Redstate

Seems Redstate has already fallen behind the Drudge/NBC/CNN report.  It can be awfully hard to get back up on the horse after being thrown off.

Remember though, just because troops didn't find it, doesn't mean it wasn't their.

Here is a quote I know you'll remember:

"Absence of evidence != evidence of absence."

Sorry to disagree with you, but I am looking for the truth regardless of how it plays out. To say we need to prove the explosives were gone automatically taints your data. You need to approach it as "we need to find out if the explosives were there or not."

Your hypothesis should not be a factor in the quest.

Wasn't Rick Leventhal or Greg Kelly from Fox with the 3rd ID? If memory serves me correctly one of them was.  How would we contact one of them?  Just e-mail Fox? I'm new to all this investigative stuff.

....is your absence evidence of?  Anything beyond your habitual foolishness?

Go, Adam!  Write a dKos diary about this injustice!

Same end accomplished.  Approach it as you will.

So the absence of evidence that it was there means it was there and we can take that to the bank! But the evidence of absense that it wasn't there, well, lets not draw any hasty conclusions now...

Mmm-kay.

has been on this story, with his usual insightful analysis.

He mentioned the uncertainty about whether or not the materials were there. Thats a highly reasonable question and would certainly help mitigate the Administration's culpability for tehse arms being used against our troops (by his calculation, the missing explosiuves are about 4,000 Murrah Federal Building explosions's worth).

I find your line of inquiry, Josh, to be honorable. Far more so than the execrable arguments being advanced by your fellow travelers, asserting that the explosives do not matter, or that the amount is miniscule, or other unbelievable arguments that reveal with a cold light the emptiness of their concern for our troops in harm's way, other than as rhetorical points to score against John Kerry.

As Carter concludes, at present it is unknown whether the explosives were there or not. Its unlikely that we can know for certain.

Urge you to read Carter's post and to include him in your investigation.

Would providing this link be a posting violation? If so, delete this post and accept my apology in advance.

i dont know why you guys are so unwilling to use your ratings systems, but I've no such hesitation. It takes two to troll-rate though.

So are you suggesting we're committing the same mistake as CBS News and the NY Times, then? Assuming the truth is what achieves our preferred political outcome, and then go searching for evidence of it, ignoring any evidence that might suggest otherwise?

You know, I'm OK with that. There are plenty of people on the opposite side of the fence doing the same thing. (Josh Marshall for example)

I say whoever ends up with the best evidence wins.

was 2BCT/3ID. TF 1-15 moved into the general vicinity at 1300 3Apr03, the entire BCT had closed by 1930 3Apr03.

2BCT conducted combat operations in the immediate vicinity until 6Apr.

On 7Apr 2BCT made the "thunder run" into downtown Baghdad.

Commander of 2BCT was Colonel Dave Perkins.

I'm not trying to be snitty, I'm just pointing out that by trying to prove a particular result instead of simply trying to determine what the result really is is a dangerous game that is causing CBS and their ilk a considerable amount of headache.

....or in the presence of children, the answer is yes.

You either misread me, or deliberately distort what I said. I will respectfully and charitably assume it is the former.

It's only a problem because CBS is pretending to be unbiased. We're not. We have no illusions that we're unbiased.

And as I mentioned before, there are other blogs out there adopting a different hypothesis and seeking evidence to back that up. In the end, we will see whose evidence is more compelling.

The scientific method isn't unbiased either. It depends upon an assumption of an initial hypothesis and then setting out to prove it. But an honest scientist must concede when the evidence disproves the hypothesis and reformulate.

....the execrable arguments being advanced by your fellow travelers, asserting that the explosives do not matter, or that the amount is miniscule....

I happen to broadly agree with these arguments, in truth.  This is, in the end, a mountain made out of a (comparative) molehill.

First, the left is the side that first advanced the theory without basis that the insurgents stole the material and are using it to blow up our troops. That is easily as unconscionable as any response offered over here.

Any point about the amount being miniscule is to point out that the left is grasping at any straw, any mistake, no matter how small, how big, to blame the President. Under a magnifying glass an ant looks giant. In proper perspective, every war has mistakes and oversights. Not all go to the top. And sometimes, just sometimes, the real story is how little something is rather than how big it is. If the left weren't on such a hunt to distort and magnify even the smallest mistakes no one would have to offer proper perspective.

I agree that it is more important to know if they were there and when they disappeared.

Lastly, I don't think anyone is scoring points against Kerry with this story. Rather Kerry is trying to score points against Bush with this story. So are you as disgusted in the cold light of this revelation?

Whining like a baby.  Doesn't even get the quote right.

Who knows if it's valid or up to date.

john.peabody COL John Peabody john.peabody@us.army.mil 703 693-8766 Active Army OCLL, HQDA

Just a word that is not allowed in the posting guidelines. For work that is ok, for children maybe not (unless too young to read...)

what's so execrable about "execrable?"

