Criminal Neglect

Today's New York Times has the bombshell regarding the disappearance of 380 tons of super explosives. A few weeks back I had a post regarding the disappearance of weapons and munitions in Iraq. Well, according the Times, it's far worse than I imagined.

Some of the key paragraphs from the Times, first pinning the blame directly on the US occupation:

"The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year."

These weapons and materials are so devastating, the represent an immediate threat to global security:

"American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.

The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of material, and larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people."

Our government was warned very early on (i.e. before the invasion) and has no explanation for what happened to the materials:

"The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country."

There is much, much more in the Times article, and I bet money that there will be more stories surfacing in the print media over the next couple of days.

Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has been tracking this story quite diligently. He also has a post about the Administration's reaction in a press conference by White House spokesman Scott McLellan.

"Asked whether securing a facility like this wasn't a key priority of the occupation forces, McClellan responded: "At the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom there were a number of priorities. It was a priority to make sure that the oil fields were secure, so that there wasn't massive destruction of the oil fields, which we thought would occur. It was a priority to get the reconstruction office up and running. It was a priority to secure the
various ministries, so that we could get those ministries working on their priorities, whether it was ..."

This is so outrageous it's almost too much to believe. We wanted to secure the oil first, and then if we got around to it, maybe we'd deal with this 380 tons of super explosive stuff. Of course, if we'd had any sense to realize there would be an insurgency, and that the insurgents would probably steal weapons and use them against our troops over the next 18 months, maybe we would have changed....no wait a second. We don't make mistakes. If we had it to do all over again, we'd do it the exact same way.

This is nothing short of criminal negligence on the part of this government, and this alone is enough reason to turn this government out.