Anatomy of a Spin

Ahh. I see. When first reports regarding the missing 377 tons of high-grade explosives turn out to be, well, possibly lacking in nuance -- i.e., false, or at least incomplete -- then the 377 tons of high-grade explosives in fact never were the story at all. (Per Sullivan.) Well, then. Moving on.

In fact, no one knows what happened to the missing explosives. No one knows if they were at the weapons site when U.S. troops arrived, whether the Russians moved them prior to the war, or whether our gross incompetence delivered them to an Iraqi insurgency group (as Al-Islam’s Army Brigades now claims.) We can speculate until the end of time, but endless speculation does not a fact make.

We should keep that in mind, perhaps, before leaping on the attack.

(By this criticism, I do not mean to excuse Mr. Bush's inability or unwillingness to disinguish criticism of him from criticism of the troops who serve all of us. I'm not voting for the man for reason, after all.)

UPDATE: Reader Wilfred points to this story by a Minneapolis/St. Paul television station, which suggests that it may have videotaped some of the now-missing explosives when it visited the Al Qaqaa installation with U.S. troops on April 18, 2003 (after the fall of Baghdad). The story -- rightly -- takes pains to point out that it's not at all clear whether the videotaped exploses are the "high explosives" in question. But I've not yet seen this report in the blogosphere, so I'm passing it along. All caveats apply.

Comments

[wilfred]

http://kstp.com/article/stories/S3723.html?cat=1

found this more than interesting.

[praktike]

There is a weapons depot in the desert. For some people the depot is easy to see. Others don't see it at all. Some people say the depot is empty. Others say it's filled with dangerous explosives. Since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to send enough troops along to guard the depot?

If there is a depot?

[von]

Thanks, Wilfred. Updated accordingly.

[Trickster]

Good one, Praktike.

[Trickster]

What IS perfectly clear from the Al Qa Qaa story is that the White House did not set up a proper network for reporting on, securing, and keeping records on WMD sites. (This was a WMD site, since the explosives were usable as nuclear triggers. That's why the IAEA was interested.)

It should have gone something like this: George Bush should have told Condoleeza Rice or Don Rumsfeld that he wanted us to track all known WMD sites, or failing that, at the very least those individuals should have known enough to take the job on themselves. One of them, e.g., Rice should have designated an individual to head this effort up, say Stephen Hadley. Hadley's task would've been to be able to quickly lay hands on records of what was found at each site and how that site was secured or how the decision was made that the site didn't need to be secured. As a very busy man, Hadley would've farmed the entire task out to some Pentagon major general, who would in turn have sub-designated chunks to 5 colonels who would each sub-designate to 5 captains, but in the end that major general would have the ability to lay hands on the records of WMD site X within minutes, and as long as Hadley had that guy's cell phone number, and Rice had Hadley's cell phone number, and Bush had Rice's cell phone number, then Bush could've had those records within an hour tops.

That's how it should've worked. And if the Administration were actually interested in securing WMDs, and competent to perform the job, that's exactly how it would've worked.

We know enough already to be absolutely certain that it didn't work that way. A press story surfaced a few days back--when was it, Monday?--and the White House is still floundering around on how to answer it. Clearly, the White House does not have a go-to guy or gal with records for that site.

Why not?

[von]

Since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to send enough troops along to guard the depot?

Praktike, you'll get no argument from me there. Remember please that I once had a mantra, which I repeated on the Tacitus site ad naseaum in the spring and summer of '03: More money, more troops, more international involvement.

[bob mcmanus]

"That's the real issue. And as the facts emerge, I've become convinced of one astounding thing: the Bush administration didn't care very much about the dangers from Saddam's alleged WMDs...The more you think about it, the more extraordinary that is." ....Sullivan

1) Is it any longer at all reasonable to believe that the administration ever thought there were significant WMD's in Iraq? Their behavior is very good evidence they knew otherwise.

2) I am tired of excusing these people with an alleged incompetence and irresponsibility at a level that exceeds reasonable credibility. Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz are not idiots or psychotics. We need to start looking at the facts with an attempt to understand why certain results were likely intended.

[bob mcmanus]

"Since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to send enough troops along to guard the depot?"

They did pre-war, assign troops to guard the oil ministries. In which case, it is hard to say that the omission of troops to guard munitions depots was due to a lack of planning or a shortage of troops.

[praktike]

Von, sorry to blogwhore, but you might be interested in this post of mine.

Short version: Rumsfeld's obsession with defense transformation led him to factor certain assumptions into the war plan, which were then mysteriously forgotten once we got to Baghdad.

[praktike]

That's a good point, Trick. It goes back to this assumption about being greeted with gumdrops and lollipops, which underlaid nearly all aspects of the planning. Even the things that they did allegedly worry about--refugees and oil fires--speak to the same "regime vs. everyone else" storyline. The truth was far more complicated; Iraq created Saddam.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

But it was incredibly important to report the story of the unknowns in headlines that were least flattering to the President, right?

No need to mention that there is huge doubt about the idea that the munitions were even present when the US soldiers arrived.