I presume he couldn't have meant what he typed, in fairness.

Call the 3ID historian and ask him.

1SG Troy Alan Hester,

3rd ID (M)

Field Historian

Ft. Stewart, GA

troy.alan.hester@us.army.mil

1SG may be able to direct you to the right folks.

ARMY HISTORIAN

Here's an AP story from April 2003, focused more on WMD's than on HE (for obvious reasons).

Cliff May at The Corner is apparently reporting

he has heard from an unnamed military source that this whole thing is a fraud, that El Baradei is pissed off that the US wants El Baradei out as head of IAEA so he's done this now to embarras the Bush administration......

I mean I remember that El Baradei was head of the IAEA since at least 1991 because he declared Iraq nuclear free a few months after the Gulf War and a few months before David Kay uncovered the whole nuclear program, the one that was days away from making a nuke, the one that all intelligence agencies had underestimated......

Yes, as long as you're willing to accept whatever facts you find and the result they provide, then the exploration process will be successful. That's all I'm really trying to say.

I don't know if this violates copyright laws or not but here is the AP story written about the 3ID at Qa Qaa on April 4 2003. They did NOT find any seals, as none were mentioned. They do say that the UN were supposed to have detedtors around Qa Qaa because of the potential to have WMD there but the UN pulled them. This confirms the story for me...they found vials of white powder without IAEA seals. More than likely not the explosives mentioned by Times. It is very unlikely that between the 4th of April and one week later that 380 tons of explosives were spirited away with no one noticing, especially when you take into consideration the 40 truck theory. As far as I am concerned the story is debunked.

There are very interesting calculations reported at CaptainsQuartersBlog.com done by retired Army Reserve Captain Ian Dodgson who's former job was to think about the logistics of such an operation.  These are quotes from the beginning and end of the article that's posted (read the whole thing), but you'll get the drift from this:

"Unfortunately for the New York Times, no one gave a thought about the logistics of the notion that small bands of insurgents made off with 380 tons of explosives under the noses of the Coalition with no one noticing. CQ reader and retired Army Reserve Captain Ian Dodgson got paid to think about logistics, and he did some "cocktail-napkin" math that escaped the geniuses at the Paper of Record:

Total = 19-20 trucks, 90 men working continuously for two weeks to "loot" facility.

Bottom line this operation would take the resources of AN ENTIRE COMPANY (approx. 100 men) OVER TWO WEEKS, good Intel to know exactly where the "right" explosives were hidden and a means of breaching huge steel doors and concrete of an ASP."

Yeah. Sure, it's true.

I posted earlier that I thought more people should be discussing (rather than dismissing) the explosives story -- it's nice to see that trevino now agrees with me.

Interestingly enough, TPM is using this same fact to suggest that it's unlikely the explosives were moved after the last IAEA inspection and before the troops got there, since the US was watching pretty closely (worried about WMDs and all).

And MSNBC appears to be backing off a bit -- apparently no real search was done. Yes, I realize  that's not the same thing as saying the explosives were there. That's why this is a good idea -- whatever the truth is, let's find it out.

Well this seems a bit strange. Josh thinks we'd watch it carefully before we had any physical presence in Iraq, but not as carefully afterwards? I mean, look, I can only assume that he's talking about spy satellite information: how else can we monitor the site remotely? So even if we didn't physically guard the site, why would the spy satellite info be any less useful?

I think we are over analyzing this in trying to tie down what 3ID did.

We know they arrived in the al Qa Qaa area on 3 April. They staged their first drive-by shooting on 5 April and moved into downtown Baghdad to stay on the morning of April 7.

The NBC team states they were there on 10 April.

If we give the NBC story credence, and I will be among the first to admit that divining credibility when having to choose between NBC and the NYT leaves one queasy, then the "looting" had to occur sometime between 7 April and 10 April. So we are really looking at a max of 2-3 days.

This assumes away the fact that we were still engaging Iraqi armor in the area as late as 6 April. It assumes away the fact that this was the Division Rear Area and crawling with armed men. It assumes away the fact that 3ID was in the process of being relieved by the 101ABN and thus you had lead elements of that division were in the area.

And it assumes that the "looters" decided to haul off some 20+ semi-trailers of high explosive rather than office equipment, copper wiring, etc.

So, its pretty safe to say that if the NBC team is telling the truth then this story is out and out hokum.

The missing witness on this little escapade is the NYT's own Judith Miller. She was the press embed (and in-bed) with the Iraq Survey Group's SOF predecessor.

If a group of insurgents recovered this explosive to use in battle, then they should have used it by now.  I mean, 380 tons is plenty and they don't need to just sit on it for a rainy day.

