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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
How team Bush has bungled the al-Qaqaa controversy -- with a new "60 Minutes" blockbuster coming on Sunday.
Oct 30, 2004 | President Bush has spent his final push toward Election Day on the defensive over allegations of his mismanagement of the war in Iraq, awkwardly trying to fend off charges that the U.S. military failed to protect huge stockpiles of explosives that have disappeared and are presumed to be in the hands of anti-American insurgents. Not even the reappearance of Osama bin Laden in a new videotape has spiked the story. The controversy erupted Monday morning when the New York Times reported that 380 tons of high explosives -- mainly HMX and RDX, which can be easily used by terrorists, even to detonate a nuclear device -- had disappeared from the Al-Qaqaa arms dump 30 miles south of Baghdad. The Times reported that the disappearance occurred after U.S. troops arrived on the site despite the fact that the U.S. government had been urged by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency to protect it. Administration officials told the Times they were looking into the disappearance.
The Kerry campaign immediately made the news its top issue. And instantly, battle over the facts was joined. The Bush White House questioned the validity of the report and insisted the explosives were likely removed from the dump while Saddam Hussein was still in power. Along with allies in the conservative media, the Bush campaign, perhaps emboldened by its win last month over CBS's "60 Minutes II" story about Bush's National Guard service -- which fell apart after questions were raised about the authenticity of the documents used as evidence -- and convinced they could make any press story they challenged go away, decided to wage an all-out war on the story and the newspapers and broadcast networks that advanced it. But this time, instead of getting the press to back down, conservative media helped keep the story alive for a week -- to the delight of the Kerry campaign -- and ultimately ended up on the wrong side of the facts.
Republicans first attempted to knock down the Times exclusive using a Monday night report by NBC's Jim Miklaszewski, who was embedded with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division during the war, and noted that that unit had visited the Al-Qaqaa weapons site on April 10, 2003, and found no explosives. That fit in nicely with the White House and Pentagon's early spin that the weapons were likely ferreted out before the war began. "Of course Saddam would remove his precious HMX from its last known location before U.S. cruise missiles could find it," commented the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
Writing in the Weekly Standard on Tuesday, its editor, William Kristol, wrote hopefully that the Times story about the missing explosives "may not even be true." A day later, Attorney General John Ashcroft's former press secretary Barbara Comstock went one step further, suggesting on CNN that military officials "don't know that anything was even there to start with." In other words, the explosives stockpile may have been a mirage.
But NBC anchor Tom Brokaw on Tuesday night clarified Miklaszewski's report: "We simply reported that the 101st did not find them. For its part, the Bush campaign immediately pointed to our report as conclusive proof that the weapons had been removed before the Americans arrived. That is possible, but that is not what we reported."
Two subsequent Times stories on Wednesday quickly set the administration back on its heels. The first featured an interview with Col. Joseph Anderson, the brigade commander whose unit of the 101st Airborne was at the weapons site in early April. He explained that his servicemen and -women were never ordered to search for weapons, which meant it was entirely possible the stash was still there. (The unit used Al-Qaqaa as an overnight stop on its way to Baghdad.) The Times noted Bush's aides had "moderated" their views, "saying it was a 'mystery' when the explosives disappeared and that Mr. Bush did not want to comment on the matter until the facts were known."
The second Times story on Wednesday featured four eyewitnesses recounting how local Iraqi looters had raided Al-Qaqaa, hauling things off in trucks, after U.S. troops had swept through the area. The report once again substantiated the Times' original story suggesting that the weapons disappeared on the U.S. Army's watch.
That same day, as CNN's conservative pundit Robert Novak labeled the controversy "phony," Bush broke his silence. Speaking at a campaign rally in Vienna, Ohio, he complained that Kerry "is making wild charges about missing explosives. Think about that. The senator is denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field."
The next morning, on NBC's "Today" show, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani stepped on Bush's line, blaming U.S. troops for not properly searching the weapons dump. "No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough -- didn't they search carefully enough?" said Giuliani.
That was the beginning of a bad message day for the Bush camp. But Bush communications director Nicolle Devenish gamely told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday the story was "an attack that's falling apart" and was playing to Bush's advantage by rallying his supporters. "We're really locked into a dogfight here," she said. But off the record, Bush aides conceded to the Associated Press that the ongoing story had "slowed their campaign."
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