Can't wait for CBS to find out about the HMS Titanic. Man will that be a scandal about the shipping industry!

Just a point about securing Iraq:
I am sick of hearing about how we "protected the Iraqi Oil Ministry but didn't bother to secure high explosives!"

Just to explain or make this point - As I have said many times before - Could it be that the President and the Army knew more about what our real enemy/objective was in Iraq?

The weapons were not in the ammo dump when the army got there!

But the Documents that prove the UN was corrupt and was actually paid to be our enemy in this endeavor were still in the oil ministry! Got that! Without those we wouldn't have proof as to why they blocked us - why they stopped our entry through Turkey, which would have freed up our troops to stay behind and guard an empty ammo dump!

We wouldn't have been able to confront them (which I believe will happen in Bush's second term) and cause a real alliance against terror!

Folks, our real enemies in this matter are spinning this and Kerry and the Main Stream Media is helping them just so they can take over power. But what kind of power will they have at the end of this? We will be lucky to have the "spitballs" Zell Miller discussed at the RNC!
DKK

Still no mention in the NYT of any doubt about their version of the story. And it's still on the front page of NYT.com.

But to run this on the Sunday before the election? Even if it appeared the story might hold up, 60 Minutes clearly was hoping to sway the election.

NBC completely sunk the NY Slimes story. Two inbedded reporters stated that when US troops entered the supposed ammo depot, these explosives were not there.

I would like to know where the shame and embarassement should be. There are at least six facts:

(1) The weapons are missing
(2) The 101st Airborne was there on April 10th
(3) A different crew of troops was there on April 4th
(4) The 101st Airborne did not search the facilities
(5) The State department found signs of looting when a full search was actually done
(6) Iraq and the IAEA say it was because of looting

Not NBC, Drudge, MSNBC, CNN, or any other news outlet disputes ANY of those six statements. You are free to believe what you want, but the NYT story is by no means completely discredited.

As for CBS, it is probably unnecessarily calculating hold back the information until the day before the election (though they could easily argue they just wanted to check their facts after the memo incident), but is it not worse that the President was going to wait until AFTER the election to tell us?

Bill, your #4- the heart of your case- is just not true.

That isn't what the embedded reporter states. And she was the heart of your case.

Isn't it great to hear and read Libs now concerned about weapons missing in Iraq? Hmmmm. Now I wonder where those WMDs went off to? Also, in their freaking fanatical attempt to bring down a president, they are willing to denigrate the military, denigrate law enforcement and intelligence, denigrate anyone involved in the war on terrorism. These slimey know-nothings keep harping that "we are not safer in America" while we in law enforcement work to protect Americans everyday. Now you know why the vast majority of military and law enforcement people are pro-Bush and believe Kerry is nothing more than another Liberal, loudmouth traitor -- a professional anti-war protester. Period.

(sigh)

What we have here, gentlemen, is an absolutely undeniable episode of media bias.

This incident occurred in April 2003, which was 18 MONTHS AGO!

If it was SO important, then why didn't the NYT run a front-page story in May or June of 2003? Yet they waited until ONE WEEK before the Presidential election to run this expose!

Nitpicking the details doesn't change this fact one bit.

And "60 Minutes" wanting to run the story 2 DAYS before the election makes the situation even worse.

What I clearly see is a mainstream legacy media desperately trying to throw the election. Period.

And isn't it funny how "October Surprises" that originate from Congress or the press are always directed at Republican candidates?

Mike, you are right on. The Dems and the media looked at the poll numbers for states and freaked. For instance, an internal poll taken by the Dems shows that Bush leads in Florida by 8 percent. In Ohio it's 4 percent. And Kerry finds he has to campaign in states he though were a lock for him. Also, because of McCain-Feingold the Dems need their allies in the MSM to help them nail Bush.

And Bill K, on what do you base your so-called facts? Do you have your own private intelligence agency? And I'm so impressed in your knowledge of troop movements while sitting in your pajamas at your PC. LOL.

