Link to NY Times story (Link edited by Angela so the thread is easier to read)

MISSING EXPLOSIVES
Video Shows G.I.'s at Weapon Cache
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

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."

Weapons experts familiar with the work of the international inspectors in Iraq say the videotape appears identical to photographs that the inspectors took of the explosives, which were put under seal before the war. One frame shows what the experts say is a seal, with narrow wires that would have to be broken if anyone entered through the main door of the bunker.

The agency said that when it left Iraq in mid-March, only days before the war began, the only bunkers bearing its seals at the huge complex contained the explosive known as HMX, which the agency had monitored because it could be used in a nuclear weapons program. It is now clear that program had ground to a halt.

The New York Times and CBS reported on Monday that Iraqi officials had told the agency earlier this month that the explosives were missing, and that they were looted after April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell.

Yesterday evening, the Pentagon released a satellite image of the complex taken just two days after the inspectors left, showing a few trucks parked in front of some bunkers. It is not clear they are the bunkers with the high explosives.

"All we are trying to demonstrate is that after the I.A.E.A. left, and the place was under Saddam's control, there was activity," said Lawrence DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman. It is not clear from the photo what activity, if any, was under way.

On Thursday, a top Iraqi official said the interim government had spoken to witnesses who said the material was still at Al Qaqaa at the time Baghdad fell.

The videotape , taken by KSTP-TV, an ABC affiliate in Minneapolis-St. Paul, shows troops breaking into a bunker and opening boxes and examining barrels. Many of the containers are marked "explosive." One box is marked "Al Qaqaa State Establishment," apparently a shipping label from a manufacturer.

The ABC crew said the video was taken on April 18. The timing is critical to the debate in the presidential campaign. By the Pentagon's own account, units of the 101st Airborne Division were near Al Qaqaa for what Mr. DiRita said was "two to three weeks," starting April 10.

Then they headed north to Baghdad, and the site was apparently left unguarded. By the time special weapons teams returned to Al Qaqaa in May, the explosives were apparently gone.

In disputing claims by Mr. Kerry that the Americans had lost the explosives, a senior administration official said Thursday, "We don't know all the facts and no one should be jumping to conclusions." Al Qaqaa, the official said, "was not controlled for three weeks after the I.A.E.A. left," and added "there are a lot of dots we have to connect."

The Pentagon also notes that it has destroyed 400,000 tons of munitions from thousands of sites across Iraq, and that the explosives at Al Qaqaa account for "one-tenth of 1 percent" of that amount.

The Minneapolis television crew was with an Army unit that was camped near Al Qaqaa, members of the crew said. The reporter and cameraman said that although they were not told specifically that they were being taken to Al Qaqaa by the military, their videotape matches pictures of the site taken by United Nations weapons inspectors, according to weapons experts.

"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al Qaqaa," said David A. Kay, a former American official who led the recent hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the vast site. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an I.A.E.A. seal."

One weapons expert said the videotape and some of the agency's photographs of the HMX stockpiles "were such good matches it looked like they were taken by the same camera on the same day."

Independent experts said several other factors - the geography; the number of bunkers; the seals on some of the bunker doors; the boxes, crates and barrels similar to those seen by weapon inspectors - confirm that the videotape was taken at Al Qaqaa.

"There's not another place that you would mistake it for," said Dean Staley, the KSTP reporter, who now works in Seattle.

The accidental news encounter began last year after the invasion, Mr. Staley recalled in an interview. Their Army unit arrived in the region on Friday, April 11, and made camp. The Fifth Battalion of the 101st Airborne's 159th Aviation Brigade flew helicopter missions from the camp in the Iraqi desert, moving troops and supplies to the front.

A week later, on Friday, April 18, two journalists recalled, they joined two soldiers who were driving in a Humvee to investigate the nearby bunkers. Among other things, wandering inside the cavernous buildings offered the prospect of relief from the desert sun.

"It was just by chance that we were able to go," said Joe Caffrey, the team's photographer. "They wanted to go out and we asked to tag along."

Mr. Caffrey provided The New York Times with the latitude and longitude of the camp, which places it between 1.5 and 3 miles southeast of Al Qaqaa bunkers. A commercial satellite photograph of the region shows that the camp was close to the storage site. Mr. Caffrey said the soldiers used bolt cutters to cut through chains with locks on them, as well as seals. He said the seals appeared to be lead disks attached to very thin wires that were wrapped around the doors of the bunker entrances, forming a barrier easily cut in two.

They visited a half dozen bunkers, he said. The gloomy interiors revealed long rows of boxes, crates and barrels, what independent experts said were three kinds of HMX containers shipped to Iraq from France, China and Yugoslavia.

The team opened storage containers, some of which contained white powder that independent experts said was consistent with HMX.

