Concord Monitor Poll, released today, shows Kerry over Bush 49% to 46% in New Hampshire.
--Josh Marshall
The voter suppression drive comes <$NoAd$>into clear view (emphasis added) ...
Citing a new list of more than 37,000 questionable addresses, the state Republican Party demanded Saturday that Milwaukee city officials require identification from all of those voters Tuesday.If the city doesn't, the party says it is prepared to have volunteers challenge each individual - including thousands who might be missing an apartment number on their registration - at the polls.
The move, which dramatically escalates the party's claims of bad addresses and potential fraud, was condemned by Democrats as a last-minute effort to suppress turnout in the city by creating long delays at the polls.
That's from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
--Josh Marshall
Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll, just released, shows Kerry 48%, Bush 45%.
--Josh Marshall
Quite apart from the political swirl and controversy over the new OBL tape, the analysis discussed in this article in the LA Times strikes me as on the mark and an intriguing explanation for some of the weirdly non-bin-Laden-like things said on the tape. It's worth a read.
--Josh Marshall
More from the <$NoAd$>field ...
Local and national GOP officials are distancing themselves from a Washington, D.C.-based college Republican group that has used aggressive and misleading tactics to raise millions of dollars from elderly people....
The Herald-Sun reported Thursday that the College Republican National Committee has received at least 87 percent of its North Carolina donations from people who list their occupation as retired. Most of those contacted by The Herald-Sun were in their 80s.
This campaign season, the CRNC has raised more than $6.3 million nationally, putting it in the top 15 political groups tracked by the IRS. The group raised $93,280 in North Carolina.
Because the CRNC solicits under different names, such as the National Republican Task Force and the National Republican Victory Campaign, many seniors have donated to the group repeatedly, often several times in a single day or week. Many had made more than 50 donations since January, sometimes totaling thousands of dollars.
When asked about their giving, many of them had little understanding of how much they had donated or where their money was going. The group's high-pressure mailings, which often play on senior citizens' emotions, suggest that the money would help re-elect President Bush and other Republicans. But according to the Center for Public Integrity, which monitors campaign spending, the CRNC has spent at least 83 percent of its proceeds since 2000 on direct mailings and other fund-raising expenses.
See the rest here.
Then there's this wonderful nugget from the Seattle Times ...
Some of the elderly donors, meanwhile, wound up bouncing checks and emptying their bank accounts."I don't have any more money," said Cecilia Barbier, a 90-year-old retired church council worker in New York City. "I'm stopping giving to everybody. That was all my savings that they got."
Barbier said she "wised up." But not before she made more than 300 donations totaling nearly $100,000 this year, the group's fund-raising records show.
The guy at the center of all this seems to be Scott Stewart, chairman of the CRNC from 1999 until last year.
He left to run the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign in Nevada.
--Josh Marshall
Peter Bergen on the new bin Laden tape and Tora Bora. Definitely give this a look.
--Josh Marshall
A simple point: This election is going to be won or lost on the ground, with organization and turnout. If you're part of the GOTV effort, on either side, this is in your hands.
--Josh Marshall
“The president said one time in caucus, ‘I don’t know how much you want to use this on the campaign trail, but our intelligence confirms they want me out.’ So however that bears on your view of the administration is secondary to the fact that if they think they can dislodge the president by hitting us before the election, they will."
[ed. note: Regrettably, The Republic is subscription only. And, no, I wasn't a subscriber before this evening. But, for the benefit of TPM readers everywhere, I plunked down the $8.95 weekly subscription rate and charged it to the TPM Educational, Research and Time-Wasting fund. A not of thanks to TPM reader SC.]
--Josh Marshall
A short note on the race, the polls, and what the Bush camp is calling bin Laden's "little gift."
The next few days phone polling probably amounts to one of the biggest industries in the United States.
So it's interesting to look at the results of last night's post-gift polling.
First, the four tracking polls released today and thus including roughly one-third of calls after the release of the OBL tape ...
In Zogby's, Kerry moved up one point.
In Rasmussen's, Kerry moved up one point.
In WaPo/ABC, Kerry moved up two points.
In Tipp, Bush moved up two points.
Two other national polls were released (at least that I've seen), Newsweek and Fox.
One third of the Newsweek poll was done last night. And in their poll Bush was up over Kerry by 50% to 44%. That's four points better than the Newsweek poll the previous week that had Bush over Kerry 48% to 46%.
Look, though, at the Fox poll.
Fox did one poll Wednesday and Thursday night. And then they did another poll with calls Thursday and Friday night. So the common denominator is that both polls had calls Thursday night. And half the calls in the second poll were done post-gift.
The first Fox poll had Bush up 5% (50% to 45%) and the second had him up 2% (47% to 45%).
Now, does this mean the bin Laden tape is giving a boost to Kerry? Of course, not. These are tiny changes. And it's altogether possible that this small shift is simply the result of statistical 'noise' -- numbers wobbling around within the polls' margins of error.
But it should put at least some damper on the notion that the release of the OBL tape would lead to some sudden Bush surge.
At least if the pundits are listening.
--Josh Marshall
One of the oddities of the al Qaqaa <$NoAd$>is story is why it should seem even remotely surprising to anyone who's actually been paying attention to what's been happening in Iraq over the last eighteen months. After all, almost all of Iraq's nuclear facilities -- containing both equipment of use to nuclear programs, partially enriched uranium, and other goodies for baddies -- were similarly looted at around the same time.
As Brett Wagner, a professor at the Naval War College, put it a year ago in USA Today ...
In the weeks before the invasion, the U.S. military repeatedly warned the White House that its war plans did not include sufficient ground forces, air and naval operations and logistical support to guarantee a successful mission. Those warnings were discounted — even mocked — by administration officials who professed to know more about war fighting than the war fighters themselves.But the war fighters were right. Military commanders weren't given enough manpower and logistical support to secure all of the known nuclear sites, let alone all of the suspected ones.
It wasn't until seven of Iraq's main nuclear facilities were extensively looted that the true magnitude of the administration's strategic blunder came into focus.
Why is Qaqaa surprising?
--Josh Marshall
Bush team calls bin Laden's tape a "little gift."
Does the president really see bin Laden's message as a "gift"?
I mean, okay, okay, of course he does. But to actually say it?
Not to flog a dead horse, but what would be the response if a Kerry campaign advisor made a similar or analogous comment?
Can someone ask the president about this?
--Josh Marshall
His own private mystery<$NoAd$> land ...
If you actually try to pin down the timeline of who destroyed what, when it was moved, what was moved, we are still in a mystery land about all that.David Brooks
Former Senior Editor
Weekly Standard
October 29th, 2004
Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match.David Kay
Former Chief Inspector
Iraq Survey Group
October 28th, 2004
The truth is out there ...
--Josh Marshall
Which of these two statements sounds like it comes <$NoAd$>from the stronger leader?
John Kerry: In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear. As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians. And I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes. Period.George W. Bush: Earlier today I was informed of the tape that is now being analyzed by America's intelligence community. Let me make this very clear: Americans will not be intimidated or influenced by an enemy of our country. I'm sure Senator Kerry agrees with this. I also want to say to the American people that we're at war with these terrorists and I am confident that we will prevail.
You decide ...
--Josh Marshall
A journalist observed Iraqi Islamists looting weapons and explosives from al Qaqaa as late as November 2003.
"I was utterly stupefied to see that a place like that was pretty much unguarded and that insurgents could help themselves for months on end. We were there for a long time and no one disturbed the group while they were loading their truck," she says.
--Josh Marshall
I was off-line for about three hours this evening. And when I got back to my computer there were a couple hundred emails commenting from various perspectives and viewpoints about the OBL tape that ran this afternoon.
The opinions ranged the gamut, from panic to indifference, many with steadfastness and underlying optimism.
Overall, though, the letters again struck me with what is one of the Democrats' greatest weaknesses: their vulnerability to getting knocked off stride by the rush of events, their tendency to fret that all is lost, almost to indulge in it, when the car hits a simple bump in the road.
Whether this OBL tape represents no-bump, a bump, or something more damaging than a bump, I don't know. But reactions can dictate and shape outcomes, especially in such a context as this where perception is the essence of the matter.
Another way I've noticed this over the years is that Republicans are usually far more confident that their candidates are going to win given races, whether polls give reason for the confidence or not, whether the eventual outcome bears out the confidence or not.
Democrats could use more of that.
Let's look at what is happening right now.
The Bush campaign is trying to use the OBL tape to slap the Kerry campaign around, knock them off their stride, and argue that for Kerry now even to mention anything about the president's failure to bag bin Laden is the height of shamefulness.
The president's communications director even told reporters that the only acceptable thing would be for John Kerry to observe a twelve or more hour moratorium on attacks on the president, even though the president should be allowed to continue attacking John Kerry.
That is what they're playing for. (That's also the reason the Bush campaign didn't allow the Kerry campaign to be briefed on the soon-to-be-released tape until late in the day. The president knew about it early in the morning.)
If the Kerry campaign falls for this it would be the height of foolishness. In itself the bin Laden video is not a matter of controversy. What the president's campaign is trying to do is either goad the Kerry campaign into three days of passivity in the run-up to the election or fuss up a debate about the supposed outrageousness of Kerry's faulting the president for allowing bin Laden to remain at large. The Kerry folks should not play into that trap. The answer is to keep to the game-plan and remain on the offensive.
The foreign policy focus of the Kerry campaign has long been the president's failure to maintain the focus on al Qaida, as evidenced by his failure to capture bin Laden and dismantle his network. To abandon that message now would be insanity.
If you're a Democrat and you notice your fellow Democrats dipping into these spasms of fecklessness and weak-kneedism, as I've described above, I strongly encourage you to slap them around a few times and tell them to get a hold of themselves. If you're experiencing such spasms, by all means, slap yourself a few times and tell yourself the same thing.
More than 95% of the electorate has already made up its mind. This is all about how those last few percentage points of the electorate break. And that will be determined by which campaign holds the initiative, stays on the offensive for the next three days and who can mobilize their forces to win this on the ground.
Kerry, the candidate, must be forward-looking in these final days. But his surrogates should be hammering the president for his failure to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora and pressing the factual case that his campaign has tried so hard to deny. On hitting the indisputable failures of the president there should be no let up.
At every turn, toughness and fight have been the subtext of this election. Who has it and who doesn't. The Bush message is that all of the president's mistakes pale in comparison to the fact of his toughness and steely resolve. The conceit of the Kerry campaign and the Democrats is that they're every bit as tough as the president and his party, and more.
Now's the time for them to show it.
--Josh Marshall
An update on the Bush rules of engagement. <$NoAd$>From AFP ...
Speaking to reporters outside the campaign rally here, White House communications director Dan Bartlett said that the tape should not affect the way Bush campaigns but that Kerry should have marked a 12-hour truce."You would think that there would be a, maybe, 12 hours to let the American absorb what has just happened today," he said.
Prodded on why, if the tape ought not to affect the campaign, Kerry should have stopped criticizing the president, Bartlett revised his statement, saying that the problem was that Kerry's attack had been "discredited."
There's nothing, it seems, they won't game.
--Josh Marshall
A few more thoughts on what this all might mean.
To a significant degree we're in zero sum game mode at this late stage of the campaign. The dynamic this week has been in Kerry's favor consistently. So anything that upsets that dynamic helps Bush.
I know the consensus among pundits is that this is a godsend for Bush and that it will rekindle and put people in the mind of the period of national unity after 9/11. I'm certainly not sure but I strongly suspect that's not true.
Were bin Laden to turn the election for Bush, it would be fitting since he and Bush have fed off each others' power for more than three years.
But I don't think the public's mind right now will react to bin Laden's reemergence in way people did in 2001, 2002 or even through much of 2003. Or in the way many in the press expect.
A lot has changed.
We'll know soon enough.
--Josh Marshall
I just spoke to al Qaida expert Peter Bergen.
He mentioned the following things about the OBL tape. Bergen noted that this is the first time we've seen an unambiguously datable tape from bin Laden since December 2001. Whatever injuries he may have sustained on the escape from Afghanistan (remember the lame arm) is clearly healed. And though he still looks older than his forty-seven years, he looks robust and hardly haggard.
As for the Tora Bora issue, Bergen suggests that there were probably more journalists on the ground at Tora Bora than American troops.
