Joshua Marshall at Talking Points Memo excerpted a story which appears in the current Nelson Report in which it is revealed that 350 tons of high explosives, which were under IAEA seal while Saddam was in power, were looted during the early days of the US occupation. Like pretty much everything except for the oil fields, it was simply left unguarded.

In case anyone was wondering where the insurgents in Iraq were getting all of their car bombs and so on, now you know. The Nelson Report claims that
A Bush administration source apparently told Nelson, "What the hell were we doing in the year and a half from the time we knew the stuff was gone, is obviously a huge question, and you can imagine why no one [in the Administration] wants to face up to it, certainly not before the election." Another told him, "You would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information."

The Pentagon has apparently known about this for some time - and has done little or nothing to investigate the theft. This is particularly worrying in that the explosives involved can be used to trigger nuclear devices - never mind the fact that these weapons could well have been taking hundreds of lives since they went missing.

Is this an example of incompetence in prosecuting the Iraqi invasion - or is there a good reason for these explosives to have been left unguarded?

Is the fact that this theft has not been previously reported part of a "political" cover-up - or a matter of national security?

Do you believe that all 350 tons of explosives are still within Iraq - or have they been exported elsewhere? If so, where?

Is this an example of incompetence in prosecuting the Iraqi invasion - or is there a good reason for these explosives to have been left unguarded?
An example of incomplete contingency planning for the immediate post-combat phase, yes. But the "good reason" that cannot be avoided is that we simply did not have enough troops in-country immediately after crushing Saddam's military and overthrowing the regime to secure all such critical locations - or to prevent extensive looting. At that time, commanders at all levels were making on the spot decisions for commitments of limited forces with even more limited information in a sort of post-combat-stability op-triage. Is someone really just now realizing this?

Is the fact that this theft has not been previously reported part of a "political" cover-up - or a matter of national security?
Just because it hasn't been widely reported until now does not mean that it has been "covered up". The massive looting of Iraqi military ordnance from various depots which occurred at the same time still has only been reported in passing - and isn't even referred to in the article. And, contrary to what's implied in the article, thus far the majority of IEDs have made use of military ordnance - artillery and mortar rounds, especially - rather than blocks of RDX.

Do you believe that all 350 tons of explosives are still within Iraq - or have they been exported elsewhere? If so, where?
I believe that most of it - what hasn't already been expended - is still in Iraq. But I am also sure that some has made its way out of the country. As to where, that's anyone's guess. But you might want to do some checking on the spate of bombings in Saudi Arabia over the past year.


Give me a *%^!-#& break. You expect a bunch of CID agents to go door to door in Iraq conducting a law-enforcement style investigation to find the explosives?

The military - is not and never has been dismissive of the potential threat posed both by the missing explosives and by the looted ordnance. We are doing everything in our power to track down and eliminate the bad guys in Iraq. Yes, there are plenty of mistakes made along the way - but there is no lack of effort. A big part of that effort is working to interdict their supplies - funds, weapons and, yes, explosives. After reading the above, you realize that, unfortunately, interdicting arms and explosives is now being done after the fact. After they've already acquired so much from Iraqi army stores last year. But to use'em, they've got to move'em and distribute'em and put'em into action. We try our best to fix'em somewhere along that chain and put a stop to their actions. It ain't easy, but we're doing the best with what we've got.

Oh, and by the way, as we're tracking down these logistics nodes which may help us find the missing explosives, remember that this is just a part of fighting an insurgency, tracking down terrorists, training new indigenous security forces and working to stabilize the country and establish some semblance of a relatively open and democratic administration. Anything else you want us to do for you while we're up?

So, can we translate "incomplete contingency planning" and lack of providing adequate manpower as, um, incompetence?


Recognizing such incompetence is not a sudden realization by any means, no. The missing 370-odd tons of RSX and HMX is not a sudden realization, either - to some. What's happened "just now" is that these missing explosives are being reported.


Condoleezza Rice is now admitting that she's known about this for a month. Enough said.


No. I expect us to be properly prepared and equipped before occupying a hostile country. And I would expect that, if we had the IAEA in place on the ground monitoring such caches, that we should probably not have kicked them out.


I am not, personally, blaming any of our military forces on the ground - at any level. My problem is with the top brass in the Pentagon - and with the Executive which administrates them.


Since you asked - yes, please. Help elect a Commander-in-Chief who would not put our troops in such a situation - who would not put our men and women in harm's way without enough manpower, without international support, and without proper equipment and training, who would not take on such an adventure with "incomplete contingency planning", who would not organize an operation in which the interdicting of arms and explosives could only take place after they had disappeared, who would not make so damned many "unfortunate" mistakes. Thank you.

