[spacefreak]

And here's the ad that Kerry pumped out to coordinate with their "October Surprise" fraud.

[MATTRESS]

Originally posted by Nicko:
Combination of being uninformed and misinformed?

Seems like you are suggesting that many Democrats are uninformed or misinformed.

[Shaddim]

Originally posted by spacefreak:
And here's the ad that Kerry pumped out to coordinate with their "October Surprise" fraud.

Yeah, this had made Kerry look like a complete fool. Glad to see this one's come back to bite him on the ass.

[Shaddim]

Originally posted by Nicko:
Combination of being uninformed and misinformed?

Because Kerry's a complete waste of air in a $10K suit?

[Mithras]

So the story stands:

When the troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa base a day or so after Baghdad's fall 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. "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.

[RAILhead]

Originally posted by Mithras:
So the story stands:

...right -- they were gone when we got there. 380 tonnes would have to have been hauled off in TRUCKS, as in BIG CARGO TRUCKS, so they were "taken" under the UN's watch.

Sad, isn't it?

[icruise]

Originally posted by RAILhead:
...right -- they were gone when we got there. 380 tonnes would have to have been hauled off in TRUCKS, as in BIG CARGO TRUCKS, so they were "taken" under the UN's watch.

I don't think it's anywhere near as clear-cut as you'd like to think.

Timing of theft of explosives a mystery

According to this article, we don't know if the explosives were there or not when the US troops arrived, since they didn't really do a search of the huge (1000 building!) complex.

PS Why do you keep spelling it "tonnes"?

[RAILhead]

Originally posted by Icruise:
I don't think it's anywhere near as clear-cut as you'd like to think.

Timing of theft of explosives a mystery

According to this article, we don't know if the explosives were there or not when the US troops arrived, since they didn't really do a search of the huge (1000 building!) complex.

PS Why do you keep spelling it "tonnes"?

It's all pretty clear cut to me, yes. As for the "tonnes" spelling, it's a metric measurement.

Maury

[spacefreak]

Originally posted by Mithras:
So the story stands:

Hardly. Looters usually have trouble carrying off 380 tons of explosives in their Saddam Mart shopping carts.

"Look at those people running off with office chairs and toilet paper. Heck, there's even a dude scrambling with 380 tons of explosives strapped to his back."

[icruise]

But the NBC reporters upon whose story the Drudge rebuttal was based admit that the troops were only there for a "pit stop" and had no orders to search the facility thoroughly. I don't see why you are so confident that the explosives weren't there. Furthermore, the article indicates that the IAEA didn't discover them missing until seven weeks after the last visit by US troops. Just because the soldiers didn't see them in a cursory exploration of the facility doesn't mean they weren't there.

From the article I linked to above:

The troops searched bunkers and found conventional weapons but no high explosives, the officials said. Six days later, the 101st Airborne Division arrived. Neither group was specifically searching for HMX or RDX, and the complex is so large � with more than 1,000 buildings � that it is not clear that the troops even saw the bunkers that might have held the explosives.

The Iraq Survey Group discovered that the stockpiles of HMX and RDX were missing on May 27, seven weeks after the last visit by U.S. troops.

An NBC News crew that accompanied the U.S. soldiers who seized the base three weeks into the war said troops saw no sign of the missing HMX and RDX.

Reporter Lai Ling Jew, who was embedded with the Army�s 101st Airborne, 2nd Brigade, said Tuesday on MSNBC TV that the news team stayed at the base for about 24 hours.

�There wasn�t a search,� she said. �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 headed 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.�

[MATTRESS]

Originally posted by Icruise:
I don't see why you are so confident that the explosives weren't there. Furthermore, the article indicates that the IAEA didn't discover them missing until seven weeks after the last visit by US troops. Just because the soldiers didn't see them in a cursory exploration of the facility doesn't mean they weren't there.

ROTFLMMFAOPIMP! If one of us inserted WMD into this paragraph in place of the word explosives then proceeded to defend the war as a precursor to stop the production of WMD you guys would have a field day!

[icruise]

Originally posted by MATTRESS:
ROTFLMMFAOPIMP! If one of us inserted WMD into this paragraph in place of the word explosives then proceeded to defend the war as a precursor to stop the production of WMD you guys would have a field day!

The difference being that the explosives actually existed and were being monitored before the invasion.

[torsoboy]

reading this thread has been pretty amusing... started with the democrats talking about something that they knew nothing about (like usual) and trying to heckle the republicans; then after some real information was obtained the republicans moved in and the democrats retreated. That's pretty much how the whole election year has been, the democrats stating something false and trying to get people riled up against Bush, then the real story coming out and the dems having to cover their butts and hide out until they could think of something new (and false) to throw into the headlines.

i can hardly wait for it all to be over in a few weeks. then again, after Bush wins, the democrats will cry foul and keep up their whining until the next election.

i am voting for Bush like many others because of his no-backing-down stands on issues such as abortion, education, national security, guns, and many others. i don't think that anyone voting for kerry can say the same thing.

