In case it wasn’t already abundantly clear that the White House was dead wrong about the story, the LA Times had an excellent piece today with more first-hand accounts of the debacle at Al Qaqaa. This controversy became significant before the election, but it didn’t stop being relevant on Tuesday.
In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material away from the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.
The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers with one unit — the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany — said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply.
The witnesses’ accounts of the looting, the first provided by U.S. soldiers, support claims that the American military failed to safeguard the munitions. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency — the U.N. nuclear watchdog — and the interim Iraqi government reported that about 380 tons of high-grade explosives had been taken from the Al Qaqaa facility after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The explosives are powerful enough to detonate a nuclear weapon.
Devastating. The administration was given warnings about the facility, which were ignored. The administration was told there weren’t enough troops, but that was ignored too. And now terrorists have several hundred tons of deadly explosives. Every defense the administration has offered to justify the mistake has been proven false.
“On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave” so looters could come in and take munitions.
“It was complete chaos. It was looting like L.A. during the Rodney King riots,” another officer said.
He and other soldiers who spoke to The Times asked not to be named, saying they feared retaliation from the Pentagon.
Seems like a safe choice. The Bush gang has already proven they like to blame the troops for the president’s mistakes, so no one should be surprised that they fear administration reprisals.