HMX and RDX explosives for everyone!

James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger with Khalid al-Ansary reveal in the New York Times today that the Bush administration allowed 380 tons of super-powerful explosives to disappear from al-Qaqaa, one of Iraq's sensitive military installations, after the war in spring of 2003. These are not ordinary bombs. This explosive material, HMX and RDX, can be used to detonate atomic bombs, collapse buildings, and form warheads for missiles. A pound of it brought down a passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland.

A lot of the roadside bombs that have killed hundreds of US troops and maimed thousands have been made of HMX and RDX, as suggested by how infrequently the guerrillas have blown themselves up in planting them. HMX and RDX are favored by terrorists because they are stable and will only explode via a blasting cap.

Incredibly, the International Atomic Energy Commission and European Union officials warned Bush before the war that these explosives needed to be safeguarded.

If Bush cannot even protect our troops from explosives at a sensitive facility in a country he had conquered, how is he going to protect the American public from terrorists who have not even yet been identified? Yet many say that GWB makes them feel "safer."

Can any supporter of the so-called Bush Doctrine explain this to me?

 

Oh we have definitely made the world safer...

We might as well start FedEx'ing this shit to the terrorists.

 

Consider what the administration called this from the very start. Straight out of Orwell, "the war that will not end in our lifetimes". What the largely misinformed and larged dumbed down populace fails to appreciate is that our MIC has made it a practice to sell arms far and wide , especially to insurgecies, unstable dictatorships and any hotspot that will provide a ready source for eventual military intervention. So this comes as no surprise at all.

Keeps the threat level up and the public all the more susceptible to control. For their own protection though, mind you.

 

Yes, this story is roughly 19 months old. Get over it. Also, they didn't allow it to disapear. It's not like they handed it over to terrorists. The crap was discovered missing a couple of months after we first went into Iraq. Likely during all the confusion these depots were raided. Considering that the Iraqi military left their posts and all their weapons just sitting there undefended 24 hours before we arived it's no surprise that this stuff came up missing. But no, you don't want to look at the facts. You just want to listen to good ole Kerry tell you how it was Bush's fault that everything happens.

So let me ask you, if Kerry gets elected, and is unable to raly support from other countries, will it be his fault? If he gets elected, and we get attacked again, will it be his fault? Or are you going to blame everything that happens in this war down to problems with trafic lights in your backwood town on Bush for the rest of your life?

 

This is a site that was under the watch of the IAEA and the UN before the invasion. There are now 380 tons of high grade explosives in the hands of Allah only knows, and you want me to "get over it"? Should we tell the families of those injured or killed by these explosives should "get over it"? This is not melodrama, this is the reality of post-war Iraq.

Read the piece in the NY Times for yourself and see what those involved have to say about this lapse in security. It is not Kerry or his "people" who saying this; it is the NY Times:

"The Qaqaa facility, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, was well known to American intelligence officials: Mr. Hussein made conventional warheads at the site, and the I.A.E.A. dismantled parts of his nuclear program there in the early 1990's after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. In the prelude to the 2003 invasion, Mr. Bush cited a number of other "dual use" items - including tubes that the administration contended could be converted to use for the nuclear program - as a justification for invading Iraq."

But this administration didn't think it was important to protect this site and didn't find out about the looting until this month? Here's what White House Spokesperson McClellan had to say:

MR. McCLELLAN: Maybe the best way to do this is kind of walk you through how we came to be informed about this. The Iraqi Interim Government informed -- told the IAEA -- the International Atomic Energy Agency on October 10th that there were approximately 350 tons of high explosives missing from Al Qaqaa in Iraq. And they informed the IAEA because these munitions were subject to IAEA monitoring, because they were considered dual-use materials. And the International Atomic Energy Agency informed the United States mission in Vienna on October 15th about these -- this cache of explosives that was missing because of some looting that went on in Iraq toward the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, or during and toward the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

So we are to believe that we shouldn't be worried about 760,000 pounds of high grade explosives that can be used in atomic bombs as the triggering explosives, or for improvised explosive devices, or for blowing up damn near anything, being used by those killing Americans and Iraqis every week?

