US: No Explosives When GIs Arrived

The Pentagon said Monday that invading U.S. troops did not find explosives at an Iraqi site where hundreds of tons of bomb-making material were once stored.

The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog alerted the Security Council this week that the Iraqi interim government reports nearly 400 tons of powerful explosives were missing from the al-Qaqaa facility, 30 miles south of Baghdad, as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security."

From the end of the 1991 Gulf War until the March 2003 U.S. invasion, the explosives had been under seal by the International Atomic Energy Agency because they could have been used to trigger nuclear weapons under Saddam's dormant bomb program.

The material might have fallen into the hands of insurgents, who've killed hundreds of coalition soldiers and civilians with roadside mines and car bombs since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

60 Minutes Correspondent Ed Bradley reports the U.N. says it warned the U.S. government the munitions site might be looted shortly after the invasion.

The disappearance of the explosives, first reported by The New York Times, became fodder on the presidential campaign trail.

The White House played down the significance of the missing weapons, but Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry accused President Bush of "incredible incompetence" and his campaign said the administration "must answer for what may be the most grave and catastrophic mistake in a tragic series of blunders in Iraq."

But Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said coalition forces were present in the vicinity of the site both during and after major combat operations, which ended May 1, 2003 — and searched the facility but found none of the explosives material in question. That raised the possibility that the explosives had disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site in the immediate invasion aftermath.

The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the nuclear agency at that point that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be.
NBC News, which had correspondents embedded with the U.S. soldiers who reached the al-Qaqaa site in April 2003, said the GIs never found the explosives but did see other stockpiles of conventional weapons.

Al-Qaqaa is near Youssifiyah, an area rife with ambush attacks. An Associated Press Television News crew that drove past the compound Monday saw no visible security at the gates of the site, a jumble of low-slung, yellow-colored storage buildings that appeared deserted.

"The most immediate concern here is that these explosives could have fallen into the wrong hands," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.

The agency first placed a seal over Al-Qaqaa storage bunkers holding the explosives in 1991 as part of U.N. sanctions that ordered the dismantlement of Iraq's nuclear program after the Gulf War.

IAEA inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers, Fleming said. Inspectors visited the site again in March 2003, but didn't view the explosives because the seals were not broken, she said.

Nuclear agency experts pulled out of Iraq just before the U.S.-led invasion later that month, and have not yet been able to return for general inspections despite ElBaradei's repeated urging that they be allowed to finish their work.
The letter dated Oct. 10 that IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei received from Mohammed J. Abbas, a senior official at Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology, reported the theft of 377 tons of explosives. It informed the IAEA that since April 9, 2003, looting at the Al-Qaqaa installation had resulted in the loss of 215 tons of HMX, 156 tons of RDX and six tons of PETN explosives.

HMX and RDX are key components in plastic explosives such as C-4 and Semtex, which are so powerful that Libyan terrorists needed just a pound to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 170 people.

Insurgents targeting coalition forces in Iraq have made widespread use of plastic explosives in a bloody spate of car bomb attacks. Officials were unable to link the missing explosives directly to the recent car bombings, but the revelations that they could have fallen into enemy hands caused a stir in the last week of the U.S. presidential campaign.

"These explosives can be used to blow up airplanes, level buildings, attack our troops and detonate nuclear weapons," senior Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart said in a statement. "The Bush administration knew where this stockpile was, but took no action to secure the site."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration's first concern was whether the disappearance constituted a nuclear proliferation threat. He said it did not.

"We have destroyed more than 243,000 munitions" in Iraq, he said. "We've secured another nearly 163,000 that will be destroyed."

Concerns over the security of former nuclear sites in Iraq have arisen before. In April, the IAEA reported that some Iraqi nuclear facilities appear to be unguarded, and radioactive materials were being taken out of the country.

Separately, the Los Angeles Times reported that 2,500 barrels of uranium that could be used to produce nuclear weapons had been left unguarded at the Tuwaitha nuclear research center site for several days following the withdrawal of Iraqi troops.