Mising explosives? What missing explosives?

[clinthopson]

There are still fools out there who believe Shrub is doing a good job against terrorism.

(CNN) -- Some 380 tons of explosives, powerful enough to detonate nuclear warheads, are missing from a former Iraqi military facility that was supposed to be under American control, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog says.

Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told CNN the Iraqi interim government reported several days ago that the explosives were missing from the Al Qaqaa complex, south of Baghdad.

The explosives -- considered powerful enough to demolish buildings or detonate nuclear warheads -- were under IAEA control until the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. IAEA workers left the country before the fighting began.

"Our immediate concern is that if the explosives did fall into the wrong hands they could be used to commit terrorist acts and some of the bombings that we've seen," Fleming said.

She described Al Qaqaa as "massive" and said it is one of the most well-known storage sites. Besides the 380 tons, there were large caches of artillery there.

Fleming said the IAEA does not know whether some of the explosives may have been used in past attacks.

There was no immediate response from the Bush administration on the IAEA announcement.

But a senior administration official told CNN that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was notified about the missing weapons about a month ago. Iraq Survey Group inspectors are investigating, the official said.

The discovery was not made public sooner because standard intelligence practice is not to let the enemy know such information, the official said.

There are hundreds of tons of other weapons and munitions missing around the country, and it is impossible for the United States to track down all of them, the official said.

Even so, he conceded, the story is not a good one for the White House, just over a week from Election Day.

A European diplomat told The New York Times that Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, is "extremely concerned" about the potentially "devastating consequences" of the vanished stockpile.

"The immediate danger" of the lost stockpiles is its potential use by insurgents to make small, but powerful, explosive devices, an expert told the Times. The expert said the explosives could be transported easily across the Middle East.

According to the Times, the stockpiles missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe.

The Iraqi letter to IAEA identified the vanished explosives as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or "high melting point explosive," 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or "rapid detonation explosive," among other designations, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or "pentaerythritol tetranitrate."

Fleming said the IAEA, whose mission is to keep track of everything with potential nuclear weapons applications, had been monitoring about 100 sites in Iraq, but there were only a few of special concern, including Al Qaqaa.

"The concern is that other sites that have items that are potentially dangerous have gone missing," Fleming added.

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."

The official said the Iraq Survey Group, the administration's weapons investigators, concluded that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, and documented the scope of the problem.

Reacting to the IAEA announcement on Monday, Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry said the "incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and put this country at greater risk than we ought to be."

In response, the Bush campaign accused Kerry of using the IAEA announcement to attack the president.

"John Kerry has no vision for fighting and winning the war on terror, so he is basing his attack on the headlines he wakes up to each day," said Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt.

"If John Kerry wants to spend the next eight days trying to explain positions again, we welcome that debate. John Kerry can't lead the nation to victory in a war he doesn't believe in." (Full story)

[patricia]

In their zeal to protect the oil ministry and the oil fields, the Bush Administration neglected protecting everything else, including the stockpiles of conventional weapons.
The only thing that I can think of is that, thinking that the invading forces would be welcomed with flowers and huzzahs, they completely forgot about the conventional weapons which were known to be in Iraq. They obviously didn't have nuclear weapons, or biological or chemical weapons, but they DID have plenty of other weapons, including raw materials for bombs, which kill just as dead. OOPS.
Incompetence doesn't have a definition in the new dictionaries. There is just a group photo of the Bush Administration.

[lynn]

The foriegn press is not holding their punches on this one.

Bombshell for Bush: 350 tons of explosives go missing in Iraq
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
26 October 2004

In a massive pre-election embarrassment for the Bush administration, nearly 350 tons of lethal explosives - which could be used to trigger nuclear weapons - have vanished from a military facility in Iraq supposed to have been guarded by US troops.

Hardly had the disappearance come to light than John Kerry, the Democratic presidential challenger, seized on the episode as proof that George Bush was incapable of keeping America safe. The material could already be in terrorist hands, he warned yesterday.

