The Command Post - 2004 US Presidential Election - "Reporter saw insurgents loot Qaqaa arms depot"

October 30, 2004

Bush | "Reporter saw insurgents loot Qaqaa arms depot"

A French journalist who visited the Qaqaa munitions depot south of Baghdad in November last year said she witnessed Islamic insurgents looting vast supplies of explosives more than six months after the demise of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The account of Sara Daniel, which will be published Wednesday in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, lends further weight to allegations that American occupying forces in Iraq failed to protect hundreds of tons of munitions from extremists plotting attacks against their own troops…

[She didn’t see any IAEA seals…] But her report is one of terrorists having easy access to a vast weapons inventory.

“I was utterly stupefied to see that a place like that was pretty much unguarded and that insurgents could help themselves for months on end,” Daniel said on Friday. “We were there for a long time and no one disturbed the group while they were loading their truck.”

A man who identified himself as Abu Abdallah and led the group Daniel was with, told her that his men and numerous other insurgent groups had rushed to Qaqaa after U.S.-led troops captured Baghdad on April 9 last year. The groups stole truck-loads of material from what used to be the biggest explosive factory in the Middle East in the expectation that coalition forces would move quickly to seal it off, Daniel was told.

Abu Abdullah and his men showed her the arsenal of rocket launchers, grenades and explosives hidden near their small farm houses, she said.

But much to the insurgents’ surprise, Qaqaa was not sealed off by U.S. soldiers, leading many groups to stop hoarding and instead going for regular refills of explosive materials, according to Abu Abdullah… […surface-to-air missile possibly from al Qaqaa fired at a DHL cargo-plane…]

From 10/06/04’s Outside Baghdad, lawlessness haunts a small Iraqi town:

The insurgents probably are using weapons and ammunition looted from the nearby Qa-Qaa complex, a 3-mile by 3-mile weapons-storage facility about 25 miles southwest of Baghdad, said Maj. Brian Neil, operations officer for the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, which initially patrolled the area. The facility was bombed during last year’s invasion and then left unguarded, Neil said. “There’s definitely no shortage of weapons around here,” he said.

Posted by Lonewacko at October 30, 2004 11:02 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Interesting timing. The story scheduled for Wednesday so the reporter can make a case she wasn’t trying to influence our election. We all know, however, that these stories break before they’re printed. This one being its’ own example. I’m curious to see if it will be in context, discussing the mission of the US Military to secure populated regions with innocent people first. Also, will it mention the fact that many of those weapons were French? How about the thought that the French had multiple opportunities to join us in securing the region, but instead took the low road of easy money by trading with Saddam’s government? Oh sorry, I forgot. This is being reported by the French!

Posted by: snappy at October 30, 2004 11:55 PM

I don’t think it matters.

The voting public is by now innoculated against these stories.

I’m a Bush supporter. As each of the “scoops” came out I was at first worried that they were true. Then happy (after a while) that at best they were exagerations.

By the 4th or 5th story (you know - swiftie lies, rathergate, etc) I stopped worrying when they came out and figured that there was no merit to them even before the refutation was done.

As a non-Republican Bush supporter (I’m voting Obama for Senate) I can’t be alone in my thinking.

If anything these stories will be losing Kerry votes at this point.

Posted by: M. Simon at October 31, 2004 02:03 AM

F F7
See them tumbling down,
E E7
Pledging their love to the ground,
F C C#dim
Lonely but free I’ll be found
G7 C C+
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.

:jackson

Posted by: jackson zed at October 31, 2004 08:54 AM

What did Colin Powell call it; the “break it and you own it” rule? The video tape is extremely clear, and the IAEA people and inspectors have verified what the tape shows. It’s just blatant denial to keep blaming the French or saying it wasn’t important in the first place or whatever else you can dream up….the following interview is excerpted from Thursday night’s “News Night”, between Aaron Brown and David Kay, the Chief U.S. Inspector:

Aaron Brown interviewed former head US weapons inspector David Kay this evening on “News Night.” The missing explosives issues is settled.

AARON BROWN: I don’t know how better to do this than to show you some pictures, have you explain to me what they are or are not, OK? First, I’ll just call it the seal and tell me if this is an IAEA seal on that bunker at that munitions dump.

DAVID KAY: Aaron, as about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it, which obviously I would have preferred to have been there, that’s an IAEA seal. I’ve never seen anything else in Iraq in about 15 years of being in Iraq and around Iraq that was other than an IAEA seal of that shape.

BROWN: And was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?

KAY: Absolutely nothing. It was he HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.

BROWN: OK. Now, I want to take a look at the barrels here for a second and you can tell me what they tell you. They obviously to us just show us a bunch of barrels. You’ll see it somewhat differently.

KAY: Well, it’s interesting. There were three foreign suppliers to Iraq of this explosive in the 1980s. One of them used barrels like this and inside the barrel is a bag. HMX is in powdered form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons.And, particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it that’s either HMX or RDX. I don’t know of anything else in al Qa Qaa that was in that form.

BROWN: Let me ask you then, David, the question I asked Jamie. In regard to the dispute about whether that stuff was there when the Americans arrived, is it game, set, match? Is that part of the argument now over?

KAY: Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match. There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken and quite frankly to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean to rephrase the so-called Pottery Barn rule if you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.

BROWN: That raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn’t know what they had.

KAY: I think quite likely they didn’t know they had HMX, which speaks to the lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area but they certainly knew they had explosives. And to put this in context, I think it’s important this loss of 360 tons but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.

BROWN: Could you — I’m trying to stay out of the realm of politics.KAY: So am I. BROWN: I’m not sure you can necessarily. I know. It’s a little tricky here but is there any reason not to have anticipated the fact that there would be bunkers like this, explosives like this and a need to secure them?

KAY: Absolutely not. For example, al Qa Qaa was a site of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) super gun project. It was a team of mine that discovered the HMX originally in 1991. That was one of the most well documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented.Iraq had, and it’s a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the U.S. has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.

BROWN: David, as quickly as you can because this just came up in the last hour, as dangerous as this stuff is, this would not be described as a WMD, correct?

KAY: Oh, absolutely not.

BROWN: Thank you.

KAY: And, in fact, the loss of it is not a proliferation issue.

BROWN: OK. It’s just dangerous and it’s out there and by your thinking it should have been secured.

KAY: Well, look, it was used to bring the Pan Am flight down. It’s a very dangerous explosive, particularly in the hands of terrorists.
*******

If we weren’t going to guard the damn things, then why break the seals and make them even easier to access? The information was available; if that wasn’t the mission of some of those troops, then that reflects very, very poor leadership from above.

Posted by: Jatsby at October 31, 2004 09:49 PM