View topic - Toronto Star continues to lead with false weapons report :: Free Dominion - Principled Conservative - Party and Canadian Politics

Oct. 26, 2004. 06:35 AM

Sparks fly over missing explosives

WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry yesterday seized on the missing explosives at a site near Baghdad as "one of the great blunders of Iraq" and said the Bush administration's "incredible incompetence" had put U.S. troops at risk.

President George W. Bush did not comment directly on the U.N. report that about 380 tonnes of explosives are missing, but said during a campaign stop in Colorado that his "opponent has a strategy of pessimism and retreat" on Iraq.

Chief White House spokesman Scott McClellan sought to downplay the threat, saying the materials represented no threat of nuclear proliferation and that the administration preferred to concentrate on weapons destroyed, not those lost.

The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog confirmed yesterday the explosives were looted from the Al Qaqaa weapons facility near Baghdad that was never secured by the U.S. military.

The types of missing explosives — known as HMX and RDX — are highly potent and are the only pure explosives that have been reported missing to the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, a spokesperson said from its headquarters in Vienna.

They could potentially be used to make a detonator for a nuclear bomb, or they could be converted into more than 2,500 135-kilogram car bombs like the one that killed 47 people in Baghdad in February.

Experts say the quantity would be enough to completely pack a 747 jetliner. They also say it would be enough to take down every plane on the planet.

"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the greatest blunders of this administration and the incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and this country at greater risk," Kerry told supporters in Dover, N.H. "The unbelievable blindness, stubbornness, arrogance of this administration to do the basics has now allowed this president to once again fail the test of being commander-in-chief."

Later in the day at a rally in Philadelphia, Kerry said: "Terrorists could use this material to kill our troops, our people, blow up airplanes, and level buildings. Now we know that our country and our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics.''

But with leadership in time of war a major issue as next Tuesday's election approaches, Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said Kerry's "armchair-generaling" did not change "the fact that he does not have a vision, a strategy or a plan to fight and win the war on terror."

Asked about charges from the Kerry campaign that the Bush administration had initially kept the disappearance secret, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said they decided "to get all the facts and find out exactly what happened in this case, and then whether there are other cases."

He said that so far, no other large-scale cases of looting of explosives have been found.

At the Pentagon, spokesperson Bryan Whitman said Washington did not believe the missing materials posed a danger of nuclear proliferation but would find it "nearly impossible to verify" whether they had left Iraq or were in insurgent hands.

Saddam Hussein's government may have moved or destroyed them before the war, or they may have been destroyed in the course of battle by U.S. bombing, U.S. defence officials said.

One defence official acknowledged Al Qaqaa was "well known as a storage depot for conventional explosives" but doubted U.S. forces made safeguarding it "a high-priority location."

"You just can't leave a guard force at all these places you find. If you leave a squad at all 10,000 places that are known so far, then there's 50,000 (troops) out of action," said another U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Several Democratic lawmakers issued statements expressing concern.

"We had a responsibility to secure the facility that stored these lethal materials, not just for the protection of our troops in Iraq, but for the security of Americans here at home and abroad,'' Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said.

The Multinational Force in Iraq and the Iraq Survey Group, the U.S.-led body that has been searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is looking into the issue of the missing explosives, said Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesperson.

McClellan said protecting the sites currently is the role of the Iraqi interim government.

"We have destroyed more than 243,000 (tonnes of) munitions," he said, adding "we've secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed."

David Kay, former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, said he was not at all surprised at the report, which was initially revealed in The New York Times.

Kay, who first visited the facility as a U.N. inspector in 1991, said it was not guarded after the U.S.-led invasion in early 2003 and was not being guarded when he left Iraq. "The extraordinary thing would be to find a site that was really guarded," he said. But, he added, the facilities were numerous and often encompassed hundreds of hectares.

