Spin City: QaQaa Explosives & The Administrations Replies

All The President's Excuses

The White House has been unable to explain how 380 tons of powerful explosives disappeared under its watch in Iraq, and has instead tried to deflect blame with a series of excuses.
None of them hold up. Read this new document from American Progress for the full story.

EXCUSE #1 – THEY WERE GONE WHEN WE GOT THERE: Administration spokesman Dan Senor said on CNN that "there's a very high probability that those weapons weren't even there
before the war." All the evidence, however, suggests the opposite. In an
Oct. 25 AP story, a Pentagon official said, "US-led coalition troops had
searched Al Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and
confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact."
According to Today's New York Times, after U.S. troops came through, Iraqis on
the scene in Al Qaqaa "described an orgy of theft"
as the sensitive military site was picked clean by looters. Iraq's top science
official, Mohammed al-Sharaa, confirmed these reports, saying, "It is
impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the
regime's fall. The officials that were inside this facility (Al Qaqaa)
beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall."

EXCUSE #2 – WE DIDN'T
KNOW ABOUT IT: One White House strategy has been to simply plead ignorance.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, "We were informed on October
15th. Condi Rice was informed days after that. This is all in the last, what, 10 days now."
What they're not talking about: The New York Times reported that Iraqi officials
say they warned Paul Bremer, the American head of the occupation authority, that
Al Qaqaa had probably been looted in May 2004, six months ago.

EXCUSE #3 – WE'VE
SECURED LOTS OF OTHER MUNITIONS: White House Press Secretary Scott
McClellan tried to minimize the importance of the 380 tons of explosives that
went missing, saying, "400,000 tons of munitions have been seized or destroyed
by coalition forces." But McClellan is comparing apples to oranges. The
400,000 tons the White House cites refers to munitions – including guns and
ammunition. Pound for pound, the 380 tons of explosives are much, much more
powerful. For example, "the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over
Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound
of the same type of material." By that math, the size of the explosives
cache looted would be enough to bring down 760,000 planes.

EXCUSE #4 – THE NBC
STORY: The Bush campaign spun an NBC News story in an attempt to bolster
its excuse, charging, "NBC Nightly News
later reported that on April 10, 2003, one day after Iraq was liberated, US
troops entered Al Qaqaa and did not find the explosives." NBC News,
however, resisted that characterization. What the network actually said:
"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...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."

REALITY –
ADMINISTRATION WAS WARNED: In a blistering op-ed in the Boston Globe,
former Ambassador Peter Galbraith describes the widespread looting of sensitive
materials in Iraq as a "preventable disaster."
Iraq's sensitive material was stored in only a few known locations, all of which
were closely monitored by the international community. U.S. troops, however,
were not given any relevant intelligence about these sites from the White House
and there was never a plan in place to secure them after the invasion. According
to Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, spokesman for one of the first units to reach Al Qaqaa,
"orders were not given
from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for
[explosives]." Iraqi witnesses to looting at Al Qaqaa also say Al Qaqaa
"employees asked the Americans to protect the site but were told this was not the soldiers' responsibility."