I realize that to blame the "plenty of mistakes" on our short-staffed men and women in Iraq would be like blaming the fact that we weren't greeted with flowers and parades on a shortage of Iraqi florists and drum majors - but blame can and should be laid where it belongs: with the Bush administration and those who gave it the green light on this ill-planned operation.

Is this an example of incompetence in prosecuting the Iraqi invasion - or is there a good reason for these explosives to have been left unguarded?

Incompetence? Hardly, there are many military sites in Iraq with many military explosives and other weapons. To only see this report come out and not many others tells me the military did a pretty good job at confiscating those large amounts of explosives that Saddam had in military installations. You cant expect them to cover everything all of the time. I dont see how you can blame anything on the military seeing as to how we do not even know when the explosives were taken. They could have been taken when Saddam's army was in retreat and before the US military arrived in the area would be my guess.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/25/...s.ap/index.html


I would also like to note that some of it was missing even before the war was launched.


Is the fact that this theft has not been previously reported part of a "political" cover-up - or a matter of national security?

I would say that the administration does not report alot of intelligence coming in from Iraq. [sarcasm]It must be a huge conspiracy by the Bush administration to decieve the American public.[/sarcasm]

Do you believe that all 350 tons of explosives are still within Iraq - or have they been exported elsewhere? If so, where?

Im in line with Mustang on this question.

Yes, some are really just now realizing this (although I knew about it, but I don't count much), and many Americans still don't realize it, because Fearless Leader is too busy filling the airwaves with how he's such a great "war president," drowning out little things like Paul Bremer saying that he had asked for more troops post-invasion victory and was brushed off by Rummy or somebody.
Amen, Wertz!
I can understand your reason for phrasing this question the way you did. We all know that "our President doesn't make mistakes." So it must be some savvy strategy, right?

I'll never understand how a president who is such a darned good "war president" could be so ill-prepared after so many months of preparation. Of course this is an example of incompetence. And as Commander-in-Chief, Bush is responsible, whether he wants to wiggle out of it or Republicans want to ignore it.
Oh no, Wertz, it can't be a cover-up--would the Bush administration do that in an election year? What are you thinking?

Of course they'd own up to it publicly, right after the election, when they figure their butts will no longer be on the line. Too bad they did not demonstrate the same degree of concern over the butts of the troops handling the occupation when they had the chance to prevent so much death and dismemberment.

The worst thing about this latest fiasco, is that it is a subject Wertz can put up here on AD to debate, and it gets debated. I just can't fathom how.

To me, this is a colossal failure beyond words. Regardless of who's fault it is, our troops are dying and will continue to die because of this mistake. But our patriotic support for the troops stops at the point accountability starts.

Unfortunately, this will be glossed over as another partisan attack. Amazing how little our soldier's lives mean when there's a political advantage to be had. We have somebody dying everyday as a result of this criminal negligence, but damned if Bush doesn't deserve 4 more years. If you lie about sex, you get impeached. If your mistakes get people needlessly killed, you get re-elected. Go figger.

The problem with the "we can't do it all argument" is that it completely ignores the facts.

This site, along with many, were guarded by the IAEA before we got there. This was no obscure site. Just before attack was imminent (about the only thing imminent in relation to this war when you come to think about it), they ran for their lives.

So, what did Bush do? He had the oil fields secured.

He had the foresight to think that maybe the liberation would be as liberating as he thought, so he protected the oil. But then he left munition dumps like this one alone. For all the talk of WMD and the like, everything but the oil fields were basically ignored. Bush was worried about WMD getting into the wrong hands, but not worried about 350 tons of C-4 and the like that brought down Pan Am 103 and the USS Cole.

No WMD, no links to Al Qaida, and 350 tons of high explosives on the loose. And we're safer today? From what?

The New York Times had a big write up on this one: Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq

Admittedly, this is not a good thing. But if we delve a little deeper, we can see that this is not the huge mistake that some are making it out to be.

From the NYT article, page 2:


If I were to guess, I would say that the military assumed that the bunker had been destroyed.

Also, from Page 2:

This site was listed as "medium priority" and sites above it on the list were also unguarded.

As with everything, hindsight is 20/20. Our first priority in Iraq was securing the sites that we thought held WMDs, not conventional weapons such as were housed here. Had we known that the WMDs did not exist, perhaps more attention would have been paid to these conventional stockpiles. As we knew the situation then, this site was a secondary priority.

Of course, this wasn't the only stockpile looted. This kind of thing has happened in every war.

Why do we assume that the US military is somehow omniscient about everything?

Fewer assumptions would have had to be made had there been more troops on the ground to take care of things like that, the additional troops Paul Bremer asked for.

