Monday, October 25, 2004

In Deep Qa Qaa

This morning I heard on the news what the Bush administration has been trying to keep under wraps for a year and a half - that 760,000 pounds of super high-yield military-grade RCX and HMX high explosives, with an explosive power of well over a megaton of TNT have been stolen from an Iraqi facility in al Qa Qaa, south of Baghdad. Less than a pound of this explosive was sufficient to bring down Flight 103 over Scotland back in 1988.

The explosives had been turned over to U.S. control from the IAEA, and had been under UN guard for years, as part of the UN sanctions sneeringly dismissed by Bush and the neocons. Sanctions that look more and more as having done their job. The explosives were noted by U.S. troops as being in place in April 2003. Then, as the insurgency started to roll in Iraq, the explosives were left unguarded due to the grossly inadequate level of troops.

The Bush administration barred the UN from any involvement in the invasion of Iraq and occupation process, and blocked all IAEA requests to help in the search for WMD and other dangerous materials. The administration has known of the theft for a year and a half, but ordered the Iraqi provisional government to keep quiet about it and not tell the IAEA.

No wonder a high-ranking administration official told Chris Nelson (author of ‘The Nelson Report’, an Asian business and politics newsletter), “This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information.”

In response to questions about whether the material might have been smuggled out of Iraq, another source told Nelson, “It’s still in Iraq, and this is the most likely primary source of the explosives which have been used to blow up Humvees and in all the deadly car bomb attacks since the occupation began. What the hell were WE doing in the year and a half from the time we knew the stuff was gone, is obviously a huge question, and you can imagine why no one [in the Administration] wants to face up to it, certainly not before the election.”

Of course, they don’t want to face up to it.

It is just one more glaring example of utter incompetance and dishonesty.

- Bob Woods