Iraqi explosives' location falling under question

From wire reports

The whereabouts of nearly 400 tons of high explosives said to be missing from a site in Iraq drew greater scrutiny Tuesday following a report released earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Reports from various sources raised questions about whether high-powered plastic explosives were missed by U.S. soldiers or already stolen before coalition forces arrived at the site.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei had reported the disappearance of 377 tons of non-nuclear explosives from the former Al-Qaqaa military installation south of Baghdad to the U.N. Security Council on Monday.

One of the first U.S. military units to reach the Al-Qaqaa military installation after the fall of Baghdad did not have orders to search for the nearly 400 tons of HMX and RDX explosives, which have reportedly gone missing, the unit spokesman said Tuesday.

When troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the Al-Qaqaa base a day or so after coalition troops seized Baghdad on April 9, 2003, there were already looters throughout the facility, Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the unit, told The Associated Press.

The soldiers "secured the area they were in and looked in a limited amount of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present in their area," Wellman wrote in an e-mail message. "Bombs were found but not chemical weapons in that immediate area.

"Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE type munitions, as they [high-explosive weapons] were everywhere in Iraq," he wrote.

His remarks appeared to confirm the observations of an NBC reporter embedded with the army unit who said Tuesday that she saw no signs that the Americans searched for the powerful explosives during their 24 hours at the facility en route to Baghdad, 30 miles to the north.

NBC News reporter Lai Ling Jew, who accompanied the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade, said her news team stayed at the Al-Qaqaa base April 10, 2003, for about 24 hours en route to the capital.

"There wasn't a search," she told MSNBC, an NBC cable news channel. "The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers headed off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around.

"But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away."

NBC reported that its embedded crew said U.S. troops did discover significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives.

Both 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 270 people.

Sources at the Pentagon have said no evidence exists linking the use of HMX and RDX to attacks on coalition forces, MSNBC reported.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said coalition forces were present in the vicinity of the site both during and after major combat operations, which ended on May 1, 2003. He said they searched the facility but found none of the explosives in question.

That raised the possibility the explosives disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.

The Pentagon said the Al-Qaqaa facility was a "level 2" priority on a list of 500 sites to be searched and secured, CNN reported. U.S. officials say it was visited dozens of times by U.S. troops in the months following the invasion and -- after searching 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings -- they never found the stockpile.

Lt. Gen. William Boykin, the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said that on May 27, 2003, a U.S. military team specifically looking for weapons went to the site but did not find anything with IAEA stickers on it.

The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the IAEA that the conventional explosives were not where they were supposed to be. Boykin said that the Pentagon was investigating whether the information was handed on to anyone else at the time.

The explosives had been housed in storage bunkers at the facility. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed fresh seals over the bunker doors in January 2003. The inspectors visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time on March 15, 2003, and reported that the seals were not broken -- therefore, the weapons were still there at the time. The team then pulled out of the country in advance of the invasion later that month.

The nuclear agency's inspectors had sealed storage bunkers shortly before the war because HMX is a "dual use" explosive that also can be used as an ignitor on a nuclear bomb.

"Our greatest concern from both a proliferation standpoint and from a standpoint of danger to human beings was Al-Qaqaa," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said Tuesday.

Guard lacking

Weapons experts are questioning why Al-Qaqaa -- once a key facility in Saddam Hussein's effort to build a nuclear bomb -- wasn't under 24-hour guard.

The facility was considered "the pre-eminent site for high explosive stockpiles," a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The explosives missing from Al-Qaqaa could produce hundreds of thousands of bombs -- more than enough to "fuel an insurgency literally for years," said Shannon Kyle, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

International Atomic Energy Agency spokeswoman Fleming said Tuesday that the Iraqis have not told the IAEA about any other missing materials since their Oct. 10 letter stating that the weapons vanished from Al-Qaqaa as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security" sometime after coalition forces took control of the capital on April 9, 2003.

But she said the agency's chief Iraq inspector, Jacques Baute, "would encourage more such reporting on what has happened to sites subject to IAEA verification."

The topic of explosives at Al-Qaqaa have become a hot issue in the final week of the presidential campaign, with the White House stressing that the U.S.-led coalition has destroyed hundreds of thousands of munitions and the Kerry campaign calling the disappearance the latest in a "tragic series of blunders."

"There was an utter lack of curiosity to follow up on what was well-known to the U.N.," said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector.

"There was a systematic failure of the military, which overran the country and left all these explosives behind without protecting its rear," he said. "The military should have had the sense to either secure high explosives and armaments or blow them up as they went through."