The late hit

Well, here we are in the land of the Late Hit.

John Kerry has seized on a New York Times /"60 Minutes" report about 380 missing tons of high explosives in Iraq and the administration's supposed dereliction in failing to secure them.

It's hard to fault the Times for pursuing the story aggressively. In an official document sent to a U.N. agency two weeks ago, the Iraqi interim government said the explosives had disappeared during the looting that followed Saddam Hussein's fall in April 2003.

That official Iraqi communication makes the story news, no matter the source or the motive behind the document being leaked.

The problem is that the story drew unsupported conclusions about how the explosives had disappeared while the United States military should have been guarding them.

And that's why it's a late hit -- designed to do maximum damage to the president's re-election effort and designed as well to give John Kerry a weapon to use against George Bush in the closing days of the campaign.

For that reason, the Times spun its own story, even though the evidence that its conclusions were unsupported is right there in the story itself.

The Iraqi official in question himself told the Times he has no idea when the explosives disappeared.

"Yes, they are missing," said the letter's author, Science and Technology Minister Rashad Omar. "We don't know what happened. ... After the collapse of the regime, our liberation, everything was under the Coalition forces, under their control. So probably they can answer this question, what happened to the materials."

In other words, the letter Omar wrote to the International Atomic Energy Agency featured sheer speculation that the 380 tons had been looted from the facility. It was not based on any evidence to that effect.

U.S. troops took a cursory tour of the place over the course of 24 hours during the war in April and didn't find materials sealed by U.N. inspectors earlier in the year.

Even the Times speculates that Saddam's people may have broken the U.N. seals and moved the explosives outside the facility to fields nearby.

If that's true, then how exactly was the U.S. military to know what happened to the stuff -- before, during or after the war?

If the explosives were hidden away, they were hidden away.

Nobody knows what happened to the stuff.

It's theoretically possible that it was looted after the war's conclusion -- though, as Ed Morrissey points out at captainsquartersblog.com, it would have taken 100 men working 12 hours a day for two weeks to shlep the stuff away.

And that would surely have been spotted by somebody.

It seems far more likely that Saddam had the materiel moved. According to one report, the United Nations last visited the facility on March 8, a week before the war began.

But the U.N.'s major report on the facility came out two months earlier.

Saddam could have been moving the materiel out over the course of the two months before the war began -- maybe into Syria.

Who knows?

That's the point. Who knows? Certainly not the Times. Certainly not John Kerry. But they'll both do or say what they feel they need to do or say to secure the result .

John Podhoretz is a New York Post columnist.