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IMHO, Bush needs to directly address this issue and take responsibility.
And we'd still be free to fly over and bomb the out those sites like before.
Great.
IMHO, Bush needs to directly address this issue and take responsibility.
As the search for a rationalization for war continues ...
The US and the UN knew about these explosives. Compared to the alleged WMD threat, they didn't even rate a footnote in Powell's UN speech. They were a low enough priority to not be properly guarded after the invasion, as much due to that the fact they were "conventional" rather than WMD as due to Rummy's misguided attempt to use as little manpower as possible. Yet when there are stockpiles of conventional weapons and whatnot, do you simply let any group of Iraqi have at them? Is this supposed to make me feel safer? Or make the troops safer?
Bush keeps telling us he'll keep us safe, but snafus like this isn't much of a confidence-builder in his promise.
So Bush said, "Don't guard those explosives!" ???? Show me that!
Iraq arms report omitted key fact
The Associated Press
Arms hunter Charles Duelfer's report left out the crucial fact that the U.N. Security Council had planned controls over Iraqi weapons for years to come, U.N. officials say.
The council, led by the United States, had decreed that inspections and disarmament of Iraq were to be followed by tough, open-ended monitoring.
“It's been a little disturbing,” said Demetrius Perricos, chief U.N. weapons inspector. “All the arguments say that when sanctions ended, Saddam Hussein would have had a free hand. By the council's own resolutions that wasn't so.”
In his Oct. 6 report, CIA adviser Duelfer discredited President Bush's stated rationale for invading Iraq, saying his Iraq Survey Group found no weapons of mass destruction there. But he suggested Iraq might still have posed a threat.
Hussein “wanted to recreate Iraq's WMD capability — which was essentially destroyed in 1991 — after sanctions were removed,” the report said, though it added that no such formal plan was uncovered.
This Duelfer finding became a new focus for the Bush administration. Vice President Cheney told one audience Oct. 7: “As soon as the sanctions were lifted, (Hussein) had every intention of going back” to building weapons.
An academic expert on the Iraq inspections regime was among those disputing this, noting that lifting the U.N. embargo would not have opened that door. “This is not the case under Resolution 687 and later ones,” said Yale University's James S. Sutterlin.
Years of Security Council resolutions preceding the 2003 U.S.-British invasion mandated that U.N. arms monitors would remain in Iraq once Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction programs were shut down — as Duelfer acknowledged they were in the 1990s. With unusual powers and the best technology, the monitors in this second stage would “prevent Iraq from developing new capabilities,” said a blueprint for the Ongoing Monitoring and Verification program.
Resolutions also stipulated that U.N. trade sanctions would not be lifted until the ongoing monitoring program was in place — and lifted then only for civilian goods.
The Security Council, where Washington has a veto, would decide how long to keep monitoring in place. Perricos said it was expected to last years. “You couldn't have disarmament and stop monitoring afterward,” he said.
In 19 pages of “Key Findings,” however, while raising the prospect of future threats, the Duelfer report ignores this plan to prevent them.
Here's another thought...
Perhaps we did know about the explosives, knew people were taking them, and have been watching from above to find out where they're going?
Maybe even snuck some homing beacons into some of the containers...
How about a lit fuse?
IMHO, I think it's funny how some say "Bush is doing a great job because there hasn't been a terrorist strike since 9/11!", but when it comes to mistakes or issues they don't even want to mention Bush being responsible.
Who are the people you are refering to?
Putting this in some perspective...
Please resume your rationalization of how it would have been preferable for Hussein to have remained in power, free to do as he pleased and in control of that arsenal. A rationalization of Kerry and Edwards' view at the time that a Hussein in possession of WMDs cons uted a grave threat to the United States and had to be removed, by force if necessary, should also be considered. Thank you.http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/...0410251421.asp
HEY, WHAT ABOUT THE 248,000 TONS OF EXPLOSIVES DESTROYED OR CAPTURED?
Back in June - nearly four months ago - the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Although the world's attention has focused on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, scant attention has been paid to the mountains of weapons of conventional destruction unearthed in Iraq.
The bombs, rockets, grenades, cannon s s and bullets amount to the world's fourth-largest stockpile of weapons, Army Corps of Engineers officials say. An estimated 600,000 tons of munitions with markings from all over the world, including the United States, and some so old that the weapons that fired them are no longer made, were stashed in Saddam's innumerable caches.
