New York Times article

[DrSmellThis]

Large

Explosives Cache Disappears From Iraq

"The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and

international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish

buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive

former military installations."

"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."

So how do 380 tons of bombs we

know about and are responsible for just disappear?! This was one of the largest munitions caches in Iraq, to be

sure. We knew about it for years, and every inch of the place was mapped by satellite. The IAEA had warned the Bush

administration to guard the site. The AP wrote elsewhere:

"At the Pentagon, an official who monitors

developments in Iraq said U.S.-led coalition troops had searched Al Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March

2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives were intact. Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces, the

official said, speaking on condition of anonymity."

How incompetent is that? Weren't we there to look for

weapons? Here is the reprinted Times article:



http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/196686_ira

q25.html (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/196686_iraq25.html)

[a.k.a.]

October 26, 2004
The winner of

the contest for the worst response to the Al Qaqaa scandal goes to...
Posted October 26, 2004 02:49

PM

Andrew Card may be a notorious Bush hack, but I have to admire his creativity.

White House

Chief of Staff Andrew Card was in Albuquerque on Monday calling reports of missing explosives in Iraq an "old

story," and saying Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is exploiting the issue for political

purposes.

"I don't know why it's been drug up now," Card told reporters during a campaign swing in New

Mexico. "I don't give a lot of credibility to the story. The story is out there, it's not new. It's an old story

rehashed."

[...]

"Yesterday's news over and over again, that's John Kerry's role," Card

said. "He hasn't talked too much about the future. He's spent a lot of time dwelling on the past."

I

couldn't make this stuff up if I tried. The Bush administration is warned about a key weapons facility before the

invasion, but they ignored the warnings. The facility had 377 tons of deadly explosives, which are now gone. The

director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, took the unusual step on Monday of

writing to the United Nations Security Council to report that the explosives were gone. The president, according to

the White House press secretary, just found out about this within the last 10 days.

But none of this matters,

says White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, because it's an "old story." See? The munitions were looted 18 months

ago! What possible reason could we have to talk about it now? Never mind all the deadly explosives in the hands of

insurgents and terrorists; let's talk about "the future" and how safe Bush will make us.

The mind

reels.

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/002864.html

[bjf]

Bush has to go. Anyone see Frontline

last night?

[DrSmellThis]

Didn't see it. What was it

about?

***
To put this in perspective of how dangerous this screw up is, these were the very same explosives

a mere pound of which terrorists used to bring down the airliner over Scotland -- and the same explosives

typically used to detonate nuclear bombs. That's enough munitions to bring down 800,000 airliners --

800 a year for the next millenium. Gone. For practical purposes, terrorists never have to worry again

about having enough explosives. How reassuring for them.

These were powerful WMD components historically used by

terrorists. According to our government, we went there to prevent this sort of thing from falling into the wrong

hands, to find and secure this sort of thing. We found almost nothing, but perhaps the largest stockpile of what we

did know was there was never guarded and "turns up missing".

To get all that out of there would be a huge,

difficult, coordinated, industrial undertaking. Iraqi facility security has been notoriously lax in general under

the occupation, as Kerry noted in the debates, but oil fields have been meticulously, tenaciously guarded.



Bush on the campaign trail has never mentioned this "little accident" one single time, and now provides no

response to the American people -- except complete silence. How presidential.

[bjf]

Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell, Chaney; went

through the whole war process. Really great...basically, they didn't listen to a couple of high ranking defense

guys who testified that we'd need hundreds of thousands troops after the war, and basically they all focused on the

battles. They tried to discredit those guys and also fired one of them.

Now look at the

situtation.

Also, there was a lot of disagreement between powell, chaney and rumsfeld.

[DrSmellThis]

ht

tp://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=5&u=/ap/20041028/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_weapons_iaea_5 (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=5&u=/ap/20041028/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_weapons_iaea_5)

[DrSmellThis]

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