The Myth of the Missing Explosives: A Shameless Lie

[kg_veteran]

THE MYTH OF THE 'MISSING EXPLOSIVES': A SHAMELESS LIE

BY RALPH PETERS
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October 28, 2004 -- SHOULD the United Na tions decide who be comes our president? Sen. John Kerry wouldn't mind. He's shamelessly promoting the lies that the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency is telling about Iraq.

A devious IAEA report suggests that 400 tons of explosives were spirited away by our enemies under the noses of our Keystone-Cops troops after the fall of Baghdad. The document just happened to be released in the closing days of our presidential election. Purely a coincidence, of course. Brought to you by those selfless U.N. bureaucrats who failed in Iraq and are now failing in Iran.

Since Kerry's willing to blame our troops for a scandal invented by America-haters, let's look at the story the military way, by the numbers.

[bOne[/b]: The IAEA claims its inspectors visited the ammo dump at Al-Qaqaa on March 9, 2003, and found the agency's seals intact on bunkers containing sensitive munitions. Unverifiable, but let's assume that much is true.

Two: Faced with an impending invasion, Saddam's forces did what any military would do. They began dispersing ammunition stocks from every storage site that might be a Coalition bombing target. If the Iraqis valued it, they tried to move it. Before the war.

Three: Members of our 3rd Infantry Division — the heroes who led the march to Baghdad — reached the site in question in early April. Despite the pressures of combat, they combed the dump. Nothing was found. Al-Qaqaa was a vast junkyard.

Four: Our 101st Airborne Division assumed responsibility for the sector as the 3ID closed on Baghdad. None of the Screaming Eagles found any IAEA markers — even one would have been a red flag to be reported immediately.

Five: At the end of May, military teams searching for key Iraqi weapons scoured Al-Qaqaa. They found plenty of odds and ends — the detritus of war — but no IAEA seals. And no major stockpiles.

Six: Now, just before Election Day, the IAEA, a discredited organization embarrassed by the Bush administration's decision to call it on the carpet, suddenly realizes that 400 tons of phantom explosives went missing from the dump.

Seven: Even if repeated inspections by U.S. troops had somehow missed this deadly elephant on the front porch, and even if the otherwise-incompetent Iraqis had been so skilled and organized they were able to sneak into Al-Qaqaa and load up 400 tons of Saddam's love-powder, it would have taken a Teamsters' convention to get the job done.

Eight: If the Iraqis had used military transport vehicles of five-ton capacity, it would have required 80 trucks for one big lift, or, say, 20 trucks each making four trips. They would have needed special trolleys, forklifts, handling experts and skilled drivers (explosives aren't groceries). This operation could not have happened either during or after the war, while the Al-Qaqaa area was flooded with U.S. troops.

Nine: We owned the skies. And when you own the skies, you own the roads. We were watching for any sign of organized movement. A gaggle of non-Coalition vehicles driving in and out of an ammo dump would have attracted the attention of our surveillance systems immediately.

Ten: And you don't just drive high explosives cross-country, unless you want to hear a very loud bang. Besides, the Iraqis would have needed to hide those 400 tons of explosives somewhere else. Unless the uploaded trucks are still driving around Iraq.

Eleven: Even if the IAEA told the truth and the Iraqis were stealth-logistics geniuses who emptied the site's ammo bunkers under our noses, the entire issue misses a greater point: 400 tons of explosives amounted to a miniscule fraction of the stocks Saddam had built up. Coalition demolition experts spent months destroying more than 400,000 tons of Iraqi war-making materiel.

Our soldiers eliminated more than a thousand tons of packaged death for every ton the United Nations claims they missed. Does that sound like incompetence? Why hasn't our success been mentioned? Can't our troops get credit for anything?

Twelve: The bottom line is that, if the explosives were ever there, the Iraqis moved them before our troops arrived. There is no other plausible scenario.

Sen. Kerry knows this is a bogus issue. And he doesn't care. He's willing to accuse our troops of negligence and incompetence to further his political career. Of course, he did that once before.

Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace."

[Drbio]

There is hope for the NY Post after all. The bottom line is this quote:

Sen. Kerry knows this is a bogus issue. And he doesn't care. He's willing to accuse our troops of negligence and incompetence to further his political career. Of course, he did that once before.

Kerry is a spineless coward who will step all over our men and women in the armed forces to become elected. He should be publically berated for crap like this.

[seal614]

ahh Hanoi John, up to his usual tricks.

[Mavdog]

Ralph Peters takes the art of moving presumption to fact to a new level. Much of what he claims above is not proving credible.

It appears that there is no "lie" and therefore no "shame":
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Video May Show Explosives at Al-Qaqaa

25 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq (news - web sites) when they first opened the bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels and bearing the markings of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The video taken by KSTP of St. Paul on April 18, 2003, could reinforce suggestions that tons of explosives missing from a munitions installation in Iraq were looted after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The video was broadcast nationally Thursday on ABC.

