Russert this morning on Imus vouches for the fact that The New York Times quoted the wrong commander in their article today. They quoted Colonel Anderson of the 101st, but it was the 3ID who got to the ammo storage area first, and was there for one week.
"......DOBBS: We're getting into real trouble on time. I'm going to ask you to be as succinct as you possibly can.
KAY: Being destroyed and removed, that the HMX, RDX should be taken out of Iraq. Iraq protested...
DOBBS: So why wasn't it?
KAY: Well, they [Iraq under Saddam], protested to the IAEA that they needed it for civil construction. The IAEA accepted that argument. Not all inspectors agreed that that was a credible argument.
DOBBS: Why in the world would the inspectors, David Albright, be making that kind of division? Wouldn't that be a governmental division and that of the United Nations' policymakers?
ALBRIGHT: Well, I don't the history of it. I mean, typically RDX, HMX was not explicitly banned by the U.N. Security Council and so the inspectors are in a bind. I mean, they left other things there, like low enriched uranium. So, I mean, one can look back and say these things should have happened. But I will say...
DOBBS: I think we can all agree those things should have happened.
ALBRIGHT: ... they were being monitored and protected -- but they were being monitored by the IAEA. Before the war they were under security. And that the question is, what's happened to them since then, not the IAEA's performance.
DOBBS: Well, I -- no, I quite disagree with you, David Albright. I think the question here is why that material is dangerous as it obviously is was permitted to exist in the hands of Saddam Hussein. Secondly, why there wasn't real security leading up in the days and months leading up to the U.S. invasion?
Then thirdly, Jamie McIntyre, we come to the point with this identified as a serious, serious repository of dangerous, high explosives, why in the world did the United States military and the CIA not make certain that this stuff was either secured or either eliminated altogether?
MCINTYRE: Well, it was certainly on the list of the facilities to be checked. The troops that first got there, as was noted, were on their way to attack Baghdad. The Baghdad had not fallen yet...
DOBBS: This is the 101st?
MCINTYRE: When we first went through it. Well, in the 3rd Infantry Division, as David Albright noted. And the other point I would note is that assuming that we take what David Kay said to be likely, that is that they may have found some powder and the bunkers may have been emptied in advance of the attack. But that would tend to support the Pentagon's case, but what really underscores is that no one really knows what happened to this material. We don't know if some of it was recovered. If it was moved someplace else. If it's in the hands of insurgents. We really don't know the answer to that question.
DOBBS: We can say all the things we don't know, but in summation, we have to say, we just don't know period! Which is remarkable, considering we are here now trying to assess what happened a year and a half ago.
David Kay, David Albright, Jamie McIntyre, thanks to you all. "
This whole story really is a concerted effort by The New York Times, CBS, AND the UN, to falsely accuse President Bush of incompetence.