On Thursday a videotape taken on April 18, 2003, nine days after the fall of Baghdad, by an ABC television affiliate in Minneapolis, KSTP, embedded with U.S. troops, clearly showed U.S. troops at the weapons dump uncovering an entire storage bunker full of high-powered explosives that soon went missing. The video even showed soldiers breaking International Atomic Energy Agency seals on warehouse doors, seals put in place months earlier and used only to secure munitions depots.

Yet, during an interview on WPHT radio in Philadelphia, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld downplayed the weapons dump story, saying, "The idea that it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, is, I think, at least debatable."

That same day the Pentagon released satellite images that it suggested showed significant truck activity at one of Al-Qaqaa's 56 bunkers on March 17, 2003. Supposedly, the weapons were whisked away by Saddam (or the Russians, according to the conservative Washington Times) before the war. But an examination by GlobalSecurity.org uncovered that the images were not what they appeared to be: "A comparison of features in the DoD-released imagery with available commercial satellite imagery, combined with the use of an IAEA map showing the location of bunkers used to store the HMX explosives, reveals that the trucks pictured on the DoD image are not at any of the nine bunkers identified by the IAEA as containing the missing explosive stockpiles." In the end, on-the-ground, up-close video shot by KSTP showing U.S. troops unsealing a locked warehouse full of explosives in April 2003 trumped the Pentagon's wrong photographic interpretation.

All day Thursday, Fox News went to extraordinary lengths to avoid reporting the definitive KSTP video. Fred Thompson, the former Republican senator from Tennessee, went on Fox's "O'Reilly Factor" to discuss how "the [explosives] stories have been pretty much discredited" and how it was clear that "in all probability [the explosives] were not there" when the war began. He dismissively called the issue a "stupid thing." To Thompson, Bill O'Reilly and his viewers, the story was another mainstream media hoax, a "hit piece," that had been debunked by fair and balanced conservatives.

During Thursday night's "Fox Special Report With Brit Hume," reporter Carl Cameron, traveling with the Kerry campaign, continued along this line, telling viewers, "The Iraqi explosives may have disappeared before the invasion, undercutting Kerry's attack on the president." Fox's panel of pundits liked what they heard from Cameron and based their subsequent conversation on his incorrect assertion. (Earlier in the week, Fox's Tony Snow announced hopefully that the missing explosives story "looks pretty bogus" and is "an embarrassment to the New York Times.")

But one hour before O'Reilly's program, ABC News, quoting weapons inspectors, reported that the KSTP video represented "the strongest evidence to date that conventional explosives missing from Iraq's al-Qaqaa installation disappeared after the United States had taken control of Iraq."

Right after Thompson's appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor," David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, handpicked by the Bush administration to search for WMD in Iraq, appeared on CNN and confirmed ABC's report: that the KSTP tape represented "game, set, match" in the debate about the story's timeline. Kay said, "And to put this in context, Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country."

But on Friday the Pentagon, in yet another attempt to explain the story, sent out an Army major for a press conference. He said his unit had removed 250 tons of equipment, ammunition and explosives from somewhere in the Al-Qaqaa facility in early April 2003, and before the Minneapolis TV crew showed up. But so many questions surrounded his story -- questions even the Pentagon cannot answer -- that it was impossible to determine how his sketchy information plays into the ongoing story. However, the major's disclosure "did little to quell the controversy over the disappearance from the site of high explosives that had been sealed by UN inspectors," reported Saturday's Chicago Tribune.

Late on Friday afternoon, the only story threatening to dislodge Al-Qaqaa from the front page came when a new tape was released of Osama bin Laden, the man Bush once promised to capture "dead or alive." Bin Laden was obviously alive. And after the tape was shown, "NBC Nightly News" ran another story on the missing explosives, featuring the KSTP tape.

On Saturday, CBS News issued a press release about a "60 Minutes" story it will broadcast on Sunday night, perhaps triggering a new cycle of controversy less than 48 hours before Election Day: "In Harm's Way -- Even though roadside explosive devices account for half of all the war's U.S. casualties, soldiers are still getting killed and wounded by them because the Pentagon hasn't provided enough fully-armored vehicles to protect them." The Bush campaign and the conservative media will have precious little time for denials.

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