"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa," David A. Kay, a 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 question of what happened to the tons of explosives has become a major issue in the closing days of the presidential campaign.

Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) says the missing explosives — powerful enough to demolish a building, bring down a jetliner or set off a nuclear weapon — are another example of the Bush administration's poor planning and incompetence in handling the war in Iraq. President Bush (news - web sites) 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 (news - web sites). "The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, I think is at least debatable."

The Pentagon also declassified and released a single image, taken by reconnaissance aircraft or satellite just days before the war, showing two trucks outside one of the dozens of storage bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base.

The particular bunker is not one known to have contained any of the missing explosives, and Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said the image only shows that there was some Iraqi activity at the base when it was taken, on March 17. Di Rita said the image says nothing about what happened to the explosives.

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

John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security, suggested to The Washington Times in an interview that the Russians may have been involved, prompting an angry denial from Moscow.

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

But at issue is whether the weapons were moved before or after U.S. forces occupied that region of the country in early April. No one has been able to provide conclusive evidence either way, although Iraqi officials blamed it on poor U.S. security after Baghdad fell.

The Pentagon has said it's 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.

[FishForLunch]

Iraqi Officials: Explosives May Have Vanished Before Invasion

Officials with the Iraqi agency cited by the New York Times earlier this week as the source for its claim that 380 tons of high explosives went missing from the Al Qaqaa weapons depot after the U.S. liberation now say that the report might be wrong.

"How, where, when [the explosives were] taken, all these questions, we don't have answers," Dr. Rashad M. Omar, Iraq's Minister of Science and Technology, told the Times on Friday.


Mohamed al-Sharaa, who heads up the national monitoring directorate at the ministry, backed Dr. Omar's account, telling the Times: "We don't say it's impossible" that the material was somehow taken out of Al Qaqaa before the American forces came through the area.
Their accounts contradict a document from the Ministry of Science and Technology cited by the Times on Monday, that said hundreds of tons of HMX and RDX explosives were "in this site after April 9 [2003]" - six days after U.S. forces had reached Al Qaqaa.

Yesterday, ABC News broadcast video from its Minneapolis-St Paul affiliate, KSTP-TV, that it said was filmed on April 18, 2003 by reporters embedded with the 101st Airborne Division.

The station claimed they found "bunker after bunker" filled with the now missing explosives.

Oddly, the crates visible in photos posted to KSTP's web site were labeled in English, with no Iraqi markings apparent. The station did not say how many of Al Qaqaa's 32 bunkers it filmed. KSTP did not attempt to quantify the amount of explosives its reporters examined.

Pfc. Ken Dixon, who was with the 101st when it arrived at Al Qaqaa on April 10, 2003, offered a conflicting account, telling the Fox News Channel on Wednesday that the two or three bunkers he searched were for the most part empty.

Satellite photos released by the Pentagon Thursday show heavy truck activity outside the al Qaqaa bunkers in the days before the U.S. invaded.

[Evilmav2]

Nope. From what I understand, the KSTP tape shows a picture of explosives labelled 1.1 D , which is a very broad label used to designate many, many blasting agents (you can buy yourself your very own 1.1 D explosives labels here), and it is only used to designate explosives that have been mixed with a hydrate. In the case of the HMX, RDX, and PETN dry agents that were sealed by the UN inspectors years ago, this label would absolutely not have been the appropriate one, but it would have been for innumerable other explosives stored around Iraq, outside of the mythical '380' tons that the New York Times reported had been 'looted' (although, the NYT's backtracked yesterday, admitting they had no idea whether the explosives were there when the 101st visited the aptly named Al Qaqaa facility, and that the UN only found 3 tons in 2002- that's progress, although they are still trying to ignore the fact that 3ID searched and secured the facility a full six days before the 101st passed through).

This inconclusive videotape is just another pathetic element of the feeble smokescreen being thrown up by a ridiculous, discredited mainstream media, in defense of their ridiculous, discredited 'Missing Explosives', October Surprise. As far as I'm concerned, this election cycle has destroyed any faith that I might have previously held that at least some members of the traditional American press and network news organizations were not irredeemably compromised and corruptly partisan. After witnessing Dan Rather's insidious 'memogate', and now this absurd joke of a 'qaqaagate' , I frankly don't give half a rat's ass what the mainstream press has to say about anything even remotely politically relevant anymore, and when half-way intelligent, left-leaning folks like you persist in using intellectually disingenuous arguments to defend stink like this 'qaqaa' crap, I frankly don't give a rat's ass what y'all have to say either...

[kg_veteran]

The KSTP video is being heralded by a lot of left-wingers (particularly Josh Marshall) as "Game-Set-Match" evidence that the explosives were looted after the invasion. Actually, all that the video proves is that there were some containers present bearing the IAEA seal. What was in those containers, or how much was in those containers, is far from clear.

It's really pretty interesting to me. You have guys like Josh Marshall saying that the evidence is clear that the explosives were looted; you also have guys like Hugh Hewitt saying that the evidence is clear that it was removed beforehand. Personally, I think that you have to look at what we know and then decide what is more plausible.

