Missing Explosives????

[Gimpy]

MISSING EXPLOSIVES
No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says
By JIM DWYER and DAVID E. SANGER


White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.


But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the site and had merely stopped there overnight.


The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.


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."


What had been, for the colonel and his troops, an unremarkable moment during the sweep to Baghdad took on new significance this week, after The New York Times, working with the CBS News program "60 Minutes," reported that the explosives at Al Qaqaa, mainly HMX and RDX, had disappeared since the invasion.


Earlier this month, officials of the interim Iraqi government informed the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives disappeared sometime after the fall of Mr. Hussein on April 9, 2003. Al Qaqaa, which has been unguarded since the American invasion, was looted in the spring of 2003, and looters were seen there as recently as Sunday.


President Bush's aides told reporters that because the soldiers had found no trace of the missing explosives on April 10, they could have been removed before the invasion. They based their assertions on a report broadcast by NBC News on Monday night that showed video images of the 101st arriving at Al Qaqaa. By yesterday afternoon Mr. Bush's aides had moderated their view, saying it was a "mystery" when the explosives disappeared and that Mr. Bush did not want to comment on the matter until the facts were known.


On Sunday, administration officials said that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. taskforce that hunted for unconventional weapons, had been ordered to look into the disappearance of the explosives. On Tuesday night, CBS News reported that Charles A. Duelfer, the head of the taskforce, denied receiving such an order.


At the Pentagon, a senior official, who asked not to be identified , acknowledged that the timing of the disappearance remained uncertain. "The bottom line is that there is still a lot that is not known," the official said.


The official suggested that the material could have vanished while Mr. Hussein was still in power, sometime between mid-March, when the international inspectors left, and April 3, when members of the Army's Third Infantry Division fought with Iraqis inside Al Qaqaa. At the time, it was reported that those soldiers found a white powder that was tentatively identified as explosives. The site was left unguarded, the official said.


The 101st Airborne Division arrived April 10 and left the next day. The next recorded visit by Americans came on May 27, when Task Force 75 inspected Al Qaqaa, but did not find the large quantities of explosives that had been seen in mid-March by the international inspectors. By then, Al Qaqaa had plainly been looted.


Colonel Anderson said he did not see any obvious signs of damage when he arrived on April 10, but that his focus was strictly on finding a secure place to collect his troops, who were driving and flying north from Karbala.


"There was no sign of looting here," Colonel Anderson said. "Looting was going on in Baghdad, and we were rushing on to Baghdad. We were marshaling in."


A few days earlier, some soldiers from the division thought they had discovered a cache of chemical weapons that turned out to be pesticides. Several of them came down with rashes, and they had to go through a decontamination procedure. Colonel Anderson said he wanted to avoid a repeat of those problems, and because he had already seen stockpiles of weapons in two dozen places, did not care to poke through the stores at Al Qaqaa.


"I had given instructions, 'Don't mess around with those. It looks like they are bunkers; we're not messing around with those things. That's not what we're here for,' " he said. "I thought we would be there for a few hours and move on. We ended up staying overnight."


Thom Shanker and William J. Broad contributed reporting for this article.

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Oct. 25, 2004 17:45 | Updated Oct. 25, 2004 17:49
380 tons of explosives missing in Iraq
By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nearly 400 tons of conventional explosives that can be used in the kind of car bomb attacks that have targeted US-led coalition forces in Iraq for months have vanished from a former Iraqi military installation, the UN nuclear agency said Monday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said it fears the explosives may have fallen into insurgents' hands. Diplomats questioned why the United States didn't do more to secure the facility, which they say posed a well-known threat of being looted.


IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei was to report the explosives' disappearance to the UN Security Council later Monday, spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told The Associated Press.
Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology told the nuclear agency on Oct. 10 that about 380 tons (350 metric tons) of explosives had gone missing from the former Al-Qaqaa facility south of Baghdad, Fleming said.


"The most immediate concern here is that these explosives could have fallen into the wrong hands," she told the AP.



Insurgents targeting coalition forces in Iraq have made widespread use of plastic explosives in a bloody spate of car bomb attacks. Officials were unable to link the missing explosives directly to the recent car bombings, but the revelations that they could have fallen into enemy hands caused a stir.


"This stuff was well-known. Everyone knew it was there, and it should have been among the first sites to be secured," said a European diplomat familiar with the disappearance of the explosives, which was first reported Monday by The New York Times.


At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said 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.

Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces , the official said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.


