By William J. Broad and David E. Sanger
New York Times
30 October 2004
The report that hundreds of tons of high explosives are missing from the Qaqaa munitions facility in Iraq has loomed over the last week of the presidential campaign, and led to a blur of charges and countercharges about what actually happened, and why the news came out so close to Election Day.
Senator John Kerry has seized on the news, first reported by The New York Times and CBS' "60 Minutes," to reinforce his argument that the Bush administration bungled the postwar occupation of Iraq.
President Bush has rejected Mr. Kerry's statements as "wild charges," and the White House has argued that the explosives may have been removed by Saddam Hussein's forces before the war or that some may have been blown up shortly after the end of the war by an ordnance unit.
What follows are some questions and answers about the explosives, what is known and unknown about their whereabouts, and how the story came to light.
The Pentagon says it has destroyed or secured 400,000 tons of the estimated 650,000 tons of munitions in Iraq. Even if 350 metric tons (385 American tons) are missing, does it make much difference?
By this estimate, the whereabouts of at least 250,000 tons of munitions remains unknown. What made the 385 tons different was its type and its location. More than half of it was HMX, a high explosive that - unlike artillery shells or other weapons - can be easily moved around, dropped and jostled without fear of explosion until it is fabricated into a weapon. That makes it well suited for small, powerful bombs; less than a pound of a similar type of high-grade explosives brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. HMX is also used as the detonator in nuclear weapons, though there is no evidence it has fallen into the hands of anyone with nuclear capability.
Because of its potential nuclear use, and because it was stored at Al Qaqaa, where Saddam Hussein tried many years ago to fabricate the triggering devices for nuclear weapons, the International Atomic Energy Agency put it under special seal. So among the many explosives dumps in Iraq, the location, size and contents of this one were well known to the nuclear agency - and to the United States.
If the whole country was an ammunitions dump, how could anyone expect to secure it all?
In Iraq, commanders say it would be an impossible job. The number of troops is finite, so there is a constant calculus under way about whether to assign forces to guard depots or whether to use them to patrol the cities and hunt down insurgents.
The officers also note that weapons were not just in depots. Much was dispersed by Mr. Hussein before the war, or in its early days. Much has been looted since. And the arms still in the depots might not alter battle on the ground, since the insurgents already are well armed.
Moreover, the HMX and RDX at Al Qaqaa may be available elsewhere in the country. "There's probably a lot of stuff that is chemically identical to this all around Iraq, but it wasn't under seal because it wasn't located at a place previously associated with nuclear work," said one senior administration official.
Why didn't the international energy agency blow this material up in the 1990's?
At the White House and even inside the agency, which is based in Vienna, many people think this was a huge mistake. But the agency decided to allow Mr. Hussein to keep it because he argued he would use it in civilian construction projects.
Who saw it last?
When inspectors returned to Iraq in late 2002, they visited the site, which is dozens of square miles, examined the material and resealed it in January 2003. They visited again just before leaving the country in mid-March, and the seals were intact. Late Wednesday, the Pentagon released a photograph of trucks belonging to Mr. Hussein's forces at the site right after the inspectors left the country, suggesting that Mr. Hussein's forces could have moved the material. But the photograph showed no evidence that anything was being loaded or unloaded, and the trucks do not appear to be near the bunkers that held the HMX.
On Friday, the Pentagon said that on April 13, a special ordnance unit went to Al Qaqaa and destroyed 250 tons of explosives. But the Pentagon did not assert it was the same explosives that the atomic energy agency had under seal. On April 18, videotape taken by a Minneapolis television station shows American troops breaking what appears to be an energy agency seal and entering a bunker that contained what former inspectors say is clearly HMX. That unit, according to the station's cameraman, left the bunker unlocked, and soon left the area. It is unclear whether units that returned to Al Qaqaa in May searching for weapons of mass destruction saw the HMX or exactly when it disappeared.
Does the satellite photo that the Pentagon released show Iraqi trucks removing high-grade explosives from Al Qaqaa before the American invasion?
