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Hmm...wasn't the stated purpose of going into Iraq to stop the spread of weapons?

October 25, 2004
TRACKING THE WEAPONS
Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

This article was reported and written by James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."

Administration officials said Sunday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.

American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.

The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of material, and larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it. The other components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain.

"This is a high explosives risk, but not necessarily a proliferation risk," one senior Bush administration official said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. 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.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Sunday evening that Saddam Hussein's government "stored weapons in mosques, schools, hospitals and countless other locations," and that the allied forces "have discovered and destroyed perhaps thousands of tons of ordnance of all types." A senior military official noted that HMX and RDX were "available around the world" and not on the nuclear nonproliferation list, even though they are used in the nuclear warheads of many nations.

The Qaqaa facility, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, was well known to American intelligence officials: Mr. Hussein made conventional warheads at the site, and the I.A.E.A. dismantled parts of his nuclear program there in the early 1990's after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. In the prelude to the 2003 invasion, Mr. Bush cited a number of other "dual use" items - including tubes that the administration contended could be converted to use for the nuclear program - as a justification for invading Iraq.

After the invasion, when widespread looting began in Iraq, the international weapons experts grew concerned that the Qaqaa stockpile could fall into unfriendly hands. In May, an internal I.A.E.A. memorandum warned that terrorists might be helping "themselves to the greatest explosives bonanza in history."

Earlier this month, in a letter to the I.A.E.A. in Vienna, a senior official from Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology wrote that the stockpile disappeared after early April 2003 because of "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

In an interview with The Times and "60 Minutes" in Baghdad, the minister of science and technology, Rashad M. Omar, confirmed the facts described in the letter. "Yes, they are missing," Dr. Omar said. "We don't know what happened." The I.A.E.A. says it also does not know, and has reported that machine tools that can be used for either nuclear or non-nuclear purposes have also been looted.

Dr. Omar said that after the American-led invasion, the sites containing the explosives were under the control of the Coalition Provisional Authority, an American-led entity that was the highest civilian authority in Iraq until it handed sovereignty of the country over to the interim government on June 28.

"After the collapse of the regime, our liberation, everything was under the coalition forces, under their control," Dr. Omar said. "So probably they can answer this question, what happened to the materials."

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.

A No Man's Land

Seeing the ruined bunkers at the vast Qaqaa complex today, it is hard to recall that just two years ago it was part of Saddam Hussein's secret military complex. The bunkers are so large that they are reminiscent of pyramids, though with rounded edges and the tops chopped off. Several are blackened and eviscerated as a result of American bombing. Smokestacks rise in the distance.

Today, Al Qaqaa has become a wasteland generally avoided even by the marines in charge of northern Babil Province. Headless bodies are found there. An ammunition dump has been looted, and on Sunday an Iraqi employee of The New York Times who made a furtive visit to the site saw looters tearing out metal fixtures. Bare pipes within the darkened interior of one of the buildings were a tangled mess, zigzagging along charred walls. Someone fired a shot, probably to frighten the visitors off.

"It's like Mars on Earth," said Maj. Dan Whisnant, an intelligence officer for the Second Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. "It would take probably 10 battalions 10 years to clear that out."

Mr. Hussein's engineers acquired HMX and RDX when they embarked on a crash effort to build an atomic bomb in the late 1980's. It did not go smoothly.

In 1989, a huge blast ripped through Al Qaqaa, the boom reportedly heard hundreds of miles away. The explosion, it was later determined, occurred when a stockpile of the high explosives ignited.

After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the United Nations discovered Iraq's clandestine effort and put the United Nations arms agency in charge of Al Qaqaa's huge stockpile. Weapon inspectors determined that Iraq had bought the explosives from France, China and Yugoslavia, a European diplomat said.

None of the explosives were destroyed, arms experts familiar with the decision recalled, because Iraq argued that it should be allowed to keep them for eventual use in mining and civilian construction. But Al Qaqaa was still under the authority of the Military Industrial Council, which ran Iraq's sensitive weapons programs and was led for a time by Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein's son-in-law. He defected to the West, then returned to Iraq and was immediately killed.

