US failed to secure Iraqi explosives (and the cover up) .:. grubbykid.com

US failed to secure Iraqi explosives (and the cover up)

The NY Times brings us this horror story, Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq:

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

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 Saturday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year [...]

American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could be used to produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings. The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa, and somewhat larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material. But the other components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain. "This is a high explosives risk, but not necessarily a proliferation risk," one senior Bush administration official said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week.

So the Bush Administration allowed 380 tons of RDX and HMX to be looted from known locations. To put that in perspective, 1 pound brought down Pan Am Flight 103 - so there is enough high-yield explosives out there to bring down 760,000 Pan Am Flight 103's. Scarry, no? No - the scarry part of this story is that the Bush Administration has known about it for over a year and has been actively obstructing IAEA involvement and public discourse about the incident. Josh Marshall has more:

There are a number of reasons why you can imagine the White House and the civilians at the Pentagon wouldn't want to inform the IAEA. But one pretty clear one is that letting the IAEA find out would pretty clearly mean that the American public would find out what a major league screw-up the president and his advisors had allowed to happen.

Only a couple weeks ago did the Iraqis finally report the theft to the IAEA. And from there it was only a matter of time till the yearlong cover-up started to unravel.

But it didn't even stop there.

As I've noted, the White House and the Pentagon have known for more than a year that this stuff had gone missing. But the White House, according to TPM sources, has known that this story was coming for at least ten days. Again, not just the underlying facts -- that the stuff had been stolen and was being used against American troops (they've known that for more than a year) -- but the fact that this story was going to break in the not too distant future. And they've been going to great lengths to try to push it back until after the election.

As another administration source told Nelson, "What the hell were WE doing in the year and a half from the time we knew the stuff was gone, is obviously a huge question, and you can imagine why no one [in the Administration] wants to face up to it, certainly not before the election."

Conventional wisdom is that it is the coverup that is more damning than the actual act, but this time that wisdom is wrong. This time, explosives from that 380 tons are being used daily to blow up American Troops. How can you let 380 tons of known explosives get away and then cover it up and do nothing about it for a year! How is this protecting American lives, Mr. President? You willfully have put soldiers and civilians into harms way, and you try to cover it up for political purposes thus slowing to capture of these materials? What kind of man are you, Mr. President?

Comments

dad says:

I'm sure the President was going to let us know about this right after November 2nd....:)

Posted by: dad at October 25, 2004 8:27 PM #

dad says:

The best spin so far on this story from the White House: We didn't release the information because we didn't want the enemy to find out about the missing explosives....dude, the enemy already had the missing explosives!!