Deathgate is the story of the 18-1/2 month gap in the truth about what’s been killing our soldiers

Assembling the truth from an assortment of sources, any American who is serious about supporting our young men and women in Iraq has to be asking more questions right now. The weak, dismissive answers of political insiders so far simply don’t pass the smell test, and hundreds of our soldiers may be dying as a result of very grave errors made by war planners.

Josh Marshall:

One ’senior administration official’ tells CNN that “the discovery was not made public sooner because standard intelligence practice is not to let the enemy know such information.”

The folks I’m talking to don’t think that much of that excuse. But isn’t the point that ‘the enemy’ probably already knows because the enemy took the stuff?

More Josh Marshall:

The BBC notes that “HMX and RDX [are] key components in plastic explosives, which have been widely used in car bombings in Iraq.”

Back to the report in the first Josh link:

The senior administration official downplayed the importance of the missing explosives, describing them as dangerous material but “stuff you can buy anywhere.” The official added that the administration did not see this necessarily as a “proliferation risk.”

“In the grand scheme — and on a grand scale — there are hundreds of tons of weapons, munitions, artillery, explosives that are unaccounted for in Iraq,” the official said. “And like the Pentagon has said, there is really no way the U.S. military could safeguard all of these weapons depots or find all of these missing materials.”

Stuff you can buy anywhere? I noted previously that the largest bull elephants weigh 15,000 pounds, and the weight of these explosives would equal 50 such beasts. So, like, I can pick up this stuff from WalMart? JC Penney’s? Under the golden arches of McBoomBooms?

Yes, ‘on the grand scale’, there are ‘hundreds of tons’ of those things missing. But the official didn’t say ‘thousands of tons’. So that means no more than 999 tons of dangerous stuff disappeared, and 380 of those tons could have been secured by guarding just one site that the International Atomic Energy Agency specifically warned them about before the invasion started.

So did someone forget the IAEA warning? Did one of the planners forget to plan for this? Or did someone not send enough troops to do this critical job? I can’t think of any possibilities beyond these three.

Remember, the UN inspectors went in late in 2002 and had this stuff located and under seal within three months. The IAEA monitored it because it does represent a proliferation threat, despite the administration official’s denial of this fact.

And, in fact, as Julia reports, our troops actually did find the deadly bomb materials:

At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said U.S.-led coalition troops had searched Al Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives were intact. Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

From Juan Cole (emphasis mine):

Only two weeks ago, The International Atomic Energy Commission reported that not only had dual-use equipment been stripped from an old Iraq nuclear weapons facility, but even the buildings had been stripped and dismantled. Muhammad al-Baradei said that some of the nuclear material stolen from facilities in Iraq has already begun showing up in other countries. But the dual-use equipment, which has applications in nuclear weapons construction, has disappeared. (Hmm. I wonder which neighbor of Iraq might be desperately at work on a nuclear bomb and might be willing to pay top dollar for such equipment?) How bad a job Bush is doing is clear when we consider that we might well be relieved to know that this equipment went to Iran, since that means Bin Laden doesn’t have it.

So let me ask this again. Bush is making us safer? The American public trusts him to fight terror more effectively than Kerry? On what record? Bush appears to have all but just called up Usamah and Khamenei and told them where Saddam’s old stuff was in case they needed it for their programs. And he politely made sure that no pesky US troops would be around to impede their access.

Bush administration spokesmen are being careful to say that the hundreds of tons of explosives stolen from al-Qaqaa are not themselves useful as fissile material, i.e. they are not enriched uranium or plutonium.

But the fact is that one of the first such “missing deadly weapons” scandals to break in Iraq had to do with the disappearance of radioactive materials from Tuwaitha. This theft was known already in the summer of 2003, and worries were expressed that that material could be used to make a dirty bomb.

So Bush not only failed to have al-Qaqaa guarded against theft of HMX and RDX, not only failed to guard against theft of dual-use equipment from a long-defunct nuclear program site, but also failed to do the elementary work of ensuring that the notorious al-Tuwaitha facility was secured against the theft of radiocative materials!

Since Tuwaitha was the great bugaboo impelling the Iraq war in the first place, you would imagine that Bush would have sent out a unit to secure and search it immediately. But no, he politely let the looters have a look-around first, waiting in line.

Is it fair to blame all this on Bush? After all, the real war planners were the team running the show that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld assembled, or the Pentagon war room planners. These errors would have to be attributed to faulty decisionmaking at one or both of those locations, not the Oval Office.

