Why GIs Didn't Hunt Explosives

[David]

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.

[darrels joy]

The Times Spoils CBS's Surprise
To make his case against President Bush, John Kerry has been relying on intelligence from sources that have been proven unreliable--specifically, the New York Times (home of Jayson Blair and Maureen Dowd) and CBS (Dan Rather and Mary Mapes). Yesterday Kerry seized on a story in the Times, "reported in cooperation with the CBS News program '60 Minutes,' " that "nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives . . . are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations."

So after arguing for months that Saddam Hussein posed no threat and had no ties to terrorists, Kerry shifted to claiming that "terrorists could use this material to kill our troops and our people, blow up airplanes and level buildings." The Times, meanwhile, published an article today titled "Iraq Explosives Become Issue in Campaign." They're an issue in the campaign in part because Bush didn't talk about them:

The White House sought on Monday to explain the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that American forces were supposed to secure, as Senator John Kerry seized on the missing cache as "one of the great blunders of Iraq" and said President Bush's "incredible incompetence" had put American troops at risk.

Mr. Bush never mentioned the disappearance of the high explosives during a long campaign speech in Greeley, Colo., about battling terrorism.

It wasn't long, though, before NBC News had raised questions about the Times/CBS October surprise. The Drudge Report summarizes the "NBC Nightly News" story:

The 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives were already missing back in April 10, 2003--when U.S. troops arrived at the installation south of Baghdad!

An NBCNews crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.

According to NBCNews, the HMX and RDX explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.

The New York Sun notes that the Times/CBS report was based on a letter from Mohamed ElBaradei, who is seeking a third term as head of the International Atomic Energy Commission. The Bush administration opposes ElBaradei's reappointment, so one suspects that this was a foreign effort to influence the outcome of America's presidential election, aided by our domestic partisan liberal media.

Ironically, the effort might have been undone by the Times' hurry to get the story out. The Los Angeles Times reports that "60 Minutes" originally planned to air it next Sunday--two nights and one day before the election. Would that have been enough time for the truth to out?