Gross Incompetence

[TexasTiger 10,929]

380 tons is a heckuva lot of car bombs. Unbelievable.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year.

The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."

Administration officials said yesterday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.

American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could be used to produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings. The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa, and somewhat larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it. But the other components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain. "This is a high explosives risk, but not necessarily a proliferation risk," one senior Bush administration official said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/internat...artner=homepage

[DKW 86 6,921]

October Surprise!

[CCTAU 2,313]

Hmmmm. they were there before the invasion. Trains full of who knows what were crossing the Syrian border unchecked just HOURS before the invasion...

So how do they now that the trains weren't full of the stuff. The UN is the ones that are grossly incompetent. But not enough dems in this country have the balls to stand up to them.

[Tigermike 2,596]

Hmmmm. they were there before the invasion. Trains full of who knows what were crossing the Syrian border unchecked just HOURS before the invasion...

So how do they now that the trains weren't full of the stuff. The UN is the ones that are grossly incompetent. But not enough dems in this country have the balls to stand up to them.

114637[/snapback]

The UN also need's to cover their butts because of the Oil for Food scandal. France and Germany were deep into that weren't they. Oh I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have said anything about France and Germany, they are the two allies that John Kerry wants to bring back aren't they.

[TexasTiger 10,929]

Hmmmm. they were there before the invasion. Trains full of who knows what were crossing the Syrian border unchecked just HOURS before the invasion...

So how do they now that the trains weren't full of the stuff. The UN is the ones that are grossly incompetent. But not enough dems in this country have the balls to stand up to them.

114637[/snapback]

"Hmmmm. How do I formulate an hypothesis that relieves Dubya of all responsibility and accountability for this problem? It would be a real bonus if I could somehow blame the UN while I was at it....Ah hah!"

[CCTAU 2,313]

Hmmmm. they were there before the invasion. Trains full of who knows what were crossing the Syrian border unchecked just HOURS before the invasion...

So how do they now that the trains weren't full of the stuff. The UN is the ones that are grossly incompetent. But not enough dems in this country have the balls to stand up to them.

114637[/snapback]

"Hmmmm. How do I formulate an hypothesis that relieves Dubya of all responsibility and accountability for this problem? It would be a real bonus if I could somehow blame the UN while I was at it....Ah hah!"

114777[/snapback]

The UN has always been the blame. But you and yours worship at the alter of the UN so its hard for you to see the truth.

[TexasTiger 10,929]

Hmmmm. they were there before the invasion. Trains full of who knows what were crossing the Syrian border unchecked just HOURS before the invasion...

So how do they now that the trains weren't full of the stuff. The UN is the ones that are grossly incompetent. But not enough dems in this country have the balls to stand up to them.

114637[/snapback]

"Hmmmm. How do I formulate an hypothesis that relieves Dubya of all responsibility and accountability for this problem? It would be a real bonus if I could somehow blame the UN while I was at it....Ah hah!"

114777[/snapback]

The UN has always been the blame. But you and yours worship at the alter of the UN so its hard for you to see the truth.

114904[/snapback]

You live in a very simple world. Simply wrong.

[rexbo 102]

"Hey, Sergeant, come over, bring your squad, we are leaving this sight."

"What, why L-T?"

"Yours is not to question why, Sergeant, but if you gotta know, Condi called, she said we are wasting our time hear guarding all these explosives, we need to get up to Fallauja and kill some more innocent babies."

"But, L-T, there are HUNDREDS of TONS of explosives here, the insurgents get a hold of this, we will have car bombs going off in Baghdad for a hundred years!"

"Shut-up Sergeant, I told you, you don't call the shots around, neither does the Captain, the Major, nor the Colonel; Condi calls, we say 'Yes Ma'am', and go do her dirty work, you hear?"

[CCTAU 2,313]

Once again TT, the gross incompetence is your daddy (sKerry) not doing his homework before he spouts his lying mouth.

Last night we get a report on NBC news that the explosives were already missing when U.S. troops arrived at the storage location on April 10, 2003.  The last time the IAEA saw the explosives was three months earlier in January of 2003.  There is no way to know just when the explosives were removed.  Sometime after the IAEA saw them in January and before American troops got there in April.  Obviously this isn't a case of Bush failing to "guard" the explosives.  By the time our troops got there they weren't there to guard.  In other words, nobody failed to guard anything and there was nothing we could have done about it.  They were gone when we got there.

