377 Tons

al-Qaqaa Seems to Seal Doubts About Bush's War Judgment

Posted 8:09 p.m., Oct. 29, 2004

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There is no doubt--I'm getting too caught up in the national and international news. It's reaching a zenith now, with this bungled Arab adventure crossing starpaths with an angry presidential election, forming a kind of empyrean historical arch that renders commonplace personal concerns marginal. For me at least. And I've learned I'm not entirely alone. Just a few days before the election, anxiety is palpable.

Osama's reappearance on the stage today does not help.

My girlfriend says I'm obsessing. Strange then, perhaps, that I haven't written much lately. I can claim a busy schedule--true enough, but I've been busier and still squeezed out a column a week--my last one before today was Oct. 13. In the meantime, the Boston Red Sox have won the series, and thank God for it--a chance to revel in the everyday idolatry of sport, commonplace heroism that doesn't require more than a speck of blood on a sock to make its ruddy point. I actually admire that it is nothing like the sand-scraped heroism of wartime, which so often exacts its sanguine toll by the pint, by the gallon.

Fact is, even while I have been immersed in the news of the campaign and the war, the impact has been to leave me not wanting to write. It has exhausted me to the very thought of the task.

And the distress is building.

But here goes. ...

377 Tons, And What Do You Get?

It is interesting, the many faces that have been put this week on the missing 377 tons of HMX and RDX explosives that went missing somewhere either right before or--more likely--shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This is stuff so powerful that a pound of it blew a jetliner out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, in the 1980s, killing hundreds. It possesses such force that 1,000 pounds could crush a hollow ball of enriched uranium to critical mass, starting a chain reaction and detonating a Hiroshima-type atomic weapon.

Keeping up with this story has been a real tangle, which is one reason why I've waited this long to chip in my two cents.

So far we've heard:

• The Iraqi government, in an Oct. 11 letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN group charged with containing nuclear proliferation, said that 377 tons of the explosive material was missing. The Iraqi government said the material was "looted from a previously secure site in the early days of the US occupation in 2003," according to the Nelson Report newsletter that first broke the story.

The Nelson Report also adds a claim that the U.S. Department of Defense pressured the Interim Iraqi Government to remain quiet about the episode, and includes the following--anonymous--confirmation of the story: "Administration officials privately admit this material is likely a primary source of the lethal car bomb attacks which cause so many US and Iraqi casualties."

A subsequent report in the New York Times, compiled in concert with CBS, repeats the story, but deemphasizes claims about Pentagon pressure to keep the information suppressed.

The spin machine was quickly at full speed.

• NBC reports that one of its news crews, embedded with the 101st Airborne, stopped at the al-Qaqaa facility, and didn't see any of the munitions. The Drudge Report leaps on this story, claiming that it refutes the Times report--the mainstream media ignores the Nelson Report. The conservative media echo chamber begins its predictable rumble about "liberal media bias." That has the desired effect. By morning, CNN news anchor Bill Hemmer, citing the NBC report, brazenly tells a Kerry spokeswoman that "the facts have changed" in relation to al-Qaqaa.

• Shortly afterward, NBC disowns the story. The 101st Airborne, it turns out, was merely on a "pit stop" at al-Qaqaa on its way to Baghdad. While it is true that the group saw no RDX or HDX in the mammoth munitions facility, it is also true that they never looked for the stuff. If they had done so, according to Col. Joseph Anderson, the commander of the unit that went through the complex on April 10, 2003, he would have needed four times the troops present on the scene to secure the site.

• The White House and Pentagon, particularly through Don Rumsfeld's spokesman Larry DiRita, latch onto the NBC story as the basis for refuting the Times/CBS/Kerry axis of evil. They claim that the material was gone before the war began. CNN, as late as the morning of Oct. 28, holds to this line, declaring that the New York Times story had been refuted.

• The White House, apparently sensing that the NBC version of the story is a dying line of attack, chooses a different storyline. Now, the White House suggests, the material was taken away by the Russians before the war, to help Saddam. (A fascinating claim to issue against a country led by a man that President Bush has described as one of his closest allies, and as "my good friend.")

• In the meantime, the president, countering John Kerry's move to seize on this story for his political advantage, accuses Kerry of somehow demeaning our troops by criticizing his--the president's--actions. Then, perversely, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani manages to directly blame the troops for the mess, asking, "Did they search carefully enough?"

• That came around the same time as a parallel White House claim, holding that Saddam had somehow removed the material himself. To bolster this story, the Pentagon released a satellite photo showing a truck parked next to one of the bunkers. However, the well-respected GlobalSecurity.org Web site indicates that the bunker where the truck is parked in the photo is not among the nine bunkers the IAEA identified as holding the sealed munitions.