--Josh Marshall
Kerry on the new OBL video ...
In response to this tape from Osama bin Laden, let me make it clear, crystal clear. As Americans, we are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. They are barbarians. And I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes. Period.
From the airport at West Palm.
--Josh Marshall
Danni, Danni, Danni ...
Danielle Pletka just accused Michael Moore on CNN of 'giving aide and comfort to the enemy' because he made Fahrenheit 9/11.
He probably forgot to take the Bush Pledge.
--Josh Marshall
Can you say 'cult of personality'?
Chris Suellentrop has a <$NoAd$>half bizarre/half chilling report from the campaign trail in Florida last night. It's about what seems to be a new feature of the Bush rallies: the pledge of allegiance to President Bush.
Here's Chris ...
"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."I know the Bush-Cheney campaign occasionally requires the people who attend its events to sign loyalty oaths, but this was the first time I have ever seen an audience actually stand and utter one. Maybe they've replaced the written oath with a verbal one.
I believe in one father, one son and one other son, who's now governor of Florida, who will take over after this son retires from office in 2009.
--Josh Marshall
Too bad the Bush team blew it at Tora Bora.
It's been more than three years. Why is bin Laden still on the loose?
--Josh Marshall
So how does this new bin Laden tape play politically in the US?
I'm really not sure.
Republicans are already trying to play this, as Drudge says now on his site, as bin Laden "campaign[ing] against Bush."
A friend tells me that the Bush-propaganda-organ Fox News is calling it bin Laden's 'endorsement' of Kerry.
On the other hand, this cuts against the Bush administration's frequent suggestions that al Qaida has been routed or that bin Laden may in fact be dead.
Much depends of course on how the press plays it. I notice for instance that as of 4:37 PM on MSNBC the front page headline momentarily had bin Laden saying "Bush cannot protect America" before correcting it to read "neither Bush nor Kerry can protect America."
[ed. note: That observation is from a rushed clicking back and forth over their site. So let me make that subject to possible later correction. But that's how it appeared.]
Clearly, Kerry has to hit the ground with a tough and emphatic statement in response to this and gear up his team's operation to go head-to-head with what will no doubt be a desperate Bush campaign's effort to use this to connect Kerry and bin Laden to shift the pro-Kerry momentum of the race in the final days of the campaign.
It seems to me that Kerry should tell voters what he's been telling them for months. That he'll take the fight to bin Laden, that he won't get distracted the way the president has, and that the one thing this tape shows is that the president hasn't gotten the job done.
If he had, there'd be no bin Laden to be making these tapes.
--Josh Marshall
With this morning's Di Rita press conference such a trainwreck, surely now must be time for a terror alert, right?
Release the hounds!
--Josh Marshall
As I've noted a few times over<$Ad$> the course of the last week, there is a real fissure running between the uniformed military and the politicals in Di Rita's office over al Qaqaa.
And as was so often the case during the run-up to the war and since then, it's fallen to two reporters at Knight-Ridder -- Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay -- to bring us this part of the story.
While Di Rita and Co. were working on today's spin operation, this story went out on the KR newswire under Landay's byline.
Note this passage in Landay's piece ...
In a new disclosure, the senior U.S. military officer and another U.S. official, who also spoke on condition he not be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that an Iraqi working for U.S. intelligence alerted U.S. troops stationed near the al Qaqaa weapons facility that the installation was being looted shortly after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.But, they said, the troops took no apparent action to halt the pillaging.
"That was one of numerous times when Iraqis warned us that ammo dumps and other places were being looted and we weren't able to respond because we didn't have anyone to send," said a senior U.S. military officer who served in Iraq.
As Landay's sourcing makes clear, this was coming out of the career military, not from the president's appointees.
Earlier this year, Strobel and Landay won the Raymond Clapper Memorial award for their prescient reporting on the Iraqi WMD question. And in an article on the award, Strobel -- Landay's colleague -- described the methods behind much of their award-winning reporting ...
Strobel says their conclusions came from a lot of extra digging and source-building they were forced to do without the red-carpet access to high-level officials that some of the nation's top media outlets enjoy."Knight Ridder is not, in some people's eyes, seen as playing in the same ball field as the New York Times and some major networks," Strobel says. "People at the Times were mainly talking to senior administration officials, who were mostly pushing the administration line. We were mostly talking to the lower-level people or dissidents, who didn't necessarily repeat the party line."
Those sources, Knight Ridder Washington Editor Clark Hoyt adds, were "closest to the information."
"I'm not saying we didn't have any top-level sources," Strobel says, "but we also made a conscious effort to talk to people more in the bowels of government who have a less political approach to things."
Their effort paid off in the fall of 2002, when a story critical of the administration's case for war generated a small, but encouraging, response. "We got two or three unsolicited calls from people in government saying, 'You're asking the right questions. Keep it up,'" Landay recalls.
...
"As the pressure built on the administration and their case got shakier and shakier, there was obviously a lot greater stress, and there was some shouting that was done at us over the telephone," Hoyt says. Some of those calls came from well-known names in high places, Bureau Chief John Walcott adds, declining to drop any names.
Around that time, the White House turned up the pressure, Strobel says, and "tried to freeze us out of briefings."
Landay adds: "I think this administration may have a fairly punitive policy when it comes to journalists who get in their face. And if you talk to some White House reporters, there is a fear of losing access." He says that fear may have played into the relatively uncritical approach of news organizations like the Times.
A little shoe-leather goes a long way.
--Josh Marshall
At a few minutes after noon, I'm watching Mr. Di Rita giving yet another round of spin about al Qaqaa. Uncharacteristically, he looked like he was on the verge of a panic attack through most of his introductory remarks. And with what followed, it's not hard to see why. The line Di Rita led off with (and I just jotted this down from hearing it once over the air, so perhaps I've got a word or two wrong) was this: "It has not been our desire to tell a particular story, only to tell the facts."
Please.
I believe this man protests too much.
The only thing accurate about this claim is that it's true that Di Rita has not been intent on telling a particular story. He's been willing to tell any story -- and has -- so long as it's a story that exonerates the White House. Even if it's a different story every day.
It's a touchy point. But it's time for someone to start making the point that the Pentagon Public Affairs office isn't supposed to be used as a formal arm of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. And for that matter if Di Rita's going to use it that way, he should at least be doing a better job of it.
Today Di Rita brought out an Army major who says his unit removed and destroyed roughly 250 tons of equipment, ammunition and explosives from somewhere in the al Qaqaa facility in early April 2003 -- that would be after the first US troops arrived but prior to the arrival of the news crew that apparently filmed much of the explosives on April 18th.
Was it the stuff in question? Di Rita kept trying to answer the questions on the major's behalf. But the major made clear that he had no idea. Did he see any IAEA seals? No, he said, he didn't.
The Fox reporter at the news conference tried to coax the major into saying more than he was saying. But to no avail. He would only say what he knew. And there was very little that he knew that pertained to the relevant question.
The other reporters on hand, apparently weary of being lied to all week, preferred to put their questions to the major directly, rather than to Di Rita. And he, the major, was straightforward enough to say that all he knew was that he had taken stuff from somewhere at al Qaqaa and destroyed it.
What does that mean? Almost nothing.
This was an unfortunate stunt, put on by Di Rita and the politicals at DOD Public Affairs. And given how it turned out, I suspect it's one they quickly regretted.
--Josh Marshall
Aaron Brown valiantly tries to carry the CNN ball into the credibility endzone, only to get dragged back by unnamed goofball colleagues who put together this piece on the CNN website.
As many of you now know, Brown had former chief weapons inspector David Kay on his show this evening and gave a rather conclusive presentation about the significance of the videotapes shot by embeds with the 101st Airborne, which clearly show large quantities of the explosives in question at al Qaqaa as late as April 18th, 2003.
They even have footage of the IAEA seal being clipped off the warehouses as they're going in.
Listen to what Kay said when Brown asked him whether the debate over when the explosives were taken is now over ...
Well, at least with regard to this one bunker, and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through, and there were others there that were sealed. With this one, I think it is game, set, and match. There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken. And quite frankly, to me the most frightening thing is not only was the seal broken, lock broken, but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean, to rephrase the so-called pottery barn rule. If you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.
Now, note one other thing. Kay is quite cautious in noting that it's only a slam dunk for the one bunker that appears in the video he's being shown.
But look at what one of the reporters who was there when the video was shot said earlier Thursday evening on Paula Zahn's show ...
Well, I should be clear. I don't think -- I'm not saying for a minute that I know that the munitions and the explosives that we stumbled upon were in fact the munitions or the explosives in question.All I can say with certainty is that, on that day, there were bunker after bunker after bunker of explosives, tons of them, that were unguarded. We went in and looked at some of them. I don't have the sort of expertise to tell you whether or not those were exactly what they're talking about when they say that these -- how many odd tons of explosives went missing.
So, apparently, there was bunker after bunker with the same stuff Kay was sure about in the one bunker he saw video of.
And now look how CNN plays the story on their website in the early hours of Friday morning (emphasis added) ...
Two more bits of possible evidence surfaced Thursday in the mystery of the missing Iraqi explosives, but they appear to bolster two different scenarios as to what may have happened to the cache.The Pentagon released a photo showing activity before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 outside a bunker at the weapons dump where nearly 380 tons of explosives reportedly disappeared.
While the photo might lend support to but does not prove the Pentagon's theory that the high-grade explosives were moved before the war, a videotape surfaced offering another scenario.
The video, shot by a crew from KSTP-TV in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division, showed barrels of explosives in unguarded bunkers in the Al Qaqaa complex on April 18, 2003, nine days after the fall of Baghdad.
It was unclear, however, if the explosives in the video were of the same types as in the missing cache.
The Pentagon evidence in question is a piece of aerial photography showing two trucks near an al Qaqaa bunker in mid-March 2003. That's it. As part of some larger argument or larger body of evidence this might be suggestive evidence. But alone it means next to nothing. On top of that, the highly-respected globalsecurity.org website says they're not even the right bunkers.
And yet to CNN, it's just a he said/she said, two "bits of possible evidence" as they put it, pointing to "different scenarios." And for them the aerial photos are actually the more probative evidence, as evidenced by the structure of the sentence in the third graf above.
And then there's that last line: "It was unclear, however, if the explosives in the video were of the same types as in the missing cache."
Really?
Who wrote that line and where do they get their information? Apparently not from CNN or ABC.
Listen to what Kay said when asked about this by Brown ...
AB: Was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?DK: Absolutely nothing. It was the HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.
And then a moment later ...
HMX is in powder form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons. And particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it, that's either HMX or RDX. I don't know of anything else in al Qaqaa that was in that form.
Whatever else you can say about him, David Kay knows a thing or two about this subject. And he seems positive.
And look what fellow inspector David Albright told ABC ...
Experts who have studied the images say the barrels on the tape contain the high explosive HMX, and the U.N. markings on the barrels are clear."I talked to a former inspector who's a colleague of mine, and he confirmed that, indeed, these pictures look just like what he remembers seeing inside those bunkers," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.
The Times even has this from a piece that went up late Thursday evening: "Weapons experts familiar with the work of the international inspectors in Iraq say the videotape appears identical to photographs that the inspectors took of the explosives, which were put under seal before the war."
Apparently, at least three weapons inspectors -- probably more, including the Times -- are certain that's the material in question. But to the folks at CNN it's still an open question.
They seem to want to play by the White House rules, under which each separate ton of explosive material must be identified in videotapes from embeds and then certified as authentic by every conceivable expert under the sun before the president will have to admit that maybe something went wrong.
And of course no one can bring the issue up in a political context until the presidential commission Jeb Bush appoints in 2010 comes back with its final report two years later.
Late Update: As of this morning (10:03 AM), the CNN webscribes did a fairly aggressive edit on this piece. I've got to start saving copies of these articles before the inevitable switcheroo.
--Josh Marshall
Hmmm. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) is slipping quickly enough in the polls that it's apparently time to start calling his opponent gay.
--Josh Marshall
Is that a bulge in your jacket? Or do ya just wanna debate me?
I must say I've never been able to get my head around the idea that the president actually had some wiring device on at the debate. But Salon has a new article with an interview with a NASA imagery analyst who says he was.
They report; you decide.
--Josh Marshall
Game. Set. Match.
