Yesterday, the NY Times splashed a rather sensational piece all over the front page, claiming that the coalition (chiefly the United States) had failed to secure 380 tons of high-grade explosives, and that they have subsequently disappeared. Like any normal human being, I was pissed. Now, it isbeginningto appear, not only did the NY Times give all the facts, but it appears that this may have been nothing more than a partisan hit piece eith nothing but old news and bad reporting.
From the Kerry Spot:
NBC News: Miklaszewski:
Al Maviva
I seem to recall some brilliant commenter below wondering aloud if this was another “looted Iraqi National Museum Story” in which it later turns out the explosives were pre-looted, prior to the arrival of U.S. troops. Who was that guy?
Oh yeah, that’s right. It was me.
I’ll repeat the gist of what I was saying here: don’t trust the NY Times when it breeaks big stories against the Bush Administration. Wait for verification. They are really good at twisting everybody – even faithful “R” partisans – into knots with their allegations, and you should know this by now. They simply lack credibility, and bitter experience should have taught you that. BTW, look for a big story slamming the Administration on Thursday – that would be the best timing to take advantage of the news cycle. Expect it – we know it’s coming; perhaps it will be the NY Times discovery that in 1972, Bush had a DWI. We’ve been here before, John.
Or as a brilliant man once put it: Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… we won’t get fooled again.
Slartibartfast
So, the disappearance of 350 trillion micrograms of nuclear trigger doesn’t bother you at all?
Bush apologist.
CadillaqJaq
Several years ago James Carville was explainging the “nature of the beast” of print and broadcast journalism: he said something to the effect that the first story out gets all the attention whether it’s accurate or not.
The NYT did it’s thing, caused the maximum damage, and probably will NOT post a retraction, nor will John Kerry who ate it up like a starving dog.
The good news is that much of this bullshit will cease for a while after next Tuesday. Then we can probably sit back and watch the litigation of an election.
Mark L
Valerie Plame
Nigerian Yellowcake
Disappearing Explosives
As I stated on the original thread, the NYT is the World Wide Weekly of the non-tabloid dailies.
Tom Maguire
Thanks for the kind words. Six more days!
My thought is, don’t get mad, get even. The Rep spin ought to be that this is a story cooked up by the NY Times and the IAEA (darn, I wish is was the UN!).
If Kerry has been chosen by the Times and this odd international agency, so be it. But it is the American people that will choose the next president.
As to the IAEA connection, they have been tussling with Bush for a year on what to do with Iran – the IAEA plan is much closer to Kerry’s, and it was there letter that started this.
Oh, gosh, the Times left out the politics of the IAEA angle, too…
Al Maviva
Hey Slarti,
Yeah, I’m pissed as hell that nuclear trigger material is missing. Guess what that means… It means we should have invaded sooner, with more troops, and quit letting Saddam jerk us around on the inspections regime much sooner – say 1993. You willing to live with those implications?
Lis Riba
Notice also how the 380 tons becomes 760,000 lbs in the second paragraph. Shock value, anyone?
1 ton is 2000 pounds.
380 tons IS 760000 pounds.
Slartibartfast
Al Maviva:
Is your sarcasm detector on the fritz, or is mine?
Slartibartfast
Al Maviva:
Is your sarcasm detector on the fritz, or is mine?
Lis:
Obviously. Why stop there, though? Over twelve million ounces of HMX are missing!
Geek, Esq.
The NBC report DOES NOT DEBUNK the Times story. From MSNBC this morning:
Amy Robach: And it’s still unclear exactly when those explosives disappeared. Here to help shed some light on that question is Lai Ling. She was part of an NBC news crew that traveled to that facility with the 101st Airborne Division back in April of 2003. Lai Ling, can you set the stage for us? What was the situation like when you went into the area?
Lai Ling Jew: When we went into the area, we were actually leaving Karbala and we were initially heading to Baghdad with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. The situation in Baghdad, the Third Infantry Division had taken over Baghdad and so they were trying to carve up the area that the 101st Airborne Division would be in charge of. Um, as a result, they had trouble figuring out who was going to take up what piece of Baghdad. They sent us over to this area in Iskanderia. We didn’t know it as the Qaqaa facility at that point but when they did bring us over there we stayed there for quite a while. Almost, we stayed overnight, almost 24 hours. And we walked around, we saw the bunkers that had been bombed, and that exposed all of the ordinances that just lied dormant on the desert.
AR: Was there a search at all underway or was, did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?