The IAEA had periodically inspected the site between 1991 and 2003, including numerous times between November 2002 and March 2003, the official said. As of January 2003 the IAEA had "fully inventoried" the site, the official said. It was not clear what additional inspections were done between January and March.


This past weekend, the Pentagon ordered the U.S. military command in Baghdad and the Iraq Survey Group to investigate the IAEA report, the official said, adding it was not yet clear how or by whom the explosives were taken or whether any of the material had been used in attacks by the insurgency.


In Washington, Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry's campaign said the Bush administration "must answer for what may be the most grave and catastrophic mistake in a tragic series of blunders in Iraq."

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Just one MORE blunder in a string of colossal, monumental and downright stupid instances of "mis-management" from the "crew of cowboys" under the direction of GEE-W! :cd: :cd: :re: :re:

[Gimpy]

Yup.........It sure as heck looks that way!

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October 26, 2004
Morons, Plus Hubris, Ignorance, Incompetence, and Arrogance
A READERS CONTRIBUTION

by Donald L Feinberg

Before invading Iraq, the Bush administration knew that a huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, contained nearly 380 tons of deadly explosives.


They knew exactly where this facility was and what was there. But they took no action to secure or protect the site.
Due to the stunning incompetence of the Bush administration and their incomprehensible failure to plan, those explosives have now somehow disappeared (380 TONS! POOF!).


Those explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces. The explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could be used to produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings. The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa, and somewhat larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.


There were "only" 760,000 pounds of this material at Al Qaqaa.
The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. (NY Times, today)


But: on freerepublic.com, the Republican blog site , I picked up this morning:


"We need to get on this one fast, people. Start smearing the NYT, smear the reporter, and focus on the WMD angle. This could be bad...reinforces the dem media narrative that we didn't plan the war carefully. We need to silence this, fast! WHERE'S OUR SURPRISE!!??!!??"


That's the spirit! Yes, we know who the Republicans are. They don't care enough to even be concerned about what the threat might be to our soldiers.


I'm beginning to learn how to laugh uncontrollably and sob uncontrollably at the same time. I have never imagined, let alone seen in my life, that there could be such a simultaneous, mind-blowing display of hubris, ignorance, incompetence, arrogance, and just plain moron-level " intelligence".


The truth is coming out. It's available to anyone willing to ask a question. An astonishing 48% of the US electorate, it seems, is going to vote for the person in charge. Yet the media still haven't had a "field day" on this kind of information. I don't know which is more tragic.

Donald L Feinberg
Naperville, IL

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Me either!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[colmurph]

What are you going to spam us with after Kerry loses?

[Gimpy]

nuthin.................cause that AIN'T gonna happen! :cl:

[SuperScout]

Take the alleged total number of tons of munitions, divide by the largest cargo carrier truck type available in quantity in Iraq, and see how long the convoy would have been to haul all this crap out of country, which is what the Russian Special Ops people did, with the active involvement of the Iraqi Army. This covert ops was accomplished before the Coalition invasion of Iraq, so of course, the "missing" tonnage is a matter of liberal hand-wringing.

If transporting of these munitions had been attempted after the invasion, the massed truck convoy would have been spotted and dealt with, but POOF, the movement had long since been done prior to our arrival.

It is also a matter of more than passing curiosity that the "document" announcing the munitions emanated from the UN, that bulwark of integrity, accounting expertise, and international accomplishments in arms control. Naturally, the New Yawk Times, paragon of journalist slanting, forgery and Jayson Blairisms, picks up the story, showing the world once again that Ol' Grey Lady shouldn't be trusted with much other than lining the bottom of the bird cage.

[Gimpy]

Evidently your math "skills" are about as proficient as your ability to comprehend the unmitigated insolence and cronic state of deception, double-dealing, subterfuge and fraud being committed by these "bushies"!

Here's some MORE "PROOF" for ya!

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Top Stories - AP
October 28, 2004


WASHINGTON - Videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq when they first opened the bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels and bearing the markings of the International Atomic Energy Agency.


The video taken by KSTP of St. Paul on April 18, 2003, could reinforce suggestions that tons of explosives missing from a munitions installation in Iraq were looted after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The video was broadcast nationally Thursday on ABC.


"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa," David A. Kay, a former American official who directed the hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, told The New York Times. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal."


The question of what happened to the tons of explosives has become a major issue in the closing days of the presidential campaign.


