NY Times: Iraqis Tell of Looting at Munitions Site

NY Times ^ | 10/28/04

[CyberAnt]

Excuse me .. we all know there are some Iraqi's who would be willing to lie for money. I'm not buying this looting stuff unless it's about munitions .. and not the explosives.

IIRC the explosives would be useless without a trigger and a delivery system.

[Drango]

LOL

[Rokke]

The Gertz story is up now. It is WAY more extensive than the Financial Times article posted earlier on Drudge. It is full of previously classified details that reveal a very complex operation to flush special equipment out of Iraq. This is HUGE. The remainder of this campaign will be a discussion of what else was shipped out of Iraq. To include WMD's. The October Surprise is here, and the Bush/Cheney campaign didn't even have to initiate it....

or maybe they did.

[BJungNan]

If we are to believe this NYTimes story, If there was looting, then the looters must have taken the really big bombs. Pathetic the leaps the New York Times expects its readers to make.

[jimbo123]

Link to Full article from Washington Times here:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20041027-101153-4822r.htm

Gertz rocks!

[mplsconservative]

Good one Gecko!

LOL

[Novel]

Looters do not make off with 380 tons of explosives. The NYT is reaching to make this stick. It ain't gonna happen fellas. Give it up!

[Jet Jaguar]

Maybe. ;-)

[ml1954]

So I'm supposed to believe that 380 tons of HDX/RDX were looted 18 months ago by Iraqi insurgents, yet NONE of it has ever been used against the coalition! This is the most incredible load of bull I have witnessed to date.

That is an excellent point. Also, if my calculations are right, 380 tons of this explosive, assuming that each ton is equivalent to 10 tons of TNT (a pure guess and hopefully too high), would be in total equal to 3.8 kilotons of TNT, or a 3.8 kiloton nuke. This is roughly about a quarter of the size of the Hiroshima bomb. And this is only if all 50 or 100 or however many truckloads of the stuff were detonated all at once. Even if true, these explosives are not even close to WMDs, so what's the big deal.

[GailA]

The place was crawling with our troops how in the sam hill did they miss 1000's of looters???? </scarsam>

[JustaCowgirl]

The trouble is I never buy the NYT anyway, nor do the vast majority of people on this board. The people who buy it are going to continue to buy it, I'm afraid.

[MeekOneGOP]

The New york Times is a bad joke. My Lord, this is laughable.

[Log]

The Times is really desperate to fabricate a story, aren't they?

[M Kehoe]

Somebody should tell the NYT to shut up. The more they try to cover their a$$, the more damage will be done to the Kerry campaign.

On second thought, let their (NYT) credibility go south along with their ad revenue.

5.56mm

[agincourt1415]

400 Tonnes carried off, OH PLEASE, can NYT be THAT STUPID?

[HawaiianGecko]

 

	Correct. RDX is nothing more than plastic explosives. RDX is considered the most powerful and brisant of the military high explosives.  It was invented in 1890 and was used in the first "plastic explosives" created. For 380 tons of it to be "looted" 18 months ago, yet NOT show up in a car bomb to date tells me this whole story is a load of crap.  Absolutely none of the I.E.D.s that have been blowing up in and around Baghdad have been from RDX and/or HDX, although if I were inclined to build a bomb I most certainly would prefer to use a bit of easy to use, easy to mold, easy to detonate, yet extremely safe to work with RDX. It's like a bunch of looters robbing a bank but not spending a single dime of the booty over an 18 month period.  I'm just not buying it. For what it's worth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDX It is a colourless solid, of density 1.82 g/cm³. It is obtained by reacting concentrated nitric acid on hexamine. It is a heterocycle and has the shape of a ring. It starts to decompose at about 170°C and melts at 204°C. Its structural formula is: hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine or (CH2-N-NO2)3 At room temperatures, it is a very stable product. It burns rather than explodes, and only detonates with a detonator, being unaffected even by small arms fire. It is less sensitive than pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN). However, it is very sensitive when crystalized, below -4°C. .

 

[HawaiianGecko]

You'd be surprise what you can get in a Yugo!

[jwalsh07]

They aren't stupid, they are Goebellsian.

[GOPrincess]

Right, looters stormed the place with the U.S. military everywhere, and got rid of 380 tons of ammo... Captain's Quarters calculated it would take a company of nearly 100 men two weeks to do this. With surveillance flights, etc.? What a joke.

Meanwhile the WA TIMES does the real heavy lifting...it was the *Russians* who did it before the war? Yet another reason we CAN'T ELECT CARRY AND LIVE UNDER U.N. RULE. Other countries have very dirty pre-war hands.

[GOPrincess]

Make that CAN'T ELECT KERRY...a little excited here, thinking about carrying off ammo :).