October Surprise

[strannix]

Ah, back to the generalizations about conservatives.

Well, it's true, though, isn't it? I mean, conservatives built a whole movement out of "liberal bias". You yourself complain about it incessantly. It was your first response to this thread.

 

[nbcrusader]

I'm not sure where you get the "complain about it incessantly" concept - but we can let that go for now.

Let's see - the US invades Iraq in March 2003. As the Saddam regime falls, the Iraqis loot their own nation.

Now, just eight days before the election, we get yet another chance to Monday morning quarterback the war. Much like in 2000, where the last great hope was pinned on the GWB drunk driving news, we get another article. In reading some quoted excerpts, it doesn't surprise me that the UN has jumped on the "we told you so" bandwagon for every detail that goes wrong.

Before we trumpet the conclusion that GWB failed miserably to protect these explosives, consider every target that would need "protection", our knowledge of exactly where these targets were located, and the tactical requirements to successfully protect them.

 

[kobayashi]

Let's see - the US invades Iraq in March 2003. As the Saddam regime falls, the Iraqis loot their own nation.

Now, just eight days before the election, we get yet another chance to Monday morning quarterback the war. Much like in 2000, where the last great hope was pinned on the GWB drunk driving news, we get another article. In reading some quoted excerpts, it doesn't surprise me that the UN has jumped on the "we told you so" bandwagon for every detail that goes wrong.

Before we trumpet the conclusion that GWB failed miserably to protect these explosives, consider every target that would need "protection", our knowledge of exactly where these targets were located, and the tactical requirements to successfully protect them.

nbc, in a sense you are correct. but you seem intelligent enough to realise that this is merely one weapon in the arsenal of one ideological side.

in the increasingly polarizing discourse of american (maybe global?) politics, diametrically opposed right and left groups utilize their media contacts effectively while accusing the spectral opposite of doing just that.

much like the classes, there is increasingly no middle

 

[deep]

Are you people so blinded by this election that you can not see the great danger here.
380 tons is 760,000 pounds of this high explosives.




One pound of this explosive blew apart the Airliner over Lockabee.

How can anyone dismiss this in terms of W's reelection.


How many American's will be comimg home in peices in body bags due to this huge blunder?

 

[nbcrusader]

The situation also raises some pre-war questions: Why these explosives were in Iraq in the first place? How were they being handled? How were they being guarded?

 

[anitram]

Rant all you want about liberal bias.

Those 380 tonnes of explosives = roughly 1 car bomb a day for 200 years.

But hey, let's keep quibbling about how the big bad media hates Bush or hates Kerry or hates whoever. That is the important thing here.

 

[anitram]

What is really disturbing (aside from the explosives missing) is that you have your National Security Advisor, not in Washington, investigating this and wondering why she wasn't told for nearly 18 months of the missing cache (if she is to be believed), but that she's gallivanting around battleground states.

It's sincerely appalling.

If this was Clinton and his NSA was giving speeches in Iowa, Bubba would have been publicly castrated, I have no doubt.

 

[hiphop]

Let's see - the US invades Iraq in March 2003. As the Saddam regime falls, the Iraqis loot their own nation.

Now, just eight days before the election, we get yet another chance to Monday morning quarterback the war. Much like in 2000, where the last great hope was pinned on the GWB drunk driving news, we get another article. In reading some quoted excerpts, it doesn't surprise me that the UN has jumped on the "we told you so" bandwagon for every detail that goes wrong.

Before we trumpet the conclusion that GWB failed miserably to protect these explosives, consider every target that would need "protection", our knowledge of exactly where these targets were located, and the tactical requirements to successfully protect them.

You haven´t read the details. Consider that according to msnbc, the IAEA got the info on 10/10. Consider that the site was under U.S. military control.

Consider, only consider! that the UN is not the IAEA - the IAEA is part of the UN though - and consider - just consider once! - to stop your paranoia about this organisation just because it didn´t authorize Bush to do a preemptive strike due to nuclear weapons that weren´t found up until the present day.

The United nations is not the Soviet Union, it´s not Cuba, it´s not against U.S. politicians. Just stop your conspiracy theories, they don´t lead anywhere. It´s ridiculous to flame the U.N., considering - just considering! - that the U.S. is still part of it. The U.S. is also part of the Security Council. The IAEA in Vienna has very good relations with the U.N. headquarters in NYC.