Well .. .hold on.  There is something we could have done about it.  We could have invaded earlier!  Get in there before the Iraqis had a chance to hide the explosives!  Is that what the Kerry supporters are saying we should have done?

This was a "get Bush" story from the beginning.  There have been some problems between the Bush White House and the head of the IAEA.  This was supposed to be the "October Surprise."  Drudge is reporting this morning that CBS was hoping to run with this story on Sunday's 60 Minutes ... two days before the election.  The New York Times beat them to the punch ... and, unfortunately for the designs of the leftist press, in time for the truth to come out.

AND WHAT ABOUT OTHER MISSING WEAPONS?

The Democrats and the media sure seem awfully concerned about this missing 380 tons of conventional explosives.  While that's a lot of bombs, it pales in comparison when you're talking about nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction.  The WMD could kill millions of people.  And those weapons are also missing.

Yet for some reason, the media and the left don't want those weapons to ever be found.  They know it advances their anti-Bush agenda for it to continue to look like "Bush lied" when he said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.  Just as always, the safety and security of the United States comes in dead last when liberals want to win elections.  We're told that 380 tons of missing explosives is the biggest disaster of the entire Iraq war.  Missing chemical and biological weapons aren't that troubling, at least not to the left.  According to the Democrats, they don't exist.  Bush lied, you know.  Never mind the fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, used weapons of mass destruction and we found weapons of mass destruction.  It's also important to note that Iraq never accounted for missing quantities of biological and chemical agents.

But that 380 tons of explosives that's been missing for over a year and half.....that's the end of civilization as we know it.

Guess this thread is just a RUMOUR now.

But it sure won't get as much attention as the lying accusations by sKerry. Just another example of your fair media, huh?

LINK

[TitanTiger 18,124]

Some follow up on this:

NBC News Said Explosives Were Gone When US Troops Arrived

By Susan Jones

CNSNews.com Morning Editor

October 26, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - NBC News reported Monday night that 380 tons of missing explosives were already gone when U.S. troops arrived at the Al-Qaqaa weapons installation in April 2003 - one day after Saddam's government was toppled.

NBC should know. It had a reporter embedded with the U.S. troops when they arrived at Al-Qaqaa in April 2003.

While the Kerry campaign blasted the Bush administration for "stunning incompetence" on Monday, many Bush supporters questioned the timing of Monday's New York Times report about the missing explosives -- coming as it did just eight days before the presidential election.

NBC News Correspondent Jim Miklaszewski suggested a political motive as well: In his report on the missing explosives Monday night, he quoted one official as saying, "Recent disagreements between the administration and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes this announcement appear highly political."

According to the New York Times, the IAEA said it had warned the Bush administration about the need to secure the Al-Qaqaa facility both before and after the war.

In a follow-up report on Tuesday, the New York Times did not mention the fact that NBC had an embedded reporter on the scene when the missing explosives were discovered -- the day after Baghdad fell.

Tuesday's New York Times report -- entitled "Iraq Explosives Become Issue in Campaign" -- covers how the Bush administration "sought to explain the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that American forces were supposed to secure."

Bush's aides, the Tuesday article said, "tried to explain why American forces had ignored warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency about the vulnerability of the huge stockpile of high explosives, whose disappearance was first reported on Monday by CBS and The New York Times."

The New York Times report portrayed the Bush administration as being on the defensive -- trying to "minimize the importance of the loss" of the military explosives.

The report noted that President Bush "never mentioned the disappearance of the high explosives during a long campaign speech in Greeley, Colo., about battling terrorism."

"There are certainly some questions about when the explosives were missing," Kerry campaign adviser Howard Wolfson admitted on Fox & Friends early Tuesday morning. But the Kerry campaign is not expected to let the matter drop.

In a press release late Monday night, the Kerry campaign accused the Bush campaign of trying to cover up its "failure" to secure the explosives.

"Instead of distorting John Kerry's words, the Bush campaign is now falsely and deliberately twisting the reports of journalists. It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous," Kerry-Edwards senior advisor Joe Lockhart said.

http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewPolitics.asp?P...L20041026b.html

[CCTAU 2,313]

And Bush is the one that can't admit when he's wrong?

sKerry will lie, cheat, steal, and gigolo to get the title of President. But that's all he wants is the title. He does not have the integrity to really do the job. And its showing!

