What we know so far

On Monday, the New York Times reported that 380 tons of exposives went missing from the al Qa Qaa weapons depot. Obviously this is an enormous story, and everybody jumped right on it. Senator Kerry made it part of his speeches on Monday and today. But those who have a vested interest in reelecting President Bush also jumped on it needing to find a way to defuse this story immediately.

NBC came to their rescue, suggesting that the explosives were gone long before the Army arrived on the scene. Their source was an inbedded reporter who visited the Al Qa Qaa site with his group on the way to Baghdad. They stopped at the site and didn't see any of the explosives, hence they must have dissappeared before the Army even had a chance to contain the site. Drudge picked up this version of the story, and it biovaced into what the Pentagon was already saying. And of course this version of the story was enough for Rush Limbaugh to declare the story over and the New York Times and John Kerry completely disgraced and discredited.

Kerry is the focus. The media is going to survive all this as they always do. They're going to be damaged by it, but they're going to survive it. But Kerry is the candidate and Kerry's actions yesterday are what need to be focused on, his continued actions today, because he is demonstrating his utter irresponsibility, his utter lack of "integrity, integrity, integrity," his utter lack of concern for the decency of our troops in Iraq, his utter lack of concern for our victory in the war on terror. No, all that matters to John Kerry, even if it's a false planted story, even if it is so untrue that it can be documented in less than ten hours, Kerry will nevertheless use it to advance himself.

Except of course this version of events makes little sense. For one thing was that army unit and NBC news crew really qualified to determine that these weapons weren't there? Saying we didn't see them is a long way away from saying they definately weren't there.

There is also the question of where we watching Al Qa Qaa? Josh Marshell explains this problem with the NBC theory (and is a valuable source in general on this issue).

As we noted earlier, there's a relatively brief window of time we're talking about when this stuff could have been carted away -- specifically, from March 8th (when the IAEA last checked it) until April 4th when the first US troops appear to have arrived on the scene.

Certainly there would have been time enough to move the stuff. That's almost a month. But this would be a massive and quite visible undertaking. As the Times noted yesterday, moving this material would have taken a fleet of about forty big trucks each moving about ten tons of explosives. And this was at a time -- the week before and then during the war -- when Iraq's skies were positively crawling with American aerial and satellite reconnaissance.

Considering that al Qaqaa was a major munitions installation where the US also suspected there might be WMD, it's difficult to believe that we wouldn't have noticed a convoy of forty huge trucks carting stuff away.

Of course another criticism and perhaps a more fair one is that this is old news. The materials probably dissappeared a long time ago, so is it really relevant today? Well, the same team that allowed those explosives to dissappear is still largely in charge.