No need to discuss that taking hundreds of tons of munitions away in the middle of the war would implicate a huge number of trucks that would have had to travel roads that were closed, right?

Wouldn't want to mention that in the initial stories, because the NYT and CBS are so unbiased, journalistic and objective, right?

[CharleyCarp]

Have to disagree just a little von. The story was and has always been that Admin negligence is (a) gross; (b) potentially very dangerous to our troops; (c) driven by ideology rather than a rational analysis*; and (d) the subject of an active cover-up activity (not reporting missing stuff to IAEA, telling Iraqis not to do so either).

Whether or not the exact details were exactly right -- and the jury is absolutely still out on what was where when -- the truth of points (a) and (b) are not affected. Point (c) hasn't been getting much play the last few days, so I'm not sure where we are.

However, if at any time anyone in an official capacity knowingly failed to report, or told the Iraqis not to report, then no amount of speculation about when exactly the stuff disappeared matters.

* I think maybe gross negligence is not appropriate, but recklessness is a better description.

[CharleyCarp]

Sorry, it's (d) that hasn't been played much. Plenty of (c).

[bob mcmanus]

"It goes back to this assumption about being greeted with gumdrops and lollipops, which underlaid nearly all aspects of the planning."

As I have said elsewhere, it is no longer reasonable to say that Cheney actually believed something simply because he said he believed it, or he is reported to have believed it. The only reasonable method of ascertaining what the small circle of decision-makers actually believed is to look at the empirical facts of how they behaved.

Did they behave as if they were liberating France? What were the levels of resources assigned to force-protection post-invasion? As compared to the situation in Paris in the winter and spring of 1944-45? Certainly the post GW1 writings of these very same people argued against them believing in lollipops. They all publicly projected anarchy and civil war after the fall of Saddam. Why do we assume their assumptions changed?

[praktike]

Why do we assume their assumptions changed?

Because it was convenient and it made them feel good?

[Slartibartfast]

As for the news video, I have to say this. What they showed was some boxes of detcord and a very, very small amount of HE (small as a fraction of what was supposed to be there). Using my extensive knowledge of physical properties*, I was able to compute (with the help of my bleeding-edge Casio fx-115s math coprocessor*) that the HMX alone, when placed into thirty-gallon fiber drums, would occupy over 500 cubic meters. What was actually shown was a miniscule fraction of that amount.

*Humor. Ar ar.

[Katherine]

I said in the other thread that what I worrried about was not so much polarization about ideology and policy as polarization about facts and reality.

Anyone who tries to discredit CBS and NY Times on selected and incomplete evidence, without trying to create a conservative news source 1/5 as reliable or unbiased or decent as the NY Times, is part of the problem. The NY Times broke a story, something they haven't done nearly enough of. I haven't followed this closely; I don't know if they nailed down every detail perfectly, but they went with what credible sources in good faith.

The NY Times isn't perfect but it, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal News Section, the Christian Science Monitor, the BBC to a much lesser extent network news--are the best chance we have of getting the truth. Yeah, some of those outlets lean to left a bit--though they most often err by allowing themselves to be bullied into "two sides to every fact coverage" where the most important stories are determined by how many people are talking about them at what volume.

You don't like it? Fine. Create a reliable news source that leans to the right a little bit, but gets the facts right and makes a good faith effort to be fair and to break stories and get to the truth. They have those in England--the Economist, the London Times, to some extent the Telegraph. What do you have here? The Washington Times, the New York Post, Fox News, the National Review, Instapundit, Powerline--for all of the NY Times and CBS many flaws, for all that the national guard documents story was inexcusable--the liberal media is so much better than any outlet on that list that it's ridiculous.

The conservative media is not about trying to find the truth about reality. It's about promoting the Republican party's version of reality, making it a "point of view" that must be given equal weight to the Democratic party's version of reality, no matter what the facts really are.

[Anarch]

When first reports regarding the missing 377 tons of high-grade explosives turn out to be, well, possibly lacking in nuance -- i.e., false, or at least incomplete...

At this point in time, it's incorrect to say that the 377 tons of HE was false; what appears to have been false is the reported quantity of RDX, but not that of HMX (as per the ABC story, at least). The net change is thus not 141 -> 3, which is a couple of orders of magnitude, but rather 377 -> 239, a total error of about 38%. While the discrepancy is disturbing because it suggests that other facts about this case might also be in error, I'm not convinced that it's sufficiently large to warrant being called "false" or even really "incomplete".

All that, however, could be changed if we have any further revision to the story. And sadly, the truth is unlikely to out before Tuesday so... well, hell. It is what it is. We'll just have to deal with it.

[Anarch]

Slarti: What was actually shown was a miniscule fraction of that amount.

The question is a) how much footage of the explosives the camera crew actually have, and b) how much footage they took relative to the amount they could have taken. Again, questions that can't be answered before Tuesday.

[praktike]

Katherine, Publius, a fellow lawyer type, has been thinking along the same lines.

[Jonas Cord]

Why do we assume their assumptions changed?