This was "one of the great blunders of the war," Mr Kerry said on the campaign trail in the swing state of New Hampshire. A statement from his campaign said the "unbelievable incompetence of this President and this administration has put our troops at risk and this country at greater risk", adding that Mr Bush, "who talks tough and brags about making America safer, has once again failed to deliver",

According to The New York Times, which broke the story in a lengthy front-page story, the missing stockpiles - some 350 tons in all - are of HMX, RMX and PETN, extremely powerful, conventional explosives that are used to blow up buildings, fill missile warheads or detonate nuclear weapons. So devastating are they that just one pound of a similar explosive was enough to destroy Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988. HMX, RMX, or explosives like them have been used in car and apartment bombings in Moscow and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in recent years.

At the time of the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the explosives were being stored by the Saddam regime, under United Nations control at the al-Qaqaa military facility south of Baghdad, which was mentioned in the Government's September 2002 dossier as a source of possible chemical-weapons production. Some time after the fall of Saddam the explosives disappeared, but their loss was not formally notified to the Bush administration and the IAEA nuclear watchdog agency in Vienna until two weeks ago.

In a letter on 10 October 2004, the Ministry of Science and Technology of the interim Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi detailed the losses to the IAEA, which it ascribed to "theft and looting". Five days later, the agency sent the letter to Bush's administration.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the IAEA, is said to be "extremely concerned" about the "potentially devastating consequences" of the vanished explosives. Yesterday, the agency made clear that the US, as leader of the coalition in Iraq, had been repeatedly warned of the importance of making sure the stockpiles were safe. "The coalition was responsible" for looking after the weapons, an IAEA spokeswoman said. "We had hoped that they would be protected."

After the news was disclosed, Mr ElBaradei formally informed the UN Security Council in a letter yesterday. Agency officials denied suggestions that the IAEA director had been under pressure from the administration to keep the news quiet until after the presidential election next Tuesday.

The White House immediately moved to contain the possible political damage, playing down the threat posed by the explosives. The material did not constitute a risk in terms of nuclear proliferation, said Scott McClellan, Mr Bush's spokesman.

As soon as US officials in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, had been told of the disappearance, the news was passed to Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, who then informed the President. Dismissing complaints that the news should have been made public earlier, the White House said the Iraq Survey Group - which reported last month - would try to find out what had happened.

It remains to be seen whether the episode is lost in the swirl of the campaign, or whether it becomes the "October surprise" - the unexpected event dreaded by both parties, capable of tipping a close election to the other side.

Democrats see the debacle as a perfect means of discrediting Mr Bush's claim that he is the commander-in-chief best able to protect America from terrorists. "The unbelievable blindness, stubbornness, arrogance of this administration to do the basics have now allowed this President to once again fail the test of being the commander-in-chief," Mr Kerry said.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...p?story=576048

[lynn]

Originally Posted by clinthopson

[
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."

OK make that 760,000 pounds of explosives, ..."So devastating are they that just one pound of a similar explosive was enough to destroy Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988. HMX, RMX, or explosives like them have been used in car and apartment bombings in Moscow and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in recent years."

Ooops. I wonder who has this stuff now.

[frank m]

So this administration official said that they didn't make this public because they didn't want them to know that they had stolen it???

Impossible.


Iraq never possessed those explosives.


Nice try though.

[john williams]

Looks like Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction.



Maybe we, the superior western nations, should invade...oh yeah, we did that already.

Australia is in the west?

[bluenoter]

Originally Posted by JBW

Looks like Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The weapons in question were not only known of but had been secured and were being guarded under a UN agency's control.

Then the UN agency pulled out, and whoops! The Bush administration forgot to have anyone guard the weapons. Silly, silly Bush administration.

[john williams]

Originally Posted by Scott Dolan

Australia is in the west?

Silly question.

[bluenoter]

(off topic)

JBW--

Stop by Dennis G.'s thread and see a couple of nice recent messages about a poster's Rom/Andalusian musical heritage, related film recs, etc.

[john williams]

Thanks Rita, will do.

Originally Posted by bluenoter

(off topic)

JBW--

Stop by Dennis G.'s thread and see a couple of nice recent messages about a poster's Rom/Andalusian musical heritage, related film recs, etc.

Threadjacker!!!