[spacefreak]

Originally posted by Icruise:
From the article I linked to above: ...�But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away."

Again, looters do not simply make off with 380 tons of explosives.

[Spliffdaddy]

380 tons of explosives on the loose and Iraq is *still* 300% safer than our nation's capitol.

go figure.

[icruise]

Originally posted by spacefreak:
Again, looters do not simply make off with 380 tons of explosives.

Who then, are you suggesting took it?

I doubt that "looters" in the conventional sense took it, but that isn't the point. They were open and unguarded for anybody to take.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by Icruise:
Who then, are you suggesting took it?

I doubt that "looters" in the conventional sense took it, but that isn't the point. They were open and unguarded for anybody to take.

The materials were probably taken by Saddam's army in the run up to the war. He would have known perfectly well that such a well-known site was going to be a target in the war.

There are estimates that 380 tons would require about 40 trucks. That's easy for a dictator and his regime operating openly in a country they still control, rather hard for a loose and disorganized insurgency operating underground. So occam's razor says Saddam dunnit. And he did it before the invasion, proabably during those months while we were in New York trying to convince the French to come around.

[Troll]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
There are estimates that 380 tons would require about 40 trucks. That's easy for a dictator and his regime operating openly in a country they still control, rather hard for a loose and disorganized insurgency operating underground.

That's just not true. It's entirely feasible that looters could cart off 380 tons of explosives over a period of months. Not sure how much time you've spent in the Third World, but having seen what happens in situations where law and order breaks down, the only thing that surprised me about this story is that there is anything left at all at that site? Is there or did they take everything away? I've seen an entire school (numerous buildings catering for 1,000 pupils) be dismantled (bricks, roof, window frames, water pipes) in less than a week. That probably weighed much more than 350 tons. Carting off explosives sounds like child's play to me.

You saw looters carting off fridges and chairs and televisions on pickup trucks under the noses of US soldiers in Baghdad. 20 guys with a pickup each could empty that depot in a few days. Faster if they knew that each load represented a year's salary on the black market. And they had months.

My father ran a company in the 80's that developed systems for tracking trucks using GPS. The company that used the technology had helicopters on stand by and when a truck deviated from its planned route, they'd send them out to check whether the truck had been stolen or hijacked. I can't tell you how many times they arrived only a short time after the truck had been stolen to find the contents had been carted off without a trace.

One truck belonging to the Zimbabwe telecomms provider which had a roll of cable weighing something like 20 tons was stopped on a highway and in 20 minutes 4 guys had unloaded most of the cable into 2 light trucks and disappeared. There was another incident where it had taken a company 6 hours to load an 18 wheeler with boxes of cigarettes. It broke down in a dangerous part of town and looters emptied it in 20 minutes! As far as arms go, in 1994 in South Africa, right-wing extremists managed to make off with over 50 tons of weapons from occupied army barracks over a period of a few weeks and no one even noticed.

I think it's infinitely plausible that looters (maybe ex army) took the stuff and it seems the US Army isn't denying that either. Look at what happened at the nuclear depots.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by Troll:
That's just not true. It's entirely feasible that looters could cart off 380 tons of explosives over a period of months.

But we aren't talking a period of months. In any case, a contemporary CBS report indicates the site was searched by the US Army when it arrived. Link They found explosives in sample size containers, but this doesn't sound like the 380 tons. Ergo the bulk was probably already gone before they got there.

CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction continues at sites where the U.S. thought chemicals weapons might be hidden.

"And although there are no reports of actual weapons being found, there are constant finds of suspicious material," Martin said. "It obviously will take laboratory testing to find out exactly what that powder is."

The senior U.S. official, based in Washington and speaking on condition of anonymity, said the material was under further study. The site is enormous and U.S. troops are still investigating it for potential weapons of mass destruction, the official said.

"Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we're still going through the place," the official said.

Peabody said troops found thousands of boxes, each of which contained three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

* * *

The facility had been identified by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons site. U.N. inspectors visited the plant at least nine times, including as recently as Feb. 18.

The facility is part of a larger complex known as the Latifiyah Explosives and Ammunition Plant al Qa Qaa.

Notice also that what the US Army was looking for were WMD - which makes sense. Since the war, the US has apparently destroyed something like 400,000 tons of high explosives and munitions. The idea that 380 tons of explosives should be Job One is pretty silly.

The blog The Belmont Club has some interesting commentary which you might also like to take a look at.

[RAILhead]

Originally posted by Icruise:
The difference being that the explosives actually existed and were being monitored before the invasion.

D'oh! You shot yourself in the foot, mien kapitan -- WHO was monitoring them before the invasion? The U-freakin-N.

Seems like they dropped the ball and the US wasn't even in the equation until it was for a last attempt at smearing our troops and the current administration.

