Facts and Questions About Lost Munitions

he report that hundreds of tons of high explosives are missing from the Qaqaa munitions facility in Iraq has loomed over the last week of the presidential campaign, and led to a blur of charges and countercharges about what actually happened, and why the news came out so close to Election Day.

Senator John Kerry has seized on the news, first reported by The New York Times and CBS' "60 Minutes," to reinforce his argument that the Bush administration bungled the postwar occupation of Iraq.

President Bush has rejected Mr. Kerry's statements as "wild charges," and the White House has argued that the explosives may have been removed by Saddam Hussein's forces before the war or that some may have been blown up shortly after the end of the war by an ordnance unit.

What follows are some questions and answers about the explosives, what is known and unknown about their whereabouts, and how the story came to light.

The Pentagon says it has destroyed or secured 400,000 tons of the estimated 650,000 tons of munitions in Iraq. Even if 350 metric tons (385 American tons) are missing, does it make much difference?

By this estimate, the whereabouts of at least 250,000 tons of munitions remains unknown. What made the 385 tons different was its type and its location. More than half of it was HMX, a high explosive that - unlike artillery shells or other weapons - can be easily moved around, dropped and jostled without fear of explosion until it is fabricated into a weapon. That makes it well suited for small, powerful bombs; less than a pound of a similar type of high-grade explosives brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. HMX is also used as the detonator in nuclear weapons, though there is no evidence it has fallen into the hands of anyone with nuclear capability.

Because of its potential nuclear use, and because it was stored at Al Qaqaa, where Saddam Hussein tried many years ago to fabricate the triggering devices for nuclear weapons, the International Atomic Energy Agency put it under special seal. So among the many explosives dumps in Iraq, the location, size and contents of this one were well known to the nuclear agency - and to the United States.

If the whole country was an ammunitions dump, how could anyone expect to secure it all?

In Iraq, commanders say it would be an impossible job. The number of troops is finite, so there is a constant calculus under way about whether to assign forces to guard depots or whether to use them to patrol the cities and hunt down insurgents.

The officers also note that weapons were not just in depots. Much was dispersed by Mr. Hussein before the war, or in its early days. Much has been looted since. And the arms still in the depots might not alter battle on the ground, since the insurgents already are well armed.

Moreover, the HMX and RDX at Al Qaqaa may be available elsewhere in the country. "There's probably a lot of stuff that is chemically identical to this all around Iraq, but it wasn't under seal because it wasn't located at a place previously associated with nuclear work," said one senior administration official.

At the White House and even inside the agency, which is based in Vienna, many people think this was a huge mistake. But the agency decided to allow Mr. Hussein to keep it because he argued he would use it in civilian construction projects.

When inspectors returned to Iraq in late 2002, they visited the site, which is dozens of square miles, examined the material and resealed it in January 2003. They visited again just before leaving the country in mid-March, and the seals were intact. Late Wednesday, the Pentagon released a photograph of trucks belonging to Mr. Hussein's forces at the site right after the inspectors left the country, suggesting that Mr. Hussein's forces could have moved the material. But the photograph showed no evidence that anything was being loaded or unloaded, and the trucks do not appear to be near the bunkers that held the HMX.

On Friday, the Pentagon said that on April 13, a special ordnance unit went to Al Qaqaa and destroyed 250 tons of explosives. But the Pentagon did not assert it was the same explosives that the atomic energy agency had under seal. On April 18, videotape taken by a Minneapolis television station shows American troops breaking what appears to be an energy agency seal and entering a bunker that contained what former inspectors say is clearly HMX. That unit, according to the station's cameraman, left the bunker unlocked, and soon left the area. It is unclear whether units that returned to Al Qaqaa in May searching for weapons of mass destruction saw the HMX or exactly when it disappeared.

Does the satellite photo that the Pentagon released show Iraqi trucks removing high-grade explosives from Al Qaqaa before the American invasion?

