From Bush on down, buck-passers are saying the 400 tons of very powerful explosives that disappeared were gone before we got there. Yeah, right. Thanks to the embedded media, we have film of soldiers inspecting the bunkers. AFTER which, the weapons disappeared. We all have moments of incompetence, most of us have moments where we lie, but lying incompentents deserve some rebuke. mjh
Top News Article | Reuters.com
Report: Video Shows Explosives Went Missing After War
ABC News on Thursday showed video appearing to confirm that explosives that went missing in Iraq did not disappear until after the United States had taken control of the facility where they were stored.
The disappearance of the hundreds of tons of explosives from the Al Qaqaa storage facility near Baghdad has become a hotly contested issue in the U.S. presidential campaign.
Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry has charged that President Bush’s administration blundered by failing to safeguard the powerful conventional explosives.
Bush countered that Kerry was making wild accusations without knowing the facts. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday advanced the administration’s argument that the explosives may have been gone by the time U.S. forces got there.
Without mentioning Kerry by name, Rumsfeld told a radio interviewer, “People who use hair-trigger judgment to come to conclusions about things that are fast-moving frequently make mistakes that are awkward and embarrassing.”
Rumsfeld also said it was “very likely that, just as the United States would do, that Saddam Hussein moved munitions when he knew the war was coming” in order to protect the material from attack.
ABC said the video it broadcast was shot by an affiliate TV station embedded with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division when the troops passed through the storage facility on April 18, 2003, nine days after the fall of Baghdad.
ABC said experts who have studied the images say the barrels seen in the video contain the high explosive HMX, and U.N. markings on the sealed containers were clear. …
ABC said the barrels seen in the video were found inside locked bunkers that had been sealed by inspectors from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war began.
“The seal’s critical. The fact that there’s a photo of what looks like an IAEA seal means that what’s behind those doors is HMX,” Albright said.
The soldiers were not ordered to secure the facility, ABC reported.
IAEA Says It Warned U.S. About Explosives
U.S. officials were warned about the vulnerability of explosives stored at Iraq’s Al-Qaqaa military installation after another facility — the country’s main nuclear complex — was looted in April 2003, the U.N. nuclear agency said Thursday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency cautioned American officials directly about what was kept at Al-Qaqaa, the main storage facility in Iraq for so-called high explosives, spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.
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The disclosure shed new light on what the United States knew about Al-Qaqaa, which held 377 tons of high explosives that have vanished — an issue that has become a flashpoint in the final days of the U.S. presidential campaign.
The explosives can be used to make car bombs that insurgents have used to target U.S.-led forces in Iraq. On Thursday, an armed group in Iraq claimed in a video to have obtained a large amount of the missing material — HMX, RDX and PETN — and threatened to use it against foreign troops.