"Quite frankly," huh! Well, quite frankly, America presently has one horrible commander-in-chief. Let's hope he gets replaced in the next election!!!
boston.com
>>>State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said that securing the site had been ''a priority" but that ''given the number of arms and the number of caches and the extent of militarization of Iraq, it was impossible to provide 100 percent security for 100 percent of the sites, quite frankly."<<<
Of course, Bush replaced his chiefs-of-staff prior to invading Iraq. In doing so, as commander-in-chief, Bush ignored then Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki's cautious advice that more ground troops would be needed to win both the war and the peace.
>>>However, Kay's team had a mandate only to search for weapons of mass destruction, not to secure conventional arms, so he could do little beyond referring the caches to the US-led coalition.
The military did not view guarding these sites as their responsibility," Kay said, recalling that he witnessed US troops guarding the gates of the Tuwaitha nuclear facility while Iraq civilians carried away radioactive pipes and metal drums through other exits.
''There just were not enough troops to guard the number of sites. It was just crazy."<<<
Again, commander-in-chief Bush ignored the sound advice of Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki.
>>>At the time, there was no major insurgency and US military officials felt the war had been won, Kay said, so the Department of Defense did not fear that the weapons that disappeared in widespread looting would be used against US soldiers.<<<
Was there any fear that outside terrorists would come into Iraq and take some of these weapons? Heck, we wrote about this on SI's DON'T START THE WAR THREAD. Why couldn't our commander-in-chief think of this!
>>>Later, as the insurgency heated, at least three major bombing sites in Iraq tested positive for HMX or RDX, Kay recalled.<<<
Was American blood spilled at these sites?
>>>Kay said that late into fall 2003, more than 100 large ammunition storage points had been left unsecured; everything from conventional bombs to artillery shells and rockets were unguarded.<<<
Again, commander-in-chief Bush ignored the sound advice of Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki.
>>>By the time Kay's team visited Qaqaa in the late summer of 2003, the buildings had been largely destroyed by the war and looting, and it was too dangerous to spend much time at the sites.<<<
Bush, as commander-in-chief, sure made sure that the Iraqi Oil Ministry Building got US protection. This, it turned out, was the only public ministry building that received US protection. Citizen records needed to conduct an election in a democracy all were destroyed due to lack of US protection. But that's another story!
>>>He [Kay] said there was no sign of the neatly packaged explosives in locked bunkers that Kay had seen as a weapons inspector in 1991, when he researched how Iraq bought the explosives, mostly from China and Eastern Europe.
Kay said he stressed the danger of leaving the weapons sites unguarded in his testimony to Congress. Since late fall of last year, the military has put out contracts seeking companies that will secure and destroy the weapons, Kay said, but the process has gone slowly.<<<
I guess it this wasn't going to get done unless and until Cheney's Haliburton was ready to perform the task.
>>>The location of the explosives at Qaqaa had been so well known to inspectors that they appeared routinely in reports written by ElBaradei to the Security Council.<<<
Unfortunately, Bush read only stovepiped intelligence that aimed to assist him in helping to publicly justify going to war. Nuts and bolts intelligence, as referred to in the above paragraph, obviously was material that Bush was incapable of digesting. Remember, he's not a thinking president!
>>>''Qaqaa was a well-known site even before the first Gulf War as a place where Iraqis were doing nuclear research," said Milhollin, who said he learned that in 1989 the Department of Defense had brought three Iraqis from the site to Oregon to train them in HMX detonations. ''It was certainly a leading candidate to be inspected after the first Gulf War and to be secured after the second."
Yesterday, Democratic Representatives Marty Meehan, of Massachusetts, and Ellen Tauscher, of California, prepared a letter to Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, requesting a hearing on the issue and demanding that the government account for the missing materiel.
The pair had written to President Bush in May asking for former weapons sites to be secured.<<<
Let's get a thinker in the White House instead of a puppet. Bush doesn't do anything, anything at all, unless Rove advises him to do so. And what does Rove know? Hey, he wasn't elected--why should he have all that power!!! |
