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Guys, with all due respect to NBC, their coverage of the story was severely lacking in both judgement and logic. I'm sorry, but for them to essentially soak in the words of this administration who told us about WMDs existing, Iraqi connections to 9/11, and much to do about nothing with Abu Gharib, they just gulped the fucking hook, line, sinker, reel, and fucking boat for that matter.
Let's examine the details, and I'm going to be borrowing some stuff from Josh Marshall's analysis (since he's all over this ridiculous spin by the WH):
First, did NBC really contradict NYTimes very much? Well, no, not really. First NBC:
| quote: | 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.
But was Miklaszewski arguing the Times got it wrong? No. He continued:
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. |
Sound familiar? It should - it compliments what the NYTimes said quite nicely:
| quote: | 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/i...ner=rssuserland |
Here the Times are contending that the Coalition forces did not do a thorough job examining Al Qa qaa, NOT that they never went in there. This is indisputable. And NBC did not say anything about how thorough a job the 101st Airborne did when they "temporarily" took over the site, nor did NBC say the explosives were gone before the troops arrived.
But what gets me is all the lovely excuses the WH made on this whole fiasco - and let's keep in mind that this kind of play simply does not bode well for Bush - their spin was a clear sign of panic. Instead of trying to handwave this away and change the subject (which would have probably been in their best interests this close to the election), they came up with a myriad of excuses. Their final excuse, however, just doesn't sit well. So here it is:
First the Iraqi interim gov't said the explosives were taken some time AFTER April 9th (when we entered Bagdhad):
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/i...d=all&position=
But Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita suggested that the explosions MAY have been taken in the final days of the old regime, i.e. BEFORE April 9th:
http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=31787
The IAEA inspected the munitions in January 2003, and then returned and saw the seals were in place in March just a week before the war started:
http://www.nola.com/newsflash/iraq/...&storylist=iraq
So far so good, right? That gives a little "window" of time for insurgents to grab all that material, throw it out into the field behind the buildings where it would be "lightly" camuflaged. Essentially, this is what Drudge and NBC reported on - the Di Rita hypothesis. Good so far?
Not quite. A Pentagon "official who monitors developments in Iraq" told the Associated Press today that "US-led coalition troops had searched Al-Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact."
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satell...d=1098677410357
That of course would mean that the explosives were not removed from the facility until some point after the war. And that would be in line with what the Iraqis two weeks ago told the IAEA.
But more problems with the Di Rita hypothesis exist. First, military and non-proliferation analysts say that a detachment of soldiers not specifically trained in weapons inspections work and certainly an NBC news crew simply wouldn't be in a position to make such a determination. We're not talking about a storage unit with a few boxes in it, but a massive weapons complex made up of almost a hundred buildings and bunkers.
Former weapons inspector David Albright was asked about this on CNN Monday evening and he said, "I would want to check it out. I mean it's a big site. These bunkers are big and it could get lost in that complex and it may be that they just didn't go to the right places and didn't see it."
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRI.../25/asb.01.html
In any case, that visit wasn't the first time US troops went to the facility. That happened a week earlier, on April 4th, as was reported at the time. According to an AP account from the following day, the troops made spot visits to some of the buildings and found chemical warfare antidotes but no WMD.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/n...readiness01.htm
The same report says they also found "thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder" which were initially believed to be chemical agents but were later determined to be "explosives."
Like the visit on the 10th, this visit seems to have been far from exhaustive and thus far from conclusive about what was there. Neither visit seems to provide clear evidence that the explosives were gone -- and the first may point in the opposite direction. (Further details about this first visit to al Qaqaa are contained in this April 5th article by the Post's Barton Gellman.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...4¬Found=true
Next comes the question of whether this really could have been pulled off at all under the circumstances.
As we noted earlier, there's a relatively brief window of time we're talking about when this stuff could have been carted away -- specifically, from March 8th (when the IAEA last checked it) until April 4th when the first US troops appear to have arrived on the scene.
Certainly there would have been time enough to move the stuff. That's almost a month. But this would be a massive and quite visible undertaking. As the Times noted yesterday, moving this material would have taken a fleet of about forty big trucks each moving about ten tons of explosives. And this was at a time -- the week before and then during the war -- when Iraq's skies were positively crawling with American aerial and satellite reconnaissance.
Considering that al Qaqaa was a major munitions installation where the US also suspected there might be WMD, it's difficult to believe that we wouldn't have noticed a convoy of forty huge trucks carting stuff away.
As the LA Times notes in Tuesday's paper, it's just not particularly credible:
| quote: | Given the size of the missing cache, it would have been difficult to relocate undetected before the invasion, when U.S. spy satellites were monitoring activity at sites suspected of concealing nuclear and biological weapons.
