117 Comments

1. Final Historian:

However this election goes, we can’t let the Mainstream Media get away unscathed. Their distortions and interference is unacceptable, and must be rooted out and exposed. The American people deserve better.

Oct 25, 2004 - 11:14 pm 2. Syl:

Um, didn’t the NYTimes say they did this story in conjunction with CBS? I smell Mary Mapes in here.

CBS (Mapes) also worked with the NYTimes to break Abu Ghraib.

Oct 25, 2004 - 11:39 pm 3. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Roger,

The MSM has become an evil empire, and I mean evil literally.

Any institution which consistently and deliberately lies (by commission and omission), while pretending to be the one source of truth, is wrong, very wrong, and needs to be fixed or destroyed.

This year’s media behavior may come as a shock to you, Roger, given your recent political shift, but we need to remember that the party most responsible for the Vietnam War continuing past 1968 is our MSM, who did the same thing then. This is not an idle speculation, but backed up by General Giap’s autobiography. The North was going to sue for peace until they saw how the Tet Offensive was misreported in the US (as a major US defeat). LBJ decided to resign when Walter Cronkite participated in this horrible lie.

So the media has very bloody hands from way back then. Those bastards effectively killed thousands of Americans and millions of SE Asians.

In 1992, the media covered up for Clinton the same way they are now covering up for Kerry, while running the few baseless charges that could be found against GHWB. They did it again in 1986. The issues were less stark in both campaigns, and Clinton less dangerous than Kerry.

Nothing has changed with the MSM except, with the internet, we can detect their lies. We can see what slimey characters they are, and how they try to exert control over world-critical issues. And they, of course, lie about their intent and their actions. I used to think media bias was simply a result of a narrow world view. It is not – it is intentional. They want Bush out, and they are purposely using their special position to that end.

I have had little respect for the national news media (or entertainment media, for that matter, with its political messages inserted into too many of its products) for many years. This is growing into a deep anger – these people are destroying democracy in order to get the results they desire.

Conservative magazines have commented off and on over many years that the leftist bias in the media costs them money, and it does. The journalists are willing to sacrifice money if they can gain political power, and it’s usually someone else’s money. People are abandoning the MSM and looking elsewhere. Unfortunattely only the MSM has the resources to do the research on some stories, although on others the blogosphere beats them hands down.

Still, a large percentage of Americans (most, probably) gets their news only from the MSM. That is the power of this evil empire. They can fool enough of the people to achieve their political or social goals.

Does anyone believe that Kerry would be anywhere close to his current numbers if the media hadn’t done his work for him? I have run into plenty of people who are Kerry supporters who believe the most outrageous things, all of which were in the MSM at one time (often debunked later, but how do these people discover that?). One example is the collection of incorrect charges about Bush and the national guard (AWOL, influence needed to get in, quit flying for selfish reasons, a non-dangerous way out of going to Vietnam). The media reported these charges but never had big stories showing them to be wrong. The reporting is horribly biased and unbalanced. Coverups are common.

How many people know that Kerry is a confessed war criminal? How many people know that he has the farthest left rating of all Senators? How many know that he worked with an enemy of our country, secretly meeting with them, assisting that enemy in putting out virulent anti-American propaganda, while our soldiers were being killed by that same enemy? How many people know he was a US Navy Reserve officer at the time? How many people know that Kerry has never achieved anything in the Senate (other than normalizing relations with the dictatorship of Vietnam, a move which landed his family a $900 million contract? How many know that he makes up facts a lot, and has been doing it for a long time? How many know that the Democrat party is the party of the super-rich? How many know the sinister influence of George Soros, or even that a billionaire is providing much of the 527 funding for Kerry?

Everything above is true. Some of it has been reported in the MSM in a milder form. Often the other stories are created to soften what negatives do get out. The Village Voice, for example, tried to justify Kerry’s 1971 atrocity charge against all Vietnam veterans. They found one example of each kind of atrocity cited. That was enough for them to declar that the charges were valid. Other media outlets are doing the same thing, once again sujecting us (Vietnam vets) to what Kerry did that got us so upset in the first place! It is outrageous!

These guys make Duranty look relatively innocent. After all, he only covered up a genocide. The MSM, in the Vietnam War, caused a genocide as a result of their lies. More precisely, their major contribution to the extension and ultimate loss of the Vietnam war (by misreporting Tet and sticking too those reports and opinions) led directly to the Cambodian genocide. Their behavior today is no less likely to cause more horrors – especially if Kerry gets in and they whitewash what he is doing.

Oct 26, 2004 - 12:08 am 4. someone:

Wait — this is the big pre-election surprise that’s going to deflate Bush like the DWI thing (almost) did in 2000?

Ha ha.

Oct 26, 2004 - 12:15 am 5. blogaddict:

I originally wrote this on LGF, but I think it’s also appropriate here:

When I read the original NY Times article I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The article made it clear that no one had a clue as to when the weapons went missing. All that was known was that the disappearance could not have occurred before early 2003 (quite a bit prior to the war’s beginning), because at that point the UN inspectors ascertained that the weapons were still there. And it was known that they didn’t vanish recently, because in May of 2003 (shortly after the invasion) they were found to have disappeared. So, the window of opportunity for their disappearance, even according to the NY Times itself, ranged from several months before the war to immediately after.

On the basis of this article, how is it that the NY Times has managed to convince so many Kerry supporters, Kerry himself, and every MSM newsperson, that this somehow implicates Bush (even before Drudge and the NBC correction)?

I wonder about the decline of reading comprehension in America today, particularly on the part of journalists. You’d think that they, of all people, could read a simple article.

I’m getting really tired of this crap. It seems to me that the media, although biased in the past, was never so profoundly blatant about it. And it seems the emperor’s lack of clothes has become just business-as-usual.

A friend of mine said an interesting thing. I was speculating as to whether the media has gotten more blatant and absurd this election cycle about its bias. He said it does appear worse, but that’s only because Kerry is such a terrible, lying candidate. He makes the media have to work extra hard to cover for him and his lies, and therefore their articles and bias can’t be as subtle as in the past. They are having to work way too hard to elect him, and it shows.

Oct 26, 2004 - 12:29 am 6. jukeboxgrad:

Our host quotes Wretchard saying “the account above shows that the RDX explosive was already gone by the time US forces arrived.” Really? Our forces didn’t arrive until 4/10/03? Only if you have a very loose definition of the word “arrived.”

This is from a press briefing dated 3/24/03: “our forces are operating through Iraq, on the ground and in the air … we are now more than 200 miles into Iraqi territory.” On 3/25, we were told “on the ground, our forces are nearing Baghdad.” On 4/4 we were told “the coalition has a substantial number of forces on the ground at Baghdad International Airport.”