"The soldiers were pretty much in awe of what they were seeing," Mr. Caffrey recalled. "They were saying their E.O.D. - Explosive Ordinance Division, people who blow this kind of stuff up - would have a field day."

The journalists filmed roughly 25 minutes of video. Mr. Caffrey added that the team left the bunker doors open. "It would have been easy for anybody to get in," he said.

Mr. Staley recalled that during the drive back to camp, they saw a red Toyota pickup truck with some Iraqis in it. "Our impression was they were looters," he said. "This was a no man's land. It was a huge facility, and we worried that they were bad guys who might come up on us."

The two journalists filed a short story, which ran soon thereafter in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

In the interview, Mr. Caffrey said he had carefully rechecked the date on the cassette for his camera, adding that he was sure it was April 18, 2003.

Yesterday Mohamed al-Sharaa, director of the national monitoring directorate at the Iraq Ministry of Science and Technology, explained for the first time why Iraqi officials had specified in their letter to the United Nations agency that the explosives had been looted after April 9, 2003. "We have some witnesses," Mr. Sharaa said outside his office at the ministry. "They say that the materials," he added, were "in this site after April 9."

The witnesses were people working at Al Qaqaa, Mr. Sharaa said. Still, he said, the evidence is not yet definitive, and "we don't say it's impossible" that the material was somehow taken out of Al Qaqaa before the American forces came through the area. The first American forces arrived at Al Qaqaa on April 3.

Rashad M. Omar, the minister of science and technology, said that as far as he was concerned, the exact timing of the disappearance remained unknown. "How, where, when is it taken, all these questions, we don't have answers," Dr. Omar said.

He said a committee headed by himself was about to undertake an investigation of the disappearance, in parallel with American efforts to clear up the mystery. Dr. Omar said that he was extremely confident that the investigations would determine the facts of the case.

"The quantity was so huge," Dr. Omar said. "Somebody must know what happened to the material. I am sure the facts will not be hidden for a long time."


And this transcript from Aaron Brown's NewsNight on CNN speaking with David Kay about the video

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/ ... sb.01.html


BROWN: OK, back to the explosives the who and when and the how of it all but on the question of when, as we saw at the top of the program, there is new information to factor in, pretty conclusive to our eye.

So, we'll sort through this now, take the politics out of it and try and deal with facts with former head U.N. weapons inspector -- U.S. weapons inspector David Kay. David, it's nice to see you.

DAVID KAY, FMR. U.S. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Good to be with you, Aaron.

BROWN: I don't know how better to do this than to show you some pictures, have you explain to me what they are or are not, OK? First, I'll just call it the seal and tell me if this is an IAEA seal on that bunker at that munitions dump.

KAY: Aaron, as about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it, which obviously I would have preferred to have been there, that's an IAEA seal. I've never seen anything else in Iraq in about 15 years of being in Iraq and around Iraq that was other than an IAEA seal of that shape.

BROWN: And was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?

KAY: Absolutely nothing. It was he HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.

BROWN: OK. Now, I want to take a look at the barrels here for a second and you can tell me what they tell you. They obviously to us just show us a bunch of barrels. You'll see it somewhat differently.

KAY: Well, it's interesting. There were three foreign suppliers to Iraq of this explosive in the 1980s. One of them used barrels like this and inside the barrel is a bag. HMX is in powdered form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons.

And, particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it that's either HMX or RDX. I don't know of anything else in al Qa Qaa that was in that form.

BROWN: Let me ask you then, David, the question I asked Jamie. In regard to the dispute about whether that stuff was there when the Americans arrived, is it game, set, match? Is that part of the argument now over?

KAY: Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match.

There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken and quite frankly to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean to rephrase the so-called (UNINTELLIGIBLE) rule if you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.

BROWN: That raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn't know what they had.

KAY: I think quite likely they didn't know they had HMX, which speaks to the lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area but they certainly knew they had explosives.

And to put this in context, I think it's important this loss of 360 tons but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.

BROWN: Could you -- I'm trying to stay out of the realm of politics.

KAY: So am I. BROWN: I'm not sure you can necessarily. I know. It's a little tricky here but is there any reason not to have anticipated the fact that there would be bunkers like this, explosives like this and a need to secure them?

KAY: Absolutely not. For example, al Qa Qaa was a site of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) super gun project. It was a team of mine that discovered the HMX originally in 1991. That was one of the most well documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented.

Iraq had, and it's a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the U.S. has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.

BROWN: David, as quickly as you can because this just came up in the last hour, as dangerous as this stuff is, this would not be described as a WMD, correct?

KAY: Oh, absolutely not.

BROWN: Thank you.

KAY: And, in fact, the loss of it is not a proliferation issue.

BROWN: OK. It's just dangerous and it's out there and by your thinking it should have been secured.