Drudge is reporting

60 MINS PLANNED BUSH MISSING EXPLOSIVES STORY FOR ELECTION EVE

News of missing explosives in Iraq -- first reported in April 2003 -- was being resurrected for a 60 MINUTES election eve broadcast designed to knock the Bush administration into a crisis mode.

Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of 60 MINUTES, said in a statement that "our plan was to run the story on October 31, but it became clear that it wouldn't hold..."

Elizabeth Jensen at the LOS ANGELES TIMES details on Tuesday how CBS NEWS and 60 MINUTES lost the story [which repackaged previously reported information on a large cache of explosives missing in Iraq, first published and broadcast in 2003].

The story instead debuted in the NYT. The paper slugged the story about missing explosives from April 2003 as "exclusive."

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 explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived. [VIDEO CLIP]

It is not clear who exactly shopped an election eve repackaging of the missing explosives story.

The LA TIMES claims: The source on the story first went to 60 MINUTES but also expressed interest in working with the NY TIMES... "The tip was received last Wednesday."

CBSNEWS' plan to unleash the story just 24 hours before election day had one senior Bush official outraged.

"Darn, I wanted to see the forged documents to show how this was somehow covered up," the Bush source, who asked not to be named, mocked, recalling last months CBS airing of fraudulent Bush national guard letters.

Developing...

That in conjunction with Cliff May report mentioned above, the BDS at the NYTimes has gotten totally out-of-hand.

It's not over-analyzing when you consider the fact that the Democrats will continue to lie and weasel about the story until there is solid proof the explosives weren't there at the beginning, or weren't mishandled afterward.

yes, Josh Marshall meant aerial and satellite coverage, which was presumably (per his argument) more intense as we went to war then after we won. But it's a good point -- do you suppose there are any satellite data that would be useful in terms of nailing this down?

spy satellite information: how else can we monitor the site remotely?

Manned overflights, UAVs.

Al Qaqaa / Latifiyah was a major Iraqi site for suspected WMDs.  We need someone with the surveilance teams to weigh in.

for Marshall to make. It ignores technology and the politics of the situation.

We didn't have geosynchronous surveillance satellites over Iraq. We used standard overhead imagery. The timing of those satellites' orbits were well known to the Iraqis, and to just about anyone else we are using them against. During the Cold War, both we and the Soviets took our opponent's overhead imagery into account and conducted our operations accordingly.

Presumably a Lacrosse satellite could have provided real time synthetic aperture radar imagery but the mainstay of our recon fleet, the KH 12, doesn't produce that kind of imagery.

I'm not privy to the intel priority in the run up to the war, but I'd be shocked if this facility received some extraordinary priority for surveillance based on what we knew about it.

Aircraft surveillance is an even dumber argument. How many aircraft did he think we had available to achieve 24/7 coverage of a country the size of Iraq. I would be willing to wager that if every aircraft in the Air Force had been converted to recon and then sent to SW Asia that we still could not have achieved complete coverage of all sensitive sites.

And then comes the tough part. Who watches and analyzes the imagery. And why do we think that 20 semi-trailers departing a munitions manufacturing compound would have raised any eyebrows. Wouldn't you expect to see semis moving back and forth in this situation?

but if the Democrat party is willing to burn down NBC over this then what 3ID was doing is irrelevant.

His analysis seems to assume that people were carrying 25lb. loads one at a time.

First, many people can carry 60lbs or more on their backs, especially on flat ground.

Second, using forklifts or other machinery could have made it much quicker than 2 weeks.

It is becoming obvious that CBS, NY Times and a host of others have no intention of doing ANY journalistic research on this.  They are going to continue to run the story, and even ADD to it right through the election.  The Kerry campaign is just about to start airing ADS based on it...even though they know it is false!  

And remember, we are in the age when a Kerry staffer can say something to the NY Times, which then PRINTS it, and then the Kerry campaign turns around and QUOTES THE NEW YORK TIMES!!!  

The Bush administration needs to get the commanders from the units who passed through the site ON THE AIR right away!  

Dems, you should be pissed about this too!!!  You don't have to like W in order to appreciate that a "Free Press" means one that is RELIABLE!

what you're talking about. I'm no expert on satellites -- what kind of orbital periods are we talking about here? Obviously how often a specific site would be checked depends on how many eyes in the sky are looking, where they are looking, and how often they look... all stuff that I suspect is very very classified, but it sounds like you might have some ideas. I don't know that you can say that many trucks over that frame of time would have been missed. Whether any significance would have been attached to them at the time I don't know. But it seems possible to me that data exist from surveillance either before, during, or after the war that could shed some light on this.  

Not trying to be annoying -- if this is a bogus story obviously I'd like to know now rather than later; even from a strictly partisan standpoint, it's going to hurt Kerry if he makes ads about something that later turns out to be inaccurate.

