Welcome Little Green Footballers!

Apparently my friend wordwarp posted my post on the Al Qaqaa controversy on LGF's weblog. Hello Republicans of all stripes! Thank you for indulging.

Interesting that wordwarp's "fisking" of my argument sidesteps the notion that the 101st Airborne Division that "first" visited the area didn't do any searching for weapons. That's now been confirmed again by commanders on the ground, per a CBS press release:

The commander of the first unit into the area told CBS he did not search it for explosives or secure it from looters. "We were still in a fight," he said. "our focus was killing bad guys." He added he would have needed four times more troops to search and secure all the ammo dumps he came across.

And by NBC's Jim Miklaszewski:

Military officials tell NBC News that on April 10, 2003, when the Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne entered the Al QaQaa weapons facility, south of Baghdad, that those troops were actually on their way to Baghdad, that they were not actively involved in the search for any weapons, including the high explosives, HMX and RDX. The troops did observe stock piles of conventional weapons but no HMX or RDX. And because the Al Qaqaa facility is so huge, it's not clear that those troops from the 101st were actually anywhere near the bunkers that reportedly contained the HMX and RDX.

U.S. troops and members of the Iraq Survey Group did arrive at the Al QaQaa compound on May 27. And when they did, they found no HMX or RDX or any other weapons under seal at the time. Now, the Iraqi government has officially said that the high explosives were stolen by looters.

As I mentioned earlier, the 101st Airborne wasn't the first group on the ground at Al Qaqaa. As for the April 4th revelation of explosives at the site, wordwarp claims that:

The holes (in the argument) appear to be that the "explosives" (in the form of white powder in vials) described in the globalsecurity doc, do not appear to be the RDX/HMX that the IAEA had labeled.

That's the only point of contention. But we know that the IAEA saw the RDX and HMX, under seal, as recently as March 9. And if you find explosives in the site, whatever they are, and this is a known large weapons cache, with 380 tons of IAEA-sealed material in it, wouldn't you, you know, guard the place? Well, the LA Times reports:

Asked if U.S. troops were ever ordered to guard the facility, where Hussein built conventional warheads and the IAEA dismantled parts of his nuclear program after the Gulf War, a Defense official responded, "Not that I'm aware of."

David Kay, the CIA's former chief weapons hunter in Iraq, believes that the material was looted in the immediate aftermath of the war.

He said he saw the facility in May 2003, "and it was heavily looted at that time. Sometime between April and May, most of the stuff was carried off. The site was in total disarray, just like a lot of the Iraqi sites."

Kay said that HMX and RDX were "superb explosives for terrorists" because they were stable compounds that could be transported safely and used for large-scale attacks.

Both types of material "would be good for a car bomb or a truck bomb," Kay said. "Just pack it together with a detonator."

I believe the chief weapons inspector in Iraq would have as full a list of information as anyone about this situation. Also, there's this from the Chicago Tribune, September 30, 2004:

The insurgents probably are using weapons and ammunition looted from the nearby Qa-Qaa complex, a 3-mile by 3-mile weapons-storage site about 25 miles southwest of Baghdad, said Maj. Brian Neil, operations officer for the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, which initially patrolled the area.

The site was bombed during last year's invasion and then left unguarded, Neil said.

"There's definitely no shortage of weapons around here," he said.

Again, a Marine major who patrolled the area probably knows what's going on.

But really, LGFers, thanks for coming, and I hope you stay and look around.