Pentagon official confirms explosives intact after invasion

Interview transcript re missing explosive
MSNBC, 10/26/04 (Transcript):

Amy Robach: And it's still unclear exactly when those explosives disappeared. Here to help shed some light on that question is Lai Ling. She was part of an NBC news crew that traveled to that facility with the 101st Airborne Division back in April of 2003. Lai Ling, can you set the stage for us? What was the situation like when you went into the area?

Lai Ling Jew: When we went into the area, we were actually leaving Karbala and we were initially heading to Baghdad with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. The situation in Baghdad, the Third Infantry Division had taken over Baghdad and so they were trying to carve up the area that the 101st Airborne Division would be in charge of. As a result, they had trouble figuring out who was going to take up what piece of Baghdad. They sent us over to this area in Iskanderia. We didn't know it as the Qaqaa facility at that point but when they did bring us over there we stayed there for quite a while. We stayed overnight, almost 24 hours. And we walked around, we saw the bunkers that had been bombed, and that exposed all of the ordinances that just lied dormant on the desert.

AR: Was there a search at all underway or did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?

LLJ: No. There wasn't a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was - at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there.

AR: And there was no talk of securing the area after you left. There was no discussion of that?

LLJ: Not for the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. They were -- once they were in Baghdad, it was all about Baghdad, you know, and then they ended up moving north to Mosul. Once we left the area, that was the last that the brigade had anything to do with the area.

AR: Well, Lai Ling Jew, thank you so much for shedding some light into that situation. We appreciate it.

LLJ: Thank you.

Bush Adm. coverup of messing explosives scandal
US: No Explosives When GIs Arrived
VIENNA, Austria, Oct. 26, 2004
CBS

The Pentagon said Monday that invading U.S. troops did not find explosives at an Iraqi site where hundreds of tons of bomb-making material were once stored.

The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog alerted the Security Council this week that the Iraqi interim government reports nearly 400 tons of powerful explosives were missing from the al-Qaqaa facility, 30 miles south of Baghdad, as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security."

From the end of the 1991 Gulf War until the March 2003 U.S. invasion, the explosives had been under seal by the International Atomic Energy Agency because they could have been used to trigger nuclear weapons under Saddam's dormant bomb program.

The material might have fallen into the hands of insurgents, who've killed hundreds of coalition soldiers and civilians with roadside mines and car bombs since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

60 Minutes Correspondent Ed Bradley reports the U.N. says it warned the U.S. government the munitions site might be looted shortly after the invasion. The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the nuclear agency at that point that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be.

NBC News, which had correspondents embedded with the U.S. soldiers who reached the al-Qaqaa site in April 2003, said the GIs never found the explosives but did see other stockpiles of conventional weapons.

Al-Qaqaa is near Youssifiyah, an area rife with ambush attacks. An Associated Press Television News crew that drove past the compound Monday saw no visible security at the gates of the site, a jumble of low-slung, yellow-colored storage buildings that appeared deserted.

"The most immediate concern here is that these explosives could have fallen into the wrong hands," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.

The agency first placed a seal over Al-Qaqaa storage bunkers holding the explosives in 1991 as part of U.N. sanctions that ordered the dismantlement of Iraq's nuclear program after the Gulf War.

IAEA inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers, Fleming said. Inspectors visited the site again in March 2003, but didn't view the explosives because the seals were not broken, she said.

Nuclear agency experts pulled out of Iraq just before the U.S.-led invasion later that month, and have not yet been able to return for general inspections despite ElBaradei's repeated urging that they be allowed to finish their work.

The letter dated Oct. 10 that IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei received from Mohammed J. Abbas, a senior official at Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology, reported the theft of 377 tons of explosives. It informed the IAEA that since April 9, 2003, looting at the Al-Qaqaa installation had resulted in the loss of 215 tons of HMX, 156 tons of RDX and six tons of PETN explosives.

HMX and RDX are key components in plastic explosives such as C-4 and Semtex, which are so powerful that Libyan terrorists needed just a pound to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 170 people.

Insurgents targeting coalition forces in Iraq have made widespread use of plastic explosives in a bloody spate of car bomb attacks. Officials were unable to link the missing explosives directly to the recent car bombings, but the revelations that they could have fallen into enemy hands caused a stir in the last week of the U.S. presidential campaign.

"These explosives can be used to blow up airplanes, level buildings, attack our troops and detonate nuclear weapons," senior Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart said in a statement. "The Bush administration knew where this stockpile was, but took no action to secure the site."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration's first concern was whether the disappearance constituted a nuclear proliferation threat. He said it did not.

"We have destroyed more than 243,000 munitions" in Iraq, he said. "We've secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed."

