Some Dissembling Required

The Pentagon and the White House are desperately trying to spin this Al Qaqaa explosive burglary story away, with little result. I heard Rush this morning bloviate that "the only difference between this story and the Bush National Guard story is Bill Burkett!" Their claim seems to be that the weapons cache under IAEA seal was not there when the US forces arrived at Al Qaqaa. This was Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita's suggestion yesterday:

This is a first report. We do not know when -- if those weapons did exist at that facility -- they were last seen, and under whose control they were last in... It's very possible -- certainly it's plausible -- that it was the Saddam Hussein regime that last had control of these things," he told AFP.

Well, we know that the IAEA made a report on the weapons in January 2003, and that, according to Josh Marshall and others, they returned to the site and saw that the seals were in place on March 8, just a week before the war started. So that would give Saddam a week or so to remove all 380 tons of explosives. And we had practically the entire country under surveillance at that time. Do you really think we wouldn't have seen 40 semi trucks rolling across the desert away from a known weapons cache 40 miles south of Baghdad?

Then, NBC News decided to step up and say that a news crew embedded with the 101st Airborne division did a spot check of the Al Qaqaa facility, and saw no weapons. This implies that the explosives were gone before the military arrived. How, then, do you explain this?

Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives. The finding would be consistent with the plant's stated production capabilities in the field of basic raw materials for explosives and propellants.

This report is dated April 5, 2003, a week before the NBC News crew got to Al Qaqaa. So they were there at that time. Also, the notion that an NBC News crew is equipped to do an explosive search in a massive complex full of bunkers is highly dubious (and the same with the 101st Airborne, who is not trained in such matters). Plus, listen to the NBC News reporter, Lai Ling Jew, and her version of events:

"There wasn't a search. 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 head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around."

So the Republican argument is that the explosives weren't there when we got there, even though there wasn't a search for explosives at all, and there were explosives when we got there a week earlier. How stupid do they think we are?