So a week or two after our troops were in the vicinity, we finally took the time to “temporarily” take over this place? A huge weapons facility that the UN had repeatedly warned us about? After we had invaded the country specifically for the purpose of securing its weapons and keeping them out of unfriendly hands?

Let’s also remember what Tommy Franks told us on 3/22: “this will be a campaign unlike any other in history, a campaign characterized by shock, by surprise, by flexibility, by the employment of precise munitions on a scale never before seen, and by the application of overwhelming force.” He forgot to tell us we didn’t have enough troops to make sure that 40 truckloads of hi-tech explosives didn’t slip away under our noses.

Anyway, if the stuff disappeared before 4/10, and we discovered it was missing on 4/10, why is the White House acting like it just found out? Here’s McClennan: “It’s something that’s being looked into now … it’s something that the Pentagon, upon being informed about it, immediately directed the multinational forces and Iraq Survey Group to look into this matter, and that’s what they’re doing.”

You’re not the only one making a fuss about this NBC report. I don’t get it. Maybe someone can explain this to me. Drudge, NRO and others are making a big fuss about NBC News saying this: “4/10/03 … troops … temporarily take over … Al Qakaa… But these troops never found the … HMX and RDX.” The claim is being made that this utterly discredits the NYT report.

But the original NYT report had already said this: “A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces ‘went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal.’ It is unclear whether troops ever returned.”

Those two passages look reasonably identical to me. Someone please explain to me what Drudge et al are gloating about. If the stuff was gone by 4/10, it still indicates it was stolen from under our noses. We had forces operating through Iraq for more than two weeks, by then. Also, this is a huge facility with more than 80 buildings. Both of the above accounts suggest a quick look that could easily have missed things. Both accounts also indicate we looked, and then we left. Nice. Too bad we didn’t show up with enough troops to properly secure this major weapons site. Since that (disarming the enemy) was supposedly a major reason for the invasion in the first place.

Also, we’re hearing a lot of the “drop-in-the-bucket” defense. This is the idea that we’ve captured so much other stuff, what’s the big deal about this particular three-quarters-of-a-million pounds batch.

But this stuff is in a very different category than all the ammo hidden all over the country, for two very simple and powerful reasons. First, these explosives are highly dangerous, much more dangerous and valuable than regular ammo. That’s why they were being tracked by the IAEA. McCellan was promulgating misinformation when he said “these are conventional high explosives.” Nonsense.

Second, we knew exactly where it was (unlike other stuff in numerous secret locations). The IAEA repeatedly warned us about this stuff, both before and after the invasion. We just didn’t pay attention. Pure criminal negligence. Why did it get lost? Because we sent 50 tanks to surround the oil ministry.

More misinformation. Like our host here, NRO (Kerry Spot, Jim Geraghty) is suggesting the stuff disappeared not just before 4/10, but before the invasion began. He said “This IAEA report, conducted in January 2003, appears to be the last time any outsider could confirm the stuff was there.” Not so: “IAEA inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers, Fleming said. Inspectors visited the site again in March 2003, but didn’t view the explosives because the seals were not broken, she said.”

In other words, inspectors were there not just in January, but also as late as March. Geragty either doesn’t know this is or is trying to obscure this. He also is seemingly trying to obscure the fact the UN didn’t pull out of Iraq until just a day or two before we invaded. Until they left, inspectors could have revisited the facility at any time (which was a deterrent, I think, to anyone inclined to move this material). We also presumably had ongoing satellite surveillance. Hard to understand how we managed to not notice 40 large trucks leaving a major known weapons site.

Before the invasion, we knew where this stuff was. Then we told the UN to go to hell, and we took over. Now no one knows where it is. But it’s nice to know that we’re all safer as a result.

Something tells me I shouldn’t hold my breath waiting for corrections from Glen Reynolds and Jim Geraghty. Not to mention McClennan, Franks and Bush.

Oct 26, 2004 - 12:46 am 7. GunnyBob:

Up late, was watching the news, and thought an update would be interesting:

C-BS: UP TO THE MINUTE…

The overnight News presentation, CBS, Up To The Minute, began it’s 3:00 AM EST feature with Bill Bradley (taped) providing a special report on the Iraqi missing munitions story. Complete of course with reactions from a stomping, fuming, gesticulating, voice near to the point of screaming, John Kerry, haranguing the President for one of the worst blunders conceivable. “Giving the means of our destruction to the terrorists…” was one of the nicer things Senator Kerry had to say, and this special report lasted until 3:06 AM EST.

Following several commercial breaks, CBS returned to “covering” the campaign with several minutes more of Kerry screaming, and “experts” wringing their hands over the horror of permitting such a thing to happen, most assuredly leaving the average uninformed viewer with the strong belief that not only was the sky indeed beginning to fall, but that President Bush was responsible.

Nothing was mentioned of the NBC report that imbedded reporters have revealed the fact that the munitions in question were already gone by the time US troops pushed forward to this particular storage area.

Up To The Minute? Yes indeed, time as measured via the MSM Democratic timepieces.

Oct 26, 2004 - 1:11 am 8. David:

The article stood out as biased. While it did mention that thousands of tons of other explosives had been destroyed, the headline didn’t give proper context. The reference to nuclear weapons in the first sentence led me initially to misread it as saying that nuclear materials had been taken. No doubt others made the same mistake.

I suggest writing to the Times Public Editor at public@nytimes.com. He’s the best hope of saving the Times from self-destruction.

Oct 26, 2004 - 1:23 am 9. WilliamA:

Jukeboxgrad

Huh?

What exactly are you arguing, that the interval between the last UN site inspection and the arrival of the Infantry was too short to allow the explosives to be removed? Are you suggesting that the NBC report is incorrect and the explosives were in fact at al QuQaa?

Doesn’t it seem likely given the logistics of loading,transporting and then storing 380 tons of material that it would be done during the last ordered days Saddam’s rule? During the chaos of combat and post combat Iraq who would be able to organize such an operation and why would they bother? Iraq is awash in HE weapons.

As to why the WH acts as if the just found out about this, well perhaps they just did. Given the amount of weapons dispersed through out Iraq why would the WH have some particular knowledge about this batch? Is it possible that they needed to get back to the people who are in charge of such things, contact witnesses, check records, etc to get their facts straight. You know the procedure that separates people who deal in facts from people like CBS and the NY Times.

