Al Qaqaa: where the roadside bombs come from

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

The military says they didn’t search for explosives.

@The New York Times

The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.

Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make plans for their next push.

"We happened to stumble on it,’’ he said. “I didn’t know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave that very same day. The plan was not to go in there and start searching. It looked like all the other ammunition supply points we had seen already.”

Maybe the media is in the habit of spinning the military’s activities more positively than the military itself. I’m not up to date on that.

Daniel

[Magiver]

@Diogenes the Cynic

What WAS secured was oil wells.

Yes they were. Instead of fighting oil fires for a year like we did in kuwait the oil wells were disarmed. What’s your point? Do you think they shouldn’t have secured them?

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

As for the April 10 search, the one the NBC reported was embedded in, it was for chemical weapons

@MSNBC

April 10
Troops from the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade spend 24 hours at the site, search for chemical weapons — but not high explosives — and then head to Baghdad. An NBC reporter embedded with the unit said there’s no talk among the 101st of securing the area after they leave.

From other sites, I’ve gathered that this compound is immense, that it’s not like there’s one warehouse that you stand inside and can see everything. Does anyone have any reason to believe that a brigade searching for chemical weapons would necessarily have seen any high explosives if they’d been there?

Naturally, it’s too early to draw any conclusions. It doesn’t look good, though.

Daniel

[Scylla]

@Diogenes the Cynic

You have the burden of proof backwards, Scylal, it is you needs to demonstrate that that stuff was taken before April 9. Since No attempt was made to search or secure the area, the onus is on Bush to prove the looting was not on his watch. His watch is the shoddy one. His watch is the one unaccounted for.

This is denser than molybdenum on multiple levels.

YOU are defining the time period in which the explosives disapeared. Since it is YOU that are making the assertion (that it occured between April 9, and May 8th) it is up to YOU to prove it.

It is not up to me to prove that it happened at some other time and if I can’t, you are somehow automatically right in your arbitrary assertion. You are smarter and better than this. To assert to the contrary is a stupid, stupid argument.

Secondly, It is a similarly irrational and stupid argument to assert that we need to prove conclusively the status of these explosives before our troops were on cite.
It’s simple. S-I-M-P-O that spells “simple.”

Show that they were there on a date after Baghdad fell and we were responsible for them. Show that they were gone.

Do those two things and you win.

Fail to do them and you don’t have any argument whatsoever.

Why don’t you just say the place was full of giant firebreathing dragons and Bush lost them. That would make just as much sense as what you’re saying.

[Sam_Stone]

I believe there were 32 bunkers on the site. How big is 380 tons of explosives?

[Atticus_Finch]

@Scylla

Bullshit. I heard this guy Dana ____ being interviewed yesterday. He said he walked up and down this, and looked all around and into many of the various. He didn’t see any of the seals nor any of the explosives and he reported at that time that the explosives were not there. I heard him say this. I heard him say that it was picked up by CBS, and the NYT times that the explosives weren’t there. ON APRIL 9. I heard this with my own ears, straight from the horse’s mouth.

Read through this thread, for God’s sake. This has been comprehensively rebutted. The 101st was only there for less than a day, or a “pit-stop”, in the words of one embedded NBC reporter. No search was done, though a few people wandered through the facility. This is up all over the web, but here’s one cite.

AR: Was there a search at all underway or was, did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?

LLJ: No. There wasn’t a search. 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.

@Scylla

No they did not. Give me a firsthand cite that says so. The Iraqi government said it was gone. They didn’t say when it went.

They have said when it left the facility. See this AFP story.

“The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of.”
He said officials at Al-Qaqaa, including its general director, whom he refused to name, made contact with US troops before the fall in an effort to get them to provide security for the site.

@Scylla

Some of it was there. We don’t know that it was all there. Your characterization of a "few GIs wandering around is a false one. We have the testimony and reports of the embeds who were there.

What testimony is this? I have a cite from someone who was there talking of "some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. "

[Atticus_Finch]

@Sam Stone

I believe there were 32 bunkers on the site. How big is 380 tons of explosives?

@Squink

In case anyone else is wondering what sort of trucking operation was needed to haul the stuff of, 350 tons of RDX (d 1.82) has a volume of 6161 cubic feet. That’s a cube 18.3 feet (5.6 meters) on a side.