PS: I'm still waiting for PETA to respond to my letter asking them why they did not protest Kerry's "killing animals-for-votes program." I wonder if Kerry shot the goose in the back since I hear he's a back-shooter from way back.

Yeah, Bill K, please provide sources for your facts. I would like to undersatnd your basis. Just a guy tryin' to figger this out.

Too long, Bill K!

Hey, I was hoping someone could give me hand with this. I've never been in the military, so not sure what the SOP is for 'searching for weapons'. I found this on Fox:

"The embedded reporter, Lai Ling Jew, told cable news partner MSNBC on Tuesday that she stopped with the Second Brigade at the Al-Qaqaa facility, 30 miles south of Baghdad, and stayed there for 24 hours.

"The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us," she said. "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."

So there were conventional weapons (hey, I thought there weren't weapons), but they weren't secured. Shouldn't they have been to avoid their falling into the hands of looters? Also, the reporter says that there wasn't a 'formal' search, although they were there for 24 hours.

Can somebody help me understand this? They're starting to talk about this at the water cooler - I'm in an office full of lefties - and I'd like to combat their one-sided arguments.

Well, facts 1,2, and 6 are in every story about the matter so I don't think it is necessary to source them. Mainly because you will find them in all the other source material.

As for point 5:

"State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said that coalition forces searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings at Al Qaqaa facility after the war, looking for weapons of mass destruction. He said the troops found none, but did see signs of looting."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6323933/

Point 3:

"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."

Yesterday is April 4 - - as the story was written April 5th.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A31589-2003Apr4¬Found=true

The white powder wasn't chemical (as noted) and was, if I am not mistaken, explosives.

Point 6:

Unfortunately this comes from Joshua Marshall currently, but since it was, ya know, on national television it can be easily verified.

(1) Earlier today the producer embedded with the 101st airborne said this:

"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."

(2) Just now NBC's went on MSNBC and said this:

"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"

So, again, you are free to believe what you want, but to act as if the NYT article was completely unfounded is ridiculous.

Sorry, I was at a late lunch.

Looting HMX ain't easy.

Kerry is trying to pretend the explosives are something you can just walk away with.

HMX is a fine powder, and not very useful for making IED's. The idea that it was removed from the site by looters is ridiculous. Where did the trucks come from and where did they go?

Well it was there when the UN inspected it and then gone a month later. During that month we invade and took over the country. Somebody had to have moved it.

Are you saying it just went away?

hmm

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council

One of the first post-election things I'd like to from the Bush White House is the suspension of all MSM access to the White House. Quite frankly, I would have liked to have seen it in response to the Rathergate episode.

That was in February, UN inspectors saw this stuff in March, and are forces were there in April - - all while (as Powell's presentation shows) we were watching locations with large stockpiles. This either slipped through the cracks early on, or was messed up after the invasion.

Oh Bill....

While you accuse the Whitehouse of a coverup, YOUR OWN LINK shoots that down

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6323933/

"IAEA kept theft quiet
ElBaradei told the council the IAEA had kept the theft quiet since learning of it from Iraqi authorities on Oct. 10 to give the U.S.-led multinational force and Iraq’s interim government “an opportunity to attempt to recover the explosives before this matter was put into the public domain.”"

It was the IAEA that tried to keep it a secret...well waddya know... Josh Marshall is wrong again. See what happens when you worship false demigods.

You guys are fun to watch though.

Bill K: The premise that the material was either there before the invasion or lost after depends on the veracity of the UN. The same UN that was taking bribes from Hussein.

Given that corruption was business-as-usual in Iraq are we to believe that the Hussein goverment didn't have access to UN seals? Or that insurgents moved 380 tons of material unobserved during a military invasion simply doesn't pass the laugh test.

Bill what flavor kool-aid you like best, I like goofy grape!!