To date, 110,000 tons have been destroyed. An additional 138,000 tons are stored behind protective barriers.
That adds up to 248,000 tons of explosives destroyed or captured! And those numbers are almost certainly much higher today.
Is it a bad thing if these 350 tons of explosives are out there? Sure. But there is nothing in the Times story to confirm that the explosives were secure when the war began. This IAEA report, conducted in January 2003, appears to be the last time any outsider could confirm the stuff was there. (The Times story quotes letters and memos from IAEA officials speculating that the explosives were taken during the looting, but this is just guessing, really.)
There is also this section:
By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of roughly 10 bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been leveled by anic blasts, apparently during the war. They presumed some of the HMX had exploded, but that is unclear.
Other HMX bunkers were untouched. Some were damaged but not devastated. I.A.E.A. experts say they assume that just before the invasion the Iraqis followed their standard practice of moving crucial explosives out of buildings, so they would not be tempting targets. If so, the experts say, the Iraqi must have broken seals from the arms agency on bunker doors and moved most of the HMX to nearby fields, where it would have been lightly camouflaged - and ripe for looting.
Also note this section: "As a measure of the size of the stockpile, one large truck can carry about 10 tons, meaning that the missing explosives could fill a fleet of almost 40 trucks."
Forty trucks filled with explosives pulled away from an Iraqi arms depot during the invasion or occupation? Yeah, right. U.S. air power and/or ground forces would have pulverized them. I'd bet a Krispy Kreme doughnut that at least a big chunk of these explosive materials were taken before the war.
UPDATE: If I'm hearing her correctly, CNN's Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr says Defense Department officials think these materials were taken from the site before the invasion began.
Last edited by Marcus Bryant; 10-25-2004 at 05:30 PM.
Conventional weapons/explosives need an army/airforce for delivery.
Just how was Saddam's army/airforce in any shape after :
a butchereous defeat in 1991,
12 years of sanctions,
enslaved in his own airspace,
inspectors crawling everywhere,
satellites scanning his terrain down to the meter (or better),
24x7 US air patrols,
massive US presence in Kuwait and Gulf waters.
to deliver anything against anybody even in his neighborhood, let alone deliver an "immediate" threat to USA?
Iraq was not threat to anybody but its own people, which was NOT a "justification" falsified by shrub before the war.
shrub wanted this war, before taking office, NO MATTER WHAT, when the real threat was/has been/still is Islamic militants everywhere BUT in Iraq.
shrub abused/exploited 9/11 ruthlessly, recklessly for justifying for his own, personal bogus war on Iraq. He's failed commander-in-chief for wasting 1200+ US lives and 1000's of US injuries. Reckless negligence, willful ignorance, murderous incompetence, ideological fantasies, shrub and posse are guilty of manslaughter of US citizens and Iraqis in this bogus war.
Again, that was not sustainable going forward. Hussein was buying his way out of the sanctions. Also, the delivery method which concerned the United States most was an unnconventional drop off in a major US urban center.
Hatred of Bush is not a valid explanation.
So finding 248,000 tons out of 600,000 tons is supposed to make me feel better? 350,000 missing tons of weapons?
Maybe the 350 tons are important because they are special explosives (guaranteed by the IAEA seal, I guess, almost as good as Good Housekeeping). Maybe it is also just the top of the iceberg.
"248,000 tons out of 600,000 tons"
not 248.
380 US tons of HMX/RDX explosive material (not finished weapons like the other 300 odd tons (guns and their ammunition, RPGs, mines, artillery s s, etc, etc). ie, this stuff is truly capable of mass destruction, taking out an ocean liner, a container port, a WTC, etc. Try that level of "massive" destruction with the stockpiles of finished weapons.
"The explosives missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe. The Iraqi letter identified the vanished stockpile as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, which stands for "high melting point explosive," 141.2 metric tons of RDX, which stands for "rapid detonation explosive," among other designations, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, which stands for "pentaerythritol tetranitrate."
In short, the one and only ing KNOWN-before-the-war, inventoried, found, inspector-monitored stockpile of WMD-ful material is now proliferated into enemy hands. reckless incompetence. This fiasco really shows how fake, trumped up shrub's WMD justification was. Shrub didn't find the WMD he claimed were there, and then he lost the WMD materiel even the inspectors knews was there. Absolutely insane.