LLJ: No. There wasn’t a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was
Simon Rippon
“380 tons is 0.00005% of the known existing weapons. Kinda diminishes the hype, no?”
That depends what the “hype” is:
-“My leg’s just been blown off”
-“Stop whining, that’s only .0000000001% of all the explosives we have.”
I hope you Bush apologists wouldn’t offer this sort of response should we find out that 0.00005% of Russia’s or America’s nuclear weapons have gone missing in a state suddenly overrun by terrorists.
Maybe these explosives were gone by the time the troops arrived at the site, maybe not. The fact remains that a whole lot of explosives that were under the military control of a (secular) state held in military lockdown by the UN/US sanctions pre-war, may now be in the possession of our deadliest, most hostile, and most ideaologically driven enemies. That’s something to care about. And it’s time to question whether any mistakes might have been made by our leaders who got us here.
Dean
I’m curious.
For the Lefties who argue that the HE was safely in the hands of Saddam:
1. Saddam openly cooperated w/ the likes of Abu Nidal. Did the prospect of his handing over HE to people like that bother you?
2. Where did y’all stand on leaving nuclear materials in the hands of another “deadliest, most hostile, and ideologically driven enemies,” who was also secular?
I’m talking about the Clinton Administration’s decision to leave nuclear materials in the hands of the North Koreans. Same sorta thing, no? Safely under inspection, etc.? If the NorKs could break their agreements, what makes you so sure Saddam wouldn’t?
3. What was this “military lockdown”? Does O-F-F affect your calculus of either the efficacy of sanctions or the security of this “lockdown” at all?
Mikey
Gee Rippon. It wasn’t perfectly done. The troops weren’t able to get everywhere and secure everything. That must mean that Bush is an evil failure and should be punished.
How about taking a deep breath and grabbing a firm grip on reality? Iraq was, is awash in explosives. That place is Satan’s toychest. Explosives and other weaponry were bound to go missing. Bad dudes (and guys willing to sell to bad dudes) went after that stuff as quickly as they could. What did you expect was going to happen? Are you surprised?
You may remember that the Princess Pats found a huge cache outside of Kabul the other week. Turns out some of the other ISAF troops knew of the site, but didn’t secure it. That part of the world is layered in arms, of all kinds, descriptions, and ages (like the water-cooled machine gun my brother found in Afgahnistan).
This isn’t exactly a surprise. Heck, Iraqis were burying MiG fighters in the desert. Finding that somebody was playing fast and loose with the HE shouldn’t be a shocker.
Military lockdown? You’re kidding, right? That place is huge. There’s no way the UN guys could be everywhere that Saddam had stuff, inspect every truck that rolled along the roads. The report is 400,000 tons of explosives and weaponry. Think of that figure. Think of the number of square miles of the country. Think of bad dudes eyeing those depots, waiting for the Iraqi Army to go home. Think of what is humanly possible (perfection isn’t) and then decide whether the POTUS is somehow responsible for this. I mean the Buck Stops There, but get real.
Simon Rippon
Mikey: No I’m not surprised one bit that some of Iraq’s explosives have gone missing. IF (BIG IF) it’s true that the explosives went AWOL in the first day of the invasion, there’s probably nothing that could have been done about it. So it’s a cost of the war.
But that’s the point. Bush, Blair and the neocons must have (or ought to have) known that this kind of thing would be a cost of the war. But in their haste to give rosy estimates of what the outcome of the war would be, they didn’t warn their people, nor Congress, nor the British Parliament, about these risks. And for all those that thing that Saddam Hussein was the worst threat to the US since Pearl Harbor, I’m going by the the *evidence* here, not “gut instinct”. He hadn’t launched any attacks since Kuwait, after which the sanctions and inspections were introduced. Every post-war report shows that the strategy of containment had been working, that he had eventually abandoned WMD, and that his military capacities had declined markedly since ’91. And there is absolutely no credible evidence that Hussein was plotitng any kind of attack, or intended to sell or give any weapons to any terrorist groups who might do so. (Abu Nidal was expelled from Baghdad in 1983 and was probably no longer active when he returned to Baghdad in 2001. To avoid misundersta nding, he also had no known link with Al Qaeda.) I’m focusing on the supposed *imminent threat* here; I’m not in any way defending his record as a brutal dictator; that is of course a different matter. We were absolutely right to oppose Saddam Hussein; the questions are whether it was right (or prudent) to go to war at the time we did and in the way we did to oppose him, and whether the people were given the information they deserve to make up their minds.