The fact remains that Bush & Co. placed higher importance on the oil fields. How interesting that the man who says that John Kerry still has a September 10th mentality still doesn't prioritize thinking preventatively himself regarding terrorists and/or insurgents? (Edit: Oh, of course those are American troops who would be fired upon by people using those weapons...and troops should be used to being fired upon, so that's okay, right?)

The fact that the same mistakes had been made in previous wars, Amlord, means that it could have been taken into account before the troops hit the ground in this war!

(edited for spelling, and a few extra words)

Really these sites where "guarded" by the IAEA before we got there? I wasn't aware that the IAEA had it's own security force. In what time span? Could you provide a link to where you got this information?

As far as the oil fields are concerned you are ignoring what happened during the first gulf war - they where secured to save the lives of US military personnel and also to prevent economical disaster. One of Saddam's key tactics in defending against air strikes was to set the oil wells on fire to impede visibility for airplanes, satellites, etc... Securing the oil fields gave the US a tactical advantage and surely resulted in saving the lives of many US soldiers.

I agree that this site should have been at least bombed (and may have been), but again we have no idea of the specifics such as when the explosives where taken and if and when the military was able to guard the area.

For all we know they could have taken them before US soldiers got into the area and searched it and saw no explosives and simply kept going.

So, we had intelligence that there were high explosives somwhere before the war. Now they aren't there. Doesn't that really mean that they never existed? Isn't that the argument with the WMD? How is it that WMD not being found means that they were never there, but when exposives are not found, it means that they were 'stolen' on the watch of this 'incompetent' administration? This appears inconsistent to me.

Whether we find these or not, there will never be a shortage of weapons in Iraq. The important thing is to win the people, not the weapons. The weapons buyback thing seemed to be a step in the right direction on both counts, but we sure are having a lousy month in Iraq.



Protecting the oil filelds was an example of learning from the previous war. The burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields and dumping oil into the Persian Gulf in 1991 was the worst environmental disaster ever. If BushCo didn't protect those fields and something would have happened, his enviro-friendly opponents would have been howling at the results.

The main difference being is that they where there when the inspectors were allowed back into Iraq (just not all of what had been there before).

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/25/...s.ap/index.html

Paul Bremer is not a general.

The generals on the ground felt they had enough troops. Pentagon rebuffs troop criticism

Although the story dwells on the Bremer angle (despite the headline), this quote is pertinent:


Rumsfeld says we have sufficient troops: Rumsfeld Says Troop Level Adequate for Current, Future Missions

The explosives we are talking about here are conventional. You can buy them at any Walmart (figuratively). I am sure most of the rifles being used by the resistance were looted from Iraqi bases. These types of things are to be expected.

I know it sounds cynical, but how many men would it take to occupy every K-Mart in California to keep shot guns out of the hands? Obviously, looting is going to happen. And no, just because it is predictable does not mean it is preventable.

Be that as it may, the munitions dumps should have been secured, and they weren't, ostensibly because there weren't enough troops on the ground to secure them in a timely manner.

Look, Bush was the one who was spoiling for this war. It was his responsibility to have his administration see to it that these things were taken care of before these things became a problem for our troops. Heck, if I were an Iraqi, I would have probably pilfered some of the munitions myself. And if I or a relative were detained at Abu Ghraib and mistreated the way some of the detainees were, you betcha I would probably consider shooting at the occupation force, too.

At whose feet are we supposed to lay responsibility for the consequences of some of the ham-handed, poorly-conceived strategies--the Democrats?

I just noticed this, thanks Amlord. That backs up what I said earlier.

Please answer to what I said earlier if you want to make a big deal about this.

It was policy under Saddam's control to remove the weapons from the storage to a safe place outside and then camouflage the weapons as not to be detected by bomb raids. Hence the weapons could not be destroyed by bombs unless detected under the camouflage.

Yes but secondary explosions are easy to detect, they can tell if they blew up explosives.

No one knows what happened to these explosives, they could have been blown up, they could have been looted, they could have been overlooked by the military brass because of their incompetent idiocy. Until more information is released, its all assumptions.

Those are fair points. Any ham-handed, poorly-conceived strategy should be laid squarely at the feet of the Bush administration. My only quibble is with small examples of tactical mistakes - 350 tons of explosives, some looting at a museum, etc. - being specifically hurled at the president, 8 days before the election. We have secured or destroyed at least 350,000 tons of explosives, and wow, some is missing. And we aren't sure when or where, maybe Saddam put it under a tarp somehwere. War is chaos. Smells like Monday-morning quarterbacking to me.

