380 TONS of Explosives (HMX, RDX) in Iraq Left Unsecured, Now Looted!

[Ramo]

Yes, I was asking, what source did Hume rely on?

[GePap]

Since we all know Stewart PWNZZ all, I loved the lines by Steven Colbert and Jon todayto paraphrase)

Jon: "But there have been reports from NBC news trhat the explosives may have not been there by the Time US troops arrived

Steven: "Thats right Jon, and since the admin. states they did not know about this till 10 days ago, people are trying to spin it as incompetence, when its actually just a case of ignorance"

I also saw Lou Dobbs make an ass of himself on the issue.

Let me MrFun again:

The US should have allowed the IAEA full access to all the sites they had had under inspection right after the war-and then this debate would not even exist, cause we would have know one way or the toher what occured with those explosives, at least during the time Inspectors left and the end of the war.

[The Mad Monk]

Originally posted by Ramo
Yes, I was asking, what source did Hume rely on?

No idea.

[Vince278]

Has anyone checked Ebay for the missing stuff?

[Drachasor]

Indeed GePap.

As I said, it basically boils down to U.S. incompetence at one point or another, wether in the intelligence, military, or both.

I still love how the administration 'defended' itself by saying they couldn't cover all the sites they needed to. Lack of manpower apparently:

Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.

Officials in Washington said they had no answers to that question. One senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex where the explosives were stored was listed as a "medium priority" site on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of more than 500 sites that needed to be searched and secured during the invasion. "Should we have gone there? Definitely," said one senior administration official.

In the chaos that followed the invasion, however, many of those sites, even some considered a higher priority, were never secured.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/international/middleeast/25bomb.html?oref=login

Oh, and naturally the Administration says elsewhere that they have and have had enough people on the ground.

-Drachasor

[Bosh]

Here's some more news and more nails in the coffin of the "they were gone when we got there" hypothesis.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apmideast_story.asp?category=1107&slug=Iraq%20Weapons

Al-Qaqaa spokesman says no weapons search

By KIMBERLY HEFLING
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

One of 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 the nearly 400 tons of explosives that are missing from the site, the unit spokesman said Tuesday.

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 in their area," Wellman wrote 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," he wrote.

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 to Baghdad, he told the newspaper for Wednesday's editions.

Associated Press 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.

Pentagon officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday night. A spokesman for the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga., said the unit was checking on whether any of its troops was at Al-Qaqaa.

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 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.

The 3rd Infantry left Al-Qaqaa and moved on to become the first U.S. unit into Baghdad. The day after Baghdad fell, the 101st Airborne arrived at Al-Qaqaa and remained there for 24 hours, later joining the 3rd Infantry in the capital.

"We still had Iraqi troops in Baghdad we were trying to combat," said Wellman, the 101st Airborne spokesman. "Our mission was securing Baghdad at that point."

NBC correspondent Lai Ling Jew, who was with the 101st, told MSNBC, an NBC cable news channel, that "there wasn't a search" of Al-Qaqaa.

"The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad," she said. "As far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away."

She said there was no talk among the 101st of securing the area after they left. The roads were cut off "so it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there," she said.

Wellman, the 101st Airborne spokesman, said the facility was in the unit's sector at that time but that he does not know if any troops were left at the grounds of the facility once the combat troops from the 2nd Brigade left.

The commander of the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade, Col. Joseph Anderson, told Times on Tuesday that he didn't learn until this week that international inspectors had been at Al-Qaqaa to inspect explosives before the war.

"We happened to stumble on it," Anderson told the Times. "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."

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.

The explosives had been housed in storage bunkers at the facility. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed fresh seals over the bunker doors in January 2003. The inspectors visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time on March 15, 2003 and reported that the seals were not broken - therefore, the weapons were still there at the time. The team then pulled out of the country in advance of the invasion later that month.

Cheney raised the possibility the explosives disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.

"It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad," Cheney said Tuesday.

Both HMX and RDX are key components in plastic explosives such as C-4 and Semtex, which are so powerful that Libyan terrorists needed just a pound to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people.

-----


Looks like this is as close to an October Surprise as we're gunna get, I hope its as damaging to Bush as the discovery of his drunk driving conviction last time around.

[The Mad Monk]

You mean "not enough to make him lose"?

[The Mad Monk]

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.

Oh, and thanks for finding a source for me.

[Ted Striker]

Earl Boykins puts up mad assists.

[Ned]

NBC is now reporting that the 3rd ID arrived at the base on April 3. The place was overrun with looters. They say they saw on HMX or RDX.

Both the 3rd ID and the 101st were just passing through to Baghdad and did not conduct a thorough search. However, neither unit saw the IAEA door seals on any building.

FOX's embed with the 3rd ID (I believe) confirmed that he saw no HE or seals.

FOX's embed also said that it was improbable that any fleet of 40 trucks could have removed the HE after April 3 as the US owned the roads into an out of the base.

[Ramo]

The lack of IAEA seals doesn't mean that the explosives are gone, just that the buildings had been broken into. And neither unit actually searched for the explosives, so what the embeds didn't see ain't evidence.

And isn't Boykin the guy who likened the War in Terror a Crusade to defend Christianity?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Simple question, Boshko, how does your piece in any way prove the munitions were not stolen prior or during invasion? All the evidence of existing materials being used by insurgents is just as likely if the stockpiles were moved prior to/during invasion.

What is still not addressed is the likelihood of 380 tons the equivalent of 40 tractor trailor loads being lifted in an area where roads were completely in control of the US forces were it a matter of looting.

But I suppose it was hauled off by looters on foot.

Do the math:

760000 lbs of high explosieve

Average looting 20 lbs/person/looting

Thats 38000 lootings

Say you had 100 people doing it once per day

It would have taken over 1 year (380 days) to make off with it on foot.

[Drachasor]

Ogie, I think an important part of Bosko's post was how we didn't have enough troops in Iraq. We couldn't secure things like we needed to when we needed to.

We could of had that base secure before we moved into Bagdhad, for instance.

-Drachasor

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Drachasor
Ogie, I think an important part of Bosko's post was how we didn't have enough troops in Iraq. We couldn't secure things like we needed to when we needed to.

We could of had that base secure before we moved into Bagdhad, for instance.

-Drachasor

Which means little considering the roads were secure and the massive quantities we are talking about that would have to be moved on foot.

I'll not argue the force deployment was thin. I have thought in my heart of heart it was. In actuality I was never convinced we needed to go in the first place. I find it more than a bit incredibdle to think these were looted by men on foot.

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
Which means little considering the roads were secure and the massive quantities we are talking about that would have to be moved on foot.

I'll not argue the force deployment was thin. I have thought in my heart of heart it was. In actuality I was never convinced we needed to go in the first place. I find it more than a bit incredibdle to think these were looted by men on foot.

The roads are not as secure as you think.

A lot of small trucks could have moved the materials pretty easily over a long time. A ton here, a ton there. It is believed that initally the materials were moved to the surrounding area, and then later removed from there. We didn't have the troops to do a thorough check and look for them, even if we had really noticed they weren't there and had wanted to try to find them.

-Drachasor