We shouldn't, quite frankly. I know that everyone is in love with this narrative about how naive the administration was about the aftermath; my own tentative theory is that in fact they were cynical and unambitious.

I do remember hearing a good many military officials believing that a reduced occupational presence meant you were less likely to provoke a prolonged insurgency. This was an assumption in Afghanistan as well.

There's a logic to this reasoning, but I'd still rather err in the opposite direction. I don't find the track record of this particular strategy very appealing.

[Jadegold]

No need to mention that there is huge doubt about the idea that the munitions were even present when the US soldiers arrived.

It's a nice meme, but it's not true.

The preponderence of evidence militates against this "huge doubt."

David Kay finds it "highly implausible" the HE was removed before the invasion and he certainly has given no indication that he disagrees with the amount of HE cited by the IAEA.

Paul Bremer was notified in May 2003 by Iraqi officials that the site had probably been looted.

The various Iraqis, in charge of the facility pre-invasion and those charged with its administration post-invasion, are adamant the site wasn't looted pre-invasion. The NYTimes even spoke to some alleged looters who said the site was pilfered after US troops had passed through.

[Edward]

Oh, it gets even better:

A group calling itself Al-Islam's Army Brigades, Al-Karar Brigade, said it had coordinated with officers and soldiers of "the American intelligence" to obtain a "huge amount of the explosives that were in the al-Qaqaa facility."

The claim is as yet unverified, but if "American intelligence" helped these folks get the explosives, I'd say Bush has a much, much bigger scandal on his hands than anyone has realized yet.

[Katherine]

I can't believe that's true. The source is not at all credible, and it makes less than no sense.

Praktile--thanks for the link. That's it exactly. He's also right about Bush's "original sin".

[Trickster]

But in reference to the idea Jonas brought up that a reduced occupational presence might do less to provoke an insurgency, my first response is that Iraq was, at least supposedly, different from Afghanistan, and the supposed difference was that Iraq was full of WMDs. And we were going in, at least supposedly, to secure those WMDs and keep them out of the hands of terrorists and the warheads of intermediate- to long-range missiles. And we really weren't too worried about an insurgency, at least according to what Administration officials were telling the public, not to mention what they were telling the Congress.

So this theory about not provoking an insurgency, which is just a theory, really should not have trumped the necessity of putting in enough troops to do what we had to do, i.e., prosecute the military offensive and come in behind the front-line troops and secure WMD sites once the ground was controlled.

[Anarch]

Edward: I'm with Katherine on this. [As almost everything else; weird, that.] It also somewhat contradicts this NYT story. My favorite quote is

The Iraqis described an orgy of theft [at al Qaqaa] so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters.

[Jesurgislac]

Edward, I think Katherine's right: I think the likelihood is that Al-Karar Brigade, realising that no one in charge of the US occupation actually has the least idea when or where these explosives went (as Bush's spin on it makes amply clear to any interested observer) is cheerfully causing trouble by saying "We've got them! And it was you who told us how to get them!"

It doesn't need to be true. The fact is, that thanks to the bad planning, no one knows when the explosives went. (We can make a good guess that it was sometime in April, but it is just a guess.)

As the only defense the Bush administration have to offer is "We have no idea when they were looted, but it could have been any time - even before we invaded!" any group can make trouble by saying they got them.

Indeed, the only thing that would lend credibility to the Al-Karar Brigade's claim that American intelligence helped them get the explosives, would in fact be that the Bush administration claimed they didn't have to assign guards to the depot because they knew that on March 19, the depot was empty. If they knew that, how did they know that? Because they'd already sent the Al-Karar Brigade there to get the explosives?

I don't believe this defense: I don't believe the Bush administration did know the depot was empty. But I'm unsurprised that one group of Iraqi insurgents has already seen how to exploit the Bush defense for their own propaganda. Others will follow.

[Edward]

Just passing along what the MSM is reporting. Seems pretty incredible to me as well.

[Jonas Cord]

Trickster,

So this theory about not provoking an insurgency, which is just a theory, really should not have trumped the necessity of putting in enough troops to do what we had to do, i.e., prosecute the military offensive and come in behind the front-line troops and secure WMD sites once the ground was controlled.

I am in 100% agreement with you. In addition, I do not think this laissez-faire style of occupation is particularily suited to the goal of transitioning to democracy - unless you're willing wait a very long time and put up with chaos in the meantime. I'd rather not.

[Trickster]

Similarly, on the idea of being greeted with gumballs and lollipops, even if we were greeted by gumballs, lollipops, and a procession of officials bearing the keys to WMD facilities, we still needed to keep records on those facilities. The records-keeping requirements should've been just as stringent as the requirements to keep records on our own NBC weapons.

Every WMD facility should've had locatable paperwork showing what materials were found there, as well as a chain of custody and chronological description of security measures for any WMD materials found. Anything else is worse than inexcusable. At least while Saddam was in power he kept his weapons locked up, not too many folks had the keys, and Saddam wasn't about to give that stuff away. It's hard to think of a better way to assure that whatever he did have would fall into terrorist hands than to eliminate weapons security without replacing it.