Seattle PI - best I could do

The main problem with your argument here Carlito, is that you are suggesting it is just 350 tons that are unaccounted for. You claim that we have secured or destroyed 350,000 tons or so of munitions, but the article you cited doesn't even agree with that number and furthermore it estimates Saddam had close to 600,000 tons of munitions. So even if we go with your number, that means that a little less than half of Saddam's munitions are still out there. When you look at it that way, that 350 tons isn't pre-election political fodder anymore, it is the tip of the iceberg. Just because the media hasn't reported on other munitions gone missing, doesn't mean they haven't disappeared.

At the moment I can't really add much that hasn't been said to the other questions for debate, but I will address this one:
Do you believe that all 350 tons of explosives are still within Iraq - or have they been exported elsewhere? If so, where?
I'd be willing to bet money these munitions are still in Iraq, now in the hands of insurgents and terrorists. I don't imagine it'll be too long before it is used against our troops further adding to the casualty and wounded figures.

It isn't too much of a logical leap to say that most of the Iraqi insurgents out there have probably been armed with Saddam's old munitions. It is far less likely that these are new weapons were purchased with funds from terrorists or something.

And this is the result of incompetency, because if someone in the Bush administration had just run a few scenarios where our soldiers weren't welcomed as heros with rose petals at their feet, they could have anticipated the insurgency and how they were going to arm themselves. And if they had done that, we might have more of those weapons under our control right now and the insurgents would be less dangerous. Perhaps it was more than incompetency, maybe arrogance and being disconnected from reality had something to do with it too.

Ahhh, Amlord, but these generals don't lend any credence to criticizing Bush in this regard, and therefore should be ignored. After all, what would the commanding generals know about troop requirements? Besides, generals are usually more interested in pragmatic concerns and not so interested in creating soundbites or personal publicity--and therefore shouldn't be trusted.

CJ, you act as if Mr. Bush was sitting atop a hill directing all military actions and the whole process of war. This is illogical. The war in Iraq, as all military incursions, will have holes. There will be no plan without flaw and where everything goes off without a hitch. Only a veteran can really understand this, but as war is waged, there are so many troops on the ground/in the air/on the sea that nothing goes perfectly. More over, this war in terms of strategy and operational effectiveness comes down to very competent military veterans. These men/women very often have been a part of other international military operations and are by no means inexperienced or "incompetent".

The fact that insurgents or other terrorist organizations have these munitions is awful. I don't for a second believe that this isn't a serious concern. However, insinuating that the Generals that run this war believed that our soldiers were going to be welcome guests is ridiculous. There are people in this region whom welcome our presence and now have the ability to walk freely down their streets, etc. At the same time (as I've seen first hand), there are people whom supported the previous regime(s) and have a hard time with their nations being occupied... hence, insurgency. While I was in Afghanistan, there was an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty in reference to our military action. We never knew if the day would bring monotony or violence. With that in mind... there is no amount of intelligence that can cover every scenario. This is the nature of war... and before partisan politics begins on that statement... we all know this was a war voted for by a bi-partisan congress.

First of all aevans, I understand quite well what role the President plays in a military conflict and a Presidents action or inaction can very much effect the outcome.

You are suggesting that the Bush administration had a post invasion plan, I think the problem here is that they didn't or that it was based on faulty assumptions. I have no doubt that the men and women on the ground have done the best job they can with the situation that they were handed, but it should be perfectly clear that there was very little up front planning about what was going to happen after Saddam was removed.

Furthermore, not making security of ammo and munitions a top priority is a little bit more than "a few holes". This isn't a question of a few things going bad as they sometimes do in war, this is a problem with no preparing for the situation.


The generals may not feel that way, but that was certainly being communicated from the highest levels of our government back home. Here is one example from an episode of Meet the Press where Dick Cheney was interviewed.

This is just but one instance of this kind of thinking, if you really wanted to you could do a search in vote-smart.org's database to see that many of the white house personnell were communicating this message to the American people.

So I agree with you, the generals probably didn't feel that way, but I don't think their advice was heeded by this administration and that advice certainly didn't stop them from trying to tell the world how much Iraq would thank us for invading.

Edited to add: From a Press Conference this morning:

So a nice dodge there and the underlying message, the oil was more important.

Thanks for your reply, but CJ, your first mention about knowing what the role of the president plays must be slightly skewed. A President rarely dictates the pace of war in terms of operational action. The President does often times dictate strategic ideas, and allows the military (with their expertise) to obtain those goals. In reference to this war, and specifically to these munitions (this missing explosives), these weapons very well could've been removed pre-war. Secondly, as a general rule, the President wouldn't dictate specifics on ground operations. If the Central Command deemed it a threat or an important target, they would've arranged for it to be secured. With that in mind, who knows if it hadn't been transported prior to the '03 invasion? Who knows if there was a feasible way to secure these explosives? How much actually got out? Even the IAEA doesn't know exactly how much was there... as the information only shows how much was there in 1998. That being said, this is all speculation.