[patricia]

Originally Posted by frank m

So this administration official said that they didn't make this public because they didn't want them to know that they had stolen it???

Well, that's one way to think about this collossol blunder, I guess.
The other way to look at it, after you've gotten over being horrified at the outright stupidity of the decision not to guard the weapons is that perhaps Mr Bush's confidence ratings on handling his War On Terrorism may decline in an election year. If they could have delayed the announcement of the vanishing of the weapons, which they seemed determined to do, that would have been better for the self-described War President.
Already the spin on it is that despite this, the Bush Administration has destroyed 400,000 metric tonnes of explosives. Oh, OK. Well there's that.
Now, what is it that happened to the other explosives?? Gone, you say??
Apparently, they just disappeared, nobody knows where. That's a lot of explosive material to just be GONE!!! It had to be transported away from the site by trucks, and trucks, and trucks!! And are we to believe that this happened and nobody noticed?? Astounding, the naivete that is assumed of the American people, that they will buy such a load of ...................well, Bullshit.

[lynn]

Originally Posted by patricia

Already the spin on it is that despite this, the Bush Administration has destroyed 400,000 metric tonnes of explosives. Oh, OK.

Are they just counting the tons of explosives we've dropped on the Iraqi resistance strongholds or what?

[GoodSpeak]

Originally Posted by Scott Dolan

Australia is in the west?

No, it's a part of The Far East.


[Hint: buy a map and a poltical compass.]



Amazing.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by lynn

Are they just counting the tons of explosives we've dropped on the Iraqi resistance strongholds or what?

That's an easy mistake to make. Different list, I guess.
If you say 300,000 metric tonnes, real fast, it doesn't seem like such a huge quantity, a pittance, really.
They'll find them............they promise.
Let's just hope they don't end up being used to kill even more people. After all, there's no other use for explosives than to blow things up.

SOMEBODY has them.

[mke]

Originally Posted by JBW

Looks like Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction.

These aren't WMDs.

[Phil_Meloy]

Originally Posted by patricia

They obviously didn't have nuclear weapons, or biological or chemical weapons

The appalling thing is that this site was specifically named in the British government's dossier on which they based their decision to go to war as a site for the production of phosgene to be used as a nerve agent - this dossier was prepared from shared US/British intelligence. This claim that it was a WMD production facility has now been disproved however you really have to ask that if this particular site was really considered to be such a high priority WMD risk at the time of the invasion why no-one bothered to secure it when they took Baghdad.

[Tom Storer]

CNN reports that NBC News journalists were with US troops when they arrived at the depot the day after Baghdad fell, and the explosives were already missing. They had been guarded by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but the IAEA understandably left the country in March, shortly before the war started. So there was a period of two or three weeks when there was no one guarding the explosives, and US troops had not yet arrived. It doesn't sound like the Bush administration is at fault (except for starting the war to begin with).

Report: Explosives already gone when U.S. troops arrived

NB News says its crew was embedded with soldiers at time

Tuesday, October 26, 2004 Posted: 3:01 AM EDT (0701 GMT)

(CNN) -- The mystery surrounding the disappearance of 380 tons of powerful explosives from a storage depot in Iraq has taken a new twist, after a network embedded with the U.S. military during the invasion of Iraq reported that the material had already vanished by the time American troops arrived.

NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.

While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC.

The International Atomic Energy Agency revealed Monday that it had been told two weeks ago by the Iraqi government that 380 tons of HMX and RDX disappeared from Al Qaqaa after Saddam Hussein's government fell.

In a letter to the IAEA dated October 10, Iraq's director of planning, Mohammed Abbas, said the material disappeared sometime after Saddam's regime fell in April 2003, which he attributed to "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. According to NBC, troops from the 101st Airborne arrived the next day to find that the material was already gone.

Prior to the Iraq war, the high-grade explosives at Al Qaqaa had been under the control of IAEA inspectors because the material could be used as a component in a nuclear weapon, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said. IAEA and other U.N. inspectors left the country in March 2003 before the fighting began on March 19.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday that five days after the IAEA received the letter from the Iraqi government, the agency alerted U.S. officials in Vienna, who in turn told National Security Director Condoleezza Rice. She then alerted Bush, McClellan said.