It's a damn good thing there really weren't any actual WMDs there, or else Zarqawi and his crew would be running around with them now.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"Anyone who tries to discredit CBS and NY Times on selected and incomplete evidence, without trying to create a conservative news source 1/5 as reliable or unbiased or decent as the NY Times, is part of the problem. The NY Times broke a story, something they haven't done nearly enough of. I haven't followed this closely; I don't know if they nailed down every detail perfectly, but they went with what credible sources in good faith."

I can't agree with you about the good faith, because the way they reported the facts which they already had at the time was blatant misinformation.

[Anarch]

I can't agree with you about the good faith, because the way they reported the facts which they already had at the time was blatant misinformation.

In what way? They might have been wrong -- I assume, perhaps optimistically, that the new tally on the amount of HE at Al Qaqaa is correct -- but I don't see how they acted in bad faith. To what specific reportage are you referring?

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"In what way? They might have been wrong..."

They didn't use any of the reports they had (and in house they had at least two) suggesting that such a large amount of high-level explosives was not present when the 3rd ID or 101st Airborne arrived. They did not use simple math calculations which would show how much work it would take to move such a large amount of explosives--casting doubt on the chances that they could have been removed undetected during the war and its immediate aftermath--though journalists are notoriously bad at logistic issues. They did not look at their own reports about the IAEA which showed that the presence of many of the explosives 'could not be verified' by the IAEA on their last visit. They did not use their own report that the most recent IAEA visit was centered around missiles and not explosives when they hyped the small window of time between inspection and the US military occupation.

In other words, they reported as certain fact a number of things that they already knew were questionable.

If they had reported the questions from the beginning it would have an excellent breaking story--they chose not to do that.

[Trickster]

I thought it was pretty clear in the original story that it would've taken a bodacious amount of work to steal all that stuff. I thought that was kind of the point.

[Jadegold]

They didn't use any of the reports they had (and in house they had at least two) suggesting that such a large amount of high-level explosives was not present when the 3rd ID or 101st Airborne arrived.

Nope. The reports you mention don't say the HE wasn't there. Instead, the reports say the site wasn't fully searched and the units didn't see the HE. There's an important difference.

They did not use simple math calculations which would show how much work it would take to move such a large amount of explosives--casting doubt on the chances that they could have been removed undetected during the war and its immediate aftermath--though journalists are notoriously bad at logistic issues.

Still more obfuscation. David Kay--who presumably does know something about logistics issues--says it wouldn't be surprising to see that amount of anything get looted or pilfered. And as someone who has served overseas, it isn't surprising in the least that high value stuff "gets legs."

[bob mcmanus]

Preamble: I supported the war in Iraq, and still>/b> support the war in Iraq. (Long discussion postponed) What I do not support is Leo Strauss inspired deceptions in the selling of the war, strategies and tactics. These can backfire, as they have, and result in the loss of public support.
.....
For those who support the war. Rumsfeld at one point is reported to have claimed he would like to get down to 30k troops in Iraq by fall 2003. In the broader context of the WoT, with a weak Syria to the West and an aggressive and dangerous Iran to the East and a fragile SA threatened by bin Laden to the South, does the desire to pull 80% of your forces back to the States actually make good sense strategically?
....
Yet if we had been greeted with lollipops, and retained the Iraqi army, and achieved a stable, peaceful Iraq in a short period, what justification would be available for keeping 150k troops in place? On the other hand, if a well-armed widespread insurgency develops in Iraq....

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

'Getting legs' doesn't get around the logistical problem of the need for trucks to move hundreds of tons of material.

[bob mcmanus]

oops trying to close the bold

[Anarch]

Sebastian: To add to Jadegold's remark, see the New York Times story I linked a few posts back. [In particular, read the particular quote I excerpted.] There's also the problem that there was something like six weeks between the time the 3ID was at Al Qaqaa and the first major post-war inspections, which is a pretty damn long time for that kind of stuff to "get legs", as Jadegold put it.

This isn't to say that the Times is necessarily right, of course, but I think that -- given what we currently know, and what they knew at the time -- their reportage was not unreasonable.

[Trickster]

You didn't need to have trucks to move the explosives.

Yes, there were hundreds of tons of materials, but we are talking about hundreds of tons of powder. So, assuming you have some time to get this job done--and why not, the matter just came to the President's attention after a news story ran on it 19 months later--the first thing you do is bring in a grunchbucket of 25- and 50-pound fertilizer bags. You bag the stuff up and it is available:

(1) in 25-pound form for the back of a child or small woman;
(2) in 50-pound form for the back of an adult;
(3) in 100-pound form for an adult with a wheelbarrow;
(4) in 300-pound form to be slung across the back of a mule;
(5) in 750 pound form for an automobile (6 bags in the trunk, 3 each in the 3 passenger floorboards);
(6) in 1000 pound form for the bed of a pickup truck (20 bags);
(7) in 1500 pound form for the back of a van (30 bags); and finally
(8) whatever you could pack into a freight container for your occasional 18-wheeler.