Pretty small in a complex spread across a few kilometres, when there’s no real search going on. For God’s sake, the information is in post #6! Did you not even read the first few posts in this thread?

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

The military says they didn’t search or secure the area. That means their failure is the same either way. Even if, hypothetically, the stuff was stolen in that covenient little three week window before the invasion, Bush’s failure to search or secure the area is still jut as egregious. An earlier date for the looting would just be a matter of luck for Bush, not a result of vigilence. Hs negligence is the same either way.

I’m glad to see that both you and Sam Stone have so far had the decency not to link to that ridiculous Washington Times story, currently being pimped with sirens on Drudge, about mysterious Russian agents spiriting the stuff away.

[RTFirefly]

@Scylla

We all understand that this explosive was gone from the complex before Baghdad fell, right? Possibly it’s been gone for several years as Iraq claimed to be taking some for use in concrete making related demolition.

We understand that this was reported on April 9, before Baghdad fell by an NBC embed with the 101st Cavalry, picked up by CNN, CBS, and the NYT, right?

We all also understand that CBS, the NYT, Cnn and et al decided to ignore their own archives and falsely report that this stuff had gone missing under Bush’s watch.

Damn! Monocracy, you beat me to the fun ones.

On the NBC crew with the 101st Cavalry, let’s roll tape:

MSNBC, 10/26/04 (Transcript):

Amy Robach: And it’s still unclear exactly when those explosives disappeared. Here to help shed some light on that question is Lai Ling. She was part of an NBC news crew that traveled to that facility with the 101st Airborne Division back in April of 2003. Lai Ling, can you set the stage for us? What was the situation like when you went into the area?

Lai Ling Jew: When we went into the area, we were actually leaving Karbala and we were initially heading to Baghdad with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. The situation in Baghdad, the Third Infantry Division had taken over Baghdad and so they were trying to carve up the area that the 101st Airborne Division would be in charge of. As a result, they had trouble figuring out who was going to take up what piece of Baghdad. They sent us over to this area in Iskanderia. We didn’t know it as the Qaqaa facility at that point but when they did bring us over there we stayed there for quite a while. We stayed overnight, almost 24 hours. And we walked around, we saw the bunkers that had been bombed, and that exposed all of the ordinances that just lied dormant on the desert.

AR: Was there a search at all underway or did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?

LLJ: No. There wasn’t a search. 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.

AR: And there was no talk of securing the area after you left. There was no discussion of that?

LLJ: Not for the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. They were – once they were in Baghdad, it was all about Baghdad, you know, and then they ended up moving north to Mosul. Once we left the area, that was the last that the brigade had anything to do with the area.

@Scylla

It seems to me that this is a pretty clear case of the fourth estate ignoring it’s responsibilities to report the truth, and instead fabricating a story in an attempt to influence the election.

On the basis of what evidence? The Iraqi government reported this to the IAEA, the IAEA notified the US government, and from there, the story got out. At first, the Bushies said this was the first they knew that the stuff was gone. Now they’re saying the stuff was gone all along. That’s a year and a half of discrepancy, for some pretty high-powered shit. Not a story?

I’ve never been one to be a big crybaby about the “liberal media,” but goddamn if this isn’t the most partisan sack of crap I’ve ever seen. The Bush National Guard story is broken what? Five times in the last year, but the Swiftvets can’t get on TV to save their lives except to be summarily condemned.

The freakin’ SwiftLiars owned August in the media. Cry me a river. And every last allegation of theirs was a lie, other than that they concurred that Kerry had in fact been in Vietnam. While other than the Dan Rather forged documents, the Bush National Guard stories were based on actual evidence from Bush’s file.

Meanwhile Kitty Kelly gets the grand tour.

Yeah, five times as well documented as the SwiftLiars, and got about one-fifth the play.

The Arnold Schwarzennegger rape stories get broken the day before the California election.

At least stick to this year, willya? You go back in time far enough, there’s always plenty of stuff to bitch about. Hear about the P.U.L.L. story? Probably not.

Now they break this story contradicted by their own archives.

Yeah, and the contradiction is…?

Some of you people still think this is an argument against Bush, or that Bush or the election is the issue here.

