Not sounding good



ABC News Investigation

Video Suggests Explosives Disappeared After U.S. Took Control

QuoteOct. 28, 2004 — The strongest evidence to date indicates that conventional explosives missing from Iraq's Al-Qaqaa installation disappeared after the United States had taken control of Iraq.

Barrels inside the Al-Qaqaa facility appear on videotape shot by ABC television affiliate KSTP of St. Paul, Minn., which had a crew embedded with the 101st Airborne Division when it passed through Al-Qaqaa on April 18, 2003 — nine days after Baghdad fell.

Experts who have studied the images say the barrels on the tape contain the high explosive HMX, and the U.N. markings on the barrels are clear.

"I talked to a former inspector who's a colleague of mine, and he confirmed that, indeed, these pictures look just like what he remembers seeing inside those bunkers," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

The barrels were found inside sealed bunkers, which American soldiers are seen on the videotape cutting through. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency sealed the bunkers where the explosives were kept just before the war began.

"The seal's critical," Albright said. "The fact that there's a photo of what looks like an IAEA seal means that what's behind those doors is HMX. They only sealed bunkers that had HMX in them."

After the bunkers were opened, the 101st was not ordered to secure the facility. A senior officer told ABC News the division would not have had nearly enough soldiers to do so.

It remains unclear how much HMX was at the facility, but what does seem clear is that the U.S. military opened the bunkers at Al-Qaqaa and left them unguarded. Since then, the material has disappeared.


http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=206847

Seems like ABC has more tricks to pull out than a magician.

Quoted: Here's a little satellite photo from March 17th 2003.  Notice the large trucks and transports outside the ammo dump? 199.165.217.2/ammo.jpg

Any more photos

First it was boxes. Now it's barrels.

First it was 380 tons. Now it's 3 tons.

The doors had the remnants of seals (as reported by the NBC guy who arrived with the first troops), and even if they were sealed, the ventilation ports were not sealed.

The US asked the UN to destroy the weaons back when they were found, and the UN (under Hans Blix) said no.





They are desperately clinging on to this story because it's ALL they have left.

ABC sucks

Quoted: ABC sucks

True.

Quoted: First it was boxes. Now it's barrels. First it was 380 tons. Now it's 3 tons. The doors had the remnants of seals (as reported by the NBC guy who arrived with the first troops), and even if they were sealed, the ventilation ports were not sealed. The US asked the UN to destroy the weaons back when they were found, and the UN (under Hans Blix) said no. They are desperately clinging on to this story because it's ALL they have left.

ABC had film showing 101st soldiers in the bunkers, after the fall of Baghdad, according to ABC.

There were stacks of wooden crates, and a large number of what appeared to be carboard barrels.

I think there are discrepancies in the amounts of explsives there. There were also 2 different types of expolsives.

Here's where I have the problem. This was 380 tons. Allegedly there were 400,000 tons of explosives in Iraq that have been siezed by Coalition forces. Waht makes this relatively minor amount of explosives SO important? Why are these explosives so dangerous? Why is it the "there were no WMD's" crowd, is suddenly saying these explosives are SO dangerous?

It's mostly political. It's an understandable sound bite.

However, this is a site that should have been secured as soon as possible after the end of hostilities. There should've been a plan.

Having said that, there are surely tons, and tons, of explosives that are still all over Iraq. Iraq had as large a small arms ammo store as the US does, prior to Op Iraqi Freedom. The place is littered with guns, rockets, grenades, and all manner or munitions. Destroying what has been captured is already a huge task.

The explosives are so powerful, its like the .50 caliber when it comes to shooting down airliners filled with old people and babies!

ABC sucks HELL YES. So does CBS for that matter.

WHO CARES!!

President Bush is not responsible for every little thing that happens anywhere in the world!  According to liberals he is personally responsible for the explosives, Abu Ghraib, Haliburton overcharges, no body armour, and the unrest. He is also responsible for a poor economy, unemployment, outsourcing, high gas prices, the lack of flu vaccine, and global warming. ANDHe hasn't apologized for any of it.

When Reno torched Waco, I don't remember the news media saying that the problem starts all the way at the top. Thank goodness that wasn't a Bush thing, he would have been impeached for that.

The liberals and the media are just trying to make as much noise as they can until election day hoping to raise as many eyebrows as possible. The all make me nauseas.

Quoted: Well I'm not sure one photo outweighs the video...  Right now I basically hope that there is enough confusion and the timing is so suspicious that it becomes a wash for the race.  I'm not quite sure what Guiliani was saying earlier when he said it was the troops fault.

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that Guiliani was taken out of context.

My money says he was trying to point out that you can't say what Kerry is saying and then say it's NOT be the troops fault. They are the ones in country. Whoever you want to TRY to blame it on, the troops will believe they let the US, the president, and everyone else, down.

I think he was trying to illustrate that attempting to draw a line between the troops and the Administration is pointless and that basically, if you blame the Administration, you blame the troops... and THAT is what Kerry is doing.

just a guess... I haven't seen any video or transcripts.

-LS

This has got to be the biggest load of BS they have tried to unload yet.  We have satellite photos of Soviet trucks hauling the stuff out before we even got there.  This guy makes Clinton look like an amateur liar.  

Is it just me, or does it seem reasonable to find explosives at an AMMO DUMP?

Is it just me, or is it reasonable to assume that troops, especially OUR troops, would KNOW what they found at some ammo dump? I mean, is it reasonable to think that a dividion of professional soldiers could walk up to an ammo dump and not know what was there until the President picked up the phone and called them directly to tell them?