Bill

Oct 26, 2004 - 1:47 am 10. blogaddict:

jukeboxgrad, let’s see if I got this straight:

We were supposed to a) fight a war, moving quickly through a large country, while protecting the civilian population from harm; b) guard all oil wells from attack by the army of that country, plus terrorists; c) guard all municipal building such as hospitals, schools, museums, etc. d) foresee that civil order would break down (ie there would be no police, etc.; e) make sure that every munitions storage facility was guarded also, in a country in which there was an extraordinary amount of munitions of all types; f) be on guard for WMDs, which were widely believed to be on hand; g) win hearts and minds ; h) adjust to the fact that our forces were, at the last moment, blocked by Turkey from entering from the north, which had been part of the original strategic plan. And we were to do this to a standard of perfection–for example, any failure to guard any building, munitions storage facility, oil well, etc. in all of Iraq, within the first few days of reaching Baghdad, is evidence of gross failure and neglect.

How many troops would have been enough for perfection?

Oct 26, 2004 - 2:04 am 11. Lola:

Speaking of war crimes, the SWFTs and POWs just may have found the smoking gun about the anti-war movement and just how closely they worked with the Vietnamese communists – see this post at Polipundit. The question is . . . will the MSM at all pay any attention to this story or will they just brush it off?

Oct 26, 2004 - 2:14 am 12. David Thomson:

ìYes, this is worse than Jayson Blair.î

But might it help to defeat President Bush? The New York Times will worry about its credibility after the election. Right now the number one priority is the destruction of the current occupant of the White House. Nothing else matters.

Oct 26, 2004 - 2:52 am 13. The Bugger That Beats the French:

“Really? Our forces didn’t arrive until 4/10/03? Only if you have a very loose definition of the word ‘arrived.’”

You must have a very loose definition of “combat.” See, you may not realize this, but the purpose of an “army” is to “destroy” the “enemy’s” “army” so that it is no longer capable of “resistance.” Got that? That means diversions that take troops away from the task of defeating the enemy and sending them to do things like clean up ElBaradei’s messes or guard the local K-Mart are utterly irresponsible since they prolong combat and increase casualties. This is, of course, assuming that the troops in the Baghdad area and around Al Qaqaa weren’t doing other things, like, you know, getting shot at or fighting the Republican Guard and even had the opportunity to go play Clousseau with the local plastique. Baghdad still wasn’t secure on April 9 when the statue came down, but yeah, I guess finding 0.05% of Iraq’s conventional munitions was more important than actually fighting the war. That’s one of those things they don’t seem to teach commanders. Nice catch.

“So a week or two after our troops were in the vicinity, we finally took the time to ‘temporarily’ take over this place? A huge weapons facility that the UN had repeatedly warned us about? After we had invaded the country specifically for the purpose of securing its weapons and keeping them out of unfriendly hands?”

Uh huh. What’s your point? Your intelligence from that period must be better than mine, since you obviously know that troops “in the vicinity” were (a) definitely close enough to the site in question to spend a couple of days sleuthing around, (b) had no enemy combatants to worry about, and (c) weren’t doing anything more important than swatting sand fleas. You should write a book. And no, we invaded the country to defeat its military and depose its government. You seem to be confusing the ultimate political objective of disarmament with the immediate strategic objective in any conflict, which is to defeat the enemy. Work on that.

“He forgot to tell us we didn’t have enough troops to make sure that 40 truckloads of hi-tech explosives didn’t slip away under our noses.”

Cool, you know for sure that the explosives in question did not disappear between January and mid-March? Why aren’t you working for the IAEA yourself, what with deductive reasoning powers like that?

“Anyway, if the stuff disappeared before 4/10, and we discovered it was missing on 4/10, why is the White House acting like it just found out? Here’s McClennan: ‘It’s something that’s being looked into now … it’s something that the Pentagon, upon being informed about it, immediately directed the multinational forces and Iraq Survey Group to look into this matter, and that’s what they’re doing.’”

Maybe because this isn’t news because it happened 18 months ago and Scott McClellan doesn’t remember where every hand grenade in Iraq has been during that period.

“Those two passages look reasonably identical to me. Someone please explain to me what Drudge et al are gloating about. If the stuff was gone by 4/10, it still indicates it was stolen from under our noses.”

Unless it was moved between January and mid-March, in which case it was stolen under the IAEA’s nose, and ElBaradei’s now just practicing some serious CYA. Hmmm?

“We had forces operating through Iraq for more than two weeks, by then.”

Busy. Fighting. War. You know, the one you called a quagmire immediately the first sandstorm “arrived.”

“Also, this is a huge facility with more than 80 buildings. Both of the above accounts suggest a quick look that could easily have missed things.”

Busy. Fighting. War. Do you really not understand this concept?

“Both accounts also indicate we looked, and then we left. Nice. Too bad we didn’t show up with enough troops to properly secure this major weapons site.”

I suppose you wanted the 3,000,000+ troops that would have been necessary to secure the entire land area of the country and every munitions dump holding more than a spitball. Seriously, your standard is that we needed to seize 99.95% of Iraq’s explosives within two weeks of initiating hostilities. Why not just say you were always against the war, BUSH LIED AND PEOPLE DIED? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

“Since that (disarming the enemy) was supposedly a major reason for the invasion in the first place.”

Are you broken? How many times do you have to say this? No, wrong, incorrect, falsch. Once you begin hostilities, your goal is to defeat the enemy, because you can’t properly do anything else before you do that. You know, busy, fighting, war.

“But this stuff is in a very different category than all the ammo hidden all over the country, for two very simple and powerful reasons.”

You’re right. It had fancy IAEA stickers all over it. I wonder if they were scratch ‘n’ sniff?

“First, these explosives are highly dangerous, much more dangerous and valuable than regular ammo.”

Oh, *highly* dangerous high explosives, neato! Where can I get some of that? Oh wait, I can easily make it at home with a few beakers, some baking soda, and two chemicals readily available from any laboratory supply company. I mean, sure, a pound of that RDX stuff is a whopping 1.6 times more powerful than TNT, and can bring down a plane, but like I said, I could make that at home. Of course, you don’t even need RDX to take down a plane, just box cutters. Maybe it’s a big deal because it can be used to trigger NUCLEAR WEAPONS? Yawn. That’s so 1945. Get back to us when you figure out how implosion-trigger fission bombs work. Some RDX along with plutonium, trained scientists and engineers, good electronic equipment and machine tools, time, and money will get you a nuke. Whoop-dee-do.

“That’s why they were being tracked by the IAEA. McCellan [sic] was promulgating misinformation when he said ‘these are conventional high explosives.’ Nonsense.”

