Oh look, CBS again

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."

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.

"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.

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. Um, 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. Almost, 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 was, 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.

Earlier this month, in a letter to the I.A.E.A. in Vienna, a senior official from Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology wrote that the stockpile disappeared after early April 2003 because of "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

moving this material would have taken a fleet of about forty big trucks each moving about ten tons of explosives. And this was at a time -- the week before and then during the war -- when Iraq's skies were positively crawling with American aerial and satellite reconnaissance.

Considering that al Qaqaa was a major munitions installation where the US also suspected there might be WMD, it's difficult to believe that we wouldn't have noticed a convoy of forty huge trucks carting stuff away.

Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of 2-by-5-inch boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.
Initial reports suggest the powder is an explosive, but tests are still being done, a senior U.S. official said. If confirmed, it would be consistent with what the Iraqis say is the plant's purpose, producing explosives and propellants.

The insurgents probably are using weapons and ammunition looted from the nearby Qa-Qaa complex, a 3-mile by 3-mile weapons-storage site about 25 miles southwest of Baghdad, said Maj. Brian Neil, operations officer for the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, which initially patrolled the area.

The site was bombed during last year's invasion and then left unguarded, Neil said.

"There's definitely no shortage of weapons around here," he said.

David Kay, the CIA's former chief weapons hunter in Iraq, believes that the material was looted in the immediate aftermath of the war.

He said he saw the facility in May 2003, "and it was heavily looted at that time. Sometime between April and May, most of the stuff was carried off. The site was in total disarray, just like a lot of the Iraqi sites."

Originally posted by SDW2001
I think you've all missed the point. The point is the LIBERAL media was going to hold this until the most inconvenient time for Bush. It was a delibrate effort to influence the election, even if it was a big fuck up for the administration. CBS is apparently on a quest to destroy any credibility it had left.

Tuesday, October 26, 2004 Posted: 11:16 AM EDT (1516 GMT)

(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.

Originally posted by giant
Here's whan an embedded NBC reporter said this morning:

Originally posted by giant
AND

April 10th wasn't the first time US troops had been there. A week earlier other US troops did "spot visits to some of the 1,100 buildings" and found lots of explosives at the site.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/ne...eadiness01.htm

LOOSE CANNON [Cliff May]
Josh Marshall is making the claim that NBCs debunking of the Times story (that explosives were looted from Al Qaqaa after the U.S. seized it) is now officially no longer operative.

His basis for that is a subsequent NBC story saying that it's not clear that those troops from the 101st were actually anywhere near the bunkers that reportedly contained the HMX and RDX.

Not clear, eh? Not clear to whom?

Even the NYT story on Monday quotes I.A.E.A. experts saying that they assume that just before the invasion the Iraqis followed their standard practice of moving crucial explosives out of buildings, so they would not be tempting targets.

Wanna bet they moved them more than a stones throw away?

And count me dubious that the 101st Airborne didnt know what to do when it reached a major weapons site.

And count me astonished that if the 101st didnt know what they were doing that should be an issue from which one candidate would dare attempt to take partisan advantage.
Posted at 05:25 PM

Originally posted by dmz
--this all stinks to high heaven, and it's old news -- even if it is true .

Originally posted by dmz

But finally, on Oct. 10, the Iraqis formally notified the IAEA, and on Oct. 15, the IAEA formally notified the Bush Administration. In press guidance prepared for release in the event news got out, but not released until today [OCT_24], when requested by The Nelson Report, State Department spokesmen confirmed the Iraqi government and IAEA report dates, and that 350 tons of dual use high explosives could not be accounted for.

I was serving as a [identifying information removed by the Kerry Spot] staff member during the time in question. The Commander on the site had complete real time intelligence on what to expect and possibly find at the Al-QaQaa depot. The ordinance in question was not found when teams were sent in to inspect and secure the area. When this information was relayed, Operational plans were adjusted and the unit moved forward. Had the ordinance in question been discovered, a security team would have been left in place.

Elizabeth Jensen at the LOS ANGELES TIMES details on Tuesday how CBS NEWS and 60 MINUTES lost the story [which repackaged previously reported information on a large cache of explosives missing in Iraq, first published and broadcast in 2003].