Once U.S. officials were alerted, the multinational force in Iraq and the Iraq Survey Group, charged with hunting for weapons in Iraq, were both ordered to investigate what was missing and the possible circumstances, according to State Department spokesman Adam Ereli.

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

The news of the missing explosives followed an IAEA report earlier this month that said high-end, dual-use machinery that could be used in a nuclear weapons program was missing from Iraq's nuclear facilities.

"Our immediate concern is that if the explosives did fall into the wrong hands, they could be used to commit terrorist acts and some of the bombings that we've seen," the IAEA's Fleming said.

She described Al Qaqaa as "massive" and said it is one of the most well-known storage sites. Besides the explosives, it also held large caches of artillery.

Fleming said the IAEA, which is based in Vienna, Austria, did not know whether some of the explosives may have been used in past attacks.

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

Ereli said coalition forces searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings at the Al Qaqaa facility after the war for weapons of mass destruction. The troops found none, but did see indications of looting, he said. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003.

"Some explosive material at the time was discovered, although none of it carried IAEA seals, and this discovery was reported to coalition forces for removal of the material," Ereli said.

Ereli said coalition forces have cleared 10,033 weapons caches and destroyed 243,000 tons of munitions. Another 162,898 tons of munitions are at secure locations and awaiting destruction, he said.

A senior administration official played down the importance of the missing explosives, describing them as dangerous material but "stuff you can buy anywhere."

The official noted 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."

The official said the Iraq Survey Group concluded that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and documented the scope of the problem.

Threat from terrorists
A European diplomat told The New York Times that Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, is "extremely concerned" about the potentially "devastating consequences" of the vanished stockpile.

"The immediate danger" of the lost stockpiles is its potential use by insurgents to make small, but powerful, bombs, an expert told the Times. The expert said the explosives could be transported easily across the Middle East.

According to the Times, the stockpiles missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe.

The Iraqi letter to the IAEA identified the vanished explosives as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or "high melting point explosive," 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or "rapid detonation explosive," among other designations, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or "pentaerythritol tetranitrate."

Fleming said the IAEA, whose mission is to keep track of everything with potential nuclear weapons applications, had been monitoring about 100 sites in Iraq, but there were only a few of special concern, including Al Qaqaa.

"This is a real massive quantity of explosives that could have reached the hands of insurgents and could be used with deadly force and consequences against people in Iraq," Fleming said.

"One would have to assume it's been stolen by someone who has some sort of nefarious purpose for it."

Political fallout
With the U.S. presidential election eight days away, news of the missing explosives quickly became campaign fodder.

Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry immediately seized on the information to accuse President Bush of incompetence in failing to secure the material, charging that "this is one of the great blunders of Iraq and one of the great blunders of this administration."

But in the wake of the NBC report, the Bush campaign fired off a statement saying that Kerry's criticism of the president over the missing material has "been proven false before the day is over."

"John Kerry's attacks today were baseless," Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said. "He said American troops did not secure the explosives, when the explosives were already missing."

Schmidt also said that Kerry "neglects to mention the 400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that are either destroyed or in the process of being destroyed" in Iraq.

But Kerry senior adviser Joe Lockhart fired back with a statement of his own, accusing the Bush campaign of "distorting" the NBC News report.

"In a shameless attempt to cover up its failure to secure 380 tons of highly explosive material in Iraq, the White House is desperately flailing in an effort to escape blame," Lockhart said. "It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous."

Lockhart did not elaborate on how the Bush campaign was distorting the NBC report.

CNN's Suzanne Malveaux and Elise Labott contributed to this report

[john williams]

Originally Posted by mke

These aren't WMDs.

Of course they will be if used as such!

Anyway, it was a joke.

These explosives aren't WMDs just like US bombs aren't WMDs. No WMDs were used during 'shock 'n' awe'. These were nice friendly all loving tools of occupation... er, oh sorry...liberation.

[mke]

NB News says its crew was embedded with soldiers at time

"Embedded?"