And if we do indeed agree that having these explosives in the hands of insurgents (or the Iranians, or whoever), is a bad thing, then we can assume that such a large stockpile known by US and international agencies would probably be an important site to protect. This way, the insurgency (or the Iranians, or whoever else ends up with them) can't use them against us. This is an example of a poor plan for after major military action. There is no way you can justify leaving a stockpile unguarded when we knew of its existence and its importance.

Those who are trying to dismiss this as immaterial might be demonstrating the most glaring denial of reality to date by Bush supporters I have seen.

 

whys everyone keep referring to nuclear weapons.. yeah rdx can be used to detonate but thats not the problem. many, many high grade explosive could be used to detonate nukes. you sure as hell dont need 760000pounds of it for WMDs

 

Are you seriously blaming the Iraqis for this? If fear of terrorism was a driving force behind Gulf War II, then high priority sites like this should have been among the first things to be secured. Yet you are satisfied with "when we had a look a couple of months after we went in it was no longer there". This is why a lot of undecided voters are considering Kerry - a culture of no accountability in the administration, and a culture of no accountability within their hardcore supporters.

 

At the moment, its use in nuclear weapons might not be the most pressing issue (unless of course Iran or some other country with nuclear aspirations) has some of this material, but its stability makes it a very reliable material for conventional uses--like using it in improvised explosive devices to blow up American and Iraqi forces which is happening on a pretty consistent basis.

In addition, it was important enough for the IAEA to keep an eye on it and keep us informed about it, so dismiss this at your own risk.

 

How can the Bush Administration be responsible for these missing explosives when they went missing preinvasion under the guard of the IAEA and the UN?


http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/26/iraq.explosives/index.html

http://www.drudgereport.com/nbcw.htm

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,136663,00.html

 

It didn't go missing under IAEA and the UN. The CNN article YOU cited specifically states:

"The IAEA said that before the war it inspected the Al Qaqaa facility multiple times and verified that the material was present in January 2003. The agency said the material was mentioned in reports to the U.N. Security Council that were made public."


Basically, It went missing because we went to war with the country, and wern't able to secure it fast enough, which is also stated in the CNN article:

"We, from the very beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, did everything we could to secure arms caches throughout the country," Ereli said. "But given the number of arms and the number of caches and the extent of militarization of Iraq, it was impossible to provide 100 percent security for 100 percent of the sites, quite frankly."

Adam Ereli is the State Department spokesman.


So where do you get that it is the UN, or anyone else's fault but our own from the article that you gave us? We couldn't secure the site. That's our fault.

 

Before we arrived onsite to secure said weapons who was appointed by the UN to inspect, log, and secure these weapons, the IAEA...

"An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.

According to NBCNEWS, the HMX and RDX explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived."

 

The explosives were fine when the UN was controlling them, and no one had invaded Iraq. The UN is not responsible for the explosives after our invasion, even if it was before Bush declared Iraq "liberated."

We are the ones who started that war knowing that the UN was not going to be involved. It was not their job, at any point after the start of the war, to secure the stockpiles.

We invaded the country, brought down the defenses, and got the explosives stolen before we could secure the site. And I got that all from the articles you gave us.

The UN and IAEA were not responsible for this at all, and I don't even think that the articles you gave us were trying to imply that. That was just a little spin you tried to give them.

 

First of all I didn't spin anything, I read the articles, and linked them back to the original poster of this thread. We must be reading different articles... You really should go to work for the DNC Press Corps; you’re a hell of a spin doctor.


I don't believe the Bush Administration can be blamed for every wrong in the world today, especially this one, its being pushed to further a POLITICAL AGENDA...


This is not breaking news, these explosives have been missing since 2003, read all of the articles in my initial post and you will see the political motivation at work here. Sorry I'll skip this batch of kook aide.


My only point was this, when the 101st Airborne arrived @ the scene these explosives were already missing...How can we secure the explosives that were NOT there?.

We must all remember, there are 2 sides to every story, somewhere in the middle of the 2 is the truth...

 

Of course we can't secure explosives when they are not there, But it isn't the UBN's fault they weren't there. They didn't invade Iraq. We can't expect the UN to be responsible for them while we are invading the country.

We just couldn't get to them in time. But it is not the UN's fault. The articles you posted didn't even imply that it was the UN's fault.

 

The articles also didn't imply that it was the current administrations fault as the original poster of this thread did either... Hence my post, anyone can blame anyone for this, that in itself does not make it truth... I guess I should have pointed that out in my initial post.

