As badly as this missing explosives story has gone for the administration and their reporters, both reluctant and otherwise, I must confess to being more than a little surprised that Sandefur is still insisting that I somehow "jumped the gun" or "fell" for a false story. The evidence could not be any more firmly on my side on this one, as I will easily show below. In this latest post, he does at least attempt to address the actual substantive issues rather than just linking to obviously farcical articles and making sarcastic comments. Unfortunately, almost every factual claim he makes is false.
As far as the Friday press conference goes, he does at least acknowledge that it didn't really clear up the issue at all, saying, "the spokesmen acknowledged repeatedly that they could not say for certain whether the explosives that were destroyed were the same explosives that are at the center of the story." I would go a bit further than that. Not only did they not say for certain whether they were the same explosives, there isn't any evidence at all that they blew up the explosives held at this particular site. But even more importantly, this answer contradicts their previous answers. First they said the explosives were gone when they got there, then they said the Russians took them to Syria; in both cases, you obviously cannot blow up explosives you just claimed 2 days earlier weren't there in the first place. Now let's think about this for a moment...
If you had a client accused of a crime and he came up with multiple alibis that turned out to be false, then suddenly had a brand new one which might explain away the evidence, but which contradicts the false alibis he's already offered, would any jury in the world buy that? Not in a million years. So let's look at those alibis.
First they said that the explosives were already gone before we got there, which Sandefur still appears to think is possible. This was actually offered three times, with different claims of support. The first one was that the NBC reporter who was embedded with the 101st Airborne had said that there were no explosives there at the time. This argument was false for two reasons. First, the reporter actually said that there was no search at all, only a few soldiers wandering around a complex of more than 100 buildings and bunkers. Second, the 101st Airborne were not the first troops through the area, the 3rd Infantry Division was, a week earlier. So what did the 3ID find?
The 3ID also did not do a search of the entire site, but what little searching they did do turned up thousands of boxes of white powder explosives, according to the AP report from the following day. And the 3ID commander said in an interview that he would have needed 4 times the number of troops to search and secure the facility and still complete their primary mission, which was getting to Baghdad. So, the first two arguments for why the explosives were gone when we got there turned out to be false.
The third argument for why they were gone when we got there was that the Russians took them to Syria and Lebanon. Sandefur seized on this one to make a highly sarcastic "see, Brayton fell for a false story" post, but apparently without really thinking about whether this story was credible. I spent a good deal of time detailing the reasons why this story was implausible, with no response whatsoever. The next day, Pentagon spokespeople were backpeddling from the story because it was so silly. So who exactly was it who "jumped the gun" and showed credulity in seizing upon a fanciful story to promote their position? I'll let my readers judge that for themselves.
All of these arguments for why the explosives were gone when they got there were proven false by one simple little fact - we have proof that they were there as of April 18th, 9 days after Baghdad fell and 15 days after American troops first got to the facility. To this, Sandefur makes the following astonishing comment:
We have a videotape which shows soldiers finding barrels with IAEA seals on them, taken on April 18. This is apparently the only evidence we have that the material was still there this late in the year.
This is a bit like saying "apparently the only evidence we have that your client murdered his wife is a videotape of him murdering his wife." We have videotape of our soldiers breaking the IAEA seal and going into a bunker with hundreds of 55 gallon drums of HMX, the very explosives that the Pentagon had been claiming for days was not there when we got there. We have the testimony of the reporters who took it that there were literally dozens and dozens of such bunkers, all still sealed and padlocked on April 18th, many of them having identical content. We have the testimony of David Kay, director of the Iraq Survey Group, that the barrels shown on that videotape were in fact the very HMX that the IAEA had sealed in the first place, as well as the testimony of several former weapons inspectors who had done the inspections on that material and sealed them prior to the invasion that what is shown on that videotape are the explosives in question. As David Kay said on CNN, "game, set and match." It simply is not credible anymore to claim that we don't know if the explosives were looted before the war or not; they were there, the evidence is overwhelming, and it is absurd to the point of surreality (is that a word?) to continue to claim otherwise. To that effect, Sandefur offers the following remarkable statement:
The Pentagon has shown every evidence of cooperating and fairly addressing the concerns of these missing explosives--and has not even tried to say that they have definitive answers as to what happened.