[mke]

Originally Posted by JBW

Of course they will be if used as such!

Anyway, it was a joke.

These explosives aren't WMDs just like US bombs aren't WMDs. No WMDs were used during 'shock 'n' awe'. These were nice friendly all loving tools of occupation... er, oh sorry...liberation.

I understood that it was a joke. But that doesn't make them WMDs. And they can't be used as such if they aren't. WMDs are defined as nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, these are neither.

What is funny, however, is that the facility is called Al Qaqaa.

[john williams]

Originally Posted by mke

I understood that it was a joke. But that doesn't make them WMDs. And they can't be used as such if they aren't. WMDs are defined as nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, these are neither.

I acknowledge that that's one definition but I find it's unsatisfactory and used rather euphemistically to promote certain military and political ends. I prefer this-

WMD encompasses a broad family of weapons, including conventional, biological, chemical, nuclear, or other advanced weapons. These weapons are characterized by their broad-sweeping intended effects, such as inflicting mass casualties and/or physical destruction.

www.afams.af.mil/programs/projects/lftt/focus_areas.htm

Those carelesslessly misplaced explosives could quite easily be converted to to a weapon of mass destruction.

[Gary Sisco]

A 2000 lb bomb is a weapon of mass destruction, if people want to go there. One would make a huge hole out of Times Square, no problem.

What irks me about this "story," is that the Times already ran it, with satellite photos of the installation, last May. Don't they read their own newspaper? It wasn't just the explosives that disappeared, it was the entire installation. The whole thing was not only looted but dismantled for scrap. Everything. They had a before and an after photo of it, along with a very long, front page article about it.

I don't understand anymore what an editor's job is today. Bean counting, I guess. Certainly not editing.

[Gary Sisco]

By the way, they are much more effective as your standard anti-personnel weapon (mines, car bombs and so forth) than as one large weapon. Why waste your ammo in one huge boom? Lots and lots of "small" attacks, like they've been launching, are much more demoralizing and terrifying.

A huge percentage of the killed and maimed in Vietnam was the result of mines and various booby-traps. A much higher percentage than from AKs, machine guns, mortars, etc. Which is why so many people talked about "never getting a chance to see the enemy" and so forth.

[Dr Dave]

If the Times reported this story a year ago, and it isn't really Bush's fault, then Kerry ought to shut up about it. Better to talk about how we know where Osama is but we're too busy fighting in Iraq to go get him.

This election campaign is giving me the shakes. I can't believe how much misinformation and disinformation is out there floating around--from the major news sources, no less. The only thing I'm sure of is that George W. Bush is incompetent to be President and needs to be voted out of office.

[Gary Sisco]

Not a year ago, Doc. This past May. Sergio and I were looking at the Times photos during the NYC hang, and I'd read the article while having coffee before he got there.

Still ...

I'll tell you what, though, if this election goes to the courts, going to the courts will be standard practice, every election, from here on. Which will mean an even greater blow to the republic than 2000 was, as it will further decrease the people's role in "choosing" their gubmint.

[Coda]

I just gotta repost this sucker. Why oh why is the peanut gallery so quiet after this info gets released?

Report: Explosives could not be found when U.S. troops arrived
NBC News says its crew was embedded with soldiers at time
Tuesday, October 26, 2004 Posted: 10:43 AM EDT (1443 GMT)





(CNN) -- The mystery surrounding the disappearance of 380 tons of powerful explosives from a storage depot in Iraq has taken a new twist, after a television news crew embedded with the U.S. military during the invasion of Iraq reported that the material could not be found when American troops arrived.

NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.

While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC.

The International Atomic Energy Agency revealed Monday that it had been told two weeks ago by the Iraqi government that 380 tons of HMX and RDX disappeared from Al Qaqaa after Saddam Hussein's government fell.

In a letter to the IAEA dated October 10, Iraq's director of planning, Mohammed Abbas, said the material disappeared sometime after Saddam's regime fell in April 2003, which he attributed to "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. According to NBC, troops from the 101st Airborne arrived the next day to find that the material was already gone.

