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| quote: | Originally posted by Yoepus
Ok I watched the tape twice. All I see is some guys cutting a lock to get into a bunker. Where is that infamous IAEA seal??? I'll take your word for it, but I couldn't see it for the life of me when I was watching.
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Well now that you mentioned it, I didn't really take notice of an "infamous" IAEA seal either. You know what, maybe we should treat our intuitive opinions as fact. I mean really, who are David Kay and other weapons inspectors to override our own unexpert evaluations? Nothing I saw looked like an IAEA seal or description to me ... similarly what they said was RMX and HMX explosives didn't look like any kind of explosive to me. Therefore they have no case. While we're on this topic, It didn't look like an airplane had made such a small hole in the pentagon, so it must have been a missile. Who's in a better position to be right, me with my own eyes, or an expert who knows what he's talking about? Clearly me right? 
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Well if they were weapons were broken into and left unlocked and vunerable as you say, those 350 tons would qualify as munitions to be destoryed under his job decsription.
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Yea, except the weapons weren't broken into and left unlocked. The munitions that were detonated occurred a week before the video footage of the RMX and HMX explosives. Pearson clearly exploded any munitions that were in the open and posed a danger to troops. Following that duty, troops investigated, and broke into weapons depots that were left unsecured in the aftermath and subsequentely stolen.
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I don't know about you, but I don't want to jump to any conclusions.
My gutt tells me the real truth lies somewhere in the middle.
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The "gutt" hardly qualifies as an appropriate indicator of probablility. There are plenty of people who have "gutt" instincts that 9/11 conspiracy theories are factual, however, that has absolutely no logical influence on the correct conclusion based upon the wealth of evidence that indicates otherwise. Similarly, there has been no convincing evidence whatsoever to prove that these explosives were ever moved prior to the invasion ... particularly since we have video proof and expert opinion that validates the fact that these explosives were present after the invasion.
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The 101 was tasked to secure the site. The 3rd ID was tasked with destorying the munitions. The Pentagon mentioned other taskforces were than assigned these duties - they are finding out who and when now and will let us know when they find out.
How is this negligent?
After observing that the site was secure or that it posed little to no threat (surely if a ground commander would have said THIS IS A BIG THREAT I REFUSE TO MOVE BEFORE SOMETHING MORE IS DONE - something more would be done)
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First, you have your facts completely mixed up and inaccurate. The 3rd ID was the first division to reach the site. And their task was not to secure the site with respect to maintaining integrity of the area but rather to defeat the Iraqi army forces that were in the area:
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The first U.S. military unit to reach the site in Iraq (news - web sites) where U.N. officials say 377 tons of high explosives are missing did not carry out a hunt for such material, the unit's commander said on Wednesday.
Col. Dave Perkins, then the commander of the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, said the immediate concern when his troops reached the Al Qaqaa site on April 3, 2003, was to defeat a couple of hundred Iraqi troops who were firing from the compound as the Americans surged toward Baghdad.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...ves_pentagon_dc
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Second the 101st didn't arrive until later and even then, there mission was NOT to secure the site. The commander of the division said as much himself:
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Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make plans for their next push.
"We happened to stumble on it,'' he said. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave that very same day. The plan was not to go in there and start searching. It looked like all the other ammunition supply points we had seen already."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/p...print&position=
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Therefore between the arrival of the 3rd ID on April 3rd and at least until the arrival of the 101st on April 18th nobody was securing these bunkers. However, since nobody was ever tasked with securing the explosives, and in fact, eyewitness accounts witnessed looting soon after the 101st broke the seals, who knows when the effort to secure these explosives were actually undertaken. So negligence? Yea I wouldn't tolerate such stupidity in any organization that I were to run.
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Its not a fact that the troops "allowed Iraqis to freely enter to take what they will", its your opinion.
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No it's not a matter of opinion. If you had bothered to read the thread and all postings in their entirety you would have stumbled across one of the sources I directly referenced:
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Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.
"We weren't quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn't appear that this was being secured in any way," said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. "It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents".
Officers with the 101st Airborne told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that the bunkers were within the U.S. military perimeter and protected. But Caffrey and former 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS Reporter Dean Staley, who spent three months together in Iraq, said Iraqis were coming and going freely.
"At one point there was a group of Iraqis driving around in a pick-up truck,"Staley said. "Three or four guys we kept an eye on, worried they might come near us."
http://www.kstptv5.com/article/stor...23.html?cat=64&
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It seems quite evident from first hand accounts that there was no security around this site. Furthermore deductive logic suggests that since explosives that were there when they were videotaped are no longer there today, one can conclude that they were stolen due to the fact that they were not guarded well enough.
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There is no evidence that all explosives left at the site.
My question if the video does show one seal as you mention, why is it only one seal? Wouldn't they store the same types of ammo, or at least a couple crates (we are talking 350 tons after all) together? How come the video didn't catch more than one seal if it did catch it (again I couldn't see any seal...)
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The evidence that explosives were left at the site not only encompasses the fact that they were confirmed to be in place a week and a half before the invasion by the IAEA, but they are further corroborated by quite a number of other factors. The pentagon has been unable to provide any photographic evidence whatsoever that these weapons were moved, this despite the fact that the Pentagon was heavily monitoring the site with satellites and UAVs which was evidenced by their satellite photo of 2 trucks engaged in activity in Al Qaqaa which was supposed to provide some evidence of a "russian" connection. They essentially shot themselves in the foot with that one. The evidence proving that the weapons were in place in Al Qaqaa are further bolstered by the video evidence of such weapons in place.