In 1996, the United Nations hauled away some of the HMX and used it to blow up Al Hakam, a vast Iraqi factory for making germ weapons.

The Qaqaa stockpile went unmonitored from late 1998, when United Nations inspectors left Iraq, to late 2002, when they came back. Upon their return, the inspectors discovered that about 35 tons of HMX were missing. The Iraqis said they had used the explosive mainly in civilian programs.

The remaining stockpile was no secret. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the arms agency, frequently talked about it publicly as he investigated - in late 2002 and early 2003 - the Bush administration's claims that Iraq was secretly renewing its pursuit of nuclear arms. He ordered his weapons inspectors to conduct an inventory, and publicly reported their findings to the Security Council on Jan. 9, 2003.

During the following weeks, the I.A.E.A. repeatedly drew public attention to the explosives. In New York on Feb. 14, nine days after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented his arms case to the Security Council, Dr. ElBaradei reported that the agency had found no sign of new atom endeavors but "has continued to investigate the relocation and consumption of the high explosive HMX."

A European diplomat reported that Jacques Baute, head of the arms agency's Iraq nuclear inspection team, warned officials at the United States mission in Vienna about the danger of the nuclear sites and materials once under I.A.E.A. supervision, including Al Qaqaa.

But apparently, little was done. A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces "went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal." It is unclear whether troops ever returned.

By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of roughly 10 bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been leveled by titanic blasts, apparently during the war. They presumed some of the HMX had exploded, but that is unclear.

Other HMX bunkers were untouched. Some were damaged but not devastated. I.A.E.A. experts say they assume that just before the invasion the Iraqis followed their standard practice of moving crucial explosives out of buildings, so they would not be tempting targets. If so, the experts say, the Iraqi must have broken seals from the arms agency on bunker doors and moved most of the HMX to nearby fields, where it would have been lightly camouflaged - and ripe for looting.

But the Bush administration would not allow the agency back into the country to verify the status of the stockpile. In May 2004, Iraqi officials say in interviews, they warned L. Paul Bremer III, the American head of the occupation authority, that Al Qaqaa had probably been looted. It is unclear if that warning was passed anywhere. Efforts to reach Mr. Bremer by telephone were unsuccessful.

But by the spring of 2004, the Americans were preoccupied with the transfer of authority to Iraq, and the insurgency was gaining strength. "It's not an excuse," said one senior administration official. "But a lot of things went by the boards."

Early this month, Dr. ElBaradei put public pressure on the interim Iraqi government to start the process of accounting for nuclear-related materials still ostensibly under I.A.E.A. supervision, including the Qaqaa stockpile.

"Iraq is obliged," he wrote to the president of the Security Council on Oct. 1, "to declare semiannually changes that have occurred or are foreseen."

The agency, Dr. ElBaradei added pointedly, "has received no such notifications or declarations from any state since the agency's inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in March 2003."

A Lost Stockpile

Two weeks ago, on Oct. 10, Dr. Mohammed J. Abbas of the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology wrote a letter to the I.A.E.A. to say the Qaqaa stockpile had been lost. He added that his ministry had judged that an "urgent updating of the registered materials is required."

A chart in his letter listed 341.7 metric tons, about 377 American tons, of HMX, RDX and PETN as missing.

The explosives missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe. The Iraqi letter identified the vanished stockpile as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, which stands for "high melting point explosive," 141.2 metric tons of RDX, which stands for "rapid detonation explosive," among other designations, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, which stands for "pentaerythritol tetranitrate." The total is roughly 340 metric tons or nearly 380 American tons.

Five days later, on Oct. 15, European diplomats said, the arms agency wrote the United States mission in Vienna to forward the Iraqi letter and ask that the American authorities inform the international coalition in Iraq of the missing explosives.

Dr. ElBaradei, a European diplomat said, is "extremely concerned" about the potentially "devastating consequences" of the vanished stockpile.

Its fate remains unknown. Glenn Earhart, manager of an Army Corps of Engineers program in Huntsville, Ala., that is in charge of rounding up and destroying lost Iraqi munitions, said he and his colleagues knew nothing of the whereabouts of the Qaqaa stockpile.

