troops arrived. The Kerry campaign called the disappearance the latest in a "tragic series of blunders" by the Bush administration.
Two weeks ago, Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology told the International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives had vanished from the former military installation as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security." The ministry's letter said the explosives were stolen sometime after coalition forces took control of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.
The disappearance, which the U.N. nuclear agency reported to the Security Council on Monday, has raised questions about why the United States didn't do more to secure the facility and failed to allow full international inspections to resume after the March 2003 invasion.
On Tuesday, Russia, citing the disappearance, called on the U.N. Security Council to discuss the return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq. But the United States said American inspectors were investigating the loss and that there was no need for U.N. experts to return.
The Al-Qaqaa explosives included HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in repeated bomb attacks on U.S.-led multinational forces and Iraqi police and national guardsmen. But HMX is also a "dual use" substance powerful enough to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb and set off a nuclear chain reaction.
The 3rd Infantry left Al-Qaqaa and moved on to become the first U.S. unit into Baghdad. The day after Baghdad fell, the 101st Airborne arrived at Al-Qaqaa and remained there for 24 hours, later joining the 3rd Infantry in the capital.
"We still had Iraqi troops in Baghdad we were trying to combat," said Wellman, the 101st Airborne spokesman. "Our mission was securing Baghdad at that point."
NBC correspondent Lai Ling Jew, who was with the 101st, told MSNBC, an NBC cable news channel, that "there wasn't a search" of Al-Qaqaa.
"The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad," she said. "As far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away."
She said there was no talk among the 101st of securing the area after they left. The roads were cut off "so it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there," she said.
Wellman, the 101st Airborne spokesman, said the facility was in the unit's sector at that time but that he does not know if any troops were left at the grounds of the facility once the combat troops from the 2nd Brigade left.
The commander of the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade, Col. Joseph Anderson, told Times on Tuesday that he didn't learn until this week that international inspectors had been at Al-Qaqaa to inspect explosives before the war.
"We happened to stumble on it," Anderson told the Times. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus."
Lt. Gen. William Boykin, the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said that on May 27, 2003, a U.S. military team specifically looking for weapons went to the site but did not find anything with IAEA stickers on it.
The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the IAEA that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be. Boykin said that the Pentagon was investigating whether the information was handed on to anyone else at the time.
The explosives had been housed in storage bunkers at the facility. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed fresh seals over the bunker doors in January 2003. The inspectors visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time on March 15, 2003 and reported that the seals were not broken - therefore, the weapons were still there at the time. The team then pulled out of the country in advance of the invasion later that month.
Cheney raised the possibility the explosives disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.
"It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad," Cheney said Tuesday.
Both HMX and RDX are key components in plastic explosives such as C-4 and Semtex, which are so powerful that Libyan terrorists needed just a pound to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people.
-----
Looks like this is as close to an October Surprise as we're gunna get, I hope its as damaging to Bush as the discovery of his drunk driving conviction last time around.
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Drachasor
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Ogie, I think an important part of Bosko's post was how we didn't have enough troops in Iraq. We couldn't secure things like we needed to when we needed to.
We could of had that base secure before we moved into Bagdhad, for instance.
-Drachasor
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Drachasor
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quote:
Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
Which means little considering the roads were secure and the massive quantities we are talking about that would have to be moved on foot.
I'll not argue the force deployment was thin. I have thought in my heart of heart it was. In actuality I was never convinced we needed to go in the first place. I find it more than a bit incredibdle to think these were looted by men on foot. |
The roads are not as secure as you think.
A lot of small trucks could have moved the materials pretty easily over a long time. A ton here, a ton there. It is believed that initally the materials were moved to the surrounding area, and then later removed from there. We didn't have the troops to do a thorough check and look for them, even if we had really noticed they weren't there and had wanted to try to find them.
-Drachasor
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27-10-2004 01:46
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to paraphrase)
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