Like I said, it’s the war plan, stupid. A very simple issue. What we already established, back in May of last year, was that despite the war being all about keeping Saddam’s WMDs out of the hands of terrorists, Bush’s war plan didn’t allow for enough troops to secure WMD sites, once our advancing armies chased Saddam’s troops away. And the sites were looted to the ground. And Bush didn’t seem particularly bothered about that. The moral I drew from this is that Bush knew all along that the WMD claim was bullshit; otherwise, how could he be so unconcerned about the looting?

But Bush knew there were these kick-ass conventional explosives; the IAEA had warned him. Could they be used against us by any leftover Saddam loyalists? Absolutely. Now, did Bush’s war plan allow for troops to secure the site once our first armies arrived at al Qaqaa on April 4, or did they have to continue on to Baghdad, leaving nobody behind?

[Brutus]

@Diogenes the Cynic

…I’m glad to see that both you and Sam Stone have so far had the decency not to link to that ridiculous Washington Times story, currently being pimped with sirens on Drudge, about mysterious Russian agents spiriting the stuff away.

Since I am nothing if not decent, I will not link to the Washington Times. I will, however, link to the Financial Times, which is carrying the same story it seems.

[Atticus_Finch]

@Scylla

Show that they were there on a date after Baghdad fell and we were responsible for them. Show that they were gone.

Well, it’s quite obvious that they are gone now and that the US would have been responsible for them had they been in that place at that time, right? Can we regard these two points as givens?

Going towards the “were they there after Baghdad fell?” point, here’s this from Talking Points Memo. I believe Josh Marshall says it better than I could:

More to the point though, look what they did find. This from a piece by Barton Gellman two days later…

In the first of yesterday’s discoveries, the 3rd Infantry Division entered the vast Qa Qaa chemical and explosives production plant and came across thousands of vials of white powder, packed three to a box. The engineers also found stocks of atropine and pralidoxime, also known as 2-PAM chloride, which can be used to treat exposure to nerve agents but is also used to treat poisoning by organic phosphorus pesticides. Alongside those materials were documents written in Arabic that, as interpreted at the scene, appeared to include discussions of chemical warfare.

This morning, however, investigators said initial tests indicated the white powder was not a component of a chemical weapon. “On first analysis it does not appear to be a chemical that could be used in a chemical weapons attack,” Col. John Peabody, commander of the division’s engineering brigade, told a Reuters reporter with his unit.

And what was the white powder? Here’s what the Associated Press was told the same day …

A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives. The finding would be consistent with the plant’s stated production capabilities in the field of basic raw materials for explosives and propellants.

RDX and HMX are white powders

[Scylla]

@Atticus Finch

Read through this thread, for God’s sake. This has been comprehensively rebutted. The 101st was only there for less than a day, or a “pit-stop”, in the words of one embedded NBC reporter.

24 hours is not less than a day. There was only one reporter there with the 101st. That was Dana who later left and went to Fox news. The other NBC person there was a producer, IIRC.

No search was done, though a few people wandered through the facility. This is up all over the web, but here’s one

My point exactly. If no thorough search was done, than how can you assert that the explosives were there?

They have said when it left the facility. See this AFP story.

You’re joking right? Baghdad had not fallen as of April 4. This guy wasn’t there at this time and cannot testify as to what occured and what did not.

Your own talking point memo even makes the argument that this stuff couldn’t have left in the weeks preceeding the war because of the heavy surveilance we had going and the huge number of trucks it would take to move the stuff. Than how do you suppose it would have been any easier after the invasion when we were crawling over Iraq?

[Sam_Stone]

Breaking News: Russia Tied to Iraq’s Missing Arms

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, The Washington Times has learned.

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.”
Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloguing the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.
Most of Saddam’s most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, he said.

If this pans out, it’s a huge story.

[Rashak_Mani]

@Sam Stone

I believe there were 32 bunkers on the site. How big is 380 tons of explosives?

Quite big. That was talked about in the beggining of the thread… trucks can carry 3+ tons apiece apparently… so at some point US surveillance missed dozens of trucks going back and forth to the site.

No matter how you spin this story… it reeks of incompetence… after all americans probably had acess to all IAEA info.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The first U.S. military unit to reach the site in Iraq (news - web sites) where U.N. officials say 377 tons of high explosives are missing did not carry out a hunt for such material, the unit’s commander said on Wednesday.