Here´s the whole article:

VIENNA, Austria - Several hundred tons of conventional explosives were looted from a former Iraqi military facility that once played a key role in Saddam Hussein’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb, the U.N. nuclear agency told the Security Council on Monday.

A “lack of security” resulted in the loss of 377 tons of high explosives from the sprawling Al-Qaqaa military installation about 30 miles south of Baghdad, said Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA.

The IAEA fears “that these explosives could have fallen into the wrong hands,” said Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the agency.

Whereabouts a mystery

ElBaradei told the council the IAEA had been trying to give the U.S.-led multinational force and Iraq’s interim government “an opportunity to attempt to recover the explosives before this matter was put into the public domain.”

But since the disappearance was reported in the media, he said he wanted the Security Council to have the letter dated, Oct. 10, that he received from Mohammed J. Abbas, a senior official at Iraq’s Ministry of Science and Technology, reporting the theft of the explosives.

The materials were lost through “the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security,” the letter said.

The letter informed the IAEA that since Sept. 4, 2003, looting at the Al-Qaqaa installation south of Baghdad had resulted in the loss of 214.67 tons of HMX, 155.68 tons of RDX and 6.39 tons of PETN explosives.

HMX and RDX can be used to demolish buildings, down jetliners, produce warheads for missiles and detonate nuclear weapons. HMX and RDX are key ingredients in plastic explosives, such as C-4 and Semtex — substances so powerful that Libyan terrorists needed just 1 pound to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 170 people.

ElBaradei’s cover letter to the council said that the HMX had been under IAEA seal and that the RDX and PETN were “both subject to regular monitoring of stock levels.”

“The presence of these amounts was verified by the IAEA in January 2003,” he said.

At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said U.S.-led coalition troops had searched Al-Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact. The site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Bush, Kerry quarrel over report

The disappearance of the explosives quickly became an issue in the presidential race, with the Democratic candidate, Sen. John Kerry, accusing President Bush of committing “one of the greatest blunders” of his administration in failing to secure the materials.

“George W. Bush, who talks tough ... and brags about making America safer, has once again failed to deliver,” Kerry told supporters in Dover, N.H. “After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in Iraq, this president failed to guard those stockpiles.”

“This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the greatest blunders of this administration, and the incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and this country at greater risk.”

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration’s first concern was whether the material was a nuclear proliferation threat and had determined that it was not.

“Remember, at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom there was some looting, and some of it was organized,” McClellan said. “There were munitions caches spread throughout the country, and so these are all issues that are being looked into by the multinational forces and the Iraqi Survey Group.”

The probe will include finding out what happened to the weapons and whether they are being used against U.S. forces, he said.

Warning from the Iraqi government

Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed of the missing explosives in the past month, the report said.

Fleming, the IAEA spokeswoman, said the agency learned of the disappearance on Oct. 10.

“We first took measures to authenticate it,” Fleming said. “Then, on October 15, we informed the multinational forces through the U.S. government with the request for it to take any appropriate action in cooperation with Iraq’s interim government.”

Before the war, inspectors with the Vienna-based IAEA had kept tabs on the so-called “dual use” explosives because they could have been used to detonate a nuclear weapon.

IAEA inspectors pulled out of Iraq just before the 2003 invasion and have not yet been able to return despite ElBaradei’s repeated urging that the experts be let back in to finish their work.

ElBaradei told the Security Council before the war that Iraq’s nuclear program was in disarray and that there was no evidence to suggest it had revived efforts to build atomic weaponry.

Plastic explosives' components

Al Qaqaa, a sprawling former military installation about 30 miles south of Baghdad, was placed under U.S. military control but repeatedly has been looted, raising troubling questions about whether the missing explosives have fallen into the hands of insurgents battling coalition forces.

Saddam was known to have used the site to make conventional warheads, and IAEA inspectors dismantled parts of his nuclear program there before the 1991 Gulf War. The experts also oversaw the destruction of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6323933/

 

[deep]

Condi Rice is beneath incompetent.

They keep her for window dressing.

And because she will not go against Cheney or Rumsfeld.

 

[strannix]

The situation also raises some pre-war questions: Why these explosives were in Iraq in the first place? How were they being handled? How were they being guarded?

... all questions that you'd already have answers to if you read the information. They've been under seal by the IAEA since 1991, which means they actually were secured until we went in.

Let that sink in. The explosives were secure until we decided not to secure them.

