IRAQ EXPLOSIVES CACHE LOOTED

The New York Times is report­ing that ” nearly 380 tons of pow­er­ful con­ven­tional explo­sives — used to demol­ish build­ings, pro­duce mis­sile war­heads and det­o­nate nuclear weapons — are miss­ing from one of Iraq’s most sen­si­tive for­mer mil­i­tary instal­la­tions.“

The huge facil­ity, called Al Qaqaa, was sup­posed to be under American mil­i­tary con­trol but is now a no-man’s land, still picked over by loot­ers as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspec­tors had mon­i­tored the explo­sives for many years, but White House and Pentagon offi­cials acknowl­edge that the explo­sives van­ished after the American inva­sion last year…
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) pub­licly warned about the dan­ger of these explo­sives before the war, and after the inva­sion it specif­i­cally told United States offi­cials about the need to keep the explo­sives secured, European diplo­mats said in inter­views last week. Administration offi­cials say they can­not explain why the explo­sives were not safe­guarded, beyond the fact that the occu­pa­tion force was over­whelmed by the amount of muni­tions they found through­out the country.

Josh Marshall has more, includ­ing this heart­warm­ing tid­bit:

The Defense Department has been try­ing to keep this secret for some time. The DOD even went so far as to order the Iraqis not to inform the IAEA that the mate­ri­als had gone miss­ing. Informing the IAEA, of course, would lead to it becom­ing pub­lic knowl­edge in the United States.

The Times notes that “the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the mate­r­ial of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa.” Now, the insur­gents have some­thing like 700,000 times that amount at their dis­posal, to go along with their ocean of cash, and increas­ingly sophis­ti­cated tac­tics like these. Bad. Very, very bad. Andrew Sullivan hits in on the head:

In terrorist-​​ridden Iraq, the pos­si­bil­ity of seri­ous weaponry falling into the hands of the enemy and being deployed against American troops and con­ceiv­ably American cit­i­zens is unfor­giv­able. The whole point of the inva­sion was to pre­vent this kind of trans­fer from tak­ing place. Yet, thanks to this admin­is­tra­tion, it may have pre­cip­i­tated it. 

THERE’S MORE: Juan Cole points out that this is one of sev­eral “miss­ing deadly weapons” scan­dals to break in Iraq. In the mid­dle of the month, we heard about the nuclear equip­ment build­ings that sim­ply dis­ap­peared from the world’s satel­lite screens. And in the sum­mer of 2003, we learned that radioac­tive mate­ri­als — good for a dirty bomb — had van­ished from Iraq’s al-​​Tuwaitha facility.

October 24th, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.