[TitanTiger 18,124]

Whoa. Now it appears that "60 Minutes" planned on "breaking" this story two days before the election, giving the Bush campaign little time to address the issue before the ballots were cast. Right now it's only on Drudge, but he does have some quotes from various people in CBS and the Bush campaign. We'll see if this gets any more traction:

60 MINS PLANNED BUSH MISSING EXPLOSIVES STORY FOR ELECTION EVE

News of missing explosives in Iraq -- first reported in April 2003 -- was being resurrected for a 60 MINUTES election eve broadcast designed to knock the Bush administration into a crises mode.

Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of 60 MINUTES, said in a statement that "our plan was to run the story on October 31."

Elizabeth Jensen at the LOS ANGELES TIMES details on Tuesday how CBS NEWS and 60 MINUTES lost the story [which repackaged previously reported information on a large cache of explosives missing in Iraq, first published and broadcast in 2003].

The story instead debuted in the NYT. The paper slugged the story about missing explosives from April 2003 as "exclusive."

An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.

According to NBCNEWS, the explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.

It is not clear who exactly shopped an election eve repackaging of the missing explosives story.

The LA TIMES claims: The source on the story first went to 60 MINUTES but also expressed interest in working with the NY TIMES... "The tip was received last Wednesday."

CBSNEWS' plan to unleash the story just 24 hours before election day had one senior Bush official outraged.

"Darn, I wanted to see the forged documents to show how this was somehow covered up," the Bush source, who asked not to be named, mocked, recalling last months CBS airing of fraudulent Bush national guard letters.

Developing...

http://www.drudgereport.com/nbcw6.htm

[MDM4AU 307]

Hmmmmm, how do we stick it to Bush right before the election? We have to do something because we can't win this thing outright from the look of most polls.

AH-HA! We can blame him for this even though it happened before the Bush Admin. "RUSHED TO WAR!!!" To hell with any other hypothetical situations. Especially those that don't fit our agenda. Then, anyone that defends him we will just claim they are trying to put the blame "wrongfully" on someone else.

Next, we act as the intellectual superiors that we delusionally think that we are and insult all those with a different opinion and talk down to them. We'll show them!

[Tigermike 2,596]

Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of 60 MINUTES, said in a statement that "our plan was to run the story on October 31."

An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.

According to NBCNEWS, the explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.

How many years did CBS have to vet the forged documents? Four, five years?

Now we see that they had 6 months to avoid the truth on this issue.

The dems continuously denigrate FOXNEWS for being partisan and maybe they are, but they are open about it. Unlike CBS who spews their bullcrap propaganda for the Democrat party and try to package it as "News".

What do you expect from people who believe that Michael Moore produced a documentary.

documentary

1. Consisting of, concerning, or based on documents.

2. Presenting facts objectively without editorializing or inserting fictional matter, as in a book or film.

A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration.

[TitanTiger 18,124]

National Review online has posted a quote from Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News:

NBC BLOWS A HOLE IN THE KERRY ATTACK ABOUT THE EXPLOSIVES

Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News pretty much dismantled the New York Times attack on behalf of Kerry today.

NBC News: Miklaszewski: “April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. In a letter this month, the Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency the high explosives were lost to theft and looting due to lack of security. Critics claim there were simply not enough U.S. troops to guard hundreds of weapons stockpiles, weapons now being used by insurgents and terrorists to wage a guerrilla war in Iraq.” (NBC’s “Nightly News,” 10/25/04)

http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerry200410252109.asp

[TexasTiger 10,929]

NBC doesn’t seem to think the issue is quite as cut and dry as those sources citing NBC assert.

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

Timing of theft of Iraq explosives remains a mystery

NBC, MSNBC and news services

Updated: 10:01 a.m. ET Oct. 26, 2004

WASHINGTON - The whereabouts of nearly 380 tons of high-powered explosives that vanished in Iraq remained a mystery Tuesday, even as the timing of their disappearance was becoming an issue in the final days of the U.S. presidential election.