Weapons experts say the trucks are parked in front of a different bunker than the ones that contained the sealed HMX. At Al Qaqaa, only 9 of 56 bunkers contained HMX, according to the energy agency, and its maps show that the bunker near the trucks, No. 45, held none of the high-grade explosive. "It's not an HMX bunker," said a weapon expert familiar with the work of the international inspectors in Iraq.

Pentagon officials say the satellite photo is intended only to show that the area was not secure. "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.

Is there any reason that the coalition troops should have known to look for the explosives?

The atomic energy agency thinks so. Its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, warned about the HMX when briefing the United Nations Security Council in January 2003. The C.I.A. had the site listed as a "medium" priority on its own list of places the United States would have to search or secure after an invasion. Because Al Qaqaa was where Mr. Hussein once made conventional warheads and some chemical weapons, it was well known to American intelligence officials. But more importantly, because the HMX would have been needed in any nuclear weapons project - a program the Bush administration had alleged Mr. Hussein was seeking to revive - it would have been a natural place to look immediately for evidence of efforts to assemble weapons of mass destruction.

But some of the first troops to arrive there on the drive to Baghdad apparently did not know any of that. Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said his troops got to the site on April 10 and camped there overnight, but until this week he did not know it was considered important. "We happened to stumble on it," Colonel Anderson said. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus."

The agency said it sent another specific warning to the Bush administration, through the American representative to the agency, in May 2003, after reports of widespread looting in Iraq. Agency officials say they never heard a response. Mr. DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman, said the teams that searched Iraq in the days after Mr. Hussein's fall were looking chiefly for weapons of mass destruction - and the high explosives did not qualify. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said this week that there were "a number of priorities," from securing oil fields to getting reconstruction going.

It is unclear. Many explosives are being rounded up. But identifying HMX takes experience, and in granular form it can be easily divided up and hidden.

Isn't there a huge discrepancy between the nearly 350 metric tons of high explosives that the energy agency claimed were at Al Qaqaa and what was actually there, especially for the explosive known as RDX?

No, weapons experts say. A Iraqi government letter of Oct. 10 identified the lost stockpile as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, 141.2 metric tons of RDX, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN.

On Wednesday, ABC News reported that it had obtained a confidential document from the energy agency showing that its inspectors in January 2003, had reported the existence of a little more than three tons of RDX explosives at Al Qaqaa - not the 141.2 metric tons in the Iraqi letter.

Melissa Fleming, an agency spokeswoman, said Friday that the confusion about the quantities arose because Al Qaqaa had more than one site for RDX storage. Three tons were kept at Al Qaqaa, she said, while 125 tons under Al Qaqaa administrative control were kept at Muaskar al Mahawil, about 30 miles away. So the total recent RDX inventory was 128 tons - 13 tons less than the Iraqi ministry wrote in their letter this month.

While Mr. Hussein was still in power, Ms. Fleming said, Iraq told agency inspectors before the war that it had used 10 tons of the RDX between late 1998 and late 2002, when the United Nations did not monitor Al Qaqaa. So the discrepancy, she said, boiled down to three tons.

"We were in the process of verifying and reconciling the three missing tons when the war erupted," she said.

The answer depends on whom you ask. The memorandum from the Iraqi interim government to the energy agency was dated Oct. 10. It was sent in response to a request from the agency for an accounting of missing materials. The Bush administration says it smells a political motive: the head of the agency, Mr. ElBaradei, was told a few months ago that the United States would not support him for another term. They suspect an effort at retribution.

Mr. Bush's political strategist, Karl Rove, said this week that he believed The Times deliberately published the story the week before the election in an effort to harm Mr. Bush's candidacy. Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said that the paper first obtained a copy of the Iraqi letter early in the week of Oct. 18, and that its reporters and CBS began asking questions about the explosives in Baghdad, Vienna and Washington during that week. The article was published on Oct. 25. The White House said President Bush was told of the Iraqi warning to the energy agency around Oct. 16.

