and offering of the same to the other fish, hook, line, and sinker.But they're not simply gullible over there at Pravda.
They're quite a bit more in fact.
At least one of their Directors is a member of the Carlyle Group, and as such stands to make more than a little money if the D.o'D.'s budget is inflated even more by an expanded war.
This shill also headed the FCC during the Clinton administration.
Funny how much of the main$tream media started to wear brown shirts about that time, isn't it?
Regarding the IEDs: funny how everyone forgets the weapons caches Rumsfeld let the locals walk away with about the time he was consolidating his hold on the oil wells.
What lurks behind the Times Select fire wall on this topic? Jeebie tagged it before it got locked up. By William J. Broad and David E. Sanger:
The videotape , taken by `KSTP-TV`, an ABC affiliate in `Minneapolis-St`. Paul, shows troops breaking into a bunker and opening boxes and examining barrels. Many of the containers are marked "explosive." One box is marked "Al Qaqaa State Establishment," apparently a shipping label from a manufacturer.
The ABC crew said the video was taken on April 18. The timing is critical to the debate in the presidential campaign. By the Pentagon's own account, units of the 101st Airborne Division were near Al Qaqaa for what Mr. DiRita said was "two to three weeks," starting April 10.
Then they headed north to Baghdad, and the site was apparently left unguarded. By the time special weapons teams returned to Al Qaqaa in May, the explosives were apparently gone.
In disputing claims by Mr. Kerry that the Americans had lost the explosives, a senior administration official said Thursday, "We don't know all the facts and no one should be jumping to conclusions." Al Qaqaa, the official said, "was not controlled for three weeks after the I.A.E.A. left," and added "there are a lot of dots we have to connect."
The Pentagon also notes that it has destroyed 400,000 tons of munitions from thousands of sites across Iraq, and that the explosives at Al Qaqaa account for "`one-tenth` of 1 percent" of that amount.
The Minneapolis television crew was with an Army unit that was camped near Al Qaqaa, members of the crew said. The reporter and cameraman said that although they were not told specifically that they were being taken to Al Qaqaa by the military, their videotape matches pictures of the site taken by United Nations weapons inspectors, according to weapons experts.
"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al Qaqaa," said David A. Kay, a former American official who led the recent hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the vast site. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an I.A.E.A. seal."
One weapons expert said the videotape and some of the agency's photographs of the HMX stockpiles "were such good matches it looked like they were taken by the same camera on the same day."
Independent experts said several other factors - the geography; the number of bunkers; the seals on some of the bunker doors; the boxes, crates and barrels similar to those seen by weapon inspectors - confirm that the videotape was taken at Al Qaqaa.
"There's not another place that you would mistake it for," said Dean Staley, the KSTP reporter, who now works in Seattle.
The accidental news encounter began last year after the invasion, Mr. Staley recalled in an interview. Their Army unit arrived in the region on Friday, April 11, and made camp. The Fifth Battalion of the 101st Airborne's 159th Aviation Brigade flew helicopter missions from the camp in the Iraqi desert, moving troops and supplies to the front.
A week later, on Friday, April 18, two journalists recalled, they joined two soldiers who were driving in a Humvee to investigate the nearby bunkers. Among other things, wandering inside the cavernous buildings offered the prospect of relief from the desert sun.
"It was just by chance that we were able to go," said Joe Caffrey, the team's photographer. "They wanted to go out and we asked to tag along."
Mr. Caffrey provided The New York Times with the latitude and longitude of the camp, which places it between 1.5 and 3 miles southeast of Al Qaqaa bunkers. A commercial satellite photograph of the region shows that the camp was close to the storage site. Mr. Caffrey said the soldiers used bolt cutters to cut through chains with locks on them, as well as seals. He said the seals appeared to be lead disks attached to very thin wires that were wrapped around the doors of the bunker entrances, forming a barrier easily cut in two.
They visited a half dozen bunkers, he said. The gloomy interiors revealed long rows of boxes, crates and barrels, what independent experts said were three kinds of HMX containers shipped to Iraq from France, China and Yugoslavia.
The team opened storage containers, some of which contained white powder that independent experts said was consistent with HMX.
"The soldiers were pretty much in awe of what they were seeing," Mr. Caffrey recalled. "They were saying their E.O.D. - Explosive Ordinance Division, people who blow this kind of stuff up - would have a field day."
The journalists filmed roughly 25 minutes of video. Mr. Caffrey added that the team left the bunker doors open. "It would have been easy for anybody to get in," he said.
Mr. Staley recalled that during the drive back to camp, they saw a red Toyota pickup truck with some Iraqis in it. "Our impression was they were looters," he said. "This was a no man's land. It was a huge facility, and we worried that they were bad guys who might come up on us."
The two journalists filed a short story, which ran soon thereafter in `Minneapolis-St`. Paul.
In the interview, Mr. Caffrey said he had carefully rechecked the date on the cassette for his camera, adding that he was sure it was April 18, 2003.
Yesterday Mohamed `al-Sharaa`, director of the national monitoring directorate at the Iraq Ministry of Science and Technology, explained for the first time why Iraqi officials had specified in their letter to the United Nations agency that the explosives had been looted after April 9, 2003. "We have some witnesses," Mr. Sharaa said outside his office at the ministry. "They say that the materials," he added, were "in this site after April 9."
The witnesses were people working at Al Qaqaa, Mr. Sharaa said. Still, he said, the evidence is not yet definitive, and "we don't say it's impossible" that the material was somehow taken out of Al Qaqaa before the American forces came through the area. The first American forces arrived at Al Qaqaa on April 3.
Rashad M. Omar, the minister of science and technology, said that as far as he was concerned, the exact timing of the disappearance remained unknown. "How, where, when is it taken, all these questions, we don't have answers," Dr. Omar said.
He said a committee headed by himself was about to undertake an investigation of the disappearance, in parallel with American efforts to clear up the mystery. Dr. Omar said that he was extremely confident that the investigations would determine the facts of the case.
"The quantity was so huge," Dr. Omar said. "Somebody must know what happened to the material. I am sure the facts will not be hidden for a long time."
Jeebie also tags a CNN transcript from October 28, 2004 of Aaron Brown's run down on the rip-off.
You can find out more about Al Qaqaa, what it was, and why it and other sites like it would have supplied all the C4 and other conventional explosives an insurrection would ever need here and here and here and here and here.
Al Qaqaa had over 380 tons of explosives. The locals made off with it completely.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), forwarded an Oct. 10 letter [.pdf] to the UN Security Council from Iraqi officials notifying the IAEA that tons of Iraq's most powerful explosives "were lost after 9 April 2003, through the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security" at al-Qaqaa.
That's enough to blow up every road in Iraq, one American personnel carrier at a time.
And of course, despite being videotaped, Bu$hCo claims that never happened. Who ya gonna believe, Dear Leader or yer lyin' eyes?
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