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question · 10-27-04, 10:21 AM

Iraq denies explosives disappeared before war

A top Iraqi science official says it is impossible that 350 tonnes of high explosives could have been smuggled out of a military site south of Baghdad before the regime fell last year.

The UN nuclear watchdog this week said the explosives went missing from a weapons dump some time after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled in April 2003.

But as the issue of the missing explosives took centre stage in the US presidential campaign, some US officials have suggested they had gone before the US-led forces moved on Baghdad.

"It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the Science Ministry's site monitoring department, said.

"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall.

"I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."

Mr Sharaa also warns that other nearby sites with similar materials could have also been plundered.

[taken from: ABCNews Australia]

question · 10-27-04, 10:29 AM

Troops Did Not Search For Missing Explosives, Spokesman Says
Nearly 400 Tons Of High Explosives Missing

POSTED: 7:30 am EDT October 27, 2004
One of the first U.S. military units to reach the Al-Qaqaa military installation south of Baghdad after the invasion of Iraq did not have orders to search for the nearly 400 tons of explosives that are missing from the site, the unit spokesman said Tuesday.

When troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa base a day or so after other coalition troops seized Baghdad 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 to The Associated Press. "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.

The 101st Airborne was apparently at least the second military unit to arrive at Al-Qaqaa after the U.S. led invasion began. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The Washington Post that the 3rd Infantry Division reached the site around April 3, fought with Iraq forces and occupied the site. They left after two days, headed to Baghdad, he told the newspaper for Wednesday's editions.

Associated Press Correspondent Chris Tomlinson, who was embedded with the 3rd Infantry but didn't go to Al-Qaqaa, described the search of Iraqi military facilities south of Baghdad as brief, cursory missions to seek out hostile troops, not to inventory or secure weapons stockpiles. One task force, he said, searched four Iraqi military bases in a single day, meeting no resistance and finding only abandoned buildings, some containing weapons and ammunition.

The enormous size of the bases, the rapid pace of the advance on Baghdad and the limited number of troops involved, made it impossible for U.S. commanders to allocate any soldiers to guard any of the facilities after making a check, Tomlinson said.

Pentagon officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday night. A spokesman for the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga., said the unit was checking on whether any of its troops was at Al-Qaqaa.

The disappearance of the explosives was first reported in Monday's New York Times and has subsequently become a heated issue in the U.S. presidential campaign, with Vice President Dick Cheney questioning on Tuesday whether the explosives were still at the facility when U.S. troops arrived. The Kerry campaign called the disappearance the latest in a "tragic series of blunders" by the Bush administration.

Two weeks ago, Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology told the International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives had vanished from the former military installation as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security." The ministry's letter said the explosives were stolen sometime after coalition forces took control of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.

The disappearance, which the U.N. nuclear agency reported to the Security Council on Monday, 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 was no need for U.N. experts to return.

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.

The 3rd Infantry left Al-Qaqaa and moved on to become the first U.S. unit into Baghdad. The day after Baghdad fell, the 101st Airborne arrived at Al-Qaqaa and remained there for 24 hours, later joining the 3rd Infantry in the capital.

"We still had Iraqi troops in Baghdad we were trying to combat," said Wellman, the 101st Airborne spokesman. "Our mission was securing Baghdad at that point."

NBC correspondent Lai Ling Jew, who was with the 101st, told MSNBC, an NBC cable news channel, that "there wasn't a search" of Al-Qaqaa.

"The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad," she said. "As far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away."

She said there was no talk among the 101st of securing the area after they left. The roads were cut off "so it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there," she said.

Wellman, the 101st Airborne spokesman, said the facility was in the unit's sector at that time but that he does not know if any troops were left at the grounds of the facility once the combat troops from the 2nd Brigade left.

The commander of the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade, Col. Joseph Anderson, told Times on Tuesday that he didn't learn until this week that international inspectors had been at Al-Qaqaa to inspect explosives before the war.

"We happened to stumble on it," Anderson told the Times. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus."

Lt. Gen. William Boykin, the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said that on May 27, 2003, a U.S. military team specifically looking for weapons went to the site but did not find anything with IAEA stickers on it.

The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the IAEA that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be. Boykin said that the Pentagon was investigating whether the information was handed on to anyone else at the time.

The explosives had been housed in storage bunkers at the facility. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed fresh seals over the bunker doors in January 2003. The inspectors visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time on March 15, 2003 and reported that the seals were not broken -- therefore, the weapons were still there at the time. The team then pulled out of the country in advance of the invasion later that month.

Cheney raised the possibility the explosives disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.

"It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad," Cheney said Tuesday.

Both HMX and RDX are key components in plastic explosives such as C-4 and Semtex, which are so powerful that Libyan terrorists needed just a pound to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people.

[taken from: Local6.com]

90dayRichie · 10-27-04, 12:24 PM

All I know is 380 tons of explosives did not get carried off by the armload, looting my ass.

If your sunni, you ain't shiate.

johnny861 · 10-27-04, 12:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RC

All I know is 380 tons of explosives did not get carried off by the armload, looting my ass.

If your sunni, you ain't shiate.

It would require 38 trucks to haul it off... Or about 5,067 looters carrying 150 lbs worth of explosives each to carry it away... I'm not for sure how far a person carrying a 150 lb box of explosives can travel by foot... unless they all organized and loaded it up into the 38 truck convoy and disappeared like a phantom in the night....

