I think perhaps you're splitting hairs a bit too close.
There are many things that are or can be 'explosive'. Each of us are driving around in cars that have tanks full of a substance that under the right conditions could have the explosive power of many sticks of TNT. Grain silos yes, can blow in a most impressive fashion.
The operative point here is whether or not bad-guy looters were able to steal 'high explosives' from under the noses of the U.S. forces in Iraq.
First, on the face of it, I think this was a dumb story from the beginning. There is no argument that there was a whole buttload of ordance available all over Iraq for the bad guys to use in the fabrication of IED's. So what? Whether it was some tons of this or some tons of that... the fact is that there was a massive amount of materiel from which to construct explosive devices.
This is not news.
What *is* news, is that the various media sources are now trying to construct a story out of whole cloth. What this thread has exposed, and it would seem to be rightly so, is that the materials discussed in the LA Times story could only really be made into high-order explosives with the application of manufacturing processes that are in all likelihood not available to them. This stuff is not worth the bother. They don't need to be messing with such things to do what they are doing, and there is no evidence that any of it is showing up on the street in the form of IED's.
This would appear to be yet another case of a reporter, and a paper, with an agenda... and the importance of the agenda blinded them to the need to really check the facts and make sure they were actually telling the whole story. Because its not the whole story that they really wish to tell.
Exactly.