Redstate

...that's one attempt that has been averted with the facts; what will be the next story that the left will throw out there to see if it will stick?

Kerry: I served my country. Hooow dare yooou attack my patriotism. I've always had one position on - those - those weapons. We should have attacked sooner, secured the weapons and then surrendered them to the U.N. who would then sell them back to Iraq. But the President failed to do that. I have a plan to get those weapons back....

Let's see... now Joe Lockhart and crew will be saying:

1. we should have let inspectors stay and guard the facility.
   
2. we should have gone to the French, told them to buy the explosives with the money they received from the Oil-for-Food program, and then donate the explosives to Bashar al-Assad, thereby saving Saddam the transportation costs.
   
3. we should have invaded Iraq sooner.

Let's see what option they choose.

NY Sun is apparently running a new revelations piece on Kerry tomorrow.  Supposed to be a one-two punch.

http://www2.swiftvets.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14551

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1256949/posts

I hope this is really good and not just more hype.  Kerry has Slick Willy out there telling people he didn't inhale OR have sex with that woman and the donks are eating it up.  We need something big to put jfk and company in the grave so we can enjoy the weekend.

This is Joe's response:

"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."

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=38845

The Pentagon is contradicting itself.  An official said they found explosives at the site intact, and failed to secure them in April.

From MSNBC, the same outlet that Drudge is relying on:

"At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said U.S.-led coalition troops had searched Al-Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact. The site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity."

So, US troops did discover intact explosives from this facility, but failed to secure them.  They are looonnnng gone now.

From the AP

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 Pentagon itself, has confirmed.

...when he plays the Vietnam Vet card.

"Mr. Kerry insinuates that Republicans attack his patriotism and do not respect his service in Vietnam.  That is not true.  We have always said that Senator Kerry's BRIEF tour in Vietnam was honorable."

Interesting that when the NBC story broke, the trolls and imposters fled like cock roaches from the kitchen light. [No offense to the handful of Dems and Inds who really are here for honest discussion--you know who you are so I don't need to name names.]

I hope it buries him.

I did find Arnold's jokes at Teddy's expense quite hilarious.  It was a bright moment today.

He even got in a crack about his pumpking being orange like Kerry's face.

The Drudge item is based on an NBC Nightly News TV broadcast on Monday evening.

The NBC broadcast news item has NOT been picked up on MSNBC.COM as yet (as of 10/25/04 @ 12:47 AM EDT) for some reason. The MSNBC item appears to be based solely on the NYT article.

There seems to be some legitimate contention that American forces were on the scene prior to the arrival of Miklaszewski's unit.  This story isn't sunk yet.

It is simply amazing to watch the Kerry campaign and MSM implode.  Clinton enters the fray and President Bush's poll numbers rise.  A five point spread by most accounts.  A seemingly well timed October "surprise" is refuted by the facts.  The New York Times decides to try the story again since it didn't fly the first time. Lockhart's response to all of this - President Bush still won't admit it was a mistake and appologize for liberating the Iraqi people.

But even if it was looted before the 101st got there, it happened 18 months ago.  

Here is a copy of the AP Report from April 4th, 2003 obtained from Lexis-Nexus Academic Network:

Closer to Baghdad, troops at Iraq's largest military industrial complex found nerve agent antidotes, documents describing chemical warfare and a white powder that appeared to be used for explosives.

U.N. weapons inspectors went repeatedly to the vast al Qa Qaa complex -- most recently on March 8 -- but found nothing during spot visits to some of the 1,100 buildings at the site 25 miles south of Baghdad.

Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of 2-by-5-inch boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

Initial reports suggest the powder is an explosive, but tests are still being done, a senior U.S. official said. If confirmed, it would be consistent with what the Iraqis say is the plant's purpose, producing explosives and propellants.

According to U.N. weapons inspectors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Iraqis filled warheads and artillery shells with explosives at the site and manufactured bomb casings there. The activities, for conventional weaponry, were allowed under U.N. resolutions. But the resolutions, passed after the 1991 Gulf War, ban Iraq from possessing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles to deliver them.

