thedrifter
10-30-04, 08:40 AM
10-28-2004
From the Editor:
Al Qaqaa Facts
By Ed Offley
My question to The New York Times, 60 Minutes and some as-yet unidentified weasels in the International Atomic Energy Agency: Have you no shame?
With just one week before an evenly divided America planned to choose a president for the next four years, an opportunistic U.N. bureaucratic source and a small group of throw-garbage-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks journalists decided to enflame the process by “revealing” a scandal that began evaporating before our eyes within hours of its disclosure. And in the process they defamed the dedicated U.S. military troops who fought, bled and died in the liberation of Iraq last year.
I’m referring, of course, to the shocking – shocking! – revelation that some 374 tons of Iraqi high explosives stored under U.N. seals at a place called Al Qaqaa somehow went missing in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom. And that somehow (please) this is the personal fault of the president of the United States.
Here’s what the Times, operating in “partnership” with 60 Minutes, alleged on Monday:
“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 sometime after the American-led invasion last year.”
The clear implication from the Times: Explosives were at the site from the moment U.S. troops occupied it; no guards were posted on the storage bunkers; the explosives vanished on their watch. Therefore, the president of the United States is guilty of nonfeasance.
Alas for the Times, which ran this exclusive scoop when even *60 Minutes begged off (citing insufficient time to prepare a report), the allegations have been steadily denied and refuted in the 72 hours that followed publication.
First, not only did the Pentagon immediately deny that it had acknowledged the explosives were stolen “after” the invasion, as the Times accused, but other journalists were quick to create a chronology of events that clearly showed a gap of three weeks’ time between the last U.N. inspection of Al Qaqaa on March 15, 2003, and the arrival of 3rd Infantry Division soldiers on the scene by April 3. Moreover, an NBC reporter embedded with the American unit reported that soldiers had seen no evidence of U.N. weapons inspectors’ seals on storage bunkers at the sprawling site.
Second, while this entire mess stems from an interim Iraqi government report to the IAEA that the explosives reportedly disappeared after the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, other sources strongly disagree. Pentagon officials this week said that Iraq had already admitted to breaking the IAEA seals and moving tons of the explosives from Al Qaqaa before U.N. inspectors re-entered the country prior to the war itself. Moreover, officials said the rest of the stockpile may have been removed and hidden before the arrival of the 3rd ID six days before the Iraqi regime fell. And when the division turned over control of Al Qaqaa to the 101st Airborne Division two days after arriving there, none of the “Screaming Eagle” patrols found any IAEA markers either, strongly suggesting that any explosives stored there were long gone.
Third, even though American troops did not occupy the weapons site in full force as Baghdad fell and the coalition wrestled with the insurgent uprising in the summer of 2003, credible military officials say it would have been impossible for anyone to loot the place of hundreds of tons of material without being immediately detected. Here’s how The Baltimore Sun jumped on that critical point in a report this morning citing Col. David Perkins, who as commander of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade, was first on the scene at al Qaqaa:
“Two major roads that pass near the Al-Qaqaa installation were filled with U.S. military traffic in the weeks after April 3, 2003, when U.S. troops first reached the area, said Col. David Perkins. … Perkins and others in the military acknowledged that some looting at the site had taken place. But he said a large-scale operation to remove the explosives using trucks almost certainly would have been detected.”
The Pentagon also said in a statement, “The movement of 377 tons of heavy ordnance would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks prior to and subsequent to the 3rd ID’s arrival at the facility.”
Fourth, there is even credible doubt as to whether the amount of explosives cited by The Times even existed at Al Qaqaa: ABC Pentagon reporter Martha Raddatz on Wednesday reported, “We have obtained a confidential report from the [U.N.] inspectors. In this report, there seems to be a significant discrepancy between what the Iraqis say is missing and what the inspectors said was missing. The Iraqis say there was 141 tons of the explosive RDX in July of 2002. The inspectors, in this report, said there were only three tons left in January of 2003.”
Fifth, new allegations surfacing late this week seem to confirm that whatever explosives were at al Qaqaa were deliberately removed to Syria by the Saddam Hussein regime *before the war started. Reporter Bill Gertz of The Washington Times quoted a senior Pentagon official as saying “Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation”:
“John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, ‘almost certainly’ removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.
“The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units,” Mr. Shaw said. “Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units.”
As Ralph Peters, the distinguished military analyst, concluded this week: “The bottom line is that, if the explosives were ever there, the Iraqis moved them before our troops arrived. There is no other plausible scenario.” Perkins, the 3ID brigade commander, called it “very highly improbable” that insurgents or looters acted after U.S. troops had passed through.
There may well be a genuinely important news story lurking under the mound of baseless accusations here: High explosives that could be used in the manufacturing of nuclear weapons, supplied to Iraq by France, China and Yugoslavia, were spirited out of Iraq by Russian *Spetnaz commandos into secret caches in Syria at the outset of the war.