Concerns over the security of former nuclear sites in Iraq have arisen before. In April, the IAEA reported that some Iraqi nuclear facilities appear to be unguarded, and radioactive materials were being taken out of the country.

Separately, the Los Angeles Times reported that 2,500 barrels of uranium that could be used to produce nuclear weapons had been left unguarded at the Tuwaitha nuclear research center site for several days following the withdrawal of Iraqi troops.

Explosives were looted after Iraq invasion
The United States allowed explosives that are killing our troops, contractors, and Iraqi civilians to remain unsecured. --- BBB

Explosives were looted after Iraq invasion
UN nuclear official cites security lapse
By Farah Stockman, Boston Globe Staff
October 26, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Iraqi officials reported that thieves looted 377 tons of powerful explosives from an unguarded site after the US-led invasion last year, the top UN nuclear official said yesterday. And a former weapons inspector said he had counted about 100 other unguarded weapons sites that may have been stripped of munitions for use in the wave of attacks against US soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

The explosives that were looted from the Al Qaqaa nuclear facility, apparently in April and May of 2003, had been sealed and monitored by international nuclear inspectors before the invasion. The explosives were monitored because they can be used to detonate a nuclear bomb, although Iraq was allowed to keep them because they also have civilian and conventional military uses.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, disclosed the security lapse to the UN Security Council yesterday after receiving a letter from the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology earlier this month that informed him of the loss and blamed it on ''theft and looting of governmental installations due to lack of security."

News that such a large amount of specialized explosives had disappeared from the abandoned facility spread alarm in Washington among longtime observers of Iraq's weapons programs.

''This is not just any old warehouse in Iraq that happened to have explosives in it; this was a leading location for developing nuclear weapons before the first Gulf War," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project, a nonprofit organization that has followed Iraq's attempts to procure weapons of mass destruction for more than a decade. ''The fact that it had been left unsecured is very, very discouraging. It would be like invading the US in to order to get rid of [weapons of mass destruction] and not securing Los Alamos or [Lawrence] Livermore [National Laboratory]."

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry said the looting of the explosives -- known as HMX, RDX, and PETN -- was fresh evidence of the Bush administration's inept handling of the Iraq invasion and its aftermath. His campaign seized on the news, organizing a conference call to reporters with Joe Lockhart, a senior adviser to the campaign, and Susan Rice, who advises Kerry on national security issues.

''Terrorists could use this material to kill our troops and our people, blow up airplanes, and level buildings," Kerry said yesterday to an audience in Dover, N.H. ''And now we know that our country and our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics. This is one of the great blunders of the Bush policy in Iraq."

The looting of the Qaqaa weapons site was first reported yesterday by The New York Times. US officials have acknowledged since the invasion that Iraq was riddled with sprawling weapons caches and that many sites were poorly guarded and subject to looting.

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said that securing the site had been ''a priority" but that ''given the number of arms and the number of caches and the extent of militarization of Iraq, it was impossible to provide 100 percent security for 100 percent of the sites, quite frankly."

Ereli said the US military had destroyed 243,000 tons of munitions and was in the process of destroying 160,000 tons more.

But the disappearance of the HMX, or ''High-Melting Point Explosive," caused particular alarm because the lightweight substance is twice as powerful as an ordinary plastic explosive and is not easily set off by an accident as other substances are. That makes it the perfect detonator for a nuclear device, or in attacks on large buildings or planes, although the substance is not considered a weapon of mass destruction and often is used for civilian purposes such as demolition and mining.

David Kay, a former weapons inspector in Iraq for the US government who led the Iraq Survey Group that searched for weapons of mass destruction, said that although his team of 1,400 investigators found no such weapons, they found small amounts of HMX and RDX -- and hundreds of square miles of other conventional munitions -- at unguarded sites across Iraq.

''The RDX, HMX, is a superb explosive for terrorists," Kay said. ''The danger is that it's gone somewhere else in the Middle East."

However, Kay's team had a mandate only to search for weapons of mass destruction, not to secure conventional arms, so he could do little beyond referring the caches to the US-led coalition.

''The military did not view guarding these sites as their responsibility," Kay said, recalling that he witnessed US troops guarding the gates of the Tuwaitha nuclear facility while Iraq civilians carried away radioactive pipes and metal drums through other exits.

''There just were not enough troops to guard the number of sites. It was just crazy."

At the time, there was no major insurgency and US military officials felt the war had been won, Kay said, so the Department of Defense did not fear that the weapons that disappeared in widespread looting would be used against US soldiers.

Later, as the insurgency heated, at least three major bombing sites in Iraq tested positive for HMX or RDX, Kay recalled.

