Kerry Pushes Missing Iraqi Weapons Story Despite Hard Proof
By Melissa Charbonneau
White House Correspondent
October 28, 2004
CBN.com – WASHINGTON - Those missing explosives in Iraq continue to dominate the presidential campaign. Sen. John Kerry is using the disappearance as proof of President Bush's blundering. The President is hitting back, as the weapons story begins to unravel.
Both candidates are courting voters in the Buckeye State, with President Bush looking to keep the 20 electoral votes that Ohio gave him in the 2000 election. He is also making stops in Michigan, a state he lost to Al Gore.
Kerry is campaigning in another Gore state, playing to his base in Wisconsin. He is accusing the President of a "growing scandal," saying that Bush failed to protect explosives at the al Qaqaa Arms Dump in Iraq.
Kerry said, "Instead of coming clean with the American people, the Bush administration has blamed the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the U.S. military, and even the media itself. And all the while, the White House took no responsibility for creating the situation where these weapons could [be] missing in the first place. "
Kerry's latest ad claims Bush’s blunder puts American soldiers at risk. But two of Kerry’s own foreign policy advisers are not backing him up, with one admitting that no one knows the truth about the missing arms, and another saying it is possible that “the explosives had been moved before U.S. troops arrived. "
The President says an investigation is ongoing and Kerry’s charges are part of a pattern of saying anything for his own political advantage.
Bush said, "Now the senator is making wild charges about missing explosives, when his top foreign policy advisors admits, ‘we do not know the facts.’ A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your Commander-in-Chief."
The Washington Times reports that Russian forces moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons to Syria before the U.S. military operation.
A Pentagon undersecretary said, "Russian troops almost certainly removed the high explosive material from the al-Qaqaa facility before the war started."
And an ABC News report says the amount of missing explosives may have been far less than originally reported. International Atomic Energy Agency documents that show 138 tons of the missing explosives may have been removed from the arms dump long before the U.S. launched its attack.
The Bush Administration points out that Kerry is not mentioning the 400,000 tons of munitions that the coalition seized or destroyed in Iraq. That is more than a thousand times the amount Kerry says disappeared, weapons Bush says would still be in hands of Saddam Hussein if the U.S. had not removed the Iraqi leader. |
