Do you FEEL safer?

[TheSnake]

I can live far enough from those silos. Or maybe I'll just move to the Northwest Territory....good ol' Northwest Territory.

[Happy Monkey]

Another embedded reporter weighs in on the Al Qaqaa explosives:

During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS news crew bunker after bunker of material labelled "explosives." Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get into the bunkers and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.
...
Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.
...
On Wednesday, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS e-mailed still images of the footage taken at the site to experts in Washington to see if the items captured on tape are the same kind of high explosives that went missing in Al Qaqaa. Those experts could not make that determination.
The footage is now in the hands of security experts to see if it is indeed the explosives in question.

[russotto]

Explosive category 1.1D:

Secondary detonating explosive substance or black powder or article containing a secondary detonating explosive substance, in each case without means of initiation and without a propelling charge, or article containing a primary explosive substance and containing two or more effective protective features.

----
Detcord is in this category... but so are RDX and TNT.

[Undertoad]

Snap of a bolt cutter sounds like the IAEA seals. I saw video of the seals and they are basically the kind of cable that secures laptops, with what looked like secure thingy that changes color if the cable is messed with. That wasn't very impressive as a secure seal and at first I was going to write a message that said so.

It's like they put a chain on the front door and said, OK, that stuff is "secure". Just ignore the ventilation shaft, we don't secure those. The fact that this stuff is prohibited to Hussein in the first place and located in a hidden bunker is not really relevant to our job.

But all that says is that the statement "once the doors were opened they weren't secured" is meaningless. If they could get in with a bolt cutter, they weren't secured BEFORE the US got there. Except by the rule of Hussein, which left a vacuum after he was disposed that was not filled by enough authority.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

But all that says is that the statement "once the doors were opened they weren't secured" is meaningless. If they could get in with a bolt cutter, they weren't secured BEFORE the US got there.

That's not the point.

Except by the rule of Hussein, which left a vacuum after he was disposed that was not filled by enough authority.

That's the point.

The basic problem is: We knew where the stuff was. We had troops in the area, some of whom appear to have happened across it. They seem to have happened across it by accident, as they certainly don't seem to have had orders concerning it. As easy as it would have been to loot it, this ABC footage seems to say that it hadn't been looted at the time. So it could have been locked down, but it wasn't.

"once the doors were opened they weren't secured"

A bigger problem is: "Once the doors were opened, and the contents were revealed, they weren't secured."

[Undertoad]

Not THE point, I agree, but certainly A point. History doesn't begin with, and will go on after Nov. 2. If Mr. Kerry wins the election he will inherit a world where "secured by the UN" means they found prohibited explosives in an underground bunker and secured it with one of those bike locks that can be foiled by a Bic pen barrel, combined with a deep faith in a fascist regime to manage them.

Reminds one of the Team America scene where Blix confronts Kim Jong-Il and demands to inspect his weapons:

"Or else."
"Or else what?"
"Or else... we'll be very angry with you. And we will write you a letter to tell you just how angry we are."

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

If Mr. Kerry wins the election he will inherit a world where "secured by the UN" means they found prohibited explosives in an underground bunker and secured it with one of those bike locks that can be foiled by a Bic pen barrel, combined with a deep faith in a fascist regime to manage them.

And yet it worked. The locks were there to detect tampering, not to present an impregnable barrier. Tamper detection is only a good strategy under an inspection regime. Once inspectors are pulled, and government is abolished, the bunkers must be immediately captured and guarded by people. No lock will keep people out if there aren't also human guards to detect lockpickers.

[Undertoad]

If Hussein had prohibited munitions, sanctions/inspections did not work.

[Happy Monkey]

That's only true if 1) they were created/purchased after the sanctions began, and 2) the explosives were actually prohibited, rather than restricted to emergency defense use. I don't know whether either of those are true.

The fact is, there were locked down munitions from before '91 all over Iraq, including nuclear materials. Nobody - including Bush - ever felt the need to actually remove the locked down materials from the country. The locks were successfully preventing access as long as Hussein knew inspectors would be back, and the latest evidence suggests they remained locked down until well after we could have taken custody.

[Undertoad]

Argh! Read this story and you will change your mind!

http://www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=204304&page=1

The IAEA documents could mean that 138 tons of explosives were removed from the facility long before the United States launched "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in March 2003. ...