Kay said that late into fall 2003, more than 100 large ammunition storage points had been left unsecured; everything from conventional bombs to artillery shells and rockets were unguarded.

By the time Kay's team visited Qaqaa in the late summer of 2003, the buildings had been largely destroyed by the war and looting, and it was too dangerous to spend much time at the sites. He said there was no sign of the neatly packaged explosives in locked bunkers that Kay had seen as a weapons inspector in 1991, when he researched how Iraq bought the explosives, mostly from China and Eastern Europe.

Kay said he stressed the danger of leaving the weapons sites unguarded in his testimony to Congress. Since late fall of last year, the military has put out contracts seeking companies that will secure and destroy the weapons, Kay said, but the process has gone slowly.

The location of the explosives at Qaqaa had been so well known to inspectors that they appeared routinely in reports written by ElBaradei to the Security Council.

''Qaqaa was a well-known site even before the first Gulf War as a place where Iraqis were doing nuclear research," said Milhollin, who said he learned that in 1989 the Department of Defense had brought three Iraqis from the site to Oregon to train them in HMX detonations. ''It was certainly a leading candidate to be inspected after the first Gulf War and to be secured after the second."

Yesterday, Democratic Representatives Marty Meehan, of Massachusetts, and Ellen Tauscher, of California, prepared a letter to Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, requesting a hearing on the issue and demanding that the government account for the missing materiel.

The pair had written to President Bush in May asking for former weapons sites to be secured.

John Kerry's medals.

October 27, 2004
MISSING EXPLOSIVES
No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says
By JIM DWYER and DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times

White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.

But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the site and had merely stopped there overnight.

The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.

Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make plans for their next push.

"We happened to stumble on it,'' he said. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave that very same day. The plan was not to go in there and start searching. It looked like all the other ammunition supply points we had seen already."

What had been, for the colonel and his troops, an unremarkable moment during the sweep to Baghdad took on new significance this week, after The New York Times, working with the CBS News program "60 Minutes," reported that the explosives at Al Qaqaa, mainly HMX and RDX, had disappeared since the invasion.

Earlier this month, officials of the interim Iraqi government informed the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives disappeared sometime after the fall of Mr. Hussein on April 9, 2003. Al Qaqaa, which has been unguarded since the American invasion, was looted in the spring of 2003, and looters were seen there as recently as Sunday.

President Bush's aides told reporters that because the soldiers had found no trace of the missing explosives on April 10, they could have been removed before the invasion. They based their assertions on a report broadcast by NBC News on Monday night that showed video images of the 101st arriving at Al Qaqaa.

By yesterday afternoon Mr. Bush's aides had moderated their view, saying it was a "mystery" when the explosives disappeared and that Mr. Bush did not want to comment on the matter until the facts were known. (BBB: That means not until after the election.)

On Sunday, administration officials said that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. taskforce that hunted for unconventional weapons, had been ordered to look into the disappearance of the explosives. On Tuesday night, CBS News reported that Charles A. Duelfer, the head of the taskforce, denied receiving such an order.

At the Pentagon, a senior official, who asked not to be identified, acknowledged that the timing of the disappearance remained uncertain. "The bottom line is that there is still a lot that is not known," the official said.

The official suggested that the material could have vanished while Mr. Hussein was still in power, sometime between mid-March, when the international inspectors left, and April 3, when members of the Army's Third Infantry Division fought with Iraqis inside Al Qaqaa. At the time, it was reported that those soldiers found a white powder that was tentatively identified as explosives. The site was left unguarded, the official said.

The 101st Airborne Division arrived April 10 and left the next day. The next recorded visit by Americans came on May 27, when Task Force 75 inspected Al Qaqaa, but did not find the large quantities of explosives that had been seen in mid-March by the international inspectors. By then, Al Qaqaa had plainly been looted.

Colonel Anderson said he did not see any obvious signs of damage when he arrived on April 10, but that his focus was strictly on finding a secure place to collect his troops, who were driving and flying north from Karbala.

"There was no sign of looting here," Colonel Anderson said. "Looting was going on in Baghdad, and we were rushing on to Baghdad. We were marshaling in."

A few days earlier, some soldiers from the division thought they had discovered a cache of chemical weapons that turned out to be pesticides. Several of them came down with rashes, and they had to go through a decontamination procedure. Colonel Anderson said he wanted to avoid a repeat of those problems, and because he had already seen stockpiles of weapons in two dozen places, did not care to poke through the stores at Al Qaqaa.

"I had given instructions, 'Don't mess around with those. It looks like they are bunkers; we're not messing around with those things. That's not what we're here for,' " he said. "I thought we would be there for a few hours and move on. We ended up staying overnight."
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Thom Shanker and William J. Broad contributed reporting for this article.