NBC News: Explosives Were Gone When U.S. Troops Arrived

NBC News: Explosives Were Gone When U.S. Troops Arrived

Susan Jones, CNSNews.com
Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004

NBC News reported Monday night that 380 tons of missing explosives were already gone when U.S. troops arrived at the Al-Qaqaa weapons installation in April 2003 – one day after Saddam's government was toppled.

NBC should know. It had a reporter embedded with the U.S. troops when they arrived at Al-Qaqaa in April 2003.

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While the Kerry campaign blasted the Bush administration for "stunning incompetence" on Monday, many Bush supporters questioned the timing of the New York Times' report Monday about the missing explosives, just eight days before the presidential election.

NBC News correspondent Jim Miklaszewski suggested a political motive as well: In his report on the missing explosives Monday night, he quoted one official as saying, "Recent disagreements between the administration and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes this announcement appear highly political."

According to the Times, the IAEA said it had warned the Bush administration about the need to secure the Al-Qaqaa facility before and after the war.

Times' Bias Caught Again

In a follow-up report on Tuesday, the Times did not mention the fact that NBC had an embedded reporter on the scene when the missing explosives were discovered - the day after Baghdad fell.

Tuesday's report in the Times, headlined "Iraq Explosives Become Issue in Campaign," covers how the Bush administration "sought to explain the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq that American forces were supposed to secure."

Bush's aides, Tuesday's article said, "tried to explain why American forces had ignored warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency about the vulnerability of the huge stockpile of high explosives, whose disappearance was first reported on Monday by CBS and The New York Times."

The Times' report portrayed the Bush administration as being on the defensive, trying to "minimize the importance of the loss" of the military explosives.

The report noted that President Bush "never mentioned the disappearance of the high explosives during a long campaign speech in Greeley, Colo., about battling terrorism."

"There are certainly some questions about when the explosives were missing," Kerry campaign adviser Howard Wolfson admitted on "Fox & Friends" early Tuesday. But Kerry's campaign is not expected to let the matter drop.

In a press release late Monday night, the campaign accused Bush's campaign of trying to cover up its "failure" to secure the explosives.

"Instead of distorting John Kerry's words, the Bush campaign is now falsely and deliberately twisting the reports of journalists. It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous," Kerry-Edwards senior adviser Joe Lockhart said.

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