From Wikipedia: “RDX forms the base for a number of common military explosives: Composition A (wax-coated, granular explosive consisting of RDX and plasticizing wax), composition A5 (mixed with 1.5% stearic acid), composition B (castable mixtures of RDX and TNT), composition C (a plastic demolition explosive consisting of RDX, other explosives, and plasticizers), composition D, HBX (castable mixtures of RDX, TNT, powdered aluminium, and D-2 wax with calcium chloride), H-6, Cyclotol and C-4.”

Looks pretty conventional to me. Relative effectiveness of 1.6, a bit more punch than nitroglycerin, used for blasting and demolition. But I forget you’re a demolitions expert too.

“Second, we knew exactly where it was (unlike other stuff in numerous secret locations).”

Obviously not!

“The IAEA repeatedly warned us about this stuff, both before and after the invasion. We just didn’t pay attention.”

Did they? You have the documents? Anaway, irrelevant. Busy. Fighting. War. Can’t go chasing after every boom stick in the country. Wouldn’t be prudent. I’m sure you’d have preferred we diverted all our forces to rounding up fireworks and let the fighting continue for months while half the country starved. Great idea!

“Pure criminal negligence.”

Now that’s just stupid. Don’t you feel silly?

“Why did it get lost? Because we sent 50 tanks to surround the oil ministry.”

Right, again, because you know for sure that junk was there in one of those 80 warehouses on March 24, 2003, and that forces necessary to secure the place had absolutely nothing better to do. You should write a letter.

“IAEA inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers, Fleming said. Inspectors visited the site again in March 2003, but didn’t view the explosives because the seals were not broken, she said.”

Oooh, the pretty stickers were still there? Even if true, keep in mind that March has 31 days. For more than half of those days, there waren’t no war yet, and for all but the last 7 or so, there waren’t no troops on the ground near Baghdad. But again, your intel is so good that you *know* that stuff was only moved sometime between March 24 and April 10, right?

“Hard to understand how we managed to not notice 40 large trucks leaving a major known weapons site.”

Don’t you know from your 20 years at the NRO?

“Before the invasion, we knew where this stuff was.”

False.

“Then we told the UN to go to hell, and we took over.”

No, we told them to get out so as not to get blowed up.

“Now no one knows where it is.”

Nah, someone does. Unless he’s like a squirrel and he buried it and forgot about it.

“But it’s nice to know that we’re all safer as a result.”

One wonders how you sleep at night knowing there’s a pliant white substance loose in the desert somewhere.

“Something tells me I shouldn’t hold my breath waiting for corrections from Glen Reynolds and Jim Geraghty. Not to mention McClennan [sic], Franks and Bush.”

Something tells me I shouldn’t hold my breath waiting for you to stop being an armchair reject regurgitating Joshua Michael Marshall’s fever-swamp-induced oral diarrhea before you graduate to armchair private with some rudimentary knowledge of facts and logic. But there is always hope.

Oct 26, 2004 - 3:06 am 14. Brown Line:

Getting back to the subject of the media, this election reminds me of an essay by the late Joseph Kraft entitled “The Imperial Media”, which appeared in the May 1981 issue of Commentary. Kraft, himself a veteran journalist, compared the media to an occupying army, which imposes itself upon a people to which it is hostile.

The big difference from 1981 is that occupied people now has weapons with which it can fight back. We can stand up to a Dan Rather, point out his lies, and be heard. That’s the good news. The bad news is that if Kerry does become president, he’s going to owe the Imperial Media a huge debt. Look for him to support Ernest Hollings-style restrictions on internet content and access, in the name of copyright protection.

Whoever wins, it will be an interesting four years.

Oct 26, 2004 - 3:48 am 15. Terrye:

Juke:

Why do you care? If it had been left up to most of the people at the UN and in the anti war movement Saddam could have made a gift of this stuff to anyone from Arafat to Zarqawi and they could have cared less.

It seems to me that the real criminal negligence here is that the stuff was still there after the UN put their fancy little stickers on it. If not for Bush they would not have bothered doing that much.

This is pathetic. First we have to put up with the whole CBS forged document thingee and now this. The Times is careful to imply rather than state that the adminsitration screwed up, and when NBC comes along and makes their sorry 18 months after the fact hatchet job story look even more riduculous people like you just ignore it.

I remember how Edwards and company were all over Bush the morning after the socalled memos were shown on CBS. It was almost as if they had coordinated events with a major news outlet or something and now we have Kerry drooling and railing aand frothing at the mouth about this bullshit story almost before the paper with its big ass headlines hit the newstands.

You are sheep. You believe whatever crap these people feed you.

Oct 26, 2004 - 3:59 am 16. Yehudit:

Here’s an excellent analysis of Kerry’s narcissism as per a previous thread. Also analyses Bush’s malapropisms and refutes the “dry drunk” meme.

Oct 26, 2004 - 4:08 am 17. Yehudit:

I think this story has much more damaging potential to Kerry than that UN thing.

Oct 26, 2004 - 4:12 am 18. Cassandra:

That remark about the MSM being an evil empire was certainly a thoughtful one. I never thought of it that way. What has happened is a group of immature and arrogant (and oh, so superior!) people have been handed great power, almost absolute power, and they have been corrupted by it.

Peter Jennings referred to the idea of an objective press as a “notion” that bothered him– since when? For years the press has pretended it was being objective, and now we find that Jennings is shocked! by the “notion” that he shouldn’t sneer when pronouncing President Bush’s name.

Perhaps we should insist that the press go back to the style they had in the days of America’s Civil War–the newspaper clearly stated it was for one side or another and never once pretended to be objective or fair. Pretending to be objective and then slanting the news is a horrible abomination and an abuse of America’s trust. It needs to be stopped.

There is no way Kerry would be this far ahead in the polls had he been treated objectively and fairly by the MSM. Instead, it covers up for him while hounding the other side for every slip of the tongue. This behavior needs to be stopped but I don’t know how.

Oct 26, 2004 - 4:13 am 19. HA:

Roger,

Have you ever read something that explains everything? Well, here’s your chance:

http://www.policyreview.org/dec00/Fonte.html

Here is the conclusion from the article:

Transmission ? or transformation

The slow but steady advance of Gramscian and Hegelian-Marxist ideas through the major institutions of American democracy, including the Congress, courts, and executive branch, suggests that there are two different levels of political activity in twenty-first century America. On the surface, politicians seem increasingly inclined to converge on the center. Beneath, however, lies a deeper conflict that is ideological in the most profound sense of the term and that will surely continue in decades to come, regardless of who becomes president tomorrow, or four or eight or even 20 years from now.

