Spokesman: Unit Didn't Search Al-Qaqaa
11 minutes ago
Middle East - AP
By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer
A U.S. military unit that reached a munitions storage installation after the invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) had no orders to search or secure the site, where officials say nearly 400 tons of explosives have vanished.
When troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa installation south of Baghdad a day or so after other coalition troops seized the capital on April 9, 2003, there were already looters throughout the facility, 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 (news - web sites) spokesman Bryan Whitman told The Washington Post that 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, the Post reported Wednesday.
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.
The disappearance of the explosives was first reported in Monday's New York Times and has 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 Dick Cheney (news - web sites) 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."
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 (news - web sites)'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 disappearance, which the IAEA reported to the Security Council on Monday, 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.
Russia, citing the disappearance, 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.
The explosives at Al-Qaqaa had been housed in storage bunkers at the facility. 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.
The Al-Qaqaa munitions included HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in bomb attacks. But 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.
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 (news - web sites) 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. |
