The imbedded NBC reporter you used before now says that the weapons depot wasn't searched. Of course, that shouldn't stop you from spreading disinformation.Right, which is why the troops searched it when they got there
That was the producer and all she said was that she saw the troops leave from where she was and go look at the site. Sounds like a search to me.
They were there for 24 hours. I'm sure the facilities which the IAEA identified as containing those particular high explosives would have been the first ones sought out. And again, the IAEA can't confirm that one of those two types of explosives was even there before the war started.
Bottom line is all of this is old news and it was desperation that brought it up again. Chalk that up to apathy. In other words....lets scare 'em!
The bigger story is that it is becoming apparent that, just like in the CBS fiasco, the Times, CBS, and Kerry campaigns were complicit in this last minute charade.
You don't have to search for 400 tons of explosives...it's either there or it's not. It wasn't.
Now, that just plain makes sense!
So you thought that the guys who just got done shooting at us should be asked to turn around and join rank? Talk about asking for a bullet in the back of the head.we disbanded the Iraqi army instead of coopting it.
The US generals were working out a deal with some officers of the Iraqi army before Bremer called it off.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/21/in...nal/21war.html
Debate Lingering on Decision to Dissolve the Iraqi Military
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: October 21, 2004
When Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus flew to Baghdad on June 14, 2003, he had a blunt message for the American-led occupation authority. As the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, General Petraeus had been working tirelessly to win the support of Iraqis in Mosul and the neighboring provinces in northern Iraq.
But the authority's decree to abolish the Iraqi Army and to forgo paying 350,000 soldiers had jolted much of Iraq. Riots had broken out in cities. Just the day before, 16 of General Petraeus's soldiers had been wounded trying to put down a violent demonstration.
Arriving at the huge Abu Ghraib North Palace for a ceremony, General Petraeus spied Walter B. Slocombe, an adviser to L. Paul Bremer III, who headed the authority. Sidling up to him, General Petraeus said that the decision to leave the soldiers without a livelihood had put American lives at risk.
More than a year later, Mr. Bremer's disbanding of the Iraqi Army still casts a shadow over the occupation of Iraq. The American military had been counting on using Iraqi soldiers to help rebuild the country and impose order along its borders. Instead, as a violent insurgency convulsed the nation, United States forces found themselves deprived of a way to put an Iraqi face on the occupation.
While Mr. Bremer soon reversed himself on paying salaries to the ex-soldiers, his decision to formally dissolve the Iraqi military and methodically build a new one, battalion by battalion, still ranks as one of the most contentious issues of the post-war.
Mr. Slocombe argues that the move was necessary to establish an Iraqi military that was not tainted by corruption and was acceptable to ethnic groups that had long been repressed by Saddam Hussein's military. He also says that it was the only possible course because so many Iraqi soldiers had fled their posts and drifted back into the population and military bases had been picked clean by looters.
But senior American generals were privately urging a much different approach, according to interviews with military and civilian officials. Top commanders were meeting secretly with former Iraqi officers to discuss the best way to rebuild the force and recall Iraqi soldiers back to duty when Mr. Bremer arrived in Baghdad with his plan.
"It was absolutely the wrong decision," said Col. Paul Hughes of the Army, who served as an aide to Jay Garner, a retired three-star general and the first civilian administrator of Iraq. "We changed from being a liberator to an occupier with that single decision,'' he said. "By abolishing the army, we destroyed in the Iraqi mind the last symbol of sovereignty they could recognize and as a result created a significant part of the resistance."
[read above link for more]
Wow, another "fluff" piece from the NYT.
A lot of those same army thugs that article is bemoaning the loss of were people who were pointing guns at Iraqi people and telling them to go shoot at American troops.
But hey, we can work with them[/convoluted logic]
Some of these guys will go to and back to protect George Bush. The Al Qa-Qaa complex is the biggest in Iraq with many bunkers, so it is easy to believe that the 101st could have spent 24 hours at the complex and unless they had explicit orders to search for these specific explosives, could have completely missed them.
We know from the imbedded NBC reporter whom the Right-wingers themselves tried to as a alibi for this fiasco that the 101st didn't go into search mode when they arrived at Al Qa-Qaa. They certainly didn't take any steps to secure the complex despite the presense of a substantial amount of arsenal. It's uncertain were the 101st even knew that these volitale explosives were even there.
