THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

ADMINISTRATION MISLEADS ON MISSING EXPLOSIVES

The Bush administration is pushing the theory that the 380 tons of explosives were missing from the Al Qaqaa storage facility before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Administration spokesman Dan Senor said on CNN that "there's a very high probability that those weapons weren't even there before the war."[1]

For days, this theory has been in direct conflict with a Pentagon official, who told the Associate Press on Monday, "US-led coalition troops had searched Al Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact."[2]

Now, video shot in Iraq by a Minneapolis news team provides further proof that the administration's theory is bogus. After the invasion - on April 18, 2003 - the Minneapolis ABC news crew was stationed just south of the Al Qaqaa facility.[]3 That day, they drove 2 to 3 miles north with the 101st Airborne Division. There, "members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS news crew bunker after bunker of material labeled 'explosives.'"[4] Some of the boxes were marked "Al Qaqaa."[5] One soldier told the crew: "we can stick [detonation cords] in those and make some good bombs."[6] Watch the video:
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=65509.

Sources:

1. "Paula Zahn Now," CNN, 10/26/04,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=65510.
2. "380 tons of explosives missing in Iraq," Associated Press, 10/25/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=65511.
3. "5 EYEWITNESS NEWS video may be linked to missing explosives in Iraq," KSTP.com, 10/28/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=65512.
4. Ibid, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=65512.
5. Ibid, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=65512.
6. Ibid, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=3382691&l=65512.

During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS news crew bunker after bunker of material labelled "explosives." Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get into the bunkers and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.

"We can stick it in those and make some good bombs." a soldier told our crew.






Soldiers who took a 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew into bunkers on April 18 said some of the boxes uncovered contained proximity fuses.

There were what appeared to be fuses for bombs. They also found bags of material men from the 101st couldn't identify, but box after box was clearly marked "explosive."

In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name "Al Qaqaa", the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

"We weren't quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn't appear that this was being secured in any way," said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. "It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents".

Officers with the 101st Airborne told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that the bunkers were within the U.S. military perimeter and protected. But Caffrey and former 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS Reporter Dean Staley, who spent three months together in Iraq, said Iraqis were coming and going freely.

"At one point there was a group of Iraqis driving around in a pick-up truck,"Staley said. "Three or four guys we kept an eye on, worried they might come near us."


On Wednesday, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS e-mailed still images of the footage taken at the site to experts in Washington to see if the items captured on tape are the same kind of high explosives that went missing in Al Qaqaa. Those experts could not make that determination.

The footage is now in the hands of security experts to see if it is indeed the explosives in question.

From the AP:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2002075416_webhalliburton28.html

Quote:

Think they'd be wasting their time with this if they didn't think there was something to it?

Cycloptichorn

The line of inquiry expands an earlier FBI investigation into whether Halliburton overcharged taxpayers for fuel in Iraq, and it elevates to a criminal matter the election-year question of whether the Bush administration showed favoritism to Vice President Dick Cheney's former company.

A 5 Eyewitness News crew in Iraq may have been just a door away from materials that could be used to detonate nuclear weapons. The evidence is in videotape shot by Reporter Dean Staley and Photographer Joe Caffrey at or near the Al Qaqaa munitions facility.

The video shows a cable locking a door shut. That cable is connected by a copper colored seal.

A spokesperson for the International Atomic Energy Agency told 5 Eyewitness News that seal appears to be one used by their inspectors. "In Iraq they were used when there was a concern that this could have a, what we call, dual use purpose, that there could be a nuclear weapons application."

5 Eyewitness News continues to develop new leads and uncover new developments in this story.

Read closer grasshopper.

Quote:

The line of inquiry expands an earlier FBI investigation into whether Halliburton overcharged taxpayers for fuel in Iraq, and it elevates to a criminal matter the election-year question of whether the Bush administration showed favoritism to Vice President Dick Cheney's former company.

Think they would be elevating an ongoing investigation to a criminal matter if they didn't think they were on to something?

Cycloptichorn

I don't know. Why don't you wait to find out instead of speculating?

(October 28, 2004 -- 12:52 PM EDT // link // print)
If you look through the right-wing media universe this morning you will hear that perhaps the explosives were never at al Qaqaa at all. Or if they were there perhaps Saddam's men carted them off in March. Or if Saddam's men didn't cart them off
for the insurgency then the Russians carted them off to Syria. Or if, God forbid, it really did happen as the critics say, well, President Bush wasn't there. It was the fault of the troops on the ground.

