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

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned
Ramo, I see no proof one way or the other, actually.

NED, LOOK HERE!!!!

Originally posted by Ramo

http://kstp.com/article/stories/S3723.html?cat=1

http://kstp.com/article/stories/S3741.html?cat=1

[Guynemer]

Oh, Che... you might need to be re-Neducated...

[Vince278]

Originally posted by Berzerker
Sorry, we gotta elect someone next week

Me.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=124374

[Lung]

Surely if they know enough for this to become public they could have addressed it? Someone has been grossly negligent

[Mordoch]

Here's commentary by David Kay, the former US UN head weapons inspector on the video tape.

Aaron Brown: We saw at the top of the program there is new information to factor in. Pretty conclusive to our eye. So we'll sort through this now. Take the politics out of it and try and deal with facts with former head UN weapons inspector, US weapons inspector, David Kay. David, it’s nice to see you.
David Kay: Good to be with you, Aaron.

AB: I don't know how better to do this than to show you some pictures have you explain to me what they are or are not. Okay? First what I’ll just call the seal. And tell me if this is an IAEA seal on that bunker at that munitions dump?

DK: Aaron, about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it which, obviously, I would have preferred to have been there, that is an IAEA seal. I've never seen anything else in Iraq in about 15 years of being in Iraq and around Iraq that was other than an IAEA seal of that shape.

AB: Was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?

DK: Absolutely nothing. It was the HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.

AB: OK now, I’ll take a look at barrels here for a second. You can tell me what they tell you. They, obviously, to us just show us a bunch of barrels. You'll see it somewhat differently.

DK: Well, it's interesting. There were three foreign suppliers to Iraq of this explosive in the 1980s. One of them used barrels like this, and inside the barrels a bag. HMX is in powder form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons. And particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it, that's either HMX or RDX. I don't know of anything else in al Qaqaa that was in that form.

AB: Let me ask you then, David, the question I asked Jamie. In regard to the dispute about whether that stuff was there when the Americans arrived, is it game, set, match? Is that part of the argument now over?

DK: Well, at least with regard to this one bunker, and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through, and there were others there that were sealed. With this one, I think it is game, set, and match. There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken. And quite frankly, to me the most frightening thing is not only was the seal broken, lock broken, but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean, to rephrase the so-called pottery barn rule. If you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.

AB: I'm -- that raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn't know what they had?

DK: I think you're quite likely they didn't know they had HMX, which speaks to lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area, but they certainly knew they had explosives. And to put this in context, I think it's important, this loss of 360 tons, but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.

AB: Could you -- I’m trying to stay out of the realm of politics. I'm not sure you can.

DK: So am I.

AB: I know. It's a little tricky here. But, is there any -- is there any reason not to have anticipated the fact that there would be bunkers like this, explosives like this, and a need to secure them?

DK: Absolutely not. For example, al Qaqaa was a site of Gerald Bull's super gun project. It was a team of mine that discovered the HMX originally in 1991. That was one of the most well-documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented. Iraq had, and it's a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the US has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.

AB: David, as quickly as you can, because this just came up in the last hour, as dangerous as this stuff is, this would not be described as a WMD, correct?

DK: Oh absolutely not.

AB: Thank you.

DK: And, in fact, the loss of it is not a proliferation issue.

AB: Okay. It's just dangerous and its out there and by your thinking it should have been secured.

DK: Well look, it was used to bring the Pan Am flight down. It's a very dangerous explosive, particularly in the hands of terrorists.

AB: David, thank you for walking me through this. I appreciate it, David Kay the former head US weapons inspector in Iraq.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_24.php#003835

[GePap]

Mordoch, Ramo, don;t you guys get it? The world is biased against George W Bush! How can we trust facts, videotapes, anything!, given we have a world that is aggressively pro-lety and anti-Bush!?

Sensible , "real" Americans see this bias and ignore it- besides, given the depressing, lefty nature of the world, the 'optimists' prefer to work with self created realities free of that anti-Bush bias.

[oedo]

I believe James Bond, McGyver and Egon Olsen changed to the dark side. It's not clear yet, if they were working for the Russians or for al Qaeda. But there seems to be evidence, that these three evildoers stole the explosives from al Qaqaa. For only these tree would be able to break into the facility without removing the seal, steal about 40 trucks loaded with explosives without being noticed and leave the same amount of meal in barrels behind in the bunkers.

And most importantly, they did this BEFORE the US-troops arrived.

[Harry Tuttle]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,137017,00.html

U.S. Team Took 200 Tons of Iraqi Explosives
Friday, October 29, 2004

WASHINGTON — A U.S. soldier is coming forward Friday to say a team from the 3rd Infantry Division took about 200 tons of explosives from an Iraqi military facility soon after Saddam Hussein's regime fell last year.

The soldier will appear before reporters at noon, EDT. The briefing will be shown on the FOX News Channel.

The announcement is the latest twist in the mystery over what happened to 377 tons of explosives that the International Atomic Energy Agency said had disappeared.

The soldier's story comes as new videotape has surfaced that supports the contention that tons of the explosives were still at the base following Saddam's fall on April 9, 2003. U.S. officials had said they suspected the explosives were taken before U.S.-led forces took Baghdad.

Videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq when they first opened the bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa (search) 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 (search).

The video, taken by a reporter and cameraman employed by KSTP, an ABC affiliate in St. Paul, on April 18, 2003, was broadcast nationally Thursday on the ABC national network.