10-27-04, 10:21 AM	#1 (permalink)
question Foolish Bastard Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Downtown Posts: 5,321	Let the finger pointing begin! Iraq denies explosives disappeared before war A top Iraqi science official says it is impossible that 350 tonnes of high explosives could have been smuggled out of a military site south of Baghdad before the regime fell last year. The UN nuclear watchdog this week said the explosives went missing from a weapons dump some time after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled in April 2003. But as the issue of the missing explosives took centre stage in the US presidential campaign, some US officials have suggested they had gone before the US-led forces moved on Baghdad. "It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the Science Ministry's site monitoring department, said. "The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall. "I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of." Mr Sharaa also warns that other nearby sites with similar materials could have also been plundered. [taken from: ABCNews Australia] __________________ True, without falsehood, certain and most true, that which is above is the same as that which is below, and that which is below is the same as that which is above, for the performance of miracles of the One Thing. And as all things are from the One, by the meditation of One, so all things have their birth from this One Thing by adaptation.

10-27-04, 10:29 AM	#2 (permalink)
question Foolish Bastard Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Downtown Posts: 5,321	Troops Did Not Search For Missing Explosives, Spokesman Says Nearly 400 Tons Of High Explosives Missing POSTED: 7:30 am EDT October 27, 2004 One of the first U.S. military units to reach the Al-Qaqaa military installation south of Baghdad after the invasion of Iraq did not have orders to search for the nearly 400 tons of explosives that are missing from the site, the unit spokesman said Tuesday. When troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa base a day or so after other coalition troops seized Baghdad 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 to The Associated Press. "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. The 101st Airborne was apparently at least the second military unit to arrive at Al-Qaqaa after the U.S. led invasion began. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The Washington Post that the 3rd Infantry Division reached the site around April 3, fought with Iraq forces and occupied the site. They left after two days, headed to Baghdad, he told the newspaper for Wednesday's editions. Associated Press Correspondent Chris Tomlinson, who was embedded with the 3rd Infantry but didn't go to Al-Qaqaa, described the search of Iraqi military facilities south of Baghdad as brief, cursory missions to seek out hostile troops, not to inventory or secure weapons stockpiles. One task force, he said, searched four Iraqi military bases in a single day, meeting no resistance and finding only abandoned buildings, some containing weapons and ammunition. The enormous size of the bases, the rapid pace of the advance on Baghdad and the limited number of troops involved, made it impossible for U.S. commanders to allocate any soldiers to guard any of the facilities after making a check, Tomlinson said. Pentagon officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday night. A spokesman for the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga., said the unit was checking on whether any of its troops was at Al-Qaqaa. The disappearance of the explosives was first reported in Monday's New York Times and has subsequently become a heated issue in the U.S. presidential campaign, with Vice President Dick Cheney questioning on Tuesday whether the explosives were still at the facility when U.S. troops arrived. The Kerry campaign called the disappearance the latest in a "tragic series of blunders" by the Bush administration. Two weeks ago, Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology told the International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives had vanished from the former military installation as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security." The ministry's letter said the explosives were stolen sometime after coalition forces took control of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The disappearance, which the U.N. nuclear agency reported to the Security Council on Monday, 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 was no need for U.N. experts to return. 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. The 3rd Infantry left Al-Qaqaa and moved on to become the first U.S. unit into Baghdad. The day after Baghdad fell, the 101st Airborne arrived at Al-Qaqaa and remained there for 24 hours, later joining the 3rd Infantry in the capital. "We still had Iraqi troops in Baghdad we were trying to combat," said Wellman, the 101st Airborne spokesman. "Our mission was securing Baghdad at that point." NBC correspondent Lai Ling Jew, who was with the 101st, told MSNBC, an NBC cable news channel, that "there wasn't a search" of Al-Qaqaa. "The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad," she said. "As far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away." She said there was no talk among the 101st of securing the area after they left. The roads were cut off "so it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there," she said. Wellman, the 101st Airborne spokesman, said the facility was in the unit's sector at that time but that he does not know if any troops were left at the grounds of the facility once the combat troops from the 2nd Brigade left. The commander of the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade, Col. Joseph Anderson, told Times on Tuesday that he didn't learn until this week that international inspectors had been at Al-Qaqaa to inspect explosives before the war. "We happened to stumble on it," Anderson told the Times. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus." Lt. Gen. William Boykin, the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said that on May 27, 2003, a U.S. military team specifically looking for weapons went to the site but did not find anything with IAEA stickers on it. The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the IAEA that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be. Boykin said that the Pentagon was investigating whether the information was handed on to anyone else at the time. The explosives had been housed in storage bunkers at the facility. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed fresh seals over the bunker doors in January 2003. The inspectors visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time on March 15, 2003 and reported that the seals were not broken -- therefore, the weapons were still there at the time. The team then pulled out of the country in advance of the invasion later that month. Cheney raised the possibility the explosives disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. "It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad," Cheney said Tuesday. Both HMX and RDX are key components in plastic explosives such as C-4 and Semtex, which are so powerful that Libyan terrorists needed just a pound to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people. [taken from: Local6.com] __________________ True, without falsehood, certain and most true, that which is above is the same as that which is below, and that which is below is the same as that which is above, for the performance of miracles of the One Thing. And as all things are from the One, by the meditation of One, so all things have their birth from this One Thing by adaptation.

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10-27-04, 12:24 PM	#3 (permalink)
90dayRichie Titty Baby Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Dallas Posts: 1,174	All I know is 380 tons of explosives did not get carried off by the armload, looting my ass. If your sunni, you ain't shiate.