Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Back in June - nearly four months ago - the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Although the world's attention has focused on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, scant attention has been paid to the mountains of weapons of conventional destruction unearthed in Iraq.

The bombs, rockets, grenades, cannon shells and bullets amount to the world's fourth-largest stockpile of weapons, Army Corps of Engineers officials say. An estimated 600,000 tons of munitions with markings from all over the world, including the United States, and some so old that the weapons that fired them are no longer made, were stashed in Saddam's innumerable caches.

To date, 110,000 tons have been destroyed. An additional 138,000 tons are stored behind protective barriers.

That adds up to 248,000 tons of explosives destroyed or captured! And those numbers are almost certainly much higher today.

Is it a bad thing if these 350 tons of explosives are out there? Sure. But there is nothing in the Times story to confirm that the explosives were secure when the war began. This IAEA report, conducted in January 2003, appears to be the last time any outsider could confirm the stuff was there. (The Times story quotes letters and memos from IAEA officials speculating that the explosives were taken during the looting, but this is just guessing, really.)

There is also this section:

By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of roughly 10 bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been leveled by titanic blasts, apparently during the war. They presumed some of the HMX had exploded, but that is unclear.

Other HMX bunkers were untouched. Some were damaged but not devastated. I.A.E.A. experts say they assume that just before the invasion the Iraqis followed their standard practice of moving crucial explosives out of buildings, so they would not be tempting targets. If so, the experts say, the Iraqi must have broken seals from the arms agency on bunker doors and moved most of the HMX to nearby fields, where it would have been lightly camouflaged - and ripe for looting.

Also note this section: "As a measure of the size of the stockpile, one large truck can carry about 10 tons, meaning that the missing explosives could fill a fleet of almost 40 trucks."

Forty trucks filled with explosives pulled away from an Iraqi arms depot during the invasion or occupation? Yeah, right. U.S. air power and/or ground forces would have pulverized them. I'd bet a Krispy Kreme doughnut that at least a big chunk of these explosive materials were taken before the war.

UPDATE: If I'm hearing her correctly, CNN's Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr says Defense Department officials think these materials were taken from the site before the invasion began.

[Posted 10/25 02:21 PM]