Administration officials say Iraq was awash in munitions, including other stockpiles of exotic explosives.

"The only reason this stockpile was under seal," said one senior administration official, "is because it was located at Al Qaqaa," where nuclear work had gone on years ago.

As a measure of the size of the stockpile, one large truck can carry about 10 tons, meaning that the missing explosives could fill a fleet of almost 40 trucks.

By weight, these explosives pack far more destructive power than TNT, so armies often use them in shells, bombs, mines, mortars and many types of conventional ordinance.

"HMX and RDX have a lot of shattering power," said Dr. Van Romero, vice president for research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, or New Mexico Tech, which specializes in explosives.

"Getting a large amount is difficult," he added, because most nations carefully regulate who can buy such explosives, though civilian experts can sometimes get licenses to use them for demolition and mining.

An Immediate Danger

A special property of HMX and RDX lends them to smuggling and terrorism, experts said. While violently energetic when detonated, they are insensitive to shock and physical abuse during handling and transport because of their chemical stability. A hammer blow does nothing. It takes a detonator, like a blasting cap, to release the stored energy.

Experts said the insensitivity made them safer to transport than the millions of unexploded shells, mines and pieces of live ammunition that litter Iraq. And its benign appearance makes it easy to disguise as harmless goods, easily slipped across borders.

"The immediate danger" of the lost stockpile, said an expert who recently led a team that searched Iraq for deadly arms, "is its potential use with insurgents in very small and powerful explosive devices. The other danger is that it can easily move into the terrorist web across the Middle East."

More worrisome to the I.A.E.A. - and to some in Washington - is that HMX and RDX are used in standard nuclear weapons design. In a nuclear implosion weapon, the explosives crush a hollow sphere of uranium or plutonium into a critical mass, initiating the nuclear explosion.

A crude implosion device - like the one that the United States tested in 1945 in the New Mexican desert and then dropped on Nagasaki, Japan - needs about a ton of high explosive to crush the core and start the chain reaction.

James Glanz reported from Baghdad and Yusifiya, Iraq, for this article, William J. Broad from New York and Vienna, and David E. Sanger from Washington and Crawford, Tex. Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad.

Gee, I'm glad we invaded Iraq to stop the spread of deadly weapons.

All sarcasm aside, what the fuck will it *take* to break the mass delusion that the current crew knows what they're doing? What's the Fox spin on this going to be? "See, I told you they had weapons!"

The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed.

Within the past *month*? Unclear if Bush's pretty little head has been troubled with the single largest weapons proliferation fiasco in recent memory? Do these clowns have *any* idea how nasty this shit is? Less than a *pound* brought down Pan Am 103! And this is 380 TONS!

ARGH!

Ryan

Rspaight wrote:"See, I told you they had weapons!"

Yea, I was thinking exactly the same thing.

Here's the spin. It's pathetic. Scottie blames the Iraqis, the DOD, the generals in the field anybody but Bush. Because Bush never screws up. Never.

And we had to protect the precious, precious oil!

And who's the idiot who says "50 car bombs?" Less than one POUND of this stuff took down a 747. That's a hell of a car bomb. 380 tons = 760,000 pounds. I think it's safe to say that 380 tons could easily make a *million* car bombs.

Bolding by me.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases ... 025-1.html

Q Prior to the 10th, and the notification by the interim government, whose responsibility was it to keep track of these munitions, the IAEA or the multinational force in Iraq?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think you need to look at the time. I think the Department of Defense can probably answer a lot of these questions for you. But that's why I pointed out what we did to -- literally, there were munitions caches spread throughout Iraq at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. That's why I pointed out the large volume of munitions that have already been destroyed and the large volume that are on-line to be destroyed. The sites now are the responsibility of the Iraqi government to secure.

