Army: We Seized Some Explosives
A U.S. Army unit removed 250 tons of ammunition from the Al-Qaqaa weapons depot in April 2003 and later destroyed it, the company's former commander said. A Defense Department spokesman asserted that some was of the same type as the missing explosives that have become a major issue in the presidential campaign.
But those 250 tons were not located under the seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency — as the missing high-grade explosives had been — and spokesman Larry Di Rita could not definitely say whether they were part of the missing 377 tons.
Maj. Austin Pearson, speaking at a news conference at the Pentagon on Friday, said his team removed 250 tons of TNT, plastic explosives, detonation cords, and white phosphorous rounds on April 13, 2003 — 10 days after U.S. forces first reached the Al Qaqaa site.
"I did not see any IAEA seals at any of the locations we went into. I was not looking for that," Pearson said.
Di Rita sought to point to Pearson's comments as evidence that some RDX, one of the high-energy explosives, might have been removed from the site. RDX is also known as plastic explosive.
But Di Rita acknowledged: "I can't say RDX that was on the list of IAEA is what the major pulled out. ... We believe that some of the things they were pulling out of there were RDX."
Further study was needed, Di Rita said.
The notion that U.S. troops may have found the high-powered explosives differs from the administration's earlier contention that the explosives might have disappeared before U.S. troops arrived.
The fate of the explosives became an issue in the presidential campaign when the IAEA informed the Security Council that the Iraqi government believed some 377 tons had been looted from the al-Qaqaa site.
IAEA inspectors, who had monitored the explosives because they could be used to trigger atomic explosions in nuclear bombs, saw and sealed the explosives in January and visited again just days before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. They found the seals intact.
Since the invasion, insurgents have killed hundreds of U.S. troops, Iraqi civilians and foreign workers with roadside mines and car bombs.
Democratic nominee John Kerry has seized on the missing explosives as proof the Bush administration mismanaged the war by not sending enough troops to secure deadly weapons.
The White House has fired back that far larger amounts of explosives were secured at sites other than al-Qaqaa, and suggests the explosives might have been looted before troops arrived on the scene.
Videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq when they first opened the bunkers at al-Qaqaa nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels and bearing the markings of the IAEA
The video taken by KSTP of St. Paul on April 18, 2003, could reinforce suggestions that the explosives were looted after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa," David A. Kay, a former American official who directed the hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, told The New York Times. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal."
Three Iraqis claim to have witnessed wide-scale looting of the site in the days after U.S. troops moved through, according to The Times.
U.S. commanders acknowledge that when troops visited the site in April 2003, they did not conduct an extensive search for weapons.
"We were still in a fight," said the commander of the unit that was first to arrive in the area, in an interview with CBS News Correspondent David Martin.
"Our focus was killing bad guys," he continued, adding that he would have needed four times as many troops to search and secure all the ammo dumps his troops came across during the push into Iraq.
But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Thursday suggested the explosives were taken away before U.S. forces arrived, saying any large effort to loot the material afterward would have been detected.
"We would have seen anything like that," he said in one of two radio interviews he gave at the Pentagon. "The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, I think is at least debatable."
The Pentagon on Thursday declassified and released a single image, taken by reconnaissance aircraft or satellite just days before the war, showing two trucks outside one of the dozens of storage bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base.
The particular bunker is not one known to have contained any of the missing explosives, and Di Rita said the image only shows that there was some Iraqi activity at the base when it was taken, on March 17. Di Rita said the image says nothing about what happened to the explosives.