They got caught with a screw-up, <$NoAd$>their response was to lie, smear, obfuscate and bamboozle. And now the unimpeachable evidence is out.
It captures the administration's whole record on Iraq, only fast-forwarded and telescoped into four days as opposed to four years.
Here's former weapons inspector David Kay on Aaron Brown this evening delivering the news ...
Aaron Brown: We saw at the top of the program there is new information to factor in. Pretty conclusive to our eye. So we'll sort through this now. Take the politics out of it and try and deal with facts with former head UN weapons inspector, US weapons inspector, David Kay. David, it’s nice to see you.David Kay: Good to be with you, Aaron.
AB: I don't know how better to do this than to show you some pictures have you explain to me what they are or are not. Okay? First what I’ll just call the seal. And tell me if this is an IAEA seal on that bunker at that munitions dump?
DK: Aaron, about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it which, obviously, I would have preferred to have been there, that is an IAEA seal. I've never seen anything else in Iraq in about 15 years of being in Iraq and around Iraq that was other than an IAEA seal of that shape.
AB: Was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?
DK: Absolutely nothing. It was the HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.
AB: OK now, I’ll take a look at barrels here for a second. You can tell me what they tell you. They, obviously, to us just show us a bunch of barrels. You'll see it somewhat differently.
DK: Well, it's interesting. There were three foreign suppliers to Iraq of this explosive in the 1980s. One of them used barrels like this, and inside the barrels a bag. HMX is in powder form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons. And particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it, that's either HMX or RDX. I don't know of anything else in al Qaqaa that was in that form.
AB: Let me ask you then, David, the question I asked Jamie. In regard to the dispute about whether that stuff was there when the Americans arrived, is it game, set, match? Is that part of the argument now over?
DK: Well, at least with regard to this one bunker, and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through, and there were others there that were sealed. With this one, I think it is game, set, and match. There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken. And quite frankly, to me the most frightening thing is not only was the seal broken, lock broken, but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean, to rephrase the so-called pottery barn rule. If you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.
AB: I'm -- that raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn't know what they had?
DK: I think you're quite likely they didn't know they had HMX, which speaks to lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area, but they certainly knew they had explosives. And to put this in context, I think it's important, this loss of 360 tons, but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.
AB: Could you -- I’m trying to stay out of the realm of politics. I'm not sure you can.
DK: So am I.
AB: I know. It's a little tricky here. But, is there any -- is there any reason not to have anticipated the fact that there would be bunkers like this, explosives like this, and a need to secure them?
DK: Absolutely not. For example, al Qaqaa was a site of Gerald Bull's super gun project. It was a team of mine that discovered the HMX originally in 1991. That was one of the most well-documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented. Iraq had, and it's a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the US has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.
AB: David, as quickly as you can, because this just came up in the last hour, as dangerous as this stuff is, this would not be described as a WMD, correct?
DK: Oh absolutely not.
AB: Thank you.
DK: And, in fact, the loss of it is not a proliferation issue.
AB: Okay. It's just dangerous and its out there and by your thinking it should have been secured.
DK: Well look, it was used to bring the Pan Am flight down. It's a very dangerous explosive, particularly in the hands of terrorists.
AB: David, thank you for walking me through this. I appreciate it, David Kay the former head US weapons inspector in Iraq.
Game. Set. Match
--Josh Marshall
Ed Kilgore (aka NewDonkey) has key new information and analysis on the GOP voter suppression effort. Set everything else aside, Ed. Keep us up-to-date on this for the next five days.
--Josh Marshall
Media Matters fact-checks the Fox 'all-stars' segment that we discussed here last night. Sisyphean job well done.
--Josh Marshall
Still more problems with Larry Di Rita's endless spinning on al Qaqaa? Globalsecurity.org seems to think so. The satellite imagery Di Rita's handing out to the press doesn't seem to match up with where the explosives were.
Of course, videotape of the explosives still on-site about three weeks later seems pretty revealing too.
Like I said last night, Di Rita's like Rather and Mapes rolled into one, crashing through all the records, looking for anything, anything, to salvage his story.
--Josh Marshall
Let's see how quickly, or if at all, CNN, <$NoAd$>MSNBC and (who knows?) even Fox pick up ABC's report which shows about as conclusively as you're ever going to be shown that the al Qaqaa explosives were there after the war. I'll be much obliged if brave souls watching these operations can send me word about what they're seeing.
And remember this passage from the piece on looters at al Qaqaa from this morning's Times?
The accounts do not directly address the question of when 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives vanished from the site sometime after early March, the last time international inspectors checked the seals on the bunkers where the material was stored. It is possible that Iraqi forces removed some explosives before the invasion.
Though the Times was there going out of its way to give the benefit of the doubt to the White House, does that caveat survive the tapes unearthed today by ABC?
--Josh Marshall
Video editors get slotted for CIA fall-guy role in latest Bush cooked up evidence flap ...
Reed Dickens, spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, acknowledged the image had been adjusted but said it was done during the editing process and had not been ordered by the campaign."It was completely unintentional," he said. "The ad has already been replaced."
Priceless.
--Josh Marshall
The latest video tape of al Qaqaa <$NoAd$>unnearthed by a local ABC affiliate and now picked up nationally seems like pretty much game, set, match.
Those corrugated barrels that look like what the IAEA described as the containers for the explosives? Turns out that's exactly what they are. So say at least two former weapons inspectors.
And what about the IAEA seals that were supposed to be there? Turns out those are in the video too.
The only question now, it seems, is why the president and his advisors spent four days spinning out increasingly far-fetched excuses and tall-tales about this, hoping to brazen it out through November 2nd without fessing up.
Even CNN should be convinced. Maybe Wolf can ask the question above?
--Josh Marshall
AP: "The FBI has begun investigating whether the Pentagon improperly awarded no-bid contracts to Halliburton Co., seeking an interview with a top Army contracting officer and collecting documents from several government offices. The line of inquiry expands an earlier FBI investigation into whether Halliburton overcharged taxpayers for fuel in Iraq, and it elevates to a criminal matter the election-year question of whether the Bush administration showed favoritism to Vice President Dick Cheney's former company."
Now the FBI's part of the international anti-Bush conspiracy.
--Josh Marshall
In President Bush’s 2000 convention acceptance speech, he hit the issue of troop readiness hard.
“Our military is low on parts, pay and morale,” he said. “If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report ... Not ready for duty, sir. This administration had its moment. They had their chance. They have not led. We will.”
Back on December 6th of last year, you’ll remember, the Washington Post reported that in 2004, four of ten Army divisions would not be combat ready for up to six months. Specifically, they would be rated at C-3 or C-4, the Army’s two lowest readiness levels.
Since then, Army internal reporting and a classified Government Accounting Office study of the combat readiness of all US ground forces have further underscored the problem. The Secretary of the Army and others were briefed on the GAO study, which is still under review, earlier this month. Senior uniformed Army officials are, of course, also receiving regular briefings on the situation.
The picture this reporting paints for Guard readiness is, I’m told, considerably more bleak than the December news about readiness in the Army.
Readiness in stateside Guard brigades is so poor because those brigades are essentially being cannibalized – for both men and materiel – to keep afloat brigades that are currently stationed in Iraq.
--Josh Marshall
If you look through the right-wing media universe this morning you will hear that perhaps the explosives were never at al Qaqaa at all. Or if they were there perhaps Saddam's men carted them off in March. Or if Saddam's men didn't cart them off for the insurgency then the Russians carted them off to Syria. Or if, God forbid, it really did happen as the critics say, well, President Bush wasn't there. It was the fault of the troops on the ground.
If you can't quite get your head around the audacity of that last one, that's what the president's surrogate Rudy Guiliani said this morning on one of the morning shows.
"The actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there," said Mr. Guiliani, "Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?"
But, please, let's see through the snowstorm of mumbojumbo the president's handlers and liegemen are trying to toss in our eyes and focus on the essence of the matter.
The president and his advisors insisted on a warplan that had far too few troops to secure even the key facilities in Iraq that were the reason for the invasion in the first place. Remember, many of the nuclear facilities were stripped bare too. This wasn't the fault of troops streaming through on their way to Baghdad, doing a quick check for chemical and biological weapons. The error was in the planning of the war itself -- planning that came from Rumsfeld's civilians and the White House over and against the advice of the generals.
Now, in this particular case, could the White House get lucky and it turn out that the al Qaqaa munitions were actually carted off to Mars?
Sure. Even though no evidence adduced to date suggests anything but that they were looted because they were not secured.
But that would hardly change the essential issue. The administration didn't deploy adequate troops to secure these facilities and didn't even have a plan to do so. It wasn't even a concern until late Sunday evening when the issue blew up into a political firestorm and they began desperately trying to come up with some rationale, any rationale, to shift the blame off themselves.
Nor is that all.
Why was the mission so undermanned?
Part of the explanation comes from Secretary Rumsfeld's and his staff's view of military transformation, one that puts a heavy emphasis on high-tech weaponry and airpower over ground forces.
That's not the biggest reason, though.
The biggest reason is that President Bush and his chief advisors knew that it would be much harder to get the country into Iraq if the electorate knew the full scope of the investment -- in dollars, deployments and casualties -- upfront. In other words, undermanning the operation was always part of the essential dishonesty and recklessness with which the president led the nation to war.
--Josh Marshall
Mr. President, is that your final answer? Larry?
New details from a local TV film crew embedded with the 101st.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, now we seem to have the White House's third rendition of what happened at al Qaqaa. And we can find it in a nicely digestible form in this new piece from Fox News.
The headline reads: "Search Showed No Explosives at Iraqi Base Before War's End."
Down into the piece we find this: "U.S. forces searched several times last year the Iraqi military base from which 380 tons of explosives vanished — including one check a week before Saddam Hussein was driven out of power. But the military saw no signs of a huge quantity of munitions."
Now that the White House's defenders have given up on the April 10th NBC visit, they've fixed on April 3rd (stretching into the 4th) arrival of units from the 3rd ID, which we first noted late Monday evening.
Fox and Larry Di Rita (Don Rumsfeld's communications guy) are now arguing that since those units that were there on the 3rd and 4th of April didn't find a "huge quantity of munitions" that the stuff had already been taken away.
Now, once again, let's review a few points.
Remember, this is a huge facility. The fact that this particular stuff wasn't found during a brief inspection is hardly conclusive about the whereabouts of these explosives, especially since that's not what they were looking for.
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.
So after a quick search what they found mainly were thousands of vials of white powder that turned out to be an explosive, and quite probably RDX and/or HMX.
Now, does this prove that the explosives were all there on the 3rd of April and that they were then left for looters to pick over? Of course, not. Like the visit on the 10th, this was a quick inspection of a facility with hundreds of buildings. At worst it was inconclusive as far as the explosives are concerned. But there is also this contemporaneous evidence that strongly suggests that they did find some of the explosives on site.
Needless to say neither the Fox Report nor the Di Rita marching orders, which they were working from, mentioned this.
One can get mixed up in the murkiness that the White House spin-doctors are trying to create here. But that's the point. They're just trying to kick up a lot of dust.
I have to tell you, though I figure that it will ruffle feathers all around, that this desperate hopping from one explanation to another reminds me very much of those desperate days when Dan Rather and Mary Mapes were hunting around trying to find some backing -- after the fact -- for a story that turned out to have very little behind it.
The same thing is going on here. The folks at the White House were caught completely flat-footed by this whole story. It's not something that they or the civilian mis-planners of the war ever gave much thought to.
But now they realize that the way they can get out of this is to find some way to show that the stuff wasn't there when they arrived. So first they try with the NBC story. And when that falls apart they move on to this story. But it doesn't really hold up either.
Later Di Rita brought out the then-commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division (the first troops on the scene) who said that in the weeks after April 3rd when his troops came through the area on the way to Baghdad it would have been "very highly improbable" that anyone could have put together a convoy to haul the stuff away because the two roads through the area were choked with US military convoys bringing men and materiel into the country.
Perhaps small-scale looting, he said, but not a major operation.
On the face of it, that sounds persuasive.
But then former weapons inspector David Kay was on CNN just a short time later saying that he can't believe it could have happened in the short time window before or during the war either -- which is just what Di Rita is trying to suggest. And it has to be one of the other. Here's Kay ...