Q But after Iraqi Freedom, there were those caches all around, wasn't the multinational force -- who was responsible for keeping track --

MR. McCLELLAN: At the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom there were a number of priorities. It was a priority to make sure that the oil fields were secure, so that there wasn't massive destruction of the oil fields, which we thought would occur. It was a priority to get the reconstruction office up and running. It was a priority to secure the various ministries, so that we could get those ministries working on their priorities, whether it was --

Q So it was the multinational force's responsibility --

MR. McCLELLAN: There were a number of -- well, the coalition forces, there were a number of priorities at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. And munitions, as I said, were literally spread throughout the country. And we have gone in and destroyed, as I pointed out, more than 243,000 tons --

Q Was it the coalition's responsibility to take care of that --

Q This morning, in Senator Kerry's remarks, he calls this one of the greatest blunders in the Iraq mission and this presidency. How do you respond to that?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Senator Kerry has a strategy of protest and retreat for Iraq. It is essential that we succeed in Iraq, because Iraq is critical to winning the war on terrorism. The President will talk in his remarks today about how the terrorists understand how high the stakes are in Iraq. They are doing everything they can to try to disrupt the progress we are making toward free elections in Iraq. And this is a critical difference in how the two candidates view the war on terrorism. Senator Kerry has a strategy for retreat and defeat in Iraq. The President has a strategy for success in Iraq. We are making important progress. And as I pointed out, the first priority, when it came to these munitions, was to make sure that there was not a nuclear proliferation risk. There is not a nuclear proliferation risk. We're talking about conventional explosives, when we talk about these -- and that's why I pointed out the more than 243,000 munitions that have already been destroyed, and nearly 163,000 munitions that are in the process or are awaiting to be destroyed now. So this, as I said, this was pointed out by the Iraqi Interim Government to the IAEA, and then we were informed about it just in recent days.

Q Scott, did we just have enough troops in Iraq to guard and protect these kind of caches?

MR. McCLELLAN: See, that's -- now you just hit on what I just said a second ago, that the sites now are really -- my understanding, they're the responsibility of the Iraqi forces. And I disagree with the way you stated your question, because one of the lessons we've learned of history is that it's important to listen to the commanders on the ground and our military leaders when it comes to troop levels. And that's what this President has always done. And they've said that we have the troop levels we need to complete the mission and succeed in Iraq.

Q But you're saying this is the responsibility of the Iraqi forces. But this was our responsibility until just recently, isn't that right? Weren't these -- there is some U.S. culpability, as far as --

MR. McCLELLAN: You're trying -- I think you're taking this out of context of what was going on. This was reported missing after -- when the interim government informed that these munitions went missing some time after April 9th of 2003, remember, that was when we were still involved in major military action at that point. And there were a number of important priorities at that point. There were munitions, munition caches spread throughout Iraq. There were -- there was a concern that there would be massive refugees fleeing the country. There is concern about the devastation that could occur to the oil fields. There was concern about starvation that could happen for the Iraqi people.

So -- and obviously there is an effort to go and secure these sites. The Department of Defense can talk to you about -- because they did go in and look at this site and look to see whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction there. So you need to talk to Department of Defense, because I think that would clarify that for you and set that record straight.

Q You said Condi Rice told the President days after October 15th. Do you know when exactly he found out about --

MR. McCLELLAN: No. It was in one of his briefings, morning briefings.

Q After --

MR. McCLELLAN: This is really in the last 10 days, Deb.

Q Go through the tick-tock one more time. Allawi tells the IAEA about it October 10th and then --

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, the Iraqi government told the International Atomic Energy Agency on October 10th that these munitions or these high explosives were missing, because of looting that occurred sometime after April 9th, 2003. And these were subject to -- some of these were subject to agency monitoring, and that's why they informed the IAEA.

Q But, Scott --

Q Who told the White House? I mean, did somebody tell the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and they told the White House?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, no, no. The IAEA informed the U.S. mission in Vienna first. And then -- and then, as I said, Condi was informed days after that and she informed the President.

Q Are U.S. troops under any kind of higher alert because there's enough munitions for like 50 car bombs? Is there, like, any kind of alert going on for them? Are they on any kind of higher standard?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think you need to look at what we have done in terms of destroying munitions. As I point out, we've destroyed more than 243,000 munitions, we've secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed.