Maury

[Troll]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
But we aren't talking a period of months. In any case, a contemporary CBS report indicates the site was searched by the US Army when it arrived. Link They found explosives in sample size containers, but this doesn't sound like the 380 tons. Ergo the bulk was probably already gone before they got there.
Notice also that what the US Army was looking for were WMD - which makes sense. Since the war, the US has apparently destroyed something like 400,000 tons of high explosives and munitions. The idea that 380 tons of explosives should be Job One is pretty silly.
The blog The Belmont Club has some interesting commentary which you might also like to take a look at.

You tried to say that looters couldn't possibly have carried away that much material. My point was simply that it is entirely plausible that those explosives were looted. Indeed the blog you linked to indicates that it's likely the stuff was looted albeit before the US troops arrived.

I don't see anything conclusive in that Blog and the CBS evidence has been used by both sides to this argument. Personally, I think that it�s far stranger that the CBS reporter did not mention that explosives tagged by the IAEA and UNSCOM and known to be at the site, were no longer there. That would have been a story. The soldiers searching the place would have known to look for this stuff and you can bet it would have been a big story if it was no longer there. The fact that a single embedded reporter fails to mention that there were explosives there doesn�t mean they weren�t there.

It�s worth restating the point your blog makes namely that explosives like this would have been quite far down a list of the most important things to secure. That list would have run something like nuclear material, oil (arguably priority number 1), biological weapons, chemical weapons, rockets, explosives etc. in that order. Now, let�s look at how much attention they paid to priority number 1 � nuclear material because that will give us an idea how much attention they might have paid to priority number 6.

Originally reported by the Washington Post on May 4 2003:

A specially trained Defense Department team, dispatched after a month of official indecision to survey a major Iraqi radioactive waste repository, today found the site heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing.

The discovery at the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility was the second since the end of the war in which a known nuclear cache was plundered extensively enough that authorities could not rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen. The survey, conducted by a U.S. Special Forces detachment and eight nuclear experts from a Pentagon office called the Direct Support Team, appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country's most dangerous technologies beyond anyone's knowledge or control.

In all, seven sites associated with Iraq's nuclear program have been visited by the Pentagon's "special nuclear programs" teams since the war ended last month. None was found to be intact, though it remains unclear what materials -- if any -- had been removed.
�
The most important looted nuclear site, less than a mile down the road, is the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, where U.N. weapons inspectors had catalogued tons of partially enriched uranium and natural uranium -- metals suitable for processing into the core of a nuclear weapon. Iraqi civilians have stripped it of computers, furniture and much equipment; whether dangerous nuclear materials were taken is unknown.

U.S. authorities do not know what is missing, if anything, because of an ongoing conflict between the Bush administration and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as a dispute within the administration about how much to involve the IAEA in Iraq. The unresolved struggle has kept U.S. forces out of Tuwaitha's nuclear storage areas, but a brief outdoor inspection on April 10 found the door to one of them had been breached.
�
Twenty-three days ago, a smaller U.S. survey team passed by and recommended an immediate increase in security. The following day, April 11, the IAEA listed this site and Tuwaitha as the two requiring the most urgent protection from looters. U.S. Central Command sent a detachment of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division to control the facility's gate.
�
Employees of the research center -- or Iraqis who said they were employees -- had been coming in by the score for more than two weeks. The 3rd Infantry's security detail had no Arabic speaker and could not verify their stories. In addition, looters had been scavenging inside continuously since U.S. forces took control. At the peak, there were 400 a day. On Friday, the U.S. soldiers detained 62 of them, but many more got away.
�
David Albright, an expert on the Iraqi nuclear program who runs the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said, "There are many radioactive areas within the berm. . . . Clearly, they do not appear adequately protected. If any radioactive material has been taken, it could pose a significant risk to those who have it. Does the military appreciate this risk?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...&notFound=true

So, when it came to priority number 1, they took a month to even survey some of the sites they knew were dangerous, they ineffectively secured the area and allowed looting to go on under their noses. If this is the way they dealt with nuclear material, I find it hard to believe that they did better when it came to explosives!

But I think you people on the right are trying to restate the argument here. The main argument is not whether or not there was incompetence in securing the materials although it seems clear that they paid more attention to the oil ministry than to WMD. The argument is that the war itself increased the threat to American security and international peace. Bush�s rush to war backfired in that instead of securing us all from a threat, Bush increased the threat. It doesn�t matter precisely when the explosives went missing. All that really matters is that it went missing after the US forced the UN and the IAEA out of Iraq. The point is that because of George Bush's decision to invade, there is now 350 metric tonnes of high explosives roaming around in the wild.

[Troll]

Originally posted by RAILhead:
D'oh! You shot yourself in the foot, mien kapitan -- WHO was monitoring them before the invasion? The U-freakin-N.

