27-10-2004 20:55									#211
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The looting hypothesis is not valid. This is sensitive material. You just don't stuff RDX in your pocket and walk around with it. it requires trucks and careful loading and unloading.

The fact is that it was removed before our troops arrived. There was plenty of time before the invasion for Saddam to remove the material without anyone knowing about it.

To blame this on our amazing and courageous soldiers is despicable.

	27-10-2004 21:23									#212
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No, RDX is so valuable because it isn't that sensitive. According to Wiki:

quote: At room temperatures, it is a very stable product. It burns rather than explodes, and only detonates with a detonator, being unaffected even by small arms fire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDX

	27-10-2004 21:29									#213
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quote: What is still not addressed is the likelihood of 380 tons the equivalent of 40 tractor trailor loads being lifted in an area where roads were completely in control of the US forces were it a matter of looting.

Exactly how secure were the roads? Were they secure throughout the occupation?

	27-10-2004 21:52									#214
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quote: BAGHDAD (AFP) - A top Iraqi science official said it was impossible that 350 tonnes of high explosives could have been smuggled out of a military site south of Baghdad before the regime fell last year. The UN nuclear watchdog this week said about 350 tonnes of high explosives went missing from a weapons dump some time after Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime was toppled in April 2003 after the US-led invasion . But as the issue of the missing explosives took centre stage in the final days of the US presidential campaign, some US officials have suggested they had gone before the US-led forces moved on Baghdad. "It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," said Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the science ministry's site monitoring department and previously worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam. "The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of." Sharaa also warned that other nearby sites with similar materials could have also been plundered. "The Al-Milad Company in Iskandariyah and the Yarmouk and Hateen facilities contained explosive materials that could have also been taken out," the official told AFP in an interview. The Al-Qaqaa facility is near the town of Latifiyah, 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of Baghdad and the bulk of materials in question include HMX (high melting point explosive) and RDX (rapid detonation explosive), which experts say can be used in major bombing attacks, making missile warheads and detonating nuclear weapons. The area in Babil province, which includes the towns of Iskandariyah and Mahmudiyah, used to be the centre of Saddam's military-industrial complex. It is now one of the most dangerous parts of the country rife with crime, kidnappings and attacks. Several headless bodies hav been found in the area, according to marines stationed there. "It may be already too late to salvage many of these sites, which are controlled by bandits and beyond the control of Iraqi forces," warned Sharaa.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...q_us_explosives

	27-10-2004 22:07									#215
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NM

	27-10-2004 22:08									#216
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NM too.

	28-10-2004 02:36									#217
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So, they just kept all that materiel in well-marked, easily located bunkers, even though they knew we were going to attack?

Nice of them to make it so easy for our bombers.

	28-10-2004 02:39									#218
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quote: Originally posted by The diplomat To blame this on our amazing and courageous soldiers is despicable.

No one is blaming this on our soldiers.


We're blaming this on our leadership.

	28-10-2004 05:21									#219
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quote: Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe Simple question, Boshko, how does your piece in any way prove the munitions were not stolen prior or during invasion? All the evidence of existing materials being used by insurgents is just as likely if the stockpiles were moved prior to/during invasion.

Well I'm sure that the looting started before US soldiers got there and that it continued after the 101st Airborne and the 3rd Infantry left. The reports that we've been getting is that when the soldiers showed up there were bombs already there and looting already going on. There's no reason why some looting couldn't have started before the US arrived, but there simply wasn't enough time to haul away 380 tons nor ANY EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that this is what happened.

quote: It would have taken over 1 year (380 days) to make off with it on foot.

They've had well over a year and I'm sure they weren't doing it all on foot.

quote: Which means little considering the roads were secure and the massive quantities we are talking about that would have to be moved on foot.

The roads to al-Qa Qaa have been completely secured by US forces during the entire course of the occupation?

quote: You just don't stuff RDX in your pocket and walk around with it. it requires trucks and careful loading and unloading.

1. Why the hell couldn't they have used trucks. They've had a YEAR.
2. The stuff's inert without the detonator, that's why terrorists like it so much.
3. According to reports, looters were already starting to work when US forces arrived and for virtually the entire occupation the site has been unguarded, do you think the looters just went home?

quote: The fact is that it was removed before our troops arrived.

There is absolutely NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that this is what occured.

quote: There was plenty of time before the invasion for Saddam to remove the material without anyone knowing about it.

There was a month. That's not enough time to get the stuff out unnoticed.

quote: To blame this on our amazing and courageous soldiers is despicable.

That's quite the spin

	28-10-2004 05:46									#220
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Well that spin is pretty much Bush's response- as ever, question what is and was done in Iraq, and you're an evil UnAmerican liberal.