We know that the IAEA performed their last full inspection of the missing explosives in January of 2003. They also performed a cursory search in early March 2003 when they looked at the containers and determined that the IAEA seals were still there. What was inside the containers at that time is unclear.

We know that the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003. The first United States troops (the 3rd ID) arrived at al Qa Qaa on or about April 4, 2003, and they performed a fairly thorough search of the facilities. We also know that the 101st Airborne arrived on or about April 10, 2003, and that they performed a less thorough search of the facilities. If I recall correctly, one other American unit came through in the early part of May 2003, and then the ISG (Duelfer's outfit) arrived on May 27, 2003, performing a complete inventory of the site.

Is it more plausible that the explosives disappeared sometime between January of 2003 (or even early March of 2003) and April 4, 2003, when the United States troops arrived for the first time at al Qa Qaa, or is it more plausible that the explosives disappeared sometime between April 4, 2003, and May 27, 2003, with American troops on the ground, round-the-clock satellite surveillance, and complete control of the airspace?

Personally, I think it's much more plausible that the explosives were removed beforehand. I find it incredibly hard to believe that "looters" (or even organized enemies) could have moved 380 tons of explosives from the site without the United States noticing and stopping them.

[Evilmav2]

Personally, I think it's much more plausible that the explosives were removed beforehand. I find it incredibly hard to believe that "looters" (or even organized enemies) could have moved 380 tons of explosives from the site without the United States noticing and stopping them.

Oh, considering the incompetence of the Bush administration, I'm sure the rag-tag, Jihadist/Baathist rebels of Iraq would have had no problems organizing a forty-plus truck convoy, to transport 380 tons of coaltion soldier-killing, nuclear explosive-ready HE, to their hiding places...

[Dooby]

FLASH 10.29.01 11:36:56 ET /// Soldier to brief reporters at Pentagon within the hour that he was tasked with removing explosives from al Qaqaa and he and his unit removed 200+ tons... Developing...

[Mavdog]

Originally posted by: Dooby

Soldier Describes Removing Some Explosives

7 minutes ago

By JOHN J. LUMPKIN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - An Army unit removed 250 tons of ammunition from the Al-Qaqaa weapons depot in April 2003 and later destroyed it, the company's former commander said. A Pentagon (news - web sites) spokesman asserted that some was of the same type as the missing explosives that have become a major issue in the presidential campaign.

But those 250 tons were not located under the seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency — as the missing high-grade explosives had been — and spokesman Larry Di Rita could not definitely say whether they were part of the missing 377 tons.

Maj. Austin Pearson, speaking at a press conference at the Pentagon on Friday, said his team removed 250 tons of TNT, plastic explosives, detonation cords, and white phosporous rounds on April 13, 2003 — 10 days after U.S. forces first reached the Al Qaqaa site.

"I did not see any IAEA seals at any of the locations we went into. I was not looking for that," Pearson said.

Di Rita sought to point to Pearson's comments as evidence that some RDX, one of the high-energy explosives, might have been removed from the site. RDX is also known as plastic explosive.

But Di Rita acknowledged: "I can't say RDX that was on the list of IAEA is what the major pulled out. ... We believe that some of the things they were pulling out of there were RDX."

Further study was needed, Di Rita said.

[Dooby]

I think I am being fair in saying that it is pretty clear that nobody has a frickin' clue what happened at Al-Qaqaa and it is going to take a long time to sort it out. Please notice I am not saying what the Army is saying is true.

All this says to me is that CBS and the NY Times had no business trying to run this story the sunday before an election. Can you imagine if this press conference had been held the thursday after the election. It would have been patently unfair.

[Epitome22]

From what I understand the ammunition that the sacrifical soldier said he removed was on April 13th, 5 days before the St. Paul crew tape was made.

The right wing regime is running from this as fast as it possibly can.

[Dooby]

Originally posted by: Epitome22
From what I understand the ammunition that the sacrifical soldier said he removed was on April 13th, 5 days before the St. Paul crew tape was made.

The right wing regime is running from this as fast as it possibly can.

First, no one has any reason not to believe the Major that was on TV today. If the Pentagon were going to make stuff up, I think they would have put together a better story than the one they did. They acknowledge the story doesn't answer nearly all the questions.

Second, the stories are not necessarily inconsistent. There are 77 different explosives that carry the identical seal that is shown on the St. Paul tape. And what is shown on the tape is refuted by the substance described by the AP reporter imbedded with the 3ID as to what they found when they went there. And by generous estimates, if what is on the tapes is in fact the questioned explosoives, the tape only shows a fraction of what is alleged to have been stored there.

I will also point out that noone reports that any bunkers were IAEA sealed. Less than three weeks after the St. Paul tape, and less than a week after Bush declared victory in Iraq, every bunker at Al-quaqua was thoroughly searched and no explosives were found. So the window was early April to early May 2003. I'll leave it to you to decide if looters in a warzone were capable of carrying off 300+tons of explosives in a month.