Democrat John Kerry says the missing explosives ? powerful enough to demolish a building, bring down a jetliner or set off a nuclear weapon ? are another example of the Bush administration's poor planning and incompetence in handling the war in Iraq. President Bush says the explosives were possibly removed by Saddam's forces before the invasion.


The Pentagon declassified and released a single image, taken by reconnaissance aircraft or satellite just days before the war, showing two trucks outside one of the dozens of storage bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base.


The particular bunker is not one known to have contained any of the missing explosives, and Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said the image only shows that there was some Iraqi activity at the base when it was taken, on March 17. Di Rita said the image says nothing about what happened to the explosives .


Rumsfeld , in one radio interview, cast doubt on the suggestion of one of his subordinates that Russian forces assisted the Iraqis in removing them.


John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security, suggested to The Washington Times in an interview that the Russians may have been involved, prompting an angry denial from Moscow.


Rumsfeld said, "I have no information on that at all, and cannot validate that even slightly."


But at issue is whether the weapons were moved before or after U.S. forces occupied that region of the country in early April. No one has been able to provide conclusive evidence either way, although Iraqi officials blamed it on poor U.S. security after Baghdad fell.


The Pentagon has said it's looking into the matter, and officials note that 400,000 tons of recovered Iraqi munitions have either been destroyed or are slated to be destroyed.


Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne Division, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS from St. Paul, Minnesota has determined their crew embedded with the troops may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where the ammunition disappeared. The news crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa, and drove two or three miles north of there with soldiers on April 18, 2003.


During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS news crew bunker after bunker of material labelled "explosives." Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get into the bunkers and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.


"We can stick it in those and make some good bombs." a soldier told our crew.


There were what appeared to be fuses for bombs. They also found bags of material men from the 101st couldn't identify, but box after box was clearly marked "explosive."


In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name "Al Qaqaa", the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.


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."

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Hmmmmmmmmmmmm..........curiouser & curiouser, huh?

Could it be more evidence of piss-poor planning on part of the "Bush boys"??? Surely not!..........Yeah right!

[exlrrp]

Regardless of the possible scenarios sketched out here, the Bush Administration has not stated exactly what DID happen, or more to the point, what did NOT happen. Theyve thrown out p[ossible scenarios but they should know what happened to all that stuff by now and they obviously don't--thats a REAL bad performance, I mean ANOTHER real bad performance
The fact that do not KNOW for sure where hundreds of tons of explosives are--that they were warned about in advance-- is a huge failure itself as is the fact that the military, in this case the 101st was not told what to look for--whether it was there or not, it was BELIEVED it was there in that specific place and nobody thought to have it checked untill months later. Certainly indicates slipshod planning at the upper levels but, as usual, the buck starts there. The important point here is that BUSH has not given a defintie answer, only allowintg the bloggers and the MauMaus to jump in front of him--not too manly there Georgieboy, you never would have made it in the Airborne!
Feinbergs reference to the bloggers"start smearing the...." is well brought out here. As usual, the problem itself--the fact that somebody--obviously the other side-- has 300 and some TONS of explosives isn't getting looked at at all. The tactic is to smoke and mirror and above all--to take the heat away from George Bush. This only increases as the end draws near
As Usual, Bush himself is not telling the true story himself, whatever it is--he only lets his spinmeisters and mouthmen take the hard questions, which they smoke and mirror. --thats whats really the most chickenshit thing about him--his absolute failure to come out front on any issue. 9 press conferences in 4 years!! No Great Communicator Merit Badge for Our Georgie! Only his surrogates, MauMaus and peasants wiith pitchforks baying at the moon over anyone trying to defile their hero by suggesting he may be at fault for anything he ever did.
There's SO much that shows the failure of Bush's leadership, but nothing more so than the fact that when one looks at the numbers, one realizes that Bush is EXACTLY where he was in the polls in 2000--an even split with Nader a factor. There was other things but certainly the Nader vote in FL was a decider. Bush got in by the merest fluke, a minority president by half a million votes.
And we're at exactly the same place--that means that Bush hasn't picked up ANY friends at all from our side!! Thats a HUGE failure in leadership, for a President not to pick up ANY votes from the other side. Reagans 2d election was a lanslide, so was Clinton's. But Our Georgie hasn't picked up any at all, even in wartime, which is as much a failure as his inablity to create jobs or balance the Budget with a Republican controlled Congress.
Ive been doing some politicking lately in an actual swing state thats experiencing its highest unemployment rate ever. I have by now heard many people who voted for Bush say theyre voting for Kerry but I have yet to hear ANYONE who voted for Gore say they were voting for Bush. Many of these were conservatives who were pissed about record deficits. And there aint going to BE any liberals or Democrats staying home this time like for Gore.This is certainly encouraging
And of course Bush's defenders will be saying that thats the NYT's fault and everybody else's but Bush. But a President that can't make at least 50% of the people see things his way is as much a failure as when he was a flyboy that refused to take his physical and ended his career as a pilot suspended from flying (for WHATEVER reason)
Bush will lose CA by 20 points and OR by at least 5. You can tell that by the fact that Bush has only been to CA twice in 4 years but has been to Pennsylvania 45 times. He does not care about us nor want to know our problems, obviously for political reasons, another huge failure in leadership. Just come out front and talk to us Georgie!! We're still paying 24.3% of your salary!
The Bush years have been bad years on the West Coast, starting with the Phony Energy Crisis that his Enron cronies set us up for. Exporting all the Silicon Valley manufacture and tech jobs to India etc cost him millions more votes.
I know that this never would cross some of your minds and you'd deny it to the hilt but did you ever stop and think that the reason you didn't pick up ANY votes from our side (or Nader's) is because you are just plain obnoxious and nobody on our side wants a country run by the people you want? I'll bet you didn't.
I know, I know, Gimp, I keeping revealing the joke to them but its so fun because you know they never will believe it! But just look at the polls! Been doing good in OR, I'll PM you more about it!
stay good, all, have a nice day!
James

