U.S. Team Took 200 Tons of Iraqi Explosives
Friday, October 29, 2004
•U.S. Military Releases Al-Qaqaa Image•Bush, Kerry Hit Each Other on Iraq Ammo•Search Showed No Explosives at Iraqi Base Before War's End•380 Tons of Explosives Missing in Iraq•Group Claims It Has al-Qaqaa Explosives•Fast Facts: Explosives Missing•Reporter's Notebook: Weapons Galore•Reporter's Notebook: Embedded at Al-Qaqaa
WASHINGTON — A U.S. soldier is coming forward Friday to say a team from the 3rd Infantry Division took about 200 tons of explosives from an Iraqi military facility soon after Saddam Hussein's regime fell last year.
The soldier will appear before reporters at noon, EDT. The briefing will be shown on the FOX News Channel.
The announcement is the latest twist in the mystery over what happened to 377 tons of explosives that the International Atomic Energy Agency said had disappeared.
The soldier's story comes as new videotape has surfaced that supports the contention that tons of the explosives were still at the base following Saddam's fall on April 9, 2003. U.S. officials had said they suspected the explosives were taken before U.S.-led forces took Baghdad.
Videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq when they first opened the bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa (search) munitions base nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels and bearing the markings of the International Atomic Energy Agency (search).
The video, taken by a reporter and cameraman employed by KSTP, an ABC affiliate in St. Paul, on April 18, 2003, was broadcast nationally Thursday on the ABC national network.
"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa," David A. Kay (search), the former American official who directed the hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, told The New York Times. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal."
The Pentagon also released a photograph of Al-Qaqaa taken just before the war, showing several bunkers, one with two tractor-trailers parked next to it. The picture was shot by a satellite on March 17, 2003.
Senior Defense officials said their photo shows that the Al-Qaqaa facility "was not hermetically sealed" after international weapons inspectors had paid their last visits to the facility earlier in the month.
Officials are analyzing the image and others for clues into when the nearly 380 tons of explosives were taken. The munitions included HMX (search) and RDX (search), key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in bomb attacks.
But what officials will say is that the image shows the Iraqis were moving something at the site before the first U.S.-launched bombs fell.
Meanwhile, an IAEA report obtained by FOX News said the inspectors noted that despite the fact that the Al-Qaqaa bunkers were locked, ventilation shafts remained open and provided easy access to the explosives.
The IAEA can definitively say only that the documented ammunition was at the facility in January; in March, an agency spokesman conceded, inspectors only looked at the locked bunker doors.
The question of what happened to the explosives has become a major issue in the closing days of the 2004 presidential campaign.
Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry says the missing explosives — powerful enough to demolish a building, bring down a jetliner or even trigger a nuclear weapon — are another example of the Bush administration's poor planning and incompetence in handling the war in Iraq.
President Bush says the explosives were possibly removed by Saddam's forces before the invasion.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld entered the debate Thursday, suggesting the 377 tons of explosives were taken away before U.S. forces arrived, saying any large effort to loot the material afterward would have been detected.
"We would have seen anything like that," he said in one of two radio interviews he gave at the Pentagon. "The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, I think is at least debatable."
The bunker with the trucks parked next to it in the Pentagon's satellite image is not one known to have contained any of the missing explosives, and Defense spokesman Larry Di Rita said the image only shows that there was some Iraqi activity at the base on March 17.
Di Rita acknowledged that the image says nothing about what happened to the explosives.
Rumsfeld, in one radio interview, also cast doubt on the suggestion by one of his subordinates that Russian soldiers assisted Iraqis in removing the munitions.
The Washington Times on Thursday quoted John A. Shaw (search), the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, who said he believed Russian special-forces personnel, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material from the Al-Qaqaa facility.
Shaw said he believed the munitions were moved to Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 invasion.
Senior Defense officials urged caution over the Washington Times article because they could not verify its allegations as true.
"I have no information on that at all, and cannot validate that even slightly," Rumsfeld said.
The article prompted an angry denial from Moscow.
At the core of the issue is whether the explosives were moved before or after U.S. forces reached that part of the country in early April. No one has been able to provide conclusive evidence either way, although Iraqi officials blamed the munitions' disappearance on poor U.S. security after Baghdad fell.
The Pentagon has said it is looking into the matter, and officials note that 400,000 tons of recovered Iraqi munitions have either been destroyed or are slated to be destroyed.
FOX News' Bret Baier, Ian McCaleb and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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