MaxFisher
War Child
Looks like the weapons were already gone before troops even arrived.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/26/iraq.explosives/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/26/iraq.explosives/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/international/middleeast/25bomb.html?oref=loginAmerican officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."
diamond said:
-Hans Blix and the inspectors were incompetent
-they had weapons after all, so there was a justifable reason to go in to Iraq,
A_Wanderer said:the question remains that if the regime was able to transport 377 tonnes of high explosive to a different location before the war is it not concievable that the WMD were also transported - I think that Saddam had weapons into 2002 at least and moved them out during the UN effort and the millitary buildup.
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.
A_Wanderer said:The key conclusions of the Duelfer report was that Saddams primary objective was the removal of the UN Sanctions and the reconstruction of his WMD stockpiles out of fear from Iran which will probably be a nuclear power by the end of next year - this probably would have occured if the UN Inspections found that Saddam had verifiably disarmed and the regime was not removed,
No the utter absence of evidence was boggling, I mean every major intelligence service in the world was absolutely wrong - now part of this was overcompensating after underestimating the capacity before the inspectors actually saw what the regime could produce and the other part was group-think. The absence of weapons program related materials would seem to confirm the feelings of those inspectors that material was moved to Syria before the war and the apparent dissaperence of this high explosives just goes to show that such a proposition is not implausible.
Saddam Husayn so dominated the Iraqi Regime that its strategic intent was his alone. He wanted to ends sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted.
Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability—which was essentially destroyed in 1991—after sanctions
were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized, but probably with a different mix of capabilities to that
which previously existed. Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability—in an incremental fashion,
irrespective of international pressure and the resulting economic risks—but he intended to focus on ballistic
missile and tactical chemical warfare (CW) capabilities.
diamond said:hiphop,
so you are saying that the inspectors were just thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat close to finding them, but it's the usa's fault for impeding their search ?
c'mon buddy u can do better than that
db9
A_Wanderer said:The corner at NRO had this to say.
BOMB-GATE [Cliff May]
Sent to me by a source in the government: “The Iraqi explosives story is a fraud. These weapons were not there when US troops went to this site in 2003. The IAEA and its head, the anti-American Mohammed El Baradei, leaked a false letter on this issue to the media to embarrass the Bush administration. The US is trying to deny El Baradei a second term and we have been on his case for missing the Libyan nuclear weapons program and for weakness on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”
(For the record, I don’t reveal my sources so if that means I end up sharing a cell at Sing-sing with Judy Miller, so be it.)
Posted at 10:00 AM
strannix said:This is ridiculous on its face. It's just a "government official" - could be anyone with that phrasing - giving his own theory. He can't possibly be in a situation to know what El Baradei's motivations may or may not be, short of mind-reading.
If we're relying on anonymous officials, there's also this story, which notes a "Pentagon official" saying that we inspected the site after the war and the stuff was still there. It's still anonymous, and therefore unreliable, but at least 1) it doesn't rely on the word of people with an obvious self-interest in saying otherwise, and 2) there's no mind-reading required.
nbcrusader said:
Please realize that an unnamed "Pentagon official" is just as unreliable as the "government official". Reporter can simply quote each other to get a quote and we will never be the wiser.
strannix said:But as a general rule, assertions made based on facts are always more credible than those based on speculation, and assertions made out of self-interest are always less credible than those that are not.
nbcrusader said:
Agreed.
And these days, where can you find someone not acting out of self-interest?
Are you paying attention?MaxFisher said:
I guess it doesn't matter to him that the story has already been proven to be wrong.
Al-Qaqaa spokesman says no weapons search
By KIMBERLY HEFLING
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
EVANSVILLE, Ind. -- The first U.S. military unit to reach the Al-Qaqaa military installation after the invasion of Iraq did not have orders to search for the nearly 400 tons of explosives that Iraqi officials say were stolen from the site sometime following the fall of Baghdad, the unit spokesman said Tuesday.
When the troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa base a day or so after Baghdad's fall on April 9, 2003, there were already looters throughout the facility, Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the unit, told The Associated Press.
The soldiers "secured the area they were in and looked in a limited amount of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present in their area," Wellman wrote in an e-mail message. "Bombs were found but not chemical weapons in that immediate area.
"Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE type munitions, as they (high-explosive weapons) were everywhere in Iraq," he wrote.
His remarks appeared to confirm the observations of an NBC reporter embedded with the army unit who said Tuesday that she saw no signs that the Americans searched for the powerful explosives during their 24 hours at the facility en route to Baghdad, 30 miles to the north.
The disappearance, which the International Atomic Energy Agency reported Monday to the U.N. Security Council, has raised questions about why the United States didn't do more to secure the facility and failed to allow full international inspections to resume after the March 2003 invasion.
On Tuesday, Russia, citing the disappearance, called on the U.N. Security Council to discuss the return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq. But the United States said American inspectors were investigating the loss and that there is no need for U.N. experts to return.
The missing explosives have become a major issue in the final week of the presidential campaign, with Vice President Dick Cheney questioning on Tuesday whether the explosives were at the facility when U.S. troops arrived, and the Kerry campaign calling the disappearance the latest in a "tragic series of blunders" by the Bush administration.
The Al-Qaqaa explosives included HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in repeated bomb attacks on U.S.-led multinational forces and Iraqi police and national guardsmen. But HMX is also a "dual use" substance powerful enough to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb and set off a nuclear chain reaction.
deep said:Bush won't take any questions on this or even address it.
Why? If there is nothing to hide?