A mess of missing ordnance
In Iraq, weapons, weapons everywhere--and free for the taking
Despite the political brawl over the missing explosives from al Qaqaa, the larger question is why Pentagon war planners made no more extensive plans for controlling Saddam's vast weapons stores. Before the U.S.-led invasion, there were some 650,000 tons of ammunition in thousands of sites around Iraq. Pentagon officials say they have destroyed 400,000 tons. Of all the Iraqi weapons sites, however, al Qaqaa was among the most important. It had been at the center of some of Saddam's efforts to develop chemical and nuclear weaponry. After looting at Iraq's main nuclear complex in April 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency warned U.S. officials about the possibility of similar activity at al Qaqaa and cautioned specifically about the high explosives stored there. The three types of explosives--HMX, RDX, and PETN--can be used to blow up buildings and airplanes and to trigger nuclear weapons.
"Theft and looting." U.S. troops visited al Qaqaa in early April of last year, but the troops, whose mission was to get to Baghdad and take the city, made only a cursory search of the facility, which is about the size of Manhattan and has 32 bunkers and 87 separate installations. Members of the 101st Airborne Division, which spent time there between April 7 and April 10, said that soldiers performed a security sweep of just a small part of the facility and "did not receive orders to search and secure the entire facility or search for high explosive-type munitions."
Pentagon inspection teams visited al Qaqaa in early May, and an Army Reserve unit charged with searching for high explosives arrived on May 27. Kay says that the unit noted in a report that it searched the entire facility but could find no explosives. Kay's team searched the still-unsecured facility at the end of June and confirmed the reserve unit's findings. "By the time we had gotten on the ground," he said, "the site was heavily looted [and] essentially destroyed."
Iraq's interim government told the IAEA that the explosive material was lost "after April 9, 2003, through theft and looting of the government installations due to a lack of security." Pentagon and the White House officials have maintained, alternately, that some of the munitions might have been destroyed by U.S. troops or that the munitions were probably removed, possibly by Saddam's army, just prior to the invasion or during it. Kay doesn't buy the latter thought: "It's hard for me to believe that the U.S. military would not have noticed 40 to 60 truckloads moving out of this site."
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