Say you had a pre-organized insurgency, all you do is order 240 people (or whatever the number might be) to be responsible for removing 1 ton each and hiding it somewhere. You really don't need a fleet of trucks. It's quite do-able.

[hilzoy]

Sebastian: I am sick (boo hoo), so not able to reply fully. However: the fact that it would have taken a lot of work to loot all those explosives was reported from the outset. (Nelson:" Sources also discount any possibility except that “this was a highly organized operation using heavy equipment, and it was done right under our noses."") It is hard to see how this could have been done at any point: before the war we were (I hope) monitoring the WMD sites, so we would presumably have noticed; during the race to Baghdad the roads were clogged; after the fall of Saddam the roads were presumably still full of traffic. Yet somehow the explosives were there, and then they were not. It is, I think, just wrong to suggest that the difficulty of removing them only existed at certain points on the timeline.

In fact, this difficulty has (for me) always been part of the point. I think I said in my first post on this that I would not be nearly as upset about this if it had involved e.g. stealing a document or a backpack full of sensitive materials. This was not because small things can't be extremely bad to lose -- they might be e.g. plans for a cheap nuclear weapon easily constructed from commonly available materials, vials of smallpox, etc. All deeply destructive and bad to lose track of. But the disappearance of something small, while potentially very bad, wouldn't imply the lack of an attempt to secure the sites. It might just be one of those really bad things that sometimes happen quite understandably in wartime. But the theft of enough very high explosives that convoys of trucks would be required is different -- it's not just really bad that insurgents or terrorists or the Iranians have them, it's also very hard to square with the idea that we made anything like a serious attempt to secure this site. And since this was a site we knew had (a) lots of very high explosives and (b) dual-use stuff, that failure is to me incomprehensible.

Do you have a view about the answer to the question: if these materials were removed before the invasion, why haven't satellite photos (or something) showing this been presented?

[Jadegold]

'Getting legs' doesn't get around the logistical problem of the need for trucks to move hundreds of tons of material.

Once more, Sebastian, you underestimate the resolve of terrorists, insurgents, Baath regime hangers-on, and garden-variety thieves to pilfer something that has value.

380 tons is nothing. Go to a third world country sometime--you'll see how fast (and how much) of relatively worthless material can disappear. Go to a breaking yard on the subcontinent and you can see how fast a ship can disappear by folks using nothing more sophisticated than a wheelbarrow. All for scrap that has a value of less than a cent a pound.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"Do you have a view about the answer to the question: if these materials were removed before the invasion, why haven't satellite photos (or something) showing this been presented?"

Because even our excellent satellites can't cover every possible site all day every day. Furthermore there were trucks going in and out of that site all the time before the war. Three or four a day trucks a day for a month would attracted no particular attention before the war and would have been plenty. Three or four a day for month after the war would have been much harder--especially with the roads closed and roadblocks up all around.

Trickster, you still aren't looking at the logisitics properly: I'm going to use your numbers (even though I don't agree with them) and 300 tons.

1) That would be 24,000 small backpacks worth.
2) That would be 12,000 large backpacks worth.

I think it is completely obvious that you can't rely on those for getting rid of the explosives.

3) Wheelbarrow--that is 6,000 trips.
4) That is 2,000 mule trips.

Still not likely

5) That is 800 car trips.
6) That is 600 pickup trips.
7) That is 400 van trips.

Even at the van level, that is a lot of trips to go A) Absolutetly completely unnoticed and never interdicted--not even once at a checkpoint. B) The roads were closed at the time in question, so these 400 (absolute bare minimum) trips all had to take place overland. C) And if you are restriciting it to a reasonable number of insurgents, you have severe time restraints (nighttime at the very minimum I would presume. That turns it into a long lasting and enormous operation which was never detected, right under the noses of the US military.

It isn't absolutely impossible, it is just hugely less probable than the far fewer trips that could have been taken under Saddam, with far less scrutiny.

[Trickster]

I wouldn't agree that the roads were closed during "the time in question," given how much uncertainty there was about what that phrase means. I'm envisioning people coming from all over Sunni Iraq, mostly in cars and vans, plus some locals for hauling. This could've gone on for months.

[Slartibartfast]

(8) whatever you could pack into a freight container for your occasional 18-wheeler.

It'd take four of them if you could load the powder loosely (farfetched) and probably six or seven if in drums on pallets.

We're talking 53' trailers, here. Unfortunately, the generic kind of these can only hold about 22 tons, so you'd need over a dozen because you're going to exceed the weight limit. Military trailers can carry a bit more, but you're still talking about nine or ten of them.

[Jadegold]

David Kay: I must say, I find it hard to believe that a convoy of 40 to 60 trucks left that facility prior to or during the war, and we didn't spot it on satellite or UAV. That is, because it is the main road to Baghdad from the south, was a road that was constantly under surveillance. I also don't find it hard to believe that looters could carry it off in the dead of night or during the day and not use the road network.

Hey, it's only David Kay---let's believe some folks on the blogosphere who have done back of the McDonald's napkin, Frederick Taylor time-and-motion studies instead.