Seems like they dropped the ball and the US wasn't even in the equation until it was for a last attempt at smearing our troops and the current administration.

Maury

No. Once the UN and the IAEA were forced out of Iraq by the US, they were no longer responsible for ANYTHING in relation to WMD.

[RAILhead]

Originally posted by Troll:
No. Once the UN and the IAEA were forced out of Iraq by the US, they were no longer responsible for ANYTHING in relation to WMD.

So when the UN made it's inspectors leave, it was our fault?

Maury

[Shaddim]

Originally posted by Troll:
No. Once the UN and the IAEA were forced out of Iraq by the US, they were no longer responsible for ANYTHING in relation to WMD.

Hello... HELLO... those explosives were most likely GONE by then. Which means the UN f*cked up. It's very simple, quit pulling hair-brained scenarios out of your bum trying to make up for it. Damn.

[SimeyTheLimey]

350 tons of high explosives that Saddam shouldn't have been allowed to keep in the first place really doesn't alter the strategic balance of the world to any significant degree. And laying it on the doorstep of the Bush Administration is just absurd. As you admit, most of it was probably removed by Saddam's regime long before the US troops had gotten there. If the US hadn't been forced to telegraph the invasion months ahead of time by wasted months of fruitless negotiations in New York, then perhaps we might have caught them.

Or better yet, had the IAEA insisted on destroying the explosives when they had the chance back when they had control in the 1990s. Perhaps we would be resting easier now. But they didn't do that because they accepted Saddam's word that he wanted the explosives for mining.

The UN's gullibility is mind blowing. Either these chemicals are not that special -- in which case, we are fretting about basically nothing given the hundreds of thousands of tons of high explosives in the world. Or we are fretting about something so uniquely suitable for nuclear weapons that Saddam never should have been allowed to keep it. It seems that the apologists for the UN want to have it both ways. To them, these are both uniquely suitable for making nukes, and ordinary explosives that we could trust Saddam to keep.

Don't forget also the background. The IAEA had these explosives under seal in 1998. Then the UN allowed itself to be thrown out. The US and Britain went to war in October 1998 to force Saddam to let them back in. They failed party because the UN Security Council was split, with France and Russia arguing that Saddam should be given a clean bill of health.

France and Russia persisted in arguing that Iraq's sanctions should be lifted in 1999 and 2000. only changed their mind after 9/11 because of American resolve. Had France and Russia got their way, the sanctions would have been lifted and the inspectors would never have come back. Saddam would then have been free to do whatever he wanted with those explosives that now suddenly the anti-Americans claim are a grave threat to the world.

[mitchell_pgh]

The Democratic distortion field is on full blast. I'm sure we are going to get another "bombshell" just prior to the election...

I'm concerned that more people aren't troubled over how the media was potentially involved with the delivery mechanism of this accusation.

I'm fine with newspapers and magazines having slants... but to aid one political party over another places everything you stand for under question.

[warmspit]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in651082.shtml

Why GIs Didn't Hunt Explosives

(CBS/AP)_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 some 350 tons of explosives that are now said to be missing from the site.

"We were still in a fight," said the commander of the U.S. military unit that was first to arrive in the area, in an interview with CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin, confirming that they did not search the bunkers at the site for explosives, and did not secure the site against looters.

"Our focus was killing bad guys," he continued, adding that he would have needed four times as many troops to search and secure all the ammo dumps his troops came across during the push into Iraq.

A special unit known as Task Force 75 finally searched the compound seven weeks later and found no sign of the explosives, which experts have said had the potential to be used either conventionally or to trigger nuclear weapons.

And while their whereabouts remains a matter under investigation, David Kay - who once headed up the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - says traces of the same type of explosives were found after a bombing this year outside a mosque in Najaf.

The White House says the unit responsible for searching for weapons of mass destruction has been directed to find out what happened.

Charles Duelfer, the head of that unit, told CBS News Tuesday that he has not received any orders to go looking for the missing explosives and doesn't think he should.

"It's hard for me to get that worked up about it," said Duelfer, in a phone interview from Baghdad, noting that Iraq is awash in hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives.

Duelfer also said U.N. weapons inspectors recommended in 1995 that the high explosives be destroyed because of their potential use in a nuclear weapons program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency instead ordered the explosives stored in sealed bunkers 30 miles south of the Iraqi capital. The last time the IAEA verified that the bunkers were still sealed was in March of last year, about a month before the first U.S. troops moved into the complex as they pushed toward Baghdad.

Pentagon officials contend the explosives could have been spirited away by the Iraqis before u.s. troops ever got there. Other officials, including Delfer, blame looters and the chaos that following the fall of Baghdad.

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," said Wellman, 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."

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 for Baghdad.

AP 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.

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 has 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.

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.