Also, your excerpt from Meet the Press doesn't really mean that our administration thought that the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms. I can say (as I've posted before) that there are in fact people in both Iraq and Afghanistan that do welcome are presence... coupled with people that don't. With that in mind, Dick Cheney's (or anyone else's) comments about being welcomed by Iraqi's does not broach why these weapons were not recovered (if in fact there were any to recover)

These explosives (along with any other Iraqi army ordinance) should've been secured. They had the largest Army in the region and there was an abundance of ammunition, etc. To expect that these kinds of things would not happen is absurd. We could not possibly secure every acre of the desert and keep Iraqi Army weapons from slipping into insurgent hands.

*****Not to mention all the munitions that we have secured. The 380 tons seems menial according to the numbers posted by the same NY Times article, which states that we DID secure over 400,000 TONS of munitions****
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/politics...artner=homepage

I probably shouldn't respond for lack of time on my part but I can't let the notion that generals agreed we had enough troops to stop this from happening despite nodding conservatives. My biggest grudge against the administration has been this idea that no one disagreed with them. That's not the case; they just ignored them.




I think I get it. Only chickenhawks can criticize other chickenhawks for their dreadful mismanagement! Like The Weekly Standard's William Kristol and Robert Kagan I quoted here:



If that isn't enough dissent to gain permission to lay blame with the White House's here's my pass. Generals weren't unanimous on the question of enough troops before the invasion. Truth be told, one was derided for suggesting the outcome with 100k on the ground would be anything less than daisies and rainbows.



According to Wolfowitz we didn't need more than 100k troops on the ground because:

• There was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo.
  
  
• Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible."
  
  
• Nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it.
  

Perhaps Fallujah was impossible to predict, but it boggles my mind that an invading force would lack a contingency plan for securing Iraq's borders.



No. A few adamant people have refuted the administration had any prior warning to that possibility, and if you sit tight, they'll refute it again shortly.

That doesn't really fly in my book aevans. You simply cannot have the majority of the administration proclaiming to the American people that we are going to be "greeted as liberators" and then say "well that isn't really what they meant" when we end up in a mess a year later. What they claimed would happen and what actually happened are completely opposite outcomes.

The administration could have made the choice to communicate that Iraq wouldn't be an easily installed Democracy and that we had a lot of work to do, but they chose not to do that. They chose to paint the most optimistic picture possible and lead people to believe that we were going to have an easy time of it and the Iraqis would fall to the ground and kiss our feet when we marched through the cities.

There of course are people in Iraq that feel that way, but the insurgency is very strong and clearly it isn't going near as easily as our administration portrayed it. What does this specifically have to do with weapons? Nothing, Cheney didn't comment on weapons. However, it does paint the mindset of the administration going into the war. If they believed that we were going to be "greeted as liberators" one could logically conclude they didn't expect to have a large insurgency and based on that one can logically conclude that they didn't place adequate importance on securing the munitions they knew about.

I'm not sure I followed this - Kagan and Kristol were speaking of Rummy. You didn't mean to suggest that former naval aviator Don Rumsfeld was a 'chicken-hawk' did you? He's an honest-to-goodness, full blown hawk if there ever was one.



If it's incompetency, couldn't you say that it's incompetency on the part of UNSCOM? Per resolution 687, they were 'monitoring' the material for years, but the resolution said that Iraq should have "unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of . . . [a]ll ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities[.]” If it had or developed any of this stuff, it was to submit it to "urgent on-site inspection and the destruction, removal or rendering harmless as appropriate of all items specified above"

According to the Times article on this, these explosives could be construed as components for rockets, nukes, etc. Why were they not destroyed, if the system was working? The resolution didn't say "go keep an eye on explosives" for years and years, it said "destroy, remove, render harmless, etc."

If you read way way down in the Times article, you learn that "Iraq argued that it should be allowed to keep them for eventual use in mining and civilian construction." OK, then. This whole inspection regime was working like a charm, about as well as the oil-for-food program I guess.

That Carlito, is an argument in misdirection. At issue here, based on my understanding, is the fact that these munitions have gone missing. You argument seems to take issue with the fact that the weapons inspectors didn't catch them, in my opinion that is the subject of another debate and has no relevance to this one. Furthermore UNSCOM didn't arrange for the post-invasion plan - Bush, his administration and his generals did.

One of the debate questions also asks whether or not leaving these unguarded was incompetence or not. I have suggested that the reason these munitions were left unguarded is because the administration was poorly prepared for an insurgency and they didn't ever conceive that Iraqi's might not actually kiss the ground we walk on and instead would steal Saddam's conventional weapons and use them against us.