Peabody told an Associated Press reporter that troops at al Qa Qaa also discovered atropine, used to counter the effects of nerve agents, and 2-PAM chloride, which is used in combination with atropine in case of chemical attack.

The presence of atropine, and the discovery of gas masks and chemical suits earlier in the war, could indicate Iraq was preparing to use chemical weapons.

For years, the al Qa Qaa site has raised the suspicions of weapons inspectors who believed the facilities could be converted for the production of missiles and chemical and nuclear weapons. It was visited repeatedly during the 1990s and during the last cycle of inspections -- between Nov. 27 and March 17 -- when U.N. experts went to the complex more than 10 times.

According to a British dossier on Iraq published last September, parts of al Qa Qaa's chemical complex, destroyed in 1991, were repaired and are now operational, including a production plant for the chemical weapon phosgene.

Nuclear inspectors believe an area of the complex was involved in designing an atomic bomb before Iraq's nuclear program was destroyed by U.N. teams after the 1991 Gulf War. The facility also made lenses and other components that can be used to trigger nuclear explosions.

In March 1990, customs officers at Heathrow Airport in London seized a case of capacitors -- components for triggers in nuclear weapons -- bound for al Qa Qaa that were especially designed for detonating nuclear warheads.

Inspectors had installed cameras and sensors around the complex after the Gulf War but the Iraqis dismantled the equipment when inspectors left in 1998. The U.N. inspectors who returned in November had planned to install new monitoring equipment but ran out of time.

Much is riding on the disarmament process.

The United States believes Iraq has chemical and biological weapons and a reviving nuclear weapons program.

But the Bush administration was unable to convince much of the world in the run-up to the war.

Countries including France and Russia blocked the United States from winning U.N. support for the war partly because they saw no proof that Iraq possessed such weapons. The chief weapons inspectors reported several times that they had found nothing to support the administration's claims.

So far, invading U.S. forces have not found chemical or biological weapons. Officials and former weapons inspectors have said discoveries were likely to be made closer to Baghdad. Several large facilities, such as al Qa Qaa, are within 50 miles of the capital.

"We believe that this regime does possess weapons of mass destruction, we remain convinced of that," U.S. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said Friday. He said some weapons may have been pulled into the Baghdad area, "either delivery systems, or, potentially, storage systems."

But a discovery far from the Iraqi capital was made Friday when troops in the western desert came across what they believe is a training center for nuclear, chemical and biological warfare, Brooks said.

One bottle found at the site was labeled "tabun" -- a nerve agent that the U.S. government says may have been used during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. There was no way to immediately confirm whether the substance was indeed tabun and soldiers found only a small amount, indicating the site was meant for training, not storing or deploying chemical weapons, Brooks said.

"In that particular site, we believe that was the only sample," he said. "That's why we believe it was a training site. Our conclusion is that this was not a (weapons of mass destruction) site ... it proved to be far less than that."

Photos of the site showed shelves of brown bottles with yellow labels. Brooks said troops did not understand some of the labels and were collecting the bottles for examination.

Iraq declared to U.N. inspectors the overall production of 3,859 tons of chemical weapons agents. According to Iraq's declarations, mustard, tabun and sarin were produced in large quantities. Iraq also admitted production of 3.9 tons of the deadly nerve agent VX.

Subsequently, inspectors destroyed 116 tons of tabun and more than 1,000 tons of ingredients for brewing up the nerve gas.

Iraq has repeatedly claimed that it destroyed its unconventional weapons programs after 1991. The claim was voiced again on April 1 by Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan. Referring to the gas masks and other chemical gear found by advancing coalition troops, he suggested U.S. forces were planning to plant evidence to implicate Iraq.

"Let me say one more time that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction," he said. "The aggressors may themselves intend to bring those materials to plant them here and say those are weapons of mass destruction."

