Jack Kelly:
The ambush was supposed to have been sprung by CBS, on "60 Minutes" the Sunday before the election. There wouldn't have been time before Election Day for the truth to catch up.
But The New York Times ran with the story it concocted with CBS about explosives missing from the Al-Qaqaa munitions storage facility on Oct. 25, eight days before the election. The truth has overtaken it, and this "October Surprise" is blowing back on its intended beneficiary, John Kerry.
Nearly 380 tons of the high explosives RDX and HMX, once under seal from the International Atomic Energy Agency, were taken from Al-Qaqaa, the Times said.
"White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year," the Times said in its initial story.
That wasn't the truth, as the Times admitted the next day: "White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq."
By Day 3, the Times claimed only that "some of [the munitions] may have been removed" after U.S. troops left the area.
The Times went on to say that the commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, which occupied Al-Qaqaa on April 10, did not search the facility.
But as the seven reporters the Times had working on the story ought to have known -- since it was widely reported at the time -- the 3rd Infantry Division had occupied Al-Qaqaa on April 4, and its engineer brigade had conducted a thorough search.
"U.S. troops found thousands of boxes of white powder, nerve agent antidote and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare," said a contemporaneous account from (ironically) a CBS reporter embedded with the 3rd ID.
The 3rd ID troops found no bunkers sealed with the IAEA seal, indicating they had been removed earlier.
"The commander on the site had complete real time intelligence on what to expect and possibly find at the Al-Qaqaa depot," an officer who was there e-mailed National Review Online's Jim Geraghty. "The ordnance in question was not found when teams were sent in to inspect the area. When this information was relayed, operational plans were adjusted and the unit moved forward. Had the ordnance in question been discovered, a security team would have been left in place."
...
The 380 tons are relatively small potatoes, considering the size of Saddam's arsenal. There were an estimated million tons of weapons and explosives in 8,700 weapons depots, several as large as 10 miles by 10 miles square, according to the Iraq Survey Group.
Of this, the United States has destroyed some 280,000 tons, and has prepared 160,000 tons more for demolition. The 380 tons missing from Al-Qaqaa amount to less four-hundredths of 1 percent (.004) of the total estimated weapons and munitions in Iraq, less than two-tenths of a percent of what already has been destroyed.
A good news organization would have put the 380 tons in perspective, but we're talking about The New York Times.
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