[Andy]

A trooper from the 101st, who is now back in the civilian world, was on TV yesterday. He said the men in his unit were not instructed to go into the bunkers, but you know how grunts are. He said they found RPG's, frags and ammo but none of the 380 tons of explosives that is supposed to look and feel like corn starch.

He also said that the 3rd ID had been at this base a week before and they had been tasked to check out the bunkers. Apparently they found nothing of importance. Iraqi looters would have sort of problem grabbing 380 tons of loose corn starch and sticking it in their pockets. They'd even have a hard time driving off with it in pick-up trucks. Soft, light powder has a tendency to blow away when in the wind and we are talking about 380 tons.

Is it possible that prior to the war large dump trucks moved this stuff, which was a banned material for Sadam to have? Was it taken to Syria? Was it just dumped all over the sandy waste lands? I have no idea. Don't think Mr. Kerry does either.

I do know that the trooper on TV said that the people saying the 101st blew it is very bad for moral in his former unit, sort of like Fonda calling us baby killers.
Times and names may change but some people seem to be trying to turn Iraq into Vietnam. For some people every time the US gears up to stop a foe, it's Vietnam.

Stay healthy,
Andy

[SuperScout]

Of all the gall, for you to take the word of a soldier, a mere warrior in this "sensitive" fighting we're engaged in in Iraq, over the prestious and pompous New Yawk Times, and that authority on each and every subject, Gimpy? How dare you imply that 350 tons or however much there was could just disappear under the watchful eye of a GI, :cl: when you know if fact that it was all them black helicopters from Halliburton, swooping down in their stealthy mode, loading up all them bangers, and transporting them to a secret site in Fiji.

And kindly note how the basic question is being begged: these were some of the very exact weapon component material that was banned under various sanctions and the GW I treaty, stuff that we knew he had and was supposed to get rid of. If he had it, he had to get rid of it, or else it would have been available for all the world to see that he was not in compliance. So where did it go? I'd ask the Syrians. Yeah, that accounting master works, called the UN, did a right wonderful job and made the world safer for all of us, right?

[Seascamp]

As part of the TJ diatribe, some mention has been made about this type explosive being used to trigger a nuke. Hmmm, all one would need is a facility to change the powder form into a machinable block, then a precision machine facility to exactly match the explosive charge surfaces to the weapons grade plutonium sphere. But of course, there would have to be a facility to create the plutonium sphere in the first place, details, huh. Then there would have to be very precise detonators set into the explosive block and an equally precise detonation control system. The objective of the drill is to set off an instant and simultaneous explosion around the plutonium sphere and instantly compress/reduce the sphere size from that of something like a grapefruit to that of a cherry, and then it goes kabooooooooooom.
Of course, the average Iraqi Mustafa the looter has access to all the equipment and technology to do all this. There is such a facility in Knoxville, Tennessee, but it is very, very large; many, many acres large actually. But who knows what Mustafa the looter has buried in the Iraqi sand, eh. Maybe TJ knows, sure, that must be it.

Scamp