RDX and HMX are described as white crystalline solids by the Material Data Sheets we have here in my lab (Biochem graduate student).  This is entirely consistent with the description of "thousands of vials of white powder."  Additionally, it would seem to rule out more convential explosives such as TNT which have a yellow crystalline appearance.  Regardless, the important aspect of this story is that it PREDATES the April 10th visit by the embedded NBC reporter.  And it jives with the inside Pentagon source cited by the original MSNBC article.  

The question is now:  What happened in the intervening week and WHY was this site not more heavily guarded?  Where are the thousands of vials?  

I'm a journalist and I'm shocked, but maybe I shouldn't be shocked. The New York Times stopped caring about the truth long ago. Political correctness and so-called community journalism (also known as lying to advance a cause) took over the Times' newsroom a long time ago.

"White House Downplays Missing Iraq Explosives" :

...Given the size of the missing cache, it would have been difficult to relocate undetected before the invasion, when U.S. spy satellites were monitoring activity at sites suspected of concealing nuclear and biological weapons.

"You don't just move this stuff in the middle of the night," said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Baghdad...

U.N. inspectors might have visited the site as late as a few weeks before the April 4, 2003 visit  by U.S. troops mentioned above. At the very least, the IAEA inspected the site in January 2003. Some of the material might have gone missing before that visit, if I read the IAEA reports correctly. However, that still leaves 10s or 100s of tons of explosives that the IAEA says were there in January, and perhaps the U.N. inspections will show the same thing.

Also note that according to reports al Qaqaa has somewhere between 87 and 1100 buildings, so troops searching for WMD might not have done near as thorough an inspection as did the IAEA or the U.N.

An HONORABLE trip to Vietnam, however brief, is still preferable to questionable (and, ironically, brief) tour in the National Guard.

Republicans have to smear Kerry's service because even a brief tour in Vietnam looks more impressive than what their boy was doing during the war.

And, of course, if they said they claimed "We have always said that Senator Kerry's BRIEF tour in Vietnam was honorable," they would be lying...

... and we all know Republicans never lie, don't we?

If we're being at all honest, we all need to admit that at the moment, it is unclear if the explosives disappeared before or after April 9 2003.  Some sources say before, some say after, we can pick our sources that support our candidates, and ignore the others, but the fact is, we simply don't know.

What we do know, however (based on the timeline below), is that the material was  tagged by the IAEA in 1991 and was still there 12 years later in January 2003 I would claim March, but again, honest discussion, the materials themselves were not inspected.  It's possible, however unlikely, that the Iraqi's figured out some way to remove them without breaking the seals.  Only to come back after the inspection but before April 9th, and break or remove them. (To be honest, this last bit is pure speculation, but I'm assuming that if we found empty containers with the seals intact, someone would have mentioned it.)  Suffice to say, I personally believe they were still there in March.

http://www.boston.com/dailynews/299/world/Timeline_on_missing_explosives:.s
html

I think it's reasonable to say that it's beyond dispute that these explosives were locked away, and undisturbed for 12 years.  Then, within 4 months (again, I'd argue 1) they disapper.  

So since we're talking about several hundred tons of the most powerful conventional explosives known to man, and since they were effectively neutralized before the invasion or (imminent threat thereof), and since we now have no idea where they are, who has them, if or when they will be used against American troops or civilians or even at home (remember, Iraq's borders are not any more secure than our own), my question is:

How exactly has this war made us safer?

Honest discussion only, please.

Isn't the charge that the CPA failed to secure the things? If the troops pop in within a day of the fall of Baghdad and see nothing, the CPA could not have "failed to secure" anything.

RDX (I haven't ever seen HMX) is solid. The structure is crystalline in the same sense that quartz is crystalline.

BTW, RDX has been around since WW II. It was the primary explosive in torpedos. So it isn't like this is some new super explosive.

Here we have a report made by people who weren't there (the IAEA), and by their own admission haven't visited the site since Jan 03, liberation notwithstanding, contradicted by contemporaneous reports of people who were there (101st Airborne, 3d ID, and NBC News embeds).