Dems, you should be pissed about this too!!!  You don't have to like W in order to appreciate that a "Free Press" means one that is RELIABLE!

The

Dems are not pissed because the "Free Press" is reliable for them ...

of why that many people would want to "loot" HMX.

I did't agree with his final calculation but the bottom line is that the explosives alone, less packing material, pallets, etc, comprised 200 cubic meters. Not inconsiderable.

NBC's latest stories on this topic are continuing to clarify the situation, and they're quite relevant to this discussion.

First of all, we know that the last time that the IAEA was able to verify the presence of both the HMX and RDX was in January. In March, just before the war, the were able to re-verify the presence of the MDX, but not the RDX: they were not given necessary access to do so.

In early April, the Army visited the site twice. There is some dispute as to just how thoroughly they might have searched. According to the Kerry spot, someone who WAS there on April 10th says that the NBC producer who is now talking doesn't have her facts straight, and they did a more thorough search than she maintains. But to be fair it seems reasonable to me that they weren't specifically there to look for HMX and RDX and might therefore have missed it.

Fast forward to May 27. At that point, the Iraq Survey Group arrived. They failed to locate the HMX and RDX. Remember, this is the group that was trying to look for things like this. And this was one of the sites high on their list.

So it would seem that somewhere in the 2 short months between the IAEA's last visit and May 27, the HMX was removed; and some time between the IAEA's January visit and May 27, the RDX was removed.

Given the short time frame, the presence of American troups in early April, and the volume of material that had to have been taken, I think it's highly credible that this was a Saddam-ordered operation.

See the Kerry Spot for details...

and their orbits are planned when they are launched. To move them from their initial orbit reduces the amount of time before they burn up.

In addition to Iraq, I am sure we were maintaining coverage of DPRK, PRC, Taiwan Straits, Libya, Syria, parts of Russia and states of the former USSR under the various SALT agreements, etc. So the resources are limited but the demand is not.

Then consider the size of Iraq and the fact that the square-mile (or sq-ft) of coverage has a direct impact on what you can see. A high resolution shot at a single site by its very nature reduces the field of view. So there is an art in deciding how much resolution you need to maximize the coverage of as many targets as you wish to cover.

However you can only do this with the satellite are overhead. So presumably a KH-whatever satellite would hit Iraq other nations on a single orbit.

So, if we believe the munitions were removed prior to 10 Apr we also have to believe the Iraqis were smart enough to evade satellite coverage or to camouflage the movement by using single trucks or very small convoys rather than a 50 truck monster convoy that would have gained attention.

the embedded reported, who then worked for NBC, now FOX, will be on FNC tonight with Brit Hume

is not the real story. The real story is that the Bush administration couldn't answer the question yesterday.

According to Whitehouse spokesmen, they were recently notified by the Iraqi interim government of the missing explosives. They should have been able to reassure Iraqi officials, the IAEA and the U.N. immediately by consulting the reports written during the first weeks of the invasion. There should have been a report stating that the site sealed by the IAEA had been cleaned out previous to the invasion, and that therefore there was no special need to secure the site.  

Instead people like Scott McClellan said that the administration didn't know, the problem was being investigated, and that anyway we destroyed more munitions than we lost explosives. In other words, they didn't know if they were responsible or not. If it turns out they weren't, it doesn't change the fact that there was no accountability in handling the search and disposition of this site. There may be dozens, maybe hundreds of other sites out there with similar histories. If there weren't enough troops to handle the job of securing these sites, whose fault was that?

Googling for information written up by embedded reporters doesn't meet the standards of thoroughness and record-keeping diligence that I require from a government that claims the right to wage pre-emptive war to prevent weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists.

Why would the 'bad guys' screw around with tons of RDX a loose, powdery explosive, that are difficult to ignite, when the d*mn country is littered with ready made bombs (155 mm artillery rounds, aircraft bombs, etc.)

This story is just so much cr*p but that isn't going to stop Kerry and company from claiming things they can't prove one way or another.

The news reports are the closest thing we have to the Army unit field reports at this point. The news reports indicate that there were no RDX, no seals, etc.

Kerry can't prove they were there and the Presidant can't prove they weren't. So lets just let the press claim that George Bush lost the d*mn things and then we can just hammer away with the lie.

I know that Kerry would not have let this happen. Like any decent President he would have gone to Iraq and dealt with them personally --- he could do that you know, he served in Vietnam in case you didn't know that... and he could have raced all around that ammo dump just like when he ran the Boston Marathon. And he's familiar with Iraq having been at the Safwan cease fire signing at the end of the Gulf War that he voted against. And he's a top notch hunter you know so he could have found the RDX without a problem....

John Kerry and the people in his campaign are not interested in the truth, in credibility, in honesty, in integrity. They are interested in power and getting even for 2000.

Inquiry Launched Over Missing Explosives in Iraq, known as getting your ducks in a row.