I must say, I find it hard to believe that a convoy of 40 to 60 trucks left that facility prior to or during the war, and we didn't spot it on satellite or UAV. That is, because it is the main road to Baghdad from the south, was a road that was constantly under surveillance. I also don't find it hard to believe that looters could carry it off in the dead of night or during the day and not use the road network.
So Kay not only says he doesn't think it happened in the only other possible time -- the last three weeks of March -- he also seems to think that it could have been done later without using those major roads.
Again, Di Rita and his associates in the Bush campaign certainly don't know what happened. Nor are they trying to find out what happened. What they're trying to do -- a la Rather and Mapes in those ugly days -- is try to come up with something, anything, that will provide an alternative, exonerating explanation of what happened. And as each new piece of evidence or explanation gets knocked down, they look around for something else.
As of late Wednesday evening, Drudge is reporting that the Russians carted it off just before the war. I kid you not.
Here we go again.
Late Update: Drudge's 'the Russians did it' story is up now at the Washington Times, all based it seems on the say-so of John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, whose theory about Russian involvement even Di Rita seems to be distancing himself from.
Shaw does at least provide the adminsitration's 9th or 10th theory of what happened. It had to have been taken out before the war because the US watched the place so closely no other explanation is possible. "That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special explosives] disappearing was impossible," Shaw told the Times. "And Number 2, if the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."
You can't make this stuff up.
Or, I guess, actually you can.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the New York Times talks to some of the folks who looted the place during the early weeks of the occupation.
--Josh Marshall
I just sat down to watch a few minutes of the alternative fact universe that is the Fox News Channel. And it's really quite bracing to see the ridiculousness up close, even from folks who should know better like Mort Kondracke or even Mara Liasson. I've always been curious what sort of brainwashing they give these otherwise good people before they take up regular gigs at that place.
To hear them tell it, the most likely time the explosives disappeared was before the war started. No one knows otherwise, including the current Iraqi officials, who say they have no way of knowing when the stuff disappeared. For all those reasons, Kerry's in big trouble. And also the NYT-CBS-IAEA anti-Bush conspiracy, did we mention that?
The collapse of the only purported evidence that the explosives were snaked away under Saddam's rule doesn't seem to have gotten their attention. What's more, only a few hours ago former weapons inspector David Kay said he found it highly implausible that the materials could have been carted away in a big fleet of trucks during the brief window of time between the last IAEA inspection and the arrival of American troops less than four weeks later. That's in contrast to the Fox panel that says it's the most likely scenario, despite the absence of any evidence.
And the Iraqis? They say they don't know when the stuff disappeared either? That must be breaking news because the guy in charge there now said today that he has specific knowledge that the explosives were taken after fall of the old government. Perhaps he's part of the anti-Bush conspiracy too but at least we can do this hopeless dead-ender the courtesy of accurately reflecting his public statements.
To the White House, and thus to Fox, no one can talk about this because we still don't know precisely what happened to the stuff -- which is of course a bit of a side-effect to leaving the place abandoned for a year and a half and never mounting any sort of investigation into what happened. For them, the administration's incompetence and cluelessness amounts to their silver bullet.
--Josh Marshall
President Bush's comments today on the al Qaqaa matter are so telling, disjointed and over-the-top that it's really worth reprinting them in full (with the most rancid or ridiculous passages emphasized courtesy of the TPM editorial staff) ...
A President must be consistent. After repeatedly calling Iraq the wrong war and a diversion, Senator Kerry this week seemed shocked to learn that Iraq was a dangerous place full of dangerous weapons. (Laughter.) The Senator used to know that, even though he seems to have forgotten it over the course of this campaign. But, after all, that's why we went into Iraq. Iraq was a dangerous place, run by a dangerous tyrant who hated America and who had a lot of weapons. We've seized or destroyed more than 400,000 tons of munitions, including explosives, at more than thousands of sites. And we're continuing to round up the weapons almost every day.I want to remind the American people, if Senator Kerry had his way, we would still be taking our global test.
AUDIENCE: Booo!
THE PRESIDENT: Saddam Hussein would still be in power.
AUDIENCE: Booo!
THE PRESIDENT: He would control all those weapons and explosives and could have shared them with our terrorist enemies.
AUDIENCE: Booo!
THE PRESIDENT: Now the Senator is making wild charges about missing explosives, when his top foreign policy advisor admits "we don't know the facts." End quote. Think about that. The Senator is denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts. Unfortunately, that's part of the pattern of saying anything it takes to get elected. Like when he charged that our military failed to get Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, even though our top military commander, General Tommy Franks, said, "The Senator's understanding of events does not square with reality," and intelligence reports place bin Laden in any of several different countries at the time.
See, our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including this one -- that explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived, even arrived at the site. The investigation is important and ongoing. And a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not the person you want as the Commander-in-Chief. (Applause.)
If you're wondering about the all the 'boo' and 'applause' lines, we're working from the White House transcript.
By the way, did you understand his <$NoAd$>answer?
--Josh Marshall
Now do you understand why the GOP is putting so much muscle into its nation-wide voter suppression campaign?
According to these polling results put out today by the Republican polling firm of Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, if Kerry gets strong minority voter turnout he'll beat President Bush fairly decisively.
--Josh Marshall
There's actually a good deal more in <$NoAd$>this AFP article we noted earlier about the missing explosives, and information that puts some concrete detail behind the Science Ministry official's claim that the explosives were not spirited before the demise of the old regime.
I'm reprinting selected portions of the piece. But by all means read the whole thing ...
"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.
The regime's fall triggered a wave of looting of government and private property, which US-led troops struggled to contain as they were busy securing their own positions.
...
Science Minister Omar Rashad sent a letter on October 10 to the International Atomic Energy Agency sounding the alarm about the explosives in Al-Qaqaa.
Sharaa said the letter was sent after repeated warnings and inquiries by the IAEA over the disappearance of so-called duel-use nuclear material, which could be used for either conventional or nuclear means.
"Normally we should be overseeing all sites but these responsibilities were stripped away from us under the coalition authority," he said.
The ministry was only handed oversight responsiblities of two site -- Al-Tuwaitha and Al-Wardiya -- after authority was transferred from the coalition to the interim government in June.
There is no need to simply take these assertions at face value. Certainly there may be a variety of motives in play. But these are very concrete and specific claims, ones that reporters might easily use to follow up on with administration and CPA officials. And the motive for members of the interim government to be making trouble for the president at just this moment is not immediately clear.
--Josh Marshall
Department of pleasant surprises<$NoAd$> ...
NBC reports out Drudge's 'terror tape' mumbojumbo and adds some helpful debunking details ...
U.S. officials told NBC News that the tape included now-standard militant Islamist rhetoric promising widespread destruction inside the United States. The man cannot be identified, the officials said, because his face is covered by a headdress.The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said ABC gave the CIA a complete copy of the tape Monday. They described analysts’ concern as “low” because it is not clear that the tape was recorded recently and because the man on the tape, who speaks in what appears to be an American accent, mentions no details.
“It’s unclear what this tape is — even whether the person on the tape is an American,” one of the officials said.
Surprise, surprise.
--Josh Marshall
Uh-oh ... The head of the Iraqi Science Ministry's site monitoring department says there's no way the explosives were snagged from al Qaqaa before the former regime fell.
"It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," Mohammed al-Sharaa told the AFP. "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."
Does this guy have an axe to grind? Is he biased? I can't say I know anything about him. But if he's some Baathist or dead-ender why is he the guy in charge of protecting these sites now?
And how about those certified statements issued to coalition officials?
Which ones?
This may even convince CNN ...
--Josh Marshall
Is it all going to be about media bias now?
A short time ago Drudge tossed up one of his flashing sirens and soon enough he was pushing the story that ABCNews -- supposedly for political reasons -- is sitting on a new terror tape warning of an attack that will dwarf the horror of 9/11.
According to Drudge, the CIA is now analyzing the tape for authenticity and there are various other breathless quotes. The tape supposedly emerged in Waziristan over the weekend.
Then we hear the odd detail that the terrorist speaks in an American accent and speculation that it might be "Adam Gadhan - aka Adam Pearlman, a California native", who, if you look at his photo on this mug shot and flyer announcing the Bureau's interest in questioning him, looks like he probably turned to radical Islam after getting turned down for a role in Dazed and Confused or possibly Clerks.
These are difficult waters to wade into, particularly with skepticism, doubt or derision. And who knows what the story is here. But a few questions suggest themselves.
Like, since when do we even hear about 'terror warning tapes' when they don't come from the likes of bin Laden or al Zawahiri?
Questioning this stuff isn't a matter of making light of terrorism. It comes from so many people's frustration about how many ways these jokers have tried to use this stuff to divide this country and manipulate it for narrow political ends.
I half expect that by tomorrow we'll be watching a grainy video of Ken Mehlman, decked out in a phony beard a la Woody Allen in Bananas, bellowing that he and his boss OBL are about to take over America with one mammoth terror attack and institute compulsory gay marriage before forcibly converting everyone to Islam.
I can only hope that we've finally come to point where even the standard pushovers in the mainstream media are getting wise to this song and dance.
--Josh Marshall
Apparently President Bush and his campaign didn't want to make it three days straight without any comment from the commander-in-chief about the al Qaqaa business.
But it wasn't pretty.
No, it probably won't surprise you that I thought it was weak. But I really don't think many of the president's supporters (at least not those who still have any critical faculties left) will be too heartened by it either.
What I jotted down just as I was listening was a line about Kerry's "wild charges about missing explosives" and how Kerry's "denigrating the actions of our troops in the field without knowing the facts."
Beside that it seemed to be a mix of 'Not my fault', 'We still don't know what happened', 'Maybe they were already gone, 'Criticizing me means criticizing the troops' and then on top of that some more mumbojumbo about Tora Bora.
I almost expected him to start whining about media bias.
--Josh Marshall
We've now gone two days without President Bush making any comment at all about the al Qaqaa business. As the Times notes, the president twice ignored reporters' questions on the topic yesterday.
Will Wednesday be number three?
It's an oddly defensive stance less than a week before an election.
--Josh Marshall
This evening, Wingerdom is all aflutter about what they now see as the New York Times-CBS-IAEA international anti-Bush conspiracy. But they might do better to focus their anxieties elsewhere.
Like at the Pentagon, for instance.
Who over there is trying to stick it to the president?
Look at two big news stories on Tuesday, the Washington Post report that the White House plans to ask for some $70 billion more in Iraq spending just a week or two after the election and this USA Today piece reporting that the Pentagon is planning to add roughly 20,000 more troops to the force in Iraq in anticipation of the elections in January.
Just on the basis of logical inference, I'm gonna bet those leaks didn't come from Scott McClellan.
More troops in the country is something that many administration critics have been pressing for. But, still, it's not the news the Bush campaign wants to be talking about one week before the election. Combined with the al Qaqaa business, these two stories managed to create what one network news talking head called a trifecta of bad Iraq news to kick off the last week of the campaign.
Tom Squitieri, author of the USA Today piece, provides some possible guidance about who was behind the troop deployment story: "Four Defense officials with direct knowledge of troop planning for Iraq discussed what the Pentagon must do to meet the need for more troops at election time. They asked not to be identified because troop matters are highly sensitive and decisions have not yet been finalized." The Post sourced its story to Pentagon officials and "Appropriations Committee aides." But what Republican Appropriations Committee aides -- who are the ones who'd know the best details -- would have leaked this stuff to the Post this week?
Even in the al Qaqaa story, while Larry Di Rita has been working reporters trying to get out the White House's storyline, there's been a steady back-draft of off-the-record comments by Army officials that keep tripping him up.
I also couldn't help but notice that both the Times and CBS managed to get lengthy and rather candid interviews with Col. Joseph Anderson, commander of the unit that came through al Qaqaa on April 10th with that NBC News crew. He completely upended the NBC/Drudge storyline that the White House had been depending on all day. And for CBS, Anderson even tossed in the bonus comment that he would have needed four times as many troops to secure all the weapons depots that his troops came across while sweeping into Iraq.
