Kerry/Edwards Campaign Preparing Campaign Ad on Missing Explosives
See, here’s what happened:
380 tons of explosives went missing in Iraq. They just could not be found. Now they think those weapons are being used on our troops in Iraq.
John Kerry and the Dems would have you believe that it’s Bush’ fault. Bush failed. He didn’t protect the explosives because he was too busy protecting the oil – and now our troops are in harms way because of decisions made by President Bush. That’s what their most recent ad is going to say when it’s released.
EXCEPT . . .
The embedded reporters from NBC report that the explosives went missing before American troops arrived in Iraq. They were missing before Operation Iraqi Freedom. ( Video Clip )
With the U.S. presidential election eight days away, news of the missing explosives quickly became campaign fodder.
Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry immediately seized on the information to accuse President Bush of incompetence in failing to secure the material, charging that “this is one of the great blunders of Iraq and one of the great blunders of this administration.”
But in the wake of the NBC report, the Bush campaign fired off a statement saying that Kerry’s criticism of the president over the missing material has “been proven false before the day is over.”
“John Kerry’s attacks today were baseless,” Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said. “He said American troops did not secure the explosives, when the explosives were already missing.”
Schmidt also said that Kerry “neglects to mention the 400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that are either destroyed or in the process of being destroyed” in Iraq.
Please tell me how were we to protect and guard explosives that weren’t even there to being with??
This doesn’t bother Kerry, the Dems OR the liberal media.
It doesn’t bother CBS – 60 Minutes is planning an election eve. broadcast about how Bush let down our troops by not protecting those explosives. (Yes, those explosives that didn’t even exist when we got there)
Not one of these Dems are criticizing the UN Inspectors – who they CLAIM were sucessful at doing their jobs – - for not finding these explosives, or protecting them from being transported wherever they were transported. No, it’s not the fault of Hans Blix or Scott Ritter – - no, no, it’s Bush’s fault!
It doesn’t bother John Kerry – who just yesterday in Wisconsin during his stump speech, went on and on about how Bush failed to find/protect/guard these explosives – putting our troops in harms way. John Kerry siezed on a story printed by the New York Times in order to make his case against Bush. Does Kerry mind when the truth comes out about the missing explosives? Does he care that those explosives weren’t even there for us to guard in the first place? Kerry doesn’t mind the lies and twisted truths that are being vomitted from his own mouth – - the message here?
The truth does not matter to the liberals! The only thing that matters is that Kerry wins and Bush loses!
Instead of retracting the comments and acknowledging the truth of the matter – - they make an ad out of their baseless accusations. I think more than a few apples have fallen off their tree.
Yeah. I find it entertaining to piss them off too.
Hey Shiloh, what would you say if I told you I’m really voting for Kerry?
re# 89 – nah – i think it was Reilly who scolded both of us and told to behave and that was that, pretty much. kind of.
snatch – you’re not voting for Kerry. have a good nite.
Peejz, where you been, Man? I’ve had them coming at me nonstop all day. Give Shiloh hell for me. (Hint) She is especially weak when talking about forgein policy.
RE #101
That still has not explained his untimely absence, especially when the election is a week away. There needs to be as many pundits as possible on all sides.
Good night all.:cool:
peejz is a woman. shiloh is a man who dresses in women’s undies.
Is everyone on this site a woman?
No, just the Bush supporters – W stands for Women, don’t ya know
it’s kinda interesting how we ascribe gender without any information except the comments made.
i took it for granted Reilly was a guy, until he told me he wasn’t. (joke)
K is a guy but i’m gonna marry him anyway.
LOL shiloh. You are just one big wit today.
Snatch- KINDA??? shiloh is weak at every arguement. It’s sole purpose is just to be heard. Doesn’t really matter what gets said. And constantly looking for a response on something!
I was out helping the economy today:!:
peejz – i apologize that i am ill-informed and unable to follow an arguement or issue to your satisfaction. you have to give me points for trying tho, don’t ya?
weakly yours,
“W stands for Women, don’t ya know”
gee, and I thought he outgrew that! LOL.
K – at the wedding – are you gonna have the bridesmaids buy the stupid chiffon things they can only wear once?
K-you are so naughty!! Are you getting married? If so congrats!!!!!
thanks peejz.
LOL – peejz- shiloh and i have somehow been joking we’d get into a carville/matlin marriage.
no, i am not getting married. but thanks 
o – re: 115 – i’m the groom.
K – explain that, K, darlin’.
beat you to the punch by one minute.
that’s why i love ya, K. a beautiful challenge.
Heh, good night all, see you here tomorrow.
g’nite K
Hi again,
It seems that your post about the missing explosives was in a bit of haste:
“The Bush campaign has not responded to the letter, but did point to a Monday report on NBC that said U.S. troops had visited the Al Qaqaa weapons depot the day after Baghdad fell to U.S. troops in April 2003.