Wow. If there is evidence of the administration cooperating and fairly addressing the issue, it seems to have escaped my notice. They've given multiple false excuses; released satellite photos to support one of those false excuses that wasn't even of the right bunkers (but of course the public isn't likely to hear the second part, only the first); they've accused their accusers of "attacking our troops", which has in fact ONLY been done by Rudy Giuliani who supports the President - that's a good faith show of cooperation and fairly addressing the issue? He continues:
Brayton is asking us to believe that this material was there when the Army arrived--they just missed it when they inspected--that it was then smuggled out of the compound after the American occupation, without our surveillance (which Brayton acknowledges is effective) noticing the fact--that the Administration then learned about this, and that it is now hiding that fact from us all, because this supposedly incompetent Administration is somehow eerily capable of secrecy and propaganda. Is that easier to believe than that this explosive was either destroyed, and the paperwork lost, or that this explosive was taken out of its location before the American army arrived? The answer is yes only if you are determined to make the answer yes.
And I'll answer the same way David Kay answered. First, we KNOW beyond all reasonable doubt that the explosives WERE there as of April 18th. David Kay says when he was there in late May, the explosives were gone and that the place had been looted (which is different from "the military emptied it out and blew everything up"). Now surely David Kay, whose sole job was to determine what happened to all of the weapons in Iraq, would have known what had been blown up and what hadn't, yet he himself has said that these explosives were there in April and were looted by May. He also says that it is far more credible to think that they were looted a little at a time by insurgents in the dead of night than that they were taken away in a big convoy of Iraqis and Russians before or after the war started. Now, you can dismiss me as merely a Michigan businessman, but not Kay. He continues:
Brayton quickly changes the subject, and starts talking about whether enough troops were sent to Iraq. The answer is, no--not enough troops were sent.
This isn't a change of subject at all, it's the same subject I've been screaming about for months. Not just that we didn't have enough troops, but that we didn't have a plan to secure the country after we invaded at all. The Pentagon and the CIA had a huge list of sites, all categorized by importance, that needed to be secured after the war, but that list apparently did not get to the commanders on the ground. Even the known nuclear sites and the disease labs were left unguarded, as I've documented here many times. Al Qaqaa is just one more bit of evidence of the much larger incompetence. They simply did not have either adequate troops or adequate planning to secure the nation, especially the munitions dumps and those munitions are now being used against our soldiers. Even strong supporters of the war like Andrew Sullivan have called this "criminal negligence". All of the military experts agree with my conclusion on this, even Sandefur agrees with it, yet he continues to insist that I'm just so eager to grab on to any reason to criticize Bush that I'm being irrational. I'll leave it to my readers to determine for themselves which of us is a member of the "reality-based community" on this one.
- Log in to post comments
In one of the previous stories the pentagon freindly report claimed that only 3 tons of RDX was even left behind in the bunker. In the latest press conference from the DoD, the demo-soldier claimed to have blown up 'hundreds of tons' of HE, mostly RDX. That's quite a flip flop if you forgive that phrase ;)
Much has been made over this report that it may only have been 3 tons of RDX and some have pretended (or misunderstood) that that collapsed 350 tons down to 3 tons. That's false. The bulk of the explosives at that site were HMX, nor RDX, and what they are referring to is a situation where the IAEA requested of the Iraqis that they move the entire store to a more secure place where it could be more easily sealed up. That move apparently did take place and they were sealed where they laid until they were apparently looted sometime after April 18th. After it was moved, there was some contention over about 38 tons of the stuff, which the Iraqi government claims it mixed with sulfur for use in blasting out sites for new construction. The IAEA could not confirm that the missing 38 tons was in fact used for that, but they did seal all of the remaining HMX and RDX, primarily HMX (RDX is apparently used for making the detonation blasting caps, so much less of it is needed relative to HMX when building explosives, which is why of the 350 tons there initially the bulk of it was HMX) and that remained sealed there at least through April 18th when it was videotaped by the news crew, still behind seals and still padlocked. At best, this reduces the amount of explosives on that site by 10%, not down to 3 tons as some have been pretending.
That particular post was the last straw and the reason why I deleted Sandefur's blog from my list of daily reads. He may continue to write very insightful and interesting things, but anyone who can write that has very questionable judgment when it comes to facts that may contradict a previously-adopted position. He's not stupid and he's not dishonest, but like Bush he seems to have trouble acknowledging past error.
Come to think of it, Bush's refusal to acknowledge past errors and fix things is a principle reason why I am anti-Bush. I can deal with people making mistakes - even stupid mistakes - because I make so many myself. I don't go a day without doing something dumb. On the other hand, I seem to have a strong aversion to people not acknowledging mistakes, taking responsibility for them, and fixing them.