One of the first US military units to reach the al-Qaqaa military installation south of Baghdad after the invasion of Iraq did not have orders to search for the nearly 400 tons of explosives that are missing from the site, the unit spokesman said Tuesday.
When troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at the al-Qaqaa base a day or so after other coalition troops seized Baghdad on April 9 last year there were already looters throughout the facility, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the unit, said.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
The soldiers "secured the area they were in and looked in a limited amount of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present in their area," Wellman wrote in an e-mail message. "Bombs were found but not chemical weapons in that immediate area.
"Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE type munitions, as they [high-explosive weapons] were everywhere in Iraq," he wrote.
The 101st Airborne was apparently at least the second military unit to arrive at al-Qaqaa after the US-led invasion began. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The Washington Post that the 3rd Infantry Division reached the site around April 3, fought with Iraq forces and occupied the site. They left after two days, headed to Baghdad, he told the newspaper for yesterday's editions.
Associated Press Correspondent Chris Tomlinson, who was embedded with the 3rd Infantry but didn't go to al-Qaqaa, described the search of Iraqi military facilities south of Baghdad as brief, cursory missions to seek out hostile troops, not to inventory or secure weapons stockpiles. One task force, he said, searched four Iraqi military bases in a single day, meeting no resistance and finding only abandoned buildings, some containing weapons and ammunition.
The enormous size of the bases, the rapid pace of the advance on Baghdad and the limited number of troops involved, made it impossible for US commanders to allocate any soldiers to guard any of the facilities after making a check, Tomlinson said.
Pentagon officials could not be reached for comment yesterday. A spokesman for the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia, said the unit was checking on whether any of its troops was at al-Qaqaa.
The disappearance of the explosives was first reported in Monday's New York Times and has subsequently become a heated issue in the US presidential campaign, with Vice President Dick Cheney questioning on Tuesday whether the explosives were still at the facility when US troops arrived. The Kerry campaign called the disappearance the latest in a "tragic series of blunders" by the Bush administration.
Two weeks ago, Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology told the International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives had vanished from the former military installation as a result of "theft and looting ... due to lack of security." The ministry's letter said the explosives were stolen sometime after coalition forces took control of Baghdad on April 9 last year.
The disappearance, which the UN nuclear agency reported to the Security Council on Monday, has raised questions about why the US didn't do more to secure the facility and failed to allow full international inspections to resume after the invasion in March of last year.
On Tuesday, Russia, citing the disappearance, called on the UN Security Council to discuss the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq. But the US said American inspectors were investigating the loss and that there was no need for UN experts to return.
The al-Qaqaa explosives included HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in repeated bomb attacks on US-led multinational forces and Iraqi police and national guardsmen. But HMX is also a "dual use" substance powerful enough to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb and set off a nuclear chain reaction.
The 3rd Infantry left al-Qaqaa and moved on to become the first US unit into Baghdad. The day after Baghdad fell, the 101st Airborne arrived at al-Qaqaa and remained there for 24 hours, later joining the 3rd Infantry in the capital.
"We still had Iraqi troops in Baghdad we were trying to combat," said Wellman. "Our mission was securing Baghdad at that point."
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS