WARNING: Dems could be falling into a trap on explosives issue!

[milkyway]

We have let this story move toward whether or not the explosives were there at the time of the invasion. This should not be the main issue! There will be evidence and claims on both sides of this, and Kerry could end up being hurt if he is seen as wrong, or too quick to attack bush on this. We don't know all of the facts yet, but the Dems have been put in the position of putting all their marbles on the position that the explosives were there when we got there (and yes, I'm aware of the Minneapolis video).

The big issue should have always been: Eighteen months after we invaded, why does the bush admin not know what happened to these explosives? The IAEA strongly warned them prior to invasion that they must safeguard these, and they warned them again shortly after the invasion. More than anywhere else, Al Qaaqaa was the weapons site over which they were most concerned. Yet a year and a half later, and only after the Times article, bush is just starting to look into what happened? The site is thirty miles from Baghdad, for crying out loud! This is total incompetence that cannot be refuted.

Bush says we don't know the facts yet. That's exactly the fucking point! A year and a half later, why don't you?

[mac56]

1. If it was only Kerry on the attack, I'd agree.

It's not. This is huge. Kerry can't afford not to speak up about it.

[Guy_Montag]

2. We've been f**Ked in the ass before by jumping after these

too quickly. Think of the Rather affair. Now call me an old cynic, but I suspect Karl Rove gave us enough rope to hang ourselves. I just hope he's not done the same again.

[archineas]

7. as evidence comes to light

it's looking more and more like the explosives were looted after the fall of baghdad.

even if they vanished prior to that, the clearer point remains...the kerry campaign attack need only ask the question "how is it that there was no plan in place to deal with places like this?" it keeps the attack on point and forces the bush campaign to respond.

i'm not bothered by this at all. it's forcing the bush campaign onto the defensive, exactly where they should be. if they can't defend themselves in the surest way possible, how on earth can they defend us the surest way possible?!?

j

[freebird04]

19. That's not realistic

This whole thing seems to have been recently triggered by info from the IAEA. I don't think it's relaistic to presume that Rove is pulling strings at the IAEA.

Bush should be held accoutnable for any negligence in Iraq but I think it's a stretch to try to pin this on Rove.

[Texas_Dem]

3. I agree the point is why DOESN'T Shrub know the facts 18 months later?

What the hell has been going on? No plan, no stategy, no leadership.

[havocmom]

16. Questions for the junta: Doesn't the DOD have spy satellites watching

known facilities?

Did the DOD just forget that the IAEA stressed the importance of securing this particular facility?

Why the hell did the DOD FAIL to secure a known depot full of dangerous explosives, given all the resources at its command?

Do you really expect the excuse that 'troops had concerns about taking Baghdad at the time' to be sufficient? The troops take orders. The orders to secure the facilities were not given?

What DOD officials, charged with the task of executing the invasion, failed to take the threat of Iraqis getting these explosives and using them against our troops into consideration and assuring the facility would not be robbed?

Take those responsible for those decisions and let them receive justice at the hands of the family members of every American killed in Iraq. Show them there are consequences for their decisions.

[gratuitous]

4. Yeah, just like the failure to capture bin Laden, and . . .

The missing WMDs, which could turn up any second now, and the increasingly bad employment numbers, and the falling stock market, and corporate corruption, and media malfeasance, and Halliburton's seemingly endless string of perfidies, and revelation after revelation of Bushista incompetence.

God forbid we should actually hold the corrupt Bush administration responsible for any of it, because some unspecified part of it might backfire!

[Wat_Tyler]

5. Not this time.

This time it's real.

[kikiek]

6. Not only that. Check out the salon story someone posted earlier

Labs with viruses. Not protected.http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2550981

[lil-petunia]

8. normally, I'd agree, but shrub's response is all wrong in that case.

no, this one has legs. and feet. and knees, and ankles and hips.

[flpoljunkie]

9. That's 30 km, about 18 miles from Baghdad!

[DemocracyInaction]

10. Some of what you say has been running through my mind also

Kerry got a ride out of it BUT these scum with the help of the media are trying to plant doubts in people's minds now and trying to make it appear as though Kerry doesn't know what's going on. I mean, like, to the point where Bush has the balls to say on the stump that Kerry would jump and do things on inaccurate information (he could hardly say it with a straight face). But as one newspaper guy said yesterday: Those who love Bush are going to believe his version; those who love Kerry are going to believe his and it's too late to get the real truth of it all straightened out before the vote. It's only benefit was maybe to get undecideds but there aren't enough of them left to fill a thimble.