Dean: I don’t like North Korea having nukes (and I think we should do everything we can to bribe and cajole them to abandon them), but I’d sure-as-hell rather have them in the hands of the North Korean Government than in the hands of Al-Qaeda. Remember the “Mutually Assured Destruction” argument that they used to use to justify our having nukes that could wipe us all out? Well, it still applies, but only to nation states. North Korea will be very reluctant to get wiped out in a nuclear counter-attack, Al Qaeda has no such concern. That for me is reason to avoid going to war when there is a substantial risk that the weapons will fall into terrorist hands in the process. You can’t negotiate the weapons back out of the hands of Al Qaeda either. By the way, the “nuclear materials” permitted to the N. Koreans under the Clinton agreement were power stations of a type useless for weapons development (that’s not what they later used in their weapons program). North Korea’s breach of the agreement on nukes by 2002 may have been provoked by Bush’s axis-of-evil statement and concerns that the US Nuclear Posture Review (of about the same time) discussed the use of nuclear weapons against N. Korea.
By the way, you can call me a “Lefty” if you like for arguing that Bush has made very serious mistakes, but I’m not attached to the label. I’d rather you devote your energy to thinking about the evidence.
Al Maviva
Hey Simon. I laugh at the fact that I lost one of my gray dress socks in the dryer last week. That’s 50% of the gray dress socks that I own.
Indeed, it’s true, that I wouldn’t be laughing if 50% of U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons were missing.
But you know what – missing .0005% of Iraq’s explosives store, their conventional weapons stock that nobody on your side of the aisle ever gave a s*** about until it turned into a Bush-Bashing opportunity, is about as relevant to missing nukes as my lost sock is.
charlemagne
Bottom lines:
1)the ammo dumps were not protected at the beginning of the occupation – ergo, a lot of the material being used against out troops has come from poor military planning.
2) one large reason that there’s an insurgency is because the war was not well planned – no plan to make the peace
3) this war was FAR from a last resort
4) please don’t tell me that Iraq is not more dangerous now than it was just prior to Saddam’s downfall.
5) Today the American appointed Iraqi Prime Minister said the death of the 50 Iraqi soldiers was due to our mafeasance – why for god’s sake did’t those poor guys have weapons?!?!
6) Is America more, or less, divided since Bush took office?
7) Is America more, or less, financially stable since Bush took office?
8) 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch
9) Kerry is not perfect, but Bush is just plain dangerous – not only to our long-term standing in the world, but to the very things this country stands for. His people helped steal the last election – that was bad enough, and most Americans swallowed hard in 2000 and said” Well, OK – but he better not screw up” – and look what we got! Bush is probably the worst President – possibly – in our entire history. He has taken my Republican party so far right I don’t even recognize it any more (nor do any one of my at least 50 Republican associatesm about 90% of whom are voting for Kerry).
Simon Rippon
Al Maviva: One pound of that explosive has been known to bring down an airliner. Three quarters of a million pounds of it have gone missing and presumably fallen into the hands of real, actual terrorists, not merely potential threats. You missed the point: this is dangerous stuff, and you’d better take that loss seriously. No matter how much of it hasn’t been lost (yet).
Dean
Simon:
I’ll happily retract the term “Lefty” if YOU familiarize yourself w/ the North Korean situation that you blithely comment on.
The nuclear materials left behind in North Korea were the plutonium rods of graphite-type reactors eminently suited to producing bomb-grade material. The types of reactors we were supposed to be BUILDING for them were light-water reactors which have fuel rods that are harder (but not impossible) to reprocess.
Deterrence? You might deter North Korea from attacking the South, but how do you deter North Korea from providing nuclear materials to third parties like al-Qaeda?
There is nothing, of course, to have kept Kim Jong-il from taking the initial rods and providing them to al-Qaeda, any more than there was anything other than the word of Saddam Hussein to keep the HMX and RDX from going to al-Qaeda.
Which brings up the question of when this material was lost. What is quite unclear is whether the three-quarters of a million pounds were in there at the time of the start of the war. What we DO know is from the IAEA itself, that long before the war began, _30_ tons of military high explosive had been removed by Saddam “for peaceful purposes”.
http://www.boston.com/news/daily/14/iraq_elbaradei_text.htm
Yup, that’s an official IAEA report on this. Gee, I guess Saddam would NEVER EVER EVER EVER have passed that stuff along to any terrorists, eh?