KAY: Well, look, it was used to bring the Pan Am flight down. It's a very dangerous explosive, particularly in the hands of terrorists.

BROWN: David, thank you for walking me through this. I appreciate it, David Kay the former head U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq.

Wait, does this mean the Washington Times, that reputable, read: piece of shit, rag, was wrong?

*gasps*

Yes. It's a joke of a paper.

there's a whole lot of argument on both sides of this thing. I don't know what to believe, to be honest. shit happens in the fog of war. the next war that goes mistake-free will be the last.

there's an awful lot of question about what is actually shown on this 20 second tape.

There are barrels. but nobody knows what's in them. there is one IEAE seal, but it's pictured in close up, out of context.

Then there's the actual on-camera guy who was there, who now says he doesn't know where he was. Could have been el Caca. Could have not been.

I just don't know. Nobody knows, I think. It seems awfully strange that 400 tons of anything could be taken on 30 18-wheelers at a time when Americans were camped on the only road out of town and owned the skies. but I suppose weird shit happens.

This wasn't the fog of war. This was after Baghdad had fallen. Where was the fog?

This is just another example of gross incompetence. Hospital supplies stolen with U.S. troops across the street watching, because they didn't know what the building was. The Iraqi National Army being disbanded without the defense secretary even knowing about it. This war has been horrifically managed. Pure incompetence.

Final line of that crack Eyewitness news report:

"5 EYEWITNESS NEWS and experts across the country are working to learn more from these pictures and find out exactly just how close they were to Al Qaqaa."

well, that proves it, eh?

For god's sake will you change the spelling of slight to sleight!

Are you just a lazy Pearl Jam fan that can't add the e?

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u ... _weapons_1

MOSCOW - Russia angrily denied allegations Thursday that Russian forces had smuggled a cache of high explosives out of Iraq (news - web sites) 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 (news - web sites)," 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.


"I didn't hear about any weapons to be taken out," Interfax quoted him as saying. "Moreover, there was nobody to take them out, because we actually evacuated all of our personnel."


He said there had been no Russian special forces in Iraq, only civilian specialists working for foreign firms.

Well, there goes that story.

I love you David Skipper.

So, uh, is this the "October Surprise?"

I say Kerry's up by 3 points in the Zogby come Monday.

Wait, I was informed yesterday that this story was...what was the word...debunked?

hahahahehe..

go minnesota, my local news!haha...

not that this is alaughing matter but this will come out and it will prove that we lost those weapons and amunition...

Of course it was debunked. Oswald was the only shooter too. That was also debunked

heres the story from the star trib here in minneapolis....


KSTP video shows seal on Iraq bunker
Bob Von Sternberg and Paul Mcenroe, Star Tribune
October 29, 2004 KSTP1029




Videotape shot by a Twin Cities television news crew in Iraq suggests that a large supply of explosives and munitions was still being stored at Iraq's unsecured Al-Qaqaa military installation nine days after the fall of Baghdad in 2003.

The explosives could include HMX, powerful high-grade explosives that were recently reported missing from Al-Qaqaa.

The KSTP-TV footage has become a new focus in a controversy that has dominated the presidential campaign this week.

Sen. John Kerry contends that President Bush must take responsibility for the missing explosives. "You were warned to guard them," Kerry said Thursday in direct challenge to Bush. "You didn't guard them."

Bush has accused Kerry of jumping to conclusions about the missing explosives, calling it a dangerous thing for a wartime president to do.

The Pentagon has said the weapons could have been moved before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. But in a potential blow to Bush's case, the U.N. nuclear agency said on Thursday that it had warned the United States about the vulnerability of explosives stored at the installation.

The videotape shows a door of one of the Iraqi storage bunkers sealed with cable and a disk that resembles seals used by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

If that is confirmed, it would mean that high-grade explosives monitored by the agency were still being stored at Al-Qaqaa on April 18, 2003, the day the video was shot. In January 2003, U.N. nuclear inspectors had placed fresh seals over the doors of storage bunkers that contained HMX.

"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa," said David Kay, a former U.S. official who led the recent hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the vast site. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal."

David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector, said Thursday that he believes the explosives in the KSTP footage are HMX. He was in Iraq in the mid-1990s and is now president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C.

Inside the bunkers, the videotape showed boxes, plastic bags and drums of what appeared to be various munitions. "I could see that there were these cardboard kind of squarish boxes in the background, and that's how I remember HMX being stored," Albright told the Star Tribune.

Albright said he sought further confirmation with another former weapons inspector, whom he asked to review the tape. He declined to identify the colleague but said he was at Al-Qaqaa during the last round of U.N. inspections. "He knows about these bunkers," Albright said. "He definitely was in these bunkers at various times."

His former colleague said that not only did the seal on the bunker in the video look like an IAEA seal but also that the inside of the bunkers "look just like I remember them when I was in there last."