Q I'm sorry -- these are going to be used against them --

MR. McCLELLAN: And then, so if you look at all those explosives there -- and now the DOD -- now that we've been informed about this, the Pentagon directed multinational forces and the Iraq Survey Group to look into this matter and do a comprehensive assessment of what happened to these munitions. So that's what's happening right now.

Q On the tick-tock, do you know if the missing munitions, if they were looted before or after the handover June 30th? Was this -- happened when the coalition was in control or when the Allawi government --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, no. First of all, I said that they reported that it went missing sometime after April 9th, 2003. Remember, early on -- during and at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, there was some looting. Some of it was organized that was going on in the country. There were munitions caches spread throughout the country. And so -- but these are all issues that are being looked into by the multinational forces and the Iraq Survey Group.

Q But you don't know yet exactly what --

MR. McCLELLAN: You might want to direct that question to the Pentagon. My understanding is that it went missing sometime after April 9th, 2003. So it's looking more back to that period, that period of time.

Q Can you also talk about Romano Prodi, Romano Prodi's comments about Kerry's plan for Iraq and he's been endorsing the Kerry plan.

MR. McCLELLAN: I haven't seen his comments. I'll be glad to look at them. But I haven't seen the comments yet.

Q Scott, one last one on the tick-tock --

MR. McCLELLAN: The President will talk about the differences when it comes to our plans for Iraq today in his remarks.

Q One last one on the tick-tock. These notices from Iraq to IAEA to U.S. to Condi to President happened over days as opposed to hours. Was there just no sense of urgency that what they had discovered here was really an important --

MR. McCLELLAN: No, just -- no, I think that this has all happened in a -- just the last few days. We're talking about the last 10 days.

Q As opposed to hours. Right. But does that mean folks believed that this was not an urgent, serious matter?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, because the Pentagon became informed -- you can check with the Pentagon when they were informed about it and the coalition forces. Absolutely not.

Q This was an urgent matter, as far as U.S. government was concerned?

MR. McCLELLAN: It's something that's being looked into now. So I don't know how you can characterize it as not. I mean, it's something that the Pentagon, upon being informed about it, immediately directed the multinational forces and Iraq Survey Group to look into this matter, and that's what they're doing.

Q Is there any greater risk to U.S. troops because of these munitions?

MR. McCLELLAN: When there are munitions missing, it's -- and we learn about it, it's always a priority. And as I pointed out, that's why we've already destroyed more than 243,000 munitions and have another nearly 363,000 on line to be destroyed.

But, I mean, we don't know -- I mean, you're assuming things right now. We don't know what happened to these high explosives. That's what's being looked into. So you -- I would urge you not to speculate. We're looking into it to find out exactly what happened to them. And you're --

Q It could be their -- this is what they're using for -- they've been using for these bombs for a year now.

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, that's all that's -- that's what's being looked into. You might want to direct questions like these to the coalition forces and to the Pentagon, who is looking into it. I would not speculate about those matters.

All right, thanks.

http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2004/1026.asp

Times' "Explosive" Scoop:
Bombshell or Politically Motivated Dud?

The Times trumpets a two-column lead story by James Glanz, William Broad and David Sanger, "Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq," in Monday's edition, a story one week before the election about events that happened at least 18 months ago -- one blaming the Bush administration for letting almost 400 tons of powerful explosives disappear under its nose. Grim news -- but is it true?

From Monday's Times: "The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives -- used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons -- are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations. The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year."

The Times puts Bush on the defensive: "The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. 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….A European diplomat reported that Jacques Baute, head of the arms agency's Iraq nuclear inspection team, warned officials at the United States mission in Vienna about the danger of the nuclear sites and materials once under I.A.E.A. supervision, including Al Qaqaa. But apparently, little was done."

Deeper in, the Times glides right by the possibility that the weapons were already gone by the Times U.S. forces arrived (a point Times Watch will return to): "A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces 'went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal.' It is unclear whether troops ever returned."