[RAILhead]

Originally posted by Troll:
You tried to say that looters couldn't possibly have carried away that much material. My point was simply that it is entirely plausible that those explosives were looted. Indeed the blog you linked to indicates that it's likely the stuff was looted albeit before the US troops arrived.

Speculation is saying that it would take 40 dump trucks and 100 men 10 -- TEN -- twelve hour days.

Looted?

I think not.

But I think you people on the right are trying to restate the argument here. The main argument is not whether or not there was incompetence in securing the materials although it seems clear that they paid more attention to the oil ministry than to WMD. The argument is that the war itself increased the threat to American security and international peace. Bush�s rush to war backfired in that instead of securing us all from a threat, Bush increased the threat. It doesn�t matter precisely when the explosives went missing. All that really matters is that it went missing after the US forced the UN and the IAEA out of Iraq. The point is that because of George Bush's decision to invade, there is now 350 metric tonnes of high explosives roaming around in the wild.

Restating it? Holy farkin crap, the whole issue everyone's discussing -- that you just tried to sideline -- was the issue of these phantom explosives! Talk about restating the topic at hand.

Anyone that doesn't think Sadaam and his goons moved the materials before we got there is just flat-out blinded by their desire to smear the US military and the current administration. Simple as that.

Maury

[RAILhead]

It's also worth noting that the NY Slimes isn't mentioning the story anymore.

[RAILhead]

Originally posted by warmspit:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in651082.shtml

Why GIs Didn't Hunt Explosives

(CBS/AP)_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 some 350 tons of explosives that are now said to be missing from the site.

Well, you've just helped "prove" everything everyone unbiased clear thinker has been saying. They didn't have order to search because it wasn't our responsibility.

Why are we still even discussing this? This whole "story" has already been put to death just as fast -- faster, actually -- than Rather Gate.

Maury

[warmspit]

Originally posted by RAILhead:
Well, you've just helped "prove" everything everyone unbiased clear thinker has been saying. They didn't have order to search because it wasn't our responsibility.

Why are we still even discussing this? This whole "story" has already been put to death just as fast -- faster, actually -- than Rather Gate.

Maury

not our responsibility?

interesting. So as american troops get blown up by these explosives, you just whistle dixie and say "aint my job, man"?

I suppose you think offering tinfoil hats to the troops is some sort of magical anti-explosive armor?

and I realize why you WANT this story to disappear, but this goes beyond political parties...this goes towards endangering troops in theatre. If you think that's an unimportant issue, then you are blinded by partisanship.

[Spliffdaddy]

lol

[Troll]

dp

[RAILhead]

Originally posted by warmspit:
not our responsibility?

interesting. So as american troops get blown up by these explosives, you just whistle dixie and say "aint my job, man"?

I suppose you think offering tinfoil hats to the troops is some sort of magical anti-explosive armor?

and I realize why you WANT this story to disappear, but this goes beyond political parties...this goes towards endangering troops in theatre. If you think that's an unimportant issue, then you are blinded by partisanship.

Come on Lerk, you're spinning and twisting words like KerryPoo. It wasn't our responsability to SEARCH FOR THEM WHEN WE GOT THERE.

Maury

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by warmspit:
not our responsibility?

interesting. So as american troops get blown up by these explosives, you just whistle dixie and say "aint my job, man"?

I suppose you think offering tinfoil hats to the troops is some sort of magical anti-explosive armor?

and I realize why you WANT this story to disappear, but this goes beyond political parties...this goes towards endangering troops in theatre. If you think that's an unimportant issue, then you are blinded by partisanship.

There is unfortunately no shortage of conventional weaponry and explosives in Iraq. Accounts from the country describe it as awash with the stuff. The Iraqi Army spent those months while we were negotiating with the UN preparing for a guerilla war. They dispersed their weapons and hid caches all over the place. When we invaded, their army melted away taking their light weapons with them.

The IUDs and booby traps being used against the troops are almost certaintly comprised mostly of these common-all-(Iraqi)-garden type explosives. That's why in your article, Duelfer is quoted as saying:

"It's hard for me to get that worked up about it," said Duelfer, in a phone interview from Baghdad, noting that Iraq is awash in hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives."

It's not like it is all that hard to construct such a device. It's a stretch indeed to blame the failure to locate one particular batch of explosives on the troops' deaths. ESPECIALLY when it is at least probable that the explosives were carted away before the US was ever in a position to secure them.

If you want to play monday-morning quarterbacks, then your article makes the better point that the IAEA had the opportunity to destroy these explosives in 1995. That's what the inspectors then in Iraq recommended. But the UN overruled them.

Duelfer also said U.N. weapons inspectors recommended in 1995 that the high explosives be destroyed because of their potential use in a nuclear weapons program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency instead ordered the explosives stored in sealed bunkers 30 miles south of the Iraqi capital.

Obviously, it is a good idea now for the coalition and (current) Iraqi government to destroy any caches it finds. But ultimately, its the insurgency that has to be defeated. This is a very low level war. They can always keep building a handful of small bombs as long as there are insurgents and terrorists willing to use them.