As I said earlier--380 tons is nothing. The fact is Iraq is awash in explosives and other ordnanace. Tens of thousands of tons--maybe more--in the hands of bad guys. But according to the Bush apologists--this stuff doesn't exist. Because the locals couldn't manage the logistics.

[Slartibartfast]

Assuming the stuff was there when we landed, natch.

[Jesurgislac]

Slarti: Assuming the stuff was there when we landed, natch.

Still on that horse?

Unless you're trying to assert that the Bush administration knew this stuff was gone before the US troops landed (which opens up a whole lot of other questions) it was an unconscionably bad decision just to ignore this site and not send anyone to search/secure it.

As a direct result of this bad decision, it's true that we don't know when these explosives vanished. The window of opportunity is somewhere between January and May 2003 - I take it that you're not disagreeing with that?

Obviously, the Bush administration and its true believers would rather believe that the stuff all went before March 19 2003. But they can offer this only as a possible hypothesis (and must ignore a considerable body of evidence that the site had not been looted by 9 March or indeed by early April 2003) because, thanks to the bad decision made by the Bush administration, we don't know for sure when the explosives were taken: only that the evidence all points towards sometime in April or early May.

Why do you keep coming back to your hypothesis "Maybe it was all gone by 19th March?" What point do you see in pushing this? You do realise that it's no defense of the decisions the Bush administration made about the occupation to be able to say that "We have no idea when 377 tons of highly dangerous explosives vanished; but hey, maybe the site was looted before we had a chance to guard it, because then it would make no difference if we'd made a sensible decision or the very, very bad one we did make!"

[Anarch]

Assuming the stuff was there when we landed, natch.

Are you actually asserting that they weren't? I can't really tell.

Also, I'm with Jes on this one: as far as we knew there were still 239 tons of HE at Al Qaqaa.* Thus, armed with that belief, the Bush Administration -- and, contrary to Rudy Giuliani's despicable (and contradictory) scapegoating, the blame falls squarely on the Administration -- nevertheless decided that Al Qaqaa was insufficiently important to secure until at least a month had passed after the "liberation". There really isn't any good way to parse this, especially not with the mealy-mouthed defenses the Pentagon and the GOP hierarchs are putting forth.

* That is, regardless of whether or not it was true, this was the intelligence we possessed.

[Slartibartfast]

I take it that you're not disagreeing with that?

Correct.

Are you actually asserting that they weren't?

No, I'm not.

Obviously, the Bush administration and its true believers would rather believe that the stuff all went before March 19 2003

I can't speak for them, sorry. And, by the way, neither can you.

I've seen no credible information that brackets the date the stuff actually left any more tightly than you've given above, Jesurgislac, so perhaps you can understand my bewilderment at so many people loudly and publicly behaving as if they know what happened.

[Jesurgislac]

I've seen no credible information that brackets the date the stuff actually left any more tightly than you've given above, Jesurgislac, so perhaps you can understand my bewilderment at so many people loudly and publicly behaving as if they know what happened.

We do know what happened, Slarti: why are you trying to claim that you don't? We know that Bush & Co failed to secure a site where they knew that there were several hundred tons of highly dangerous explosives. As has been repeatedly explained to you, even if the site had been looted before March 19, failing to search/secure it was an unconscionably bad decision.

What part of this don't you understand?

[Anarch]

I can't speak for them, sorry. And, by the way, neither can you.

No, but the Administration is capable of speaking for themselves. [The byline is AFP so it's more reliable than the site might suggest.] I find it hard to believe that DiRita is merely trying to play the part of the honest skeptic here.

[radish]

Three or four a day trucks a day for a month would attracted no particular attention before the war and would have been plenty.

Even if that were the case, hilzoy and Jes are right. It should have attracted attention, regardless of when it happened. Even from a terribly narrow and purely tactical point of view, failure to surveil Al QaQaa on a regular basis prior to invading, and to secure it properly after invading, would have been obvious errors. Never mind that had there been WMDs it would have been bad strategy as well.

Suppose Saddam spirited the stuff away before we got there, leaving only dribs and drabs for the embedded video crews to look at. It's not unreasonable to ask why nobody was keeping an eye on a major munitions depot that was known to exist, indeed that had just recently been inventoried by IAEA. We have a whole agency, the DIA, devoted entirely to doing exactly that sort of thing.

From what little I know for sure about the NRO and DIA it strains my credulity to think that they would lack the resources to have been doing (at least!) 48-hour interval flyovers of (at least!) the top twenty or thirty sites of interest for as long as necessary. Long before the invasion and continuing to this day. Tracking enemy materiel is one of the top priorities of military intelligence, and you're basically asking me to believe that the joint chiefs shipped whole divisions across oceans and didn't do their best to find out what was waiting for them and where? You can't even get into West Point without knowing how important stuff like that is, let alone graduate.

And these weren't obscure caches of mortars and AK47s out in the boonies. These were sites with known stockpiles of HE and suspected WMD, inspected, inventoried, and sealed by the IAEA in the months and weeks leading up to the invasion. If they weren't considered important there was something very seriously wrong with the invasion plan...

