Boy, I leave for a few hours and this turns into a big partisan nyah-nyah about who is right and who isn't.
I just don't understand you conservatives. You hold every accomplishment up as a victory for Bush, but none of the mistakes are Bush's (or his teams) fault. I understand things go wrong in wartime; no battle plan survives the first minute of actual engagement.
But when things go wrong again, and again, and again.... you need to be thinking about new management. It's (for you baseball fans) like leaving a pitcher in the game far too long, after the other team has started to hit home runs where before they couldn't do much.
Now; to the subject at hand, namely, the missing explosives.
Quote:The first U.S. military unit to reach the site in Iraq (news - web sites) where U.N. officials say 377 tons of high explosives are missing did not carry out a hunt for such material, the unit's commander said on Wednesday.
Col. Dave Perkins, then the commander of the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, said the immediate concern when his troops reached the Al Qaqaa site on April 3, 2003, was to defeat a couple of hundred Iraqi troops who were firing from the compound as the Americans surged toward Baghdad.
<snip>
Diplomats said the IAEA had cautioned the United States about the danger of the explosives before the war, and after the invasion told U.S. officials about the need to keep them secured.
Perkins said he did not believe that his forces had been informed the IAEA previously had marked and sealed explosives at the site. "This was just another one of those sites that the process was no different. It was no less stringent or more stringent," he told reporters.
Perkins said the key concern at the time was whether there were any weapons of mass destruction, particularly chemical weapons, and that a white powdery substance found at the site proved to be a WMD false alarm.
Bush and Pentagon officials said the material might have been moved from the site before U.S. forces arrived.
Perkins also said it was "very highly improbable" that enemy forces could have trucked out such a huge amount of explosives in the weeks after U.S. forces first arrived there, considering the high level of U.S. military presence and how clogged the roads around the site were with U.S. convoys.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=3&u=/nm/20041027/ts_nm/iraq_explosives_pentagon_dc
The Iraqis claim the same thing.
http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=31993
Quote:Iraq says 'impossible' explosives taken before regime fall
AFP: 10/27/2004
BAGHDAD, Oct 27 (AFP) - A top Iraqi science official said Wednesday it was impossible that 350 tonnes of high explosives could have been smuggled out of a military site south of Baghdad before the regime fell last year.
He warned that explosives from nearby sites could have also been looted.
The UN nuclear watchdog this week said the explosives went missing from a weapons dump some time after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled in April 2003 by the US-led invasion .
But as the issue took centre stage in the final days of the US presidential campaign, some US officials have suggested the explosives had gone before the US-led forces moved on Baghdad.
The Pentagon has said it did not know when the explosives went missing.
Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the science ministry's site monitoring department and worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam, said "it is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall."
He said he and other officials had been ordered a month earlier to insure that "not even a shred of paper left the sites."
"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."
He said officials at Al-Qaqaa, including its general director, whom he refused to name, made contact with US troops before the fall in an effort to get them to provide security for the site.
The regime's fall triggered a wave of looting of government and private property, which US-led troops struggled to contain as they were busy securing their own positions.
Sharaa warned that other sites close to Al-Qaqaa with similar materials could have also been plundered.
"The Al-Milad Company in Iskandariyah and the Yarmuk and Hateen facilities contained explosive materials that could have also been taken out," he told AFP.
Al-Qaqaa is near latifiyah, 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of Baghdad. The bulk of materials in question include HMX (high melting point explosive) and RDX (rapid detonation explosive), which can be used in major bombing attacks, making missile warheads and detonating nuclear weapons.
The area in Babil province, which includes the towns of Iskandariyah and Mahmudiyah, used to be the centre of Saddam's military-industrial complex.
It is now one of the most dangerous parts of the country, and is rife with crime, kidnappings and attacks.
"It may be already too late to salvage many of these sites, which are controlled by bandits and beyond the control of Iraqi forces," warned Sharaa.
Science Minister Omar Rashad sent a letter on October 10 to the International Atomic Energy Agency sounding the alarm about the explosives in Al-Qaqaa.
Sharaa said the letter was sent after repeated warnings and inquiries by the IAEA over the disappearance of so-called duel-use nuclear material, which could be used for either conventional or nuclear means.
"Normally we should be overseeing all sites but these responsibilities were stripped away from us under the coalition authority," he said.
The ministry was only handed oversight responsiblities of two site -- Al-Tuwaitha and Al-Wardiya -- after authority was transferred from the coalition to the interim government in June.
Sharaa refused to put a number on the sites with dangerous materials but said that many include hospitals, schools and factories that are now under the control of various ministries.
Some Iraqi officials have estimated the number at 200.
"It is very serious if these materials fall into the wrong hands, because they will be used to kill Iraqis," Muwaffaq al-Rubaiye, a special advisor to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's government, warned Tuesday
Rubaiye, formerly national security advisor, warned in July that materials to make so-called dirty bombs might already be in the hands of militant groups like that of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, believed to be Al-Qaeda's frontman in Iraq.
10/27/2004 13:56 GMT - AFP
So; the evidence is now against any theory supporting the removal of these weapons before the U.S. invasion. This gives great legitimacy to those who have claimed that the people running the war in Iraq are
complete asshats.
There is little doubt in my mind that we could have prevented this with more troops and more planning, or perhaps allowing the IAEA to keep a watch on things...
Enough is enough, people! Conservatives, stop defending Bush and concentrate on the real power players in his admin which have stolen your party from you and made a mess of our foriegn policy...
Cycloptichorn