If it were appropriate, I might even note that one of the folks who received the 'talking points' di Rita sent out today describing how to spin the al Qaqaa mess decided to send them on to me.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that the Army is trying to drive the president from office or that there's anything coordinated about this. I'm simply pointing out that if you look at the Pentagon as a whole -- and not just Larry Di Rita's shop in OSD -- in Bush-Cheney '04 terms, it's starting to look like part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
--Josh Marshall
Now might be a good time <$NoAd$>for a follow-up from Rick Jervis of the Chicago Tribune.
Back on September 30th, he wrote a piece about the lawlessness in the Iraqi town of Latifiyah, what the US military calls the "IED [or 'improvised explosive device'] capital of Iraq."
Down a ways into the story, in the process of explaining all the violence and bombings and explosions, Jervis writes ...
The insurgents probably are using weapons and ammunition looted from the nearby Qa-Qaa complex, a 3-mile by 3-mile weapons-storage facility about 25 miles southwest of Baghdad, said Maj. Brian Neil, operations officer for the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, which initially patrolled the area.The facility was bombed during last year's invasion and then left unguarded, Neil said. "There's definitely no shortage of weapons around here," he said.
From the context of the piece it sounds like he may be talking about mortar shells and artillery rounds rather than the RDX and HMX from al Qaqaa that everyone's now talking about.
Still, this sounds like something we should know more about.
[ed. note: thanks to TPM reader TH for having the eagle eye.]
--Josh Marshall
Oh if only he'd remembered his own sage advice ...
Back at the last debate, after John Kerry rattled off some press praise about one of his programs, President Bush quipped (at Kerry's and Bob Schiefer's expense), "In all due respect, I'm not so sure it's credible to quote leading news organizations."
I bet the folks at the White House are now wishing they'd followed the headman's advice before they based their entire push back on the al Qaqaa fiasco on a short blurb on NBC Nightly News that fell apart about as quickly as it took to get all their surrogates to start talking about it.
As we've noted in a series of posts over the course of the day, the NBC story started falling apart when MSNBC interviewed one of the members of the news crew in question, who said that there hadn't been any search at all. A short time later Jim Miklaszewski came on to explain that indeed there had been no search and that what the NBC News crew saw didn't tell us much of anything about whether explosives were still there at the time the news crew arrived with the 101st Airborne on April 10th. By early evening, Tom Brokaw told Nightly News viewers in polite but no uncertain terms that they hadn't said what the White House was claiming they did.
In fairness to NBC, they never ran that hard with their 'scoop'. And they carefully unpacked it over the course of the day. That fell to CNN, which got goaded into running with the story by Drudge. But by late in the afternoon, even CNN was bailing out.
There's certainly plenty of schadenfreude to go around. But it's worth drawing back and seeing this turnabout in the context of the broader story.
Given all that's happened in Iraq, the potency of the al Qaqaa story was never that it was the worst thing that has happened in Iraq. It's that it brings together in one package almost everything that's gone wrong: incompetence, abetted by denial, covered up by dishonesty, and all in one fatal brew.
And what do we have over the last forty-eight hours? The White House faces a press storm over a new revelation and their reaction is to go to battle with the news organizations involved with an argument they pretty clearly hadn't thought over for more than a few minutes.
Now the White House has first, denied they knew anything about the problem before October 15th; second, said they've known about it all along and that it wasn't their fault because it happened before we got there; and third, well ... I guess we'll find that out tomorrow.
Special thanks to TPM reader TB for reminding me of that moment from the first debate.
--Josh Marshall
I'm told that Dan Senor went on Paula Zahn's show this evening to try to push back on the al Qaqaa story, and that it wasn't a pretty sight. They've just uploaded the transcript. So I'm going to read it shortly. But before I do, an idea ...
When Jerry Bremer headed up the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, Dan Senor was his right hand man. He's still playing that role for Bremer here stateside now that the CPA has gone out of existence.
Now, Sunday evening I noted that there was one big dog who hadn't barked in this whole brouhaha. And that's Bremer. Yes, we're caught up with all this mumbojumbo about whether there are any aerial photographs of what was happening at al Qaqaa in March 2003. But Bremer's really the guy at the center of all this.
He was the administrator of Iraq for almost the entire period of the occupation. All these issues were part of his brief. He was the senior US government official on the ground. And according to Monday's article in the Times, the Iraqis told Bremer in May of this year of their concerns about al Qaqaa. Bremer would also almost certainly know about US pressure on the Iraqis not to communicate these concerns to the IAEA.
Yet, Bremer's not talking. The Times piece made that clear. And journalists who are trying to get him to talk are getting a particularly feeble excuse for why he won't.
He's telling them his publisher isn't letting him talk to the press.
(Back on July 4th of this year Bremer told Fox's Chris Wallace that he was about to "turn to writing a book about my experiences" in Iraq. So presumably that's what he's talking about.)
So when Senor hits the shows, shouldn't the hosts be asking him why his boss isn't willing to answer any questions on this topic from the press? Is the Times right that Iraqis told Bremer about the problem at al Qaqaa last May? Does he know about the pressure CPA officials put on the Iraqis not to talk to the IAEA?
Those would all be great questions to have answers to. But let's talk for a moment about the real reason Bremer is probably observing radio silence.
Let's go back to the beginning of this month.
What got Bremer in hot water a few weeks ago were his indiscreet remarks about how the US occupation force in Iraq was undermanned and the looting that ensued because of it.
"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," the Washington Post quoted him as saying. "We never had enough troops on the ground." In another speech, he reportedly said, "The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation.
Later, after the firestorm erupted, Bremer wrote an OpEd in the Times tried to do as much damage control as he could with his remarks. And he did so by pulling his criticisms and dissents back to the earliest stages of the occupation. In that way, his already public criticisms would only apply to this very limited period of time.
As he wrote in the Times, "I believe it would have been helpful to have had more troops early on to stop the looting that did so much damage to Iraq's already decrepit infrastructure."
Now, here I think we may be on to the root of the matter. A few weeks ago, the widespread looting and destruction of critical infrastructure in the first weeks of the occupation seemed an out-of-the-way and politically safe point.
Now, not so much.
When CBS interviewed the commander of the unit that visited al Qaqaa with that NBC news crew on April 10th, they heard the following ...
The commander of the first unit into the area told CBS he did not search it for explosives or secure it from looters. "We were still in a fight," he said. "our focus was killing bad guys." He added he would have needed four times more troops to search and secure all the ammo dumps he came across.
This really is the same issue, the heart of the matter: the lack of a sufficient number of troops early on to secure critical infrastructure and facilities. And it seems to be one to which Bremer's given quite a bit of thought.
I know it's not fun to get on the wrong side of your publisher. But somehow I think that's not the only reason Mr. Bremer's staying mum.
Special thanks to TPM reader ADJJ for recalling for me what Bremer said in the Times OpEd.
--Josh Marshall
The lede in tomorrow's Times story about al <$NoAd$>Qaqaa ...
White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the facility and had merely stopped there for the night on their way to Baghdad.
And then there's this ...
President Bush's aides told reporters that because the soldiers had found no trace of the missing explosives on April 10, the explosives could have been removed before the American invasion. They based their assertions on a report broadcast by NBC News on Monday night that showed video footage of the 101st arriving at Al Qaqaa.By yesterday afternoon, as Mr. Bush made his way through Wisconsin and Iowa, his aides had moderated their view, saying it was a "mystery" when the explosives disappeared. They said that it could have happened before or after the invasion and that Mr. Bush did not want to comment on the matter until the facts were known.
Reduced to hanging their hat on the say-so of the NBC News crew. Splendid.
Much more on this, this evening. But for now, those grafs above pretty much say it all, don't they?
--Josh Marshall
Interesting.
CBS Evening News just did a follow-up on the missing explosives story and it adds a few new facts to the mix.
First of all, remember how yesterday Scott McClellan said that,"the Pentagon, upon learning of [the disappearance of the explosives], directed the multinational forces and the Iraqi Survey Group to look into this matter, and that's what they are currently doing."
CBS talked to the Chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charlie Duelfer, in Baghdad and he says he hasn't gotten any order like that.
Duelfer does say something that may provide some grist for the White House's defenders. At this point, he says, he doesn't think the stuff is even worth looking for.
Here's the text from the CBS press release ...
"It's hard for me to get that worked up about it," Duelfer said in a phone interview from Baghdad, adding that Iraq is awash in hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives.
And how about the first troops who arrived on the scene and didn't find any weapons? Maybe not.
The commander of the first unit into the area told CBS he did not search it for explosives or secure it from looters. "We were still in a fight," he said. "our focus was killing bad guys." He added he would have needed four times more troops to search and secure all the ammo dumps he came across.
Too few troops?
--Josh Marshall
I'd be much obliged if people could send me examples of CNN news readers and anchors pushing the Drudge/NBC 'the weapons were already gone' line even now that NBC has pulled the plug on the story.
As we noted last night, on the Nightly News, NBC ran a segment on one of their news crews' visit to al Qaqaa on April 10th, 2003, as embeds with the 101st Airborne. According to that NBC initial report, these were the first US troops on the scene and the explosives were already gone.
NBC didn't run very hard with the story, though, as evidenced by the fact that it didn't even show up on the MSNBC website. But after Drudge started hammering it and it got ginned around the Republican media echo chamber, CNN picked it up and started running with it harder than NBC ever did.
They even made it the headline story on their website for much of last night.
They did this apparently without doing a google or Nexis search to see that the NBC crew embedded with the 101st Airborne wasn't with the first US troops to get there. That actually happened a week earlier, on April 4th 2003, as we noted in this post last night.
In a series of reports today from a member of the news crew in question and from follow-up reporting from Jim Miklaszewski, it became clear that the troops in question made no attempt to inspect the facility for the explosives in question.
Yet CNN is apparently still pushing it.
No matter how easy you guys give it up, they're still not going to love you like FOX.
Sad.
Late Update: As of 5:29 PM on the east coast CNN has a front page story that still includes the now-defunct NBC story.
--Josh Marshall
Lovely Di Rita?
We're told that the folks in the <$NoAd$>Department of the Army don't think the al Qaqaa debacle is such a 'who cares' situation as Don Rumsfeld's spokesman Larry Di Rita seems to think it is.
But they're not supposed to say so. At least not publicly.
To provide guidance on what they are supposed to say about the "missing explosives in Iraq", Di Rita, a political appointee sent out these "talking points" yesterday to folks in the Pentagon.
Recent stories in the media report that the Iraqi government has notified the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that several hundred tons of explosives are missing from the former Al-Qaqaa military facility in Iraq, about 30 miles south of Baghdad. Following are talking points on the issue.# Since Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003, Coalition forces have discovered that Saddam’s regime stored weapons in countless locations, including schools, mosques and hospitals. Citizens were forced to hide weapons in their homes and neighborhoods. Many Iraqis have bravely stepped forward with information leading to more weapons.
# Weapons searches have been successful in Iraq. The Duelfer Report states that since mid-September, Coalition forces have reviewed and cleared more than 10,000 caches of weapons and destroyed more than 240,000 tons. Another 162,000 tons of munitions are awaiting destruction.
# Some weapons were stored at the Al-Qaqaa Complex. Coalition forces were present in the vicinity at various times during and after major combat operations. The forces searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings at the facility, but found no indicators of WMD. While some explosive material was discovered, none of it carried IAEA seals.
# Although some believe the Al-Qaqaa facility may have been looted, there is no way to verify this. Another explanation is that regime loyalists or others emptied the facility prior to Coalition forces arriving in Baghdad in April.
# The material does not pose any nuclear proliferation risk.
# During the 1990s, the IAEA reportedly destroyed or rendered harmless all “single use” (i.e., uniquely usable in the context of a nuclear program) equipment and material in Iraq.
# The material in question is “dual-use” equipment (which could have conventional applications), high explosives that are somewhat more powerful than TNT. This dual-use equipment was generally permitted to remain in Iraq.
# Explosives of the nature reported missing from Al-Qaqaa are available around the world. It would be nearly impossible to verify that these materials ever left Iraq or are being used for any specific purpose.
# The Administration takes the report of missing munitions very seriously. The Iraqi Survey Group is evaluating this recent report by the Iraqi government.
It's good to see he's on the case.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, now can we say that the NBC Nightly News report that <$NoAd$>the explosives at al Qaqaa were already gone when the first US troops arrived -- the one Drudge goaded CNN into running with far harder than NBC ever did -- is now officially no longer operative?