And it is offset by the words of an anonymous "official" who "monitors" events in Iraq.

Seems like we can only trust the media when it is reporting another anti-Bush calumny.

And absolutely what proof do you have that Bush served "questionably" in the National Guard?  All those who have tried to support such a claim have been demonstrated to be liars.

The idea that someone could become a military pilot (they fly multi-million dollar equipment) through anything other than hard work and merit is insane.

Don't you recall that  Bush VOLUNTEERED to go over to Vietnam as a pilot, but was refused by his commanders?  An inconvenient fact.  But when are leftists ever inconvenienced by facts?  

This is as opposed to Kerry, who "volunteered" for the Naval reserves, not the Navy, in order to avoid a draft.  Then he lied and cheated, to get medal recommendations in order to get out after less than half of his agreed upon tour was done.  Why did he want to get out of the war?  he had this desperate need to betray his fellow swiftvets, and other troops.

Yeah, Kerry has a record only communists could love.  It is only Republican weakness that prevents an honest assessment of Kerry's "service."

Its always interesting that when a story embarrasses the US military and the President we know what we need to know to condemn them. But when the facts don't support the condemnation we need to wait until we resolve conflicting reports and get all the facts.

As I recall both RDX and TNT date from the late 1800s. Each has 'good' and 'bad' characteristics and for military use they are most often combined with a wax in a material called 'Composition B'.

was that old.

According to the official history, it was developed in 1899 as a medicinal substance and discovered to be an explosive in the 1920s.

RDX is the base ingredient in C-4 -- my contact with it.

This should be getting wider coverage. LA Times is reporting this morning:

"60 Minutes" teamed up with the New York Times after learning about the disappearance of a large cache of explosives in Iraq. Producer Jeff Fager says in a statement that "our plan was to run the story on [Oct.] 31, but it became clear that it wouldn't hold, so the decision was made for the Times to run it [on Monday]." A source tells Elizabeth Jensen that Fager was "distraught but understood" why he had to lose his scoop.

You'd have a point if Kerry's tour in Vietnam was honorable. But given his self-inflicted wounds, fabricated reports to justify medals he didn't earn, and an un-earned early out after only 4 months of duty, it really wasn't all that honorable.

First, I should note that you weren't one of the people I had in mind when I said, "You know who you are" but that is ok...

Second, the meat of your inferred point falls off the bone like a juicy Buffalo wing. If we go simply by the amount of explosives floating around the world, 380 tons pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of tons already destroyed. So net effect, according to your logic, is that there are less explosives in the world today because we have destroyed all but a tiny tiny fraction of it. Based just on that we would be safer not less safe.

Third, I didn't know that the knowledge needed to make explosives was so super secret that the terrorists' only way to get them is to steal them. Making more explosives or buying them from another source is obviously so impossible for them that they would be using slingshots today if they hadn't [according to conjecture] gotten these particular explosives.

Even if so, it pokes a rather large whole in the "insurgents took my explosives" theory. If they disappeared that early on, most certainly it was Saddam's people that took them, and most likely they took it wherever they took any remaining WMDs [if any] which was most likely Syria and/or Iran.

I was wondering why that sounded familiar, and why it had such wide application. Good catch.

...if Republicans are going to give Kerry a pass on his behavior on Vietnam anyway, they can at least get a backhanded slap in by mentioning how brief his tour of duty was.  

It might encourage people to look into his record that otherwise may not have.  

C-BS was going to go with this story on the 31st , on 60 Minutes. All off a sudden, the NYT comes out with this Sunday night/Monday morning....

...Does it seem to be a coincidence that the Washington Times article by Joel hit the same day ?

IMHO, the NYT KNOWS that this story is false...

Wag the Dog, all over again.

Also, how did Kerry have the time to tape the advertisement on Monday, if he was on the campaign trail all day ???

I think he taped it over the weekend, in advance of the NYT article...

I smell collusion here.