Posted on 10/31/2004 12:17:12 PM PST by Calvarys_Soldier
Even after the U.S. military secured some 400,000 tons of munitions, as many as 250,000 tons remain unaccounted for.
But with the names of other sites popping up everywhere — al-Mahaweel, Baqouba, Ukhaider, Qaim — experts say the al-Qaqaa stash is only a tiny fraction of what’s buried in the sands of Iraq.
“There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons,” said Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst and Iraq expert with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. He contends Iraq’s prewar stockpiles “were probably in excess of 650,000 tons.”
A nation ‘awash in weapons’ Through mid-September, coalition forces inspected and cleared more than 10,000 caches of weapons, U.S. arms hunter Charles Duelfer said in a recent report. But up to 250,000 tons remain unaccounted for, according to military estimates, much of it in small stashes scattered around the country.
Among the sites that don’t appear to have been secured was a cache of hundreds of surface-to-surface warheads at the 2nd Military College in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. Each warhead is believed to have contained 57 pounds of high explosives.
Another prominent site is an ammunition storage area at Ukhaider, 75 miles south of Baghdad, where U.N. inspectors found 11 empty chemical warheads in “excellent” condition in January 2003.
Al-Qaqaa also contained large stores of RDX and PETN, but the U.N. nuclear agency’s main concern was the HMX. Although the IAEA said Saddam’s nuclear program was in disarray before the war and there was no evidence that Iraq had revived efforts to build atomic weaponry, the agency placed the material under seal as a precaution.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Or for that matter, that we could have found them easily if we hadn't spent three months trying to get Senator Kerry's precious UN to join us? Very interesting...
...and no information on this throughout the media...how shocking!
But what surrounds the selected excerpts I chose of course paints an unflattering picture of the Bush Administration...but in the process quietly admits that those weapons WERE THERE! How can the U.S. fail to secure weapons that weren't there?
But most importantly, for these weapons to be missing, one must believe one of two things. Either a) the American military is so incompetent that they didn't notice 250,000 tons of explosives being moved. Or b) Saddam Hussein moved them BEFORE we invaded. Which is more logical? If your name is John Kerry, please don't answer that question. I don't have a spare three days to sort out your answer.
Isn't it amazing how all these other weapons REALLY were there and is just missing, but when it comes to the biological and chemical agents inspectors KNOW he had prior to the inspectors being kicked out in the late '90's then it's a totally different story.
How can that be? It was 380 tons in one place, so they say.
So the weapons which were not exist were stolen by terrorists who were not there?
PMSNBC? Being honest? My heart...!
How come the title of your story is negative - while the actual title from MSNBC is more positive ..??
We're supposed to use the ACTUAL TITLE OF THE ARTICLE.
CyberAnt, I'm behind you 100% on the principle of using the correct title---but it looks like just one word is off ("missing" instead of "absent"). Sounds like a simple mistake to me. Or are you seeing a different headline than I am?
Exactly.
We have two catagories of things that aren't there.
One catagory isn't there, and that's bad, because Bush lied about it being there.
The other catagory isn't there, and that's bad, because it was there and Bush didn't keep it there.
In both cases, a big stink is being made about a blank. A ghost. An empty space. Something that can't be pointed to. Something that can't be refuted, or argued, or even seen.
(steely)
The thing that isn't there, that Bush lied about being there? That thing was used by Saddam Hussein to kill thousands of people in Halubja, and tens of thousands during the Iran-Iraq war.
And the thing that isn't there, that Bush incompetantly didn't keep there? That thing wasn't seen by embedded NBC reporters, or by the men who did get rid other bad things from the same area. In fact, the amount of bad stuff these guys did get rid of was about 20 times greater than the stuff Bush is now accused of not holding on to.
(steely)
During this entire presidental campaign, we have heard that Kerry and the Democrats were "united", i.e. shared something... a purpose, a direction, some characteristic. And now it dawns on me... they all share a particular condition, they simply do not know what they are talking about. And we cannot turn over power to such an army of idiots.
Hmmmm? Suddenly the title got changed .. too bad I didn't copy the title that was there.
THE TITLE WAS DIFFERENT!! It said something like "250 tons of missing ...". It specifically did not say 377 tons, and there was no reference to it being a "small part" of anything.
101st HQ'd in Al-Qaqaa for Two Weeks! (Vanity - Just spoke with someone who was there)
Soldier in Iraq with the 101st | 10-27-04 | DTogo
Posted on 10/27/2004 10:21:14 PM CDT by DTogo
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1259535/posts
As soon as this Al-Qaqaa story "broke" I thought of calling my friend (an officer and unit commander attached to the 101st during Operation Iraqi Freedom) to find out what really happened. Well, I just got off the phone with him and after joking that he was directing traffic for all the Iraqi trucks that looted explosives out of Al-Qaqaa, I asked him what this story is really all about.
Turns out several of his unit's men were with the 2nd Brigade that first arrived at Al-Qaqaa, secured it, spent the night, then moved out. The day they left, the 101st Division Command Staff (which my friend was attached to) then moved into Al-Qaqaa and set up temporary HQ for TWO WEEKS! While there he walked around and inside bunkers and saw all sorts of stuff stacked up and lying around: AK-47s, RPGs, rockets, bombs, ammo, and black powder used in making weapons as that's what the Al-Qaqaa facility was - manufacture and storage.
Did he see any IAEA sealed bunkers? No. Did he see anything other than field weapons/munitions? No. Did they allow Iraqis to drive trucks into HQ and help themselves to weapons? Gimme a break! Would the 101st Division Command Staff HQ next to 380 tons of HMX, RDX and PETN during combat? I would think not.
My friend's parting thoughts were that this was likely Kerry's "October Suprise" to be leaked right before the election, leaving the Bush team no time to rebutt or explain, but it got leaked too early. Turns out this highly explosive story is one big DNC dud.
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