Not all responses have to be made within one news cycle.

Here you go. Some useful supplemental info.

And while I'm here, Hannity is just announcing that Dana Lewis, the NBC reporter who was embedded with the 101st, now works for Fox News. There goes his credibility according to the MSM :( But he has confirmed that they didn't exhaustively search the site. They did a cursory search for WMDs, but they were particularly anxious to get on to Baghdad. At the same time, he said that there was no evidence of looting: padlocks still on the doors, for example.

Every PDB, intelligence report, every army unit's action reports, and a host other documents accumulated over the last 18 months are all sitting righ there on the President's desk. All they have to do is find the one paper out of the ten million sheets sitting on the rubble of what used to be the Presidential desk...

No problem!

Just like Kerry couldn't answer the charge that he wasn't in Cambodia on Christmas the same day he was asked about it?

Story: http://www.savannahnow.com/stories/081502/LOCSTEWARTFOLLOW.shtml

(registration required)

Picture only:

http://img19.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img19&image=Peabody.gif

Seriously, why does Kerry get a pass when it takes him several days to figure out that his SEARED memory was flawed, and yet this dude pounds the Bush administration for taking some time to figure out what the deal is with one small aspect of a huge military operation?

Savanah Morning News Military reporter (who did the story linked above) Noelle Phillips can be reached at Phillips @ savannahnow.com (provided she still works there).

but I really like to hear cowalker venture a try... <G>

The scientific method isn't unbiased either. It depends upon an assumption of an initial hypothesis and then setting out to prove it.

That may be true for mathematics, but in all other sciences the correct approach is to try to disprove your hypothesis.

That is a good text book answer, but I submit that in reality it doesn't quite happen that way. People put forth theories, and test them, often with the goal of proving them right. Whether the test is of a conflicting hypothesis just to disprove a contending theory, it doesn't matter. Einstein spent most of his life trying to disprove quantum mechanics because it didn't agree with his personal views of how the universe should behave. The flip side of that statement is to say that he spent most of his life trying to establish a universal law that tied everything together.

I also have noticed that most evolutionists aren't trying to disprove the theory of evolution.

That is simply not the case. Yes that's valid approach, but if there is a means to positively test the hypothesis, that's an entirely reasonable approach as well. It happens all the time that way.

Now certainly it's often worthwhile to look for simple refutations to avoid having to do harder work proving the affirmative. But it's not required if the affirmative test is sufficient.

Because the news is a year and half old.  

The administration probably still thinks the press will fact check and work out misinformation.  (I'm not sure why)

I'm in 2nd BCT of the 101st. Can't vouch for what they found at al-Q, I think that was 1st Battalion that went through there. We were in one hell of a hurry at the time, mainly trying to cover 3rd ID's LOC's because any mech unit is short on dismount infantry.

Anyone have any luck calling Fort Stewart and trying to find out what their field history says?

This may be completely naive, but looking at what the April 4th AP story did not say is important here. Regardless if whether 380 tons of high explosive qualifies as WMD, certainly its capacity to act as a detonator for a nuke amongst other things would make it reportable material. Despite the site's huge size, 380 tons is particularly hard to miss as well so any contention that it wasn't "discovered" yet will not hold very well. Furthermore, even if the HE was discovered in a subsequent search, it would certainly be a newsworthy and should have been reported on.

From Just One Minute:

...it was the NY Times itself that reported this news about Saddam's pre-war planning on October 20, all of six days ago:

In a major misreading of Iraq's strategy, the C.I.A. failed to predict the role played by Saddam Hussein's paramilitary forces, which mounted the main attacks on American troops in southern Iraq and surprised them in bloody battles.

The agency was aware that Iraq was awash in arms but failed to identify the huge caches of weapons that were hidden in mosques and schools to supply enemy fighters.

Patient readers have to work their way to the seventh paragraph to
learn that. Maybe the Times editors never made it that far, or simply forgot.

But for the rest of us, this reporting opens our minds to the vaguest of possibilities - Saddam actually had a plan to fight an insurgency, and dispersed ammo throughout Iraq. Eye-opening stuff. Oh, not really - the NY Times wrote about the Fedayeen Saddam in March 2003, and we have a bit more here.

So, we might wonder, why would Saddam's plan *not* have included dispersing the ammo at the Al QaQaa facility? The facility was under his control from March 8 (the last UN inspection) until April 4, when US troops arrived.

This is the sort of intellectual challenge that Times reporters might engage with starting, hmm, November 3.

I would think that, absent a good answer, folks might be inclined to give a bit more weight to the theory that the munitions were gone when we got there.