[tomfodw]

11. The real point is, why weren't there enough troops in Iraq...

...to secure all the weapons and arms and explosives we knew were blanketing the entire country? (Or at least the IAEA knew.) Why did Rumsfeld insist on using a bare minimum size force just enough to secure a rapid victory in the march on Baghdad rather than include additional forces sufficient for a secure occupation? Why did the Defense Department ignore all warnings that the post-war aftermath was not going to be as peaceful as they were assuming? Why did they never even question their assumptions? Why did Bush let them get away with all this incompetence? And why has no one - no one - in the entire Bush Administration been held accountable for the morass that they let Iraq become?

Those are the real questions, not what happened to 380 tons of dangerous explosives at one dump. Although that's an important question, too.

[kaitykaity]

12. I had this same sort of nervous thought last night when

I heard Martha Radditz on ABC report "breaking news" that
there may have only been 3 tons of whatever one of these
explosives there, not 31.

I was like oh shit, here it comes. I just have this queasy
feeling that some how, some way, Bush is going to wrangle
free of this and hang it like an albatross on Kerry.

[papau]

13. Bull - Bush is toast on this - NEED VIDEO? NEED EYEWITNESS? got both!

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

A 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew in Iraq shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein was in the area where tons of explosives disappeared. snipUsing GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS determined our crew embedded with them may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where that ammunition disappeared. Our crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa. On April 18, 2003 they drove two or three miles north into what is believed to be that area. During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew bunker after bunker of material labelled explosives. <snip> VIDEO AT SITE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/international/middlee... <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/international/middleeast/28bomb.html?oref=login>

MISSING EXPLOSIVES

4 Iraqis Tell of Looting at Munitions Site in '03

By JAMES GLANZ and JIM DWYER

Published: October 28, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 27 - Looters stormed the weapons site at Al Qaqaa in the days after American troops swept through the area in early April 2003 on their way to Baghdad, gutting office buildings, carrying off munitions and even dismantling heavy machinery, three Iraqi witnesses and a regional security chief said Wednesday.

The Iraqis described an orgy of theft so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters. But some looting was clearly indiscriminate, with people grabbing anything they could find and later heaving unwanted items off the trucks.

Two witnesses were employees of Al Qaqaa - one a chemical engineer and the other a mechanic - and the third was a former employee, a chemist, who had come back to retrieve his records, determined to keep them out of American hands. The mechanic, Ahmed Saleh Mezher, said employees asked the Americans to protect the site but were told this was not the soldiers' responsibility.

The accounts do not directly address the question of when 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives vanished from the site sometime after early March, the last time international inspectors checked the seals on the bunkers where the material was stored. It is possible that Iraqi forces removed some explosives before the invasion.

[On the Road]

14. There Seems to be Photographic Evidence in This Case

That's why it's worth pursuing. Bush can be shown up with video and pictures.

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

[On the Road]

15. One More Piece of the Puzzle

I saw somewhere that this type of explosive was used in an incident in Najaf, but it was not clear whether US troops were involved.

If it can be shown that these munitions were used to kill or wound US soldiers, that's huge. In that case, I suggest Dems emphasize the point and actually increase the pressure.

[nostamj]

17. biologicals, yellowcake, AND explosives...

there has always been more to the looting story....

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room//index.html#p_galbraith

While the Bush administration scrambles to do damage control over the nearly 380 tons of missing high-tech explosives in Iraq, an Op-Ed today in the Boston Globe from arms control and non-proliferation expert Peter W. Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, reveals more evidence of a long pattern of negligence by Team Bush in the war. There's little doubt now among military and security experts that the Rumsfeld doctrine of minimal-boots-on-the-ground resulted in poor capability for U.S. forces to control violence and looting after the fall of Baghdad -- but we're not just talking about a disregard for Iraqi museums here. The administration's failure to secure large amounts of potentially deadly materiel of all sorts, as described by Galbraith, is utterly frightening.

