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 agency says.
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US media (CNN etc) and Kerry are playing this up quite a lot today. Makes me wonder if this is really something new and serious.. or is it merely an “October Surprise in Reverse”. Kerry would like the voters to think this is a clear smoking gun that Bush has botched up the war in Iraq. Will it work?
it's been missing for a while now.. they only reported it recently..
Well here's my prediction..
remember a while back some Israeli trucks were caught and had traces of explosives.. as usual they were quickly shuttled back to Israel and case closed but now everything falls in place.
Conventional bomb explosions on United States soil for the first time.. traces of explosives will be Eyeraqi.. so nation comes together like another 9/11.
u get your link of Iraq and Al-Qaeda and the war is suddenly justified... dissent is deemed unpatriotic again. Kerry rallies behind Bush. Bush gets another four years and Mullah Ashcroft gets to impose some more Orwellian Acts..
NBC reports that one of it’s embedded reporters was at this site three weeks intot he war and that the site was searched for the explosives and not found. You would think that 380 TONS of material would be realtively easy to find…
An NBC News crew that accompanied U.S. soldiers who seized the Al-Qaqaa base three weeks into the war in Iraq reported that troops discovered significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6323933/
You have to question the timing of the IAEA right before and election coming up with this pronouncement, if indeed they should have known that it was unaccounted for three weeks after the war started.
OG, a senior official at Iraq's Ministry of Science gave the letter to the IAEA on OCT 10th which reported to them theft of 377 tons of explosives. Don't blame the IAEA, it's the Iraqi gov. that turned over the report.
I listened to the woman from the IAEA yesterday. She gave the distinct impression that this was new and breathless news. Pretty easy to check with the Iraq Survey Group to establish the timing before you go all over the airwaves with the report.
I just suspect that news releases over the next week, on both sides, should be examined for motivation and timing before we are all in a lather. The IAEA was shut out of a lot of the Iraq survey, they have a axe to grind....
First the forged air national guard docs and now a clear attempt to package a bogus news story for election eve to influence the election. CBS now rightly deserves the recognition as the single least trustworthy news organization in the US.
Getting out the truth about Bush’s failure to secure hundreds of tons of explosives is bogus, how so?
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WASHINGTON - Videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq (news - web sites) when they first opened the bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels and bearing the markings of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The video taken by KSTP of St. Paul on April 18, 2003, could reinforce suggestions that tons of explosives missing from a munitions installation in Iraq were looted after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The video was broadcast nationally Thursday on ABC.
“The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa,” David A. Kay, a former American official who directed the hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, told The New York Times. “The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn’t use seals on anything. So I’m absolutely sure that’s an IAEA seal.”