The network reported that an embedded reporter did not see any explosives during her stop at Al-Qaqaa.
Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said the NBC report showed Kerry’s accusations on the campaign trail were “baseless.”
But NBC reporter Lai Ling Jew told the network’s cable arm, MSNBC, that the 24-hour visit by elements of the 101st Airborne Division was “more of a pit stop.”
U.S. troops did not conduct a detailed search of the compound nor did they try to prevent looting, she said.
“Certainly, some of the soldiers headed off on their own [and] looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away,” she said.”
This story is still developing, so as I said before, we’ll have to see what happens, but this NBC reporter certainly does not sound as sure about the explosives as was represented in your post “the truth goes missing”.
Have a good night.
Thanks Nancy and have a good night.
By the way, this is a blog, not the debate club.
Seems there is just a ‘bit’ more to it, Sandy – and yet no one really does know, do they? No one can say, for definite, that the weapons were or weren’t moved. Even the ever liberal NYTimes stated that the IAEA had seen, in satelite images, that there was a lot of movement from that compound prior to our troops going in – so who knows?
Point here is — no one really does, do they? That includes Kerry and his operatives. This story about NBC’s embedded reporters broke on Drudge last night at 1am – by 8am this morning, Kerry was already calling Bush a threat to our troops . . and yet, he did that without any knowledge of the fact. And certainly not with knowledge of Dana Lewis’s ‘developments.
It took a Congress 18 long months to decide Saddam was a threat in this ’18 month rush to war’ – - it took them that long to deliberate . . and yet it took John Kerry and his operatives a split second to say that Bush is a threat, based on shoddy reporting that results in no one really knowing what happened to the explosives.
It still proves that the Kerry camp does not care about the truth . . . they care about headlines. A quick read of a headline, and Kerry is off and running calling our President a threat to our troops.
Irresponsible is what it is.
g’nite
Experts Worry About Missing Iraqi Arms
Very Basic Time Line from article :
IAEA – January 2003 – Says they have HMX,RDX and PETN
UN – March 2003 – Leaves Iraq
March 19th 2003 – Operations Begin
US Forces – April 9th 2003 – Baghdad Falls
US Forces – April 10th 2003 – The Base is taken. Lots of explosives found but the HMX,RDX and PETN can not be found.
NBC takes two positions in the same article :
Position 1 :
An NBC News reporter embedded with a U.S. Army unit that seized the Al-Qaqaa base the following day — April 10, 2003 — said Tuesday that she saw no signs that the Americans searched for the powerful explosives.
Reporter Lai Ling Jew, who accompanied the Army’s 101st Airborne, Second Brigade, said her news team stayed at the base for about 24 hours en route to the capital.
“There wasn’t a search,” she told MSNBC, an NBC cable news channel. “The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. … As far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away.”
Position 2 :
On Monday night, NBC reported that its embedded crew said U.S. troops did discover significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives.
Seems to me across the board that obviously no one has a clue in regards to this story and not enough facts have been developed to properly take a position either way.
Although on a side note.. the way the article flip flops its almost like kerry wrote it himself.
I would agree that the story is developing. That’s what I have been saying. Sorry if this isn’t a debate club, peejz. If you want, instead of saying stuff I can write slogans.
“He can run but he can’t hide!”
“Bring it on!”
Is that better?
for not being a debate site, there seems to be alot of abuse going on in the form of debate.
125: I wonder if this is going to ultimately turn out to be as credible and reliable as a certain batch of documents acquired by CBS that turned out to be forged.
Speaking of which, the participation of CBS in all of this makes me more than a little suspicious, needless to say. You’d think they’d have learned their lesson where credibility and certification is concerned, wouldn’t you?
128: I’m sure you remember Truman’s advice for those who can’t stand the heat.
Kerry’s beatng this story into the ground prematurely. It could come back to bite him on the ass…….
Spokesman: Unit Didn’t Search Al – Qaqaa
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 27, 2004
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Filed at 11:16 a.m. ET
A U.S. military unit that reached a munitions storage installation after the invasion of Iraq had no orders to search or secure the site, where officials say nearly 400 tons of explosives have vanished.
When troops from the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa installation south of Baghdad a day or so after other coalition troops seized the capital 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 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 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. It left after two days for Baghdad, the Post reported Wednesday.
AP 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.
The enormous size of the bases, the rapid pace of the advance on Baghdad and a limited number of troops made it impossible for U.S. commanders to allocate any soldiers to guard any of the facilities after making a check, Tomlinson said.
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.
The Kerry campaign called the disappearance the latest in a “tragic series of blunders” by the Bush administration in Iraq.