And BTW, a bad answer would take the form of "our air power would interdict a huge 40 truck convoy". A good answer would credit Saddam's
team with a bit of sense. For example, three trucks a day from March 19 to April 4 would be more than adequate.

why does Kerry get a pass when it takes him several days to figure out that his SEARED memory was flawed

D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T

And BTW, a bad answer would take the form of "our air power would interdict a huge 40 truck convoy". A good answer would credit Saddam's team with a bit of sense. For example, three trucks a day from March 19 to April 4 would be more than adequate.

True enough, but remember that at that point the facility is in a division rear area and directly adjacent to supply routes, thousands of US troops moving around. Could be done, but it probably wouldn't be easy.

Misread your statement and missed the dates you used, my contact lenses are clouding up and I'm blinking every 2 seconds just to read RedState :-)

Right, the point is that there was ample time to remove the explosives before the Americans reached the area, without arousing too much suspicion.

And how did I miss these acronyms?

As for someone contacting the 3ID historian, we need a generous reader with some time to make that call for us.

Find a member of the 101st Airbourne and a member of the 3rd Infantry Division who was at Al Qaqaa on the dates in Question 04/10/2003 and 04/03/2003. i.e. Soldiers, who are now stateside due to transfers or, unfortunately, injury (preferably currently civilian).

Interview them on the issues in question. Did they conduct a search for any weapons while they were at Al Qaqaa? Were the weapons HMX and RDX at Al Qaqaa when they were there?

Get a military logistics expert to explain how difficult it would be for looters to carry off 380 tons of explosives without being caught once the Army had overrun the base. Make animations in Macromedia Flash to illustrate if possible.

Comment: HMX/RDX can be used to detonate nuclear weapons and by retaining them, Saddam Hussein was violating a number of UN resolutions. Furthermore, knowing how powerful these weapons are, post 9/11 and knowing Saddam Hussein's record, how could the UN have allowed him to keep them?

PUT EVERYONE ON VIDEO IN DIGITAL FORMAT i.e. mpeg and put it up on a site. Send to Drudge, FoxNews and get links from the entire right side of the blogosphere.

The UN estimated that over 1 million tons of explosives were in Iraq. 380 tons is not even a rounding error.

AP Reports: Lt. Gen. Boykin says a special forces team went to the Al-Qaqaa site on May 27, 2003 and didn't find anything with IAEA stickers on it.

http://stones-cry-out.blogspot.com/2004/10/ap-report-special-weapons-team.h
tml

Stones Cry Out

The story says May 27th.

Sorry about that.

Well. They were gone when the 101st arrived, sure.

What is this assertion based on?  As I understand it, when the 101st passed through the facility briefly and did not ascertain that the explosives had already been removed.

No offense, but the amount of ignorance in this country is appalling.  Do you seriously think that the administration would have knowledge of or ready access to one report out of thousands that were generated in the war at their fingertips ready to answer the first press question?

Do you have any comprehension of how complex an operation the OIF was?  Or how little the President would know about day to day operations?  The CinC sets goals and directions.  He does does not get involved in details.

The next thing you know, we'll be blaming President Bush for dirty toilets in the White House.  For God's sake, people, wake up!

This entire story, and the press coverage of it, merely shows how truly ignorant of the military the press is and how gullible the American people are to blaring headlines followed by meaningless text.

You don't need to read a single news article to know (Occam's razor) that if terrorists had any of the explosives, they would have already used them.  My God, it's been 19 months since the site was searched.  There is precisely 0 evidence that one ounce of the explosives have been used in Iraq and tons of evidence that other sources (artillery shells, etc.) have been used instead.

Furthermore, the original Times story provides it's own answer to where the explosives went.

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." It is unclear whether troops ever returned.

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.

Other HMX bunkers were untouched. Some were damaged but not devastated.

Get that?  Our troops went through the bunkers and found nothing.  Furthermore, two of the bunkers were "leveled by titanic blasts".

Gee, I wonder what that could have been?

Sheesh.  THINK.

Site was visisted on April 3, 2003...prior to the NBC visit.  No explosives of the kind in question.  And this is from CBS!!!

The truth about this needs to spread BEYOND the blogs!!!!!!!!!

That is an OLD CBS story. CBS so botched this one (again) that they didn't search their own news archives for stories related to this site.

So no, the truth hasn't quite made it there yet.

Yes.  The administration was informed of the problem before this story broke. Did they think there wouldn't be questions? They had time to check the records before they had to respond.

Certainly I don't think the President has personal knowledge of this, but he's supposed to have competent people who can locate information about important things, like a site flagged by the IAEA as a possible source of WMDs. No, reports are not at their fingertips, but they're supposed to be filed systematically and able to be located fairly quickly by people who understand the system. Important  information like this should also be summarized in more accessible reports written for higher level individuals. If this kind of information is not available at fairly short notice, then the needs of our troops and military strategists are not being met.

