Bush and his surrogates have experimented with a variety of justifications for the missing tons of deadly explosives at Al Qaqaa, nearly all of which have proven either unpersuasive or completely wrong. The one they’ve really rallied behind the past couple of days, however, is the possibility that the munitions were taken from the facility before the U.S. invasion began.
It’s seemed like a stretch that most discounted — including Iraqi officials, David Kay, the IAEA — but this was the Bush administration’s new story and they were sticking to it.
Today we learned that this point, too, is false.
An ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, KSTP, had a crew embedded with the 101st Airborne when the division arrived at the Al Qaqaa facility. They have video proof that the explosives were there on April 18, 2003.
There were what appeared to be fuses for bombs. They also found bags of material men from the 101st couldn’t identify, but box after box was clearly marked “explosive.”
In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name “Al Qaqaa”, the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.
Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren’t secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.
“We weren’t quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn’t appear that this was being secured in any way,” said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. “It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents”.
Another Bush explanation comes up, another Bush explanation goes down. Then again, they’ve never seemed particularly interested in reality before, so I suppose I shouldn’t count on them to start now.
So, does this mean the Bush campaign is right and we should blame the troops? Of course not. As Matt Yglesias explained very well:
[T]he point here is not that the soldiers in the 101st Airborne didn’t do their jobs properly — they didn’t know what they were looking at, and didn’t have any orders to secure the facility. The higher-ups in the chain of command, on the other hand, new exactly what was in the facility and, had they used some common sense, would have ordered it secured. But they didn’t.
Exactly. Those troops in the KSTP video weren’t sent to Al Qaqaa to secure the facility and lock down those tons of explosives. This was a pit stop. Don’t blame the soldiers as Giuliani did on Bush’s behalf this morning; blame their commander-in-chief who was urged to seal the facility, ignored the warnings, and still refuses to accept responsibility.
And for good measure, the Center for American Progress did a nice job summarizing the Bush administration’s four main defenses for Al Qaqaa and why each argument is wrong.