To make matters worse, the administration tried to keep this from the Iraqi interm Government so that they wouldn't report the loss to the International Atomic Nuclear Agency, and thus make it public before the Nov 2nd presidential election. This administration put politics above the safety of our troops, and allowed insurgents to gain possession of explosives that could be used in Nuclear weapons.
Kansas Citysnip>
"There was an utter lack of curiosity to follow up on what was well-known to the U.N.," said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector.
"There was a systematic failure of the military, which overran the country and left all these explosives behind without protecting its rear," he said. "The military should have had the sense to either secure high explosives and armaments or blow them up as they went through."
The Al-Qaqaa explosives included HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in repeated bomb attacks on the U.S.-led multinational force.
<snip>
"Our greatest concern from both a proliferation standpoint and from a standpoint of danger to human beings was Al-Qaqaa," the IAEA's Fleming said.
Weapons experts are questioning why Al-Qaqaa - once a key facility in Saddam Hussein's effort to build a nuclear bomb - wasn't under 24-hour guard.
The facility was considered "the pre-eminent site for high explosive stockpiles," a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Well, so much for Scotty's theory that it was no big deal, they could have gotten these kinds of weapons anywhere. BTW, has Scotty been allowed to talk to the press today? There's no transcript up at the White House site. I guess they realize the more they open their mouths, the deeper they sink.
Yet another confirmation that coalition troops did not consider guarding the Al Qa-Qaa military depot a major priority in the war...
Boston.comBy Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | October 26, 2004
WASHINGTON -- Iraqi officials reported that thieves looted 377 tons of powerful explosives from an unguarded site after the US-led invasion last year, the top UN nuclear official said yesterday. And a former weapons inspector said he had counted about 100 other unguarded weapons sites that may have been stripped of munitions for use in the wave of attacks against US soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
<snip>
''This is not just any old warehouse in Iraq that happened to have explosives in it; this was a leading location for developing nuclear weapons before the first Gulf War," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project, a nonprofit organization that has followed Iraq's attempts to procure weapons of mass destruction for more than a decade. ''The fact that it had been left unsecured is very, very discouraging. It would be like invading the US in to order to get rid of and not securing Los Alamos or Livermore ."
<snip>
''The military did not view guarding these sites as their responsibility," David Kay said, recalling that he witnessed US troops guarding the gates of the Tuwaitha nuclear facility while Iraq civilians carried away radioactive pipes and metal drums through other exits.
''There just were not enough troops to guard the number of sites. It was just crazy."
At the time, there was no major insurgency and US military officials felt the war had been won, Kay said, so the Department of Defense did not fear that the weapons that disappeared in widespread looting would be used against US soldiers.
Hey Bozo, the explosives were GONE. Why guard an empty building?
Last edited by Yonivore; 10-27-2004 at 07:51 AM.
Funny...
one of the reasons the US "rushed" the war was that we had clear and unequivocal sattelite recon evidence that Sadaam was gutting and dispersing the weapons stored in bunker complexes just like this one...
yet the Kerry camp wants to criticize that we didn't dither and negotiate LONGER and thus allowing MORE of these complexes to be gutted and the contents hidden...
am I the only one that sees the inconsistency in this position?
If there is anything consistent about Kerry and the Democrats, it is their inconsistency.
Oh sure, but don't let logic and reason dissuade you.
Hussein wasn't a threat because he didn't have devastating weapons which he could put in the hands of terrorists but the Bush administration ed up because the devastating weapons Hussein had ended up missing. Makes sense to me.
Once upon a time Kerry advocated a broad multi-pronged strategy for dealing with Islamofascist terrorism which also included addressing the threat Hussein posed to the United States while we dealt with the al Qaeda terrorist network. Now he makes the war on Islamofascist terrorism out to be solely about eliminating bin Ladin, as if that would end the terrorist threat.
"Hussein wasn't a threat because he didn't have devastating weapons which he could Put in the hands of terrorists but the Bush administration ed up because the devastating weapons Hussein had ended up missing. Makes sense to me."
The explosives that shrub/rummy/cia lost were not weaponized or munitions, just (very powerful) explosives, tied down/locked up by the inspectors/sanctions for 10 years, ie, effectively safe from enemy hands.
In that state, they represented no threat to anybody, esp not the "immediate threat to USA" that shrub lied about, esp no threat as compared to the real and immediate terrorist enemies outside of Iraq. Saddam couldn't deliver Scuds to Isreal with any effect in 1991, how was he to weaponize and deliver these explosives in 2003 against the USA 1000's of KM distant?
