Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldworldnet who wrote (652133)	10/27/2004 10:17:21 AM
From: Bill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

LOL!

To: goldworldnet who wrote (652133)	10/27/2004 10:19:46 AM
From: sandintoes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

How many times? Munitions Overkill The story behind the story of Saddam's lost explosives. Wednesday, October 27, 2004 12:01 a.m. Kudos to the Kerry-Edwards campaign for responding on a dime to the news that some 380 tons of high-grade explosives have gone missing from the Qaqaa munitions depot near Baghdad. The story was first reported on Monday by The New York Times and CBS News; by Tuesday, the Times headline was the featured visual in a new Kerry campaign ad damning President Bush for having "failed to secure" the cache. "This is one of the great blunders, one of the great blunders of this Administration," says the junior Senator from Massachusetts. But here's something our Democratic friends might keep in mind: The next time you try to set a land-speed record for demagoguing an issue, first check if the story has wheels. In this case, it doesn't. In the late 1980s, Saddam Hussein's regime purchased large stocks of the explosives HMX, RDX and PETN from suppliers in China, Yugoslavia and--deep breath now--France. Ostensibly, these explosives have their civilian applications, such as mining and demolition. But because they are both chemically stable (they detonate only when properly fused) and highly explosive, they also have extensive military uses. They are common in conventional military ordnance, such as mines and artillery shells. They are uniquely well-suited for terrorist attacks; less than a pound of these explosives brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. And they can be used as triggers to set off a nuclear chain reaction. Following the first Gulf War, the International Atomic Energy Agency put the Qaqaa cache under seal, where it remained until U.N. inspectors were kicked out in 1998. Upon the inspectors' return in late 2002, some 35 tons of HMX were found to be missing; the Iraqis claimed some of it had been removed for civilian use. That's the last we know of their whereabouts. According to a Times source, U.S. troops "went through the bunkers, but saw no items bearing the IAEA seal." NBC News, which was embedded with the 101st Airborne when it arrived at Al-Qaqaa on April 10, 2003--the day after the fall of Baghdad--also reports this week that back then it found no sign of the explosives either. Stands to reason: Of course Saddam would remove his precious HMX from its last known location before U.S. cruise missiles could find it. So much, then, for Mr. Kerry's suggestion that Bush Administration negligence is to blame for the missing stockpile. The larger question is: Just what sort of story do we have here? One possibility is that it's a relative non-story. Several hundred tons of missing high-grade explosives may seem like a big deal. But that has to be viewed in the context of the hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives the U.S. has already seized and the many thousand tons more that may remain hidden. The second possibility is that the story is every bit as important as Mr. Kerry alleges, just not in the way he means. Al-Qaqaa is known to have been one of the sites where Saddam pursued his nuclear projects in the 1980s; throughout the 1990s it remained under control of Hussein Kamal's Military Industrial Council, the umbrella ministry tasked with developing Iraq's WMD capabilities. That seems like reasonable evidence that Saddam remained bent on developing a nuclear bomb, retained at least some of the ingredients to make one and therefore posed a "grave and gathering threat" to the peace of the world. Both of these possibilities are logical, if contradictory, and both acquit the Administration. But there's one more thing we'd like to know: How did this story come to light, oh, one week before the presidential election? The IAEA informed the U.S. of the missing stockpile on October 15; according to our sources, it also notified the government that the story was "likely to leak." Leak, of course, is what it did, and to no one other than CBS's "60 Minutes." Funny how that rings a bell. Whatever the case, what's certain is that some 380 tons of frightfully powerful stuff has gone missing, and the objective before us should be to locate it, not locate blame. Sensationalized stories and politically motivated leaks don't exactly advance that cause. opinionjournal.com