Minneapolis News Channel 5 has video & pics of missing explosives

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Taken on April 18, 2003.



http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S3723.html?cat=1

A 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew in Iraq shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein was in the area where tons of explosives disappeared, and may have videotaped some of those weapons.
The missing explosives are now an issue in the presidential debate. Democratic candidate John Kerry is accusing President Bush of not securing the site they allegedly disappeared from. President Bush says no one knows if the
ammunition was taken before or after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003 when coalition troops moved in to the area.

Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne Division, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has determined the crew embedded with the troops may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where the
ammunition disappeared. The news crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa, and drove two or three miles north of there with soldiers on April 18, 2003.

During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS news crew bunker after bunker of material labelled "explosives." Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get into the bunkers and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.
"We can stick it in those and make some good bombs." a soldier told our crew.

Soldiers who took a 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew into bunkers on April 18 said some of the boxes uncovered contained proximity fuses. There were what appeared to be fuses for bombs. They also found bags of material men from the 101st couldn't identify, but box after box was clearly marked "explosive."

In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name "Al Qaqaa", the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing. Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.
"We weren't quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn't appear that this was being secured in any way," said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. "It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents".

Officers with the 101st Airborne told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that the bunkers were within the U.S. military perimeter and protected. But Caffrey and former 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS Reporter Dean Staley, who spent three months together in Iraq, said Iraqis were coming and going freely. "At one point there was a group of Iraqis driving around in a pick-up truck,"Staley said. "Three or four guys we kept an eye on, worried they might come near us."

On Wednesday, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS e-mailed still images of the footage taken at the site to experts in Washington to see if the items captured on tape are the same kind of high explosives that went missing in Al Qaqaa. Those experts could not make that determination. The footage is now in the hands of security experts to see if it is indeed the explosives in question.

http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S3723.html

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[watermock]

Yeah, a pickup truck drove off with 380 tons of explosives along a highway dominated by Americans.

The whole story is so full of crap it's literally humorous. After American forces controlled that highway, we are supposed to accept that 380 tons were simply "looted".

The fact of the matter is there was plenty of crap left behind in the confusion and fog of war, but it's bottom line impossible for that much explosive to vanish because we were running convoys on the only major road in the region.

Detonation cords are not RDX. WMD was shipped off you Dimwits.

Oct. 27, 2004 — Iraqi officials may be overstating the amount of explosives reported to have disappeared from a weapons depot, documents obtained by ABC News show.




Alleged American Al Qaeda Warns of U.S. Attacks
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The Iraqi interim government has told the United States and international weapons inspectors that 377 tons of conventional explosives are missing from the Al-Qaqaa installation, which was supposed to be under U.S. military control.


But International Atomic Energy Agency documents obtained by ABC News and first reported on "World News Tonight with Peter Jennings" indicate the amount of missing explosives may be substantially less than the Iraqis reported.


The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing — presumably stolen due to a lack of security — was based on "declaration" from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility.


But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency's inspectors recorded that just over three tons of RDX were stored at the facility — a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported.


The IAEA documents could mean that 138 tons of explosives were removed from the facility long before the United States launched "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in March 2003.


The missing explosives have become an issue in the presidential campaign. Sen. John Kerry has pointed to the disappearance as evidence of the Bush administration's poor handling of the war. The Bush camp has responded that more than a thousand times that amount of explosives or munitions have been recovered or destroyed in Iraq.




Another Concern


The IAEA documents from January 2003 found no discrepancy in the amount of the more dangerous HMX explosives thought to be stored at Al-Qaqaa, but they do raise another disturbing possibility.


The documents show IAEA inspectors looked at nine bunkers containing more than 194 tons of HMX at the facility. Although these bunkers were still under IAEA seal, the inspectors said the seals may be potentially ineffective because they had ventilation slats on the sides. These slats could be easily removed to remove the materials inside the bunkers without breaking the seals, the inspectors noted.




ABC News' Martha Raddatz filed this report for "World News Tonight." Luis Martinez contributed to this report.

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Russia Denies Involvement in Iraq Weapons

I guess 'Vlad' won't be GeeDubya's fall guy.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...pons&printer=1

MOSCOW - Russia angrily denied allegations Thursday that Russian forces had smuggled a cache of high explosives out of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

Defense Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov dismissed the allegations as "absurd" and "ridiculous."

"I can state officially that the Russian Defense Ministry and its structures couldn't have been involved in the disappearance of the explosives, because all Russian military experts left Iraq when the international sanctions were introduced during the 1991 Gulf War," he told The Associated Press.