I have supplied one quote by Dick Cheney conveying that message but if you really don't believe me I'll go dig the rest of them up. For at least a month and maybe longer, that was the message coming from this administration - the Iraqis are going to welcome us as liberators and things are going to be rosy once Saddam is removed. It continued to come from them until the "minor squabbles" in "isolated areas" starting becoming much larger.

Update:

NBC News is reporting that this huge cache of explosives vanished from site in Iraq at least 18 months ago, before troops arrived.

So to answer your questions:

• Is this an example of incompetence in prosecuting the Iraqi invasion - or is there a good reason for these explosives to have been left unguarded?
  
  It would if the troops were there.
  
  
• Is the fact that this theft has not been previously reported part of a "political" cover-up - or a matter of national security?
  
  No it is because we were not there.
  
  
• Do you believe that all 350 tons of explosives are still within Iraq - or have they been exported elsewhere? If so, where?
  
  I really don't play black army helicopter very well, so i don't know.

You guys are right. I must amend a former statement. If Rumsfeld was being told by "military commanders" that we had sufficient troops - and those "military commanders" were on the ground in Iraq rather than behind a desk in Washington (though I don't see that distinction made anywhere) - then those "military commanders" are just as incompetent as anyone in the Bush administration or the Pentagon. As has become abundantly clear to eveyone by now, we clearly did not - and do not - have enough troops to "accomplish" the "mission", whatever it is. Unless, of course, the "mission" is to waste the lives of as many of our enlisted men and women as is humanly possible. At that, we are succeeding brilliantly (regardless of when, why, or how these particular explosives went missing).

:::::::::::::::::::::::::

Yehoshua: You have a link? MSNBC has apparently not got wind of this yet. Their website still states the following:

Well well well.



http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/26/...ives/index.html



Now how did that happen. Am I physic?

carlitoswhey



Then why was the Iraqi Oil Ministry the only ministry to be secured by US troops once Baghdad fell?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Amlord



Then why is the US military currently requiring Scottish troops to fill the holes in its campaign?

Would this be the same Donald Rumsfeld who predicted US troops would be greeted with flowers by cheering Iraqi's? Who said he had credible intelligence as to the location of WMD's? Under who's authority Abu Graib was allowed to happen?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


carlitoswhey



'some looting at a museum'?



Are you not aware that some 90% of Iraq's civil adminstration was destroyed AFTER Baghdad was 'secured'. That the majority of the city's hospitals were also looted as well as a sizable portion of the city's medical supplies.

It really doesn't matter what any one says about all this. Dayton Rocker is right. There is really nothing to debate here. Despite what the generals on the ground might claim. The entire war has been planned with a distinct lack of foresight and understanding of the local people. And this can be seen in myriad details, from the appointment of Jay Garner, the original Iraqi interim government with its Iranian backed members to the numerous accounts of Saddam Husseins weapons facilities being ignored by the coalition troops.

And lets be honest about this. This is not the first facility that was over looked. Greenpeace have already been out to numerous sites to secure nuclear material that was left to rot in the sunshine.


editted to add:

Hobbes



These are also the same generals who carry the responsibility for the lack of planning so its a bit rich to use them as some sort of justification against accusations of a lack of planning.

Guilty people seldom acknowledge their own guilt.

I allready stated this earlier, economics.



They where greeted with flowers and by cheering Iraqi's.

The "credible intelligence" may have been as good as the intelligence of the stockpile of weapons that has been the subject of this thread.

I dont think anyone "allowed" this to happen short of the people directly invloved in the Abu Gharib torture.



You mean right about the explosives that where not there when US troops arrived (I thought I was the one right about that)? How was this facility overlooked?



In war you have to change your "planning" with each given day.

Vampiel


Indeed you did, but as the question was directly in reponse to carlitoswhey's claim, I'm sure you'll forgive me for not responsding further to you on this issue.



Yeah.. a some of the Iraqis did seem rather happy for about a week...



Maybe so. I don't know. All I know is, this one incident of a weapons stockpile that was not safe guarded is but one of many such weapons stockpiles that were looted, as well as numerous nuclear facilities that were ignored by the coalition and which were safe guarded by Greenpeace.

editted to add:

Since writing my post, I have become aware of these two articles. Both indicate that the Pentagon is unaware of the actual timing of the missing weapons, so I take it as some what misleading if you are attempting to claim the US military command had no share in the responsibility for these explosives going missing. It seems to me as if the matter is still very much open to interpretation.

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=31787

http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041025193205.33jf3vao.html
Edit ends



Was Hitler responsible for the Holocaust?