So who’s been disciplined, demoted or reassigned for these grave errors that needlessly endangered our troops? Nobody? Then that is Bush’s fault.

Kerry spokesman Joe Lockhart, via Atrios:

“These explosives can be used to blow up airplanes, level buildings, attack our troops and detonate nuclear weapons. The Bush administration knew where this stockpile was, but took no action to secure the site. They were urgently and specifically informed that terrorists could be helping themselves to the most dangerous explosives bonanza in history, but nothing was done to prevent it from happening.”

Defense expert Phil Carter (emphasis mine):

Analysis: The “fire” metaphor is probably overused and trite by now, but I think it’s still the best one for explaining the significance of this report. Think of the Iraqi insurgency as a fire. A fire requires three things — combustible material, oxygen, and a spark — known as the triad. An insurgency also requires three things — men, warfighting materiel, and a spark, provided by ideology. (”Every idea is an incitement.” — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes) What this report makes clear is how easy it was to find warfighting materiel in Iraq after the end of major combat operations. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or explosives expert, to figure out that this stuff is now being used against us in the form of IEDs on the roads of Iraq.

I can’t put this point bluntly enough: our failure to provide effective security in the early days of the post-war aftermath allowed this materiel to be looted. The effect of that failure is that the insurgents were able to acquire significant amounts of high-quality explosives. They are now using that material against us. It would be hard to find a more clear case of how our failure to plan for the post-war aftermath set the conditions for the Iraqi insurgency, and allowed that insurgency to gain strength. Our other decisions, such as that to disband the Iraqi army and de-Baathify the Iraqi government, over the objections of men like then-MG David Petraeus and countless SF teams working with the Iraqis to secure the country, added another component of the insurgency triad. And of course, once you’ve got those two things, it only takes a spark, something readily provided by Shiite and Sunni insurgents seeking to eject us and retake the country in their own name.

What can be done now? Nothing — it’s far too late to stuff this cat back in the bag. We now need to recognize the extent of the threat we face in Iraq. The Pentagon revised its estimate last week of the insurgency’s strength — it now includes 12,000 individuals around the country, or roughly the strength of one U.S. light infantry division. As this report makes clear, the insurgency has access to a great deal of warfighting materiel, and it continues to use this stuff against us in ambushes and IED attacks. We need to gird ourselves for a long fight, and we need to prepare the Iraqis for a long fight, because this fight ain’t going to end for a long time, no matter what happens next week in the U.S. election.

Update I: The always informative trade journal Inside the Army (subscription required) reports this morning that one of the Army’s top procurement officials sees improvised explosive devices (”IEDs”) and car bombs as the most important threats facing U.S. forces in Iraq today.

“We focus a lot on IEDs, but probably the most significant problem, and the one that concerns me the most is car bombs. While we have an idea of what we need to do with IEDs, car bombs are much more difficult. Any vehicle on the highway or on the road can be a car bomb. And how do you tell one from the other?” Maj. Gen. John Doesburg, commander of Research, Development and Engineering Command said in an Oct. 21 interview with Inside the Army.

The RDX, HMX and PETN materials looted at Al Qa Qaa are instrumental for making high-explosive IEDs and car bombs, which are being used today with deadly effect against U.S. forces and Iraqi forces. Make no mistake about it — the material looted at Al Qa Qaa is now being used against our troops in Iraq. Our negligence with respect to securing the country is coming back to haunt us.

Remember what was said back then by the war planner in chief ?

Published 4/11/2003 5:53 PM

WASHINGTON, April 11 (UPI) — U.S. forces should not be blamed for the lawlessness and looting in Baghdad as it is a natural consequence of the transition from a dictatorship to a free country, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday at the Pentagon.

“The task we’ve got ahead of us now is an awkward one … It’s untidy. And freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here,” Rumsfeld said.

“And for suddenly the biggest problem in the world to be looting is really notable.”

Yes, even more notable now. The Defense Secretary also said:

Rumsfeld was unusually exercised about critical press coverage of the lawlessness that seems to be gripping Baghdad, saying coverage is repetitive and distorts what’s really going on.

“I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny ?- ‘The sky is falling.’ I’ve never seen anything like it!” Rumsfeld exclaimed. “The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times and you think, ‘My goodness, were there that many vases?’”

No. But there was three quarters of a million pounds of military grade explosives that somebody should have been watching. The public gets its news from television. Defense Secretaries are supposed to get their news from military commanders. Or were they assigned to watch the vases, too?

(Note: I have another Deathgate report breaking, to follow in a couple of minutes)