Make no mistake, they are they enemy.
The story, you may have heard, is the "missing" 350 tons of explosives that the UN's IAEA had tagged, but now are gone. The implication is Bush/Rumsfeld had too few troops, or planned poorly, or didn't know what was important to guard.
The only problem is, the explosives were gone before Iraq fell.
Let's also ignore that the Corps of Engineers has secured or destroyed 410,000 of explosives, so a "missing" 350 tons is less than 1/10th of 1%! Let's not remark on the other 99.915%, that might look like something's going right!
The NYT first reported, in its second paragraph:
United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored theBut that's an outright lie.
explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon
officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime
after the American-led invasion last year.
And they know it. How does that make you feel?
All that was really acknowledged "after the invasion" is that indeed the explosives are unaccounted for. The suggestion that the time they disappeared was after we took over is a total fabrication, in a deliberately misleading statement.
I'll dissect the rest of the NYT story below to show the internal contradictions, but here's the punchline: NBCNEWS had an embedded crew with the troops that first swept through the area, and they discovered the bunkers were already emptied:
tonight, NBCNEWS reported: The 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives were already missing back in April 10, 2003 -- when U.S. troops arrived at the installation south of Baghdad!Oh look, there's CBS again!
An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.
According to NBCNEWS, the HMX and RDX explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.
"The U.S. Army was at the site one day after the liberation and the weapons were already gone," a top Republican blasted from Washington late Monday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers.
Dem vp hopeful John Edwards blasted Bush for not securing the explosives: "It is reckless and irresponsible to fail to protect and safeguard one of the largest weapons sites in the country. And by either ignoring these mistakes or being clueless about them, George Bush has failed. He has failed as our commander in chief; he has failed as president."
A senior Bush official e-mailed DRUDGE late Monday: "Let me get this straight, are Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards now saying we did not go into Iraq soon enough? We should have invaded and liberated Iraq sooner?"
Why is the U.N. nuclear agency suddenly warning now that insurgents in Iraq may have obtained nearly 400 tons of missing explosives -- in early 2003?
NBCNEWS Jim Miklaszewski quoted one official: "Recent disagreements between the administration and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes this announcement appear highly political."
The source behind the NYT story first went to CBSNEWS' 60 MINUTES last Wednesday, but the beleaguered network wasn't able to get the piece on the air as fast as the newspaper could print. Executive producer Jeff Fager hoped to break the story during a high-impact election eve broadcast of 60 MINS on October 31.
Once you get deep into the NYT story, you find that paragraph 2 is directly contradicted:
The Qaqaa stockpile went unmonitored from late 1998, when United Nations inspectors left Iraq, to late 2002, when they came back. Upon their return, the inspectors discovered that about 35 tons of HMX were missing.So it was already disappearing well before the war.
Then during the war:
By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of roughly 10 bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been leveled by titanic blasts, apparently during the war. They presumed some of the HMX had exploded, but that is unclear.Who knows, maybe all that was left there was destroyed. They tell us nothing about the relative sizes of the bunkers or how much may have been in those 2!
Then the article tells us near the end:
A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces "went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal."So the area WAS checked, and the particular explosives in question WERE NOT THERE.
And now NBC confirms.
Then we find the whole "scandal" is based on this:
experts say they assume that just before the invasion the Iraqis followed their standard practice of moving crucial explosives out of buildings, so they would not be tempting targets. If so, the experts say, the Iraqi must have broken seals from the arms agency on bunker doors and moved most of the HMX to nearby fields, where it would have been lightly camouflaged - and ripe for looting.So the NYT admits it's likely much of the explosives WERE REMOVED PRIOR TO THE WAR AND HIDDEN. But it's just speculation where they were moved to or when. It says "assume"! The notion they were moved to "nearby fields" and "ripe for looting" is just made up!
And yet, Kerry and Edwards tried to make hay from an obviously shaky story, didn't they even read it?
"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration," Kerry said.And even when faced with this new revelation from NBC, the Kerry campaign won't back down, but clings to the big lie:
Top Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart fired back Monday night: "In a shameless attempt to cover up its failure to secure 380 tons of highly explosive material in Iraq, the White House is desperately flailing in an effort to escape blame. Instead of distorting John Kerry’s words, the Bush campaign is now falsely and deliberately twisting the reports of journalists. It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous."The New York Times holds you in contempt.