The denial followed a story in The Washington Times on Thursday that quoted a high-ranking U.S. defense official alleging that Russian special forces had "almost certainly" helped spirit out the hundreds of tons of high explosives that went missing from the al-Qaqaa base. The newspaper based its report on an interview with John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security.

Two weeks ago, Iraqi officials told the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency that 377 tons of explosives had vanished as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security." The compounds, HMX and RDX, are key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in bomb attacks.

Russia' charge d'affaires in Iraq, Ilya Morgunov, also denied the report.

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Russia calls Bush claim absurd, ridiculous"

MOSCOW -- Russia angrily denied allegations Thursday that Russian forces had smuggled a cache of high explosives out of Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

Defense Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov dismissed the allegations as "absurd" and "ridiculous."

"I can state officially that the Russian Defense Ministry and its structures couldn't have been involved in the disappearance of the explosives, because all Russian military experts left Iraq when the international sanctions were introduced during the 1991 Gulf War," he told The Associated Press.

The denial followed a story in The Washington Times on Thursday that quoted a high-ranking U.S. defense official alleging that Russian special forces had "almost certainly" helped spirit out the hundreds of tons of high explosives that went missing from the al-Qaqaa base. The newspaper based its report on an interview with John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security.

Two weeks ago, Iraqi officials told the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency that 377 tons of explosives had vanished as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security." The compounds, HMX and RDX, are key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in bomb attacks.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-rus...

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Marshall at Talking Points Memo blew this up today. He said it's a Drudge fabrication that got picked up by the Washington Times. No basis in reality, strictly a Rethug Talking Point that was put out to deflect attention from W's incompetence.

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This is the bozo who's the source for the Moonie Times fairy tale...

Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- A senior Defense Department official conducted unauthorized investigations of Iraq reconstruction efforts and used the results to push for lucrative contracts for friends and their business clients, according to current and former Pentagon officials and documents.

John A. "Jack" Shaw, deputy undersecretary for international technology security, represented himself as an agent of the Pentagon's inspector general in conducting the investigations this year, sources said.

In one case, Shaw disguised himself as an employee of Halliburton Co. and gained access to a port in southern Iraq after he was denied entry by the U.S. military, the sources said...

...Shaw justified his investigations under a special agreement with the Pentagon inspector general, Joseph Schmitz.

"Jack Shaw was never authorized to do any kind of investigation or auditing on his own," said one source close to Schmitz.

http://tinyurl.com/3lhje

[Spider]

http://kstp.com/article/stories/S3741.html?cat=1

[Spider]

Republicans are doing what they can in damage control , Here is my problem with this ......
To me it doesnt matter when the Weapons came up missing ( hold on here me out )
What bothers me is , the Army didnt know about this place , it was just a pit stop , IEAE gave warning to Bush about this place before the invasion , We didnt bother to stop and secure the place ........ Nothing Nadda , and then moved on , That tells me from the get go Bush knew there were No WMD , all that mattered was getting Baghdad and the rest be damned ........

[Bronco_Beerslug]

ABC just announced they have video that shows the weapons in place April 18th.

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...=564&ncid=1480

[Spider]

I wonder if Sean Hannity will admit he was wrong ?

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Originally Posted by §Pide®

I wonder if Sean Hannity will admit he was wrong ?

Dude, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard you say!

[Spider]

Originally Posted by L.A. BRONCOS FAN

Dude, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard you say!

Yeah I think we both know the answer to that

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Originally Posted by §Pide®

...What bothers me is , the Army didnt know about this place , it was just a pit stop , IEAE gave warning to Bush about this place before the invasion , We didnt bother to stop and secure the place ........ Nothing Nadda , and then moved on , That tells me from the get go Bush knew there were No WMD , all that mattered was getting Baghdad and the rest be damned ........

Exactly.

The bottom line is that this explosives debacle constitutes proof positive of Bush's utter incompetence where the planning for this war is concerned.

Bush and the PNAC/neocon whack jobs who influence his foreign policy obviously live in a world of complete denial and delusion.

Remember how they told us the war would be a cakewalk, that they could fight it on the cheap, and that the Iraqis would greet our troops with flowers, etc?

[Spider]

Iraqi oil will pay for this war .........
I wonder , how much of a boost 87 Billion $ would have proped up our Rust belt and got People and Companies back to work ........

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Originally Posted by §Pide®

Iraqi oil will pay for this war .........
I wonder , how much of a boost 87 Billion $ would have proped up our Rust belt and got People and Companies back to work ........

Exactly.

And how much of that $87 billion actually made it to the troops?

Meanwhile, Halliburton is making a killing.