Earlier we noted that MSNBC had interviewed a member of the NBC news crew that was embedded with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade, which visited the al Qaqaa facility on April 10th, 2003.
She said they didn't do any search. They were there on a "pit stop" on the way to Baghdad.
Now, NBC's Jim Miklaszewski just went on MSNBC with this follow-up (emphasis added) ...
Following up on that story from last night, military officials tell NBC News that on April 10, 2003, when the Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne entered the Al QaQaa weapons facility, south of Baghdad, that those troops were actually on their way to Baghdad, that they were not actively involved in the search for any weapons, including the high explosives, HMX and RDX. The troops did observe stock piles of conventional weapons but no HMX or RDX. And because the Al Qaqaa facility is so huge, it's not clear that those troops from the 101st were actually anywhere near the bunkers that reportedly contained the HMX and RDX. Three months earlier, during an inspection of the Al Qaqaa compound, the International Atomic Energy Agency secured and sealed 350 metric tons of HMX and RDX. Then in March, shortly before the war began, the I.A.E.A. conducted another inspection and found that the HMX stockpile was still intact and still under seal. But inspectors were unable to inspect the RDX stockpile and could not verify that the RDX was still at the compound.Pentagon officials say elements of the 101st airborne did conduct a thorough search of several facilities around the Al QaQaa compound for several weeks during the month of April in search of WMD. They found no WMD. And Pentagon officials say it's not clear at that time whether those other elements of the 101st actually searched the Al QaQaa compound.
Now, Pentagon officials say U.S. troops and members of the Iraq Survey Group did arrive at the Al QaQaa compound on May 27. And when they did, they found no HMX or RDX or any other weapons under seal at the time. Now, the Iraqi government is officially said that the high explosives were stolen by looters. Pentagon officials claim it's possible -- they're not sure, they say, but it's possible that Saddam Hussein himself ordered that these high explosives be removed and hidden before the war. What is clear is that the 350 metric tons of high explosives are still missing, and that the U.S. or Iraqi governments or international inspectors, for that matter, cannot say with any certainty where they are today.
Poor CNN.
--Josh Marshall
Just a pit stop.
This morning MSNBC interviewed one of the producers <$NoAd$>from their news crew that visited al Qaqaa as embeds with the 101st Airborne, Second brigade on April 10th, 2003.
This is the 'search' that the White House and CNN are hanging their hats on (empahsis added)...
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. Um, 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. Almost, 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 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. 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.
AR: Well, Lai Ling Jew, thank you so much for shedding some light into that situation. We appreciate it.
Of course, as we noted last evening, contrary to the Drudge/CNN account, this wasn't the first detachment of troops to visit al Qaqaa. That came a week earlier when explosives were in fact found in a quick spot check of the facility.
Bear in mind the the al Qaqaa facility contains a vast number of buildings. Different press reports put the number anywhere from 87 to 1100. The discrepancy, I believe, is a definitional one, depending on whether one counts major buildings or individual bunkers and storage units.
--Josh Marshall
Why did CNN get scammed into running a headline last night based on a Drudge news item? More on that later.
The never-ending decline of the house that Ted built.
--Josh Marshall
This morning John Kerry is hitting exactly the right note, both on the politics and on the merits. If the White House was trying to keep the al Qaqaa debacle under wraps until after the election, what else are they hiding?
--Josh Marshall
Let's note a few more problems with what I guess we should call the Di Rita/Drudge/NBC 'It was gone when we got there' hypothesis.
To refresh our memories, this is the claim that the explosives at the al Qaqaa facility were removed by the former Iraqi regime before the first US troops ever arrived on the scene. That wouldn't make the loss of the material any less dangerous. And it would raise serious questions about why the material was allowed to be dispersed. But it might go some way to mitigating the charge of incompetence since this would mean that the material was already gone before US ground troops were able to start guarding it.
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. This was in turn trumpeted by a number of conservative news outlets like Drudge and the Washington Times.
So, let's review some of the problems.
First, 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."
In any case, that visit wasn't the first time US troops went to the facility. That happened a week earlier, on April 4th, as was reported at the time. According to an AP account from the following day, the troops made spot visits to some of the buildings and found chemical warfare antidotes but no WMD.
The same report says they also found "thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder" which were initially believed to be chemical agents but were later determined to be "explosives."
Like the visit on the 10th, this visit seems to have been far from exhaustive and thus far from conclusive about what was there. Neither visit seems to provide clear evidence that the explosives were gone -- and the first may point in the opposite direction. (Further details about this first visit to al Qaqaa are contained in this April 5th article by the Post's Barton Gellman.)
Next comes the question of whether this really could have been pulled off at all under the circumstances.
As we noted earlier, there's a relatively brief window of time we're talking about when this stuff could have been carted away -- specifically, from March 8th (when the IAEA last checked it) until April 4th when the first US troops appear to have arrived on the scene.
Certainly there would have been time enough to move the stuff. That's almost a month. But this would be a massive and quite visible undertaking. As the Times noted yesterday, moving this material would have taken a fleet of about forty big trucks each moving about ten tons of explosives. And this was at a time -- the week before and then during the war -- when Iraq's skies were positively crawling with American aerial and satellite reconnaissance.
Considering that al Qaqaa was a major munitions installation where the US also suspected there might be WMD, it's difficult to believe that we wouldn't have noticed a convoy of forty huge trucks carting stuff away.
As the LA Times notes in Tuesday's paper, it's just not particularly credible ...
Given the size of the missing cache, it would have been difficult to relocate undetected before the invasion, when U.S. spy satellites were monitoring activity at sites suspected of concealing nuclear and biological weapons."You don't just move this stuff in the middle of the night," said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Baghdad.
If we had seen something like that happening, it's hard to figure we wouldn't have bombed the convoy, since the US had complete air superiority through the entire campaign. And if the thought that WMD might be on those trucks had prevented such an attack, certainly there would have been running surveillance of where the stuff was going and where it ended up.
My point here is not to say that this could not have occurred. What I am trying to show is that Pentagon appointees like Di Rita don't seem to have any clear idea what happened to this stuff. And in an attempt to push back the story, they're cooking up various theories, most with very short half-lives, that just don't seem credible to a lot of folks who follow these issues.
If you look at the multiple contradictions in the different stories administration officials told reporters over the course of Monday, it's hard not to get the sense that they're caught without a good explanation and they're just making this stuff up as they go along.
The folks who really understand this stuff don't seem to put much stock in what guys like Di Rita and Scott McClellan are saying. The LA Times piece notes that one of them is former chief weapons inspector David Kay, that notorious bush-basher and left-winger. Kay thinks the stuff was carted off after the old regime was history. Kay told the Times he visited the site in May 2003 "and it was heavily looted at that time. Sometime between April and May, most of the stuff was carried off. The site was in total disarray, just like a lot of the Iraqi sites."
--Josh Marshall
I'm working on a final update for the evening on the al Qaqaa issue. But I notice that CNN has picked up the NBC news report that the explosives were already gone when the first US troops arrived.
NBC, they say, "reports that the material had already vanished by the time American troops and an NBC crew arrived there on April 10, 2003."
You guys are awfully gullible. Did it strike you guys as odd that MSNBC doesn't even appear to have picked up this "report"?
Setting aside the matter of whether a detachment from the 101st Airborne and an NBC news crew would have been able to make that determination, they weren't the first US troops there.
The first American troops on the scene (from the 3rd Infantry Division) came a week earlier, on April 4th and they found lots of explosives -- though what kind is unclear from contemporary wire service reports -- in a series of spot checks of the 87 buildings and bunkers at the al Qaqaa complex.
--Josh Marshall
So which is it?
The Iraqi interim government says that the explosives at al Qa Qaa went missing some time after April 9th 2003 because of "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."
(Remember, Baghdad fell on April 9th, so presumably that's a marker denoting simply that it happened at some point after the fall of the old regime.)
Today, Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita suggested that the weapons may have been taken from al Qa Qaa in the final days of the old regime or in fact during the war.
Remember, the IAEA inspected the munitions in January 2003 and then returned to the site and saw that the seals were in place in March, just a week or so before the war started. So Di Rita is claiming that the explosives were taken away in a two or three week period in late March of very early April 2003. If Drudge is to be trusted (yes, yes, I know), NBC will be running with some version of this storyline.
But there's another version of events.
A Pentagon "official who monitors developments in Iraq" told the Associated Press today that "US-led coalition troops had searched Al-Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact."
That of course would mean that the explosives were not removed from the facility until some point after the war. And that would be in line with what the Iraqis two weeks ago told the IAEA.
Let's review for a moment. We have a dispute here about a window of time covering two to four weeks, say roughly from March 10th to April 10th 2003 at the longest. But it's an important few weeks because it was over this span of time that the region went from the control of Saddam's government to the US military.
If the Di Rita hypothesis rests on the claim that the first US troops that visited al Qa Qaa found that the explosives had already been stolen or looted or otherwise secreted away. (He has, in fact, already said this.) And that would mean that the US government has known the explosives were missing for some eighteen months.
The problem is that the White House has spent the entire day claiming that they knew nothing about this until ten days ago, October 15th. Scott McClellan said this repeatedly during his gaggle with reporters this morning. Indeed, he went on to say the following: "Now [i.e., after the notification on October 15th], the Pentagon, upon learning of this, directed the multinational forces and the Iraqi survey group to look into this matter, and that's what they are currently doing."
So McClellan says that the Pentagon only just learned about this. And that's why they only now assigned the Iraq Survey Group to examine what happened at al Qa Qaa.
But Di Rita says that the US government has known about it for 18 months.
So which is it?
They've known about it since just after the war and kept it a secret? Or they just found out about it ten days ago and now they're on the case?
PS. David Sanger has a nice follow-up today in the Times giving a tick-tock of the White House's story as it zigged and zagged over the course of the day.
PPS. The Sanger piece has now been expanded to include some more excuses and distortions from Bush campaign spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish.
--Josh Marshall
Nothing's his fault.
The president today in Colorado ...
Now my opponent is throwing out the wild claim that he knows where bin Laden was in the fall of 2001, and that our military passed up the chance to get him in Tora Bora. This is an unjustified criticism of our military commanders in the field.
Reality = wild claim.
--Josh Marshall
Difficulties keeping the story straight.
In this article filed today by the AFP, Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita suggests that the explosives at al Qa Qaa may have disappeared even before American troops arrived on the scene.
"We do not know when -- if those weapons did exist at that facility -- they were last seen, and under whose control they were last in ... It's very possible -- certainly it's plausible -- that it was the Saddam Hussein regime that last had control of these things."
Di Rita went on to say that it is not clear whether the explosives were at the facility when US troops did their initial searches of the place for weapons of mass destruction and related materials.
But another Pentagon official who spoke to the Associated Press seems to disagree ...
At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said US-led coalition troops had searched Al-Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact. Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
Sad.
--Josh Marshall
As McClellan is now making clear, RDX and HMX -- the explosives looted from the al Qa Qaa facility are hardly a big deal at all. And in any case, they're the responsibility of the Iraqis.
But interestingly, on January 30th 2003, when then-UN Ambassador (and now Ambassador to Iraq) John Negroponte testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about Iraqi non-compliance with the inspections regime, one of the items in the long bill of particulars he adduced was the fact that the Iraqis had not come clean about their stocks of HMX.
"Dr. ElBaradei," he told the Committee, "also explained that IAEA has yet to determine the relocation or use of certain, dual-use items, such as the high explosive HMX which was sealed by IAEA in 1998, and which Iraq claims it has used since for mining."
No, it certainly wasn't the highest on their list of concerns. But it was there.
--Josh Marshall
Would al Qaida want to get its hands on RDX and HMX? al Qaida expert Peter Bergen says 'yes'. In fact, Peter says that's what would-be LAX bomber Ahmed Ressam got caught trying to bring over the Canadian border.
--Josh Marshall
A clip from an article just posted on the WaPo website that truly says it all ...
In a 45-minute speech in Greeley, Colo., today, Bush ignored the news about the missing explosives, Washington Post staff writer Mike Allen reported. Instead, Bush stuck to his stock assertion: "America and the world are safer with Saddam Hussein sitting in a prison cell."
Doesn't that capture everything?
--Josh Marshall
When your whole story is a crock spun together on the fly, I guess it's hard to keep your numbers straight. But this still seems a noteworthy contrast. Two quotes from McClellan's briefing this morning ...
