Josh's Weblog: A Big Day For Explosives

A Big Day For Explosives

So today's big news is the Washington Times story “Russia Tied to Iraq's Missing Arms”:

Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation…

There's also the last item in the piece:

Officials believe the Russians also can explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

Captain Ed of Captains Quarters Blog has some choice comments in his piece “Did 'Starving Soviets' Back The Moving Van Up To Al Qaqaa?”:

The new question is how the IAEA managed to hoodwink the New York Times, CBS, and the John Kerry campaign into thinking it did its job in securing the weapons from Saddam. Far from providing stable security, they actively fought to keep the HMX and RDX from being destroyed by UNSCOM, and then watched as it disappeared without a trace in 2001 and 2002.

Wizbang has been focused on the perfidy of the New York Times. A comprehensive piece is “CBS/NYT Times Story Crumbles Tonight.” Choice quotes:

The Russians probably moved the explosives, the Department of Defense has satellite images that might prove it and Mohamed ElBaradei might have mislead the United Nations Security council about the amount of explosives missing. And for good measure we learn the bunkers were never really sealed!

…

On Oct 10, 2004, Mohamad Albardi told the UN Security council that 350 tons of explosives were missing based on a search of the compound done in January including 141.2 metric tons of RDX and 194.7 metric tons of HMX.

However, the actual “Action Report” from January that Albardi was supposedly relaying to the UN says that only 3 tons of RDX were missing. No explanation for the discrepancy has been given yet but apparently there are about 130 US tons less explosives missing than we thought.

Hugh Hewitt's column at The Daily Standard “The Commander-In-Chief” points out Kerry's attacks on the explosives issue were not exactly beneficial to the Kerry campaign:

This week he embraced an already discredited account of missing munitions to attack the reputation of the 3rd Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne. Make no mistake, that is exactly what Kerry is doing when he asserts that deadly weapons went unsecured and unreported as these two divisions rushed to liberate Baghdad. And not just these divisions, but every officer and soldier who had a hand in drawing up the war plan. If the negligence that Kerry charges the military with was real, additional troops would not have made a difference. The initial search would still have been conducted by the 3rd I.D. and the site pronounced clear. The 101st would still have spent 24 hours in the munitions complex before moving on.

Other online articles have been just as gleeful in pointing out the errors of John Kerry, the New York Times, and CBS. For example, there's the New York Post's Ralph Peters article “The Myth of the 'Missing Explosives': A Shameless Lie” and Roger L. Simon's “Liar, Liar, Al Qaqaa Pants on Fire.” We've also had different names for this disaster, from explosivesgate to the apt NYTrogate.

Another great day for bloggers, another miserable experience for certain of the mainstream media.

Josh Poulson

Posted Thursday, Oct 28 2004 01:20 PM