[Hawkeye]

According to the Washington Post and the New York Times, the great war President Georgie Bush and his team of neocon fanciers knew of the loss of the 380 metric tons of RDX and HMX months ago and agreed to keep the horrifying facts secret until after the election. The saga of the greatest pillage of high explosives in modern history almost defies belief, exceeded only by the degree of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld incompetence.

The only Bush and Co. action more egregious than the theft itself and its subsequent cover-up is the current attempt of the Bush spin machine to pretend that the whole miserable affair never occurred at all and that Saddam Hussein was in fact the guilty party. The proclivity of Georgie Bush and his hapless helpers to produce scenarios reaching a crescendo of unbelievability in the face of overwhelmingly contrary evidence boggles the imagination.

The only storyteller capable of rivalling Georgie Bush and his spin-master's take on Near Eastern affairs was the twelfth century literary genius who produced the magical wonderland of The Arabian Nights.

For a taste of reality, consider just for a moment, a rusty Chevy van carrying a half a dozen migrant laborers, one of whom is in fact an Al Quaeda agent carrying ten pounds of HMX, unloading its passengers at the "porous border" on a moonless two A.M. Feel safer?

[JennyInSeattle]

The saga of the greatest pillage of high explosives in modern history almost defies belief, exceeded  only by the degree of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld incompetence. 

Blah blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda.

Your talking points are already inoperative. The explosives were stolen sometime between Jan. & April 2003 - before the US even got to Qa Qaa.

Are you arguing now that Bush, Cheney, Rice, & Rumsfeld are incompetent because they didn't send in the troops fast enough??? Geeeeeez!!!

(It's so fun watching liberal campaigns implode. )

[Mixxster]

On Monday, the Pentagon gave mixed signals about what the first troops on the scene found. Or rather, an official whom the AP describes as closely involved in the Iraq survey work says the explosives were there, while Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita says they weren't.

First, military and non-proliferation analysts say that a detachment of soldiers not specifically trained in weapons inspections work and certainly an NBC news crew simply wouldn't be in a position to make such a determination. We're not talking about a storage unit with a few boxes in it, but a massive weapons complex made up of almost a hundred buildings and bunkers.

Former weapons inspector David Albright was asked about this on CNN Monday evening and he said, "I would want to check it out. I mean it's a big site. These bunkers are big and it could get lost in that complex and it may be that they just didn't go to the right places and didn't see it."

As we noted earlier, there's a relatively brief window of time we're talking about when this stuff could have been carted away -- specifically, from March 8th (when the IAEA last checked it) until April 4th when the first US troops appear to have arrived on the scene.

Certainly there would have been time enough to move the stuff. That's almost a month. But this would be a massive and quite visible undertaking. As the Times noted yesterday, moving this material would have taken a fleet of about forty big trucks each moving about ten tons of explosives. And this was at a time -- the week before and then during the war -- when Iraq's skies were positively crawling with American aerial and satellite reconnaissance.

http://www.talkingpo...ives/003800.php

[Hawkeye]

May I suggest the virtue of accuracy in responses to posts on this forum. Some posters appear to be clairvoyant in their anticipation of certain messages. When noting the time of quoted posts the accuracy of the hour and minute at which the post in question was actually transmitted often relieves the quoter of the need to deny superhuman powers, unless of course the apparent error was in fact the result of the exercise of rather uncommon mental abilities.

[livandletlive]

Umm , Im not trying to put the blame on anyone , but why wouldnt the military secure this site? It was on of the largest weapon storage areas in Iraq. It was full of weapons and when the military arrived it was already being looted. It is standard practice that when the military captures a important site that they secure it. Why wasnt this done? All reports from the embedded journalist say that it wasnt secured and barley even searched.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6323933/

Im not saying it is or is not Bush's fault , but he does need to hold someone responsible for this screw up. I understand it could have been looted before the military got there, but according to the article it would have taken a fleet of tracktrailers to move it and it also say that if that was the case the trucks would have been seen.

[GeezUS]

http://tinypic.com/ekrw1

[Mixxster]

FumAlum, you forgot:

"It's Clinton's fault."

[Hawkeye]

I have been too busy to look at the news (here or elsewhere) all day. Can someone bring me up to date on the latest half dozen or so of the White House's latest explanations of the RDX-HMX scandal? I think I have seen all of those they had tried as of about 8:30 AM today. If there are more than six or so, just hi-light the most outrageous ones. Many thanks.

[JennyInSeattle]

I have been too busy to look at the news (here or elsewhere) all day.  Can someone bring me up to date on the latest half dozen or so of the White House's  latest explanations of the RDX-HMX  scandal? I think I have seen all of those they had tried as of about 8:30 AM today.  If there are more than six or so, just hi-light the most outrageous ones.  Many thanks.

IMO the most outrageous statement by the White House is that this is a political stunt - an October Surprise that the Kerry campaign has latched on to in its latest effort to throw everything they can find at the wall & see what sticks.

I am shocked - SHOCKED - to think that the Kerry campaign would stoop so low!

[darleneann]

The Laws of Something-or-Other do say that something SHOULD stick eventually.

[usedmeat]

John Kerry has been vindicated. For those of you who think he made reckless charges befor all the facts were in, he was repeating what the IAEA inspectors had determined. The White House 'investigation' was a smoke screen. All the reports say that the Al Qaqaa site was looted after we invaded because there wasn't enough troops to secure this and other munitions dumps. The lates good news is all the missing shoulder fired surface to air missiles.

[usedmeat]

It's not about who sold what. After all, Cheney was lobbying the Clinton administration to lift the sanctions so Halliburton could belly up to the Iraqi money trough. This is about the blatent incompetence of the likes Rumsfeld and Wolfawitz who pushed onto the military commanders invasion plans without the necessary troops. There were no troops to secure all the conventional weapon and nuclear developement sites now all that stuff is in terrorists hands. Should any of this end up on our door step it will be Bush's fault.

Anybody besides me notice the 'next year' tactic. When ever the right fouls up it's either blame Clinton or 'facts will come out next year that will vindicate us' only they never do.