asheris

Have you heard the latest Bush administration excuse for the missing 377 tons of HMX and RDX?

They say it's the fault of the troops.

Remember that just yesterday Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, and RNC chairman Ed Gillespie (among others) were claiming that Kerry was denigrating the troops by (they claimed) suggesting the soldiers were derelict in their duty.

Kerry's actual statement, which my Dad and Grandpa heard him repeat in person in Rochester, MN yesterday, said: "George W. Bush who talks tough and brags about making America safer has once again failed to deliver. After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in Iraq, this administration failed to guard those stockpiles – where nearly 380 tons of highly explosive weapons were kept. Today we learned that these explosives are missing, unaccounted for and could be in the hands of terrorists."

Kerry didn't blame the troops- he specifically blamed their commander in chief for not doing HIS duty.

So today, the whole attack changed: the Bush Administration and Campaign turned the blame on the troops.

Media Matters has a summary of the new developments, and has links to several articles with more details: Conservatives launch baseless verbal attacks on U.S. troops.

Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division who was commanding the unit in question, has also had a few things to say about the issue.

The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.

Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make plans for their next push.

"We happened to stumble on it," he said. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave that very same day. The plan was not to go in there and start searching. It looked like all the other ammunition supply points we had seen already."

...

The 101st Airborne Division arrived April 10 and left the next day. The next recorded visit by Americans came on May 27, when Task Force 75 inspected Al Qaqaa, but did not find the large quantities of explosives that had been seen in mid-March by the international inspectors. By then, Al Qaqaa had plainly been looted.

Colonel Anderson said he did not see any obvious signs of damage when he arrived on April 10, but that his focus was strictly on finding a secure place to collect his troops, who were driving and flying north from Karbala.

"There was no sign of looting here," Colonel Anderson said. "Looting was going on in Baghdad, and we were rushing on to Baghdad. We were marshaling in."

A few days earlier, some soldiers from the division thought they had discovered a cache of chemical weapons that turned out to be pesticides. Several of them came down with rashes, and they had to go through a decontamination procedure. Colonel Anderson said he wanted to avoid a repeat of those problems, and because he had already seen stockpiles of weapons in two dozen places, did not care to poke through the stores at Al Qaqaa.

"I had given instructions, "Don't mess around with those. It looks like they are bunkers; we're not messing around with those things. That's not what we're here for," " he said. "I thought we would be there for a few hours and move on. We ended up staying overnight."

But wait, there's more!

KSTP TV news right here in the Twin Cities had a crew embedded with one of the units stationed just south of al Qaqaa. On April 18, 2003, they were escorted through bunkers and filmed bunker after bunker of material labeled "explosives".

In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name "Al Qaqaa", the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

"We weren't quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn't appear that this was being secured in any way," said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. "It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents".

Officers with the 101st Airborne told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that the bunkers were within the U.S. military perimeter and protected. But Caffrey and former 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS Reporter Dean Staley, who spent three months together in Iraq, said Iraqis were coming and going freely.

"At one point there was a group of Iraqis driving around in a pick-up truck,"Staley said. "Three or four guys we kept an eye on, worried they might come near us."