"In 2003 I went to tell Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz what I had seen in Baghdad in the days following Saddam Hussein's overthrow. For nearly an hour, I described the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion -- the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad, the devastation of Iraq's cultural heritage, the anger of ordinary Iraqis who couldn't understand why the world's only superpower was letting this happen.

"I also described two particularly disturbing incidents -- one I had witnessed and the other I had heard about. On April 16, 2003, a mob attacked and looted the Iraqi equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control, taking live HIV and black fever virus among other potentially lethal materials. US troops were stationed across the street but did not intervene because they didn't know the building was important.

"When he found out, the young American lieutenant was devastated. He shook his head and said, 'I hope I am not responsible for Armageddon.' About the same time, looters entered the warehouses at Iraq's sprawling nuclear facilities at Tuwaitha on Baghdad's outskirts. They took barrels of yellowcake (raw uranium), apparently dumping the uranium and using the barrels to hold water. US troops were at Tuwaitha but did not interfere.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

22. Never heard about the Iraqi CDC looting before

man that is unbelievable if true. I hope there is corroboration if so.

[nostamj]

27. there's not reason to doubt that it's true.... look who this guy is...

sounds very credible. he was a bushie at the time he observed the looting.....

here's more from the Op-Ed referenced in the Salon 'ar Room' entry:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/10/27/eyewitness_to_a_failure_in_iraq/

This was a preventable disaster. Iraq's nuclear weapons-related materials were stored in only a few locations, and these were known before the war began. As even L. Paul Bremer III, the US administrator in Iraq, now admits, the United States had far too few troops to secure the country following the fall of Saddam Hussein. But even with the troops we had, the United States could have protected the known nuclear sites. It appears that troops did not receive relevant intelligence about Iraq's WMD facilities, nor was there any plan to secure them. Even after my briefing, the Pentagon leaders did nothing to safeguard Iraq's nuclear sites.

I supported President Bush's decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. At Wolfowitz's request, I helped advance the case for war, drawing on my work in previous years in documenting Saddam's atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons on the Kurds. In spite of the chaos that followed the war, I am sure that Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein.

It is my own country that is worse off -- 1,100 dead soldiers, billions added to the deficit, and the enmity of much of the world. Someone out there has nuclear bomb-making equipment, and they may not be well disposed toward the United States. Much of this could have been avoided with a competent postwar strategy. But without having planned or provided enough troops, we would be a lot safer if we hadn't gone to war.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, is a fellow at the Center For Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. In the 1980s, he documented Iraqi atrocities against the Kurds for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.


Please visit my online store | Nostamj_Online

[milkyway]

25. Wow! Hard to believe anyone could read this and still vote for bush.

KERRY IN A LANDSLIDE. FIVE MORE DAYS.

[Village Idiot]

18. RELAX!!!

The REAL story isn't the missing explosives or the timing of the disappearance, it was WHY the US Armed forces were NOT TOLD to secure the ordinance at places like Al-Qaqaa and Tuwailia...who CARES when the stuff went missing...it was there when the IAEA left, and NOT THERE the next time anyone BOTHERED to check...


'nuff said!

[Catherine Vincent]

20. It doesn't matter. Kerry was not the president when these

explosives disappeared. Dumbass was.

[milkyway]

21. I am aware of the video, but there's also this from ABC:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=938372&mesg_id=938372

The point is, the repugs might be able to come up with, or manufacture, evidence that discredits a small part of the big story. They are fighting to hold onto the power of the presidency, and they will do whatever they can. This is turning into a debate over when the explosives disappeared. But the bigger, IRREFUTABLE, point is that bush has mismanaged his war so badly that 18 months later he still doesn't know have any idea about what happened to 380 tons of high explosives at al Qaaqaa, and is just now trying to find out.

[KharmaTrain]

23. We're Controlling This Story

That's what is really driving the Wingnuts crazy. They're used to having the last word and the fifth ace up the sleeve. Not this time.

This is a story they didn't expect, couldn't respond to and can't manipulate...as hard as they try. Each time they've tried to deflect, there's been another piece of evidence that comes forward and they try another tact to get checkmated there. This is now turning into a tar baby that will last for another couple precious days...and that's not a bad thing.