As for the video evidence of only one seal, they only visited one of the bunkers. It's not like they had the forknowledge that this would be a serious issue and therefore they should have cataloguted everything completely. What you require that they visit every bunker and provide video evidence of all 350 tons of explosives before you believe them??? Sorry but that's simply illogical and irrational.
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Look, leadership also goes from the ground up. If US soldiers - the same one that are complaining now that nothing is being done about gaurding the ammo dumps would have complained back than that the ammo dumps pose a major secruity threat, something would have been done.
US military leadership is dynamic. It is not a top-down approach. It is a symbosis for the top - the overall strategy and the bottom - the commander in the field. The commander in the field has A LOT of power in his theater.
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What??? Leadership goes from the ground up??? In the MILITARY??? Look based upon these two points it's clearly evident that you lack a proper understanding of leadership and the command and control structure of the military. The military is one of the most hierarchical structures in ANY case public or private. Where you come to the conclusion that leadership in the military in any way deviates from the chain of command escapes me. For christ's sake, there's a weekly history channel show solely based on tactical blunders committed as a result of ineptitutde on the part of commanders who fail to listen to the troops.
But hey, if you want to argue that commanders in the field have a LOT of power in their theater, why don't you dispute the fact that they originally asked for 350,000 troops and got only 100,000 troops?
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Right, and this is of course Rumsfeld and Bushs fault obviously 
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Well if they only assign someone to address the issue of post war planning mere months before the invasion and only provide half staff to do the job, than YES it is their fault .
Christ, this behaviour would NEVER be acceptable in the business world. Why don't you read some of the controls that Sarbanes-Oxley places upon companies and specifically CEOs. Even IF they have no direct involvement in wrongdoing, they have a fiduciary responsiblity to act competently in avoiding any possiblity of wrongdoing on such a monumental level.
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Yes, the Palestinians do it all the time. And I've seen Afghans boast about it too.
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Well I'm glad you brought this up again. I was so moved by your insistence that you need confirmation from terrorists themeselves about the incompetance in securing supply depots that I searched out such information:
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4 Iraqis Tell of Looting at Munitions Site in '03
By JAMES GLANZ and JIM DWYER
Published: October 28, 2004
AGHDAD, 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/i...html?oref=login
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Since your argument was hinged upon the fact that the account from troops on the ground was uncorroborated from the terrorists from the field, I can only logically conclude that your conditions are satiated and that incompetance in securing weapons depots is now an indisputable fact. Unless of course, you wish to add inumerable subsequent conditionals, of which I would not be surprised.
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Ever heard of six sigma? 1% error is still 1% error.
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Hahahahaha I really laughed at this one. Yes I've "heard" of six sigma ... it was actually one of my job functions a year ago. Six sigma is such crap that I don't know of one major institution that regards it as a major factor of risk. LOL as a matter of fact, I don't even know of any "black belts". There are typically far more importaant risk issues than ones that "define" perfection as dictated by six sigma. Anyway relating back to the topic of Iraq, this hardly seems like a six sigma issue ... at least not one that is issued to the media. That would be akin to something like the amount of food going into Iraq.
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As in C&C there is always a limit to how many forces you can have.
No matter what, it will never be enough, it will never be perfect. |
The commanders weren't asking for an unreasonable amount. They were asking for an amount that htey felt were necessary to accomplish the task at hand. If you are unwilling to make the sacrifice required why embark upon the task? It's logically retarded.
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Why? If I was the current leadership I'd send more troops just to keep you guys shut up about the issue.
Current leadership is a damn if you do, damn if you don't on this issue. People will complain that too many troops are there if they send more, and people will complain that there aren't enough troops if they don't. So I believe they'll do whats damn better.
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Sigh ... because there ARE no troops to send!!! Haven't you been keeping abreast of the news? Tour of duties have been extended:
http://www.michigan.gov/dmva/0,1607...75165--,00.html
Stop Loss policies have been put in place:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation...my-troops_x.htm
And the indivdual ready reserve is starting to be called up:
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/new...ed-690510.shtml
With current and former troops being rotated out after their tours of duties have been completed, who do you think is going to take their place?
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I fail to see how deciding on a large strategic decision such as the number of forces to on campaign exactly qualifies as "micomanagement".
Perhaps you could enlighten me? 
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I would be glad to enlighten you. It's micromanagement since a civilian is attempting to dictate to a military expert what he/she needs to do to complete their job given the task at hand. Rumsfeld was countermanded not by generals alone, but by the CIA, the army war college, and nearly EVERY other intelligence department.
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Again, link to KnightRidder?
Personally I've always heard the opposition. The party line is the party line true, but you don't hear how it is formulated and why. You do hear the critism of these forumaltions though. Hence my point..
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If there were a proper response to such "inaccurate" formulations, than I don't see why there would not be a response.
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Anyway, I'm sort of getting bored of this debate. Maybe they'll release some new news over the weekend to get me heated up. I'll be off for halloween - so don't think you've won if I don't reply |
I normally consider a non-response as an affirmation of a "win" but I've been guilty of not responding because I've been too lazy as well. One such example was the muslim peacekeeping troops thread that I was too lazy to respond to. Therefore I wouldn't think less of you for not responding. However, I still would consider a non-response as a "win" as I'm sure you considered the muslim peacekeeper thread as a "win" ;. This is not one of those threads that I would be lazy about however. At least not this close to the election.
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Retro ...
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