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A soldier with the 101st Airborne Division is seen examining the contents of a barrel in a bunker in the Al-Qaqaa facility in Iraq in video footage made by Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP-TV on April 18, 2003.
大統領選の決定打になるかもしれない。
占領後に消えた爆発物の証拠写真。
数日前のBBCのインタビューでトミー・フランクスは「我々が入った直後にはすでに無かった」と答えている。
msNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6323933/
Video suggests explosives at site after invasion
U.S. TV crew saw troops opening bunkers at Al-Qaqaa base
Oct. 29: Former U.S. administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer talks with "Today" show anchor Matt Lauer about the missing explosives.
Today show
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 7:29 a.m. ET Oct. 29, 2004WASHINGTON - Videotape shot by a Minnesota television crew traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq when they first opened the bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein shows what appeared to be high explosives still in barrels and bearing the markings of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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The video taken by KSTP of St. Paul on April 18, 2003, could reinforce suggestions that tons of explosives missing from a munitions installation in Iraq were looted after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The video was broadcast nationally Thursday on ABC.
“The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa,” David A. Kay, a former American official who directed the hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, told The New York Times. “The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn’t use seals on anything. So I’m absolutely sure that’s an IAEA seal.”
The question of what happened to the tons of explosives has become a major issue in the closing days of the presidential campaign.
Democrat John Kerry says the missing explosives — powerful enough to demolish a building, bring down a jetliner or set off a nuclear weapon — are another example of the Bush administration’s poor planning and incompetence in handling the war in Iraq. President Bush says the explosives were possibly removed by Saddam’s forces before the invasion.
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Oct. 29: Dean Staley, a reporter who was embedded with the 101st airborne in Iraq, talks with "Today" show anchor Ann Curry about video footage made by KSTP-TV during the war.
Today show
Ambassador Paul Bremer told NBC the "Today" show on Friday that the evidence was still far from conclusive about the explosives. "The most important thing to keep in mind here is that we don't know what the facts are," he said.
The former U.S. administrator of Iraq criticized Kerry for jumping to conclusions. He said that moving that amount of explosives from the Al-Qaqaa facility would have taken scores of trucks -- and that there were no reports of that kind of activity following the fall of Saddam.
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld entered the debate, suggesting the 377 tons of explosives were taken away before U.S. forces arrived, saying any large effort to loot the material afterward would have been detected.
“We would have seen anything like that,” he said in one of two radio interviews he gave at the Pentagon. “The idea it was suddenly looted and moved out, all of these tons of equipment, I think is at least debatable.”
Single image
The Pentagon also declassified and released a single image, taken by reconnaissance aircraft or satellite just days before the war, showing two trucks outside one of the dozens of storage bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa munitions base.
The particular bunker is not one known to have contained any of the missing explosives, and Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said the image only shows that there was some Iraqi activity at the base when it was taken, on March 17. Di Rita said the image says nothing about what happened to the explosives.
Rumsfeld, in one radio interview, also cast doubt on the suggestion of one of his subordinates that Russian forces assisted the Iraqis in removing them.
John Shaw, the deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense for international technology security, suggested to The Washington Times in an interview that the Russians may have been involved, prompting an angry denial from Moscow.
Rumsfeld said, “I have no information on that at all, and cannot validate that even slightly.”
But at issue is whether the weapons were moved before or after U.S. forces occupied that region of the country in early April. No one has been able to provide conclusive evidence either way, although Iraqi officials blamed it on poor U.S. security after Baghdad fell.
The Pentagon has said it’s looking into the matter, and officials note that 400,000 tons of recovered Iraqi munitions have either been destroyed or are slated to be destroyed.
U.N. warning
Meanwhile, the U.N. nuclear agency said Thursday that U.S. officials were warned about the vulnerability of explosives stored at Iraq’s Al-Qaqaa military installation after another facility — the country’s main nuclear complex — was looted 18 months ago.
IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said the IAEA cautioned American officials directly about what was kept at Al-Qaqaa, the main storage facility in Iraq for so-called high explosives.
Dept. of Defense via Reuters
The Pentagon on Thursday released this aerial photograph, taken two days before the Iraq war, on March 17, 2003, of two trucks at the site where 377 tons of high explosives went missing. The Pentagon said that the photo shows a large tractor-trailer loaded with white containers (yellow arrow) with a smaller truck (red arrow) parked behind it, but was unable to say that they had anything to do with the disappearance.
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Fleming said the IAEA — which had put storage bunkers at the site under seal two months before the war — alerted the United States about the Al-Qaqaa site after the Tuwaitha nuclear complex was looted. The IAEA said it informed U.S. officials separately of the Tuwaitha looting on April 10.
“After we heard reports of looting at the Tuwaitha site in April 2003, the agency’s chief Iraq inspector alerted American officials that we were concerned about the security of the high explosives stored at Al-Qaqaa,” she said.
“It is also important to note that this was the main high explosives storage facility in Iraq, and it was well-known through IAEA reports to the Security Council,” Fleming said.
What's happened to the explosives is a mystery. A video surfaced Thursday in which a group calling itself Al-Islam’s Army Brigades, Al-Karar Brigade, said it had coordinated with officers and soldiers of “the American intelligence” to obtain a “huge amount of the explosives that were in the Al-Qaqaa facility.”
The claim couldn’t be independently verified. The speaker was surrounded by masked, armed men standing in front of a black banner with the group’s name on it in the tape obtained by Associated Press Television News.
“We promise God and the Iraqi people that we will use it against the occupation forces and those who cooperate with them in the event of these forces threatening any Iraqi city,” the man added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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