As for this “one pound could bring down an airliner,” fer cryin’ out loud, how many pounds of TNT does it take to bring down an airliner? Hint: RDX is about 1.6X as energetic as nitroglycerin. NOT an order of magnitude, NOT substantially more powerful. So, please, that is fear-mongering in the worst-sense.
Now, is the loss of 300+ tons bad? Of course it is—but to suggest that this is somehow the end of the world or somesuch is simply silly. To be in such high dudgeon, when Saddam was openly taking stuff according to the IAEA’s own reports in the period when UNSCR 1441 was in effect, let’s just say I see a slight double-standard here.
John Cole
Charlegmane: YOU can’t even get past one without passing flasehoods:
1)the ammo dumps were not protected at the beginning of the occupation – ergo, a lot of the material being used against out troops has come from poor military planning.
There is absolutely no evidence that the ammo was in the dumps when we reached them. None. There was ample time for the explosives to be removed as part of a pre-invasion strategy from Saddam Hussein.
Some questions you my want to ask- why didn’t the IAEA warn about these explosives PRIOR to the onset of the ground war? Go back to the DNC and get the updated talking points.
Simon- You fired and missed in your opening declaration as well.
Semtex was what is known to take down planes with only one pound. These explosives are the same as TNT. Also, that is pretty stupiod way to guage the destructive force of explosives. Geese flying through cockpit windows have been known to bring down a plane. Birds flying into jet intakes have wrecked planes.
Now, I ask you: How explosive are geese in relation to tnt or semtex?
BAck to the DNC with you. This story is crumbling around the usual suspects, and by Friday everyone in the country except the kool-aid drinkers will see this as another attempted hit piece. The only thing missing are forged documents.
Ricky
Cripes…..Chris Matthews is still passing this off as a legit story and wondering how this October surprise will affect Bush.
Wow…….I thought the press couldn’t get more biased than ’92. Was I ever wrong….
Al Maviva
Simon,
So a single pound of HE has been known to bring down an airliner. Big fuckin’ deal. HE is quite a bit different from the raw materials used to make HE – and the raw materials are the stuff that has gone missing. Unless the insurgency has a munitions factory – not an old dude with a pestle and some wire-cutters, but a legit manufacturing plant, it’s highly unlikely that this stuff is what is being used to blow up our troops. If anybody gave a shit about finding it, they’d do well to check in Damascus.
As for the canard about a single pound of the stuff being able to take out a plane – well, maybe post-manufacture that’s true. That isn’t enough to cause a crisis, however, since a single well-placed seagull has been known to bring down airliners, not to mention a single hijacker with a single 9mm pistol. Thousands or hundreds of thousands of tons of HE are floating around the world legally and illegally, so going into a panic about a half-kilo of anything of that sort is paranoia of the most insanely overreactive type. You might as well panic about the profusion of seaguls near our coastal airports – especially given the seagulls proven track record of downing planes.
I repeat: the only reason anybody gives a shit about this story is it’s a nice soundbite to beat Bush with. I’d recommend you drop down to the next item on the list that you downloaded from Joe Lockharts (or David Brock’s) website.
Sandi
Forget the imbeded NBC reporter. Take it from military personel that were there.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerryspot.asp
From yet another Kerry Spot reader with a “.mil” e-mail address:
You are correct in your bottom line conclusion. Here is a second follow up.
I was serving as a [identifying information removed by the Kerry Spot] staff member during the time in question. The Commander on the site had complete real time intelligence on what to expect and possibly find at the Al-QaQaa depot. The ordinance in question was not found when teams were sent in to inspect and secure the area. When this information was relayed, Operational plans were adjusted and the unit moved forward. Had the ordinance in question been discovered, a security team would have been left in place.
More from a Kerry Spot reader with a “.mil” e-mail address, stating he was among the soldiers who secured Al QaQaa on April 10th with the 101st:
I can tell you what happened at my squad level. When we arrived there, humvees with Mark-19’s and other mounted weapons immediately secured the parameter with appropriate manpower backup. On the foot level we broke up into squads and went building to building and cleared them; mind you, we couldn’t do them all. But we found what had been typical finds, caches of AK-47’s, artillery rounds and bullets. There was absolutely no talk of a big find, and what I could sense no worries of anything that should have been there. Of course, we were still worried about the possibilities of chemical weapons but they never panned out.
