EXPLOSIVE PROBLEMS

NBC now says that the 380 tons of miss­ing Iraqi explo­sives might have van­ished before the U.S. inva­sion. If true, it’s a small com­fort — the bot­tom line is, the insur­gents there now have the stuff, to go along with their giant bankroll, swelling man­power, and seemingly-​​impermeable com­mand struc­ture.
Besides, the NBC story — now being pushed by con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tors — doesn’t quite hold together, Josh Marshall believes.

On Monday, the Pentagon gave mixed sig­nals about what the first troops on the scene found. Or rather, an offi­cial whom the AP describes as closely involved in the Iraq sur­vey work says the explo­sives were there, while Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita says they weren’t.
Di Rita’s claim that the explo­sives were already gone was picked up this evening by NBC news which reported that one of its news crews embed­ded with the 101st Airborne vis­ited the facil­ity on April 10th and found no weapons…
[But] mil­i­tary and non-​​proliferation ana­lysts say that a detach­ment of sol­diers not specif­i­cally trained in weapons inspec­tions work and cer­tainly an NBC news crew sim­ply wouldn’t be in a posi­tion to make such a deter­mi­na­tion. We’re not talk­ing about a stor­age unit with a few boxes in it, but a mas­sive weapons com­plex made up of almost a hun­dred build­ings and bunkers.
Former weapons inspec­tor David Albright was asked about this on CNN Monday evening and he said, “I would want to check it out. I mean it’s a big site. These bunkers are big and it could get lost in that com­plex and it may be that they just didn’t go to the right places and didn’t see it.”

THERE’S MORE: “There wasn’t a search,” says the NBC news pro­ducer with the 101st when it stopped at the weapons dump. “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 head 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. But there was at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very dif­fi­cult, I believe, for the loot­ers to get there.”

October 26th, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.