The developing kicker to this story is that 60 minutes was going to run with it on October 31 as a last minute bomb before the election. I bet they're happy the NYT beat them to the punch on this one
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Moderators: LawBeefaroni, $iljanus
Will that matter if the corrections/updates are buried?Snow wrote:Kerry continues to step into it. He's still stumping on this issue.
Mainstream media is profit driven first, politically/morally driven second. "The media" is neither liberal nor conservative. It is greedy.Eco-Logic wrote:And so many people still don't believe the mainstream media is liberal.
Piff.
While I tend to agree with you, that doesn't explain Dan Rather or Tom Hayes.LawBeefaroni wrote:Mainstream media is profit driven first, politically/morally driven second. "The media" is neither liberal nor conservative. It is greedy.Eco-Logic wrote:And so many people still don't believe the mainstream media is liberal.
Piff.
And 101st was not the first US unit there the 3rd ID was there a week before.At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said 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. Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
And lazy. Don't forget lazy.LawBeefaroni wrote:Mainstream media is profit driven first, politically/morally driven second. "The media" is neither liberal nor conservative. It is greedy.Eco-Logic wrote:And so many people still don't believe the mainstream media is liberal.
Piff.
No, an anonymous pentagon official according to the AP, says that.WAW wrote:This Pentagon official says they still there whenwe got thereAnd 101st was not the first US unit there the 3rd ID was there a week before.At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said 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. Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
It also saysThe 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.
Any munitions experts on board?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."
I believe that ND just asked a question - since he's not an explosives expert and would have no way of knowing the availability of this stuff.Come on, guys, you can do better than to expect us to buy into this stuff.
This is violating me "It's on the internet and it must be true" law. It doesn't screw up any Republican-happy timeline. It screws up the timeline that CNN is offering (or CNN is screwing up the timeline that globalsecurity.org is offering).Guess that screws up the Republican-happy timeline, huh? UN Inspectors were at Qa Qaa on March 8.
Well, I suppose I'll have to read that article then.And also, we've got first-hand that the 101st and an NBC news crew *weren't* the first folks at Al Qa Qaa. Right there, in that AP article, you've got engineers from the 3ID talking on-record about their findings at AQQ.
Exodor wrote:My take:
March, 2003 - IEA inspectors check the site, find the seals on the explosives intact, then leave the country prior to the US invasion
Sometime thereafter, the explosives disappear.
Whether that occurred before or after the invasion is a moot point to me - the point to me is those weapons were controlled and accounted for until we forced the inspectors out of the country.
How, exactly, can the current administration spin this as another other than a colossal screw-up? Sure, if they disappeared before our troops reached the site it's not quite as bad as if the explosives were simply left unguarded, but either way the loss of those explosives is a direct consequence of the decision to invade Iraq.[/img]
I ask because I really don't know - do you have any sort of timetable or evidence that the sanctions were going to be lifted?noxiousdog wrote: Fair enough. Except that the only reason the inspectors were there were to enforce the UN resolutions. Had the invasion not occurred, the sanctions would have been lifted and therefore the inspectors would no longer be there either.
I guess we know now why NBC didn't push this story as hard as CNN did. They may have known it didn't have a leg to stand on.MSNBC today. Jim Miklaszewski reporting....
Following up on that story from last night, military officials tell NBC News that on April 10, 2003, when the Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne entered the Al QaQaa weapons facility, south of Baghdad, that those troops were actually on their way to Baghdad, that they were not actively involved in the search for any weapons, including the high explosives, HMX and RDX. The troops did observe stock piles of conventional weapons but no HMX or RDX. And because the Al Qaqaa facility is so huge, it's not clear that those troops from the 101st were actually anywhere near the bunkers that reportedly contained the HMX and RDX. Three months earlier, during an inspection of the Al Qaqaa compound, the International Atomic Energy Agency secured and sealed 350 metric tons of HMX and RDX. Then in March, shortly before the war began, the I.A.E.A. conducted another inspection and found that the HMX stockpile was still intact and still under seal. But inspectors were unable to inspect the RDX stockpile and could not verify that the RDX was still at the compound.
Pentagon officials say elements of the 101st airborne did conduct a thorough search of several facilities around the Al QaQaa compound for several weeks during the month of April in search of WMD. They found no WMD. And Pentagon officials say it's not clear at that time whether those other elements of the 101st actually searched the Al QaQaa compound.