"There weren't enough troops to guard the ministry buildings,'' Kay said. "It's a result of not having enough troops on the ground. And it would have been a very large number."

from the star's wire services

Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 11:37 am Post subject:

This "story" was proven false on Fox and Rush today and CBS has backed off because they are already in one journalistic malpractice charge...they let the leftist NY times run with it and take the heat when it blows.

The Star is just filling it's roll as an intellectually lethargic parrot.
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Celebrate Hard Likker and Handgun week here at the Shadowy GroupTM

Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 11:40 am Post subject:

http://www.drudgereport.com/nbcw6.htm

Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 11:44 am Post subject:

Any ounce of integrity that 60 minutes ever had they have lost completely in the last few weeks. They might just as well turn off the lights and close the door.
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Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 11:44 am Post subject:

The Great Falls Tribune just "broke" this story this morning as well....

You can SEE who does their "show prep" by watching NBC the night before....and NOT verifying EVERYTHING the NYT "discovers" in an election cycle.

All you are witnessing is the flushing sound coming from the THIRD STRING COMMIE RAGS.

The BIG BOYS had it yesterday and last night.

Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 11:54 am Post subject:

This is the best line from this article:

"Lockhart did not elaborate on how the Bush campaign was distorting the NBC report."
---------------------
Report: Explosives could not be found when U.S. troops arrived
CNN | Oct 26, 2004 | Suzanne Malveaux and Elise Labott contributed

(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.

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.

Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 11:56 am Post subject:

This development is proof that there was a concerted effort to move weapons en-mass prior to U.S. ground operations.

Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 3:30 pm Post subject:

Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 4:12 pm Post subject:

Does make you wonder where Husein sent this marerial ... presuming of course that the U.N. was correct in saying it was ever in the depot to begin with.

Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 4:25 pm Post subject:

Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 5:10 pm Post subject:

CBSNEWS PLANNED
BUSH MISSING EXPLOSIVES STORY FOR ELECTION EVE {DRUDGE} Rush is hitting this issue hard.
He's connecting all the dots, including airing a clip of Kerry
during one of the debates, where Kerry accused President Bush of not guarding
ammo dumps and thus allowing the ordinance to be used against our troops.
Kerry said this a couple of weeks BEFORE the New York Times
story.

NYT's October
Surprise Collapses

Why don't they just call it the Oct 25th
Surprise, since they have a new one everday.

Analysis Of An
October Surprise

This is not the real October surprise- it's too
early for the critical hit; there's a whole week for the story to be shot at and
sunk - The real attack comes at the end of week and is
directed at Bush's character, a follow-up to the Kitty Kelly and Dan Rather
types of attack.

Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 9:38 pm Post subject:

NBC reporter: No search at site of missing explosives
Russia calls for investigation into missing stockpile

(CNN) -- The Bush administration's role in the apparent disappearance of nearly 380 tons of sophisticated explosives in Iraq remains in question Tuesday, a day after the White House pointed to an NBC report to quash the story.

The embedded reporter who who visited Al Qaqaa during the U.S. Army's march to Baghdad downplayed the soldiers' role at the facility in a Tuesday interview.

The Iraqi government notified U.N. nuclear monitors in early October that an explosive stockpile was missing from the Al Qaqaa arms depot near Baghdad, blaming the disappearance on looting that followed the collapse of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003.

The Bush campaign has not responded to the letter, but did highlight Monday a report on NBC that said U.S. troops had visited the weapons depot the day after Baghdad fell to U.S. troops in April 2003.

The network reported that an embedded reporter did not see any explosives during her stop at Al Qaqaa. Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said the NBC report showed that allegations made on the campaign trail by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry were "baseless."

But NBC reporter Lai Ling Jew told the network's cable arm, MSNBC, that the 24-hour visit by elements of the 101st Airborne Division was "more of a pit stop."

U.S. troops did not conduct a detailed search of the compound nor did they try to prevent looting, she said.

