This report is interesting. I suppose you can believe in the ideologues at the N.Y. Times, or you can believe in the G.I.s of the armed services. Of course, since army polls indicate G.I's are going to vote over 75% for Bush, it could be a "right wing conspiracy". ;)
I wonder how much support the armed services are going to give Kerry after calling them incompetent over and over. If he does win, we may need a draft, because, so many will get out instead of serving for John Kerry who obviously thinks they are complete fools.
101st Airborne Vet: 'No Way' Explosives Were at Al-Qaqaa
Thursday, Oct. 28, 2004 1:26 a.m. EDT
A former GI with the 101st Airborne Division who was among the first Americans on the scene at Saddam Hussein's Al-Qaqaa weapons depot said Wednesday there was no way the bunkers he inspected housed 380 tons of high explosives as reported by the New York Times.
"When we walked into the bunkers that apparently nobody [else] went into, there is no way there were 380 tons of explosives in those bunkers," 101st Airborne veteran Ken Dixon told Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" Wednesday night.
Story Continues Below
Instead, said Dixon, the weapons that were left behind at Al-Qaqaa were "regular RPGs, rockets and hand grenades."
Dixon did say, however, that he saw evidence that something had been removed before U.S. forces arrived on the scene.
"You had tire tracks in dried-up mud," he told Sean Hannity. "Large tire tracks from big trucks. And you had boot prints going in and out of these bunkers."
But as far as individual looters of the sort claimed by the New York Times, Dixon said he saw "no sign" of that at all.
The Iraq War vet was critical of Sen. John Kerry for using the Times report to bash President Bush, telling Hannity on his radio show, "It definitely undermines the work we're trying to do in Iraq."
Dixon's revelations on "Hannity & Colmes" capped a day that began on Nashville radio station WTN, where he detailed what he saw at Al-Qaqaa to host Steve Gill.
When the 101st arrived on April 10, 2003, the Al-Qaqaa bunkers were "wide open," he told Gill, as if somebody had already been there and broken the seals placed on the high explosives by the U.N.
"There was me and two other guys who were the only ones who actually went in the bunkers," he recalled. "What drew us there - they had these big metal doors and they were already open. So we thought people had already gone in there - we wanted to take a look."
While there were a few boxes inside the bunkers, Dixon told the Nashville host, "There was nowhere near what they're saying that came up missing that was inside those bunkers."
The crates that were left behind, however, had some interesting markings.
"We pretty much knew that they contained explosives from the symbols that were on the crates themselves," Dixon said. "There was nothing we could actually read because the majority of it was written in French."
And he had an interesting observation for those in the press who dismiss pre-war Iraq as a major player in global terrorism, noting that prior to stopping off at Al-Qaqaa, his unit has cleaned out a terrorist training camp.
"There were terrorist training camps all over [Iraq]," he told Gill.
Editor's note:
newsmax.com |