In a tonal shift from their usual reports downplaying Hussein's threat, the Times emphasizes Hussein's weaponry in order to expose the administration's alleged failure: "The explosives missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe. The Iraqi letter identified the vanished stockpile as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, which stands for 'high melting point explosive,' 141.2 metric tons of RDX, which stands for 'rapid detonation explosive,' among other designations, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, which stands for 'pentaerythritol tetranitrate.' The total is roughly 340 metric tons or nearly 380 American tons."

Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes found a lack of perspective in the Times' story, arguing on Fox News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume: "I don't think the Times, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the Times mentions, gives the perspective, that there are actually more than 400,000 tons that have either been destroyed or at least captured and are ready for destruction. I don't think they mentioned those numbers. So the story is really incomplete, overplayed. But it is, as Mort suggested, in line with the stories the Times is running. Clearly, the Times has chosen sides. The Times has become like one of those partisan newspapers in Europe. You know, the Guardian, for instance, promotes Labour. The Telegraph in London promotes the Conservatives. The New York Times supports the Democrats clearly, and it's one thing to have editorial writers who do that and columnists who do that, but this is the news coverage. The story was way overplayed." (Indeed, the Democratic party leaped on the Times story, as did most of the media.)

But lack of context might be the least of the story's problems: A Monday NBC Nightly News report may refute the Times' take.

Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News is quoted on National Review Online contradicting the front-page story from that morning's Times: "April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qaqaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq."

Miklaszewski concluded (according to quotes taken down by the Media Research Center): "Pentagon officials claim there's no evidence the H.M.X. or R.D.X. have been used in attacks in Iraq. Nevertheless, the explosives are still missing, and President Bush today ordered a full investigation. But one U.S. official tells NBC News that recent disagreements between the administration and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes the agency's release of this explosive information, one week before elections, appear highly political."

Neither of those points made it into the Times.

Undaunted, the Times ran a front-page follow-up Tuesday morning from David Sanger, "Iraq Explosives Becomes Issue In Campaign."

Sanger opens: "The White House sought on Monday to explain the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that American forces were supposed to secure, as Senator John Kerry seized on the missing cache as 'one of the great blunders of Iraq' and said President Bush's 'incredible incompetence' had put American troops at risk. Mr. Bush never mentioned the disappearance of the high explosives during a long campaign speech in Greeley, Colo., about battling terrorism….Yet even as Mr. Bush pressed his case, his aides 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….White House officials said they could not explain why warnings from the international agency in May 2003 about the stockpile's vulnerability to looting never resulted in action. At one point, Mr. McClellan pointed out that 'there were a number of priorities at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.'"

Sanger demands the administration answer accusations from the Kerry camp: "Asked about accusations from the Kerry campaign that the White House had kept the disappearance secret until The Times and CBS broke the story on Monday morning, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said the White House had decided 'to get all the facts and find out exactly what happened in this case, and then whether there are other cases.'"

Sanger reveals how the Republicans are taking it to the Times, and belatedly reveals the possibility the looting of the explosives may have taken place before American troops had even arrived: "On Monday afternoon, Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager, wrote a letter to supporters saying that 'every day brings a new charge against the president and every charge is pulled right from the headlines of The New York Times.' 'John Kerry will say anything he believes will help him politically,' Mr. Mehlman wrote, 'and today he is grasping at headlines to obscure his record of weakness and indecision in the war on terror.' Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, also contended that The Times had chosen to run the article at the end of the campaign, though he argued that the explosives probably disappeared about 18 months ago. The Times article said it was based on a letter reporting the missing explosives dated two weeks ago, on Oct. 10, sent to the International Atomic Energy Agency by the Iraqi interim government. The Times and CBS confirmed the facts in the letter in an interview with the Iraqi minister of science and technology, Rashad M. Omar."

Finally there's this intriguing bit, which dovetails with what NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reported Monday night: "On Monday evening, Nicolle Devenish, the spokeswoman for the Bush campaign, noted a section of the Times report indicating that American troops, on the way to Baghdad in April 2003, stopped at the Al Qaqaa complex and saw no evidence of high explosives. Noting that the cache may have been looted before the American invasion, she said Mr. Kerry had exaggerated the administration's responsibility."