"Certainly, some of the soldiers headed off on their own [and] 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," she said.
Campaign trail attack

Kerry continued his second day of attacks on the Bush administration regarding the missing explosives while President Bush remained silent on the issue.

Bush did not answer a reporter's shouted questions about the missing explosives at a campaign stop in Richland, Wisconsin, but Vice President Dick Cheney blasted Kerry for "playing armchair general."

Pentagon officials have said the site was searched repeatedly but no high explosives were found.

Russia has called on the U.N. Security Council to investigate the issue, but the United States has said there is no need.

Andrey Denisov, Russian ambassador to the United Nations, told a closed meeting of the council that Russia wants to discuss the missing explosives as well as the return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq.

U.S. Ambassador John Danforth said, "We have in place the Iraq Survey Group, which is equipped to look into all of this."

On Monday, the State Department said troops from the U.S.-led coalition and the Bush administration's Iraq Survey Group were both ordered to investigate what was missing and the possible circumstances.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post quoted Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, as saying he had received no such orders.

The explosives, which are considered powerful enough to demolish buildings and can be used to detonate nuclear warheads, were well known before the war and had been sealed by U.N. inspectors, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog organization.

The news of the missing stockpile was reported by several media outlets soon after the March 2003 invasion.

The issue became news again this week when The New York Times reported that Iraq's interim government informed the IAEA in a letter that the explosives disappeared after Saddam's government fell in April 2003. (Full story)

In the letter, dated October 10, the interim government blamed "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."
IAEA: Bunkers had inspection seals

The IAEA said the last time it can vouch for the presence of the explosives at Al Qaqaa was in March 2003, before the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam.

IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said Monday the agency warned U.S. officials in May 2003 that U.N. inspectors feared the site might have been looted.

The complex contains 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings and held compounds related to Iraq's pre-1991 chemical, biological and nuclear programs and long-range missile work.

"If one had to name 10 famous sites in Iraq, well known in weapons circles, Al Qaqaa would be one of them," a U.N. official familiar with Iraq said. "It was subject of interest of all four weapons categories. There can't be that many sites in Iraq which drew the attention of all four."

Fleming said the IAEA had been monitoring about 100 sites in Iraq before the invasion, but Al Qaqaa was one of a handful of special concern.

"The concern is that other sites that have items that are potentially dangerous have gone missing," she said.

The Pentagon said Al Qaqaa was a "level 2" priority on a list of 500 sites to be searched and secured. U.S. officials said it was visited dozens of times by U.S. troops in the months after the invasion and they never came upon the stockpile.

The IAEA verified that the material was present in January 2003 and said its seals on the bunkers that held the materials were still intact in early March, Fleming said.

Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said Monday that troops did discover some explosive material at Al Qaqaa, "although none of it carried IAEA seals."

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)

CNN's Suzanne Malveaux, Elise Labott and Liz Neisloss contributed to this report.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast...ives/index.html

Posted: 10/ 26/ 04 10:09 pm Post subject:

Posted: 10/ 28/ 04 7:48 am Post subject:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20041028-122637-6257r.htm

Russia tied to Iraq's missing arms

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."

Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional
arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.

Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, he said.

The Russian involvement in helping disperse Saddam's weapons, including some 380 tons of RDX and HMX, is still being investigated, Mr. Shaw said.

The RDX and HMX, which are used to manufacture high-explosive and nuclear weapons, are probably of Russian origin, he said.

Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita could not be reached for comment.

The disappearance of the material was reported in a letter Oct. 10 from the Iraqi government to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Disclosure of the missing explosives Monday in a New York Times story was used by the Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, who accused the Bush administration of failing to secure the material.

Al-Qaqaa, a known Iraqi weapons site, was monitored closely, Mr. Shaw said.

"That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special explosives] disappearing was impossible," Mr. Shaw said. "And Number 2, if the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."

The Pentagon disclosed yesterday that the Al-Qaqaa facility was defended by Fedayeen Saddam, Special Republican Guard and other Iraqi military units during the conflict. U.S. forces defeated the defenders around April 3 and found the gates to the facility open, the Pentagon said in a statement yesterday.

