Posted on 10/28/2004 11:22:58 PM PDT by ambrose
US releases pre-war photo of Iraqi weapons
By Jim Mannion
Washington - On Thursday the Pentagon released an aerial photograph of the Iraqi facility where hundreds of tons of powerful explosives have gone missing, showing two trucks parked by a bunker just before the American-led invasion.
The issue of the missing weapons has taken the forefront of the American presidential race.
The bunker was at Al Qaqaa Explosives Storage facility where the high explosives were kept under seals placed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but United States Defence Department spokesperson Lawrence DiRita said US officials did not know what the trucks were doing there.
He also could not say if the bunkers contained any of the explosives reported missing earlier this month by the Iraqi government and the IAEA.
The photograph was taken on 17 March 2003 - two days before US forces invaded Iraq and the same day that the last IAEA inspectors left the country.
"We believe this is a period of time when there was no international observation and prior to the beginning of the war, and certainly prior to the presence of US forces," DiRita told reporters.
He said the Pentagon released the photograph to show activity on the facility before the war, but was not suggesting the picture showed the removal of the missing high explosives.
"There is a perception that this facility was under some sort of hermetic seal between the time the IAEA last looked at the facility in January (2003), when they actually counted weapons... and the time US forces arrived in April," he said.
"The only point we've been trying to make is not that we know what happened there, but that stuff was happening on this facility at the time at which it was under Saddam's control," he said.
DiRita said another photograph taken on 1 April 2003 of a nearby airfield also showed a lot of vehicles on it.
"But we don't know what that means. It's only a kilometre or two away from the bunkers," he said, adding that that photograph was not being released.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said earlier in a radio interview that it was "very likely" that the explosives were removed before the war by Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, but offered no concrete evidence.
"I guess the first thing to say about it is that first reports are almost always wrong," he said in an interview with a Philadelphia radio station.
"And people who use hair-trigger judgement to come to conclusions about things that are fast moving frequently make mistakes that are awkward and embarrassing," he said.
Although he mentioned no one by name, Rumsfeld appeared to be alluding to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry who has repeatedly cited the disappearance of the explosives in campaign attacks on President George Bush.
The declassified aerial photograph was posted on the Pentagon's website.
A caption said the picture shows two trucks parked outside one of the 56 bunkers at the Al Qaqaa Explosive Storage Compex. A blowup of the image is inset in the picture.
"A large, tractor-trailer (yellow arrow) is loaded with white containers with a smaller truck parked behind it," it said.
International inspectors identified bunkers in the complex as containing High Melting Explosive, or HMX, but not all the bunkers were believed to contain HMX, it said.
UN inspectors were believed to have visited the complex on March 15, and the UN weapons inspection staff was withdrawn from Iraq two days later, it said.
In the interview with WPHT radio, Rumsfeld argued that removing the explosives after the arrival of US forces would have been detected because of the size of the operation required.
"Picture all of the tractor trailers and fork lifts and caterpillars it would take to move 377 tons. And we had total control of the air. We would have seen anything like that," he said.
"So the idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, is I think at least debatable," he added.
"And it's very likely that, just as the United States would do, Saddam Hussein moved munitions when he knew the war was coming."
Uhhh, we only know in hindsight that they were trucking materials out to Syria.
The military can't be exected to secure every possible weapons dump or set off cruise missles every time a truck is parked in front of a facility.
Nice. I especially like that there's no linked picture and no link to the original article.
Sorry, sometimes *$#@ happens. We don't live in a perfect world. 3 tons of missing explosives out of the nearly 500k tons we've secured is a drop in the bucket.
Just for your information in the future, the defined job of the military is to to close with and destroy enemy forces. That says nothing about posting a large contingent of guards at every one of over 10,000 arms caches that were in Iraq at the time. There were over 400,000 tons of explosives confiscated since we got there.
The military, deprived of its' second prong in the attack by Turkey, was moving as fast as it possibly could in order to keep the Iraqi military off balance - and saving the lives of our forces. In fact, if you remember, they were moving so fast that the logistics had trouble keeping up with the combat forces. This was Blitzkrieg taken to a level that no military force on Earth has ever witnessed in the history of mankind. What were they supposed to do, leave combat units at every arms depot? Then what would they arrive at Baghdad with? As an infantryman, I resent the entire basis of your comment, and the lack of tactical knowledge behind it. So now all these months later, the DNC decides to put out this crap and we have to explain why it works this way to you? Because you don't personally agree with the way this war was waged?
There's a whole lot of info about this small piece of the puzzle that isn't in the public arena FOR A REASON. For you to second guess the military is arrogant beyond belief. (Especially given that you obviously have never served in a combat unit.)
AFP is a french press organization
Rarely tell the truth about USA
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