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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
A top nuclear-proliferation expert says that the Bush administration's failure to safeguard almost 380 tons of high-tech explosives "borders on criminal negligence."
Oct 26, 2004 | It could prove to be the "October surprise" that nobody anticipated. While election watchers have speculated that the Bush campaign could announce the capture of Osama bin Laden or terrorist ringleader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the final week of the presidential race instead opened with a bombshell report that a huge cache of sophisticated explosives in Iraq had vanished and likely fallen into the hands of insurgents or terrorists.
Late Sunday, the New York Times reported that nearly 760,000 pounds of the explosive compounds HMX and RDX had disappeared from Saddam Hussein's al-Qaqaa weapons depot -- even though the United States had known that the site contained vast amounts of the high-tech explosives. American officials could not explain why they failed to guard the depot.
Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the destructive consequences of the administration's failure to secure the site could be almost incalculable. "This is thousands and thousands of potential terrorist attacks," Cirincione told Salon. "It's like they knocked off the Fort Knox of explosives."
Cirincione says that the Bush administration's desire to "punish" the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, was partly responsible for the disaster. "This is where the ideology of the administration has really hurt U.S. national security," he says. "The administration didn't like the inspection reports they were getting out of the IAEA before the war, and they were determined to punish and humiliate them."
Monday, the Bush administration downplayed the threat posed by the missing explosives and tried to shift the responsibility for safeguarding them to the Iraqi military. White House spokesman Scott McClellan pointed to the "more than 243,000 [tons of] munitions" already destroyed by U.S. forces. "The sites now are really ... the responsibility of the Iraqi forces," he added.
On Monday, the Kerry campaign called the explosives debacle "one of the great blunders of [the Bush] administration" and another demonstration of the White House's "stunning incompetence and their incomprehensible failure to plan" for the postwar phase. Cirincione says that the report of the missing explosives in Iraq, where violence escalated again over the weekend, could have a major impact at the voting booth next week, especially if it turned out that the materials are behind many of the attacks carried out on U.S. troops. Cirincione spoke to Salon by phone Monday from his office in Washington. Thus far the Bush administration hasn't offered much of an explanation for how this could have happened. How and why do you think the U.S. failed to secure these explosives? That this happened is simply inexcusable. The administration knew the material was there. The IAEA warned them before the war. In their public statements to the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 29, 2003, the IAEA noted that there were over 200 tons of HMX stored in Iraq. They continued to warn the administration privately after the war began, about the need to secure it. The administration knew it was there. Why didn't they do anything about it? It was arrogance. I think you have to say that this is not incompetence as much as it is arrogance. They simply did not believe that they were going to have an insurgent or terrorist problem after taking the country. Even when the insurgency began, apparently there was no effort to try to go back and secure these materials. We don't know yet if HMX and RDX are behind the roadside bombs that are going off almost daily in Iraq. We've been told that they were artillery shells or other munitions, which is certainly possible. But now that we know that nearly 380 tons of this material was stolen, it seems that this is the most likely use for it by insurgents. It's lightweight, it's highly insensitive, so it can be kicked around without it detonating, it can be pressed into a variety of shapes -- it's ideal for the kinds of terrorist attacks U.S. troops and Iraqis have been experiencing.