Now that shrub let the explosives get into enemy hands as part of his bogus war that disrupted the static, effective debilitation of Iraq, the explosives are now being weaponized, and used to kill Americans and Iraqis in Iraq, and very probably exported to the entire terrorist networks.
The big boom of the cartoon in this thread is reallly 1000's of little booms in Iraq, and the big boom(s) from these lost explosives will be heard for years to come against US embassies, ships, buildings, installations, and allies.
shrub's bogus Iraq war is a recruitment and explosives/munitions-equipping campaign for terrorists inside and outside of Iraq. America and world is absolutely not safer from the bogus Iraq war.
Hussein could have easily passed on those explosives to whoever he pleased. The IAEA didn't certify that one type of high explosive that had been there previously was there in early March of 2003 before the invasion.
What exactly did the IAEA and the UN offer as a deterrent? An angry letter?
In the aftermath of the 1st Gulf War the UN had an opportunity to destroy those weapons but they didn't because they bought Hussein's bogus argument that the explosives were needed for "mining" purposes.
Also Hussein was buying his way out of the sanctions scheme and if he 'came clean' about his WMD programs which not even his own generals knew the true state of then what would have been the justification to maintain a military presence in the region? There wouldn't be and your side would argue that Hussein wasn't a threat and we should reallocate our resources elsewhere (which is precisely what Hussein wanted all along).
And again, Hussein supposedly didn't have devastating weaponry that concerned us but Bush lost the devastating weaponry that should concern us? Consistency, nay is you.
Last edited by Marcus Bryant; 10-27-2004 at 01:04 PM.
By giving it to those who could. Duh.Saddam couldn't deliver Scuds to Isreal with any effect in 1991, how was he to weaponize and deliver these explosives in 2003 against the USA 1000's of KM distant?
BUSH REBUKES KERRY OVER 'MISSING EXPLOSIVES' ATTACK
Wed Oct 27 2004 11:59:11 ET
Bush at rally in Pennsylvania:
"After repeatedly calling Iraq the wrong war, and a diversion, Senator Kerry this week seemed shocked to learn that Iraq is a dangerous place, full of dangerous weapons..."
"If Senator Kerry had his way... Saddam Hussein would still be in power. He would control all of those weapons and explosives and could share them with his terrorist friends. Now the senator is making wild charges about missing explosives, when his top foreign policy adviser admits, quote, 'We do not know the facts.' Think about that: The senator is denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts..."
"Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site. This investigation is important and it's ongoing. And a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief."
I hope that was not directed at me. As I have said before, we don't know the facts. It is therefore, premature of anyone to make such accusations at this time. If it comes out BUsh lied about something, then let's fault him. I don't know how you can say he lied, since he never even made a comment about the explosives in the first place. I can't be sure how you can fault him either. Did Bush directly order the troops to leave the stuff lying out in the open? If you can find that then you have something. But you're just not going to find that at this time.
I highly doubt that stuff was there or had been there for years. Something like that would probably already have been moved or distributed long before the US moved in. It would make no sense that is was just left there. In a country full of AK47s and RPG, how hard do you think it is to get a few pounds of HE? They probably have that in every bizaar in the country. I want a little something before I go flying off the handle. It's too bad Saddam isn't running for president. He'd probably do better than Nader.
Rather than shrub addressing the issue of the 380 tons of explosive HE lost, he spins an attack on Kerry.
shrub and his accomplices say "we don't know, we need facts". GMAFB
The facts that are known:
1. the inspectors saw the there in Jan 03, or at latest, in Dec 02. It was perhaps still there in Mar 03.
2. the wasn't there in April 03.
3. shrub and his army were going to war well before Dec 02.
Then, how the could they take their ing high-tech surveillance eyes off 380 tons of high explosives that had been known about for 10 years??
How come US commandos weren't watching that depot with their low-tech eyeballs?
How could the logistics of moving 380 tons of explosives NOT be detected by The World's Mightiest, High-Techy-est Miliatary, in full battle dress, just couple hours' drive away?
Exactly! Because it was already gone! We don't know that it was there. We don't know that the inspectors that were there know their ass from a hole in the ground. People keep jumping the gun on this issue. It's easier to say, "I'm sorry." than ask for permission.
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