For the love of god…
At the time we invaded, the entire stockpile was still there. It would take a convoy of over 100 trucks to move the explosives, and we had satellites watching that facility non-stop. The UN had inspected that site, and marked all the explosives. The ordinance did not violate any of the restrictions placed on Iraq’s weapons, but the UN marked it anyways simply because of the large amount. As of the start of the war, the place had not had any trucks visit capable of moving even a small fraction of the explosives.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6323933/
WASHINGTON - The whereabouts of nearly 380 tons of high-powered explosives that vanished in Iraq remained a mystery Tuesday, even as the timing of their disappearance was becoming an issue in the final days of the U.S. presidential election.
In reporting the theft on Monday, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, said the explosives had been looted from the sprawling Al-Qaqaa military base, about 30 miles south of Baghdad because of a “lack of security” at the former Iraqi military facility.
The explosives included HMX and RDX, which can be used to demolish buildings, down jetliners, produce warheads for missiles and detonate nuclear weapons. They are key ingredients in plastic explosives, such as C-4 and Semtex — substances so powerful that Libyan terrorists needed just a pound to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 170 people.
No one disputes that the explosives are missing. The crucial question is exactly when they disappeared. Iraq’s Ministry of Science and Technology told the IAEA that the explosives were looted sometime in the seven weeks after U.S. forces showed up in Al-Qaqaa, when they presumably could have taken steps to secure the materials.
An NBC News crew that accompanied the U.S. soldiers who seized the base three weeks into the war said troops saw no sign of the missing HMX and RDX.
Reporter Lai Ling Jew, who was embedded with the Army’s 101st Airborne, 2nd Brigade, said Tuesday on MSNBC TV that the news team stayed at the base for about 24 hours.
“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.”
Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, the unit’s spokesman, appeared to confirm NBC’s report in an e-mail message Tuesday to The Associated Press, saying the brigade did not have orders to search for the explosives that Iraqi officials say were stolen.
The soldiers “secured the area they were in and looked in a limited amount of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present in their area,” Wellman wrote. “Bombs were found but not chemical weapons in that immediate area.
“Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE type munitions [high-explosive weapons], as they were everywhere in Iraq,” he wrote.