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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (29131)	9/29/2003 11:19:45 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

From your post Why must Americans in Iraq face death because of outmoded body armor? No we don't need more troops, and the ones there don't need body armor. Senior American military officials say that as much as 650,000 tons of ammunition remains at thousands of sites used by the former Iraqi security forces, and that much of it has not been secured and will take years to destroy. The scope of the problem is much larger than the Pentagon acknowledged three weeks ago, when senior military officials insisted that all known munitions sites in Iraq had been secured. The daunting task facing the military is illustrated in an infrared videotape of a sprawling, unguarded Iraqi air base taken by an Army helicopter crew in June that shows several huge hangars stripped bare of their roofing and siding, revealing bombs, missiles and other weaponry stacked dozens of feet high. On the videotape, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times by an American official in Baghdad, a crewman said: "It looks like there's hundreds of warheads or bombs." Two months later, F.B.I. investigators returned to the site on a tip that it might have been the source of a 500-pound Soviet-made bomb that they suspect was used in the attack on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on Aug. 19. They, too, were surprised to find piles of bombs, all unguarded. As of yesterday, military officials said that they had erected barriers and signs at the site and were patrolling it periodically, but that there were still no permanent guards. In Congressional testimony last week, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the senior American commander in the Persian Gulf region, summed up the broader problem confronting the military. "There is more ammunition in Iraq than any place I've ever been in my life," he told the Senate Appropriations Committee, "and it is all not securable." He put the amount at 650,000 tons. He added, "I wish I could tell you that we had it all under control, but we don't." Moreover, the general told the House Armed Services Committee, "There's probably places where we've put Iraqi guards that may be vulnerable to people that would come in and bribe the guards." General Abizaid's sobering assessment directly contradicted reassurances from a senior Pentagon official earlier in September that "all known Iraqi munitions sites are being secured by coalition forces." The general's remarks also fueled anxiety on Capitol Hill that dozens of unguarded or lightly guarded sites could be serving as the source of the explosives now being used not only in the recent major bombings, but in the daily attacks against American forces. and more from nytimes.com JMO lurqer