Explosives Missing from Iraqi Ex-Military Site -UN
Mon Oct 25, 2004 03:44 PM ET


By Louis Charbonneau

VIENNA (Reuters) - Hundreds of tonnes of explosives are missing from a site near Baghdad that was part of Saddam Hussein's dismantled nuclear arms program but never secured by the U.S. military, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

The missing 377 tons (342 tonnes) of high explosives, monitored by inspectors from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency until the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, could potentially be used to make a detonator for a nuclear bomb or in conventional weapons as well as in a variety of other military and civilian uses, arms experts said.

Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology informed the IAEA two weeks ago that the explosives had been "lost after April 9, 2003, through the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security," the watchdog agency told the 15-nation U.N. Security Council.

The New York Times, which broke the story on Monday, said arms experts feared the most immediate use of the explosives would be to attack U.S. or Iraqi forces, which have come under increasing fire ahead of Iraq's elections due in January.

Diplomats at the IAEA warned that materials useful in making nuclear bombs could also easily be shipped out of Iraq and sold to countries like neighbor Iran or terrorist groups.

The IAEA has been barred from most of Iraq since the war and has watched from afar as the former nuclear sites it once monitored have been stripped by looters.

Vienna diplomats said the IAEA had cautioned the United States about the danger of the explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told U.S. officials about the need to keep them secured.

U.S. presidential challenger John Kerry accused President Bush of committing a massive blunder in failing to safeguard the explosives.

KERRY SEES 'GREAT BLUNDER'

"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the greatest blunders of this administration, and the incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and this country at greater risk," Kerry told supporters in Dover, New Hampshire.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Danforth said the Bush administration was investigating the matter.

"Obviously this is a serious matter. We are looking into it," he said.
ElBaradei informed Washington of the seriousness of the matter on Oct. 15, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said in Vienna. Bush was informed days later, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.

Prior to the war, 215 tons (195 tonnes) of HMX explosives had been sealed and tagged with the IAEA emblem while stored at Iraq's sprawling Al Qaqaa military facility. Some 156 tons (141 tonnes) of RDX and 6.4 tons (5.8 tonnes) of PETN were also stored at the Al Qaqaa site and monitored by the IAEA.

The U.N. agency last verified the presence and amounts of the three types of explosive at Al Qaqaa in January 2003, ElBaradei told the Security Council.

Iraq was allowed to keep some explosives for civilian use after the IAEA completed its dismantling of Saddam's covert nuclear weapons program after the 1991 Gulf war.

A Western diplomat close to the IAEA, who declined to be identified, said it was hard to understand why the U.S. military had failed to secure the facility.

"This was a very well known site. If you could have picked a few sites that you would have to secure then ... Al Qaqaa would certainly be one of the main ones," the diplomat said.

At the Pentagon, a U.S. defense official said Al Qaqaa was "well known as a storage depot for conventional explosives" but doubted U.S. forces in Iraq made it "a high-priority location" for providing security.

The missing explosives were not weapons of mass destruction, The official said, adding that U.S. forces gave higher priority to suspected WMD sites after the invasion. No WMD were found, however.

"You just can't leave a guard force at all these places you find. If you leave a squad at all 10,000 places that are known so far, then there's 50,000 (troops) out of action," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. (Additional reporting by Javier E. David in New York, Patricia Wilson in Dover, N.H., Will Dunham at the Pentagon in Washington and Irwin Arieff at the United Nations in New York)

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.


>>>source

Almost 380 tons of explosives. Anybody seen them?

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http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast...ives/index.html

maybe the haters were too hasty to play the blame card?...again.

this just out an hour ago.

NBC embedds. so they can't support a right-wing cover-up. plus they probably have reporting notes and footage.

If the weapons were gone when the US troops got there, and the site was really that important, then why didn't the Bush administration know? Why did the information, that the explosives were already missing, have to come from a news crew?

as the units rolled up to secure it, the weapons were gone. the embedds took note of it, to them it wasn't a big deal, and data dumped it.

now, one week from the election, for one reason or another, someone realizes that, "yeah...uh...remember all those explosives and missles we have been guarding prior to the invasion?...uhh...they're gone!" "slipped through the cracks" when we knew they were gone from the outset. and it takes time (at least a day) to confirm stuff like this.

i don't know. i'm tired. goin to bed.

"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the greatest blunders of this administration, and the incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and this country at greater risk," Kerry told supporters in Dover, New Hampshire.



Another example of Kerry sticking his foot in his mouth again. Now he's gonna have to hope that the media somehow hides it or under publicizes it. This was an idiotic attack on Bush that misfired badly.

quote:

Originally posted by tecnolover Another example of Kerry sticking his foot in his mouth again. Now he's gonna have to hope that the media somehow hides it or under publicizes it. This was an idiotic attack on Bush that misfired badly.

For once I tend to agree with you. It was careless of Kerry to jump onto so fresh news. However, some questions still remain to be answered (including those in my previous post), before Bush can be declared an innocent victim of a ruthless attack.

quote:

Originally posted by trancaholic For once I tend to agree with you. It was careless of Kerry to jump onto so fresh news. However, some questions still remain to be answered (including those in my previous post), before Bush can be declared an innocent victim of a ruthless attack.