Vice President Dick Cheney raised the possibility the explosives disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site, and he complained that Kerry does not mention the “400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that our troops have captured.”
Two weeks ago, Iraqi officials told the International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives vanished from the al-Qaqaa 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.
The disappearance, which the IAEA 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 invasion.
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.
Russian U.N. Ambassador Andrei Denisov insisted that raising the issue in the council was “practical,” not political, saying the explosives posed a danger.
The explosives at Al-Qaqaa 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.
The Al-Qaqaa munitions included HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in bomb attacks. 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.
NBC correspondent Lai Ling Jew, who was with the 101st, told MSNBC 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.”
Wellman, the 101st Airborne spokesman, said he does not know if any troops were left at the facility once combat troops from the 2nd Brigade left.
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.
The IAEA had pulled out of Iraq in 1998, and by the time it returned in 2002, it confirmed that 35 tons of HMX that had been placed under IAEA seal were missing.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei told the United Nations in February 2003 that Iraq had declared that “HMX previously under IAEA seal had been transferred for use in the production of industrial explosives, primarily to cement plants as a booster for explosives used in quarrying.”
“However, given the nature of the use of high explosives, it may well be that the IAEA will be unable to reach a final conclusion on the end use of this material,” ElBaradei warned at the time.
He did not specifically mention Al-Qaqaa in his February 2003 briefing to the United Nations, and the agency has not said whether it separately informed the United States
Alias, why do you drop these slanted news stories in here? To rebutt your ridiculous article from the associated press, an imbedded NBC reporter that was with the 101st Airborne Division says that the explosives were NOT there when they arrived. Why is it so inconcieveble for you liberals to consider the possibility that Saddam could have shipped them to Syria in between the two month lapse from when the IAEA sealed the MATERIALS to make explosives, not explosives themselves?
It could be a possibility, could it not?
There is NO evidence to suggest that the explosive materials were looted. Then again, on that note, if it’s unbelievable that Saddam shipped them out in two months, then why do people think the looters could easily steal 380,000 tons of HMX? And wouldn’t that make the case that maybe the WMDs could have been in Iraq before the war and Saddam, biding for time, shipped them out as well?
This is just speculation on my end but with you dropping collumns like that, it just shows that your mind is made up…
Bush did it. Blame Bush for every thing that goes wrong in the world. That shows how narrow minded you are. Did you even think about the possibility that this 18 month old story is just a last ditch effort to unseat Bush?
Think about it. You got the U.N., CBS, the NewYork Times and John Kerry all pushing this as hard as they can just now all of the sudden…..a week out of an election…….
Yeah. This story is going to blow up in Kerry’s face and all those that sat around clinging to desperation in defending that idiot will look worse then him.
Look before you leap.
I suggest you actually read the article you’ll find that you are grossly mistaken about no looting occuring.
the AP isn’t a good enough source for you now? You only seem to believe Fox News and won’t even admit they are right wing. Oh well you must be a very happy person because ignorance is bliss.
Actually the story isn’t 18months old Iraq’s puppet president sent a letter about it this month.
Alias, you are a real class act, just like your boy Kerry. You can insult the new leaders in Iraq but you seem to be very tolerant of Saddam.
Get the fuck out of here.
WASHINGTON — The mystery over tons of missing explosives in Iraq turned Tuesday from a question of what happened to them to when they disappeared.
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 Department officials told FOX News they’re not sure whether looters made off with the explosives or whether Saddam moved them before the war began. NBC News reported Monday night that one of its reporters was embedded with the 101st Airborne. She watched the troops conduct what can be described as a “cursory search” of the premises on April 10, and found a great deal of conventional ordnance, but no RDX or HMX.
The embedded reporter, Lai Ling Jew, told cable news partner MSNBC on Tuesday that she stopped with the Second Brigade at the Al-Qaqaa facility, 30 miles south of Baghdad, and stayed there for 24 hours.
“The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us,” she said. “And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was — at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there.”
You seem to be very tollerent of a president that sold out the lives of your troops for oil. You can hide behind the banner of being a patriot to help yourself sleep at night. But underneath your just another brain washed idiot shirking his civic duty to question the motives of his government. The checks and balances are there for a reason.
Experts Worry About Missing Iraqi Arms
Tons of Missing Explosives Have Experts Worrying What Else Is Circulating in Iraq
The Associated Press
Oct. 26, 2004 – Revelations that nearly 400 tons of conventional explosives have disappeared in Iraq have experts worrying that other weapons might also be in jeopardy of falling into insurgent or terrorist hands.
Even the State Department concedes it can’t provide “100 percent security for 100 percent of the sites.” And by all accounts, Iraq is studded with weapons depots many in places where U.S.-led forces are preoccupied by fierce fighting.
