Via Josh Micah Marshall:
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: October 24, 2004 - October 30, 2004 Archives: As I've noted a few times over the course of the last week, there is a real fissure running between the uniformed military and the politicals in Di Rita's office over al Qaqaa.
And as was so often the case during the run-up to the war and since then, it's fallen to two reporters at Knight-Ridder -- Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay -- to bring us this part of the story.
While Di Rita and Co. were working on today's spin operation, this story went out on the KR newswire under Landay's byline.
Note this passage in Landay's piece ...In a new disclosure, the senior U.S. military officer and another U.S. official, who also spoke on condition he not be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that an Iraqi working for U.S. intelligence alerted U.S. troops stationed near the al Qaqaa weapons facility that the installation was being looted shortly after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.
But, they said, the troops took no apparent action to halt the pillaging.
"That was one of numerous times when Iraqis warned us that ammo dumps and other places were being looted and we weren't able to respond because we didn't have anyone to send," said a senior U.S. military officer who served in Iraq.As Landay's sourcing makes clear, this was coming out of the career military, not from the president's appointees.
Didn't I warn Cheney that screaming at non-political appointee underlings would be hazardous to his reelection as grand vizier? Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
Payback's a bitch, and all the people who hate his guts means that the bad news keeps a-coming. Watching all this shit land on this administration is almost better than sex. Almost. Well, not quite, but it's still pretty damn good.
Posted by: Chris at October 29, 2004 01:32 PMAh. A Patrick R. Sullivan-free zone.
Imagine that.
Yes, Al Qaa Qa was simply one of the most flagrant cases of failure to secure an area. The most egregious was probably Al Tuwaitha. I'll be interested to find-- after the election, of course-- how many tons of yellowcake were removed from there.
The Washington Post estimates that there were in Iraq, if memory serves, 650Ktons-1000Ktons tons of "munitions," a vague term that includes everything from bullets to bombs. The Administration claims to have destroyed 400K tons. Without allowing for the usual spin and hyperbole of Bush Inc., this means that there are 250Ktons- 600Ktons of munitions not under American control. Of these, perhaps 10% are actually explosives. So, we can estimate that 25,000 -60,000 tons of explosives are available to insurgents and terrorists.
At the rate of 100 attacks per day, 10 lbs of explosive per attack, that should last them for, oh, say, roughly 50 years.
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