You can't have it both ways. As 'Commander in Chief', GW Bush is directly responsible for everything that his actions resulted in. If Hitler was responsible for the crimes comitted under his leadership then Bush is equally responsible for the crimes comitted under his leadership. Regardless of the scale of the crimes the principle is the same.



No. I mean DR was right when he said;

Regardless of whether or not this particular ammunition dump was, or was not looted, the fact is there were and are ammunitions cahes hidden all over Iraq and these have been allowed to fall into the hands of a very dangerous enemy.



In war, you also have to plan ahead.

Is this an example of incompetence in prosecuting the Iraqi invasion - or is there a good reason for these explosives to have been left unguarded?

Well not if you read the whole story as noted above –“"We do not know what happened to the explosives or when they were looted," she told AP.” As with the WMD the location of which probably changed as we invaded. The fact that records showed that both these explosives and, for example 8,500 liters of anthrax, means little today.



Is the fact that this theft has not been previously reported part of a "political" cover-up - or a matter of national security?

No

Do you believe that all 350 tons of explosives are still within Iraq - or have they been exported elsewhere? If so, where?


If they existed they could be anywhere. There are many more tons of munitions out there. We need to kill the people who would use them. You can never stop terrorists from getting weapons and explosives especially in a country overflowing with them.

moif

I agree with most of your post, and Bush has apologized about that certian incident but to compare it to Hitler is a bit far fetched because indeed it was Hitler who supported such actions. Also;



Could you provide a source that state's the US military "ignored" these sites? The information about the explosives has allready been brought out in that the explosives where taken before US soldiers where able to reach the site, and that the site was also bombed before hand in an attempt to destroy the weapons.

I dont see how this was "ignored".

Please explain how they were "allowed" to fall into the wrong hands.

NYT's October Surprise Collapses



NBC reported in 2003 that the US Army did not find the suspected cache of HMX and RDX. Report: Explosives already gone when U.S. troops arrived


If this is true, this stuff was long gone before the US army ever got there.

http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/dkay100203.html



Explain to me the huge failure by the military to destroy and guard these stockpiles again?

My question is why are the New York Times and other news agencies still posting this as front page news when it has been shown the explosives were not even there when the troops originally got there in the first place?

Because that hasn't been conclusively proven yet, there are still other versions of events which conflict with the version Amlord just posted. I'll cite an entry from Talking Points Memo because it lays it out fairly clearly. Feel free to follow the link inside this quote to the original source.


Someone is distorting the truth here, and it certainly isn't clear who yet. Although from their track record, I'd be inclined to believe the White House is.

Just like when CBS broke the memo story.

Just like I did with the CBS memo story. I will go out on another limb here and say this was specifically a hit piece news stroy done by the New York Times, also 60 minutes was going to try and air the same story but now that NBC has debunked the NYT they are not going to air it.

Based upon a better track record of lying, I would blame the NY Times and CBS.

DRUDGE: 60 MINS PLANNED BUSH MISSING EXPLOSIVES STORY FOR ELECTION EVE

CBS: US: No Explosives When GIs Arrived

FOX: When Did Missing Explosives Disappear?

noticias.info: US ELECTION: In Case You Missed It: Report: Explosives Already Gone When U.S. Troops Arrived

useless-knowledge: John Kerry's “New” Information Is Old [Missing Weapons]

I'll report more web sites as they come in.

I have a more fundamental question:

Why do these sites still exist?

No matter what they contain now or contained earlier, why weren't they completely destroyed during the air campaign? How is it that these sites were never military targets if we knew weaponry was stored there? And why search or guard them when you would just eliminate them?

This is what's not adding up to me as far as the new revisionist theory. If we cared about what was stored at those sites (this apparently isn't the only site), they wouldn't exist.

How about the following reasons:

1. near school
2. near hospital
3. near homes
4. near market place

Or what if the building was destroyed? As I mentioned earlier, it is known policy in Iraq during Saddam regime to move all weapons out of known storage facilities and camouflage them in fields. What if they have been moved.

Or what about the other popular debate about the Syria border? Heavily active border transporting something. Weapons? These Weapons?

Or what about using these weapons? What if Saddam passed out these weapons to his troops in order to defend Baghdad?

Or seeing how these weapons are long range, and against the resolutions, could they have been destroyed with all other WMDs? More so, if Saddam was not suppose to have long range weapons per the resolution, why then did he still have these weapons?

What we know is there is a period of three months from the time of inspection to the time the troops arrived. In that time the weapons disappeared. Where is unknown. Protecting something that is not there is impossible. This story is now another Memo Gate

Perhaps because the Al-Qaqaa site was one of the WMD sites listed by the UN inspectors.



Indeed someone is, and it's the Democrats as usual.