	28-10-2004 06:32									#221
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http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=31993

interesting, very interesting:

quote: "The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of." He said officials at Al-Qaqaa, including its general director, whom he refused to name, made contact with US troops before the fall in an effort to get them to provide security for the site. The regime's fall triggered a wave of looting of government and private property, which US-led troops struggled to contain as they were busy securing their own positions. ... Science Minister Omar Rashad sent a letter on October 10 to the International Atomic Energy Agency sounding the alarm about the explosives in Al-Qaqaa. Sharaa said the letter was sent after repeated warnings and inquiries by the IAEA over the disappearance of so-called duel-use nuclear material, which could be used for either conventional or nuclear means. "Normally we should be overseeing all sites but these responsibilities were stripped away from us under the coalition authority," he said. The ministry was only handed oversight responsiblities of two site -- Al-Tuwaitha and Al-Wardiya -- after authority was transferred from the coalition to the interim government in June.

	28-10-2004 06:37									#222
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Very very interesting indeed.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...q_us_explosives

quote: Iraq says 'impossible' explosives taken before regime fall Wed Oct 27, 9:47 AM ET Mideast - AFP BAGHDAD (AFP) - A top Iraqi science official said it was impossible that 350 tonnes of high explosives could have been smuggled out of a military site south of Baghdad before the regime fell last year. The UN nuclear watchdog this week said about 350 tonnes of high explosives went missing from a weapons dump some time after Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime was toppled in April 2003 after the US-led invasion . But as the issue of the missing explosives took centre stage in the final days of the US presidential campaign, some US officials have suggested they had gone before the US-led forces moved on Baghdad. "It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," said Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the science ministry's site monitoring department and previously worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam. "The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of." Sharaa also warned that other nearby sites with similar materials could have also been plundered. "The Al-Milad Company in Iskandariyah and the Yarmouk and Hateen facilities contained explosive materials that could have also been taken out," the official told AFP in an interview. The Al-Qaqaa facility is near the town of Latifiyah, 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of Baghdad and the bulk of materials in question include HMX (high melting point explosive) and RDX (rapid detonation explosive), which experts say can be used in major bombing attacks, making missile warheads and detonating nuclear weapons. The area in Babil province, which includes the towns of Iskandariyah and Mahmudiyah, used to be the centre of Saddam's military-industrial complex. It is now one of the most dangerous parts of the country rife with crime, kidnappings and attacks. Several headless bodies hav been found in the area, according to marines stationed there. "It may be already too late to salvage many of these sites, which are controlled by bandits and beyond the control of Iraqi forces," warned Sharaa.

Plain and simply there is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that the stuff was trucked out before the invasion. All there is is the embedded NBC reporter who swung by with the 101st Airborne, which didn't conduct any kind of search of the complex at all.

	28-10-2004 07:50									#223
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quote: Originally posted by Boshko Plain and simply there is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that the stuff was trucked out before the invasion. All there is is the embedded NBC reporter who swung by with the 101st Airborne, which didn't conduct any kind of search of the complex at all.

There is plenty of evidence!

In fact, according to the Washington Times, Russian troops shipped the explosives to Syria before the Iraq war.

	28-10-2004 07:52									#224
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quote: Originally posted by The diplomat In fact, according to the Washington Times, Russian troops shipped the explosives to Syria before the Iraq war.

Next.

	28-10-2004 07:53									#225
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quote: There is plenty of evidence! In fact, according to the Washington Times, Russian troops shipped the explosives to Syria before the Iraq war.

Link?

	28-10-2004 07:56									#226
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quote: Originally posted by Guynemer Next.

Why? It's perfectly coherent with the damning pieces of evidence reported by the Telegraph. You know, those ultra secret papers they found in the rubble of Iraqi buildings...

	28-10-2004 08:11									#227
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The point conveniently ignored by various GOP talking heads on damage control duty is that a site like this needed to be secured and because of the small invasion force and the failure to order any units to secure the place, it wasn't secured. It doesn't matter if the HE was grabbed before or after the arrival of coalition forces, it was a failure in the leadership's planning. The fact we knew about the place beforehand makes the bungling even worse.

And for these paid liars to accuse Kerry of criticising the ground troops is both illogical and But that's what Bush 1 did. When the #2 turret of the battleship Iowa blew up about 15 years ago around the first war, the Pentagon brass announced that Clayton Hartwig, one of the sailors killed in the explosion was a jilted homosexual who committed suicide by sabotaging the firing mechanism. That cover story was in all the papers within days of the accident, but not much notice to the actual report issued a few months later indicting "bad powder". Now, Bush may not have made up that BS but he sure sanctioned it by doing nothing to publicly chastise those responsible or apologise to the Hartwig folks...

	28-10-2004 08:25									#228
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Oh yeah, forgot all the other weapons there. Hell, it sounds like a massive stockpile and now our guys are being killed by those weapons. It was a mistake, a big one... I don't see how anyone can argue otherwise... Maybe that's why we're hearing the GOP talking point on TV about "Kerry is insulting our soldiers". I swear, I never thought I'd say this, but the GOP has run the nastiest campaign I've ever seen.