Earlier this week, it was reported that 377 tons of high-grade munitions disappeared from the Al-Qaqaa complex. Exactly when the munitions disappeared has become a flashpoint in the presidential race, with questions lingering over whether the explosives disappeared before or after U.S. troops overthrew Saddam Hussein. Portions of the KSTP videotape were aired Wednesday night after Dean Staley, the reporter embedded with the 101st Airborne Division, recognized recent news photographs of the bunkers. "We didn't know what we had until the issue of the missing explosives came up," said Chris Berg, news director at KSTP. "At the time it was shot, Iraq's munitions weren't the news we were interested in."

The footage shows U.S. troops cutting into the bunkers with bolt cutters, inspecting various kinds of munitions and then leaving without securing the bunkers.

The TV report created a buzz on the Internet, and KSTP reported that its Web site had received 200,000 hits Thursday, a tenfold increase over a typical day.

The buzz was fueled in large part by liberal and partisan bloggers using it as ammunition against Bush.

On Thursday, the IAEA announced that U.S. officials had been warned about the vulnerability of explosives stored at Al-Qaqaa after another facility -- the country's main nuclear complex -- was looted in April 2003. The agency cautioned U.S. officials directly about Al-Qaqaa, the main storage facility in Iraq for high-grade explosives.

Iraqi officials say the explosives were taken amid looting some time after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, although the Pentagon and Bush have suggested that the ordnance could have been moved before the United States invaded on March 20, 2003.

An IAEA official told the Associated Press that the high-grade explosives were stored in hundreds of heavy cardboard drums. A portion of KSTP's video shows similar drums, labeled "explosive" and filled with powdery material.

"We're not munitions experts, so nobody was sure what it was," said Joe Caffrey, the photographer who shot the video during a five-hour tour of the complex.

Caffrey and reporter Dean Staley had been embedded with an air assault battalion at a base 2 to 3 miles south of Al-Qaqaa. On April 18, two off-duty soldiers drove up in their Humvee to the complex, and the journalists went with them. "They were just going up there to look around, and we decided to tag along," Caffrey said.

They passed as many as 50 bunkers, some broken open and empty, others locked with chains and at least one with a seal resembling the kind used by the IAEA. The soldiers used bolt cutters to open about a half-dozen locked bunkers.

The soldiers were able to identify detonation cord, bombs and proximity fuses scattered on the ground. "I'm an air traffic controller, not a weapons expert," one soldier said on-camera as he poked through a box of explosives.

Some barrels and boxes were labeled "explosive," and one crate was stenciled with the words "AL QAQAA STATE ESTABLISHMENT."

The soldiers gathered documents to pass to their superiors, but they took none of the munitions. "They didn't tell their officers anything about it," Caffrey said.

John Pike, who maintains a Web site specializing in satellite imagery, GlobalSecurity.org, reviewed the station's video for the Star Tribune.

Using the video and global positioning system coordinates provided by Caffrey, Pike concluded that the KSTP journalists were at Al-Qaqaa. He said he reached that conclusion because the video shows igloo-like structures that are consistent with buildings at Al-Qaqaa and because the global satellite coordinates recorded by the film crew match those of the complex.

Military officials with the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade, in Ft. Campbell, Ky., said Thursday that they couldn't say for sure if the TV crew had actually been at Al-Qaqaa.

"I don't know if it's the same place, but we did missions in that area," said Lt. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the unit. "There were several facilities in that area that we dealt with."

The chickenhawk cowboy going it alone once again. UN suggestions? We don't need no stinking UN suggestions?!

I actually mean "slight" as in "I got slighted." It's a long story.

so, no.

but thanks for caring.

We can't change usernames anyway.

this video doesn't neccesarily prove anything.

Now, what about this 3rd ID member who is about to testify at the Pentagon that he was in charge of removing and destroying about 200 tons of this stuff that has supposedly gone missing?

doesn't that conflict with the Eyewitness News crew?

Seems if you believe the NYT and John Kerry, you'll jump on anything that supports your case and ignore evidence to the contrary. And if you don't believe the NYT and Kerry, you'll jump on anything that supports your case and ignore evidence to the contrary.

It's human nature, I guess. I'm not faulting anybody for that.

This story is so muddy that I don't know what to make of it. And, if you are being honest with yourself, you'll believe the same thing.

how do you deny the video though?have you seen the video?sattellite photos have pretty much confirmed that is al kakakakakakakakaka...

Post of the year.

If we assume the weapons were looted, how in the heck do we personally blame Bush for it? That's what I'm trying to piece together. It is like there is a missing link. If I were to blame somebody, it seems most reasonable to blame the man who was actually supposed to come up with and exectute their military strategy, namely someone in the military. I guess that I see this whole thing as irrelevant as far as politics go.