And this is no Monday-morning quarterbacking, as again you would know if you'd have actually been reading the information. Not only was this particular site known to us before the election, but in general, the Bush administration was warned again and again that they'd need a large number of troops to secure the country.

And while it's convenient to blame the Iraqis for looting their own country, as you delicately put it, this again was a widely predicted consequence of overthrowing Saddam's government. And come on, don't you find it just a bit disingenuous to blame the Iraqis anyway? What do you think would happen here if the cops just disappeared for a while? Christ, we Americans riot and loot all the time after natural disasters or sports championships or power outages or whatnot.

We overthrew their government, so it was up to us to provide security. There's really no arguing this point, as besides being common sense and moral, it's also the law.

 

[nbcrusader]

I'll leave your snide comments aside; you have to wonder why these explosives were left in Iraq for over a decade?

As for Monday morning quarterbacking, to believe this was the only munitions dump to protect is unrealistic.

And as for providing security, in the days following the fall of Saddam, I would think personal security to be more important than property security. You will always have the luxury of pointing to what was not protected, because you cannot measure what was successfully protected.

 

[STING2]

Are you people so blinded by this election that you can not see the great danger here.
380 tons is 760,000 pounds of this high explosives.




One pound of this explosive blew apart the Airliner over Lockabee.

How can anyone dismiss this in terms of W's reelection.


How many American's will be comimg home in peices in body bags due to this huge blunder?

The 760,000 pounds of explosives you talk of, is a TINY fraction of the available shells and other explosives and former Iraqi military bases and other military sites. Iraq has more pounds of explosives than any country on earth with the exception of Russia and the United States.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Although the world’s attention has focused on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, scant attention has been paid to the mountains of weapons of conventional destruction unearthed in Iraq.

The bombs, rockets, grenades, cannon shells and bullets amount to the world’s fourth-largest stockpile of weapons, Army Corps of Engineers officials say. An estimated 600,000 tons of munitions with markings from all over the world, including the United States, and some so old that the weapons that fired them are no longer made, were stashed in Saddam’s innumerable caches.

To date, 110,000 tons have been destroyed. An additional 138,000 tons are stored behind protective barriers. Saddam seemed to hoard this cornucopia of death aimlessly. “There are no aisles to walk down. It’s just heaped,” he said. “It just blows your mind to see this stuff.”

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/177738_weapons14.asp

So you have 248,000 tonnes of arms and explosives accounted for or destroyed in Iraq.

Perhaps a good question could be why the IAEA felt that Iraq should be allowed to maintain stockpiles of high explosive that could be used in nuclear bomb triggers.

 

[STING2]

Rant all you want about liberal bias.

Those 380 tonnes of explosives = roughly 1 car bomb a day for 200 years.

But hey, let's keep quibbling about how the big bad media hates Bush or hates Kerry or hates whoever. That is the important thing here.

The 380 tonnes of explosives is a drop in the bucket compared to all the other artillery shells and other munitions that are available throughout Iraq. Most IED's use Soviet made 152 mm shells. This is known because a large number of IED's and other explosives are found and dismantled before they hurt anyone. Of course that is a fact you will not find in the media very often.

 

[hiphop]

Perhaps a good question could be why the IAEA felt that Iraq should be allowed to maintain stockpiles of high explosive that could be used in nuclear bomb triggers.

I´m not that familiar with the statute, but I think the IAEA is not authorized to "feel" or to "allow". In every agency within the U.N. the political decisions are left to the member states (or, in other cases, the Security Council).


ARTICLE XII: Agency safeguards

A. With respect to any Agency project, or other arrangement where the Agency is requested by the parties concerned to apply safeguards, the Agency shall have the following rights and responsibilities to the extent relevant to the project or arrangement:

1. To examine the design of specialized equipment and facilities, including nuclear reactors, and to approve it only from the view- point of assuring that it will not further any military purpose, that it complies with applicable health and safety standards, and that it will permit effective application of the safeguards provided for in this article;

2. To require the observance of any health and safety measures prescribed by the Agency;

3. To require the maintenance and production of operating records to assist in ensuring accountability for source and special fissionable materials used or produced in the project or arrangement;

4. To call for and receive progress reports;

5. To approve the means to be used for the chemical processing of irradiated materials solely to ensure that this chemical processing will not lend itself to diversion of materials for military purposes and will comply with applicable health and safety standards; to require that special fissionable materials recovered or produced as a by-product be used for peaceful purposes under continuing Agency safeguards for research or in reactors, existing or under construction, specified by the member or members concerned; and to require deposit with the Agency of any excess of any special fissionable materials recovered or produced as a by-product over what is needed for the above- stated uses in order to prevent stockpiling of these materials, provided that thereafter at the request of the member or members concerned special fissionable materials so deposited with the Agency shall be returned promptly to the member or members concerned for use under the same provisions as stated above.