As we have seen, Tocquevillians and Gramscians clash on almost everything that matters. Tocquevillians believe that there are objective moral truths applicable to all people at all times. Gramscians believe that moral “truths” are subjective and depend upon historical circumstances. Tocquevillans believe that these civic and moral truths must be revitalized in order to remoralize society. Gramscians believe that civic and moral “truths” must be socially constructed by subordinate groups in order to achieve political and cultural liberation. Tocquevillians believe that functionaries like teachers and police officers represent legitimate authority. Gramscians believe that teachers and police officers “objectively” represent power, not legitimacy. Tocquevillians believe in personal responsibility. Gramscians believe that “the personal is political.” In the final analysis, Tocquevillians favor the transmission of the American regime; Gramscians, its transformation.

While economic Marxism appears to be dead, the Hegelian variety articulated by Gramsci and others has not only survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also gone on to challenge the American republic at the level of its most cherished ideas. For more than two centuries America has been an “exceptional” nation, one whose restless entrepreneurial dynamism has been tempered by patriotism and a strong religious-cultural core. The ultimate triumph of Gramscianism would mean the end of this very “exceptionalism.” America would at last become Europeanized: statist, thoroughly secular, post-patriotic, and concerned with group hierarchies and group rights in which the idea of equality before the law as traditionally understood by Americans would finally be abandoned. Beneath the surface of our seemingly placid times, the ideological, political, and historical stakes are enormous.

Leftists have take to calling themselves “progressives.” But what are they “progressing” towards? The answer is Gramscian Marxism. As a Gramscian propaganda organ, the only news that is fit to print at the NY Times is that which advances the Gramscian transformation process. All news that serves to transmit traditional American principles is unfit to print.

The Democratic party and the MSM have reach a point of absolute moral and intellectual corruption. By this, I mean that they no longer believe in, and will no longer participate in perpetuating the American political creed. They are actively opposing that creed and in its place they are advancing the Gramscian Marxist creed that is rotting out Europe. They are tearing America apart BY DESIGN and in accordance with the latest, state-of-the-art marxist theory. God help us all of they succeed.

American democracy is in serious trouble. All of our opinion forming organizations have been take over by Gramscian Marxists. The Democratic party and the MSM are organized around the principles of Gramscian Marxism and they are in the process transforming the rest of American society around these principles. If this process is not reversed, the consequences will be devestating, not only for America, but the whole world. America is the last best hope for mankind. If the transformation of American society along Gramscian principles continues, there will be no hope.

Oct 26, 2004 - 4:21 am 20. Howard:

The decline of the Times “happened” because the creators of the paper, the people who put in the sweat equity, handed control over to family members just as Kings handed down countries. There is the inevitable decline as pampered children who have never had to work for anything “take over.” They then hire others who are like them; went to the same schools, think the same way, and have the same view of themselves and the world.

Duranty didn’t just happen. He was telling it like the pampered children running the Times wanted it told. What you have now are the grandchildren of the founders, rich beyond belief, guilty about their free money, and arrogant as it is possible to be running the paper with no accountability (they own more than 50% of all the stock).

The Times is read by all the “right” people and will continue on this path until the “right” people wise up then, like a street whore who sees that there is better money inside the Plaza than on the cold street outside, the Times will seem to change. Dress up in different clothing so as to appear different but inside the soul of the Times, like the insides of the street whores dressing in fine clothing, the Times will remain the corrupt soul of what it once was.

They are like the Hapsbergs. They will vanish when they are kicked out, and it is possible the new media will do the job. Let us all hope so.

Oct 26, 2004 - 4:35 am 21. vegetius:

PERSPECTIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Since there were 600,000 tons of high explosives in Iraq……….380 tons looks like a rounding error. We’ve already secured or destroyed 400,000 tons.

Get a grip everyone.

Oct 26, 2004 - 5:13 am 22. hcq:

What I find interesting is that NBC ran a story last nigh that its own reporters’ eyes contradict the Times. And CNN’s picked up the story.

Only what, a day after the story appeared?

Now THAT is news – the MSM eating each other. I can’t imagine this happening a month ago. Let’s hope it’s a trend.

Oct 26, 2004 - 5:57 am 23. hcq:

Grr. Let’s try that link again.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:00 am 24. skeeziks:

I am astonished how many people and organizations have been so willing to toss their reputations to the wind over this election. I expect news outlets to have a slant. No one can be truly objective. All people see things through the color of their own convictions. It is incumbent on me, as a consumer of any source of news, to take that into consideration. But the examples of media bias this election season have not been tainted by bias; they have been tainted by the manufacturing of realities that the news organizations are trying to perpetrate on their viewers and readers. This year, with the NYT’s incident just being the latest, the propaganda has been so overwhelming I can only assume that this concerted effort has been coordinated. I don’t know by whom, but this level of disinformation and deliberate omissions can’t just be a fluke due to some bizarre alignment of the planets; this has been planned. It doesn’t matter if the coordination came from a secret wink and nod society or the society that is assumed strictly by placing to many of the same like-minded people in the halls of journalistic power, but it is coordinated nonetheless.

What they are doing is not just manipulative, it’s dangerous. Just as Mr. Simon can’t help but take this latest as personal, so too, many unknown and anonymous readers and viewers may also be drawing the same conclusion. When segments of the populous go beyond exasperation to feeling personally affronted, they start to feel an investment in the outcome. People will no longer give the media the benefit of the doubt. The fourth pillar is chipping away at its own base, and apparently doing so with no regard to their own outcome. Their protections have been guaranteed by the First Amendment of our Constitution, but nowhere in there does it say that they have the freedom from truth. The press has been able to garner so much support for its First Amendment rights over time that it is able to protect its sources with the sanctity that is only alloted to the clergy. We want the press to be able to hold the government’s feet to the fire withour fear of retribution. But if the press systematically corrodes that trust among the population at large, people will doubt whether placing their trust in an organ that seems to be abusing said trust for political gain is wise. So the next time the govenment pushes hard on journalists to reveal their sources or the next time the full-court press from the government to stifle information comes down the pike, who will the public believe? Or will the public turn a blind eye to a journalist’s plight. When that happens, we all lose.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:02 am 25. hcq:

@*%(#*?!?

And to think I “use HTML tags for style” all day long. I give up. The story’s over at cnn.com.

Apologies, Roger.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:02 am 26. Charlie (Colorado):

Our host quotes Wretchard saying “the account above shows that the RDX explosive was already gone by the time US forces arrived.” Really? Our forces didn’t arrive until 4/10/03? Only if you have a very loose definition of the word “arrived.”

Yes, the US troops arrived at that location on April 10th. That’s because it’s separated physically from those other places.

You know, space? The thing that keeps everything from being in the same place?