Weapons experts say the trucks are parked in front of a different bunker than the ones that contained the sealed HMX. At Al Qaqaa, only 9 of 56 bunkers contained HMX, according to the energy agency, and its maps show that the bunker near the trucks, No. 45, held none of the high-grade explosive. "It's not an HMX bunker," said a weapon expert familiar with the work of the international inspectors in Iraq.
Pentagon officials say the satellite photo is intended only to show that the area was not secure. "All we are trying to demonstrate is that after the I.A.E.A. left, and the place was under Saddam's control, there was activity," said Lawrence DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman.
Is there any reason that the coalition troops should have known to look for the explosives?
The atomic energy agency thinks so. Its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, warned about the HMX when briefing the United Nations Security Council in January 2003. The C.I.A. had the site listed as a "medium" priority on its own list of places the United States would have to search or secure after an invasion. Because Al Qaqaa was where Mr. Hussein once made conventional warheads and some chemical weapons, it was well known to American intelligence officials. But more importantly, because the HMX would have been needed in any nuclear weapons project - a program the Bush administration had alleged Mr. Hussein was seeking to revive - it would have been a natural place to look immediately for evidence of efforts to assemble weapons of mass destruction.
But some of the first troops to arrive there on the drive to Baghdad apparently did not know any of that. Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said his troops got to the site on April 10 and camped there overnight, but until this week he did not know it was considered important. "We happened to stumble on it," Colonel Anderson 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."
The agency said it sent another specific warning to the Bush administration, through the American representative to the agency, in May 2003, after reports of widespread looting in Iraq. Agency officials say they never heard a response. Mr. DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman, said the teams that searched Iraq in the days after Mr. Hussein's fall were looking chiefly for weapons of mass destruction - and the high explosives did not qualify. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said this week that there were "a number of priorities," from securing oil fields to getting reconstruction going.
Is anyone looking for the explosives now?
It is unclear. Many explosives are being rounded up. But identifying HMX takes experience, and in granular form it can be easily divided up and hidden.
Isn't there a huge discrepancy between the nearly 350 metric tons of high explosives that the energy agency claimed were at Al Qaqaa and what was actually there, especially for the explosive known as RDX?
No, weapons experts say. A Iraqi government letter of Oct. 10 identified the lost stockpile as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, 141.2 metric tons of RDX, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN.
On Wednesday, ABC News reported that it had obtained a confidential document from the energy agency showing that its inspectors in January 2003, had reported the existence of a little more than three tons of RDX explosives at Al Qaqaa - not the 141.2 metric tons in the Iraqi letter.
Melissa Fleming, an agency spokeswoman, said Friday that the confusion about the quantities arose because Al Qaqaa had more than one site for RDX storage. Three tons were kept at Al Qaqaa, she said, while 125 tons under Al Qaqaa administrative control were kept at Muaskar al Mahawil, about 30 miles away. So the total recent RDX inventory was 128 tons - 13 tons less than the Iraqi ministry wrote in their letter this month.
While Mr. Hussein was still in power, Ms. Fleming said, Iraq told agency inspectors before the war that it had used 10 tons of the RDX between late 1998 and late 2002, when the United Nations did not monitor Al Qaqaa. So the discrepancy, she said, boiled down to three tons.
"We were in the process of verifying and reconciling the three missing tons when the war erupted," she said.
Why is this coming out in the week before the election?
The answer depends on whom you ask. The memorandum from the Iraqi interim government to the energy agency was dated Oct. 10. It was sent in response to a request from the agency for an accounting of missing materials. The Bush administration says it smells a political motive: the head of the agency, Mr. ElBaradei, was told a few months ago that the United States would not support him for another term. They suspect an effort at retribution.
Mr. Bush's political strategist, Karl Rove, said this week that he believed The Times deliberately published the story the week before the election in an effort to harm Mr. Bush's candidacy. Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said that the paper first obtained a copy of the Iraqi letter early in the week of Oct. 18, and that its reporters and CBS began asking questions about the explosives in Baghdad, Vienna and Washington during that week. The article was published on Oct. 25. The White House said President Bush was told of the Iraqi warning to the energy agency around Oct. 16.
----------------------------------------------------
Citation: William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, "Facts and Questions About Lost Munitions," New York Times, 30 October 2004.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/30/politics/campaign/30bomb.html?pagewanted=print&position
--------------------------------------------------