"Harry Hope" <rivrvu@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:3650o0dktrdtn00deqai8pitck53j3ne20@4ax.com...

From The Associated Press, 10/27/04:

Spokesman: Unit Didn't Search Al-Qaqaa

By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer

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.

Looters were already throughout the Al-Qaqaa installation south of
Baghdad when troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade
arrived at the site a day or so after other coalition troops seized
the capital on April 9, 2003, 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 said 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.

A U.N. official said Al-Qaqaa installation was believed to be the only
site in Iraq where high explosives such as HMX, RDX and PETN were
stored. When Iraq declared the explosives after the 1991 Gulf War,
IAEA experts concentrated them at Al-Qaqaa so they could be monitored
by U.N. nuclear inspectors, the official said, speaking on condition
of anonymity.

HMX and RDX are key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents
in Iraq have used in bomb attacks.

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.

The disappearance of the explosives -- first reported in Monday's New
York Times -- 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.

It has also 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 ***** 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."

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.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that the U.S. military
still does not know when the material disappeared from al-Qaqaa.

Briefing reporters aboard Air Force One as Bush flew from Washington
to Pennsylvania, McClellan said there was "a very real possibility"
that Saddam Hussein's own regime removed the cache before U.S. forces
arrived.

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 explosives were housed in storage bunkers at Al-Qaqaaa. 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.

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.

Russia, citing the disappearance of the nealry 400 tons of explosives,
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.

_____________________________________________________________

Waitin' breathlessly for the next Bush/Cheney excuse.

Harry

The Whitehouse accuses the NY Times of with holdng the report untill close
to the elecetion.