They’re not just sending us morons, they’re sending us poor-quality morons.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:02 am 27. Ken:

What is dangerous about the NYT isn’t necessarily its fault: All the major media take the NYT’s lead on all stories . . . as if they don’t have minds of their own! Thus when the Times goes off the rails, the other media follow.

Actually, if they would come out of the closet and tell America (and the rest of the so called MSM) that they are a democratic party house organ, I wouldn’t have any problem with them.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:19 am 28. Buddy Larsen:

Roger, your “…in their zeal (they) don’t stop to consider the reality of what they are saying and writing” answers the proximate of your ‘why do they DO this?’ but the underlying (ha! “underlying!”) compulsion is the novelist’s question. I don’t think it’s answerable, tho, so ignore me. The best I can come up with is biology’s ‘protective coloration’. Or, glibly, the ‘heard mentality’. Be funny if it hadn’t become so damn deadly. Not metaphorically deadly, but “DEAD” deadly.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:20 am 29. Rick Ballard:

“Or will the public turn a blind eye to a journalist’s plight.”

On behalf of many millions of Americans let me assure you that we will never turn a blind eye to a journalist’s plight. Should said plight become extremely serious, involving risk to the journalist’s personal freedom, we will bid for the opportunity to watch and applaud.

You give them higher status than they have ever warranted. They have positive societal value only when they report verifiable facts in a straightforward manner. The propagandists working for the MSM today are no better than malicious gossips and deserve nothing but contempt. Spreading lies given them by “anonymous sources” with axes to grind should never get them a get out of jail free card. Adopting British libel law would be the simplest way in which to straighten out the current mess.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:34 am 30. slarrow:

Nice fisking, The Bugger That Beats the French.

What worries me about the MSM is that I don’t know that it will matter. This all seems like deja vu to me. Substitute “Linux” for “bloggers” and “Microsoft” for “MSM”, and this all happened five years ago. Since then, there’s just not been that much movement on that front.

The MSM is big business, and big businesses are usually pretty good about staying big.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:36 am 31. Mark Poling:

I’ve been trying to get a handle on why the MSM so uniformly despises W., and I’ve boiled it down to three major factors:

W. is obviously of the Coastal Establishment, but rejected it in becoming thoroughly Texan.

CYA (indecisiveness and misdirection) has beome synonymous with intelligence.

The Coastal Establishment has become incapable of holding a perspective beyond the current news cycle, and the length of the current news cycle keeps shrinking.

In all three areas W. embodies an existential threat to the Coastal Establishment’s primacy.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:42 am 32. David Thomson:

ìThe MSM is big business, and big businesses are usually pretty good about staying big.î

You may have inadvertently stumbled onto something. The MSM are a big business under threat by the new media. Iím utterly convinced that at least subconsciously they perceive John Kerry as a champion of not only their ideological biases—but also their economic interests. Journalists are not civil servants virtually guaranteed a job until retirement. No, if the the regular citizens are not purchasing their publications and viewing their TV news programs, then many of these professional journalists will be compelled to seek another way of earning a living.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:53 am 33. Gary and the Samoyeds:

Unless someone can argue that it’s sheer incompetence at the NYT, this is a pure campaign piece for Kerry. Perhaps someone should file suit with the FEC that this was an in-kind campaign contribution.

Oct 26, 2004 - 7:14 am 34. Kyda Sylvester:

My crisis of faith with the MSM began when details of what had been going on behind closed doors in “Camelot” started to ooze out. I came to understand that the public’s right to know was far from absolute and that Uncle Walter, Mr. Bradlee, Sulzberger pere & fils etc would decide what I needed to know and what I didn’t need to know and when I needed to know it (or not). Vietnam perfected that crisis and it is only now, almost 30 years later and with the advent of the internet, that not only is the truth out there but that I, from time to time, actually may find it.

Oct 26, 2004 - 7:16 am 35. JuanBGood:

The story pivots about a memo from Iraq to the UN regarding missing high-explosives. Has anyone looked closely at that memo?

The memo number and date are handwritten. Other than the signature and a handwritten notation in Arabic above the Iraq seal, the rest of the memo is typed. Why are the number and date handwritten? Was the memo prepared at one point, then later dated and numbered?

The year is not completely legible. I presume it says 2004 because thatís what the NYT article suggests. It is not clear though whether the year is 2003 or 2004. How would the NY Times know that he year was 2004?

The word ‘Date’ is typed with a substantially larger font than the rest of the memo. That seems particularly strange.

The memo says the material was stolen sometime after 9-4-2003. Does this suggest that the material was inspected on that date and was not missing then? Does this suggest that another inspection was made prior to the date of the memo and was found missing then? How is that date consistent with the 4-10-2003 data when the US Forces arrived and found no HMX / RDX?

The memo seems to know why the material was missing. The material was lost ‘due to theft and looting Ö due to lack of security.’ Coupled with the previous observation, does this suggest that the 342 tons of high explosives were discovered, then left unguarded, then later checked to see if they were still there?

The memo is signed by Dr. Mohammed J. Abbas, General Director of the Planning & Following Up Directorate. I get zero hits in Google for:

Dr. Mohammed J. Abbas

Mohammed J. Abbas

Mohammed Abbas + General Director of the Planning

Mohammed Abbas + General Director of Planning

Following Up Directorate

I get no seemingly relevant hits for

Dr. Mohammed Abbas + Iraq

Doctor Mohammed Abbas + Iraq

I get lots of hits for

Mohammed Abbas + Iraq

Mohammed Abbas is a common name. One reason for all the hits on the last search was Mohammed Abbas was the given name of Abu Abbas, the renowned terrorist harbored by Saddam. He was responsible for, among other attacks, the taking of the Achille Lauro and the murder of the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer.

Iím not saying that the author is not as advertised, and I am certainly not saying the author is a terrorist. (Abu Abbas died in US custody.) At this point however, we know nothing about the person who sent the memo, and we donít know to whom it was sent.

The memo is stamped CONFIDENTIAL at the top. Who applied the stamp? It is similar to the confidential marking I recall from my time in the Air Force, but US military documents are marked both on top and bottom. Was this a copy obtained by the US then marked as classified? Is the mark consistent with a secure communication between Iraq and the UN? Why was the document marked at all? If it is classified, from where did the NY Times get its copy?

Maybe someone can help with these questions.