A caption to a picture of Bush with troops in Nebraska reads: "Mr. Bush did not mention the issue of missing explosives in Iraq."

That's rich, given that Tuesday's Times doesn't mention details of the NBC News report that may negate their two front-page stories.

For the rest of Monday's explosives story, click here.

For the Tuesday follow-up, click here.

Umm...even if they *were* gone by the time troops got there, isn't the whole point that prior to the war the site was being monitored? It seems to come down to either they didn't bother to secure the site after the invasion, or they didn't think that looting would be an issue between the time the inspectors were pulled and when troops went in.

Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News is quoted on National Review Online contradicting the front-page story from that morning's Times: "April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qaqaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon.

From MSNBC (via the K/E site):

LATEST BUSH EXCUSE ON WEAPONS DUMP EVAPORATES

George Bush's continuing efforts to avoid responsibility for failing to secure 380 tons of highly dangerous explosives in Iraq just took another blow. The reporter who was actually traveling with the 101st Airborne in the report cited by the Bush campaign has clarified that the unit was not there to secure the massive weapons complex and it was merely a 'pit stop' on their way to Baghdad.

Try as it might, the Bush spin machine can not change the truth: the President is responsible for his catastrophic failures in Iraq and needs to personally address this issue.

MSNBC, 10/26/04 (Transcript):

Amy Robach: And it's still unclear exactly when those explosives disappeared. Here to help shed some light on that question is Lai Ling. She was part of an NBC news crew that traveled to that facility with the 101st Airborne Division back in April of 2003. Lai Ling, can you set the stage for us? What was the situation like when you went into the area?

Lai Ling Jew: When we went into the area, we were actually leaving Karbala and we were initially heading to Baghdad with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. The situation in Baghdad, the Third Infantry Division had taken over Baghdad and so they were trying to carve up the area that the 101st Airborne Division would be in charge of. As a result, they had trouble figuring out who was going to take up what piece of Baghdad. They sent us over to this area in Iskanderia. We didn't know it as the Qaqaa facility at that point but when they did bring us over there we stayed there for quite a while. We stayed overnight, almost 24 hours. And we walked around, we saw the bunkers that had been bombed, and that exposed all of the ordinances that just lied dormant on the desert.

AR: Was there a search at all underway or did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?

LLJ: No. There wasn't a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to

secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was – at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there.

AR: And there was no talk of securing the area after you left. There was no discussion of that?

LLJ: Not for the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. They were -- once they were in Baghdad, it was all about Baghdad, you know, and then they ended up moving north to Mosul. Once we left the area, that was the last that the brigade had anything to do with the area.

AR: Well, Lai Ling Jew, thank you so much for shedding some light into that situation. We appreciate it.

LLJ: Thank you.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Talk about an "October Surprise".

My favorite quote of the hour, taken from an AP report of Bush castigating Kerry for (presumably) attacking him on this issue:

"A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief," Bush told supporters at an airport rally.

...pot...kettle...black?

Xenu wrote:...pot...kettle...black?

Even that would be totally unfair to Kerry. Bush's whole process seems to be that he doesn't think he *needs* "facts" - his gut (or lord) will lead him.

Does Bush seriously think that staging a political attack in the last week of a presidential campaign is in any way comparable to starting a war?

If he'd questioned the Iraq WMD/al Qaeda intelligence as hard as he's denying responsibility for the missing explosives, the explosives never would have gone missing because we wouldn't have created the circumstances under which they went missing.

Ryan

Bolding mine.

4 Iraqis Tell of Looting at Munitions Site in '03
By JAMES GLANZ and JIM DWYER

BAGHDAD, Iraq, 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, determined to keep them out of American hands. The mechanic, Ahmed Saleh Mezher, said employees asked the Americans to protect the site but were told this was not the soldiers' responsibility.

The accounts do not directly address the question of when 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives vanished from the site sometime after early March, the last time international inspectors checked the seals on the bunkers where the material was stored. It is possible that Iraqi forces removed some explosives before the invasion.

But the accounts make clear that what set off much if not all of the looting was the arrival and swift departure of American troops, who did not secure the site after inducing the Iraqi forces to abandon it.