Now, Pentagon officials say U.S. troops and members of the Iraq Survey Group did arrive at the Al QaQaa compound on May 27. And when they did, they found no HMX or RDX or any other weapons under seal at the time. Now, the Iraqi government is officially said that the high explosives were stolen by looters. Pentagon officials claim it's possible -- they're not sure, they say, but it's possible that Saddam Hussein himself ordered that these high explosives be removed and hidden before the war. What is clear is that the 350 metric tons of high explosives are still missing, and that the U.S. or Iraqi governments or international inspectors, for that matter, cannot say with any certainty where they are today.
I saw this second one on Talking Points Memo originally, but both stories are being repeated across the blogosphere.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.
Supposedly, it would have taken 40 trucks to move it from a site thought to house WMD's. Are you trying to tell me that they weren't watching every single vehicle that moved from there?Given the size of the missing cache, it would have been difficult to relocate undetected before the invasion, when U.S. spy satellites were monitoring activity at sites suspected of concealing nuclear and biological weapons.
"You don't just move this stuff in the middle of the night," said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Baghdad.
The more they spin, the more they look incompetent.If we had seen something like that happening, it's hard to figure we wouldn't have bombed the convoy, since the US had complete air superiority through the entire campaign. And if the thought that WMD might be on those trucks had prevented such an attack, certainly there would have been running surveillance of where the stuff was going and where it ended up.
My point here is not to say that this could not have occurred. What I am trying to show is that Pentagon appointees like Di Rita don't seem to have any clear idea what happened to this stuff. And in an attempt to push back the story, they're cooking up various theories, most with very short half-lives, that just don't seem credible to a lot of folks who follow these issues.
Inspectors would not have been in the country at all if not for American pressure. Yes inspections were taking place at the end but only when we had amassed an invasion force on the Iraq border. Were we supposed to keep those troops there in order to contain Saddam?Exodor wrote:My take:
March, 2003 - IEA inspectors check the site, find the seals on the explosives intact, then leave the country prior to the US invasion
Sometime thereafter, the explosives disappear.
Whether that occurred before or after the invasion is a moot point to me - the point to me is those weapons were controlled and accounted for until we forced the inspectors out of the country.
How, exactly, can the current administration spin this as another other than a colossal screw-up? Sure, if they disappeared before our troops reached the site it's not quite as bad as if the explosives were simply left unguarded, but either way the loss of those explosives is a direct consequence of the decision to invade Iraq.[/img]
And yet we should believe that in a nine day period looters made off with explosives that would fill a forty truck convoy? How many looters was it? Were they working in concert? Where did they store the stuff? If it was individual looters, how many pounds each did they get away with? How far away do these looters live from the facility?Mr. Sparkle wrote:
The more they spin, the more they look incompetent.
Poleaxe wrote:And yet we should believe that in a nine day period looters made off with explosives that would fill a forty truck convoy? How many looters was it? Were they working in concert? Where did they store the stuff? If it was individual looters, how many pounds each did they get away with? How far away do these looters live from the facility?Mr. Sparkle wrote:
The more they spin, the more they look incompetent.
But if you recall, the inspectors were not accomadated when they first returned to the country. They were not allowed to inspect some facilities. They were not allowed to do confidential interviews with Iraqi scientists. Other scientists the Iraqi govt. said had refused to meet with the inspectors. They could not take the scientists out of the country to do interviews. All of this changed when troops started showing up on the border.Enough wrote:Hey Poleaxe, after a few moments of surfing I wasn't able to pin down the date we started massing troops on the border, have a link? Or any idea? I had thought it was around February or Jan. of 2003 prior Bush's talk before the UN in March?
I do know that Saddam had caved by Sept. 2002, so I am assuming we were deploying prior to Sept and I am mistaken? Or were you referring to November when inspectors actually returned? Either way that would seem to be before we really got going with massing troops on his borders. And fwiw, I think getting inspectors back into Iraq was the single best accomplishment of Bush foreign policy, too bad he has sucked from my pov since.
Link
So.In any case, that visit wasn't the first time US troops went to the facility. That happened a week earlier, on April 4th, as was reported at the time. According to an AP account from the following day, the troops made spot visits to some of the buildings and found chemical warfare antidotes but no WMD.