Troubling questions about which other weapons could be vulnerable to looting have arisen since the U.N. nuclear agency’s warning this week that 377 tons of non-nuclear explosives vanished from the former Al-Qaqaa military installation south of Baghdad.
International Atomic Energy Agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said Tuesday that the Iraqis have not told the IAEA about any other missing materials since their Oct. 10 letter stating that the weapons vanished from Al-Qaqaa as a result of “theft and looting … due to lack of security” sometime after coalition forces took control of the capital.
But she said the agency’s chief Iraq inspector, Jacques Baute, “would encourage more such reporting on what has happened to sites subject to IAEA verification.” IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei reported the explosives’ disappearance to the U.N. Security Council on Monday.
The missing explosives have become a hot issue in the final week of the presidential campaign, with the White House stressing that the U.S.-led coalition has destroyed hundreds of thousands of munitions and the Kerry campaign calling the disappearance the latest in a “tragic series of blunders.”
“There was an utter lack of curiosity to follow up on what was well-known to the U.N.,” said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector.
“There was a systematic failure of the military, which overran the country and left all these explosives behind without protecting its rear,” he said. “The military should have had the sense to either secure high explosives and armaments or blow them up as they went through.”
The Al-Qaqaa explosives included HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in repeated bomb attacks on the U.S.-led multinational force.
Among Iraq’s known weapons depots is one near Khaldiya about 50 miles west of the capital where a suicide car bomber attacked a U.S. convoy Monday, destroying at least two Humvees. Others have been identified around Tikrit and near Karbala places where U.S.-led forces have battled insurgents and been targeted by car bombs.
Last week, a patrol from the 1st Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade discovered a weapons cache at a large depot near Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. The cache included 450 anti-tank mines, 300 grenades, 35 rocket-propelled grenades, as well as mortar shells and primers.
The Pentagon said U.S.-led forces who searched the Al-Qaqaa facility after last year’s invasion found some explosive material but that none of it carried IAEA seals. The nuclear agency’s inspectors had sealed storage bunkers shortly before the war because HMX is a “dual use” explosive that also can be used as an ignitor on a nuclear bomb.
“Our greatest concern from both a proliferation standpoint and from a standpoint of danger to human beings was Al-Qaqaa,” the IAEA’s Fleming said.
Weapons experts are questioning why Al-Qaqaa once a key facility in Saddam Hussein’s effort to build a nuclear bomb wasn’t under 24-hour guard.
The facility was considered “the pre-eminent site for high explosive stockpiles,” a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The explosives missing from Al-Qaqaa could produce hundreds of thousands of bombs more than enough to “fuel an insurgency literally for years,” said Shannon Kyle, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said coalition forces were present in the vicinity of the site both during and after major combat operations, which ended on May 1, 2003. He said they searched the facility but found none of the explosives in question.
That raised the possibility the explosives disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.
However, some reports suggest otherwise.
Iraq’s Ministry of Science and Technology told the IAEA the explosives disappeared sometime after coalition forces took control of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.
An NBC News reporter embedded with a U.S. Army unit that seized the Al-Qaqaa base the following day April 10, 2003 said Tuesday that she saw no signs that the Americans searched for the powerful explosives.
Reporter Lai Ling Jew, who accompanied the Army’s 101st Airborne, Second Brigade, said her news team stayed at the base for about 24 hours en route to the capital.
“There wasn’t a search,” she told MSNBC, an NBC cable news channel. “The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. … As far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away.”
On Monday night, NBC reported that its embedded crew said U.S. troops did discover significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives.
The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the IAEA at that point that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be.
Associated Press writer Mattias Karen contributed to this story from Stockholm, Sweden.
Snatch,
I suggest that before you tell someone to get the “f–k out of here” without arguing with them, you consider how much of an idiot you are being. I am not going to post stories about the weapons at this point, I think Alias is doing a good job. I do have a point that not one pundit or journalist has seemed to consider.
Lisa’s post uses an NBC embed’s claim that explosives were not seen in April as evidence that they were not there, yet a release by NBC later seemed to contradict this. Why is noone asking the simplest question at the heart of the NBC claim – did this embed have enough knowledge of explosives to identify these two types on a “pit-stop” visit when her unit did not have a mandate to search? The reporter concedes that the whole dumo wasn’t searched. How does this contravene the claim of the Iraqi gov’t's letter?
Snatch,
Who’s tolerant of Saddam? I do not see anything in Alias’ writing that reveals that. Methinks you don’t feel like defending this anymore.
Just to touch base on this post, I say this about the missing materials to make explosives…..
If the cache was not there when the Coalition forces arrived, then how is Bush responsible for this? This story is still to undefined for any of us to make a definitive assessment…..including John Kerry.