The RDX Story Develops

It seems fair to say that
MSNBC is
not saying that the missing RDX was already missing from al Qa Qaa when
their embedded reporters arrived in Baghdad with US troops. So MSNBC cannot
reasonably be used to support the contention the site had already been stripped
of RDX..

Army officials told NBC News on condition of anonymity that troops from the
Army�s 3rd Infantry did not arrive at Al-Qaqaa until April 4, finding "looters
everywhere" carrying what they could out on their backs. The troops searched
bunkers and found conventional weapons but no high explosives, the officials
said. Six days later, the 101st Airborne Division arrived. Neither group was
specifically searching for HMX or RDX, and the complex is so large � with more
than 1,000 buildings � that it is not clear that the troops even saw the
bunkers that might have held the explosives.

What the DOD is willing to say on the record is

this:

McClellan said the Defense Department ordered an inquiry of the missing
weapons, directing Multinational Force Iraq and the Iraq Survey Group to come
up with a comprehensive assessment about what happened to them.

The Iraqi government reported an estimated 350 tons of missing explosives
Oct. 10 to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. monitoring group
that last inventoried the facility in January 2003.

During that visit, the U.N. inspectors counted the munitions and equipment
and tagged them with IAEA seals that indicate they are "dual use," or have
conventional-weapons applications. These munitions were generally permitted to
remain in Iraq. In contrast, "single use" munitions with nuclear applications
were destroyed or rendered harmless. The IAEA returned to the site two months
later, in March 2003, and confirmed the equipment it had tagged was still
there.

However, coalition forces found no evidence of the weapons in question when
they first arrived at the sprawling Al-Quaqaa facility, 30 miles south of
Baghdad, about April 10, 2003, according to a defense official. The troops
searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings, finding some weapons and explosive
material, but nothing close to the quantity reported missing by the Iraqi
government, and none with IAEA seals, he said.

In an Oct. 10, 2004, letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency,
Mohammed J. Abbas, general director of the Iraqi Ministry of Science and
Technology's Planning and Following Up Directorate, reported that 195 tons of
high-melting explosive, 141 tons of rapid-detonating explosive, and 6 tons of
pentaerythrite tetranitrate, another type of explosive commonly known as PETN,
"registered under the IAEA custody were lost" after April 9, 2003.

Abbas blamed the loss on "the theft and looting of the governmental
installations due to lack of security."

However, the defense official said there's no verification that looting
ever occurred at the site. Citing lack of accountability over the materials
between the March IAEA visit and April 10, he said it's possible that regime
loyalists or other groups emptied the facility before coalition forces arrived
in Baghdad.

The DOD is asserting that it did not find the 350 odd tons of explosive
referred to in the IAEA report in its search of 32 bunkers and 87 buildings. Two
things stand out in this account. First, the search was probably not
comprehensive. If one accepts the estimate of 1,000 buildings on the site, then
a visit to 120 structures does not constitute an exhaustive survey. Second, the
missing material was a dual-use type of explosive whose possession had been
permitted to Saddam. The UN under its terms of inspection, could have destroyed
the RDX in the course of its inspection, but it judged that course of action to
be improper. It may have occurred to Baradei in January 2003 that the impending
war would necessarily break the chain of custody between the Saddam regime and
the arriving US forces. But it was his judgement that the RDX did not, under his
terms of reference, have to be destroyed, since it had potential civilian
applications.

None of this establishes when the material was spirited away. There are three
possibilities. First, the material disappeared before 3ID reached Baghdad;
second, it vanished between the arrival of 3ID and 101st Airborne; third, it
vanished afterward. Since an inquiry is under way, it is reasonable to say that
no one knows for sure. The New York Times strongly implied, however, that it
vanished afterward. In their article of October 25, the

Times said:

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American
military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as
recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the
explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge
that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion
last year.

The

New York Times later allowed that Pentagon officials said, or now said that
the explosives may have gone missing before US troops reached it, but then imply
this assertion is contradicted by the cursory inspection that followed.

White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful
explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while
Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not
find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day
after Baghdad fell. But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday
that his troops had not searched the facility and had merely stopped there for
the night on their way to Baghdad.

The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's
101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site,
known as Al Qaqaa, was considered highly sensitive, or that international
inspectors had visited there shortly before the war began in 2003 to inspect
explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.

But a moment's reflection will show this account is essentially the same as
MSNBC's. For the NYT assertion that the explosives vanished sometime after
US custody to be true, the RDX would necessarily have to be present when 3ID and
101st got there. But if, as MSNBC emphasizes, we don't know what there was 
-- didn't know they were not there -- then necessarily we don't know they were
there. A null value cannot be true or false as one prefers. It is null. Nor
should the menace of the material suddenly transform itself arbitrarily. The
IAEA did not think them particularly dangerous in the hands of Saddam, who is
after all, only going on trial for mass murder. Physically they are what they
have always been but semantically they have been transmogrified.

The jury is still formally out on when the material actually vanished. IEDs
and bombs are the most common cause of death or injury to American soldiers in
Iraq. It is theoretically possible for soldiers and marines not to care about
explosives reaching the hands of the enemy. But is not very probable.Considering
the bulk of the explosive, its value and the natural human tendency to steal
things before, rather than after you lose easy access to it (remember the
currently sainted "resistants" were once the equally sainted Ba'athist high
officials who had the keys to the explosives dump) it seems overwhelmingly
probable the material was taken before, rather than after US custody.