Although these bunkers were still under IAEA seal, the inspectors said the seals may be potentially ineffective because they had ventilation slats on the sides. These slats could be easily removed to remove the materials inside the bunkers without breaking the seals, the inspectors noted.

[Happy Monkey]

The paragraph before your bolded quote:

The IAEA documents from January 2003 found no discrepancy in the amount of the more dangerous HMX explosives thought to be stored at Al-Qaqaa, but they do raise another disturbing possibility.

So the inspectors saw the potential weakness, made note of it, checked the amounts, and found no discrepancy.

As for the missing RDX, I'll definitely keep an eye out for how that one pans out. The story's a bit skimpy - were there seals on the RDX? Were there vents? Was the RDX supposed to be controlled, or just the HMX? Was there any followup on the discrepancy?

[Undertoad]

According to this story

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...0037982.htm?1c

Lessee if I can re-write this story properly. Fuckin' AP writers...

-- In July 2002, the Iraqis told the IAEA they had 141 tons of RDX at Al-Qaqaa.

-- In January 2003, the IAEA visited al-Qaqaa and found only 3 tons.

-- The Iraqis told the IAEA they had used 10 tons of it for legitimate purposes, and moved the rest to al-Mahaweel.

-- So, the IAEA went to al-Mahaweel. They found the RDX. They weighed a few boxes and extrapolated that if the other boxes weighed similarly, there were about 125 tons there. Then they left it without sealing it. They intended to come back later and look at the boxes and extrapolate again, but it was not at the top of their list because the Iraqis had legitimate uses, such as mining and wiring bridges and oil fields for detonation.

They were not really concerned about the RDX, which was not controlled, but more about the HMX. Both RDX and HMX are components of plastic explosives. HMX however is also a nuclear bomb accelerant. So they were more concerned with the HMX.

Of the HMX there were not 377 tons, but 214 tons? The 377 number, then, is bogus, because it includes the RDX, which was apparently moved???

The HMX was "sealed" in January 2003 by IAEA, using Kryptonite bike locks. In March 2003 they visited the locks and found they were not opened with any Bic pen barrels, so they didn't check the actual stock.

Lastly, none of this really makes any sense compared to the other news items that have come across. Can anyone make any sense of it at all?

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Can anyone make any sense of it at all?

Yes. I can. Here goes:
The people in charge are no smarter than I am. I could do just as good a job as these bozos. But I don't feel like I'm qualified to run things.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by glatt

Yes. I can. Here goes:
The people in charge are no smarter than I am. I could do just as good a job as these bozos. But I don't feel like I'm qualified to run things.

That is evidence of sanity right there.

But things won't get much better with attitudes like this, where intelligent people are considered too elitist, and people want a president "just like them". There should at least be a desire to elect someone smarter than oneself, even if there's disagreement on whether a particular person is.

Or, to rephrase in a more important way, there should be the desire to elect someone smarter than other national leaders.

Back to a serious response (WHICH thread is this? Oh yeah, "do you feel safer?"). I feel that America is LESS safe from terrorist attack, given George Jr.'s bungling and fiasco's like the one discussed above. I bet Bin Laden is sitting on silk pillows in a palace in Saudi Arabia somewhere, plotting his next move and chuckling the whole time. He blows up the WTC and the first thing the US does is spirit out of the country all the members of his family who might have given away important imformation that could have led to his capture. Then the US goes and stirs things up briefly in Afganistan, recruiting more members to Bin Laden's cause. After that we have the debacle of Iraq which makes EVERYONE else in the world, not just the Arabs, feel pretty upset with America. In the middle of all this George Jr. is videotaped saying that Bin Laden is not really a concern to him, and he (Bush) hasn't heard anything from him lately. Tisk, tisk, Osami, your letter writing skills need polishing.

His terrorist skills still get an A+, however. Bin Laden has managed to get the US to throw away billions of dollars and over a thousand American lives (we won't even talk about Iraqi civilian lives, because they don't count) on a pointless exercise in the Middle East. The very freedoms this country stands for have been eroded by the patriot act, and the average American citizen is running like a cowed dog back to the master who beats him in the form of the voters who want to give Junior a second round of screwing things up royally. I cannot imagine the gratification Bin Laden must feel to see the results of his efforts, and he is as free as a bird to follow up his first performance with some resounding encore act. I think the US is in even more danger than it was before 9/11.