So the Bush Administration's ill-thought-out occupation didn't think to secure the weapons base, where we (and the International Atomic Energy Agency) knew there were 380 tons of military-grade explosives. And those explosives are now gone. Actually, according to the NYT, they've been gone for more than a year...a fact which the White House is declining to address. (This amount includes large amounts of RDX, which the Wikipedia calls "the most powerful and brisant of the military explosives.")

That's more than enough for over seven hundred and fifty thousand individual bombings on the scale of Lockerbie. The mind reels.

Well, I guess now we know where the explosives that are used to attack and kill our troops come from. Because of our negligence, our own people are dying over there.

Don't forget that the IAEA knew exactly where these explosives were, and was making sure they didn't go anywhere. Until the US kicked them out of Iraq, and didn't bother to secure the explosives.

From Talking Points Memo, which is alluding to the Nelson Report, which broke this story:

One administration official told Nelson, "This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information."

In response to questions about whether the material might have been smuggled out of Iraq, another source told Nelson, "It’s still in Iraq, and this is the most likely primary source of the explosives which have been used to blow up Humvees and in all the deadly car bomb attacks since the Occupation began.”

"Mission Accomplished", indeed. (My emphasis above.)

Once again, because of the Bush Administration's bottomless perfidy and unrelenting incompetence, US troops and innocent civilians are dead.

(But go ahead and vote for Bush -- he makes us safer! Because he says so, it must be true!)

ADDENDUM: Josh Marshall is doing some particularly fine work on this story, chronicling the Administration's assorted zigzags, lies, and disingenuity as they scramble to try to minimize this mess.

Case in point: this TPM post:

The Iraqi interim government says that the explosives at al Qa Qaa went missing some time after April 9th 2003 because of "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

(Remember, Baghdad fell on April 9th, so presumably that's a marker denoting simply that it happened at some point after the fall of the old regime.)

Today, Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita suggested that the weapons may have been taken from al Qa Qaa in the final days of the old regime or in fact during the war.

Remember, the IAEA inspected the munitions in January 2003 and then returned to the site and saw that the seals were in place in March, just a week or so before the war started. So Di Rita is claiming that the explosives were taken away in a two or three week period in late March of very early April 2003. If Drudge is to be trusted (yes, yes, I know), NBC will be running with some version of this storyline.

But there's another version of events.

A Pentagon "official who monitors developments in Iraq" told the Associated Press today that "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."

That of course would mean that the explosives were not removed from the facility until some point after the war. And that would be in line with what the Iraqis two weeks ago told the IAEA.

Let's review for a moment. We have a dispute here about a window of time covering two to four weeks, say roughly from March 10th to April 10th 2003 at the longest. But it's an important few weeks because it was over this span of time that the region went from the control of Saddam's government to the US military.

If the Di Rita hypothesis rests on the claim that the first US troops that visited al Qa Qaa found that the explosives had already been stolen or looted or otherwise secreted away. (He has, in fact, already said this.) And that would mean that the US government has known the explosives were missing for some eighteen months.

The problem is that the White House has spent the entire day claiming that they knew nothing about this until ten days ago, October 15th. Scott McClellan said this repeatedly during his gaggle with reporters this morning. Indeed, he went on to say the following: "Now [i.e., after the notification on October 15th], the Pentagon, upon learning of this, directed the multinational forces and the Iraqi survey group to look into this matter, and that's what they are currently doing."

So McClellan says that the Pentagon only just learned about this. And that's why they only now assigned the Iraq Survey Group to examine what happened at al Qa Qaa.

But Di Rita says that the US government has known about it for 18 months.

So which is it?

They've known about it since just after the war and kept it a secret? Or they just found out about it ten days ago and now they're on the case?

PS. David Sanger has a nice follow-up today in the Times giving a tick-tock of the White House's story as it zigged and zagged over the course of the day.

Stay tuned. This should be big.

Comments

[jonmc]

This old chestnut sums up politics perfectly:

A little boy goes to his dad and asks, "What is Politics?"
Dad says, "Well son, let me try to explain it this way: I am the head of the family, so call me The President.
Your mother is the administrator of the money, so we call her The Government.
We are here to take care of your needs, so we will call you The People.
The nanny, we will consider her The Working Class.
And your baby brother, we will call him The Future.
Now think about that and see if it makes sense.
So the little boy goes off to bed thinking about what Dad has said. Later that night, he hears his baby brother crying, so he gets up to check on him. He finds that the baby has severely soiled his diaper. So the little boy goes to his parent's room and finds his mother sound asleep.
Not wanting to wake her, he goes to the nanny's room. Finding the door locked, he peeks in the keyhole and sees his father in bed with the nanny. He gives up and goes back to bed.
The next morning, the little boy say's to his father, "Dad, I think I understand the concept of politics now,"
The father says, "Great son! Tell me in your own words what you think politics is all about."
The little boy replies, "The President is screwing The Working Class while The Government is sound asleep. The People are being ignored and The Future is in deep shit."

kinda says it all, don't ya think?