This is politics as usual, and its sickening.

 

I think that it is pretty much common sense to consider it our fault, since we are the invading country. We can't try and duck our responsibility. "We couldn't get to them fast enough" is most likely true, but it doesn't make the explosives any less our responsibility.

 

The MSNBC ariticle http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6323933/ says the following:

"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.

U.S. defense officials said Tuesday that the materials could have vanished during a period of about three weeks, between March 15, 2003, when inspectors for the IAEA confirmed that at least some of the materials were still stored under IAEA seal at Al-Qaqaa, and April 4, when U.S. troops arrived.
On March 15, said Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the IAEA, “the seals on the doors on the bunkers were checked at many of the bunkers to see if they were still there and hadn’t been tampered with, and that was the case.”

The war in Iraq began March 20. Army officials told NBC News on condition of anonymity that troops from the Army’s 3rd Infantry did not arrive at Al-Qaqaa until April 4, finding “looters everywhere” carrying what they could out on their backs.

The troops searched bunkers and found conventional weapons but no high explosives, the officials said. Six days later, the 101st Airborne Division arrived. Neither group was specifically searching for HMX or RDX, and the complex is so large — with more than 1,000 buildings — that it is not clear that the troops even saw the bunkers that might have held the explosives...

An NBC News crew that accompanied the U.S. soldiers who seized the base three weeks into the war confirmed that troops saw no sign of the missing HMX and RDX.


Reporter Lai Ling Jew, who was embedded with the Army’s 101st Airborne, Second 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.”

This kind of limited search by the 101st of over 1000 buildings during a "pit stop" does not tell us whether the explosives were stolen before or after our first visit to the site. Saying, as a senior Bush administration official said, that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces "went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal," does not mean that a complete search was done, so there is no way to know exactly when the explosives disappeared.

What we do know is that there was little if any attempt to guard this site at any point after this initial, inadequate search.

I agree with you that the complete truth (if it exists) is closer to the middle than necessarily at either extreme, but it is clear that this administration grossly miscalculated what it would take to secure a post-war Iraq.

 

Again, this is a very old story. It is being used now as everything else to derail the Bush campaign. I like how it was the UN's and the IAEA's responsibility before we got there and then, once we were there, and they were still there, it became a Bush thing.

So let me get this straight. Before we got there someone else was keeping an eye on it. Then, when we arive in the country mind you, these laughable groups known as the UN and the IAEA decided to just stop watching? If it was so damn important, and worth talking about 19 months later, why wouldnt they keep an eye on it until the US troops were able to get there to secure it? Now we are getting somewhere. You put the pieces together and tell me what you come up with. Here are the pieces.

Kerry running for president
Clinton wants to run the UN
Mrs. Clinton wants to run for pres in 08

 

It isn't the UN's job to babysit us while we invade a country. Especially since we went in without the support of the UN. Why should we expect them to help support us even when they said they would not? We took the responsibility when we invaded the country. We can't shift even a tinge of blame on this over to the UN or the IAEA

 

Chief US Weapons inspector Charles Duelfer issued an urgent warning about the weapons cache at Al-Qaqaa—in 1995—and the International Atomic Energy Agency opted to ignore the warning and let Saddam Hussein keep his explosives.

IAEA Incompetence Responsible for Weapons Cache

WASHINGTON - Nine years ago, U.N. weapons inspectors urgently called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to demolish powerful plastic explosives in a facility that Iraq’s interim government said this month was looted due to poor security.

The chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, told The New York Sun yesterday that in 1995, when he was a member of the U.N. inspections team in Iraq, he urged the United Nations’ atomic watchdog to remove tons of explosives that have since been declared missing.

Mr. Duelfer said he was rebuffed at the time by the Vienna-based agency because its officials were not convinced the presence of the HMX, RDX, and PETN explosives was directly related to Saddam Hussein’s programs to amass weapons of mass destruction.

Instead of accepting recommendations to destroy the stocks, Mr. Duelfer said, the atomic-energy agency opted to continue to monitor them.

By e-mail, Mr. Duelfer wrote the Sun, “The policy was if acquired for the WMD program and used for it, it should be subject for destruction. The HMX was just that. Nevertheless the IAEA decided to let Iraq keep the stuff, like they needed more explosives.”

http://www.nysun.com/article/3826