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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (149177)	10/26/2004 6:23:03 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

NBC reporter says ‘No move to secure the weapons’ (seems to contradict your assertion that NBC says "they were gone"). The Al Qa-Qaa facility is huge. Soliders on a "pit stop" most certainly did not search it. “There wasn’t a search,” she said. “The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers headed off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. “But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away.” msnbc.msn.com

To: Ish who wrote (149177)	10/26/2004 8:35:46 PM
From: E	Respond to of 281500

"The looting of the Qaqaa weapons site was first reported yesterday by The New York Times. US officials have acknowledged since the invasion that Iraq was riddled with sprawling weapons caches and that many sites were poorly guarded and subject to looting. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said that securing the site had been 'a priority' but that 'given the number of arms and the number of caches and the extent of militarization of Iraq, it was impossible to provide 100 percent security for 100 percent of the sites, quite frankly.'" boston.com Why would it have been "a priority" to "secure" the al Qaqaa site if the weapons were "gone"? Adam Ereli says it was "a priority." boston.com I think it wasn't exactly a great idea to invade a country when we were unprepared to secure the caches containing massive amounts of explosives and weapons that could, in the ensuing chaos, fall into the hands of ever-increasing numbers of terrorists and furious insurgents fighting against our troops. But hey, everybody has his or her own way of supporting our troops and keeping us safe from terrorists. Some are just harder to comprehend than others. There is a certain irony in the RWers having to excuse Bush administration incompetence by crying, "The weapons were already gone when we invaded!"