The same report says they also found "thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder" which were initially believed to be chemical agents but were later determined to be "explosives."
Meghan, this is something that I asked about earlier (don't know if anyone responded). 5 cm x 12 cm. We would have to be talking about HUNDREDS of thousands of these boxes. And that seems a strange way to describe that kind of quantity. That's like using "several" to describe 400.Meghan wrote:The same report says they also found "thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder" which were initially believed to be chemical agents but were later determined to be "explosives."
Here is a story from the BBC indicating that the troop build up was already starting in October of 2002.Nade wrote:Here's what I found:Enough wrote:Hey Poleaxe, after a few moments of surfing I wasn't able to pin down the date we started massing troops on the border, have a link? Or any idea? I had thought it was around February or Jan. of 2003 prior Bush's talk before the UN in March?
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/iraqtimeline2.htmlDec. 21, 2002 President Bush approves the deployment of U.S. troops to the Gulf region. By March an estimated 200,000 troops will be stationed there. British and Australian troops will join them over the coming months.
Then let's deal just with this. Because the NBC corrections don't establish that the RDX was there on April 4th. At least not based on the articles that you and trig have linked. Not yet.Meghan wrote:The explosives were there on April 4th. Barring some new revelation that there were thousands of other random explosives in Al Qa Qa
It's mostly conjecture, but we know that:Exodor wrote:I ask because I really don't know - do you have any sort of timetable or evidence that the sanctions were going to be lifted?noxiousdog wrote: Fair enough. Except that the only reason the inspectors were there were to enforce the UN resolutions. Had the invasion not occurred, the sanctions would have been lifted and therefore the inspectors would no longer be there either.
indicates that in one form it is granular, though it does not give a color.RDX forms the base for a number of common military explosives: Composition A (wax-coated, granular explosive consisting of RDX and plasticizing wax),
The 101st not searching is irrelevent. What is relevent is that 3ID was there and did condcut a thorough search of the complex. Reuters was embedded with 3ID at the time.
Initial careful readings of reports seem to indicate the some elements of 3ID were there searching through the complex for at least two days. Reports are unclear but these dates have allbeen mentioned in one report or another in connection with 3ID and Col. Peabody. April 3rd, April 4th, and April 5th. It seems they proceeded from there toward the airport which fell on the 6th or the 7th.
WaPo reported on the 5th that the previous days first discovery at the site was the three-in-a-box vilas of white powder. Followed by this, "This morning, however, investigators said initial tests indicated the
white powder was not a component of a chemical weapon. "On first analysis it does not appear to be a chemical that could be used in a chemical
weapons attack," Col. John Peabody, commander of the division's engineering brigade, told a Reuters reporter with his unit."
I've run numerous Google seraches and I cannot find any indication that HMX or any other explosive is ever stored in this "vial" manner. It is only ever in a vial for testing purposes it seems. If the IAEA had previously described the HMX/RDX being stored in this manner I'd like to see it.
Al Qaqaa was an explosives manufacturing facility so it's not an automatic that the "white powder" was an HE at all. At the time one British analyst went so far as to suggest that at that site it could even be rocket fuel.
The "tabun" was found at a second site west of the Al Qaqaa site. The CBS report indicates that pretty clearly.
The CBS report alsoincludes this;
*"Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we're still going through the place," the official said. *
It is no surprise at all the the 101st had no orders to search the place when HQ already knew the 3ID had gone over the place with a fine-toothed comb!
Being that a nuke would have been the ultimate WMD, I'm sure that IAEA tags would have attracted some attention.
Speaking of IAEA, this website:
http://www.vertic.org/onlinedatabase/un ... m?siteID=9
- seems to indicate that the last time IAEA-specific inspectors were at the site was March 01 and that it was only to verify activity. And that the last time IAEA-specfic inspectors went for the purpose to "verify dual use equipment" was Dec 25 2002! We know the HMX was/is considered dual use.
That needs to be looked at more carefully, IMO. By their own admissionduring the "last visit" they only saw seals for HMX and did not verify if the RDX was still there or not! A seal on a door does not tell me that beyond a doubt the material is inside. Especially in light of Oil-For-Food in their minds and the build up well underway during the mystery convoys into Syria.