[Shaddim]

Originally posted by warmspit:
not our responsibility?

interesting. So as american troops get blown up by these explosives, you just whistle dixie and say "aint my job, man"?

I suppose you think offering tinfoil hats to the troops is some sort of magical anti-explosive armor?

and I realize why you WANT this story to disappear, but this goes beyond political parties...this goes towards endangering troops in theatre. If you think that's an unimportant issue, then you are blinded by partisanship.

What "story"?

The UN allowed for 400 tons of munitions to get swiped, before the US got there. These were taken while the UN was "watching". THERE'S your story.

[Troll]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
350 tons of high explosives that Saddam shouldn't have been allowed to keep in the first place really doesn't alter the strategic balance of the world to any significant degree. And laying it on the doorstep of the Bush Administration is just absurd. As you admit, most of it was probably removed by Saddam's regime long before the US troops had gotten there. If the US hadn't been forced to telegraph the invasion months ahead of time by wasted months of fruitless negotiations in New York, then perhaps we might have caught them.

Or better yet, had the IAEA insisted on destroying the explosives when they had the chance back when they had control in the 1990s. Perhaps we would be resting easier now. But they didn't do that because they accepted Saddam's word that he wanted the explosives for mining.

The UN's gullibility is mind blowing. Either these chemicals are not that special -- in which case, we are fretting about basically nothing given the hundreds of thousands of tons of high explosives in the world. Or we are fretting about something so uniquely suitable for nuclear weapons that Saddam never should have been allowed to keep it. It seems that the apologists for the UN want to have it both ways. To them, these are both uniquely suitable for making nukes, and ordinary explosives that we could trust Saddam to keep.

Don't forget also the background. The IAEA had these explosives under seal in 1998. Then the UN allowed itself to be thrown out.

Well, there's a post full of distortions:

1) I never admitted that Saddam's regime removed the explosives. I said it was probably looted just like all of the nuclear material that was stolen while US troops stood around and watched.

2) You know as well as I do that that the UN and the IAEA were destroying everything as fast as they could. Every time they had access to Iraq they destroyed weapons - over 90% of Iraq's capability was destroyed and verified before the UN left in 1998.

3) The UN was not thrown out of Iraq. It left of its own accord.

4) Neither the UN nor the IAEA nor France nor Russia nor any of the 200 nations that thought the war a bad idea thought that Iraq should be allowed to keep the explosives. That is why they were tagged and marked for destruction.

The background here is that the US didn't have the manpower to secure Iraq. The background here is that the CIA and the US Army stood around for over a month arguing about what to do about nuclear material instead of securing it. When they finally took a decision to do something, the morons they employed to do the task stood by and watched the facilities be looted under their very noses. Now that same administration would have us believe (because it's closer to elections) that when it comes to explosives which are a lot less dangerous, they took more care than they had ever taken at nuclear facilities.

All of which is irrelevant. The fact is that these materials were there the week before the US forced the UN and the IAEA to leave Iraq. There simply is no argument against the reality that the course of action that the Bush Administration adopted is responsible for these dangerous items having disappeared. Bush knew what he was getting into. He knew there was a risk that the invasion would cause anarchy and a loss of control over these dangerous materials. He knew because the UN and the IAEA told him so, because world leaders that do have brains told him so. And he failed miserably. Iraq, when it was under US control, failed consistently to comply with the obligations imposed on it under international law in respect of WMD. The US failed to secure the sites like it was supposed to.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by Troll:

2) You know as well as I do that that the UN and the IAEA were destroying everything as fast a

No. See above. The IAEA put little seals on them instead of destroying them as the inspectors on the ground recommended. That was in 1995. The inspectors were forced out in 1998. Had France and Russia succeeded in lifting sanctions, as they were trying to do in 1999, 2000, and the early part of 2001, all restrictions would have been off Saddam. There would have been no resumption of inspections, and Saddam would have been free to use these explosives you are now so worried about.

So either these explosives aren't really all that much different from conventional weapons, in which case, probably putting little seals on them was reasonable, or these explosives really are specially suitable for nuclear weapons. If they are the former, there really is no reason to panic about this story in light of the vast quantities of explosives in Iraq. If it is the latter, then the IAEA dropped the ball when it overruled its inspectors and didn't destroy the explosives when it had the chance.

Not being an expert on explosives, i don't know which one of these is the case. But it is one or the other.

[Spliffdaddy]

*SMACKDOWN*

[Troll]

Originally posted by RAILhead:
Anyone that doesn't think Sadaam and his goons moved the materials before we got there is just flat-out blinded by their desire to smear the US military and the current administration. Simple as that.