A military unit in charge of searching for weapons, the Army's 75th Exploitation Task Force, then inspected Al-Qaqaa on May 8, May 11 and May 27, 2003, and found no high explosives that had been monitored in the past by the IAEA.

The Pentagon said there was no evidence of large-scale movement of
explosives from the facility after April 6.

"The movement of 377 tons of heavy ordnance would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks prior to and subsequent to the 3rd Infantry Division's arrival at the facility," the statement said.

The statement also said that the material may have been removed from the site by Saddam's regime.

According to the Pentagon, U.N. arms inspectors sealed the explosives at Al-Qaqaa in January 2003 and revisited the site in March and noted that the seals were not broken.

It is not known whether the inspectors saw the explosives in March. The U.N. team left the country before the U.S.-led invasion began March 20, 2003.

A second defense official said documents on the Russian support to Iraq reveal that Saddam's government paid the Kremlin for the special forces to provide security for Iraq's Russian arms and to conduct counterintelligence activities designed to prevent U.S. and Western intelligence services from learning about the arms pipeline through Syria.

The Russian arms-removal program was initiated after Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, could not persuade Saddam to give in to U.S. and Western demands, this official said.

A small portion of Iraq's 650,000 tons to 1 million tons of conventional arms that were found after the war were looted after the U.S.-led invasion, Mr. Shaw said. Russia was Iraq's largest foreign supplier of weaponry, he said.

However, the most important and useful arms and explosives appear to have been separated and moved out as part of carefully designed program. "The organized effort was done in advance of the conflict," Mr. Shaw said.

The Russian forces were tasked with moving special arms out of the country.

Mr. Shaw said foreign intelligence officials believe the Russians worked with Saddam's Mukhabarat intelligence service to separate out special weapons, including high explosives and other arms and related technology, from standard conventional arms spread out in some 200 arms depots.

The Russian weapons were then sent out of the country to Syria, and possibly Lebanon in Russian trucks, Mr. Shaw said.

Mr. Shaw said he believes that the withdrawal of Russian-made weapons and explosives from Iraq was part of plan by Saddam to set up a "redoubt" in Syria that could be used as a base for launching pro-Saddam insurgency operations in Iraq.

The Russian units were dispatched beginning in January 2003 and by March had destroyed hundreds of pages of documents on Russian arms supplies to Iraq while dispersing arms to Syria, the second official said.

Besides their own weapons, the Russians were supplying Saddam with arms made in Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria and other Eastern European nations, he said.

"Whatever was not buried was put on lorries and sent to the Syrian border," the defense official said.

Documents reviewed by the official included itineraries of military units involved in the truck shipments to Syria. The materials outlined in the documents included missile components, MiG jet parts, tank parts and chemicals used to make chemical weapons, the official said.

The director of the Iraqi government front company known as the Al Bashair Trading Co. fled to Syria, where he is in charge of monitoring arms holdings and funding Iraqi insurgent activities, the official said.

Also, an Arabic-language report obtained by U.S. intelligence disclosed the extent of Russian armaments. The 26-page report was written by Abdul Tawab Mullah al Huwaysh, Saddam's minister of military industrialization, who was captured by U.S. forces May 2, 2003.

The Russian "spetsnaz" or special-operations forces were under the GRU military intelligence service and organized large commercial truck convoys for the weapons removal, the official said.

Regarding the explosives, the new Iraqi government reported that 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or high-melting-point explosive, and 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or rapid-detonation explosive, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, were missing.

The material is used in nuclear weapons and also in making military "plastic" high explosive.

Defense officials said the Russians can provide information on what happened to the Iraqi weapons and explosives that were transported out of the country. Officials believe the Russians also can explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

Posted: 10/ 28/ 04 7:54 am Post subject:

Great avatar.
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