[fdl]

I think we need two timelines, one on the story and one on the [alleged] loss of the explosives.

As best i can tell, looking at the NYTimes and TalkingPointsMemo, the story started with a Nelson Report article stating:

"Despite pressure from DOD to keep it quiet, the IAEA and the Iraqi Interim Government this month officially reported that 350-tons of dual-use, very high explosives were looted from a previously secure site in the early days of the US occupation in 2003."

The 10/25 story in the NYTimes is similar.

now, the conservatives on this thread appear to be arguing that the Times hadn't done enough research to run the story. C'mon; the letter IS the story. Compare this story to the Swift Vets stories -- the very existence of the Swift Vet allegations just as newsworthy as the existence of the letter.

So, what IS the story? What should the story be?

Alternatives:
(a) Lots of dangerous explosives are missing.
(b) The Iraqi govt is circulating a story about (a).
(c) (b) is occurring just days before the election.
(d) The DOD (and presumably the administration) tried to prevent (c) from occurring.

that's just day 1. since then, we have other possible narratives.

(d) (a) is false.
(e) (a) is the fault of the admin.
(f) (a) is not the fault of the admin.
(g) each party is rightly trying to get political mileage out of (a).
(h) each party is wrong to try to get political mileage out of (a).
(i) the timeline surrounding (a) is critical because the timing of the loss may absolve the admin.
(j) the timeline surrounding (a) is irrelevant because the admin (1) knew or (2) should have known about the explosives anyway.
(k) the evidence is sufficiently clear to blame the admin of wrongdoing.
(l) the evidence is sufficiently clear to absolve the admin of wrongdoing.
(m) the evidence is too muddled to reach any fair conclusions.
(n) (a) was done by Saddam.
(o) (a) was done by looters.
(p) (a) is just part of the fog of war.
(q) (a) is a tangible example of the administration's failure to plan and carry out the invasion adequately.
(r) new evidence supports/contradicts any of (a) - (q).

and so forth.

as best i can tell, each of the prior narratives is a legitimate news story. any wonder why we are talking right past each other?

what really surprises me is the degree to which this story caught the admin off guard. they didn't know about the Oct 10 letter to the IAEA? they didn't have a persuasive response ready? the vaunted Rove machine seems to have stumbled badly. [that, of course, would be a different news story and a classic for NPR, which loves to report on the meta-narrative.]

Francis

[Trickster]

What we DO know, as I said in my original post in this thread, is that the Bush Administration still has not been able, a good 72 hours after this story broke in the press, to coherently explain when that site was secured and by whom, and what it contained at that time. That proves to me beyond doubt that there was no chain of accountability and documentation set up for securing, reporting on, and accounting for known WMD sites.

I'm not sure why we're asking about anything else.

[Anarch]

That proves to me beyond doubt that there was no chain of accountability and documentation set up for securing, reporting on, and accounting for known WMD sites.

Technically, I believe Al Qaqaa was a dual-use site and not a WMD site. The rest of your point stands, though.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"it strains my credulity to think that they would lack the resources to have been doing (at least!) 48-hour interval flyovers of (at least!) the top twenty or thirty sites of interest for as long as necessary."

I'm sure we did. But it strains my credulity to believe that 48-hour intervals would have been good enough to be certain to catch the movement of standard explosives.

This is really the whole problem with playing defense and trusting inspections. You can't have a perfect defense, and you can't have reliable inspections in a large country. You can't inspect every truck, you can't look inside every shipping container, you can't do it all.

[Anarch]

I'm sure we did. But it strains my credulity to believe that 48-hour intervals would have been good enough to be certain to catch the movement of standard explosives.

Are you saying that the looters interviewed by the NYT are lying?

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

I don't understand your point Anarch. I am suggesting that flying over a site once every 48 hours wouldn't be a likely way to catch the 'looters'.

[Anarch]

I don't understand your point Anarch. I am suggesting that flying over a site once every 48 hours wouldn't be a likely way to catch the 'looters'.

I'm saying -- for the third time -- that the New York Times has interviewed Iraqis who claim to have been looting Al Qaqaa after the Americans rolled through. [Let me repeat the money quote once again: "The Iraqis described an orgy of theft [at al Qaqaa] so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters."] Are you saying that those whom the NYT interviewed are liars?

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

And 48 hour flyovers would have caught that if it were true? Maybe you didn't see what I was responding to--"it strains my credulity to think that they would lack the resources to have been doing (at least!) 48-hour interval flyovers of (at least!) the top twenty or thirty sites of interest for as long as necessary".

Which I then followed with a more general comment:

This is really the whole problem with playing defense and trusting inspections. You can't have a perfect defense, and you can't have reliable inspections in a large country. You can't inspect every truck, you can't look inside every shipping container, you can't do it all.

So I don't understand what you are trying to tell me.

[Jesurgislac]

You can't have a perfect defense, and you can't have reliable inspections in a large country. You can't inspect every truck, you can't look inside every shipping container, you can't do it all.

No. And if this was an obscure, unknown, uninventoried site, where no one knew exactly what was there until David Kay looked at it, this would be a fair point.