Remember, this election is a referendum on this regime and specifically the fact this manchild took us to war and will keep us there if he's retained...nothing more, nothing less. His credibility must be constantly attacked and shreaded further...if not to help Senator Kerry, but then to weaken him so much he'd have little authority if he were to steal a second 4 years.

My feelings are this story has been carefully crafted by someone who had this information sitting in their files...checked, double-checked and sprung to do just what it is...removing yet another layer of teflon off this regime and exposing it's total mismangement of this country. Whomever it is deserves our most esteemed gratitude.

[hnsez]

24. Russia: We didn't take explosives

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2004/10/28/689163.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia angrily denied allegations Thursday that Russian forces had smuggled a cache of high explosives out of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

Defense Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov dismissed the allegations as "absurd" and "ridiculous."

"I can state officially that the Russian Defense Ministry and its structures couldn't have been involved in the disappearance of the explosives, because all Russian military experts left Iraq when the international sanctions were introduced during the 1991 Gulf War," he told The Associated Press

[hnsez]

26. IAEA defends missing explosives report

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1230263.htm


A report on the amount of conventional explosives missing from an Iraqi storage site did not overstate the stockpile's size as a US media report suggests, the UN nuclear watchdog says.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had said that 342 tonnes of high explosives had disappeared from a site near Baghdad.

Iraq told the IAEA the explosives at the sprawling Al Qaqaa military facility had gone missing through theft and looting due to lack of security after the US-led invasion.

But ABC News (America) reports that confidential IAEA documents show that on January 14, 2003, UN inspectors found just over three tons of one type of explosive, RDX.

That inspection was conducted before the war began.

"The bulk of the RDX was stored at another site that was under Al Qaqaa's jurisdiction," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.

She says that the report seen by ABC only covers the Al Qaqaa site itself.

The second site, Al Mahaweel, is roughly 45 kilometres from Al Qaqaa.

"They (Iraq) considered that site part of Al Qaqaa and that's how it was always declared," she said.

"IAEA inspectors inventoried that site on January 15, 2003," the day after the Al Qaqaa inspection reported by ABC.

RDX is one of three types of explosive at the Al Qaqaa site that arms experts say could potentially be used to make a detonator for a nuclear bomb, blow up an airplane or building, or in numerous other military and civilian applications.

However, Ms Fleming says it is possible that the Iraqi report on missing explosives overstated the amount of RDX by 10 tons because it did not take account of an earlier Iraqi statement that that amount had been used for civilian purposes.

The IAEA has yet to verify the Iraqi statements because it has been barred from most of Iraq since the war.

It has watched from afar as the former nuclear sites it once monitored have been stripped by looters.

-- Reuters

[Lone_Star_Dem]

28. You have a good point

'There's more than one way to skin a cat' In regards to this story.

However:

With this there is more evidence to prove this then Bush had to invade Iraq seeking WMD's.

1)Pictures (not verified).
2)Documented media coverage from April, 4 2003 saying explosives were there.
3)IAEA report.

Which makes it so tempting to say LIAR!

[Q]

29. Radioactive materials have also been looted...

...and could be used to create a 'dirty bomb'. One thing is clear...the Bush* Team wasn't worried about securing these sites and it will come back to bite us all in the ass.

[snippy]

30. Bush is on defense and reacting to being kicked in the nuts by Kerry.

Here is who fell into a trap on the explosive issue.

American Military Casualties in Iraq

American Deaths

Since war began (3/19/03): 1107

Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03) (the list) 970

Since Capture of Saddam (12/13/03): 645

Since Handover (6/29/04): 246

American Wounded

Total Wounded: 8019

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

[nostamj]

31. add uncounted THOUSANDS of innocent Iraqis

to that list.

[snippy]

33. Very true. n/t

[onecitizen]

32. That is the point

K&E are making. Listen to them today. That is exactly what they are saying.

[milkyway]

34. Good. PeteNYC is with the campaign, and he posted at DU yesterday

that they see this as the main point. Biden was on CNN yesterday saying the same. I just don't want to see the media winnow this issue down to when the explosives went missing, and then see the Rove/Drudge misinformation machine try to make Kerry the issue, rather than bush.