In reporting the theft on Monday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that the explosives had been looted from the sprawling Al-Qaqaa military base, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, since January 2003 due to a “lack of security” at the former Iraqi military facility.

An NBC News crew that accompanied U.S. soldiers who seized the Al-Qaqaa base three weeks into the war in Iraq reported that troops discovered significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives.

It remains unclear, however, how extensively the U.S. forces searched the site in the immediate aftermath of the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

Signs of looting seen at war's end

The State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said that coalition forces searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings at Al Qaqaa facility after the war, looking for weapons of mass destruction. He said the troops found none, but did see signs of looting.

…

There was disagreement among U.S. officials over when the explosives might have disappeared.

At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said U.S.-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. The site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

But other Pentagon officials, also speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested that the explosives could have been hidden elsewhere before the war. They also stressed that there is no evidence HMX or RDX have been used against coalition forces in Iraq.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, in an exclusive interview with NBC News during a visit to South Korea, refused to comment on the timing of the disappearance.

Powell: Facts of disappearance unclear

"I don't know that we know what happened to it or the exact disposition," he said. "And I'll wait for those looking into this to come up with the answer as to what was there, when it was discovered missing, and where it might be."

NBC reporter disputes there was an extensive search on April 10th :

Just a pit stop. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/...0_24.php#003804

This morning MSNBC interviewed one of the producers from their news crew that visited al Qaqaa as embeds with the 101st Airborne, Second brigade on April 10th, 2003.

This is the 'search' that the White House and CNN are hanging their hats on (empahsis added)...

Amy Robach: And it's still unclear exactly when those explosives disappeared. Here to help shed some light on that question is Lai Ling. She was part of an NBC news crew that traveled to that facility with the 101st Airborne Division back in April of 2003. Lai Ling, can you set the stage for us? What was the situation like when you went into the area?

Lai Ling Jew: When we went into the area, we were actually leaving Karbala and we were initially heading to Baghdad with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. The situation in Baghdad, the Third Infantry Division had taken over Baghdad and so they were trying to carve up the area that the 101st Airborne Division would be in charge of. Um, as a result, they had trouble figuring out who was going to take up what piece of Baghdad. They sent us over to this area in Iskanderia. We didn't know it as the Qaqaa facility at that point but when they did bring us over there we stayed there for quite a while. Almost, we stayed overnight, almost 24 hours. And we walked around, we saw the bunkers that had been bombed, and that exposed all of the ordinances that just lied dormant on the desert.

AR: Was there a search at all underway or was, did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?

LLJ:No. There wasn't a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was – at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there.

If they were moved in the weeks prior to Baghdad falling, wouldn’t we have noticed?:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_24.php#003800

In any case, that visit wasn't the first time US troops went to the facility. That happened a week earlier, on April 4th, as was reported at the time. According to an AP account from the following day, the troops made spot visits to some of the buildings and found chemical warfare antidotes but no WMD.

The same report says they also found "thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder" which were initially believed to be chemical agents but were later determined to be "explosives."

Like the visit on the 10th, this visit seems to have been far from exhaustive and thus far from conclusive about what was there. Neither visit seems to provide clear evidence that the explosives were gone -- and the first may point in the opposite direction. (Further details about this first visit to al Qaqaa are contained in this April 5th article by the Post's Barton Gellman.)

Next comes the question of whether this really could have been pulled off at all under the circumstances.

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.

Considering that al Qaqaa was a major munitions installation where the US also suspected there might be WMD, it's difficult to believe that we wouldn't have noticed a convoy of forty huge trucks carting stuff away.

David Kay thinks it was looted in the aftermath of war:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-explosives26oct26,1,5204158.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Some cast doubt on the Pentagon's claim. Given the size of the missing cache, it would have been difficult to relocate undetected before the invasion, when U.S. spy satellites were monitoring activity at sites suspected of concealing nuclear and biological weapons.

"You don't just move this stuff in the middle of the night," said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Baghdad.

Iraqi officials told the International Atomic Energy Agency — the U.N. monitoring group — earlier this month that the explosives were looted after April 9, 2003, when U.S. forces entered Baghdad. IAEA officials verified that the explosives were still at the site and under seal in January 2003, the last time the inspectors were there.

The IAEA had been monitoring the material — known as HMX and RDX — as part of the U.N. inspection program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The agency had issued numerous warnings about the explosives falling into the wrong hands before and after the U.S. invasion.

