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I got a few Question.
- Why did the Bush Administration deny the International Atomic Energy Agency's request to back into Iraq to verify the status of the stockpile?
- Since 2003, how many attacks on our troops in Iraq or terrorist bombings in Iraq, Egypt or elsewhere have been carried out using HMX, RDX or PETN -- the same kind of explosive that went missing from al Qaqaa?
Now this came out 3 hours ago.
Baghdad - A top Iraqi science official said on Wednesday that it was impossible that 350 tons of high explosives could have been smuggled out of a military site south of Baghdad before the regime fell last year.
He warned that explosives from nearby sites could have also been looted.
The United Nations nuclear watchdog this week said the explosives went missing from a weapons dump some time after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled in April 2003 by the United States-led invasion.
But as the issue took centre stage in the final days of the US presidential campaign, some US officials have suggested the explosives had gone before the US-led forces moved on Baghdad.
The Pentagon has said it did not know when the explosives went missing.
Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the science ministry's site monitoring department and worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam, said "it is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall".
He said he and other officials had been ordered a month earlier to insure that "not even a shred of paper left the sites".
"The officials that were inside this facility (al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."
He said officials at al-Qaqaa, including its general director, whom he refused to name, made contact with US troops before the fall in an effort to get them to provide security for the site.
The regime's fall triggered a wave of looting of government and private property, which US-led troops struggled to contain as they were busy securing their own positions.
Sharaa warned that other sites close to al-Qaqaa with similar materials could have also been plundered.
"The al-Milad company in Iskandariyah and the Yarmuk and Hateen facilities contained explosive materials that could have also been taken out," he told reporters.
Al-Qaqaa is near Latifiyah, 30km south of Baghdad. The bulk of materials in question include HMX (high melting point explosive) and RDX (rapid detonation explosive), which can be used in major bombing attacks, making missile warheads and detonating nuclear weapons.
The area in Babil province, which includes the towns of Iskandariyah and Mahmudiyah, used to be the centre of Saddam's military-industrial complex.
It is now one of the most dangerous parts of the country, and is rife with crime, kidnappings and attacks.
"It may be already too late to salvage many of these sites, which are controlled by bandits and beyond the control of Iraqi forces," warned Sharaa.
Science Minister Omar Rashad sent a letter on October 10 to the International Atomic Energy Agency sounding the alarm about the explosives in al-Qaqaa.
Sharaa said the letter was sent after repeated warnings and inquiries by the IAEA over the disappearance of so-called duel-use nuclear material, which could be used for either conventional or nuclear means.
"Normally we should be overseeing all sites but these responsibilities were stripped away from us under the coalition authority," he said.
The ministry was only handed oversight responsiblities of two sites - al-Tuwaitha and al-Wardiya - after authority was transferred from the coalition to the interim government in June.
Sharaa refused to put a number on the sites with dangerous materials but said that many include hospitals, schools and factories that are now under the control of various ministries.
Some Iraqi officials have estimated the number at 200.
"It is very serious if these materials fall into the wrong hands, because they will be used to kill Iraqis," Muwaffaq al-Rubaiye, a special advisor to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's government, warned Tuesday
Rubaiye, formerly national security advisor, warned in July that materials to make so-called dirty bombs might already be in the hands of militant groups like that of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, believed to be al-Qaeda's frontman in Iraq
Mark
-------Original Message-------
Date: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 13:54:12
Subject: RE: [QUAD-L] Who's the Enemy?
I guess you missed the part about there "NOT" being any sign of said
missing materials IE "no proof they were STILL in Al Qaqaa" at the
beginning of the invasion.
Hype is not tangible.
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/
"For the NYT assertion that the explosives vanished sometime after US
custody to be true, the RDX would necessarily have to be present when
3ID and 101st got there. But if, as MSNBC emphasizes, we don't know
what there was -- didn't know they were not there -- then necessarily
we don't know they were there. A null value cannot be true or false as
one prefers. It is null."
an email from a soldier who had knowledge of the al Qa Qaa search and
reiterates that the RDX was already gone when the teams first arrived.
"I was serving as a 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."
Faced with an invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam carried out his own
sideslip maneuver into a redoubt. The Duelfer report notes that Saddam
may have begun moving his WMD materials into Syria as the US vainly
attempted to get UN authorization to topple his regime.
Duelfer agreed that a large amount of material had been transferred by
Iraq to Syria before the March 2003 war. "A lot of materials left Iraq
and went to Syria," Duelfer said. "There was certainly a lot of traffic
across the border points. We've got a lot of data to support that,
including people discussing it. But whether in fact in any of these
trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say."
>
>
> I didn't realize we were talking about media hype Stuntman I thought
we were
> talking about what happened to these explosives and 60 minutes bad
judgement
> doesn't change the fact that they
> failed to secure them.
> Here's the latest story hot off the press and it's straight from the
101st
> Airborne Division's second brigade soldiers.
>
> Associated Press
>
> A U.S. military unit that reached a munitions storage installation
after the
> invasion of Iraq had no orders to search or secure the site, where
officials
> say nearly 400 tons of explosives have vanished.
> When troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at
the
> Al-Qaqaa installation south of Baghdad a day or so after other
coalition
> troops seized the capital on April 9, 2003, there were already looters
> throughout the facility, Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs
> officer for the unit, told The Associated Press.
> The soldiers "secured the area they were in and looked in a limited
amount
> of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present in their area,"
> Wellman wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "Bombs were found
but
> not chemical weapons in that immediate area.
> "Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the
facility or to
> search for HE type munitions, as they (high-explosive weapons) were
> everywhere in Iraq," he wrote.
--
TRUNCIATED DUE TO REPETITION---------------------
--
It's not the fall that hurts.
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