Oct 26, 2004 - 7:21 am 36. Buddy Larsen:

Strong point, slarrow. Dan Rather lost a few moderates, he had no conservatives, anyway, and is now a Hero of the Nomenklatura. Status: Improved, with chosen constituency. Mark Poling, too, there’s gotta be a NorthEast establishment vs Texas thing, Texas has had too many presidents. Way back in the late 90s when the GWB rumble began, that was my first thought, and its only grown. And Rick, British libel law, AND British ‘loser pays’ would have enormous positive benefits for the polity. Like a flat tax. How do we get these things started? What’s the first tiny step?

I hate to be a sycophant, but Bill O’Rielly is doing some good stuff lately, be sure and catch him tonite, he has a couple Kerrymen ’sitting in’ for the Man Who Won’t Be Interviewed. Last night he burned away some major cover, and the device continues tonite with the Senate record, and the Big Dig. Big Dig. No one has looked at Kerry and the Big Dig.

Oct 26, 2004 - 7:21 am 37. alcibiades:

OT I know, but have you guys seen the latest Mark Steyn article discussing “our friend” Charlie Brooker and his EU-ronic malaise.

Well worth the read.

Oct 26, 2004 - 7:27 am 38. Sandy P:

Vodkapundit posted this:

…About the same time, I got an email from someone who would know, speaking off the record. This person has been told that New York Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson is responsible for the anti-Bush flurry. They also admit that it’s her paper, and she can do what she wants with it – except for playing with the facts.

And this story (written by James Glanz, William J. Broad, and David E. Sanger) plays faster and looser than a pair of twin Balinese hookers slathered in Wesson oil.

If anyone has email addresses for Abramson, Glanz, Broad, and/or Sanger, I’d just love to post them here, so that readers might be able to share their thoughts with these four would-be assassins.

UPDATE: Frank asks, “Wasn’t Jill Abramson a major player in the Clarence Thomas smear campaign?”

Oct 26, 2004 - 7:37 am 39. Sandy P:

Kind of OT, kind of not, via Bros. Judd:

If it were up to the Israeli expatriate community in Los Angeles, President Bush apparently would win re-election not just by a landslide, but by an earthquake.

Take the middle-aged Israeli, waiting for his order of falafel and hummus at the Pita Kitchen restaurant.

Asked about his political choice, the man, who declined to give his name, burst out, ìBush, only Bush. He is a strong man, a man of his word….î

http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?strwebhead=L%2EA%2E+Israelis+back+Bush&intcategoryid=3

Oct 26, 2004 - 7:46 am 40. Swopa:

How could such things happen, I always wondered. Now I know. They happen when people think they are doing the right thing for the right cause and in their zeal don’t stop to consider the reality of what they are saying and writing.

A fairly apt description of yourself and your commenters there, Roger.

Back in the land of reality, though, people are finding evidence that the explosives were there:

Associated Press, April 5, 2003 –

Closer to Baghdad, troops at Iraq’s largest military industrial complex found nerve agent antidotes, documents describing chemical warfare and a white powder that appeared to be used for explosives.

. . . Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives.

Oooops. But don’t worry, I’m sure Wretchard will come up with something else that all of you will accept uncritically.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:03 am 41. Sandy P:

Swopa – 4/5 v. 4/10?

Many things can happen in 5 days.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:08 am 42. RogerA:

Swopa–I dont quite understand your post: are you asserting the vials of white powder were the same as the HE missing from the Al QuaQuaa site?

As an aside: It has been a while since I was in the army, but I dont recall any military explosives coming in the form of vials of white

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:12 am 43. max:

” Although it is nowhere near as drastic, of course, it makes me think of the days of Walter Duranty, that Timesman who won a Pultizer while white-washing Stalin. How could such things happen, I always wondered. Now I know. They happen when people think they are doing the right thing for the right cause and in their zeal don’t stop to consider the reality of what they are saying and writing.”

That the nyt believed it was “doing the right thing for the right cause” when it published Walter Duranty’s tragically and totally dishonest articles on Stalin’s genocide through starvation of 6+ million Ukrainians in the early 1930s articles shows what a destructive force it (the nyt) has been in American life for generations.

And of course it continues in that arrogant destructive manner to this day. Witness not only this week’s hit-and-run job (which mercifuly has blown up in its face – not that you would know it from reading the nyt today), but also how its current publisher reacted when the Pulitzer Prize Committee was considering revoking Duranty’s notorious Pulitzer Prize.

Did AS do the following: “Yes, please do revoke this award which is a travesty since no one, not even the Times argues that Duranty’s reporting was anything other than a tissue of lies, and while I?m at it, let me have the Times publish an apology to the millions who died and the descendants of the few who survived, because not only was the Times wrong, but its errors continued for a period of years, and if the Times had reported the truth early enough, perhaps several million lives could have been saved.

No, no no, of course not. AS wrote, without a word of apology, asking that the prize not be revoked on the specious and contemptible grounds that revoking the prize would be ‘air-brushing’ history, as though when Congress repeals a piece of legislation or when a court reverses itself it is ‘air-brushing’ history. The revoked legislation, the overturned case both are still there; it’s just that the responsible parties realize that an error has been made and it?s time to correct it. Similarly, if the Pulitzer committee had revoked the award to Duranty, the record would still show that he had been awarded the prize, but that an error had been made when it was given to him.

A truly truly disgusting performance by AS, but as good an indication as any of the mind-boggling arrogance and, let’s face it, moral corruption, of AS and the Lying Liberal Death Star.

The lying liberal media is the greatest enemy Anerica faces today.

——————————————————————————–

There’s more…visit the archives!

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:13 am 44. Mark Poling:

Swopa quotes:

. . . Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

I’m confused. Are you now saying there was reason to think the Iraqi’s were preparing for chemical warfare? How odd.

Never mind that NBC says its correspondent was with the troops who examined the facilities in question, and no high explosives were found, I think this evidence of an active Iraqi WMD progam needs to be examined.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:14 am 45. Sandy P:

And we knew about the chem suits and antidotes.

It was a dual use facility.

And it seems part of it went boom during the war, 2 bunkers were destroyed, 10, IIRC, left.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:15 am 46. RogerA:

Mark Poling: you and I are apparently confused together! And it couldnt possibly be the Iraqi’s had chemical weapons–why those would be evidence of WMD and we know those werent found–and you have to disregard the eyewitness accounts of embedded NBC reporters–I think our friend Swopa is suffering from a bout of cognitive dissonance.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:18 am 47. Fausta:

The MSM has every reason to manipulate the news. Go back to the days of William Randolph Hearst.

First, they are in the business of selling. “If it bleeds, it leads”.

Then, they are out to further their own points of view. The power to influence the public is much too great, and they will use that power, both directly (in the NYT editorial endorsing Kerry, and the Philadelphia Enquirer’s 21 days of Kerry lovefest), and indirectly through whatever else means they can cough up.