"The looting started after the collapse of the regime," said Wathiq al-Dulaimi, a regional security chief, who was based nearby in Latifiya. But once it had begun, he said, the booty streamed toward Baghdad.

Earlier this month, on Oct. 10, the directorate of national monitoring at the Ministry of Science and Technology notified the International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives, which are used in demolition and missiles and are the raw material for plastic explosives, were missing. The agency has monitored the explosives because they can also be used as the initiator of an atomic bomb.

Agency officials examined the explosives in January 2003 and noted in early March that their seals were still in place. On April 3, the Third Infantry Division arrived with the first American troops.

Chris Anderson, a photographer for U.S. News and World Report who was with the division's Second Brigade, recalled that the area was jammed with American armor on April 3 and 4, which he believed made the removal of the explosives unlikely. "It would be quite improbable for this amount of weapons to be looted at that time because of the traffic jam of armor," he said.

The brigade blew up numerous caches of arms throughout the area, he said. Mr. Anderson said he did not enter the munitions compound.

The Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division arrived outside the site on April 10, under the command of Col. Joseph Anderson. The brigade had been ordered to move quickly to Baghdad because of civil disorder there after Mr. Hussein's government fell on April 9.

They gathered at Al Qaqaa, about 30 miles south, simply as a matter of convenience, Colonel Anderson said in an interview this week. He said that when he arrived at the site - unaware of its significance - he saw no signs of looting, but was not paying close attention.

Because he thought the brigade would be moving on to Baghdad within hours, Al Qaqaa was of no importance to his mission, he said, and he was unaware of the explosives that international inspectors said were hidden inside.

Pentagon officials said Wednesday that analysts were examining surveillance photographs of the munitions site. But they expressed doubts that the photographs, which showed vehicles at the location on several occasions early in the conflict, before American troops moved through the area, would be able to indicate conclusively when the explosives were removed.

Col. David Perkins, who commanded the Second Brigade of the Third Infantry division, called it "very highly improbable" that 380 tons of explosives could have been trucked out of Al Qaqaa in the weeks after American troops arrived.

Moving that much material, said Colonel Perkins, who spoke Wednesday to news agencies and cable television, "would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks."

He conceded that some looting of the site had taken place. But a chemical engineer who worked at Al Qaqaa and identified himself only as Khalid said that once troops left the base itself, people streamed in to steal computers and anything else of value from the offices. They also took munitions like artillery shells, he said.

Mr. Mezher, the mechanic, said it took the looters about two weeks to disassemble heavy machinery at the site and carry that off after the smaller items were gone.

James Glanz reported from Baghdad for this article and Jim Dwyer from New York. Ali Adeeb contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Khalid W. Hussein and Zainab Obeid fromAl Qaqaa.

Col. David Perkins, who commanded the Second Brigade of the Third Infantry division, called it "very highly improbable" that 380 tons of explosives could have been trucked out of Al Qaqaa in the weeks after American troops arrived.

Moving that much material, said Colonel Perkins, who spoke Wednesday to news agencies and cable television, "would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks."

These sorts of statements are typical of the thinking of "superior force" commanders, who are prone to underestimate the ingenuity and perseverance of their "ragtag" enemies.

In 1954, the French were at war with the Vietminh. Similar to the Americans in Vietnam 10 years later, the French controlled the air and had superior firepower.

As part of their plan to completely rout the losing enemy, the French took control of a remote airfield west of Hanoi and brought in 15,000 soldiers to establish a base. This area -- known as Dien Bien Phu -- was in a depression, surrounded by hills covered in jungle, and completely vulnerable to attack by heavy artillery. However, the French high command thought that it would be impossible for the poorly equipped Vietminh to drag heavy artillery through miles of thick jungle. They were wrong.

Once the Vietminh had all their artillery placed at the jungle perimeter, they threw the camouflage off and opened fire. On average, a shell hit the French every 6 seconds for the next 8 weeks, until they surrendered. The survivors were forced to march about 200 miles. Of the original 15,000 troops, only about 3900 survived to return to France.

Somebody was listening to the Franken show.