If you can't quite get your head around the audacity of that last one, that's what the president's surrogate Rudy Guiliani said this morning on one of the morning shows.

"The actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there," said Mr. Guiliani, "Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?"

But, please, let's see through the snowstorm of mumbojumbo the president's handlers and liegemen are trying to toss in our eyes and focus on the essence of the matter.

The president and his advisors insisted on a warplan that had far too few troops to secure even the key facilities in Iraq that were the reason for the invasion in the first place. Remember, many of the nuclear facilities were stripped bare too. This wasn't the fault of troops streaming through on their way to Baghdad, doing a quick check for chemical and biological weapons. The error was in the planning of the war itself -- planning that came from Rumsfeld's civilians and the White House over and against the advice of the generals.

Now, in this particular case, could the White House get lucky and it turn out that the al Qaqaa munitions were actually carted off to Mars?

Sure. Even though no evidence adduced to date suggests anything but that they were looted because they were not secured.

But that would hardly change the essential issue. The administration didn't deploy adequate troops to secure these facilities and didn't even have a plan to do so. It wasn't even a concern until late Sunday evening when the issue blew up into a political firestorm and they began desperately trying to come up with some rationale, any rationale, to shift the blame off themselves.

Nor is that all.

Why was the mission so undermanned?

Part of the explanation comes from Secretary Rumsfeld's and his staff's view of military transformation, one that puts a heavy emphasis on high-tech weaponry and airpower over ground forces.

That's not the biggest reason, though.

The biggest reason is that President Bush and his chief advisors knew that it would be much harder to get the country into Iraq if the electorate knew the full scope of the investment -- in dollars, deployments and casualties -- upfront. In other words, undermanning the operation was always part of the essential dishonesty and recklessness with which the president led the nation to war.

-- Josh Marshall

David, thank you very much for joining us.

Give us your assessment. You know this facility. You knew it from your days in the 90s when you worked for the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency. What's going on?

DAVID KAY, FORMER CHIEF U.S. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Well, Wolf, this is a very large facility.

And I'm afraid we're into a zone of which we won't know definitively what happened. We do know that the U.N. certified in early March that the explosives were there. We know that by May, when the 75th Exploitation Task Force went in, they were not there. There's a gap of about three weeks, two and a half weeks, before the war took place until a month after the war took place and we simply don't know what happened.

I must say, I find it hard to believe that a convoy of 40 to 60 trucks left that facility prior to or during the war, and we didn't spot it on satellite or UAV. That is, because it is the main road to Baghdad from the south, was a road that was constantly under surveillance. I also don't find it hard to believe that looters could carry it off in the dead of night or during the day and not use the road network.

I saw many Iraqi facilities in which they came by pickup truck and constantly -- it's amazing to see whole buildings disappear at the hands of looters who are not organized, who do not have heavy equipment. I also think we ought to put it in perspective. We're talking about 400 tons of high explosives. It would be a great tool in the hands of insurgents and terrorists. But that's a country that is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives that have been used now for well over a year against the coalition forces there.

Iraq is not short of explosives. The insurgents are not short of explosives.

BLITZER: When you were head of the U.S. government's Iraq Survey Group, you spent, what, about nine months in Iraq before Charles Duelfer completed the job, didn't come up with any stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Did you visit this Al-Qaqaa facility over there, because you knew, presumably in advance, that it had been closely monitored throughout the '90s?

KAY: Well, in fact, it was a team of mine that discovered the original HMX and RDX there as part of their weapons program in late '91.

No, by the time I got there, we had definitive evidence from the 75th Exploitation Task Force that the facility was empty of the explosives. Now, I did send teams there. This is a very large facility. It was originally the home of Gerald Bull's super gun. It had a phosgene production plant, a chemical dual-use nature that could be used for chemical weapons.

So we sent teams there, but they weren't looking for the explosives. The explosives were definitively gone by the time the ISG was created and on the ground.

BLITZER: Three hundred and eighty tons -- tons -- of this material. One pound of it -- one pound of it -- could bring dune jetliner like Pan Am 103.

David Kay, thanks very much. We'll continue to speak with you and get some more information on this story. Appreciate it.

Doesn't look good for the 'they were already gone' theory....

as I see it, the only asset Kerry has is that he is not a republican that forms the third leg of our current government. we currently have a one legged stool that does not balance. I continue to support Kucinich because I am a liberal in philosophy and in life.