Prior to the Iraq war, the high-grade explosives at Al Qaqaa had been under the control of IAEA inspectors because the material could be used as a component in a nuclear weapon, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said. IAEA and other U.N. inspectors left the country in March 2003 before the fighting began on March 19.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday that five days after the IAEA received the letter from the Iraqi government, the agency alerted U.S. officials in Vienna, who in turn told national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. She then alerted Bush, McClellan said.

Once U.S. officials were alerted, the multinational force in Iraq and the Iraq Survey Group, charged with hunting for weapons in Iraq, were both ordered to investigate what was missing and the possible circumstances, according to State Department spokesman Adam Ereli.

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

The news of the missing explosives followed an IAEA report earlier this month that said high-end, dual-use machinery that could be used in a nuclear weapons program was missing from Iraq's nuclear facilities. (Full story)

"Our immediate concern is that if the explosives did fall into the wrong hands, they could be used to commit terrorist acts and some of the bombings that we've seen," the IAEA's Fleming said.

She described Al Qaqaa as "massive" and said it is one of the most well-known storage sites. Besides the explosives, it also held large caches of artillery.

Fleming said the IAEA, which is based in Vienna, Austria, did not know whether some of the explosives may have been used in past attacks.

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

Ereli said coalition forces searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings at the Al Qaqaa facility after the war for weapons of mass destruction. The troops found none, but did see indications of looting, he said. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 2003.

"Some explosive material at the time was discovered, although none of it carried IAEA seals, and this discovery was reported to coalition forces for removal of the material," Ereli said.

Ereli said coalition forces have cleared 10,033 weapons caches and destroyed 243,000 tons of munitions. Another 162,898 tons of munitions are at secure locations and awaiting destruction, he said.

A senior administration official played down the importance of the missing explosives, describing them as dangerous material but "stuff you can buy anywhere."

The official noted 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."

The official said the Iraq Survey Group concluded that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and documented the scope of the problem.

Threat from terrorists
A European diplomat told The New York Times that Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, is "extremely concerned" about the potentially "devastating consequences" of the vanished stockpile.

"The immediate danger" of the lost stockpiles is its potential use by insurgents to make small, but powerful, bombs, an expert told the Times. The expert said the explosives could be transported easily across the Middle East.

According to the Times, the stockpiles missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe.

The Iraqi letter to the IAEA identified the vanished explosives as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or "high melting point explosive," 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or "rapid detonation explosive," among other designations, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or "pentaerythritol tetranitrate."

Fleming said the IAEA, whose mission is to keep track of everything with potential nuclear weapons applications, had been monitoring about 100 sites in Iraq, but there were only a few of special concern, including Al Qaqaa.

"This is a real massive quantity of explosives that could have reached the hands of insurgents and could be used with deadly force and consequences against people in Iraq," Fleming said.

"One would have to assume it's been stolen by someone who has some sort of nefarious purpose for it."

Political fallout
With the U.S. presidential election eight days away, news of the missing explosives quickly became campaign fodder.

Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry immediately seized on the information to accuse President Bush of incompetence in failing to secure the material, charging that "this is one of the great blunders of Iraq and one of the great blunders of this administration."

But in the wake of the NBC report, the Bush campaign fired off a statement saying that Kerry's criticism of the president over the missing material has "been proven false before the day is over."

"John Kerry's attacks today were baseless," Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said. "He said American troops did not secure the explosives, when the explosives were already missing."

Schmidt also said that Kerry "neglects to mention the 400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that are either destroyed or in the process of being destroyed" in Iraq.

But Kerry senior adviser Joe Lockhart fired back with a statement of his own, accusing the Bush campaign of "distorting" the NBC News report.

"In a shameless attempt to cover up its failure to secure 380 tons of highly explosive material in Iraq, the White House is desperately flailing in an effort to escape blame," Lockhart said. "It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous."

Lockhart did not elaborate on how the Bush campaign was distorting the NBC report.

CNN's Suzanne Malveaux and Elise Labott contributed to this report

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast...ives/index.html

[Chris D]

When the weapons inspectors were there, these explosives were UNDER IAEA SEAL!

As the story above says, they left just before the U.S. invasion.