	28-10-2004 08:26									#229
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quote: Originally posted by The diplomat There is plenty of evidence! In fact, according to the Washington Times, Russian troops shipped the explosives to Syria before the Iraq war.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Who writes this stuff?

	28-10-2004 09:27									#230
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If there's any doubt left:

quote: Oct. 27 - Looters stormed the weapons site at Al Qaqaa in the days after American troops swept through the area in early April 2003 on their way to Baghdad, gutting office buildings, carrying off munitions and even dismantling heavy machinery, three Iraqi witnesses and a regional security chief said Wednesday. The Iraqis described an orgy of theft so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters. But some looting was clearly indiscriminate, with people grabbing anything they could find and later heaving unwanted items off the trucks. Two witnesses were employees of Al Qaqaa - one a chemical engineer and the other a mechanic - and the third was a former employee, a chemist, who had come back to retrieve his records.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/i...html?oref=login

	28-10-2004 09:34									#231
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quote: Two witnesses were employees of Al Qaqaa - one a chemical engineer and the other a mechanic - and the third was a former employee, a chemist, who had come back to retrieve his records.

Hmm...lotta chemistry goin on there

	28-10-2004 09:37									#233
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Bush's answer to Kerry's criticism of this debacle?

quote: The president accused his rival of "wild charges" unbecoming a man with ambitions for the Oval Office.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...pr/campaign_rdp

If pointing out that this was a big Bushie screw-up constitutes "wild charges," you gotta wonder what to call claiming that Saddam had WMD and links to 9/11.

	28-10-2004 09:42									#234
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Yeah, Bush's campaign has been even more of a parody of itself in the past month or so. If Kerry had his way, Saddam would've had the explosives and he could've shared them with the terrorists!

	28-10-2004 09:43									#235
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We lost the WMD! We lost OBL! But we got Saddam




And his broken down country

	28-10-2004 10:16									#236
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What pisses me off, is that four months after 9/11 at a press conference, Bush outright said that he was not at all concerned about Osama Bin Laden.

	28-10-2004 10:51									#237
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quote: Originally posted by The diplomat There is plenty of evidence! In fact, according to the Washington Times, Russian troops shipped the explosives to Syria before the Iraq war.

Dangit, I knew they invented time travel in the future before us!

Those time-traveling Russian troops can be anywhere they want at any time they want!

We're doomed. Next they'll bring back Lenin!

-Drachasor

	28-10-2004 13:17									#238
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The Bush/GOP response to Kerry's attack over this issue is downright hilarious. Paraphrasing the new slogan, you can't jump to conclusions without the facts and be CinC. That's how we got into Iraq, a CinC who jumped to conclusions without the facts.

	28-10-2004 14:26									#239
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This is getting more bizarre by the minute, now for all intents and purposes there is no RDX comparatively speaking

ABC

quote: Oct. 27, 2004 — Iraqi officials may be overstating the amount of explosives reported to have disappeared from a weapons depot, documents obtained by ABC News show. The Iraqi interim government has told the United States and international weapons inspectors that 377 tons of conventional explosives are missing from the Al-Qaqaa installation, which was supposed to be under U.S. military control. But International Atomic Energy Agency documents obtained by ABC News and first reported on "World News Tonight with Peter Jennings" indicate the amount of missing explosives may be substantially less than the Iraqis reported. The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing — presumably stolen due to a lack of security — was based on "declaration" from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility. But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency's inspectors recorded that just over 3 tons of RDX was stored at the facility — a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported. The IAEA documents could mean that 138 tons of explosives were removed from the facility long before the start of the United States launched "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in March 2003. The missing explosives have become an issue in the presidential campaign. Sen. John Kerry has pointed to the disappearance as evidence of the Bush administration's poor handling of the war. The Bush camp has responded that more than a thousand times that amount of explosives or munitions have been recovered or destroyed in Iraq. Another Concern The IAEA documents from January 2003 found no discrepancy in the amount of the more dangerous HMX explosives thought to be stored at Al-Qaqaa, but they do raise another disturbing possibility. The documents show IAEA inspectors looked at nine bunkers containing more than 194 tons of HMX at the facility. Although these bunkers were still under IAEA seal, the inspectors said the seals may be potentially ineffective because they had ventilation slats on the sides. These slats could be easily removed to remove the materials inside the bunkers without breaking the seals, the inspectors noted.

	28-10-2004 14:48									#240
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quote: The Bush camp has responded that more than a thousand times that amount of explosives or munitions have been recovered or destroyed in Iraq.

That's probably true, it still doesn't excuse the failure in planning though. I'd like to know if this was a pattern or an aberation, I mean, were alot of our forward deployed troops ordered to remove Saddam's regime before trying to secure weapons that might be used against us? The guy in charge of the 101st unit, Anderson I think, said they didn't even know what the place was before taking a look around and moving on to Baghdad. Oh well, fog of war....or Bush Fog as opposed to Boss Hog.