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"When Bush declined to answer a debate question about mistakes he made in his first term, it indicated more than a personal idiosyncracy. His unwillingness to confront past errors reflected a penchant for self-deception that has been characteristic of his administration, particularly in regard to its lethal blunders in Iraq. A frightening example of those unacknowledged errors is the failure to prevent the theft of nearly 380 tons of powerful explosives from a well-known site in Iraq."

--Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/edi...unders_in_iraq

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"Bush's misbegotten invasion of Iraq appears to have achieved what Saddam did not:
putting dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists and creating an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Iraqi and American officials cannot explain how some 760,000 pounds of explosives were spirited away from a well-known site just 30 miles from Baghdad. But they were warned. Within weeks of the invasion, international weapons inspectors told Washington that the explosives depot was in danger and that terrorists could help themselves "to the greatest explosives bonanza in history."

--NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/op...=login&ei=5090

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Bush losing traction from Qaqaa: Polls

Finally slipping from his own record. Slipping on Qaqaa. How apropriate. It's about time. What's good is Bush is saying we don't know all the facts. To be sure. But we are getting more facts all the time. Now the insurgents are claiming to have benefitted from Al Qaqaa. See my post below.

http://www.electoral-vote.com/

Ellis Henican had a very insightful column yesterday that is relevant to the Rasmussen poll I cited yesterday in which 1/3 of the voters weren't sure the election would be fair. Henican said the banks execute millions of ATM transactions every day, giving the customer a printed receipt if requested, and get them all right all the time. Not a margin of 1%, no recounts, but 100% right all the time. Why can't we make a voting system that is 100% right all the time? It would seem to me that the right way to do this would be a touch screen machine that asks the voter to make choices for the various offices in a language chosen by the voter (with audio output if desired), and when all done prints a paper ballot the voter can personally verify and deposit in the ballot box. The computer total would be available instantly after the polls close but in the event of a challenge, these paper ballots could be optically scanned or even hand counted. I can't believe a system like this is infeasible and it would certainly help restore faith in the electoral process.

But the problems aren't only technological. There may be deeper forces at work. Today's New York Times reports that tens of thousands of absentee ballots in Florida's heavily Democratic Broward County have mysteriously vanished. The county says it mailed them but the post office says it never got them.

Several lawyers have contacted me about the issue of what to do if you show up to vote and the election officials say you are not registered. Here is the procedure. First, be absolutely sure you are in the correct precinct. If you are in the wrong precinct, in most states, your vote won't be counted. If you are not 100% certain of your polling place, go to www.mypollingplace.com and check. Alternatively, call the toll-free number 1-866-OUR-VOTE or your county clerk. If you are sure you are in the correct polling place and the officials claim you are not registered, ask for a provisional ballot and fill it out correctly. You are entitled to one by law. Politely, but firmly, insist on being given a provisional ballot.

Today's Washington Post has an excellent story dealing with the issue of whether the polls are accurate. The basic problem is that the vast majority of people refuse to participate, so the sample is no longer random. Surveying mostly elderly, lonely, or bored people can bias the results. The Post reports that one caller apparently was so fed up with telemarketeers and pollsters that he attached a device to the telephone that made such a loud noise it damaged the pollster's eardrum. Even response rates for exit polls on election day have dropped to 50%. This information goes a long way to explaining why the polls are so erratic this year. But in all fairness, the final 2000 polls weren't so hot either. Eleven of the 15 national polls just before the election predicted Bush would win the popular vote by a margin of 2% to 6%. Ultimately, Gore won it by 0.5%.

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GOP decendents found

HOMOgopians

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996588

The skull and bones of one adult female, and fragments from up to six other specimens, were found in the Liang Bua limestone caves on Flores Island, which lies at the eastern tip of Java.

The female skeleton, known as LB1 - or by the nickname "Ebu" - has been assigned to a new species within the genus Homo - Homo floresiensis. Examination of the remains shows members of the species stood just 1 metre tall and had a brain no bigger than a grapefruit.

Modern day descendants...

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UPDATE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://kstp.com/article/stories/S3748.html?cat=64
Updated: 10/29/2004 09:09:48 AM - VIDEO


Watch and read the original
5 EYEWITNESS NEWS report.






5 EYEWITNESS NEWS' exclusive video of bunkers in Iraq is getting nationwide attention.

A 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew was with U.S. soldiers in Iraq as they discovered large amounts of unguarded explosives just after the fall of Baghdad. This has become a sensitive issue, since tons of explosives are reported missing from that area and are possibly now in the hands of the enemy.