- Bill K...Most of the time you and I see eye to eye on things, mainly because you evidence a high level of intelligence and common sense, seperating any personal issues you may have with your politics and blogmenting with good reasoning, articulation, and impecable fact checking. Every now and then you slide into the rhetorical slipstream of the moonies....

- This is just exactly what it seems. A last minute pot shot at the Bush Admin, carping on every infintesimal detail that can possible be dug up. The obligatory "October supprise"....

- I echo what one of the Bush RNC people emailed to Drudge...."What the hell does this mean.....Is Kerry now saying we didn't go into Iraq soon enough???"....

- The IAEA is pissed off because the Bush people didn't give them more years of negotiation while Iraqi women and children died, deprived of the OFF funds Saddom was busily siphoning off in concert with France, Germany, Russian and who knows what other countries. Bush's preemption made them look bad and this is payback...

- At least you begrudgingly admit to the duplicitous plans of CBS... Plans that were no doubt thrwarted in some part by your own very excellant efforts in exposing their fraudulent partisan bias during MemoGate...

Ok... so CBS is now officially slimy to the core. That said, this story does raise some interesting questions like where did the explosives go? And... if they could hide this could they hide smaller things like a few gallons of anthrax, VX, or other assorted nasty weapons.

Lets assume for the moment that the NYT has it right and that 380 tons of high explosive were looted while we weren't looking... We know that they were there--and now they aren't. Perhaps we should think that the Saddam regime destroyed them somewhere in the desert because they might be associated with WMD production...and then again perhaps we shouldn't think that....

But then doesn't it seem possible, even plausible that if the explosives were there--and now they aren't--that other nastier things--were also there? Ok --I know that this could not be possible :-) but doesn't the possibility that something like this could occur lend credibility to the idea the Saddam's WMD were "removed" rather than destroyed?

It seems that one can think one of three things--

1. Saddam clandestinely broke the IAEA seals and destroyed the dual use exposives with the rest of his WMD and ended up having his country invaded and having his sons killed because he was proud (or stupid) to provide us with evidence of this distruction (which probably would have gotten him out of hot water).

2. Saddam clandestinely broke the IAEA seals and hid the explosives and everything else associated with his most valuable weapons programs so the they could be used another day...

3. After nearly 6 Months of preparation we caught Saddam flatfooted--unable to hide his critical programs of interest. His posession of WMD was a hoax prepetrated by the Bush administration in its desperate attempt to wrest control of Iraq's oil reserves... Furthermore, because our commanders on the ground and in Washington were underprepared or stupid we let an unknown and potentially unorganized band of looters steal 380 tons of explosives while we have our backs turned...oh and did I say that the WMD thing was a hoax... I must be repeating my self.

Ok--I know--I've pushed this to an extreme but I think you have to be drinking serious kool-aid to be believing scenarios 1 or 3.

Hopefully the NYT will not let this evolve into NYTrogate... :-) Yes I stole the line from another post but I like it!

Isn't it interesting that Kerry already had ready to air about the explosives? This was reported late yesterday. How do you get an ad so quickly without previous knowledge of the story? It would be interesting to see when his "explosives" ad was made.

The way this war is armchair-quarterbacked is absolutely ridiculous...

So the Dems "support the troops" but claim that they are so inept as to have spent 24 hours in a place and not noticed that they were sitting amongst many tons of explosives. Priceless.

Here's another angle. The troops were racing to Baghdad, primarily concerned with accomplishing a mission and keeping themselves out of body bags. No one knew the level of resistance to be encountered. So while they were setting up a secure perimeter, and Oh yeah, probably resting from days of continuous operations, they were supposed to go around on some U.N. style, IAEA seal verification mission? Not likely.

This is another perfect example of the liberal left bashing our troops under the guise of "holding the administration accountable".

We can sit here all day finding things that were not done perfectly. War does not unfold perfectly. Bottom line, there is no evidence these particular explosives are being used against us, and it is simply a non-story.