6. To send into the territory of the recipient State or States inspectors, designated by the Agency after consultation with the State or States concerned, who shall have access at all times to all places and data and to any person who by reason of his occupation deals with materials, equipment, or facilities which are required by this Statute to be safeguarded, as necessary to account for source and special fissionable materials supplied and fissionable products and to determine whether there is compliance with the undertaking against use in furtherance of any military purpose referred to in sub- paragraph F-4 of article Xl, with the health and safety measures referred to in sub- paragraph A-2 of this article, and with any other conditions prescribed in the agreement between the Agency and the State or States concerned. Inspectors designated by the Agency shall be accompanied by representatives of the authorities of the State concerned, if that State so requests, provided that the inspectors shall not thereby be delayed or otherwise impeded in the exercise of their functions;

7. In the event of non- compliance and failure by the recipient State or States to take requested corrective steps within a reasonable time, to suspend or terminate assistance and withdraw any materials and equipment made available by the Agency or a member in furtherance of the project.

B. The Agency shall, as necessary, establish a staff of inspectors. The Staff of inspectors shall have the responsibility of examining all operations conducted by the Agency itself to determine whether the Agency is complying with the health and safety measures prescribed by it for application to projects subject to its approval, supervision or control, and whether the Agency is taking adequate measures to prevent the source and special fissionable materials in its custody or used or produced in its own operations from being used in furtherance of any military purpose. The Agency shall take remedial action forthwith to correct any non- compliance or failure to take adequate measures.



ARTICLE XX: Definitions

As used in this Statute:

1. The term "special fissionable material" means plutonium-239; uranium- 233; uranium enriched in the isotopes 235 or 233; any material containing one or more of the foregoing; and such other fissionable material as the Board of Governors shall from time to time deter mine; but the term "special fissionable material" does not include source material.

2. The term "uranium enriched in the isotopes 235 or 233" means uranium containing the isotopes 235 or 233 or both in an amount such that the abundance ratio of the sum of these isotopes to the isotope 238 is greater than the ratio of the isotope 235 to the isotope 238 occurring in nature .

3 . The term "source material" means uranium containing the mixture of isotopes occurring in nature; uranium depleted in the isotope 235; thorium; any of the foregoing in the form of metal, alloy, chemical compound, or concentrate; any other material containing one or more of the foregoing in such concentration as the Board of Governors shall from time to time determine; and such other material as the Board of Governors shall from time to time determine.

http://www.iaea.org/About/statute_text.html

 

[SouthPark(R)]

The NY Times is the real October surprise. Take one part old news, mix liberally and serve just before the election.

Rant all you want about liberal bias.

Those 380 tonnes of explosives = roughly 1 car bomb a day for 200 years.

But hey, let's keep quibbling about how the big bad media hates Bush or hates Kerry or hates whoever. That is the important thing here.

ooops!

it seems they were gone before the military got there....

“April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq.” (NBC’s “Nightly News,” 10/25/04)

might these be the weapons that went over to Syria before the war started? Wasn't it reported that a convoy trucks were seen via satelite headed to Syria?

Do you think NY Times will follow up with this info above the fold in tomorrow's edition? How about CNN, who has mentioned it a least 50x today?

 

[drivemytrabant]

Do you think NY Times will follow up with this info above the fold in tomorrow's edition? How about CNN, who has mentioned it a least 50x today?

Above the fold? Maybe page C-11. Here is the full scoop on this from drudge:

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX MON OCT 25 2004 22:45:05 ET XXXXX

NBCNEWS: HUGE CACHE OF EXPLOSIVES VANISHED FROM SITE IN IRAQ -- AT LEAST 18 MONTHS AGO -- BEFORE TROOPS ARRIVED

The NYTIMES urgently reported on Monday in an apprent October Surprise: The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives are now missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

Jumping on the TIMES exclusive, Dem presidential candidate John Kerry blasted the Bush administration for its failure to "guard those stockpiles."