But it wasn't. The IAEA had inventoried and sealed it. To argue that the Bush administration couldn't possibly have searched and secured every site where the IAEA had identified large stocks of dangerous materiel is absurd: the whole rationale of the invasion was that Saddam Hussein was armed and dangerous and the US had to invade now, March 2003, no waiting around to get international agreement, because of the vast stockpiles of WMD. And yet, evidently, the administration had no plans for the occupation to secure these stockpiles and make sure no one made off with them.

The Bush administration claimed repeatedly that not only did Saddam Hussein have stockpiled WMD, they knew where they were. Doesn't it shake your confidence in them in the slightest, Sebastian, now that you know that even where the Bush administration did know where there were stockpiles, they had no plan to actually make them secure?

[Anarch]

Your timeline appears to be in error, Sebastian; at least, that's what it looks like to me. To wit:

This is really the whole problem with playing defense and trusting inspections.

implies that the site was looted during the inspections regime. According to the NYT, however, that is false: the site was looted after we had gone on offense, after we had ceased UN inspections, and after we supposedly controlled the area. "Playing defense" and "trusting inspections" are irrelevant to the case at hand. The only way I can see the relevance of your comments here is if you're asserting that the looters interviewed by the NYT are lying.

[Added in proof: Or, what Jes said.]

[wilfred]

hey von,

i'm glad I went back to this well a 2nd time:

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

as i said, it just gets more interesting.

[radish]

Sorry to engage in thanato-equine abuse Anarch. I personally suspect the Iraqis are telling the truth, but that NYT rag is part of MSM and can't be trusted ;-)

But it strains my credulity to believe that 48-hour intervals would have been good enough to be certain to catch the movement of standard explosives.

Sebastian, the best case scenario for the administration, the absolutely very best, least humiliating, least incompetent scenario, is that before the invasion Saddam simply outfoxed what are indisputably the finest aerial reconnaissance systems the world has ever known, snuck 300+ tons of HE out of the site, and stashed it where we still can't find it. And despite you hoping against hope the evidence overwhelmingly contradicts that... What Anarch is trying to tell you is that it's not even that Saddam was very very clever. It's that somebody at the pentagon was excruciatingly, criminally dumb.

The reason that's not a trivial issue is that we now know what the pentagon knew then -- that AQQ was a location with considerable tactical importance. Even after Rummy's Big Purge, I doubt that US generals are quite as boneheaded as to have been oblivious to that fact.

Now obviously we differ about the tactical threat posed by 300+ tons of HE in enemy hands. To my mind, the need to keep tabs on 300+ tons of HE until such time as it can be secured or destroyed is what the old man calls a "known known." We know for a stone cold fact that the pentagon knew for a stone cold fact that at some point prior to our arrival there was definitely a substantial stockpile of HE at this site. Enough HE to be dangerous militarily.

Even a paltry 3 tons is nothing to joke about (though admittedly not worth the kind of surveillance I'm suggesting would have been applied to AQQ). 50 tons is a threat worth keeping out of enemy hands even if it means devoting a whole company to the task. 300+ tons is, as a lot of young men and women are discovering, more than enough to supply any halfway competent guerilla army for a long long time...

[liberal japonicus]

We know for a stone cold fact that the pentagon knew for a stone cold fact that at some point prior to our arrival there was definitely a substantial stockpile of HE at this site. Enough HE to be dangerous militarily.

I think this is where we see the outlines of the problem. The looting was often pictured as the ordinary people getting back some of the assets that Saddam had stolen from them. I guess we thought they were going to sell the HE on ebay and put the profits into buying McDonalds franchises. Buy hey, freedom is messy, ain't it...

[hilzoy]

LJ: "The looting was often pictured as the ordinary people getting back some of the assets that Saddam had stolen from them."

This is one of the reasons I thought the Galbraith piece I posted on yesterday was interesting: he clearly told Wolfowitz that this conception of the looting was wrong, but it made no difference:

"As I pointed out to Wolfowitz, as long as these sites remained unprotected, their deadly materials could end up not with ill-educated slum dwellers but with those who knew exactly what they were doing. (...) Even with the troops we had, the United States could have protected the known nuclear sites. It appears that troops did not receive relevant intelligence about Iraq's WMD facilities, nor was there any plan to secure them. Even after my briefing, the Pentagon leaders did nothing to safeguard Iraq's nuclear sites."

[fdl]

and i burst into song: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

sing it janice.

Francis

p.s. there's also "We paved paradise and put up a parking lot" but that's only because i represent real estate developers in southern california.

[JadeGold]

But it strains my credulity to believe that 48-hour intervals would have been good enough to be certain to catch the movement of standard explosives.

Before this meme gets more deeply ingrained, it must be noted we have nearly 24 hour per day satellite coverage of Iraq. As of 2002, there were 12 overflights of Iraq per day that provided the highest resolution images. In reality, it's rare to go more than 2 hours without a pretty high quality image over Iraq.

This also doesn't include other aerial recon from UAVs or manned aircraft.