Okay, let's imagine that's true in respect of this one particular site. That would still make it an exception from the general rule which is that the US Army stood by and watched looters steal dangerous materials. That they admit that they didn't have the resources to secure all of the sites. How do you explain what happened at all of the other sites, like Tubaitha? What's the excuse for THAT incompetence?

[Troll]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
No. See above. The IAEA put little seals on them instead of destroying them as the inspectors on the ground recommended.

So you're saying that the IAEA wanted to make sure that Saddam retained WMD. You want to join Abderdeenwriter in the deep end?

You know how the system works. You can't just light 350 tons of explosives and destroy it just like that. You need experts to destroy it in a controlled environment. You need people to verify that all of it has been destroyed. That takes time and organisation. When the UN and the IAEA first got into Iraq, their priority was finding what was there. They tagged everything they could find and they started destroying the most important things first. When they went back, the first thing they started doing was destroying the stuff they hadn't got around to destroying in 1998. And again, they destroyed over 90% of the WMD before 1998.

This stuff wasn't destroyed because it was low down on the priority list, not because it wasn't dangerous. Everything that was identified and tagged was dangerous.

[bewebste]

I think one thing that's getting lost in all this is that the problem of missing munitions goes past just Al QaQaa. There were hundreds of these types of sites (although Al Qaqaa was one of the largest) all around Iraq. We did manage to secure a whole bunch of them, but a lot of others slipped through the cracks. The root cause for this was simply not having enough troops to secure all that needed to be secured. Rumsfeld pushed and pushed to have a smaller force go in to get the job done. This worked OK when it come to toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan, but Iraq was a much different situation. He originally wanted to go in with only around 50,000 troops, and it was only after many weeks of negotiation with Tommy Franks and the military types, who wanted to go in with several hundred thousand, and they ended up deciding on a number around 150,000 or so.

http://www.boston.com/news/world/art...vasion?mode=PF

WASHINGTON -- Iraqi officials reported that thieves looted 377 tons of powerful explosives from an unguarded site after the US-led invasion last year, the top UN nuclear official said yesterday. And a former weapons inspector said he had counted about 100 other unguarded weapons sites that may have been stripped of munitions for use in the wave of attacks against US soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
...
David Kay, a former weapons inspector in Iraq for the US government who led the Iraq Survey Group that searched for weapons of mass destruction, said that although his team of 1,400 investigators found no such weapons, they found small amounts of HMX and RDX -- and hundreds of square miles of other conventional munitions -- at unguarded sites across Iraq.

''The RDX, HMX, is a superb explosive for terrorists," Kay said. ''The danger is that it's gone somewhere else in the Middle East."

However, Kay's team had a mandate only to search for weapons of mass destruction, not to secure conventional arms, so he could do little beyond referring the caches to the US-led coalition.

''The military did not view guarding these sites as their responsibility," Kay said, recalling that he witnessed US troops guarding the gates of the Tuwaitha nuclear facility while Iraq civilians carried away radioactive pipes and metal drums through other exits.

''There just were not enough troops to guard the number of sites. It was just crazy."

Now, I'm not saying that even if we had had the full amount of forces requested by the military, that we would have been able to secure every single bullet in Iraq. There is a limit to how fast you can move the troops in, to the knowledge of where all these sites are, etc. But going in with the force we did cleary didn't leave many extra troops available to watch over, inspect, and guard the sites that the army went through on its march to Baghdad. We could have prevented a lot of this material from being stolen with a larger force.

The more I look at it, the more it seems that our number 1 mistake in Iraq was not having enough boots on the ground, especially at the very beginning. It would have let us secure all this dangerous material (along with other sites such as hospitals, museums, etc.) and we would have been better able to crush the insurgency in its inception, before it started gaining support among a wider range of Iraqis.

[BRussell]

Originally posted by MacNStein:
What "story"?

The UN allowed for 400 tons of munitions to get swiped, before the US got there. These were taken while the UN was "watching". THERE'S your story.

Where's your evidence that it was taken before we got there? No one but Drudge has said that. The Iraqi government is blaming it on the US. The report Drudge based his story on has been discredited by the reporter who was there with the troops at the time. And the UN had nothing to do with it.

[SimeyTheLimey]

Originally posted by Troll:
So you're saying that the IAEA wanted to make sure that Saddam retained WMD. You want to join Abderdeenwriter in the deep end?

You know how the system works. You can't just light 350 tons of explosives and destroy it just like that. You need experts to destroy it in a controlled environment. You need people to verify that all of it has been destroyed. That takes time and organisation. When the UN and the IAEA first got into Iraq, their priority was finding what was there. They tagged everything they could find and they started destroying the most important things first. When they went back, the first thing they started doing was destroying the stuff they hadn't got around to destroying in 1998. And again, they destroyed over 90% of the WMD before 1998.

This stuff wasn't destroyed because it was low down on the priority list, not because it wasn't dangerous. Everything that was identified and tagged was dangerous.

