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=> Re: Kerry Stomps Bush

Re: Kerry Stomps Bush
Posted by St. Me (Guest) - Tuesday, October 26 2004, 19:46:48 (CEST)
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When Did Missing Explosives Disappear?
Tuesday, October 26, 2004

WASHINGTON — The mystery over tons of missing explosives in Iraq turned Tuesday from a question of what happened to them to when did they disappear?

The United Nations' nuclear department, the International Atomic Energy Agency (search), warned Monday that insurgents may have stolen the 380 tons of conventional explosives — the kind used in the car bombing attacks that have killed many soldiers and bystanders in Iraq.

But senior Defense officials told FOX that they’re not sure whether looters made off with the explosives or whether Saddam moved them before the war began. And NBC News said one of its reporters was with the 101st Airborne when the unit took control of the weapons installation in southern Iraq, a day after the fall of Saddam, and there were no “powerful explosives” there.

The question of when the explosives disappeared becomes especially important because the discovery has become an issue in the presidential campaign during its final week.

The campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry said that securing and accounting for the weapons was still the responsibility of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, especially since it isn’t clear when they disappeared.


Kerry accused Bush of "incredible incompetence" and his campaign said the administration "must answer for what may be the most grave and catastrophic mistake in a tragic series of blunders in Iraq."

But the White House has played down the significance of the missing weapons, saying the NBC report shows the United States wasn’t responsible for the loss of the explosives.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei (search) reported the disappearance to the U.N. Security Council on Monday, two weeks after he said Iraq told the nuclear agency that the explosives had vanished from the former Iraqi military installation as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security."

The disappearance raised questions about why the United States didn't do more to secure the Al-Qaqaa facility 30 miles south of Baghdad and failed to allow full international inspections to resume after the March 2003 invasion.

In the aftermath of Saddam’s ouster, U.S. troops were looking for weapons of mass destruction, conducting more than two dozen searches there. U.S. commanders say the military had already destroyed or secured and prepared to destroy more than 400,000 tons of explosives, artillery shells, mines and ammunition.

IAEA inspectors visited the site in late 2002 and early 2003 before the war, sealing and tagging the stockpiles of “high explosives.”

Al-Qaqaa is near Youssifiyah, an area rife with ambush attacks. An Associated Press Television News crew that drove past the compound Monday saw no visible security at the gates of the site, a jumble of low-slung, yellow-colored storage buildings that appeared deserted.

"The most immediate concern here is that these explosives could have fallen into the wrong hands," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.

The agency first placed a seal over Al-Qaqaa storage bunkers holding the explosives in 1991 as part of U.N. sanctions that ordered the dismantlement of Iraq's nuclear program after the Gulf War.

IAEA inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers, Fleming said. Inspectors visited the site again in March 2003, but didn't view the explosives because the seals were not broken, she said.

Nuclear agency experts pulled out of Iraq just before the U.S.-led invasion later that month, and have not yet been able to return for general inspections despite ElBaradei's repeated urging that they be allowed to finish their work. Although IAEA inspectors have made two trips to Iraq since the war at U.S. requests, Russia and other Security Council members have pressed for their full-time return — so far unsuccessfully.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said coalition forces were present in the vicinity of the site both during and after major combat operations, which ended May 1, 2003 — and searched the facility but found none of the explosives material in question. That raised the possibility that the explosives had disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site in the immediate invasion aftermath.

The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the nuclear agency at that point that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be.

Saddam's regime used Al-Qaqaa as a key part of its effort to build a nuclear bomb. Although the missing materials are conventional explosives known as HMX and RDX, the Vienna-based IAEA became involved because HMX is a "dual use" substance powerful enough to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb and set off a nuclear chain reaction.

Both 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 170 people.

Insurgents targeting coalition forces in Iraq have made widespread use of plastic explosives in a bloody spate of car bomb attacks. Officials were unable to link the missing explosives directly to the recent car bombings, but the revelations that they could have fallen into enemy hands caused a stir in the last week of the U.S. presidential campaign.

"These explosives can be used to blow up airplanes, level buildings, attack our troops and detonate nuclear weapons," senior Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart said in a statement. "The Bush administration knew where this stockpile was, but took no action to secure the site."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration's first concern was whether the disappearance constituted a nuclear proliferation threat. He said it did not.

"We have destroyed more than 243,000 munitions" in Iraq, he said. "We've secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed."

McClellan said the IAEA informed the U.S. mission in Vienna on Oct. 15 about the missing explosives at Al-Qaqaa. He said National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice was notified "days after that," and she then informed President Bush.

ElBaradei told the council the agency 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 Monday in The New York Times, ElBaradei 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 377 tons of explosives.

The letter from Abbas informed the IAEA that since April 9, 2003, looting at the Al-Qaqaa installation had resulted in the loss of 215 tons of HMX, 156 tons of RDX and six tons of PETN explosives.

Diplomats said there was nothing to suggest that ElBaradei, who had irritated the Bush administration before the war by insisting there was no evidence that Saddam had revived his nuclear program, had intended to keep the report a secret until after the Nov. 2 election.



parhad wrote:
>.."it is right to get rid of Bush...he MIGHT do something"...(expert)
>
>heheheheh
>
>Kerry slams Bush over missing Iraq explosives
>
>Mon Oct 25,10:28 AM ET
>
>DOVER, United States (AFP) - Democratic hopeful John Kerry (news - web sites) Monday branded President George W. Bush (news - web sites)'s administration arrogant, blind, incompetent and guilty of "great blunders" after the disappearance of 380 tonnes of high explosives in Iraq (news - web sites).
>
>
>Kerry pounced on reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives that could be used in conventional or nuclear bombs had disappeared, as proof Bush had failed as US commander in chief.
>
>"George W. Bush, who talks tough, talks tough, and brags about making America safer has once again failed to deliver," Kerry said.
>
>"After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in Iraq this president failed to guard those stockpiles.
>
>"Terrorists could use this material to kill our troops, our people, blow up airplanes and level buildings," Kerry said.
>
>"Now we know our country and our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics, this is one of the great blunders of Iraq one of the great blunders of this administration.
>
>"The incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and our country at greater risk than we ought to be."
>
>"The unbelievable blindness, stubbornness, arrogance of this administration to do the basics has now allowed this President to once again fail the test of being Commander in Chief.
>
>Nearly 400 tonnes of powerful explosives that could be used in conventional or nuclear missiles disappeared from an unguarded military installation in Iraq, the IAEA said Monday.
>
>The Iraqi ministry of science and technology informed the IAEA of the disappearance of nearly 380 tonnes of mainly HMX and RDX explosive materiel on October 10, agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told AFP, confirming a report in The New York Times.
>
>"It can be used in a nuclear explosion device, for the explosion," she said, adding: "That's why it was under IAEA verification and monitoring" before the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
>
>The New York Times said the materiel "could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings."



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