It is abundantly clear to me that the Bush  administration has no confidence that the report that will solve this mystery exists. If they believed it existed, they wouldn't have started making excuses for themselves before their investigation into the matter was complete.

They could have responded within one news cycle in a way that would have communicated that they were in control. All they had to do was have a press conference, tell what steps they were taking to locate the pertinent information, and reassure the American public that they would  explain what happened as soon as they had the details. And then follow through.

And while I may not have personal experience with the military or nation-building, at least I knew that invading Iraq would not be a cakewalk, and that it would not be able to finance its own reconstruction from oil revenues.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/politics/27bomb.html?oref=login&oref=
login&pagewanted=print&position=

Does it make sense that the lates NYTimes article interviewed Commander of the 2nd Brigade? Where was the 2nd Brigade in all this?

The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.

oh, i guess there's a previous comment, 2BCT did the "thunder run".

so, did nytimes screw up again?

the commander doesn't verify that the explosive were there and doesn't say anything about 3BCT.  so really, the article doesn't do anything.

i wonder how big a story this is for the times.

Your logic is predicated on two key fallacies. First, such a report exists and can easily be found. It takes a lot more time and effort to prove the absense of something. If the explosives were not there by the time we reached the facilities, the report would obviously not exist, and proving that it did not exist requires searching through virtually everything to rule out its existence. That's not going to happen in one news cycle. If on the other hand they were there and someone saw them and reported it, then you'd be quite right that finding the report might be easy. But to criticize, you have to assume guilt a-priori...and I know a fair minded person like yourself would never do that.

The second fallacy is that the White House must answer to every NYT piece. Let me ask you this. Should the White House just go ahead and reserve a time everyday from here to the end of the administration (whether months or 4 years from now) for a daily press conference to deal with the daily Bush-bashing article from the NYT? That's quite a bit of power the NYT and you expect to be given away!

Judging from the way events have unfolded both here and with CBS's other debacle, neither organization deserve the time of day from the administration. Why should they get embroiled when the story will fall apart all on its own?? Because you want them to? Puh-lease.

I see you still haven't answered why it took a few days for Kerry to determine whether or not he was in Cambodia over Christmas of '68. Not going to touch that? I wouldn't if I were you...

and I'll say it again. I think cowalker should be quite content for the Bush administration to take just as long to provide answers about Al Qaqaa as John Kerry took to explain how he could have been wrong about an event SEARED in his memory concerning Christmas in Cambodia.

I corrected the description of the "scientific method". Sure, pleople use other strategies from time to time, but I wouldn't call them the scientific method.

The "disprove" instead of "prove" thinking is IMHO a very useful limtus test for differentiating between faith and knowledge. I read a lot on sects and alternative medicine years ago and one of my observations was that these people do not submit their pet thesis to chance of disproval.

The thought experiment "what must happen before I reconsider my stance" is a very helpful one. From trusting a friend/company/restaurant to political affiliation to religious belief. There's nothing wrong with "I'll never change my stance no matter what" if you're aware that this stance is in the realm of faith and not knowledge.

E.g. the thesis "therapy X will heal all cases of illness Y" is trivially refutable once you find a single case where it just didn't work. In that cases you usually hear statements like "well, then it wasn't applied properly", or "the patient blocked the theraphy" or other weasely statements.

Not quite as bad are accusations which imply that there are no ways of proving innocence. (= disproving the accusation). For example, during the runup to the Iraq war, the world accused Saddam of possessing WMD. For all I knew back then, that was true (though likely overstated), but I wondered what Saddam could have done to disprove the accusations. My conclusions was that there was no way he could have done it. Not good.

So there were the UN inspection, trying to prove the accusations but failing every single time they tried to find the smoking gun.

Thus we had a theory where disproval was not possible and positive proof failed in all cases it was tried. One can argue about the risk of choosing the wrong conclusion (i.e. type 1 error vs. type 2 error), but in simple terms of logic the thesis was as close to be debunked as possible.

99% of dealing with this type of issue is deciding who to respond to and when.

I can't even think of one reason why the White House would respond to questions from the NYT. Personally, I think Bush should take a cue from Cheney and ban the NYT from Air Force 1.

I think a great number of Americans would "get the message" if Bush simply came out and said, "look, folks, it's the New York Times.  Do I really need to say any more?  Do you really think our troops would see tons of explosives, ignore them, not tell anyone, and then be surprised when they disappeared?  That's what the NYT wants you to believe.  But c'mon, it's the New York friggin' Times."

It's the sort of line his speaking style is perfect to deliver, with that little sarcastic smirk...

And it would play well in the midwestern battleground states they view NYC (and New England) pomposity the same way they do British interference.

You start off saying you are discussing prove vs. disprove approaches to theories. Then you quickly diverge into a discussion of open mindedness vs. non open mindedness.

Those are two different subjects. One can take a proof approach and still be open to reconsideration. One can take a disproof approach and not be open to reconsideration.