On another note I thought it was interesting that the Iraqis claimed this went missing sometime after the 9th. And that the 101st was there on the 10th and never mention 38 truckloads of HE laying around. It seems even the Iraqi insider forgot about 3ID!
The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing — presumably stolen due to a lack of security — was based on "declaration" from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility.
But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency's inspectors recorded that just over three tons of RDX were stored at the facility — a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported.
The IAEA documents from January 2003 found no discrepancy in the amount of the more dangerous HMX explosives thought to be stored at Al-Qaqaa, but they do raise another disturbing possibility.
The documents show IAEA inspectors looked at nine bunkers containing more than 194 tons of HMX at the facility. Although these bunkers were still under IAEA seal, the inspectors said the seals may be potentially ineffective because they had ventilation slats on the sides. These slats could be easily removed to remove the materials inside the bunkers without breaking the seals, the inspectors noted.
Yeah, this story does keep changing, eh? Now this 3ID searched it theory you posted yesterday is dead in the water.noxiousdog wrote:Good wrapup by Khepri on Captain's Quarters BlogThe 101st not searching is irrelevent. What is relevent is that 3ID was there and did condcut a thorough search of the complex. Reuters was embedded with 3ID at the time.
Initial careful readings of reports seem to indicate the some elements of 3ID were there searching through the complex for at least two days. Reports are unclear but these dates have allbeen mentioned in one report or another in connection with 3ID and Col. Peabody. April 3rd, April 4th, and April 5th. It seems they proceeded from there toward the airport which fell on the 6th or the 7th.
WaPo reported on the 5th that the previous days first discovery at the site was the three-in-a-box vilas of white powder. Followed by this, "This morning, however, investigators said initial tests indicated the
white powder was not a component of a chemical weapon. "On first analysis it does not appear to be a chemical that could be used in a chemical
weapons attack," Col. John Peabody, commander of the division's engineering brigade, told a Reuters reporter with his unit."
I've run numerous Google seraches and I cannot find any indication that HMX or any other explosive is ever stored in this "vial" manner. It is only ever in a vial for testing purposes it seems. If the IAEA had previously described the HMX/RDX being stored in this manner I'd like to see it.
Al Qaqaa was an explosives manufacturing facility so it's not an automatic that the "white powder" was an HE at all. At the time one British analyst went so far as to suggest that at that site it could even be rocket fuel.
The "tabun" was found at a second site west of the Al Qaqaa site. The CBS report indicates that pretty clearly.
The CBS report alsoincludes this;
*"Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we're still going through the place," the official said. *
It is no surprise at all the the 101st had no orders to search the place when HQ already knew the 3ID had gone over the place with a fine-toothed comb!
Being that a nuke would have been the ultimate WMD, I'm sure that IAEA tags would have attracted some attention.
Speaking of IAEA, this website:
http://www.vertic.org/onlinedatabase/un ... m?siteID=9
- seems to indicate that the last time IAEA-specific inspectors were at the site was March 01 and that it was only to verify activity. And that the last time IAEA-specfic inspectors went for the purpose to "verify dual use equipment" was Dec 25 2002! We know the HMX was/is considered dual use.
That needs to be looked at more carefully, IMO. By their own admissionduring the "last visit" they only saw seals for HMX and did not verify if the RDX was still there or not! A seal on a door does not tell me that beyond a doubt the material is inside. Especially in light of Oil-For-Food in their minds and the build up well underway during the mystery convoys into Syria.
On another note I thought it was interesting that the Iraqis claimed this went missing sometime after the 9th. And that the 101st was there on the 10th and never mention 38 truckloads of HE laying around. It seems even the Iraqi insider forgot about 3ID!
First U.S. Unit at Iraq Site Did Not Hunt ExplosivesThe first U.S. military unit to reach the site in Iraq where U.N. officials say 377 tons of high explosives are missing did not carry out a hunt for such material, the unit's commander said on Wednesday.
Col. Dave Perkins, then the commander of the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, said the immediate concern when his troops reached the Al Qaqaa site on April 3, 2003, was to defeat a couple of hundred Iraqi troops who were firing from the compound as the Americans surged toward Baghdad [...]
Perkins also said it was "very highly improbable" that enemy forces could have trucked out such a huge amount of explosives in the weeks after U.S. forces first arrived there, considering the high level of U.S. military presence and how clogged the roads around the site were with U.S. convoys.