White House caught in lie about missing weapons

[montana500]

No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says
By JIM DWYER and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: October 27, 2004


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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/politics/27bomb.html?oref=login


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

[radfringe]

1. talking Head spin

about those explosives....

the "news" last night did not focus on the the fact that explosives were missing -- but rather the "timing" of the report --- it's the media's fault

Meanwhile -- according to several talking heads -- the whole explosive story is "overblown" and it's an "over-reaction"

errrr...and about Allawi's statement that US is negligent? according to talking heads --- opps, the statement was "mis"-translated

[izzie]

2. What about the missing President?

If he would stop his naps and vacations.

[LiviaOlivia]

3. How many more people will die because of Bush?

from Iraq'd blog by Spencer Ackerman
10-25-04


"THE GREATEST EXPLOSIVES BONANZA IN HISTORY": So let's review. The ostensible purpose for the Iraq invasion was to preempt the unquestionably intolerable acquisition of weapons of mass destruction--chief among them nuclear-weapons material--by Al Qaeda from Saddam Hussein. Leaving aside for a moment what U.S. intelligence officials knew or assessed at the time, it's now clear that this scenario envisions the transfer of weapons that Saddam didn't have to an ally he didn't possess. This calculation--the denial of WMD to undeterrable jihadist networks--wasn't applicable in Iraq, but it surely will form the basis for major U.S. security decisions for years to come, regardless of who is in the White House. But thanks to the Bush administration, the global black market in conventional weapons and component parts for nuclear weapons has already reaped what an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) memo terms "the greatest explosives bonanza in history": 380 tons of high melting point explosive (HMX), rapid detonation explosive (RDX), and pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), looted from Saddam's unsecured munitions dump at Al Qaqaa beginning after the invasion last year and as recently as last week. Exploding HMX or RDX is typically a key step in facilitating a nuclear detonation. Less than a pound of the material exploded Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. And now, these tremendously dangerous explosives, typically well-regulated by the world's governments to limit their proliferation, are in the hands of God knows who. If there was any doubt that the Iraq war has severely diminished U.S. national security, the argument may be ending.

It's worth remembering that while the looting of Al Qaqaa appears to be singular in the danger it has caused, it's not the first such facility that the U.S. failed to secure. An insufficient U.S. military presence at Mosul's Al Kindi Research, Testing, Development, and Engineering Facility and at the Tuwaitha nuclear facility southeast of Baghdad in spring 2003 led to severe looting of such dirty-bomb component material as cesium and cobalt. The likely scenario is that Al Qaqaa is the rule, not the exception.

How could this have happened? Insufficient military personnel and sustained attention, certainly. But that doesn't explain why the administration didn't devote critical resources to such a dire problem. One likely explanation is ideology. As Bill Keller described in a 2003 article on nuclear proliferation, the Bush administration worries far more about the character of regimes that possess dangerous weapons than about the danger posed by the weapons themselves. That explains, for example, why the administration didn't make securing Russian nuclear material a tier-one priority even after September 11, but turned its counterproliferation attention (such as it is) to Baghdad. But with a national-security outlook that boils down to "no dangerous regime, no danger," it's hardly surprising that securing munitions sites would fall to what one administration official told The New York Times was a "medium priority"--particularly in the triumphal moments of spring 2003, when the administration was mistakenly gloating about a successful war. (It's the same focus on the centrality of states that leads the administration to misunderstand the war on terror.)

Finally, the administration resorted to another pattern during the Al Qaqaa debacle: covering up what it knew instead of dealing with it. As the Times reports, the Coalition Provisional Authority prevented the IAEA from inspecting the site, and it took until the restoration of national sovereignty to an Iraqi government for the formal admission that Al Qaqaa was stripped of its hazardous inventory. Admitting that 380 tons of explosives that lend themselves perfectly to terrorist machinations have gone missing would have tarnished the administration's stated line that things are improving in Iraq during President Bush's reelection campaign. It also would have been the first step in limiting the damage to national security. President Bush made his choice, and next Tuesday, so will the rest of us.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd
subscription req'd

note: I added bold type.

[KelleyKramer]

4. Whats the latest Bush lie about troops dying?

Was it 'I know he has weapons of mass destruction?'

Bush is on reason number 27 about attacking.

Now we find out he let thousand of pounds of weapons fallinto enemy hands.

What sucks more?

Their incompetence or their lying???