As it is, every single person has a small vested interest in proving their own theory right. Is that a bad thing necessarily? No. It is human nature. Being open to being wrong is another issue entirely though.

Regarding Saddam, surely you can see how he could have proven his innocense, at least to the point that most were no longer convinced he had the weapons. Granting unrestricted access to inspectors, not kicking them out periodically until pressured to let them return, not playing the shell game of moving everything before inspectors showed up... those things come to mind.

You also mix in faith as if the people that try to prove things affirmatively are led by blind faith. In fact it is quite the opposite. Faith has nothing to do with proof or disproof, because it is the belief in absense of proof or evidence. A person taking something on faith is more likely to say "Ok, disprove it" than he is to take it upon himself to prove it. The "blind faith" camp is more firmly entrenched in the "disproof" camp than the "proof" camp contrary to what you imply.

Faith has nothing to do with proof or disproof, because it is the belief in absense of proof or evidence.

Faith, if declared as faith, is ok for me. Nothing wrong with that and I don't expect facts to sway real faith.

My point is, that some people hold opinions which they regard as being based in solid thoughts and experiments while blocking all possibility of disproval. (for an example, read up on Scientology.) That I can't accept.

If you think that blessing a scsi-adaptor with the blood of freshly slaughtered chickens help with weird termination problems, be my guest. As long as you're aware that it's a faith not an established fact. (RFC2321 non withstanding)

The original point made by mcg was that the scientific method starts with a hypothesis which the scientist attempts to prove while being open to the facts showing disproof. You then said the scientific method consisted of disproof, not proof and that math consisted of proof not disproof.

Mcg's statements are more consistent with common definitions like this and this which specifically allow for affirmative testing of hypotheses. I see none that exclusively say that the scientific method is limited only to disproof testing.

That all said, I don't know how we got off on the faith topic.

Blamebush.typepad.com puts it best (satirically):

"Please keep in mind that these are not the fabled Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD's) that Saddam never had, but rather smaller, less pointy, Weapons of Tolerable Destruction (WTD's). They weren't important when Saddam had them and are only dangerous in the context of Bush losing them. For years, Saddam held these weapons safely under lock and key, stockpiling them for purely humanitarian purposes - foreworks displays, blowing up tree stumps, etc. For decades, he diligently kept the explosive material out of the hands of America's enemies."

P.S. I absolutely don't believe "Bush lost them", I just got a chuckle out of the satirization of the left and MSM's position.  Just to clarify.

Why would the 'bad guys' screw around with tons of RDX

It may be used for IEDs, or it might not be.

In any case, I'd imagine it's worth something, especially to, for instance, the Iranians or Syrians. Maybe they took it or it was sold to them to buy weapons.

is that the explosives were definitively confirmed gone (in May) before the insurgency began. They were likely gone before we even showed up. Either way, the bad guys we are fighting today had little to do with their disappearance.

had a guy call in today, guess he was 1st Battalion 502nd (part of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team) who'd been on-site and is since out of the Army.

He said the did find a few containers of the powdery white HMX/RDX, and it also all was in French and German marked crates.

If someone had a larger project in mind, phil@philvalentine.com

2nd BCT of the 3rd ID (Mechanized) did the "thunder run" into Baghdad after their 1st Brigade seized the airport. There were also Special Forces guys with Toyota pickups and whatnot rolling around in front of 3rd ID, and SEALs out in front of 1st Marine Division. THOSE were the guys with lists of classified sites to get to and get eyes-on. Note the comment from LTG Boykin, a longtime special operations commander and 1st SFOD-D (what the media calls Delta Force) veteran and current chief of intelligence for the Army.

2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, the guys with the Screaming Eagle patches, we were supposed to seize the airport (which would have been a bloodbath) but instead had to turn and keep the Fedayeen from blowing up all of 3ID's supply trucks as they went through places like Karbala. So the tanks rolled into the airport and we air-assaulted all over the place. Given as we were not supposed to be the first ones there, and were not, no one above COL Anderson (the finest bird colonel I ever worked for and one hell of a good man) would bother telling him to go looking for the stuff a week later.

Read Thunder Run for an account of 2BCT, 3rd ID in Baghdad, and In the Company of Soldiers by Atkinson for an account of what we in the 101 were up to.

As a follow up, did some checking. Was 2nd, not 1st Battalion, and that kid Dixon was apparently in Delta Company (Humvee-mounted antiarmor outfit) of 2/502.

He was on Hannity and Colmes a minute ago. Did OK, though Colmes tried to murder him on cross-examination.

Drudge is breaking a story that Russian special forces took it out through Syria with other explosives....I'm lost at a loss with that one. Any ideas?

GERTZ / THURSDAY / WASH TIMES: Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned. John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

I copied it because my last post was not clear..