Unfortunately for the partisan journalists at The New York Times and 60 Minutes, that story can’t be used to harm anyone’s re-election.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=57&rnd=576.9802482621504
Ellie
From the Editor:
Al Qaqaa Facts
By Ed Offley
My question to The New York Times, 60 Minutes and some as-yet unidentified weasels in the International Atomic Energy Agency: Have you no shame?
With just one week before an evenly divided America planned to choose a president for the next four years, an opportunistic U.N. bureaucratic source and a small group of throw-garbage-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks journalists decided to enflame the process by “revealing” a scandal that began evaporating before our eyes within hours of its disclosure. And in the process they defamed the dedicated U.S. military troops who fought, bled and died in the liberation of Iraq last year.
I’m referring, of course, to the shocking – shocking! – revelation that some 374 tons of Iraqi high explosives stored under U.N. seals at a place called Al Qaqaa somehow went missing in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom. And that somehow (please) this is the personal fault of the president of the United States.
Here’s what the Times, operating in “partnership” with 60 Minutes, alleged on Monday:
“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 sometime after the American-led invasion last year.”
The clear implication from the Times: Explosives were at the site from the moment U.S. troops occupied it; no guards were posted on the storage bunkers; the explosives vanished on their watch. Therefore, the president of the United States is guilty of nonfeasance.
Alas for the Times, which ran this exclusive scoop when even *60 Minutes begged off (citing insufficient time to prepare a report), the allegations have been steadily denied and refuted in the 72 hours that followed publication.
First, not only did the Pentagon immediately deny that it had acknowledged the explosives were stolen “after” the invasion, as the Times accused, but other journalists were quick to create a chronology of events that clearly showed a gap of three weeks’ time between the last U.N. inspection of Al Qaqaa on March 15, 2003, and the arrival of 3rd Infantry Division soldiers on the scene by April 3. Moreover, an NBC reporter embedded with the American unit reported that soldiers had seen no evidence of U.N. weapons inspectors’ seals on storage bunkers at the sprawling site.
Second, while this entire mess stems from an interim Iraqi government report to the IAEA that the explosives reportedly disappeared after the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, other sources strongly disagree. Pentagon officials this week said that Iraq had already admitted to breaking the IAEA seals and moving tons of the explosives from Al Qaqaa before U.N. inspectors re-entered the country prior to the war itself. Moreover, officials said the rest of the stockpile may have been removed and hidden before the arrival of the 3rd ID six days before the Iraqi regime fell. And when the division turned over control of Al Qaqaa to the 101st Airborne Division two days after arriving there, none of the “Screaming Eagle” patrols found any IAEA markers either, strongly suggesting that any explosives stored there were long gone.
Third, even though American troops did not occupy the weapons site in full force as Baghdad fell and the coalition wrestled with the insurgent uprising in the summer of 2003, credible military officials say it would have been impossible for anyone to loot the place of hundreds of tons of material without being immediately detected. Here’s how The Baltimore Sun jumped on that critical point in a report this morning citing Col. David Perkins, who as commander of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade, was first on the scene at al Qaqaa:
“Two major roads that pass near the Al-Qaqaa installation were filled with U.S. military traffic in the weeks after April 3, 2003, when U.S. troops first reached the area, said Col. David Perkins. … Perkins and others in the military acknowledged that some looting at the site had taken place. But he said a large-scale operation to remove the explosives using trucks almost certainly would have been detected.”
The Pentagon also said in a statement, “The movement of 377 tons of heavy ordnance would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks prior to and subsequent to the 3rd ID’s arrival at the facility.”
Fourth, there is even credible doubt as to whether the amount of explosives cited by The Times even existed at Al Qaqaa: ABC Pentagon reporter Martha Raddatz on Wednesday reported, “We have obtained a confidential report from the [U.N.] inspectors. In this report, there seems to be a significant discrepancy between what the Iraqis say is missing and what the inspectors said was missing. The Iraqis say there was 141 tons of the explosive RDX in July of 2002. The inspectors, in this report, said there were only three tons left in January of 2003.”
Fifth, new allegations surfacing late this week seem to confirm that whatever explosives were at al Qaqaa were deliberately removed to Syria by the Saddam Hussein regime *before the war started. Reporter Bill Gertz of The Washington Times quoted a senior Pentagon official as saying “Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation”:
“John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, ‘almost certainly’ removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.
“The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units,” Mr. Shaw said. “Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units.”
As Ralph Peters, the distinguished military analyst, concluded this week: “The bottom line is that, if the explosives were ever there, the Iraqis moved them before our troops arrived. There is no other plausible scenario.” Perkins, the 3ID brigade commander, called it “very highly improbable” that insurgents or looters acted after U.S. troops had passed through.
There may well be a genuinely important news story lurking under the mound of baseless accusations here: High explosives that could be used in the manufacturing of nuclear weapons, supplied to Iraq by France, China and Yugoslavia, were spirited out of Iraq by Russian *Spetnaz commandos into secret caches in Syria at the outset of the war.
Unfortunately for the partisan journalists at The New York Times and 60 Minutes, that story can’t be used to harm anyone’s re-election.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=57&rnd=576.9802482621504
Ellie