This stuff disappeared between January and the early part of April.

Troops arrived at the Al-Qaqaa site on April 10, this stuff was already missing.

This explosive is 350 tons of basically white powder (think powdered sugar, or talc powder). The vehicles required to move that much would have been large and easily spotted if our forces were in the area. There were reports of numerous trucks heading over to the Syrian border prior to the war, as David Kay pointed out... I wouldn't be suprised if this turns out to be part of that stash.

Wrong.... Here is a video link (text available inside) from MSNBC. There was an embedded reporter with the 101st Airborne division that originally discovered the facility.

Can't blame this one on the Democrats I'm afraid, as this story gets more an more attention the facts coming to light suggest... incompetence.

Seems to me that somone should have had the presence of mind to call this in and say "hey we just discovered a lot of weapons, should we secure them". Maybe the soldiers did do that and they were told to just continue with their mission because no one considered that there might be looting or insurgency, which once again brings us back to incompetence.

I take issue with the use of the word incompetence. The correct term is negligence - as in the legal definition: Failure to exercise the degree of care considered reasonable under the circumstances, resulting in an unintended injury to another party. The administration had access to plenty of regional expertise, to those who had years of operational and analytical experience in dealing with Iraq - and they willfully ignored or sidelined everyone who disagreed with their predetermined point of view.

Having spent most of my military career focused on Iraq - including years in-country between Desert Storm and OIF - I wanted to see Saddam gone as much as anyone. I had more exposure to the atrocities of the Ba'ath regime than I still care to consider. But I was shocked at what appeared to be complete lack of planning for the immediate post-Saddam stabilization phase of operations. Even more disturbing was the reality - that planning had indeed taken place, but it had been discarded by this administration.

The events have snowballed since then, and we've completely lost the initiative. We are operating in a reactive mode. But we can still succeed in Iraq - yet our job is made exponentially more difficult by the waste of that first honeymoon period in the first weeks of the occupation and the incredibly bad decision-making that occurred at that time. I have yet to see any indication that we are truly working towards resolving those difficulties in any sort of effective and timely manner.

Right now there is an amazing amount of CYA going on at senior military levels, which is both politically driven and career minded. The behavior of certain of our general officers in Iraq has disgusted me as a professional. I'll leave it at that.

A fair point Mustang, but the question is - when does negligence rise to the level of incompetence? How many times do you have to be negligent before it is clear that you had no idea what you were doing in the first place? I am certain the soldiers on the ground are trying to do their jobs, don't get me wrong there. It is perfectly clear to me that the people in charge and specifically the administration have no clue what they are doing.

So I am not saying you are incorrect, but it is something to think about.

Ok, first of all CJ, the little interview didn't prove anything conclusively where the weapons went. These soldiers were doing their jobs and didn't secure some munitions (which I might add were probably prevalent during the whole campaign... remember, I saw some of this first hand). How is this GW's fault again? Incompetence because he wasn't carring a rifle and following the 101st? Wow... that's a stretch.

While I'm on that...let's use your logic in terms of WMD's. People always say that the war is a farce due to no WMD's. If soldiers let known bombs walk away, why couldn't **much smaller and more easily concealed** biological or nuclear components have been shipped out?

(Ok, back to the point... )
In the event that these weapons weren't secured, which is a believable scenario, why not lay blame where it is due? It is more than safe to say that the president wasn't called about a cache of munitions during the heat of battle, as this was probably a common thing. Remember... we already discussed the fact that hundreds of thousands of tons have been secured. This was 380 tons, and I would bet (and I rarely gamble) that the red phone in the oval office wasn't ringing.

I can say as a veteran, as an officer, and as an objective American that soldiers are human and make mistakes just like everyone else. Commanders have to make judgement calls on the battlefield as the issues arise. Who's to say some General didn't blunder????

Dropped ball? It sure seems like people are looking for something to blame GW on this one. I really doubt that it's going to make any difference on this one... there are just to many "what-if's".

Vampiel


Well as I said, regardless of the scale of the crimes involved, the principle is the same.
A leader is responsible for the actions he initiates.




Not without hunting for it. I saw a documetary a little while back. It was made by Greenpeace and showed them examining nuclear research sites once used by the Iraqi's.
There was radioactive material lying out in the open.
This was several months after the initial American invasion.
Greenpeace sealed up various rooms and containers and left warning marker tape all over the contaminated area's of the site and then turned over their findings to the US authorities. I don't know what happened after that, but it was pretty clear that until Greenpeace turned up, the sites they video'd had never been inspected.

There was also an article at Antiwar.com a few weeks back about yellow cake being found, lying in the open, but again I can't prove it, I didn't save the link.




Radioactive material was lying out in the open...