Pentagon officials said that although U.S. troops searched the facility on several occasions during and after the invasion, the facility was not high on U.S. commanders' list of sites to guard because survey teams found no nuclear or biological materials at Al Qaqaa, a collection of 87 buildings and underground bunkers less than 30 miles south of Baghdad.

Asked if U.S. troops were ever ordered to guard the facility, where Hussein built conventional warheads and the IAEA dismantled parts of his nuclear program after the Gulf War, a Defense official responded, "Not that I'm aware of."

David Kay, the CIA's former chief weapons hunter in Iraq, believes that the material was looted in the immediate aftermath of the war.

He said he saw the facility in May 2003, "and it was heavily looted at that time. Sometime between April and May, most of the stuff was carried off. The site was in total disarray, just like a lot of the Iraqi sites."

Kay said that HMX and RDX were "superb explosives for terrorists" because they were stable compounds that could be transported safely and used for large-scale attacks.

Both types of material "would be good for a car bomb or a truck bomb," Kay said. "Just pack it together with a detonator."

The U.S. failure to guard hundreds of ammunition depots after the invasion has been well documented. Top military officials in Iraq believe that weapons taken from these sites have armed an insurgency that is taking American lives almost daily. More than 1,100 U.S. troops have been killed since the invasion began.

[Tigermike 2,596]

Other than to blindside President Bush’s reelection campaign and to influence the election, what other reason could there be for CBS to plan their “news” for the weekend before election day? And for then to ignore and even misrepresent the facts?

[CCTAU 2,313]

[AURaptor 1,113]

Kerry (again) recklessly lying about Iraq. But thanks to years of Jerry Springer, Reality shows and far Left leaning, biased network news....no one cares.

[CShine 0]

Looters stormed the weapons site at Al Qaqaa in the days after American troops swept through the area in early April 2003 on their way to Baghdad, gutting office buildings, carrying off munitions and even dismantling heavy machinery, three Iraqi witnesses and a regional security chief said Wednesday.

The Iraqis described an orgy of theft so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters. But some looting was clearly indiscriminate, with people grabbing anything they could find and later heaving unwanted items off the trucks.

Two witnesses were employees of Al Qaqaa - one a chemical engineer and the other a mechanic - and the third was a former employee, a chemist, who had come back to retrieve his records, determined to keep them out of American hands. The mechanic, Ahmed Saleh Mezher, said employees asked the Americans to protect the site but were told this was not the soldiers' responsibility.

The accounts do not directly address the question of when 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives vanished from the site sometime after early March, the last time international inspectors checked the seals on the bunkers where the material was stored. It is possible that Iraqi forces removed some explosives before the invasion.

But the accounts make clear that what set off much if not all of the looting was the arrival and swift departure of American troops, who did not secure the site after inducing the Iraqi forces to abandon it.

"The looting started after the collapse of the regime," said Wathiq al-Dulaimi, a regional security chief, who was based nearby in Latifiya. But once it had begun, he said, the booty streamed toward Baghdad.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/internat...ogin&oref=login

[Tigermike 2,596]

Wow if the NY Times says it, it must be true, they are absolutely beyond reproach, they have no agenda.

[TexasTiger 10,929]

Wow if the NY Times says it, it must be true, they are absolutely beyond reproach, they have no agenda.

115779[/snapback]

Well this is a witness who I'll admit has been proven not to be credible, but he claims the Bush administration regularly monitored such sites:

At this ballistic missile site, on November 10, we saw a cargo truck preparing to move ballistic missile components. At this biological weapons related facility, on November 25, just two days before inspections resumed, this truck caravan appeared, something we almost never see at this facility, and we monitor it carefully and regularly.

link

[rexbo 102]

The NY Times now has as much credibility as Dan Rather, or Baghdad Bob or whatever his name was...

[CShine 0]

The video shows a cable locking a door shut. That cable is connected by a copper colored seal.

A spokesperson for the International Atomic Energy Agency told 5 Eyewitness News that seal appears to be one used by their inspectors. "In Iraq they were used when there was a concern that this could have a, what we call, dual use purpose, that there could be a nuclear weapons application."

http://kstp.com/article/stories/S3741.html?cat=1