But when did they go missing? Were they even there? Mr. NZ Bear has a great article, and a good roundup of links, regarding the explosive explosives story. Seems like the NY Times, and anyone else that is sticking by it, similar to Rathergate, shall be walking the plank:
A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces “went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal.”
This matches perfectly with the NBC story:
NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.
While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC.
Oops. Seems as if the Times and other Left falling organisations have been saying that alot. Please head over to The Truth Laid Bear, and read up on it, then hit the links. This story really shows that the UN inspectors really didn’t do very much and/or were stonewalled by Saddam.
Holbrooke: “I Don’t Know the Truth”
Even his campaign’s senior foreign policy adviser can’t vouch for the New York Times’s “explosive” explosives story. But that isn’t stopping John Kerry from using it as a political prop.
by William Kristol
10/26/2004 11:00:00 PM
IT SEEMS THAT Monday’s groundbreaking New York Times story on missing explosives in Iraq was certainly not groundbreaking and may not even be true. The allegations that nearly 400 tons of “high explosives” were missing from the al Qaqaa arms dump are based on charges leveled by Mohamed al Baradei, chairman of the International Atomic Energy Association. The claims are old and increasingly suspect. But that hasn’t kept John Kerry’s presidential campaign from using the story in a new television ad and in virtually every stump speech and media appearance over the past two days.
Now, however, the Kerry campaign admits that the information that is the basis of Senator Kerry’s statements and his campaign advertisement may not even be true. Pressed on Tuesday afternoon about the accuracy of the allegations on Fox’s Big Story with John Gibson, Richard Holbrooke, a senior adviser to the Kerry campaign, said: “You don’t know the truth and I don’t know the truth.” He later underscored this point: “I don’t know the truth.”
That minor issue hasn’t kept the Kerry campaign from creating a television ad based on what may well be untruthful claims.
The ad, called “Obligation” shows John Kerry speaking solemnly about the responsibilities of a president.
The obligation of a Commander in Chief is to keep our country safe. In Iraq, George Bush has overextended our troops and now failed to secure 380 tons of deadly explosives. The kind used for attacks in Iraq, and for terrorist bombings. His Iraq misjudgments put our soldiers at
risk, and make our country less secure. And all he offers is more of the same. As President, I’ll bring a fresh start to protect our troops and our nation. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message.
The claim is, well, explosive. John Kerry says the Bush administration’s incompetence is killing U.S. soldiers. Reporting from a variety of news sources suggests that the explosives may have been gone before the U.S. troops arrived. In any case, Kerry’s top advisers have conceded that their claims may prove false.
Yet, Kerry has leveled an extraordinarily harsh wartime charge against President Bush.
Shouldn’t he at least make sure that such a charge is true?
It also now turns out that CBS 60 Minutes was planning to echo the New York Times story two days before Election Day. So what we have is an attempt by the New York Times, CBS, and a U.N. agency to work together to promote a very likely false story to damage President Bush’s reelection prospects. Perhaps no one should be surprised that the liberal media and the United Nations are willing to go to quite extraordinary lengths to promote Kerry’s prospects against Bush, but their behavior is not the issue. The issue is Kerry’s willingness to advance allegations that his own campaign acknowledges may not be true.