Here's the Slimes' version of the Al QaQaa facts. They're moving the goal posts. Now, not even all of the RDX was at Al QaQaa itself.

By the way, here's their whole nine paragraph article on the actual press conference. Fair and balanced it is not. Only seven are actually devoted to what was said there:

Soldier Tells of Destroying Some Arms

By ERIC SCHMITT

ASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - An Army demolition expert said Friday that his former unit in Iraq destroyed hundreds of tons of ammunition and explosives in a part of the munitions complex at Al Qaqaa in April 2003.

But the Defense Department said it was not clear whether those munitions had anything to do with the nearly 380 tons of high explosives that the Iraqi government and the International Atomic Energy Agency have said are missing from the complex.

Soon afterward, however, Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking at a campaign stop in Dimondale, Mich., cited the Army officer's comments, at a Pentagon news conference, as evidence that some of the missing explosives had been demolished.

"They seized and destroyed some 250 tons of ammunition,'' Mr. Cheney said, "which included in that amount some significant portions of the explosives in question.''

At the news conference, the demolition expert, Maj. Austin Pearson, and the Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, were both asked repeatedly whether the material the unit destroyed was the same as that reported missing. They both said they did not know.

Major Pearson, former commander of the 24th Ordnance Company, 24th Corps Support Group, said the munitions destruction that the unit undertook had been part of a routine process of clearing away dangerous explosives that posed an immediate danger to American troops operating in the area beginning in April 2003.

Mr. Di Rita said that while some of what Major Pearson described destroying was a plastic explosive called RDX, similar to some of the material that the International Atomic Energy Agency has said is missing, "I can't say that RDX that was on the list of the I.A.E.A. is in what the major pulled out."

Other explosives that Major Pearson's unit destroyed on April 13, 2003, 10 days after American forces first reached Al Qaqaa, included TNT, detonation cords, initiators and white phosphorous rounds - none of them the type of material that had been inspected and sealed by the agency before the war.

"I did not see any I.A.E.A. seals at the locations that we went into," Major Pearson told reporters. "I was not looking for that. My mission specifically was to go in there and prevent the exposure of U.S. forces and to minimize that by taking out what was easily accessible and putting it back and bringing it in to our captured ammunition holding area."

Excellent short article on WSJ Editorial Page today titled "The U.N.'s Revenge." Here are some short excerpts...

On October 10, a letter from the Iraqi Ministry of Science & Technology arrived at the International Atomic Energy Agency's Vienna headquarters. The letter included a list of "high explosive materials" that "were lost" after April 9, 2003, through "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security." This is the ministry that worked with the IAEA before the war and it's headed by a man who used to work for Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqi ministry was responding, in what appears to be record time, to a U.N. request. IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei attaches the Iraqi letter to his own October 25 letter to the U.N. Security Council, saying he had received it "consequent to [a] reminder" the IAEA had sent on October 1. Somehow, information that was known for many months suddenly required urgent communication to New York. ...

The IAEA informed the U.S. about the missing stockpile on October 15, noting that it was "likely to leak." In his October 25 letter to the Security Council, Mr. ElBaradei dryly noted "the matter has been given media coverage today." That was the day the story was first reported by the New York Times and CBS News. Mission accomplished? ...

There's one last date worth noting: September 10. That's the day Mr. ElBaradei announced that he would seek a third term as IAEA head. The Bush Administration believes heads of U.N. agencies should serve a maximum of two terms. It told Mr. ElBaradei when it supported him for a second term in 2001 that it would not support him for a third. A Kerry Administration might take a different view, especially after this week.

380 tons of bailed straw

The liberal media reports are of allegations, as to the:

tonnage
type
location

When the media provide an unbroken evidence chain, which can account for the alleged explosives existance from the moment of its discovery on up to the moment of its disappearance, then we may know that there actually was something, and it remained something, and then suddenly it did not remain. The evidence must include the observers, too.

Otherwise, there is nothing.

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October 30, 2004