I didn't say that they decided to let him keep it because they wanted him to have WMD. In fact, they decided to let him keep it because he convinced them that he wanted it for mining and civilian contruction projects. This is according to David Kay, being interviewed on CNN:

KAY: Being destroyed and removed, that the HMX, RDX should be taken out of Iraq. Iraq protested...
DOBBS: So why wasn't it?

KAY: Well, they protested to the IAEA that they needed it for civil construction. The IAEA accepted that argument. Not all inspectors agreed that that was a credible argument.

That was pretty gullible of them.

However, the consequence of letting him keep it was that it was still there when the inspectors were forced out in 1998. Had France and Russia succeeded in persuading the Security Council to lift the sanctions in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001, then Saddam would have been left in possession of something you now emphasise is suitable as a component of nuclear weapons. As much as you want to side-step that fact, that is the logic of events as they were evolving in the 1990s. France and Russia were pushing to permanently end the inspection and sanctions regime that you now seem to think had the whole thing under control. But it wouldn't have controlled anything once they shut it down.

On the other hand, it may be that these explosives aren't all that special. That would explain why it was "low down on the priority list" for the UN. However, if it is that low on the priority list for the UN expert weapons inspectors in the mid 1990s, such that they didn't think it was necessary to dispose of the chemicals, why should it be so much higher on the priority list for a bunch of ordinary troops engaged in a complex war? Even assuming, of course, that the explosives were still there when the US troops arrived -- which is unproven at best.

[warmspit]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp..._us_explosives

Iraq says 'impossible' explosives taken before regime fall

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.






AFP Photo








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_


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.

[RAILhead]

Originally posted by Troll:
Okay, let's imagine that's true in respect of this one particular site. That would still make it an exception from the general rule which is that the US Army stood by and watched looters steal dangerous materials. That they admit that they didn't have the resources to secure all of the sites. How do you explain what happened at all of the other sites, like Tubaitha? What's the excuse for THAT incompetence?

...uh, howabout that Clinton didn't go in there and kill the SOBs while he was in office? Where do yo come off saying we just stood there and watched? THEY WERE ALL BEING WATCHED BY THE UN, NOT THE US. By the time we got there, Lord only knows how many times the stashes were removed.

No matter how many resources we threw over there, there would ALWAYS be something that slipped through the cracks. It's inevitable and it's the fact of life. Does that discredit the whole operation. No. Does that mean the whole event is a quagmire? No.

Well, not to clear thinkers at least. You libbies can do nothing but dwell on the negative and overlook he BIG FARKING PICTURE.

I say it again: there's nothing to discuss any longer, and the people that started this mess have even shut up about it because it got blown away so fast. Why are some of you still straggling along with this story? It's over man, go rest up for the next "October Surprise."

Maury

[Mithras]

Yeah, but who believes the Iraqi Interm Government anyway? Why should we trust them?

[warmspit]

Originally posted by RAILhead:
...uh, howabout that Clinton didn't go in there and kill the SOBs while he was in office? Where do yo come off saying we just stood there and watched? THEY WERE ALL BEING WATCHED BY THE UN, NOT THE US. By the time we got there, Lord only knows how many times the stashes were removed.

No matter how many resources we threw over there, there would ALWAYS be something that slipped through the cracks. It's inevitable and it's the fact of life. Does that discredit the whole operation. No. Does that mean the whole event is a quagmire? No.

Well, not to clear thinkers at least. You libbies can do nothing but dwell on the negative and overlook he BIG FARKING PICTURE.

I say it again: there's nothing to discuss any longer, and the people that started this mess have even shut up about it because it got blown away so fast. Why are some of you still straggling along with this story? It's over man, go rest up for the next "October Surprise."

Maury

LOL! don't look now...this story has more legs than a centipede convention. It AINT going away, because it highlights the incompetence of the miscommander in chief, but MORE IMPORTANTLY it highlights how the WH tries to cover up these things...not good to be obvious about coverups.

you little repub sheeples are wanting this to go away....but.it.is.not. This is bigger than even the election.

[Spliffdaddy]

And Washington DC is still 300% more dangerous than Iraq.

[Troll]

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:
That was pretty gullible of them.

The stuff was tagged so it wasn't being used by anybody!

Originally posted by SimeyTheLimey:

However, the consequence of letting him keep it was that it was still there when the inspectors were forced out in 1998. Had France and Russia succeeded in persuading the Security Council to lift the sanctions in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001, then Saddam would have been left in possession of something you now emphasise is suitable as a component of nuclear weapons.

First, I never said it was suitable for nuclear weapons. Second, France and Russia never argued for leaving Saddam in control of WMD or any components that had been tagged by the UN. That's just another of your distortions. The only way sanctions would ever have been ended is if he had allowed inspectors to finish the job they had got nine tenths of the way to completing in 1998. The argument for dropping sanctions and the conditions under which they would be dropped are a lot more complicated than you make out.