I’m eager to hear how Bush plans to rationalize this one. How the hell do you lose track of 300+ tons of explosives? I don’t own a gun, but I’d imagine that if I did, I’d be damn sure that I’d know where it was at any given moment. I can’t even imagine what 300+ tons of explosives would even look like.
Iraq Explosives Become Issue in Campaign: “The White House sought on Monday to explain the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that American forces were supposed to secure.”
4 responses so far ↓
1 Aaron // Oct 26, 2004 at 9:06 am
I hope you are seeing now the follow up stories that show that the explosives were gone when we got there.
2 Dan // Oct 26, 2004 at 1:02 pm
Aaron – that is misleading. The explosives were marked by the Int’l Atomic Energy Association as important, and we were supposed to secure them when we invaded. They were, indeed, “gone when we got there” but that is because we got there absurdly late because our troops were busying guard, you know, THE OIL.
Now our guys are betting blown up because of Bush’s incompetance. With friends like George W. Bush, who needs enemies?
3 Aaron // Oct 27, 2004 at 1:07 pm
Yet, what do you think about this story?
http://www.nysun.com/article/3826
Seems that we did want to get rid of the cache years ago. If we are playing the blame game, how far back do we go?
4 Jonty // Oct 29, 2004 at 3:20 am
Maybe the explosives are in North Korea? Seriously, my house burned down about 2 years ago. It was a three-family, 3.5 story house, full of furnishings. When the fire was done, NOTHING was left but ash. (So in addition to the actual building materials, the contents lost included all of the personal items in the building as well.) We had dumpters brough in to haul away the ash. Each dumpster was roughly large enough to fit 4 medium-sized sedans into. Each one of these things held about 12 tons of ash. (Bear in mind that ash compacts pretty solidly.) Assuming that there were 300 tons of explosives (the figure is actually larger than that), this means that approximately 25 dumpsters full of explosives were “lost”. (By the way, when my house burned, we only had 15 dumpsters removed. So if you want to paint a visual, when you factor in the weight of the house before the fire, the explosives were most likely the same size and volume as a 3.5 story building, about 75 feet deep by 35 feet wide.)
-Jonty