"We've destroyed more than 243,000 munitions, we've secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed."
Followed a few moments later by this ...
"And as I pointed out, that's why we've already destroyed more than 243,000 munitions and have another nearly 363,000 on line to be destroyed."
Special thanks to TPM reader DJ.
--Josh Marshall
Definitely take a moment to skim over Scott McClellan's remarks today in the press gaggle about the al Qa Qaa debacle. It's a brazen effort.
McClellan's key point is that the US knew nothing about any of this until October 15th, ten days ago.
That contradicts what the Times says, which is that Iraqis claim they told Jerry Bremer about this last May. It contradicts what the Iraqis have told the IAEA, which is that the US pressured them not to report the disappearance to the IAEA.
It also stands in what I guess you'd have to call simple defiance of the fact that the US had formal charge of these facilities for more than a year ending in late June of this year.
To say that we knew nothing about the theft of these materials during that entire time is simply not credible. And if it's really true, it's considerably worse than if it's a lie.
Asked whether securing a facility like this wasn't a key priority of the occupation forces, McClellan responded: "At the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom there were a number of priorities. It was a priority to make sure that the oil fields were secure, so that there wasn't massive destruction of the oil fields, which we thought would occur. It was a priority to get the reconstruction office up and running. It was a priority to secure the various ministries, so that we could get those ministries working on their priorities, whether it was ..."
And then one of the key questions from one of the reporters ...
Q: Scott, did we just have enough troops in Iraq to guard and protect these kind of caches?MR. McCLELLAN: See, that's -- now you just hit on what I just said a second ago, that the sites now are really -- my understanding, they're the responsibility of the Iraqi forces. And I disagree with the way you stated your question, because one of the lessons we've learned of history is that it's important to listen to the commanders on the ground and our military leaders when it comes to troop levels. And that's what this President has always done. And they've said that we have the troop levels we need to complete the mission and succeed in Iraq.
Q But you're saying this is the responsibility of the Iraqi forces. But this was our responsibility until just recently, isn't that right? Weren't these -- there is some U.S. culpability, as far as --
MR. McCLELLAN: You're trying -- I think you're taking this out of context of what was going on. This was reported missing after -- when the interim government informed that these munitions went missing some time after April 9th of 2003, remember, that was when we were still involved in major military action at that point. And there were a number of important priorities at that point. There were munitions, munition caches spread throughout Iraq. There were -- there was a concern that there would be massive refugees fleeing the country. There is concern about the devastation that could occur to the oil fields. There was concern about starvation that could happen for the Iraqi people.
So -- and obviously there is an effort to go and secure these sites. The Department of Defense can talk to you about -- because they did go in and look at this site and look to see whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction there. So you need to talk to Department of Defense, because I think that would clarify that for you and set that record straight.
Did you understand his answer? Or the proper 'context' he was saying it needs to be seen in? As nearly as I can tell his explanation is that there was a lot of stuff going on during the early occupation and that this wasn't that high on the priority list.
And even this explanation, if accepted at face value, doesn't get at the real issue. Let's say things were just too crazy in the first month or more of the occupation to secure the al Qa Qaa facility. What about the period of relative calm between spring 2003 and the end of the year. Didn't anybody go out and see that the place had been swept clean?
Not only are McClellan's explanations not good ones, most of them don't even make any sense. And they all hang on the palpably false premise that the US knew nothing about this until little more than a week ago.
--Josh Marshall
Could the al Qa Qaa debacle be a sinister and ingenious ploy on the part of the White House to give the public one more view of the goofball buck-passing that has been such an asset to the president's administration?
Look at the latest from Scott McClellan on Air Force One. This from CNN ...
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said President Bush wants to determine what went wrong.McClellan, on Air Force One, stressed that the missing explosives were not nuclear materials, and said the storage site was the responsibility of the interim Iraqi government, not the United States, as of June 28, when the United States turned over the nation's administration to the Iraqis.
The president wants to determine what went <$Ad$>wrong.
This reminds me of when I wanted to know why my Palm Pilot stopped working after I dropped it in the bath tub.
Doesn't this capture Bush's entire presidency?
The thing happened more than a year ago, his administration has taken active steps to cover it up and now that the truth finally comes out, he 'wants to determine what went wrong.'
The idea of accepting responsibility for anything is simply alien to the man. He doesn't even have the good grace to scam us by finding a scapegoat to pin the blame on.
And what about Scott McClellan trying to pin it on the Iraqis?
Does he not read the newspapers or does he think everyone else to too stupid to remember what they just read in them this morning. The stuff was taken more than a year before the Iraqis took over the US occupation authority. And even the highly-cautious Times piece makes clear that Jerry Bremer was told about it no later than May of this year.
--Josh Marshall
Nolo contendere?
As one would expect, the Kerry campaign has seized on today's revelation of the Bush administration's latest lethal blunder in Iraq and pressed the point on the campaign trail.
And the Bush administration's response?
Kerry's lying?
It's not true?
There's an explanation?
Apparently, on the merits, there's no response at all.
Bush spokesman Steve Schmidt issued the campaign's response: "John Kerry has no vision for fighting and winning the War on Terror, so he is basing his attacks on the headlines he wakes up to each day."
--Josh Marshall
Agreed, it's extremely important to find out what happened to those few hundred tons of high-explosives and how much of the stuff has already been used in terrorist operations against American troops and Iraqi civilians inside Iraq.
But missing explosives isn't the only thing we've got to be concerned about. What about the missing Administrator of Occupied Iraq?
Where's Jerry Bremer?
As we noted last night, he seems to have stiffed the Times. And as nearly as I can tell he still hasn't made any comment about any of this even though he is at the very center of what happened.
An honorary TPM ambassadorship to the first reporter who gets Bremer on the record!
(No, I don't have any idea what that means either.)
--Josh Marshall
On Good Morning America, President Bush pushes the idea of a pre-election or an election day terrorist attack: "I am worried about it and we should be worried about it. On the other hand, I don't want people to say, that he knows something I don't know and therefore, something is imminent."
--Josh Marshall
The White House seemed to be caught flatfooted at first in their response to the al Qa Qaa debacle. But now the spin is emerging.
One 'senior administration official' tells CNN that "the discovery was not made public sooner because standard intelligence practice is not to let the enemy know such information."
The folks I'm talking to don't think that much of that excuse. But isn't the point that 'the enemy' probably already knows because the enemy took the stuff? And since the stuff's been gone for something like a year and a half, when were people in the US going to be informed?
And is that why no one told the IAEA? Were we afraid they'd tell the enemy?
Then there's this quickly emerging excuse, I guess we might call it the FUBAR rationale.
The same official took this one out for a spin with CNN too ...
The senior administration official downplayed the importance of the missing explosives, describing them as dangerous material but "stuff you can buy anywhere." The official added that the administration did not see this necessarily as a "proliferation risk.""In the grand scheme -- and on a grand scale -- there are hundreds of tons of weapons, munitions, artillery, explosives that are unaccounted for in Iraq," the official said. "And like the Pentagon has said, there is really no way the U.S. military could safeguard all of these weapons depots or find all of these missing materials."
So, given what a powder keg Iraq is, what's another few hundred tons of plastic explosives. It's not even "necessarily" a proliferation risk.
I'm feeling better already.
--Josh Marshall
What have the al Qa Qaa RDX and HMX been used for so far?
The BBC notes that "HMX and RDX [are] key components in plastic explosives, which have been widely used in car bombings in Iraq."
Then there was this terrorist arms cache discovered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia after the housing complex bombing in Riyadh. It contained "38.4 tons of 'RDX explosive materials'".
No word yet on the explosives used in the car bombing today near the Australian Embassy in central Baghdad.
--Josh Marshall
One last point for the evening.
If you go to the MSNBC website, the headline on the al Qa Qaa story reads: "Paper: Iraq tells U.S. of missing explosives."
Please.
That not only doesn't square with simple logic, it doesn't even match with what the article in Times says.
The issue here is that the Iraqis finally told the IAEA.
The material seems to have been missing since some time shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in March/April 2003. So this isn't something that just happened. It probably happened some eighteen months ago.
What's more, the Times piece notes explicitly that Iraqi officials say they told Jerry Bremer about this last May. By definition, that means that the US government knew about this almost six months ago, and while it was still the occupying power.
And all this on top of the fact that IAEA officials have told journalists from several news outlets, including the Nelson Report, that the Bush administration not only failed to notify the IAEA of this while the US was still the occupying power but has pressured the Iraqis not to inform the IAEA both before and after the July 1st handover of power.
Are those facts covered by "Iraq tells U.S. of missing explosives"?
Please.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Assignment Desk: a list of questions reporters might do well to get to the bottom of in this looted explosives story ...
1. Most glaringly, why won't Jerry Bremer talk? If you look at the Times piece it says: "Efforts to reach Mr. Bremer by telephone were unsuccessful." Yet the piece also makes clear that the Times has been working on this story since sometime last week. So presumably this isn't a matter of their calling him this morning and then spending the afternoon playing phone tag. Bremer's literally at the center of this. He was in charge of Iraq for almost the entire period of the occupation. What's his story? And if he won't talk to the press, why not?
2. The Times piece says: "American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could be used to produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings."
That rather passes over the question of whether these explosives have already been used against US or Iraqi troops. As we noted earlier this evening, government officials who spoke to the Nelson Report seemed to think that's very likely. One US government official told Nelson, "this is the most likely primary source of the explosives which have been used to blow up Humvees and in all the deadly car bomb attacks since the Occupation began." Another official told him, "this is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops."
But surely we can get a more specific sense. If for no other reason, given Iraqi record keeping and the quantity of explosives in question, it seems unlikely that specific attacks could be forensically demonstrated to have used these specific explosives from this stash. But, again, certainly we could narrow down the possibilities.
For instance, hypothetically, let's say that the explosive from al Qa Qaa were all of type A and B and the vast majority of attacks in Iraq used types C and D. Then we could say that as bad as it is that all of this material has gone missing, little or none of it seems to have been used against US soldiers or Iraqi civilians. On the other hand, if most of the attacks have used types A and B, then perhaps that 350+ tons of the stuff that got carted away from al Qa Qaa would be a likely source of a lot of it.
Again, clearly I'm no expert on military-grade explosives, or any other grade for that matter. But clearly some reporting is needed here to give us a rough sense of the range of possibilities about how much of this stuff was used against our own soldiers.
This evening's Nelson Report contains the following passage ...
That last, rueful crack refers to efforts by DOD to create the impression that the road side bombs are made from captured artillery shells; our sources say, “this is very unlikely. Taking a shell apart is incredibly dangerous and difficult, it has to be done by real experts, and we’d have seen more ‘accidental explosions’ if they were doing this on any scale. No...it’s the RDX and HMX doing most of the damage, you can bet on it.”
I have no way of evaluating that judgment. But certainly that's a good topic for more reporting. One hint comes from this report from a Indian think-tank which says that RDX is often used in 'improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Kashmir.
3. This is a simple one. What pressure, if any, did Pentagon, CPA or now US Embassy officials bring to bear on Iraqi officials not to report the disappearance of the al Qa Qaa materials to the IAEA? What have the Iraqi representatives to the IAEA in Vienna told IAEA officials? What do the folks in Iraq say? What does Jerry Bremer say? And why would the US not want the Iraqis to inform the IAEA?
4. Did CPA officials become aware of the disappearance of the al Qa Qaa materials prior to the CPA's dissolution at the end of June 2004? And if they did, why did they not inform the IAEA?
A quote from an administration official in the Times piece suggests that the folks in charge of the CPA at the time were simply too busy with the impending governmental turnover and the growing insurgency to do anything about it. The quote from the senior administration official is: "It's not an excuse. But a lot of things went by the boards."
5. Whenever White House, Pentagon or CPA officials say they found out about the looting of the al Qa Qaa facility, did they inform congress?
6. The Times article says that Condi Rice "was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing." How many days after she was informed did she begin her current campaign swing?
7. In the revised and expanded version of the Times article, Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita suggests that whatever happened to the explosive material at al Qa Qaa must be seen in context of far larger quantities of explosives which have been destroyed by coalition forces. The actual text reads ...
A Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Sunday evening that Saddam Hussein's government "stored weapons in mosques, schools, hospitals and countless other locations," and that the allied forces "have discovered and destroyed perhaps thousands of tons of ordnance of all types."
The reporting from the Times and the Nelson Report would seem to suggest that this is not an apples to apples comparison, given the specific type of high explosives at al Qa Qaa. Who's right?
--Josh Marshall
If I'm not mistaken, the piece on al Qa Qaa in the Times has now been revised and expanded since it was first posted late Sunday evening.
--Josh Marshall
The New York Times, following the lead of The Nelson Report, has now posted its story on the looting of the 350-odd tons of high-explosives from the al Qa Qaa weapons facility in Iraq.
The Times story treads lightly over the question of whether the explosives in question have played a substantial role in the various suicide bombings, car bombings and sundry other attacks in Iraq over the last year.
They also say little about Pentagon pressure on the Iraqis not to report the disappearance of the explosives to the IAEA.
In its place seems to be an administration version of events in which no one was put in charge of ascertaining what happened to the al Qa Qaa materials, then Iraqis mentioned it to Bremer in May but he seems not to have passed on word to anyone else, then Condi was told "within the past month" but it's not clear whether she told the president.
If that's true, you've really gotta marvel at the chain of command this crew has in place. The whole thing is "I forgot", "I didn't know", "I didn't tell anybody", "It wasn't my responsibility", "What?" and so on.
There are even moments of refreshing candor like this line: "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."
As I wrote earlier, there are very good reasons to disbelieve this Keystone Cops explanation for what happened. There was a much more concerted effort to keep hidden what had happened here, including pressure on Iraqi officials not to report the disappearance of these materials to the IAEA.
But even if you accept this explanation on its face, I think it's almost worse.
Think about it ...
The explosives at al Qa Qaa were one of the primary -- and much-publicized -- concerns of non-proliferation officials at the IAEA and elsewhere prior to the war. During and after the war there was apparently no effort to secure the facility or catalog its remaining contents. Then no one realized there was a problem until more than a year later when someone told Jerry Bremer. But he didn't tell anyone in Washington, or at least no one remembers. And then Condi Rice only found out about it within the last month, but it's not clear she told anyone (i.e., the president or other principals) either.
Next up, a list of questions reporters should be focusing on ...
--Josh Marshall
Now that the story of the looted munitions dump has seen the light of day, all the bigs will be digging into it this week, at least one as early as tomorrow morning. But let's take a moment to put into perspective what this means.
To review the essential facts, prior to the war, Iraq's Al Qa Qaa bunker and weapons complex had roughly 350 tons of high explosives under IAEA seal. After the war, for whatever reason, the complex was either not guarded at all or inadequately guarded. And all those explosives (primarily RDX and HMX) were carted away.
What we're talking about here isn't just a bunch of dynamite. This encyclopedia entry says RDX "is considered the most powerful and brisant of the military high explosives." And not 350 pounds, 350 tons.
It is apparently widely believed within the US government that those looted explosives are what in many, perhaps most, cases is being used in car bombs and suicide attacks against US troops. That is, according to TPM sources and sources quoted in this evening's Nelson Report, where the story first broke.
One administration official told Nelson, "This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information."
In response to questions about whether the material might have been smuggled out of Iraq, another source told Nelson, "It’s still in Iraq, and this is the most likely primary source of the explosives which have been used to blow up Humvees and in all the deadly car bomb attacks since the Occupation began.”
One need only look to the West Bank or al Qaida operations around the world to see that terrorists or insurgents don't need access to 350 tons of military-grade explosives to be able to pull off terrorist operations. But that quantity of material would clearly constitute an almost limitless supply for the insurgents now targetting US military personnel in Iraq. And it seems that these materials constitute at least a major source of the stuff now being used against US troops, not to mention Iraqi military personnel, policemen and civilians.
It has become increasingly clear of late in just what a ramshackle and disorganized fashion the occupation was run, with too few troops, too little planning, and often misplaced priorities.
Now we are starting to see the human consequences of that incompetence. I don't think we can know yet how many of our own troops have been killed with explosives that were looted because the administration didn't field enough troops to secure key installations like the al Qa Qaa facility. But the number may be high. And I'm sure we'll get more details on that count in reporting over the next few days.
In any case, it puts the consequences of the administration's incompetent management of the war and occupation in a whole new light.
Then there's the subsidiary matter of the use of these sorts of explosives in triggering devices for nuclear weapons. The IAEA clearly believes this aspect of the loss of these materials is a very big deal. But I want to wait to hear more from non-proliferation experts about this aspect of the story.
Those points give at least an outline of the consequences of this screw-up. But what's possibly the most damning aspect of this is the level of dishonesty, subterfuge and cover-up. What's clear in Nelson's and TPM's reporting is that the administration has known about this for at least a year. But they've gone to great lengths to hide the facts both from monitoring organizations like the IAEA but also, by extension, from the American public.
When the US was still the occupying power in Iraq, we didn't inform the IAEA.
And once Iraqis were in semi-control over the reporting process and now under de jure control, with the reestablishment of a nominally sovereign Iraqi government, the US continued to order the Iraqis not to report the theft of the explosives to the IAEA.
There are a number of reasons why you can imagine the White House and the civilians at the Pentagon wouldn't want to inform the IAEA. But one pretty clear one is that letting the IAEA find out would pretty clearly mean that the American public would find out what a major league screw-up the president and his advisors had allowed to happen.
Only a couple weeks ago did the Iraqis finally report the theft to the IAEA. And from there it was only a matter of time till the yearlong cover-up started to unravel.
But it didn't even stop there.
As I've noted, the White House and the Pentagon have known for more than a year that this stuff had gone missing. But the White House, according to TPM sources, has known that this story was coming for at least ten days. Again, not just the underlying facts -- that the stuff had been stolen and was being used against American troops (they've known that for more than a year) -- but the fact that this story was going to break in the not too distant future. And they've been hoping it could be pushed back until after the election.
As another administration source told Nelson, "What the hell were WE doing in the year and a half from the time we knew the stuff was gone, is obviously a huge question, and you can imagine why no one [in the Administration] wants to face up to it, certainly not before the election."
Another told Nelson, "You would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information."
It's a story that really brings together the adminstration's two cardinal sins: dishonesty and incompetence.
And what other stories are they trying to push back until after November 2nd?
--Josh Marshall
This has been rumored in Washington for several days. And now the Nelson Report has broken the story.
Some 350 tons of high explosives (RDX and HMX), which were under IAEA seal while Saddam was in power, were looted during the early days of the US occupation. Like so much else, it was just left unguarded.
Not only are these super-high-yield explosives probably being used in many, if not most, of the various suicide and car bombings in Iraq, but these particular explosives are ones used in the triggering process for nuclear weapons.
In other words, it's bad stuff.
What also emerges in the Nelson Report is that 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.
I quote from Chris Nelson's summary ...
Despite pressure from DOD to keep it quiet, the IAEA and the Iraqi Interim Government this month officially reported that 350-tons of dual-use, very high explosives were looted from a previously secure site in the early days of the US occupation in 2003. Administration officials privately admit this material is likely a primary source of the lethal car bomb attacks which cause so many US and Iraqi casualties. In the first presidential candidate debate, on foreign policy, Democratic nominee John Kerry charged that captured munitions and weapons were being turned against Coalition Forces, with US troops suffering 90% of the casualties. But the specifics of the losses from the Al Qa Qaa bunker and building complex, only now being reported, were apparently unknown outside of DOD and the US occupation authorities. The Bush Administration barred the IAEA from any participation in the Iraq invasion and occupation process, and blocked IAEA requests to help in the search for WMD and other dangerous materials. As part of the UN sanctions regime still in place when the US invaded, the IAEA had “under seal” 350 tons of RDX and HDX explosives, since singly, and in combination, these materials can be used in the triggering process for a nuclear weapon. However, the explosives were allowed to remain in Iraq due to their conventional use in construction, oil pipe lines, and the like. Since the explosives went missing last year, sources say DOD and other elements in the Administration sought to block the IAEA from officially reporting the problem, and also tried to stop the new Iraqi Interim Government from cooperating with the IAEA. But finally, on Oct. 10, the Iraqi’s formally notified the IAEA, and on Oct. 15, the IAEA formally notified the Bush Administration. In press guidance prepared for release in the event news got out, but not released until today, when requested by The Nelson Report, State Department spokesmen confirmed the Iraqi government and IAEA report dates, and that 350 tons of dual use high explosives could not be accounted for. State says DOD has now authorized the Iraq Survey Group to investigate the situation, which, by all accounts, took place in April, 2003. The official press guidance claims “no indications of WMD” at the Al Qa Qaa site, but concedes that the IAEA-sealed explosives were already missing at that time. Some sources say that in addition to the explosives, 20,000 RDX-armed rockets were lost, but we cannot confirm this. However, sources do say that parts of Iraqi Scud engines, and other metal components, have turned up in scrap metal yards in Amsterdam.1. The Summary gives you the sum total of what we have been told, starting Friday, by informed observers and directly involved officials. There was an expectation of a major newspaper story on it this morning, and perhaps also a segment on tonight’s 60 Minutes, on CBS Television. The newspaper report failed to materialize, the TV show may yet appear...stay tuned.
-- the information confirmed by the State Department Press Guidance, prepared, but not called for Friday, is important in that it provides, for the first time, explicit details on exactly what was lost to “looters” of the Al Qa Qaa bunker and building complex in the early days of the Iraq invasion and occupation, in April, 2003. The importance of the information? A highly informed official offered the assessment that, “this is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information.”
Further down in this evening's edition of The Nelson Report comes this ...
3. The Iraqi authorities were caught in a similar bind, observers feel. Under heavy pressure from their sponsors in DOD and US occupation authorities not to cooperate with the IAEA, by confirming that all 350 tons of sealed explosives could not be accounted for, the Iraqi’s had to wait until the formal turnover of authority before notifying the IAEA, sources here suggest. So the Iraqis failed to act until Oct. 10, and the IAEA did not formally notified the US, by letter, until Oct. 15, according to the State Department’s official press guidance.-- “What the hell WE were doing in the year and a half from the time we knew the stuff was gone, is obviously a huge question, and you can imagine why no one [in the Administration] wants to face up to it, certainly not before the election,” an Administration source says. Other sources also noted the language of the State Department guidance, which they interpret as seeking to deflect from the gravity of the situation in two ways: first, by listing hundreds of thousands of tons of other munitions and weapons already discovered and/or destroyed, “the Guidance has the effect, for unsophisticated listeners, of lowering the profile of ‘only’ 350 tons of RDX and HMX explosives from Al Qa Qaa”.
Note: experts were reluctant to say exactly how much of this stuff it takes for a successful road side bomb, for example, but the guesstimates were “a few pounds, at most.” In other words, “with 350 tons out there, the bombing can go on for years...”
4. Second, several highly informed sources were careful to hint, the “implications” of RDX and HMX, singly, and in combination, “are also an extremely serious issue, which is why they were under IAEA-seal”. One expert pointedly added, “and that’s all I can say on that, even on background.” Another sources noted, however, “it’s interesting that the Press Guidance seems to want us to look past any WMD implications for what was taken.”
-- another obvious question is what’s been done with the 350 tons, if anything, outside of Iraq? Our sources were unanimous in thinking that for reasons noted below, “it’s still in Iraq, and this is the most likely primary source of the explosives which have been used to blow up Humvees and in all the deadly car bomb attacks since the Occupation began.” Sources also discount any possibility except that “this was a highly organized operation using heavy equipment, and it was done right under our noses.”
More on this very soon ...
--Josh Marshall
It's looking more and more clear that the GOP is looking to pull in Ohio the same voter 'fraud'/voter suppression operation they tried to pull two years ago in South Dakota. Probably they'll be doing it in other states as well, but Ohio is clearly ground zero. Not altogether a surprise since they just sent their South Dakota get-out-the-vote chief to run things in Ohio.
We'll be posting more on this later today. But if you're interested in finding out more about what I'm talking about you can read up on the 2002 South Dakota drama by running through the TPM archives. Go to the TPM search function up there in the upper left hand corner of the site and type in keywords 'Dakota fraud'.
--Josh Marshall
More news of shady contracting with Halliburton from Time Magazine, via Campaign Extra.
--Josh Marshall