"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa," David A. Kay (search), the 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 Pentagon also released a photograph of Al-Qaqaa taken just before the war, showing several bunkers, one with two tractor-trailers parked next to it. The picture was shot by a satellite on March 17, 2003.

Senior Defense officials said their photo shows that the Al-Qaqaa facility "was not hermetically sealed" after international weapons inspectors had paid their last visits to the facility earlier in the month.

Officials are analyzing the image and others for clues into when the nearly 380 tons of explosives were taken. The munitions included HMX (search) and RDX (search), key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in bomb attacks.

But what officials will say is that the image shows the Iraqis were moving something at the site before the first U.S.-launched bombs fell.

Meanwhile, an IAEA report obtained by FOX News said the inspectors noted that despite the fact that the Al-Qaqaa bunkers were locked, ventilation shafts remained open and provided easy access to the explosives.

The IAEA can definitively say only that the documented ammunition was at the facility in January; in March, an agency spokesman conceded, inspectors only looked at the locked bunker doors.

The question of what happened to the explosives has become a major issue in the closing days of the 2004 presidential campaign.

Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry says the missing explosives — powerful enough to demolish a building, bring down a jetliner or even trigger 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.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld entered the debate Thursday, suggesting the 377 tons of explosives were taken away before U.S. forces arrived, saying any large effort to loot the material afterward would have been detected.

"We would have seen anything like that," he said in one of two radio interviews he gave at the Pentagon. "The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, I think is at least debatable."

The bunker with the trucks parked next to it in the Pentagon's satellite image is not one known to have contained any of the missing explosives, and Defense spokesman Larry Di Rita said the image only shows that there was some Iraqi activity at the base on March 17.

Di Rita acknowledged that the image says nothing about what happened to the explosives.

Rumsfeld, in one radio interview, also cast doubt on the suggestion by one of his subordinates that Russian soldiers assisted Iraqis in removing the munitions.

The Washington Times on Thursday quoted John A. Shaw (search), the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, who said he believed Russian special-forces personnel, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material from the Al-Qaqaa facility.

Shaw said he believed the munitions were moved to Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 invasion.

Senior Defense officials urged caution over the Washington Times article because they could not verify its allegations as true.

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

The article prompted an angry denial from Moscow.

At the core of the issue is whether the explosives were moved before or after U.S. forces reached that part of the country in early April. No one has been able to provide conclusive evidence either way, although Iraqi officials blamed the munitions' disappearance on poor U.S. security after Baghdad fell.

The Pentagon has said it is 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.

FOX News' Bret Baier, Ian McCaleb and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Lordy, lordy. Pretty soon we're going to know how many grains of sand are in the compound...

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

IF true, 200+ tons of high explosives removed less the amount the IAEA said were really there per ABC news report and that means for all intents all of it has been accounted for.

It would be priceless if true.

[Cruddy]

Given the number of car bombings - I doubt the insurgents will run out of explosives any time soon.

Even if some feckless squaddie is going to admit to moving 200 tons of them.

"Thou shalt not get caught" (11th commandment).

[GePap]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
IF true, 200+ tons of high explosives removed less the amount the IAEA said were really there per ABC news report and that means for all intents all of it has been accounted for.

It would be priceless if true.

1. Why the **** would it be just a private, and not, say the commander of the unit, or the whole chain of command, come out with this information?

2. Why the **** would the US Army remove materials under IAEA seal without telling the IAEA?

3. This complex had many types of explosives-how the hell does this one moron know they took the materials under IAEA seal only, and not say, regular explosives?

4. Why the hell would the amdin. NOT tell the IAEA if this is true?

I am sorry, but 1, the soldier is probably talking out his ass, 2. If this is true, we are still talking about an utterly incompetent administration.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

First of all you'll note I never claimed this yet to be true I am skeptical howerv, to your points.

Originally posted by GePap


1. Why the **** would it be just a private, and not, say the commander of the unit, or the whole chain of command, come out with this information?

Its a major, not a private. A command level rank that one would expect be in charge of said operation.

2. Why the **** would the US Army remove materials under IAEA seal without telling the IAEA?

3. This complex had many types of explosives-how the hell does this one moron know they took the materials under IAEA seal only, and not say, regular explosives?

4. Why the hell would the amdin. NOT tell the IAEA if this is true?

I am sorry, but 1, the soldier is probably talking out his ass, 2. If this is true, we are still talking about an utterly incompetent administration.

As for the rest before you continue to further jump to conclusions why not wait to see what the major reveals, ehh? OTOH restraining yourself from jumping to conclusion doesn't seem to be a trait that your candidate seems to display either.

[Drachasor]

The fact that the Administration didn't know what was going on and has admitted we didn't have enough troops to guard everything is proof enough of their incompetence; Horrible planning.

Anything else is just more evidence to that effect.

-Drachasor

[GePap]

Where the hell did the story say it was a major?

As for the rest before you continue to further jump to conclusions why not wait to see what the major reveals, ehh? OTOH restraining yourself from jumping to conclusion doesn't seem to be a trait that your candidate seems to display either.

Man, while not as clueless as some, you are getitng there by association...

Only sheer incompetence, malice, or ideological idiocy would explain the possibility of the US military removing items and goods under IAEA seal without telling the IAEA or the Iraqi intereim authorities, or at least knowing itself. I don;t see any other possiblity for such an action:

So even if this were true, it would show enough incompetence amongs the chain of command and the civilian leadership to scream for change.

[Harry Tuttle]

Maj. Austin Pearson has now said the amount is 250 tons.