[Red Ghost]

Dreadful, frightening and repulsive.

[victor]

Actually, according to NBC, the weapons were gone before April 2003, before US troops even arrived.

So basically, in a four page "bombshell" article the New York Times can't find the space to present a decently balanced account.

It is not clear why the NYT failed to report the cache had been missing for 18 months -- and was reportedly missing before troops even arrived.

[Vidiot]

So if the weapons had been missing for 18 months, as the Administration is saying, why is the Administration also saying that they only knew about it for two weeks?

Especially when the Iraqis told Paul Bremer about the missing explosives back in May 2003.

Oh, and NBC is saying that the Administration is mischaracterizing their reporting:

"Last night on this broadcast we reported that the 101st Airborne never found the nearly 380 tons of HMX and RDX explosives,'' Tom Brokaw, the NBC anchor, said. "We did not conclude the explosives were missing or had vanished, nor did we say they missed the explosives. We simply reported that the 101st did not find them.''

"For its part, the Bush campaign immediately pointed to our report as conclusive proof that the weapons had been removed before the Americans arrived,'' Mr. Brokaw added. "That is possible, but that is not what we reported.''

And a member of the NBC crew that accompanied the 101st to Al Qa Qaa has said that "there wasn't a search...as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away."

Furthermore, US troops actually first got to Al Qaa Qa on April 4, according to this article, and there were signs of explosives. This is a week before NBC (and the 101st) got there.

Incidentally, this whole mess would have been avoided if the Bush Administration hadn't kicked the IAEA out of Iraq prematurely.

To quote Josh Marshall:

Given all that's happened in Iraq, the potency of the al Qaqaa story was never that it was the worst thing that has happened in Iraq. It's that it brings together in one package almost everything that's gone wrong: incompetence, abetted by denial, covered up by dishonesty, and all in one fatal brew.

And what do we have over the last forty-eight hours? The White House faces a press storm over a new revelation and their reaction is to go to battle with the news organizations involved with an argument they pretty clearly hadn't thought over for more than a few minutes.

Now the White House has first, denied they knew anything about the problem before October 15th; second, said they've known about it all along and that it wasn't their fault because it happened before we got there; and third, well ... I guess we'll find that out tomorrow.

Incomplete, sloppy planning, terrible consequences, lies and backpedaling to cover it up...isn't this the hallmark of the Bush Administration?

[victor]

Of course, it's not really 380 tons, it's three, and it's a story jointly pushed by CBS (still stinging from Rathergate) and NYT--

On Sunday night, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told Jeff Fager, executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” that the story they had been jointly pursuing on missing Iraqi ammunition was starting to leak on the Internet.

“You know what? We’re going to have to run it Monday,” Keller said.

CBS’s Jeff Fager had asked the paper to delay publication one week.

The paper’s front-page story, charging that 377 tons of powerful bomb-making material “vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year,” hit the presidential campaign with explosive force, as Sen. John F. Kerry seized on it for three straight days and President Bush accused Kerry yesterday of making “wild charges.”

The article has also sparked criticism of the two news organizations from some conservatives, who accuse the Times and CBS of orchestrating a late hit against Bush.

Keller said in an interview yesterday that campaigns “attack the messenger” when they do not like the message. “Beating up on the so-called elite media has a nice populist ring to it, and some of it is calculated,” he said. Bush campaign officials thought that “if they barked at us, we would back off. . . . We’ve vetted this every way we can, and we continue to do that.”

Keller said “60 Minutes” executives asked the newspaper to hold the story until this Sunday so they could report it the same day, and “we said we weren’t comfortable doing that because it wouldn’t give the White House a fair opportunity to respond.”

Fager dismissed criticism of the timing as “absurd,” saying “it was a breaking news story and a significant one. It’s impossible to manage these things.” He said “60 Minutes” and correspondent Ed Bradley had planned to break the story this Sunday — two days before the election — only because “the story came to us on relatively short notice” and that was the next available show. The program has a separate staff from “60 Minutes Wednesday.”

Fager said it was “incredibly unfair” to link the ammunition story to the earlier “60 Minutes Wednesday” report on documents about Bush’s National Guard service, which CBS has admitted it cannot authenticate.

[Vidiot]

Three questions and few comments:

--From whom are you quoting above?

--Why does it matter that CBS and the NYT were reporting on it together? It seems to me that the Bush Administration is the one scrambling for after-the-fact corroboration this time.

--How does this change the fact that the Bush Administration has claimed contradictory things about this? They are lying to us.

--The figure of 380 tons is taken, I believe, from the Iraqis' letter to the IAEA. If there were only three tons, then that's still a Lockerbie a day fo the next sixteen years...or a Madrid a day for the next four months.

At least you're not blaming the troops, like Rudy Giuliani did.

Another interesting wrinkle...a Minnesota TV station's videotape.

[Vidiot]

Also, the IAEA warned the Bush Administration -- and the UN -- about the explosives in April 2003.

And the administration says it's only known about this for two weeks.