An unnamed senior Bush administration official told the Times on Sunday that U.S. forces passed through the site during the initial race to Baghdad, and "went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the IAEA seal." Apparently they left it behind and did not return. What do you make of that decision?

If in fact we learn that the bomb attacks that are killing U.S. troops almost daily are being carried out with this material, it borders on criminal negligence that the administration did not secure this material when they had the chance.

The administration knew about this material and was explicitly warned about its dangers. They did not dispose of or guard it, and I think we are likely to discover that as a result, American troops are now dying.

This now turns everyone to the question of, What kind of material was being used in all these bomb attacks, including the really powerful ones like attack on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad last fall? I'm not aware of any public mention of HMX or RDX in previous stories about the bomb attacks in Iraq, but I'm sure that as of today a lot of people are going to be asking what was being used.

A key question here is, Have U.S. officials known all along that these were the explosives that they were dealing with? People need to go back to Bush officials and start asking some hard questions about what kinds of explosives have been used.

And how does this all play into the threat of nuclear proliferation, and the specter of nuclear weapons getting into the hands of terrorists?

Making a nuclear weapon is complicated and you need a long list of ingredients. This stuff is one of them. If you have it, it makes your shopping list shorter. It's not the most essential ingredient -- obviously that's the plutonium or highly enriched uranium -- but after that, this material certainly makes the list of the top five ingredients that you need to make a nuclear weapon. It's used for detonation, to compress the material -- and because it's insensitive, it's especially useful: If you accidentally drop the bomb, it won't go off, which is a nice feature to have.

What do you make of the Bush administration's response to this news? And where is former Coalition authority Paul Bremer on it? Why aren't we hearing anything from him? Clearly he knew about this problem well before the transition of power -- the Times reported that numerous Iraqi officials warned him about potential looting of the Al Qaqaa site last May.

All the CPA and Bush officials are ducking and hiding on this and changing the subject. The administration has proved remarkably adept at shirking responsibility for anything that's gone wrong with the war and framing everything as a question of resolve and strength, rather than blame or accountability. The Bush administration hasn't admitted to being mistaken about anything. Why should they start now?

Why did Bush keep the IAEA out after they knew that this site could be a big problem?

This is where the ideology of the administration has really hurt U.S. national security. They wanted to make a point that they didn't need international inspections or the help of international authorities, that the U.S. could do it alone or in cooperation with its few selected Coalition partners who would play along. They rebuffed repeated IAEA requests to come in and help account for and secure the nuclear materials. Now we're suffering the price.

There was no security or logistical reason why the administration couldn't have let the IAEA back in -- it was ideology. 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.

As it turns out, the IAEA was absolutely correct in its reports on Iraq before the war. The U.N. intelligence was far better than the U.S. intelligence. They got it right. We should've listened.

In terms of conventional weapons use, much of the focus right now is on how the looted materials from Al Qaqaa can be used against U.S. and Iraqi forces. But what about beyond that, in the hands of terrorists?

This material is ideally suited for a wide range of terrorist attacks. For example, it's very hard to detect through the standard airport security measures. It's non-metallic and fairly odorless. This is one of the reasons it was used in the Pan Am plane bombing.

I mean, you worry about the availability of this material in order: First, against U.S. and Iraqi government forces. Second, pounds or maybe even tons of it could be smuggled out of the country to attack U.S. bases and installations in the Middle East region. And third, it can be used in attacks against airplanes, office buildings and shopping malls.

And what is the scope of the problem in terms of the quantity of material that's missing?

Look, a couple of pounds of this stuff can cause a very large explosion. A small amount of this material brought aboard an airplane in the cargo hold, or in a carry-on bag, could blow a plane out of the sky. And we're talking about almost 380 tons of it. This is thousands and thousands of potential terrorist attacks. It's like they knocked off the Fort Knox of explosives. And they didn't have to work very hard to do it.

The administration failed to keep this problem quiet ahead of the election, but what else do you think we should be worried about that we don't yet know of?

Well, there could be all kinds of things! For example, there are still unanswered questions about the nuclear material from Tuwaitha [one of Saddam's main sites for developing nuclear equipment and materials]. We don't know where that went, either.

Is there reason to believe that there are a lot more problems like this that the administration isn't talking about?

Well, like Rumsfeld says, "We don't know what we don't know." But they've been peppered with questions about the nuclear sites, and they've just dodged them all along. We don't know what happened to a lot of the material from those places, some of which could certainly be usable in so-called dirty bombs. They are highly radioactive materials that could be used mixed in with conventional explosives -- such as RDX or HMX -- and dispersed over a wide area.

Do you think the news of this missing stockpile of explosives will have an impact on the last week of the presidential campaign?

It most certainly could, especially if it becomes clear that many of the explosions that have been killing U.S. troops have been caused by this material. That could really hurt President Bush's reelection chances, because it would be such a clear and dramatic example of how the mismanagement of the war has made the situation much worse than it might otherwise have been.

It's one thing if insurgents have been making bombs from artillery shells or munitions that they could've gotten from a hundred other sites. But it's something altogether different for them to have gotten possession of some of the most sophisticated explosives material ever made -- and in vast quantities. And to do so after U.S. forces had been warned about this and apparently had gone to the site and seen the material and still done nothing about it.

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