Posted on 10/26/2004 8:15:25 PM PDT by Cableguy
White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.
But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the facility and had merely stopped there for the night.
The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, known as Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.
Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make plans for their next push.
"We happened to stumble on it,'' he said. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave that very same day. The plan was not to go in there and start searching. It looked like all the other ammunition supply points we had seen already."
What had been, for the colonel and his troops, an unremarkable moment during the sweep to Baghdad took on new significance this week, after The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes" reported that the explosives at Al Qaqaa, mainly HMX and RDX, had disappeared since the American invasion.
Earlier this month, officials of the interim Iraqi government informed the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives, the same kind used to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, disappeared sometime after the fall of the government of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003, when American forces took over the country's security. Al Qaqaa, which has been unguarded, was looted in the spring of 2003, and looters were seen there as recently as Sunday.
President Bush's aides told reporters that because the soldiers had found no trace of the missing explosives on April 10, the explosives could have been removed before the American invasion. They based their assertions on a report broadcast by NBC News on Monday night that showed video footage of the 101st arriving at Al Qaqaa.
By yesterday afternoon, as Mr. Bush made his way through Wisconsin and Iowa, his aides had moderated their view, saying it was a "mystery" when the explosives disappeared. They said that it could have happened before or after the invasion and that Mr. Bush did not want to comment on the matter until the facts were known.
At the Pentagon, a senior official, who asked not to be identified, acknowledged that the timing of the disappearance remained uncertain. "The bottom line is that there is still a lot that is not known," the official said.
The official suggested that the material could have vanished while Saddam Hussein was still in power, sometime between mid-March, when the international inspectors left, and April 3, when members of the Army's Third Infantry Division fought with Iraqis inside Al Qaqaa. At the time, it was reported that those soldiers found a white powder that was tentatively identified as explosives. The facility was left unguarded, the official said.
The 101st Airborne Division arrived April 10 and left the next day. The next recorded visit by Americans came on May 27, when Task Force 75 inspected Al Qaqaa, but did not find the large quantities of explosives that had been seen in mid-March by the international inspectors. By then, Al Qaqaa had plainly been looted.
Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the 101st and spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said that he did not see any obvious signs of damage when he arrived on April 10, but that his focus was strictly on finding a secure place to collect his troops, who were driving and flying north from Karbala.
"There was no sign of looting here," Colonel Anderson said. "Looting was going on in Baghdad, and we were rushing on to Baghdad. We were marshaling in."
A few days earlier, some soldiers from the division thought they had discovered a cache of chemical weapons that turned out to be pesticides. Several of them came down with rashes, and they had to go through a decontamination procedure. Colonel Anderson said he wanted to avoid a repeat of those problems, and because he had already seen stockpiles of weapons in two dozen places, did not care to poke through the stores at Al Qaqaa.
"I had given instructions, 'Don't mess around with those. It looks like they are bunkers; we're not messing around with those things. That's not what were here for,' " he said. "I thought we would be there for a few hours and move on. We ended up staying overnight."
hmmph....
Looting.
How does one "loot" roughly 400 tons of this sort of exotic explosive?
Just like a kid, when you are caught in a lie, instead of owning up, they usually dig themselves in deeper and deeper trying to prove they aren't lying.
Wasn't the 3D also there? Why are some in the 101st A saying they did check and found nothing. And why is Dana Lewis saying he saw no IAEA tagged stuff there.
I HATE the NYT!
With about 30 large trucks. Easy to do with roads shut down in the middle of a war zone.
But already the NYT has retreated (and I think will retreat even further). The NYT had couched this as if it were new and had just happened. Now they aren't doing that. Keep on trying NYT, you are now the story, not the story itself.
The NBC reporter showed video of opened bunkers? I guess the commander disobeyed a direct order?
This sounds like the sort of background work they should have done before they published their first hit piece if they wanted to be fair.
On its face, though, the article doesn't seem to be plainly lying like the first two.
The relocation and consumption of some dual use materials has been among the questions raised in connection with Iraq's backlog of semi-annual declarations. The high explosive "HMX" is a prime example of such material. The removal of Agency seals on the HMX and the declared relocation and consumption of some of the HMX must be explained and documented by Iraq before the Agency can reach a conclusion with regard to the use of such material. The Iraqi declarations indicate that out, of the 228 tonnes of HMX available in Iraq at the end of 1998, 196 remained at the facility where the HMX was previously under IAEA seal. Iraq also declared that it had blended the remaining 32 tonnes with sulphur and turned them into 45.6 tonnes of "industrial explosive" provided mainly to cement plants for mining. The material balance, current stock, whereabouts and final use of such material are currently being investigated. http://www.iraqwatch.org/un/iaea/iaea-elbaradei-unscbriefing-010903.htm
I think it would be a lot more than 30 Iraqi trucks aren't as big as our normal trucks. Mil guy on Hewwit's show said they only carry 5Ton. Thats a lot of truckin.
Foxnews website has a great video of a peice from the Brit Humes' show well worth seeing.
Wonderful!!
Once again, compared with the amount of weapons that have been recovered and destroyed, that 380 is drop in bucket IF they could have snuck 38 truckloads out from under the military's noses.
Plus, since Bush was not there, and was relying on military like a good Commander in Chief does (remember Vietnam, a war fought by politicians at the last)then Kerry is really blaming the military and the Commander of the Unit named in story would be the scapegoat.
Anybody have a picture of his fella Anderson?
More like 60-70 or so trucks then. Easy for simple looters.
Besides, if these weapons are so dangerous that everyone is all paniced about them being gone, then doesn't that prove that Bush was correct in going to war. The IAEA says they left these horrible weapons locked up. Why didin't they destroy them if they were so dangerous.
They can't have it both ways!!!!!!!!!!!!!
{sarcasm/} still have trouble with that one after all these years.
Something about this doesn't smell right. Anderson is risking his career by commenting to the press that way.
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