WASHINGTON — A U.S. Army officer came forward Friday to say a team from the 3rd Infantry Division took about 250 tons of munitions and other material from the Al-Qaqaa arms-storage facility soon after Saddam Hussein’s regime fell in April 2003.

Maj. Austin Pearson said at a Pentagon news conference that he was tasked in the days after the fall of the Iraqi regime with a mission to secure and destroy ammunition and explosives. He led a 25-man team called Task Force Bullet.

His comments were the latest twist into the mystery of what happened to 377 tons of explosives that the International Atomic Energy Agency reported missing from Al-Qaqaa. The IAEA reported the matter to the United Nations on Monday and said it feared that looters may have stolen the explosives.

The issue also has dominated much of the presidential campaign in its final full week. Pearson’s team arrived at Al-Qaqaa on April 13, 2003, 10 days after U.S. forces first reached the site and four days after Saddam went into hiding. This was the same time that the 101st Airborne Division had secured Al-Qaqaa and the surrounding area.

According to Pearson, the team removed 250 tons of material including TNT, plastic explosives, detonation cords and munitions. He arrived at that estimate because he said the team used nine truck-trailer combinations that each could carry 33 tons of material.

While Pearson could not characterize the tonnage of plastic explosives his team removed and he could not remember seeing any IAEA tags on the bunkers, he said plastic explosives taken from the site were used to detonate thousands of tons of other munitions collected further north in Baghdad.

Pearson also described the area around Al-Qaqaa, which the Army called “Objective Elms.”

“At the time when I was in Objective Elms, that area was very pacified where there wasn’t a lot of civilians in the area at that time. If they were, they were very respectful to U.S. forces. They were very respectful to us. I didn’t see any hostilities at that location at that time,” he told reporters.

The whole story is here.

We now know that this 380 tons of explosives was not looted under the watch of the US military, as Kerry and Edwards have claimed. The sick thing is that Kerry and Edwards were so desperate to seize upon any story they could use to bolster their dying campaign that they didn’t even wait until all the facts were known. And as the facts came out, and their claims started to unravel, they refused to stop. They now are left with egg all over their faces, and a campaign that is in even worse shape than it was before.

We also know that Mohammed El Baradei leaked this phony story to the media in an attempt to lose Bush the election, because Bush opposes him for a third term as head of the IAEA. The New York Times, more eager to hurt the Bush Administration than to properly research and confirm the story, bought it hook, line and sinker. Make no mistake, this is a scandal, and the guilty parties must pay the price.

Rate this post:

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...