"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration," Kerry said.

In an election week rush:

**ABCNEWS Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 4 Times
**CBSNEWS Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 7 Times
**MSNBC Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 37 Times
**CNN Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 50 Times

But tonight, NBCNEWS reported: The 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives were already missing back in April 10, 2003 -- when U.S. troops arrived at the installation south of Baghdad!

An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.

According to NBCNEWS, the HMX and RDX explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.

The TIMES left the impression the weapons site had been looted of its explosives recently, and since Iraq has been under US control.

The TIMES reported: "The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday."

[In a fresh Page One story set for Tuesday on the matter, the TIMES once again omits any reference to troops not finding any explosives at the site when they arrived in April of 2003. Attempts to reach managing editor Jill Abramson late Monday were unsuccessful.]

"The U.S. Army was at the site one day after the liberation and the weapons were already gone," a top Republican blasted from Washington late Monday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers.

Dem vp hopeful John Edwards blasted Bush for not securing the explosives: "It is reckless and irresponsible to fail to protect and safeguard one of the largest weapons sites in the country. And by either ignoring these mistakes or being clueless about them, George Bush has failed. He has failed as our commander in chief; he has failed as president."

A senior Bush official e-mailed DRUDGE late Monday: "Let me get this straight, are Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards now saying we did not go into Iraq soon enough? We should have invaded and liberated Iraq sooner?"

Top Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart fired back Monday night: "In a shameless attempt to cover up its failure to secure 380 tons of highly explosive material in Iraq, the White House is desperately flailing in an effort to escape blame. Instead of distorting John Kerry’s words, the Bush campaign is now falsely and deliberately twisting the reports of journalists. It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous."

Developing...

 

[deep]

drivemytrabant
SouthPark(R)

The Iraqi Governing Council

that the Bush Administration put in
says they were looted after invasion.

Drudge has proven to be a bias unreliable source

Iraqi officials reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency -- the U.N. monitoring group -- earlier this month that the explosives were looted after April 9, 2003, when U.S. forces entered Baghdad. IAEA officials verified the explosives were still at the site and under seal in January 2003, the last time the inspectors were there.

The IAEA had been monitoring the material -- known as HMX and RDX -- as part of the U.N. inspections program following the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The agency had issued numerous warnings about the explosives falling into the wrong hands, before and after the U.S. invasion. Pentagon officials said that while U.S. troops searched the facility on several occasions during and after the invasion, the facility was not high on U.S. commanders’ list of key sites to guard because survey teams found no nuclear or biological weapons at Al Qaqaa, a collection of 87 buildings and underground bunkers 30 miles south of Baghdad.

Asked if U.S. troops were ever ordered to guard the facility, where Saddam built conventional warheads and where the IAEA dismantled parts of his nuclear program after the Gulf War, one Defense official responded, “Not that I’m aware of.”

David Kay, the CIA’s former chief weapons hunter in Iraq, said he believes the material was looted in the immediate aftermath of the war.

“I saw (the facility) in May (of 2003) and it was heavily looted at that time,” Kay said. “Sometime between April and May most of the stuff was carried off. The site was in total disarray, just like a lot of the Iraqi sites.”

Kay said that the stolen HMX and RDX are “superb explosives for terrorists” because they are stable compounds that can be transported safely and used for large-scale attacks.

Both HMX and RDX “would be good for a car bomb or a truck bomb,” Kay said. “Just pack it together with a detonator.”

The U.S. failure to guard hundreds of ammunition depots in the wake of the Iraq invasion has been well documented. Top military officials in Iraq believe that weapons taken from these sites have armed an insurgency still killing U.S. forces almost daily. More than 1,100 U.S. troops have been killed since the invasion.

The explosive power of the stolen material -- just a half pound of HMX brought down the Pan Am 103 flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 -- has officials particularly worried.

article here

 

[A_Wanderer]

One could same about the New York Times (Jason Blair) and CBS (Rathergate).

 

[nbcrusader]

drivemytrabant
SouthPark(R)

The Iraqi Governing Council

that the Bush Administration put in
says they were looted after invasion.

