Vast, Unsecure Iraqi Arms Depots Could Take Years to Dispose Of nytimes.com
[ Elsewhere in the NYT today, this mordantly amusing story. Rumsfeld wants control so bad, but he doesn't exactly seem to be using the control he has very effectively. It must all be somebody else's fault, though. The '"we know everything and everyone else is stupid" civilian team running the Pentagon' ( (c) Friedman) couldn't possibly be responsible. Excerpts: ]
Senior American military officials say that as much as 650,000 tons of ammunition remains at thousands of sites used by the former Iraqi security forces, and that much of it has not been secured and will take years to destroy.
The scope of the problem is much larger than the Pentagon acknowledged three weeks ago, when senior military officials insisted that all known munitions sites in Iraq had been secured.
The daunting task facing the military is illustrated in an infrared videotape of a sprawling, unguarded Iraqi air base taken by an Army helicopter crew in June that shows several huge hangars stripped bare of their roofing and siding, revealing bombs, missiles and other weaponry stacked dozens of feet high.
On the videotape, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times by an American official in Baghdad, a crewman said: "It looks like there's hundreds of warheads or bombs."
Two months later, F.B.I. investigators returned to the site on a tip that it might have been the source of a 500-pound Soviet-made bomb that they suspect was used in the attack on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19.
They, too, were surprised to find piles of bombs, all unguarded. As of yesterday, military officials said that they had erected barriers and signs at the site and were patrolling it periodically, but that there were still no permanent guards. . . .
After F.B.I. bomb technicians identified a piece of a 500-pound bomb from the United Nations site, investigators asked where such a weapon could be found. The air base, sprawling over almost 10 square miles, was an obvious candidate.
When a small F.B.I. team accompanied by two platoons of the 82nd Airborne Division visited the base on Aug. 27, the team found no guards or security gates, said an official familiar with the visit.
Looters had ransacked the buildings and fled when the Americans arrived. Investigators also found live shells, bombs, mines and TNT, the official said. |