Col. Dave Perkins, then the commander of the 2nd Brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, said the immediate concern when his troops reached the Al Qaqaa site on April 3, 2003, was to defeat a couple of hundred Iraqi troops who were firing from the compound as the Americans surged toward Baghdad.
The missing explosives have become a key issue heading into Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election, with President Bush (news - web sites)'s Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites), saying the administration’s failure to safeguard the material revealed the president’s “incredible incompetence.”

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=3&u=/nm/20041027/ts_nm/iraq_explosives_pentagon_dc

[Sam_Stone]

Here’s what the actual commander who was there has to say:

The infantry commander whose troops first captured the Iraqi weapons depot where 377 tons of explosives disappeared said Wednesday it is “very highly improbable” that someone could have trucked out so much material once U.S. forces arrived in the area.

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. He commanded the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, the division that led the charge into Baghdad.

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.

…

But the Pentagon said 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 I.D.'s arrival at the facility.”

Cite.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@Rashak Mani

Quite big. That was talked about in the beggining of the thread… trucks can carry 3+ tons apiece apparently… so at some point US surveillance missed dozens of trucks going back and forth to the site.

No matter how you spin this story… it reeks of incompetence… after all americans probably had acess to all IAEA info.

This is an underappreciated point. Colin Powell wanted to convince the world with some satellite images of a few bunkers that he claimed were related to weapons production. I find it hardly satisfying that Bush would like to claim that we have no idea if two dozen huge trucks carted nearly 400 tons of material away from a known weapons facility in the weeks before the invasion. Presumably they were keen on finding a little bioweapons RV or two, and were looking to smart-bomb restaurants that Hussein might have been dining in, yet we missed a huge convoy of WMD (as far as we might know) being carted off?

How anyone can argue that as an excuse is beyond me.

[Atticus_Finch]

@Scylla

24 hours is not less than a day. There was only one reporter there with the 101st. That was Dana who later left and went to Fox news. The other NBC person there was a producer, IIRC.

Ok, exactly a day, then, if you’d prefer. Yes, the other NBC person who was there was a producer. That’s her that I quoted. Care to address the issue rather than dancing around it?

My point exactly. If no thorough search was done, than how can you assert that the explosives were there?

I merely assert that this particular piece of information proved nothing either way. If you’re arguing that “the 101st went there, they didn’t see the stuff, so it wasn’t there”, that would be incorrect. If this isn’t what you’re trying to argue, I apologize. For the sake of the debate, let’s leave the 101st out of it then, shall we?

You’re joking right? Baghdad had not fallen as of April 4. This guy wasn’t there at this time and cannot testify as to what occured and what did not.

How silly of me to think that the head of the Iraqi Science Ministry’s site monitoring department would know anything about the sites in his area. Look at the quote again. He’s not claiming he was in the area, he’s claiming that his subordinates were in the area before the invasion and saw nothing leave at that point.

The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of.

I was responding to your assertion that:

Give me a firsthand cite that says so. The Iraqi government said it was gone. They didn’t say when it went.

The Iraqi government has said when it went. The person in charge of this kind of thing has commented, and said his subordinates saw no movement of explosives pre-election. Call him a liar if you want, but the Iraqi government has said when it went.

[Sam_Stone]

Diogenes the Cynic said:

I’m glad to see that both you and Sam Stone have so far had the decency not to link to that ridiculous Washington Times story, currently being pimped with sirens on Drudge, about mysterious Russian agents spiriting the stuff away.

Aww, I missed this first time through, and now I’ve gone done and disappointed you.

Atticus Finch said:

For God’s sake, the information is in post #6! Did you not even read the first few posts in this thread?

The ‘information’ extrapolates the volume of this stuff by simply looking at the weight and density of the raw material. While that might be a good working ballpark estimate, it’s hardly definitive. If it was packaged in vials of powder as some are saying, it would have been MUCH bulkier. Round vials have a lot of air space around them when packed together - even more so if they are are packaged in foam or cardboard carriers. We’re just guessing, but I think it’s safe to assume that the actual volume was somewhat larger than the simple approximation in post #6.

[Atticus_Finch]

@Sam Stone

Breaking News: Russia Tied to Iraq’s Missing Arms

If this pans out, it’s a huge story.

Sure, all you need to prove for that one is the existence of large units of Russian forces inside Iraq at the time. It’s kinda suprising that noone commented on the streams of Ruski trucks laden with Saddam’s WMDs at the time…