IAEA: U.S. Warned On Explosives
The U.N. nuclear agency said Thursday it warned the United States about the vulnerability of explosives stored at Iraq's Al-Qaqaa military installation after another facility — Iraq's main nuclear complex — was looted in April 2003.
Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, told The Associated Press that U.S. officials were cautioned directly about what was stored at Al-Qaqaa, the main high explosives facility in Iraq.
Some 377 tons of high explosives are now missing from the facility, said by Iraqi officials to have been taken amid looting. Questions have arisen about what the United States knew about Al-Qaqaa and what it did to secure the site.
Fleming did not say which officials were notified or exactly when, but she said the IAEA — which had put storage bunkers at the site under seal just before the war — alerted the United States after the Tuwaitha nuclear complex was looted.
"After we heard reports of looting at the Tuwaitha site in April 2003, the agency's chief Iraq inspectors alerted American officials that we were concerned about the security of the high explosives stored at Al-Qaqaa," she told the AP.
"It is also important to note that this was the main high explosives storage facility in Iraq, and it was well-known through IAEA reports to the Security Council," Fleming said.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei informed the United Nations in February 2003, and again in April of that year, that he was concerned about HMX explosives stored at Al-Qaqaa.
The explosives' disappearance has become a flashpoint in the final week of the U.S. presidential campaign, with Democratic hopeful John Kerry accusing the Bush administration of ignoring the threat and the White House. The Pentagon has suggested that Saddam Hussein's regime may have removed the explosives before the war began.
However, three Iraqis claim to have witnessed wide-scale looting of the site in the days after U.S. troops moved through, according to The New York Times.
IAEA inspectors reportedly last confirmed that the agency's seals on the explosives were in place and intact on March 15, five days before the invasion began.
But a U.S. infantry commander said Wednesday it is "very highly improbable" that someone could have trucked out so much material once U.S. forces arrived in the area.
Col. David Perkins, who commanded a brigade in the division that led the charge into Baghdad, said the roads near the site were filled with military traffic. He said a large-scale operation to remove the explosives using trucks almost certainly would have been detected.
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.
The Pentagon is studying satellite photographs of the site, trying to determine the nature of unusual vehicle activity there before U.S. troops arrived, reports CBS News Correspondent David Martin.
Martin reports that the trucks seen on satellite photos could have been at the site for any number of reasons having nothing to do with hauling away the explosives. The Pentagon is trying to correlate the specific geographic coordinates of those bunkers where the explosives were stored with these satellite photos to see if there is evidence that trucks were parked outside those bunkers.
A story in The Washington Times on Thursday quoted a high-ranking U.S. defense official alleging that Russian special forces had "almost certainly" helped spirit out the hundreds of tons of high explosives. The newspaper based its report on an interview with John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security.
Russia angrily denied the allegations. Defense Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov dismissed the allegations as "absurd" and "ridiculous."
The IAEA sought Thursday to clarify reports that the amount of missing explosives may have been far less than what the Iraqis said in an Oct. 10 report to the nuclear agency.
ABC News, citing IAEA inspection documents, reported Wednesday night that the Iraqis had declared 141 tons of RDX explosives at Al-Qaqaa in July 2002, but that the site held only three tons when it was checked in January 2003.
The network said that could suggest that 138 tons were removed from the facility long before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
But Fleming said most of the RDX — about 125 tons — was kept at Al-Mahaweel, a storage site under Al-Qaqaa's jurisdiction located outside the main Al-Qaqaa site. She also said about 10 tons already had been reported by Iraq as having been used for non-prohibited purposes between July 2002 and January 2003.
"IAEA inspectors visited Al-Mahaweel on Jan. 15, 2003, and verified the RDX inventory by weighing sampling," Fleming said. She said the RDX at Al-Mahaweel was not under seal but was subject to IAEA monitoring.
In June 2003, IAEA inspectors investigated reports of widespread looting of storage rooms at Tuwaitha, and they returned in August 2003 to take inventory of several tons of natural uranium that had been stored there. They have not been allowed back to Al-Qaqaa.
Meanwhile, an armed group claimed in a video obtained Thursday to have obtained the explosives and warned that it will use them if foreign troops threaten Iraqi cities.