Drudge has proven to be a bias unreliable source

Before we do the old bash the messanger, ignore the message dance, read the info from CNN

 

[diamond]

NB wins again

db9

 

[deep]

Before we do the old bash the messanger, ignore the message dance, read the info from CNN

i read that article



from the link you posted

In a letter to the IAEA dated October 10, Iraq's director of planning, Mohammed Abbas, said the material disappeared sometime after Saddam's regime fell in April 2003, which he attributed to "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. According to NBC, troops from the 101st Airborne arrived the next day to find that the material was already gone.

Prior to the Iraq war, the high-grade explosives at Al Qaqaa had been under the control of IAEA inspectors because the material could be used as a component in a nuclear weapon, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said. IAEA and other U.N. inspectors left the country in March 2003 before the fighting began on March 19.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday that five days after the IAEA received the letter from the Iraqi government, the agency alerted U.S. officials in Vienna, who in turn told National Security Director Condoleezza Rice. She then alerted Bush, McClellan said.

Once U.S. officials were alerted, the multinational force in Iraq and the Iraq Survey Group, charged with hunting for weapons in Iraq, were both ordered to investigate what was missing and the possible circumstances, according to State Department spokesman Adam Ereli.

"We, from the very beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, did everything we could to secure arms caches throughout the country," Ereli said. "But given the number of arms and the number of caches and the extent of militarization of Iraq, it was impossible to provide 100 percent security for 100 percent of the sites, quite frankly."

 

[nbcrusader]

You haven´t read the details. Consider that according to msnbc, the IAEA got the info on 10/10. Consider that the site was under U.S. military control.

Consider, only consider! that the UN is not the IAEA - the IAEA is part of the UN though - and consider - just consider once! - to stop your paranoia about this organisation just because it didn´t authorize Bush to do a preemptive strike due to nuclear weapons that weren´t found up until the present day.

The United nations is not the Soviet Union, it´s not Cuba, it´s not against U.S. politicians. Just stop your conspiracy theories, they don´t lead anywhere. It´s ridiculous to flame the U.N., considering - just considering! - that the U.S. is still part of it. The U.S. is also part of the Security Council. The IAEA in Vienna has very good relations with the U.N. headquarters in NYC.

Consider the part of the article you didn't quote:

the International Atomic Energy Agency said that the explosives had been looted from the sprawling Al-Qaqaa military base, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, since January 2003 due to a “lack of security” at the former Iraqi military facility.

It was disappearing before the war! The UN took responsibility for this material since 1991. And to release a letter saying they "just discovered" the disappearance is irresponsible.

 

[hiphop]

Consider the part of the article you didn't quote:

It was disappearing before the war! The UN took responsibility for this material since 1991. And to release a letter saying they "just discovered" the disappearance is irresponsible.

Clicked the link, read the story. Well the timing remains a mystery. Nobody seems to know if it disappeared before the war or after that or in between.

I agree with you; if it happened when the IAEA had to guard it, it was not guarded properly by the IAEA. If it happened when the U.S. had to guard it, it wasn´t properly guarded by the U.S.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Timing is plain and simple, CBS wanted to run a shocking story about the incompetence of the Bush administration on 60 minutes right before the election by running a story with "unimpeachable" sources only this time it may well explode because the NYT ran the thing early and the other media outlets have at least half a brain and now question these "shocking revelations' before burying themselves any deeper.

 

[nbcrusader]

I guess CBS didn't learn anything from the false memo Dan Rather promoted. If there was a plan to air this misleading story right before the election, CBS has lost what ever credibility they had left.

 

[A_Wanderer]

The Pajamujahadeen Will Be Victorious In Their Jihad Against The MSM!

 

[diamond]

Timing is plain and simple, CBS wanted to run a shocking story about the incompetence of the Bush administration on 60 minutes right before the election by running a story with "unimpeachable" sources only this time it may well explode because the NYT ran the thing early and the other media outlets have at least half a brain and now question these "shocking revelations' before burying themselves any deeper.

Didn't that network and dan rather get slapped hard enough already?

Do they ever learn?
Well my fellow leftie friends ever learn?

Geez enough already

db9

 

[nbcrusader]

Careful, we are not allowed to suggest a liberal bias. Otherwise we are only re-enforcing certain stereotypes of conservatives. Please disregard facts to the contrary.

 

[diamond]

Careful, we are not allowed to suggest a liberal bias. Otherwise we are only re-enforcing certain stereotypes of conservatives. Please disregard facts to the contrary.

NB,
Do you think next the lefties will start blaming Karl Rove for planting false evidence thus making them look like bafoons?

db9