I am a little perturbed at the gross mischaracterization of what went on there. From what I remember of the NBC crew, they did not go out with us, and they may have in fact been asked to not to go on the search with us, due to the dangers that may have possibily come up. Now this part is my opinion, but don’t you think that if they had gone out with us they would have video?
charlemagne
When CBS interviewed the commander of the unit that visited al Qaqaa with that NBC news crew on April 10th, they heard the following …
The commander of the first unit into the area told CBS he did not search it for explosives or secure it from looters. “We were still in a fight,” he said. “our focus was killing bad guys.” He added he would have needed four times more troops to search and secure all the ammo dumps he came across.
This really is the same issue, the heart of the matter: the lack of a sufficient number of troops early on to secure critical infrastructure and facilities. And it seems to be one to which Bremer’s given quite a bit of thought.
from:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_24.php#003800
Ricky
Wow, Josh Marshall, the guy who collaborated with CBS on the false document story.
I’m convinced!
Mikey
Ends of wars are always messy. If anyone thinks that the Army, Marines, Royal Army – and the respective governments weren’t aware of that, then there isn’t any point in continuing this discussion.
Soldiers are humans. There likely were plans to gaurd as much of the ammo store as possible – do you seriously think the Defense Department planners didn’t think of that? Sometimes, these things don’t go off as well as planned, you know, “The best laid plans of mice and men?”
The scenario for the war was too rosy? I also remember the anti-war scenarios being so gloomy. They didn’t happen either.
There were other alternatives to war? There always is an alternative to fighting. It’s called “not fighting.” In the instant case, based on the information that was commonly available, I thought war was the best option. Based on the information that has come to light about Iraq’s WMD programs and the individual and national bribery going on between Iraq and members of the Security Council I am even more convinced that war was the correct option. Saddam had to go and he wasn’t going quietly.
I’m sorry if the United States has not hit the level of God-like perfection in all of its actions, but I mostly feel sorry for you. If perfection is your standard then you are bound to remain a bitter, disappointed person for the rest of your life.
Simon Rippon
John Cole responds:
>Semtex was what is known to take >down planes with only one pound. >These explosives are the same as >TNT. Also, that is pretty >stupiod way to guage the >destructive force of explosives. >Geese flying through cockpit >windows have been known to bring >down a plane. Birds flying into >jet intakes have wrecked planes.
>
>Now, I ask you: How explosive >are geese in relation to tnt or >semtex?
The facts: The lost RDX & HMX explosive are not “the same as” TNT; though all of these are high explosives, TNT is harder to detonate. RDX and HMX may be used to make semtex and other plastic explosives, but they can be used alone.
I’m not sure what you hope to acheive by the comparison with TNT; maybe the thought is that if Bush incompetence hadn’t put these explosives into the laps of terrorists, they could have easily just gone and bought (widely-used) TNT from elsewhere? Maybe so, but TNT (1) isn’t as easy to use in bombs, and (2) isn’t all that easy to get hold of, which explains why the IRA spent decades making fertilizer bombs instead of buying TNT.
Onto the pedantry: Obviously my *point* was that it’s *not difficult* to bring down an aircraft with a pound of this material (one reason it’s not difficult, of course, is that thanks to Bush inaction, air freight is still not properly scanned here in the US). On the other hand, it’s quite difficult for terrorists to attack our aircraft with geese, or these days with box knives or hand guns. I can only put your reponses down to silliness or to wilful obtuseness.
Once more; if the explosives disappeared after the troops arrived, we have to put the loss down to poor planning, to not haing enough troops on the ground to mount this kind of invasion, and thus to negligence. More evidence is mounting that this was in fact the case, though you won’t find it reported properly on this blog, which is in such a hurry to prove a “media conspiracy” that it’s blind to even investigating the facts properly; more prominence is given to bizarre conspiracy theories about Russian special forces than to film records from US media sources that show the IAEA seals in place when the troops arrived.
If the explosives disappeared after the invasion, but before the troops arrived and secured the site, the war planners can be expected to have known about this risk. Quite predictably, we and especially the troops, contractors, and humanitarian assistants in Iraq are in danger because of it. It’s one more piece of evidence to go by when you want to decide whether the war made us safer, and whether we were lied to when we were told it certainly would.
Dean seems to have made up his mind already about this:
> there was [nothing]
> other than the word of Saddam
> Hussein to keep the HMX and RDX > from going to al-Qaeda.
Which is true. But there’s also nothing other than the word of *any* of the world’s military and political leaders to keep their weapons from terrorists. We obviously can’t (nor should we) invade them all. So how do we decide who has *intentions* to pass their weapons on except by going on the evidence? Despite the best efforts of Bush and all of you, to date there has been *not a single piece* of credible evidence presented to show that Saddam Hussein intended to do any such thing.