The Russians Did It
October 28, 2004
Here’s what the Defense Department is now saying about the vanished super-explosives from the Al Qaqaa munitions dump, according to the Washington Times . Of course, it’s nonsense:
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.
The Russians?
tompaine.com
AND:
Thursday, October 28, 2004
Breaking News: Film Crew May have Smoking Gun
A US film crew has footage of the explosives at al-Qaqaa that later went missing. This development may be the downside of embedding for the US military. It makes things hard to deny later on if you leave a filmed trail. For instance, the Russians can't have absconded with the explosives before the war if a US camera crew still sees them there in April of 2003.
posted by Juan @ 10/28/2004 10:35:01 AM
AND:
Iraqi Officials Deny Early Disappearance of Explosives
Dr. Muhammad Sharaa who leads Iraq's science monitoring department, denies that the 380 tons of high explosives that has gone missing could have been moved in spring of 2003 before or during the war. AFP reports:
"It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the Science Ministry's site monitoring department, said.
"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall.
"I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."
AP's timeline on the explosives shows that an inspection team from the International Atomic Energy Commission visited Iraq in mid-March, 2003 just before the war, and found the seals they had placed on the explosives containers in January untouched.
US military officers are now expressing confidence that the explosives couldn't have been removed in April-May 2003 because there were US vehicles all over the roads it would need to have travelled. But as Nathan Brown notes below, the signs of looting were far more extreme as reported in spring of 2004 than they had been earlier. So the evidence suggests that in fact lots of looting did go on under the nose of the US military. (Again, as John Kerry has pointed out, this wasn't their fault; they didn't have enough troops on the ground to secure the weapons sites). In fact, all the looting of all the weapons depots took place with US military driving all over the country. But they had no instructions to stop random trucks and that was not defined as their mention by the Bush administration.
After all, you wouldn't have thought that seven nuclear facilities in Iraq could have been looted at that time, either, with all the US troops around and US vehicles on the roads. Sorry, nice try but no cigar.
I think the evidence is that the explosives were still there and under seal in mid-March 2003. I find it difficult to believe they were moved during the war. What soldier would have been stupid enough to drive a truck full of that stuff through Iraq as the US was bombing the country? One stray piece of shrapnel and boom, craterville. Plus the Iraqi scientists now confirm that it wasn't moved.
posted by Juan @ 10/28/2004 06:14:09 AM
AND:
Brown: 2004 Bremer Report on al-Qaqaa Looting
Professor Nathan Brown of George Washington University writes:
In the dispute between the Kerry campaign and the Bush administration over the disappearance of explosives at al-Qaqaa, the core of the Bush defense is that we don’t know when the explosives disappeared; it could have happened before American troops arrived. President Bush stated today: “Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site. This investigation is important and it’s ongoing, and a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief.”
I have to admit that I am unsure why this is a defense. If the investigation is so important, why is it still ongoing? One CPA document (discussed below) makes clear that the extent of looting has been known—not merely suspected but documented and evaluated—for some time. The reason we don’t know when the explosives disappeared is that we were not securing or monitoring the site. In other words, our lack of knowledge about the date of the disappearance is itself an indication that nobody was watching one of the most important military production sites in the country. Thus, to proclaim now that we don’t know what happened is not evidence of an open mind; it is evidence of an open barn door. Why did Bush wait until October 2004 to look into the matter? The 18 ½-month gap is no more to Bush’s credit than the 18 ½-minute gap was to Nixon’s. It is the absence of evidence that is the problem.
But the absence of evidence is not evidence of absent-mindedness. There were people who said a year and a half ago that this needed attention. In particular, the IAEA was trying to examine the site from the very end of the war. We barred them. In other words, the failure to monitor was not an oversight but a policy decision. It may have been partly based on the size of the American force, but it was also based on an ideological hostility to the United Nations.
Actually, we do know a little bit more than has been reported. But the little evidence we do have hardly supports the Bush case. What has been widely reported is that during and immediately after the war, some American military units and journalists briefly visited the site. What has not been reported is that on 15 April 2004—a year after the war—CPA head Paul Bremer issued a regulation transferring the employees of some military industries to various parts of the Iraqi government. I assume the point was to ensure that these critical people would get paid and not defect to the insurgents. That regulation can be viewed here.
Annex A to the regulation mentions al-Qaqaa (see p. 3 of the annex) and the extent of damage and looting there. 37% of the buildings were destroyed and fully 85% of its machines were destroyed or looted.
In other words, the place was very utterly trashed as of this past April, a year into the Iraqi occupation.
What does this have to do with the flap between Bush and Kerry? Well, it seems to me that if damage to equipment was so remarkably extensive—with the vast majority of the equipment ripped out or destroyed—any of the military units or journalists visiting in April 2003 should have noticed it even in a cursory examination. One of the accounts (by Fred Wellman, a former spokesman for the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade) does indeed mention that looting was underway on April 9. This was roughly when the Iraqi regime disintegrated and the looting began, so the observation makes sense. Looting was not mentioned in the accounts of the first American visit to the site, the previous week. I do not know how long it takes to loot such a site so thoroughly (according the original NY Times story, the looting was still going on quite recently), but it seems that almost all of it occurred during the period of the American occupation. When the explosives were taken cannot be ascertained from this. But we seem to have evidence that virtually everything at the site—even the stuff that was nailed down—was taken while it was under our nominal control.
- Nathan Brown
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