Actually, it's not new at all. It's old news that happened before our troops were even on the site back in 2003. Kerry in his haste to jump on any little thing to attack the pres. with didn't even research it first and made himself look like an idiot more than he already has. With his remarks, given the circumstances, the question for Kerry would be "then Mr. Kerry are you suggesting US troops should have invaded Iraq sooner than they did? thereby even circumventing UN authorization even sooner?! Thanks Kerry for unknowingly suggesting to everyone in the world that we the US should have invaded even sooner since then we might have secured those explosives before Saddam or whoever moved them. And with this I agree we should have attacked sooner and not even wasted our time with trying to get UN authorization.

quote:

Originally posted by trancaholic If the weapons were gone when the US troops got there, and the site was really that important, then why didn't the Bush administration know? Why did the information, that the explosives were already missing, have to come from a news crew?

This is a hard question to answer. It's possible US didn't have intel on that site in question or if there was good intel US was still too busy trying to get UN support (weapons inspections ect ect.) to invade and the delay gave the enemy too much time to hide them or move them. Again, reason we should have moved in sooner.

Lamest October Surprise ever...NBC just owned NYTIMES story like a two dollar whore.

quote:

Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News pretty much dismantled the New York Times attack on behalf of Kerry today.

quote:

NBC News: Miklaszewski: “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 Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq.” (NBC’s “Nightly News,” 10/25/04)

Last night a report on NBC news stated that the explosives were already missing when U.S. troops arrived at the storage location on April 10, 2003.

The last time the IAEA saw the explosives was about three months earlier in January of 2003. There is no way to know when the explosives were removed.
Sometime after the IAEA saw them in January and before American troops got there in April. Obviously this isn't a case of Bush failing to "guard" the explosives. By the time our troops arrived there they weren't there to guard.
In other words, nobody failed to guard anything and there was nothing we could have done about it. They were gone when we got there.

quote:

Also the Pentagon officials said yesterday that Iraq had already admitted to breaking the IAEA seals and moving tons of the explosives from the Al Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad, before U.N. inspectors re-entered the country in 2002. Officials said the rest of the explosives stockpiles may have been removed and hidden before the arrival of American troops.

But maybe just maybe according to sKerry there was something we could have done. There is something we could have done about it. We could have invaded earlier at the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong war! GO into the wrong war at the wrong time and wrong place and look for the explosives in the right place and leave the wrong war at the wrong place and wrong time? Is that what the Kerry supporters are saying we should have done?

Link

Last edited by speedracer_mec on Oct-26-2004 at 12:06

quote:

Originally posted by speedracer_mec Lamest October Surprise ever...NBC just owned NYTIMES story like a two dollar whore.

That just about sums it up. And that's what you get for trusting the New York Times on a story!

I didn't see the story posted here yesterday, so I wasn't even going to bother posting it along with the NBC info. I figured, by some grace of God, that the TA's had actually read and checked the facts and decided against posting it. But hey, now that it's here, go ahead and slam Kerry, the NYT, and whoever else had a hand in this totally pathetic attempt at an attack!

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FLUSHED THE JOHNS!

The most thurough debunking of this NBC stuff you righties are trying to pull (From Josh Marshall):



Let's note a few more problems with what I guess we should call the Di Rita/Drudge/NBC 'It was gone when we got there' hypothesis.

To refresh our memories, this is the claim that the explosives at the al Qaqaa facility were removed by the former Iraqi regime before the first US troops ever arrived on the scene. That wouldn't make the loss of the material any less dangerous. And it would raise serious questions about why the material was allowed to be dispersed. But it might go some way to mitigating the charge of incompetence since this would mean that the material was already gone before US ground troops were able to start guarding it.

On Monday, the Pentagon gave mixed signals about what the first troops on the scene found. Or rather, an official whom the AP describes as closely involved in the Iraq survey work says the explosives were there, while Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita says they weren't.

Di Rita's claim that the explosives were already gone was picked up this evening by NBC news which reported that one of its news crews embedded with the 101st Airborne visited the facility on April 10th and found no weapons. This was in turn trumpeted by a number of conservative news outlets like Drudge and the Washington Times.

So, let's review some of the problems.
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."

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.

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.)

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 ...

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.

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.

If you look at the multiple contradictions in the different stories administration officials told reporters over the course of Monday, it's hard not to get the sense that they're caught without a good explanation and they're just making this stuff up as they go along.

The folks who really understand this stuff don't seem to put much stock in what guys like Di Rita and Scott McClellan are saying. The LA Times piece, notes that one of them is former chief weapons inspector David Kay, that notorious bush-basher and left-winger. Kay thinks the stuff was carted off after the old regime was history. Kay told the Times he visited the site in May 2003 "and it was heavily looted at that time. Sometime between April and May, most of the stuff was carried off. The site was in total disarray, just like a lot of the Iraqi sites."

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quote:

Originally posted by davedresden oh my fucking god i die, dave

Kerry made an ass out of himself.. AGAIN.

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