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Bush not off the hook for missing Iraq explosives

CNN touts the NBC News claim that the 380 tons of high explosives that apparently disappeared from an Iraqi military facility under American supervision were already gone when a particular U.S. military division got there. Conservatives are hailing this as proof of, well, lesser incompetence by Bush, which might be worth celebrating in an age of reduced expectations. But Josh Marshall says hold the champagne:

NBC, they say, “reports that the material had already vanished by the time American troops and an NBC crew arrived there on April 10, 2003.”

You guys are awfully gullible. Did it strike you guys as odd that MSNBC doesn’t even appear to have picked up this “report”?

Setting aside the matter of whether a detachment from the 101st Airborne and an NBC news crew would have been able to make that determination, they weren’t the first US troops there.

The first American troops on the scene (from the 3rd Infantry Division) came a week earlier, on April 4th and they found lots of explosives — though what kind is unclear from contemporary wire service reports — in a series of spot checks of the 87 buildings and bunkers at the al Qaqaa complex.

And more:

As the Times noted yesterday, moving this material would have taken a fleet of about forty big trucks each moving about ten tons of explosives. And this was at a time — the week before and then during the war — when Iraq’s skies were positively crawling with American aerial and satellite reconnaissance.

Considering that al Qaqaa was a major munitions installation where the US also suspected there might be WMD, it’s difficult to believe that we wouldn’t have noticed a convoy of forty huge trucks carting stuff away.

As the LA Times notes in Tuesday’s paper, it’s just not particularly credible …

Given the size of the missing cache, it would have been difficult to relocate undetected before the invasion, when U.S. spy satellites were monitoring activity at sites suspected of concealing nuclear and biological weapons.

“You don’t just move this stuff in the middle of the night,” said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Baghdad.

If we had seen something like that happening, it’s hard to figure we wouldn’t have bombed the convoy, since the US had complete air superiority through the entire campaign. And if the thought that WMD might be on those trucks had prevented such an attack, certainly there would have been running surveillance of where the stuff was going and where it ended up.

My point here is not to say that this could not have occurred. What I am trying to show is that Pentagon appointees like Di Rita don’t seem to have any clear idea what happened to this stuff. And in an attempt to push back the story, they’re cooking up various theories, most with very short half-lives, that just don’t seem credible to a lot of folks who follow these issues.

If you look at the multiple contradictions in the different stories administration officials told reporters over the course of Monday, it’s hard not to get the sense that they’re caught without a good explanation and they’re just making this stuff up as they go along.

The folks who really understand this stuff don’t seem to put much stock in what guys like Di Rita and Scott McClellan are saying. The LA Times piece, notes that one of them is former chief weapons inspector David Kay, that notorious bush-basher and left-winger. Kay thinks the stuff was carted off after the old regime was history. Kay told the Times he visited the site in May 2003 “and it was heavily looted at that time. Sometime between April and May, most of the stuff was carried off. The site was in total disarray, just like a lot of the Iraqi sites.”

This feels an awful lot like the White House response to the question of Bush’s AWOL status. A lot of puffery and obsfuscation, shortly to be followed by the intermittent drip of documentation. The old Potomac two-step of deny and delay.

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