The news crew was with soldiers from the 101st Airborne division on April 18, 2003 when they checked out the bunkers at or near Al-Qaqaa. Inside those bunkers, they found a variety of explosives.

One type of explosives discovered were "boosters," which are used in mining and quarrying. Experts who examined the video said the soldiers also appeared to have found sticks of military-grade dynamite.

A box shown in the video caught one expert's eye. First, it bears the words, "Al-Qaqaa State Establishment." Also, the box says it weighs 49.3 kilograms.

"The cases are clearly marked as 49.3 kilograms which is just over 100 pounds," said retired FBI explosives expert Rick Hahn. "The barrels I presume hold 100 pounds of explosives. You're talking about thousands and thousands of pounds of explosives here."

That would be enough to make hundreds of 300- to 400-pound car bombs that experts say insurgents in Iraq are assembling.

"These pictures are pretty dramatic proof that the high explosives were there after Baghdad fell," physicist David Albright.

It wasn't quantity that impressed Albright, but quality. One of the hundreds of barrels in one bunker is marked "1.1 D,' which is an indicator of a high explosive.

One of the bunkers that was chained shut also had a seal on it. A soldier looked through the window of the sealed bunker, but did not go in.

"That makes me nervous there," a soldier can be heard on the video footage. "What's the lead seal? Why would they seal it?"

"This one's going to be harder to get into," added another soldier.

The seal has been identified as one placed by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The agency's inspectors historically sealed bunkers containing only the most powerful munitions.

"The fact that there's a photo of an IAEA seal means what's behind those doors is HMX," Albright claimed, making reference to one of the most powerful explosives in the world.

Albright is known as a critic of Bush war policy. The easy access soldiers had to the bunkers and the way they left them hasn't changed that.

"When they left, they didn't lock the door. They didn't post a guard at the bunker. So I think any Iraqi could have cut the seal or cut the chain around the door," Albright said.

The 101st Airborne Division told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that they had a perimeter set up around the area of the bunkers. However, the division never had specific orders to guard the bunkers. Instead, their orders were to get to Baghdad.

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Thanks for that update/link, Spider.

ABC: Explosives Went Missing After US Control

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...losives_abc_dc

More proof that Bush lied, but do the facts matter these days?

ABC said the video was shot by an affiliate TV station embedded with the 101st Airborne Division when members of the division passed through the facility on April 18, nine days after the fall of Baghdad.

ABC said experts who have studied the images say the barrels seen in the video contain the high explosive HMX, and U.N. markings on the sealed containers were clear. The barrels were found inside locked bunkers that had been sealed by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war began.

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Video shows G.I.'s at Al Qaqaa weapon cache

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/politics/29bomb.html

A videotape made by a television crew with American troops when they opened bunkers at a sprawling Iraqi munitions complex south of Baghdad shows a huge supply of explosives still there nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, apparently including some sealed earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The tape, broadcast on Wednesday night by the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, appeared to confirm a warning given earlier this month to the agency by Iraqi officials, who said that hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives, powerful enough to bring down buildings or detonate nuclear weapons, had vanished from the site after the invasion of Iraq.

The question of whether the material was removed by Mr. Hussein's forces in the days before the invasion, or looted later because it was unguarded, has become a heated dispute on the campaign trail, with Senator John Kerry accusing President Bush of incompetence, and Mr. Bush saying it is unclear when the material disappeared and rejecting what he calls Mr. Kerry's "wild charges."

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Another corroboration on al qaqaa

A French journalist who visited the Qaqaa munitions depot south of Baghdad in November last year said she witnessed Islamic insurgents looting vast supplies of explosives more than six months after the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The account of Sara Daniel, which will be published Wednesday in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, lends further weight to allegations that American occupying forces in Iraq failed to protect hundreds of tons of munitions from extremists plotting attacks against their own troops.

"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," Daniel said on Friday. "We were there for a long time and no one disturbed the group while they were loading their truck."

A man who identified himself as Abu Abdallah and led the group Daniel was with, told her that his men and numerous other insurgent groups had rushed to Qaqaa after U.S.-led troops captured Baghdad on April 9 last year. The groups stole truck-loads of material from what used to be the biggest explosive factory in the Middle East in the expectation that coalition forces would move quickly to seal it off, Daniel was told.

Abu Abdullah and his men showed her the arsenal of rocket launchers, grenades and explosives hidden near their small farm houses, she said.

But much to the insurgents' surprise, Qaqaa was not sealed off by U.S. soldiers, leading many groups to stop hoarding and instead going for regular refills of explosive materials, according to Abu Abdullah.

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.ph...s/explode.html

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Terrorists love Incurious George.