Detestation of shrub is based on his misconduct in office (which misconduct he lies about and has caused loss of life) which shows how inconsequential is the misconduct of blow job or two (which cost no lives). The Repugs spent more energy, were more relentes in pursuing Whitewater and blowjobs than they were in deciding to start a ing bogus war.
You know, for all of your hate and outrage over this, I haven't seen conclusive proof that Saddam and his cronies didn't scatter this stuff BEFORE we crossed the Iraqi border.
Perhaps we should wait to see the final results before you go off like a whiny, nagging little .
"I haven't seen conclusive proof that Saddam..."
The Pentagon and the WH both admit the explosives were there AFTER the US invasion.
Post your source on that "admission," and verbatim please.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/in...c96cfb25d97926
Tracking the Weapons: Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq
October 25, 2004
By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
....
"The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be
under American military control but is now a no man's land,
still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United
Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for
many years, but White House and Pentagon officials
acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the
American-led invasion last year."
...
No, the quote from the "White House and Pentagon officials" that led to that report.
Because, it doesn't say coalition forces had actually taken control of the facility yet. And, it doesn't say how long "after" the invasion the stuff went missing...
I note that nowhere do you see that coalition forces controlled the facility when the explosives were stolen or went missing.
Maybe they can blame this on Jayson Blair. Something to think about the next time you read anything from the NY Times.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerryspot.asp
NBC BLOWS A HOLE IN THE KERRY ATTACK ABOUT THE EXPLOSIVES [10/25 09:09 PM]
Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News pretty much dismantled the New York Times attack on behalf of Kerry today.
NBC News: Miklaszewski: “April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq.” (NBC’s “Nightly News,” 10/25/04)
If Jill Abramson, managing editor of the New York Times, had a shred of concern over her paper's reputation for getting the facts right never mind objectivity or fairness, she would be running the correction - or at least this blatantly contradictory information - in the giant headline font and above-the-fold location that today's story got. But I guess the interest in echoing the sentiments of Maureen Dowd is more important than getting it right at the Old Gray Lady.
I'm a republican and a Bush supporter and I can admit this was a major up. I don't know why some of you are so clouded by your political beliefs that you can't see the reality.
No, I'm not saying that Bush personally told people, "Don't guard the explosives." But YES, it's the responsibility of the administration to limit these kind of mistakes. So they must take the blame.
Same thing with the trained Iraqis who were executed. That's on the adminstration. They should have been closely guarded/protected and they weren't.
These are catastrophic mistakes that shouldn't have happened. Sack up, take responsibility, and do more to safeguard things like this from happening in the future.
If it happened as the Kerry camp...er, The New York Times reported it did then sure, take responsibility. But apparently that was not the case.
More...
Oops. Snafus like this don't give me much confidence in the criticisms of Bush I read daily in the NY Times.http://www.drudgereport.com/nbcw.htm
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX MON OCT 25 2004 22:45:05 ET XXXXX
NBCNEWS: HUGE CACHE OF EXPLOSIVES VANISHED FROM SITE IN IRAQ -- AT LEAST 18 MONTHS AGO -- BEFORE TROOPS ARRIVED
The NYTIMES urgently reported on Monday how the Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives are now missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.
Jumping on the TIMES exclusive, Dem presidential candidate John Kerry blasted the Bush administration for its failure to "guard those stockpiles."
"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration," Kerry said.
In an election week rush:
**ABCNEWS Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 4 Times
**CBSNEWS Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 7 Times
**MSNBC Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 37 Times
**CNN Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 50 Times
But tonight, NBCNEWS reported, once: 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.
It is not clear why the NYTIMES failed to report the cache had been missing for 18 months -- and was reportedly missing before troops even arrived.
"The U.S. Army was at the sight one day after the liberation and the weapons were already gone," a top Republican blasted from Washington late Monday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers.
Developing...
-----------------------------------------------------------
Filed By Matt Drudge
Reports are moved when cir stances warrant
http://www.drudgereport.com for updates
(c)DRUDGE REPORT 2004
Not for reproduction without permission of the author
Last edited by Marcus Bryant; 10-25-2004 at 10:09 PM.
Here's more from the Drudge Report:
Classic!
Link
Can you say
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