posted October 26, 2004 02:14 PM            

NBC News: Explosives Were Gone When U.S. Troops Arrived
Susan Jones, CNSNews.com
Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004

NBC News reported Monday night that 380 tons of missing explosives were already gone when U.S. troops arrived at the Al-Qaqaa weapons installation in April 2003 – one day after Saddam's government was toppled.

NBC should know. It had a reporter embedded with the U.S. troops when they arrived at Al-Qaqaa in April 2003.

While the Kerry campaign blasted the Bush administration for "stunning incompetence" on Monday, many Bush supporters questioned the timing of the New York Times' report Monday about the missing explosives, just eight days before the presidential election.
NBC News correspondent Jim Miklaszewski suggested a political motive as well: In his report on the missing explosives Monday night, he quoted one official as saying, "Recent disagreements between the administration and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes this announcement appear highly political."

According to the Times, the IAEA said it had warned the Bush administration about the need to secure the Al-Qaqaa facility before and after the war.

Times' Bias Caught Again

In a follow-up report on Tuesday, the Times did not mention the fact that NBC had an embedded reporter on the scene when the missing explosives were discovered - the day after Baghdad fell.

Tuesday's report in the Times, headlined "Iraq Explosives Become Issue in Campaign," covers how the Bush administration "sought to explain the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that American forces were supposed to secure."

Bush's aides, Tuesday's article said, "tried to explain why American forces had ignored warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency about the vulnerability of the huge stockpile of high explosives, whose disappearance was first reported on Monday by CBS and The New York Times."

The Times' report portrayed the Bush administration as being on the defensive, trying to "minimize the importance of the loss" of the military explosives.

The report noted that President Bush "never mentioned the disappearance of the high explosives during a long campaign speech in Greeley, Colo., about battling terrorism."

"There are certainly some questions about when the explosives were missing," Kerry campaign adviser Howard Wolfson admitted on "Fox & Friends" early Tuesday. But Kerry's campaign is not expected to let the matter drop.

In a press release late Monday night, the campaign accused Bush's campaign of trying to cover up its "failure" to secure the explosives.

posted October 26, 2004 02:19 PM            

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a frequent defender of President Bush, issued a statement Tuesday blasting Kerry's New-York-Times-fueled attacks over missing explosives that once were stored at Iraq's Al-Qaqaa facility.

The weapons, according to an NBC report on Monday, had been moved from the site before coalition forces arrived in April 2003, Cornyn noted. NBC said it had a reporter embedded with coalition forces when they arrived at the site, only to find the explosives already gone.

"When U.S. and coalition troops secured more than 400,000 tons of the Hussein regime's explosives, John Kerry said nothing," Cornyn noted. "But when less than one tenth of one percent of that amount was reported missing by the New York Times, John Kerry suddenly found his voice.

"But now, after calling the administration incompetent and blundering, it turns out that John Kerry's charges Monday, as usual, were based on false assumptions," Cornyn said.

"I hope my colleague will now apologize to the brave men and women in Iraq who are working every day to secure Hussein's vast arsenal. And I hope that I am not the only one who sees the irony in the Kerry campaign complaining about the dangers of weapons that, if John Kerry had his way, would still be under the hair-trigger control of Saddam Hussein.

"Sadly, John Kerry is all too quick to criticize our men and women in uniform for short-term political gain before he has the facts. This is not a quality America needs in a commander-in-chief during a time of war."

posted October 26, 2004 02:36 PM            

Soon, all over the land, supporters of the Dud Duo will be repeating the lie ad infinitum as they have all the other lies of Kerry/Edwards, Algore, the DNC, Ted Kennedy, MoveOn.org and the vast vipers nest of Kerry's 527 support groups.

Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004
Edwards Parrots New York Times' Fictional Party Line

The novice legislator who wants to be one heartbeat from the presidency either is too stupid to understand the phoniness of the New York Times' latest fiction about Iraq or thinks the American people are too stupid.

Or perhaps Democrat airhead apparent John Edwards is just doing his handlers' bidding: the old Democrat trick of repeating a lie often enough until people believe it.

Edwards claimed today in Wilmington, Ohio: "These are exactly the kind of explosives terrorists want. They're the dangerous weapons we wanted to keep from falling in the hands of terrorists. And now these explosives are out there, and we have no idea who's got them. Dick Cheney calls that a remarkable success."

He failed to mention that the pro-Democrat Times, whose recent endorsement of the Kerry-Edwards ticket was the nation's most obvious redundancy since the coining of the term "liberal media bias," refused to report reality: that the explosives were already missing from Al-Qaqaa when GIs got there a mere one day after Saddam Hussein's fall.

Nor did the one-term senator or the Times note that that "news" dated from April 2003.

posted October 26, 2004 03:10 PM            

Hey Kerry, they were not there when Coalition Forces arrived 1 day after the fall of Saddam's regime.

Hey Kerry, we're talking about 380 tons of material, enough to fill 40 semitrailer trucks.

Hey Kerry, terrorists didn't stroll into the weapons storage complex and stuff their pockets with RDX...because RDX and the other explosives are granular..like sugar.

Only a moron would suggest that a storage depot was broken into by terrorists after coalition forces had secured the facility and make off with 40 semi-trailers of high explosives...in plain sight. Hello, is there any intelligent life there?

Report: Explosives could not be found when U.S. troops arrived
NBC News says its crew was embedded with soldiers at time
Tuesday, October 26, 2004 Posted: 11:16 AM EDT (1516 GMT)

Officials fear the missing explosives could be used in bombings like those occurring regularly in Iraq.
Image:

(CNN) -- The mystery surrounding the disappearance of 380 tons of powerful explosives from a storage depot in Iraq has taken a new twist, after a television news crew embedded with the U.S. military during the invasion of Iraq reported that the material could not be found when American troops arrived.

NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.

While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC.

The International Atomic Energy Agency revealed Monday that it had been told two weeks ago by the Iraqi government that 380 tons of HMX and RDX disappeared from Al Qaqaa after Saddam Hussein's government fell.

In a letter to the IAEA dated October 10, Iraq's director of planning, Mohammed Abbas, said the material disappeared sometime after Saddam's regime fell in April 2003, which he attributed to "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. According to NBC, troops from the 101st Airborne arrived the next day and could not the material.

At the Pentagon, officials said that the site had been repeatedly searched but the high explosives the IAEA described were never found.

The Pentagon said the Al Qaqaa facility was a "level 2" priority on a list of 500 sites to be searched and secured. U.S. officials say it was visited dozens of times by U.S. troops in the months following the invasion, and -- after searching 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings -- they never came upon the stockpile.

Prior to the Iraq war, the high-grade explosives at Al Qaqaa had been under the control of IAEA inspectors because the material could be used as a component in a nuclear weapon, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said. IAEA and other U.N. inspectors left the country in March 2003 before the fighting began on March 19.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday that five days after the IAEA received the letter from the Iraqi government, the agency alerted U.S. officials in Vienna, who in turn told national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. She then alerted Bush, McClellan said.

Once U.S. officials were alerted, the multinational force in Iraq and the Iraq Survey Group, charged with hunting for weapons in Iraq, were both ordered to investigate what was missing and the possible circumstances, according to State Department spokesman Adam Ereli.

"We, from the very beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, did everything we could to secure arms caches throughout the country," Ereli said. "But 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."

The news of the missing explosives followed an IAEA report earlier this month that said high-end, dual-use machinery that could be used in a nuclear weapons program was missing from Iraq's nuclear facilities. (Full story)

"Our immediate concern is that if the explosives did fall into the wrong hands, they could be used to commit terrorist acts and some of the bombings that we've seen," the IAEA's Fleming said.

She described Al Qaqaa as "massive" and said it is one of the most well-known storage sites. Besides the explosives, it also held large caches of artillery.

Fleming said the IAEA, which is based in Vienna, Austria, did not know whether some of the explosives may have been used in past attacks.

The IAEA said that before the war it inspected the Al Qaqaa facility multiple times and verified that the material was present in January 2003. The agency said the material was mentioned in reports to the U.N. Security Council that were made public.

Ereli said coalition forces searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings at the Al Qaqaa facility after the war for weapons of mass destruction. The troops found none, but did see indications of looting, he said. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003.

"Some explosive material at the time was discovered, although none of it carried IAEA seals, and this discovery was reported to coalition forces for removal of the material," Ereli said.

Ereli said coalition forces have cleared 10,033 weapons caches and destroyed 243,000 tons of munitions. Another 162,898 tons of munitions are at secure locations and awaiting destruction, he said.

A senior administration official played down the importance of the missing explosives, describing them as dangerous material but "stuff you can buy anywhere."

The official noted that the administration did not see this necessarily as a "proliferation risk."

"In the grand scheme -- and on a grand scale -- there are hundreds of tons of weapons, munitions, artillery, explosives that are unaccounted for in Iraq," the official said.

"And like the Pentagon has said, there is really no way the U.S. military could safeguard all of these weapons depots or find all of these missing materials."

The official said the Iraq Survey Group concluded that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and documented the scope of the problem.

Threat from terrorists
A European diplomat told The New York Times that Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, is "extremely concerned" about the potentially "devastating consequences" of the vanished stockpile.

"The immediate danger" of the lost stockpiles is its potential use by insurgents to make small, but powerful, bombs, an expert told the Times. The expert said the explosives could be transported easily across the Middle East.

According to the Times, the stockpiles missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe.

The Iraqi letter to the IAEA identified the vanished explosives as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or "high melting point explosive," 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or "rapid detonation explosive," among other designations, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or "pentaerythritol tetranitrate."

Fleming said the IAEA, whose mission is to keep track of everything with potential nuclear weapons applications, had been monitoring about 100 sites in Iraq, but there were only a few of special concern, including Al Qaqaa.

"This is a real massive quantity of explosives that could have reached the hands of insurgents and could be used with deadly force and consequences against people in Iraq," Fleming said.

"One would have to assume it's been stolen by someone who has some sort of nefarious purpose for it."

Political fallout
With the U.S. presidential election eight days away, news of the missing explosives quickly became campaign fodder.

Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry immediately seized on the information to accuse President Bush of incompetence in failing to secure the material, charging that "this is one of the great blunders of Iraq and one of the great blunders of this administration."

But in the wake of the NBC report, the Bush campaign fired off a statement saying that Kerry's criticism of the president over the missing material has "been proven false before the day is over."

"John Kerry's attacks today were baseless," Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said. "He said American troops did not secure the explosives, when the explosives were already missing."

Schmidt also said that Kerry "neglects to mention the 400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that are either destroyed or in the process of being destroyed" in Iraq.

But Kerry senior adviser Joe Lockhart fired back with a statement of his own, accusing the Bush campaign of "distorting" the NBC News report.

"In a shameless attempt to cover up its failure to secure 380 tons of highly explosive material in Iraq, the White House is desperately flailing in an effort to escape blame," Lockhart said. "It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous."

Lockhart did not elaborate on how the Bush campaign was distorting the NBC report.