"You don't just move this stuff in the middle of the night," said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Baghdad.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...-home-headlines |
If we had seen something like that happening, it's hard to figure we wouldn't have bombed the convoy, since the US had complete air superiority through the entire campaign. And if the thought that WMD might be on those trucks had prevented such an attack, certainly there would have been running surveillance of where the stuff was going and where it ended up.
My point here is not to say that this could not have occurred. What I am trying to show is that Pentagon appointees like Di Rita don't seem to have any clear idea what happened to this stuff. And in an attempt to push back the story, they're cooking up various theories, most with very short half-lives, that just don't seem credible to a lot of folks who follow these issues.
To top it all off, let's examine some of the statements made by WH spokesman Scott McClellan and crew:
RDX and HMX -- the explosives looted from the al Qa Qaa facility are hardly a big deal at all. Yeah, no big deal. Let's look at how little of a deal they are:
1. 380 tons of explosives stolen in Iraq.
2. One US ton = 2,000 pounds
3. So, 380 tons of explosives x 2,000 pounds = 760,000 pounds
4. One pound of this explosive brought down the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people.
5. If one pound is enough for one Lockerbie, then 760,000 pounds is enough to blow 760,000 US commerical jets out of the sky.
6. 760,000 Lockerbies times 270 dead per Lockerbie = 205,200,000 dead
7. 205 million dead is 2/3 of the population of the United States.
And let's also keep in mind that these explosives are currently being used by the insurgents to blow the limbs and guts out of our brave soldiers and blow the heads off of innocent Iraqi children:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mi...ast/3950493.stm
McClellan also further states that in any case, they're the responsibility of the Iraqis. But the big kicker with McClellan is he states that the WH knew nothing about this whole ordeal until October 15th:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/rele...20041025-1.html
That directly contradicts the Times story which is that Iraqis claim they told Jerry Bremer about this last May. It contradicts what the Iraqis have told the IAEA, which is that the US pressured them not to report the disappearance to the IAEA.
And speaking of Bremer, where the fuck is he? He could sure help clear the air a bit. He ditched on the Times, and he's no where in sight now.
Why?
It also stands in what I guess you'd have to call simple defiance of the fact that the US had formal charge of these facilities for more than a year ending in late June of this year.
To say that we knew nothing about the theft of these materials during that entire time is simply not credible. And if it's really true, it's considerably worse than if it's a lie.
But it's not just a mere contradiction to the NYTimes, it contradicts the Di Rita hypothesis, the SAME FUCKING STORY THAT NBC AND DRUDGE HAVE BEEN RUNNING? How, you ask? It's the timeline, once again:
If the Di Rita hypothesis rests on the claim that the first US troops that visited al Qa Qaa found that the explosives had already been stolen or looted or otherwise secreted away, that would mean that the US government has known the explosives were missing for some eighteen months.
The problem is that the White House has spent the entire day claiming that they knew nothing about this until ten days ago, October 15th. Scott McClellan said this repeatedly during his gaggle with reporters this morning. Indeed, he went on to say the following:
| quote: | "Now [i.e., after the notification on October 15th], the Pentagon, upon learning of this, directed the multinational forces and the Iraqi survey group to look into this matter, and that's what they are currently doing."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/rele...20041025-1.html |
So which is it, Conservatives? What story are you willing to jump on? Di Rita or McClellan? Make your choice, but please, please, PLEASE don't "waffle". Whatever you do, don't "flip-flop", 'kay?
Other juicy info:
The Times article also mentions that Condi Rice was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. How many days after she was informed did she begin her campaigning for Bush? Shouldn't her ass be working on this development a little more?
A story which broke in the Chicago Tribune, Sept. 30, 2004 reads as follows:
| quote: | | The insurgents probably are using weapons and ammunition looted from the nearby Qa-Qaa complex, a 3-mile by 3-mile weapons-storage site about 25 miles southwest of Baghdad, said Maj. Brian Neil, operations officer for the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, which initially patrolled the area. The site was bombed during last year's invasion and then left unguarded, Neil said. "There's definitely no shortage of weapons around here," he said |
Seems that soldier has known about it for awhile - long before October 10th, ain't it?
And finally, I'm sure all of you remember the story about Zarqawi, and how our Administration botched/directly avoided killing him out right several times before the war:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4431601/
The WSJournal also finally picked this one up too:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email...IaKmGm4,00.html
So let's just put 2 and 2 together here - we had the opportunity to nail Zarqawi but failed to do so. We had the opportunity to secure hundreds of tons of explosives but failed to do so. Now we see both the explosives AND Zarqawi all too closely as they are combined to murder our troops and innocent Iraqi civilians we are supposed to protect.
Need I say anything further about this Administration and Iraq?
Edit: Damnit! superfb beat me to the punch. Nice job.
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Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
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