So what's this I hear at the coffee machine this morning that a TV station in Minneapolis has tape of US soldiers entering the bunker at al KaKa, slicing the IAEA seal, and finding it full of explosives, just a day or two after the invasion?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1261221/posts
But the operative line in that story, for me, was:
The material in the cardboard cylinders could have been the RDX, but this is at odds with the label and the lost amounts are inconsistent with the visible quantity. However, there may have been storage area outside the field of view of the camera.
They found some explosives. They didn't find any with IAEA inventory stickers. It is the IAEA inventoried stuff that Kerry is spouting about.
You mean to tell me they were in Baghdad a day or two after the invasion? Boy that war was faster that I was told.
They have not dated nor confirmed where the video is from.
There is one thing no one in the media today is picking up on - THE NEWS CREW SAID THEY DID NOT GO IN ANY BUNKER THAT HAD BEEN SEALED BY THE IAEA - THEREFORE, THE PHOTOS AND VIDEO WERE TAKEN OF A BUNKER THAT COULD NOT HAVE CONTAINED THE EXPLOSIVES IN QUESTION.
ABC has been VERY DECEPTIVE, leading everyone to believe that the soldiers and news crew went in a bunker that was sealed. THEY DID NOT. Nothing in any of the videos or photos shows any soldier breaking an IAEA seal, and the reporter himself said he never went in any bunker that had been sealed - in fact, one of the videos shows someone who had climbed up to look in a ventilation vent to see what was in the sealed bunker - conclusion - THE SEALED BUNKERS WERE NOT OPENED. They just show a PHOTO of a bunker that was sealed, and IMPLY that that is the bunker where the explosives were found.
This sham has got to be exposed for what it is. Also, the location has NOT been verified.
A soldier with the 101st Airborne Division is seen examining the contents of a barrel in a bunker in the Al-Qaqaa facility in Iraq in this video footage made by Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP-TV on April 18, 2003 while the station had a crew embedded with the 101st during the war. The station says the video shows soldiers examining explosives, but the television station said it remained unclear if the explosives were the high-energy explosives that are missing. (AP Photo/KSTP,ABC News)
Video May Show Explosives at Al-Qaqaa
WASHINGTON - Videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq when they first opened the bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels and bearing the markings of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The video taken by KSTP of St. Paul on April 18, 2003, could reinforce suggestions that tons of explosives missing from a munitions installation in Iraq were looted after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The video was broadcast nationally Thursday on ABC.
"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa," David A. Kay, a former American official who directed the hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, told The New York Times. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal."
The question of what happened to the tons of explosives has become a major issue in the closing days of the presidential campaign.
Democrat John Kerry says the missing explosives powerful enough to demolish a building, bring down a jetliner or set off a nuclear weapon are another example of the Bush administration's poor planning and incompetence in handling the war in Iraq. President Bush says the explosives were possibly removed by Saddam's forces before the invasion.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld entered the debate Thursday, suggesting the 377 tons of explosives were taken away before U.S. forces arrived, saying any large effort to loot the material afterward would have been detected.
"We would have seen anything like that," he said in one of two radio interviews he gave at the Pentagon. "The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, I think is at least debatable."
The Pentagon also declassified and released a single image, taken by reconnaissance aircraft or satellite just days before the war, showing two trucks outside one of the dozens of storage bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base.
The particular bunker is not one known to have contained any of the missing explosives, and Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said the image only shows that there was some Iraqi activity at the base when it was taken, on March 17. Di Rita said the image says nothing about what happened to the explosives.
Rumsfeld, in one radio interview, also cast doubt on the suggestion of one of his subordinates that Russian forces assisted the Iraqis in removing them.
John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security, suggested to The Washington Times in an interview that the Russians may have been involved, prompting an angry denial from Moscow.
Rumsfeld said, "I have no information on that at all, and cannot validate that even slightly."
But at issue is whether the weapons were moved before or after U.S. forces occupied that region of the country in early April. No one has been able to provide conclusive evidence either way, although Iraqi officials blamed it on poor U.S. security after Baghdad fell.
The Pentagon has said it's looking into the matter, and officials note that 400,000 tons of recovered Iraqi munitions have either been destroyed or are slated to be destroyed.