And the former top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay doubts it could have happened like that, anyway:

"I find it hard to believe that a convoy of 40 to 60 trucks left that facility prior to or during the war and we didn't spot it on satellite or UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle]. ... That was because it is the main road to Baghdad from the south. It was a road that was constantly under surveillance. I also don't find it hard to believe that looters could carry it off in the dead of night or during the day and not use the road network."

-- David Kay, "Wolf Blitzer Reports,"
CNN, Oct. 27, 2004

Embedded with the Truth?

Now the story is that the U.S. removed the weapons itself, and in that spirit DiRita today trotted out Maj. Austin Pearson, who said "his team removed 250 tons of TNT, plastic explosives, detonation cords and white phosphorous rounds on April 13, 2003," 10 days after U.S. forces first reached al-Qaqaa. However, neither Pearson nor DiRita could say whether the 250 tons of material removed included the missing 377 tons of RDX and HDX. More study is needed, DiRita says.

But all these alternate stories appear to have been contradicted by a KSTP-TV news crew in Minneapolis, which like the NBC news crew, was embedded with the 101st. And unlike the NBC crew at al-Qaqaa,these guys actually participated with a pair of soldiers in a search of several al-Qaqaa military bunkers.

• Over the past two nights, KSTP has broadcast video showing several bunkers filled with explosives and other munitions. The footage was shot on April 18, 2003--fully nine days after the fall of Baghdad, a point at which the U.S. was totally in charge. And contrary to the weapons that DiRita referred to that did not bear IAEA seals, the material on the KSTP videotape clearly shows those seals. And says the former top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, the seals would only have been attached to RDX and HDX, because of those materials' capacity as nuclear-weapons precursors.

(To answer one key question: How do these news guys know where they were in the confusion of sifting through Iraqi deserts? Tonight on the Twin Cities public affairs program "Almanac," KSTP photographer Joe Caffrey says that reporter Dean Staley, now a Seattle TV anchor, saved the coordinates of the their nearby camp on his GPS, and later verified those coordinates with the 101st Airborne, proving they were indeed at the al-Qaqaa facility. The 101st has subsequently acknowledged the news crew was present at the scene.)

This revelation, apparently, has led to the most astounding claim of all, which actually is confirmed by news organizations such as Knight-Ridder.

• Now, defense officials are saying that the 377 missing tons of high-capacity explosives are really no big deal. In fact, at least another 250,000 tons of munitions from Saddam's regime also have gone missing. The Associated Press reports some of it undoubtedly has fallen into the hands of insurgents.

So it's much ado about nothing--at least in the most broad, relativistic terms.

What Have We Learned?

What we know about this incident is fairly scant. As Kay noted on CNN, we know that the U.N. certified early in March that the explosives were in place and under seal at al-Qaqaa. We know that by early May, when the 75th Exploitation Task Force went in, they were gone. So there remains a gap of about three weeks lost in time. We don't know what really happened to the material.

On the other hand, the KSTP video suggesting that the explosives were in place at a tiime when they should have been secured by U.S. forces is awfully compelling, and today's Pentagon briefing trying to suggest that U.S. forces destroyed the 250 tons of munitions at the same site does absolutely nothing to offset that. This is particularly true, given that KSTP-TV tonight replayed its original story from April 22, 2003, showing that troops indeed were destroying some munitions, particularly bombs, rockets, grenades and land mines.

According to that story, filed from al-Qaqaa, Staley reports that troops on the ground were "rounding up the smaller stockpiles" and destroying them. "In Iraq these days," Staley says in the videotaped story, "it's a fulltime job."

I haven't talked to Staley, but it would be interesting to know if he would say the troops were doing anything with the larger stockpiles that clearly are visible in the videotape. The "hangar bunkers" that the news crew and the soldiers entered, which were penetrated with simple bolt cutters, were then left unlocked. And Staley has been quoted saying that there were even then Iraqis driving around in pickup trucks, people he and everyone else on the scene assumed were looters.

In the end, perhaps I'm being sold a left-wing bill of goods, but I feel very much that this story really does serve as a symbol for the arrogant idiocy that was shown by U.S. leaders who rushed into this war without preparing for its aftermath--apparently without even believing there would be an aftermath. Just chocolates, hugs and flowers.

And whatever you think of John Kerry, these words from a campaign rally in Florida today absolutely resonate with me:

"Every headline has brought fresh evidence that our commander-in-chief doesn't see what is happening. Or, he sees it and he won't level with the American people about why we went to war in Iraq, how the war is going. And he has no idea how to put this policy back on track. His mistakes and misjudgments have hurt our troops, have put our troops at greater risk, have overextended the Armed Forced of the United States, have driven away our allies, have diverted our focus away from Osama bin Laden and the real war on terror.

And that's just abroad. ..."

-- John Kerry, campaign speech,
Oct. 29, 2004

-- Kevin Featherly

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