So, if Kerry is claiming the troops didn't know what they had, he's saying they're incompetent. BAD for him.

If Kerry is claiming that 380 TONS of material were stolen out from under the noses of our troops, he's saying they're incompetent. BAD for him.

If the weapons were requested by the US to be destroyed when the UN was there, and they didn't, then Kerry's ideal UN-run war is proven false (again). BAD for him.


If this was treated as it SHOULD be treated, then Kerry would be running away from this screaming his head off. But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

I hate the media, and I can't wait for Tuesday to come.

The stories are also making it seem like these explosives are being used in all these bomb attacks, which is absolutely untrue. The explosives mentioned are very powerful, but also quite difficult to use and detonate. You need a lot of very specific conditions to meet before they will go kaboom.

So this is not what Abdullah is packing when he takes his Last Ride.

The bottom line is that because of Sadaam's games with the UN and because of the UN's indulgence of him, we have NO IDEA what he had. Because Sadaam PLANNED a lot of the crap we are seeing in Iraq and a lot of other bad guys showed up to arm themselves while we were busy fighting Iraq's army, we have NO IDEA where lots of stuff went.

Remember how everyone complained about the looting going on in Iraq? How we "should have secured" all those precious national treasures? Remember how the media complained that the ground war was moving too fast, so fast that supply wasn't able to keep up?

There is a concept in war called PRIORITIZATION. A commander ALWAYS has a limited number of resources to deploy. Thus he needs to set up primary, secondary, and tertiary objectives and use his available forces and assets to best achieve the most important things first, the less important things second, and the least important things last of all.

This is always a difficult calculation and the objectives are always fluid. People who have never commanded battle have no concept of how difficult it can be.

Our troops were FIGHTING A BLOODY WAR. They did not have TIME to sit around babysitting every weapons storage facility they could find. They did not have time to fight the war AND guard every damned little thing in Iraq. To accomplish that would have taken MILLIONS of troops, meaning damn near every reservist and every unit would have had to be deployed, and we STILL wouldn't have been able to protect everything.

A buddy of mine was on a ship waiting to deploy to Iraq right before the war. But Turkey got in the way. Remember all those countries that wouldn't let our planes fly in their airspace? And people complain we didn't have enough troops? I have news for you: We planned for more troops, but we couldn't get them there in a reasonable ammount of time because of the bloody "international community" butt f*cking us at every turn.

It is SO EASY to monday morning QB a war. It is SO EASY to look at something a year later and criticize the planning and execution. It is SO EASY to say "Why didn't you do this?" or "Didn't you consider that?" after the shooting is mostly over.

But people with some mother ***king sense understand that no plan of action survives first contact with the enemy, and that it is a hell of a lot easier to sit back and nitpick every decision made under fire from the safety of a nice safe office than it is to make those same decisions with men dying, bullets whizzing past your head and the entire world watching.

So how about cutting the President AND the troops some ***king slack.

And make no mistake: By criticising the "loss" of these explosives, you are DIRECTLY speaking against the men who were over there being shot at. Yet another instance of John Kerry attacking the military and the people planning the war.

Belive it or not President Bush was not making every decision of the war. He made the decision to go to war, but it is the military's job to execute.

It's hard to tell the interior of one bunker from another.  BTW the markings I saw looked like US DOT placards indicating explosive class.

yuo know better than to bring REASON into this...if you do you will sound right wing...

Quoted: Is it just me, or does it seem reasonable to find explosives at an AMMO DUMP? Is it just me, or is it reasonable to assume that troops, especially OUR troops, would KNOW what they found at some ammo dump? I mean, is it reasonable to think that a dividion of professional soldiers could walk up to an ammo dump and not know what was there until the President picked up the phone and called them directly to tell them? So, if Kerry is claiming the troops didn't know what they had, he's saying they're incompetent. BAD for him. If Kerry is claiming that 380 TONS of material were stolen out from under the noses of our troops, he's saying they're incompetent. BAD for him. If the weapons were requested by the US to be destroyed when the UN was there, and they didn't, then Kerry's ideal UN-run war is proven false (again). BAD for him. If this was treated as it SHOULD be treated, then Kerry would be running away from this screaming his head off. But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. I hate the media, and I can't wait for Tuesday to come.

A = Ass


B = Backwards


C = Communists

Quoted: yuo know better than to bring REASON into this...if you do you will sound right wing...

Yeah, I know. It's a weakness of mine....

Quoted: The stories are also making it seem like these explosives are being used in all these bomb attacks, which is absolutely untrue. The explosives mentioned are very powerful, but also quite difficult to use and detonate. You need a lot of very specific conditions to meet before they will go kaboom.

Not really.  They aren't any more difficult to detonate than any other main charge explosive.  I've detonated PETN with just a blasting cap.  HMX and RDX are used in the fillers of a lot of bombs and projectiles.  RDX is a prime component in Composition C4.

The video is from KSTP TV which had an embedded crew with part of the 101st.  They opened one bunker and filmed it, and the troops commented that they would come back and get some of the explosives and supplies for demolition work.  No news about whether the doors had UN seals but I think they would have noticed them.  The troops left the building unlocked and unguarded but the whole area was inside the 101st perimeter and access was limited.  The camera crew claims that there was one pickup with Iraqis running around the base complex but I doubt a pickup could carry away more than 1,000 pounds of HX.

One other thing--the barrels were labelled as explosives but I don't think they actually tested them.  They could have propellent, pesticides, or yellowcake for all we know.

GunLvr

I have one important question:

If there is so much RDX and other high order explosives floating around Iraq, why are the terrorists using unexploded ordnance for bombs?
Lucy, you have esplaining to dooo.