Combine that with how BORING an uncontested election would be (which wouldn’t sell much deadtree or airtime), and voila, the recipe’s cooked into, as Roger so aptly puts it,

progandistic drivel timed to encourage the defeat of a sitting president in favor of a candidate, I am almost certain, the paper’s publisher and editors do not even care for in the first place.

Unfortunately for the MSM, things are not like they used to be in the days of Hearst. To quote Cal Thomas (who’s made a living in the MSM for decades),

Regardless of who wins next Tuesday’s election (and no matter how long it takes to get the results following expected lawsuits and ballots cast by ineligible voters), this may well be the last election cycle in which the Big Media are taken seriously or regarded as influential.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:26 am 48. Buddy Larsen:

Swopa, I almost busted a gut over this post upscroll, here, I hate for you to miss out on a good laugh, let me paste it for you, so it’ll be closer in time and space:

“Yes, the US troops arrived at that location on April 10th. That’s because it’s separated physically from those other places.

You know, space? The thing that keeps everything from being in the same place?

They’re not just sending us morons, they’re sending us poor-quality morons.

Posted by: Charlie (Colorado) at October 26, 2004 06:02 AM”

And, I have it on good authority that ‘time’ operates in much the same way as ’space’. I’m thinking you need to get past the “Big Bang”, and, y’know, move on.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:27 am 49. RogerA:

If you are into conspiracy theories re the MSM. please check drudge–he is reporting that CBS planned to re-release the missing explosives canard on Sunday nite 60 minutes–I think our friend Syl nailed it up thread. Wonder what CBS will pull out of its hat now? Anyone care to start a pool?

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:28 am 50. Fausta:

Make that the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:28 am 51. Fausta:

RogerA, re: 60 Minutes, how’s this for a money quote: Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of “60 Minutes,” said in a statement that “our plan was to run the story on [Oct.] 31, but it became clear that it wouldn’t hold, so the decision was made for the Times to run it.”

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:33 am 52. Charlie (Colorado):

You know, I’m not even going to jump in on Swopa here. Not when I’m seeing the degree of frantic desperation needed to dredge up a story from another location on another day, about a chemical weapons location, and bringing up “thousands” of 2 inch by 5 inch boxes containing three vials each, in order to try and support a story about hundreds of tonnes of cyclonite?

Swopa, put a damp cloth on your forehead, close your eyes, take deep breaths. It’ll be okay.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:34 am 53. thibaud:

Smash the MSM! Let a thousand blogs contend.

The blogosphere needs to cultivate its own sources so that it’s not a spectator but an active correctant to these MSM spinfests.

The blogs need

1) an aggregated, “call for papers”-type function that would reach out to knowledgeable, potential inside sources of the quality that a Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News can call upon, and then

2) a means of sifting through the inevitable barrage of noise for the few high-quality “signals” that will come back in response to the call.

Finally, a better format is needed to deliver the results of this newsgathering: instead of the journal/diary format, a streaming video format that allows the better bloggers to create, on the fly, their own “newscasts”. These could eventually be vastly superior to the kind of canned, static, heavily produced crap you get from CNN and the networks because they’d be truly interactive, with real (and real-time) conversations between different bloggers.

Now THAT would detonate the MSM.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:35 am 54. Rick Ballard:

“our plan was to run the story on [Oct.] 31, but it became clear that it wouldn’t hold, so the decision was made for the Times to run it.”

Good catch, Fausta. So a story that even CBS won’t drop their pants for winds up at the Times. That may raise some eyebrows in the MSM brothel. I wonder when the Times got moved to the $2 corner?

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:43 am 55. Fausta:

Rick, maybe CBS thought it was someone else’s turn to be “fake, but accurate”?

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:46 am 56. Kevin P:

Roger:

The New York Times prints it. The vast majority of the MSM vomits it out to the world without checking it, examining it, or giving it proper perspective. Instead of using their reporters to check to see whether what the Times got it right they take it as truth the way a preacher quotes the Gospel. They will continue to report the story but only as a process story that starts with the idea that everything in the original story is gospel.After the election is over and the damage is done they may go back and re-examine it but by then the agenda journalism of the Times will have achieved its goal.

The MSM chides the blogosphere for letting rumours and false stories onto their sites. The blogs clear up their errors far quicker then the MSM ever will. The CW of the MSM that are false last far longer then the frauds of the internet. The Times has been caught time and time again printing slanted or bogus stories and then never getting around to taking the blame for them or even fessing up to them. Your example of the Times not fully disowning the Duranty scandal is a perfect example. Roger, You have printed stories that have been either false or misguided and you are corrected, usually in the same day, and you own up to your errors right away. the Times will never confess to their blantant pimping for Kerry and will go to their graves believing they are rightous and only print news that is “Fit”.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:51 am 57. Charlie (Colorado):

RogerA, cyclonite in its pure form after synthesis is a white crystalline powder. It’s not used in that form, instead being mixed with various things including tallow (stearic acid).

I’m not aware of any use for the stuff until it’s composed with something else, though, and I’m suspicious that pure crystalline cyclonite is, how you say, a little touchy?

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:55 am 58. Charlie (Colorado):

Thibaud, I think those are mostly really good ideas; my one thought, though, is that for most of us print is a faster, easier way of accessing information. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that, but I’m not sure streaming audio/video is the optimal form.

Oct 26, 2004 - 8:58 am 59. Knucklehead:

I have to join RogerA and Mark polling in their confusion: Swopa, WTF are you talking about? Are you suggesting that these “thousands” of 5cm x 12 cm “vials of white powder” are the 380 TONS of HE in question? That’s some heavy powder your sniffing at there, Swopa. Tell Mr. Peabody & Sherman hello for us.

Oct 26, 2004 - 9:05 am 60. Fausta:

At NRO

Sent to me by a source in the government: ?The Iraqi explosives story is a fraud. These weapons were not there when US troops went to this site in 2003. The IAEA and its head, the anti-American Mohammed El Baradei, leaked a false letter on this issue to the media to embarrass the Bush administration. The US is trying to deny El Baradei a second term and we have been on his case for missing the Libyan nuclear weapons program and for weakness on the Iranian nuclear weapons program.?

Next thing you know, AlBaradei’s going to be sending faxes from Texan Kinko’s.

Oct 26, 2004 - 9:05 am 61. Percy Dovetonsils:

A quick thought on the media: I had to drive into work yesterday, so I listened to the radio (which I rarely do) – the newscaster from a major Chicago station came on and discussed the Guardian’s email campaign to “enlighten” Ohio voters on the True Evil That Is Bush’s Amerikkka… and discussed it as if it was breaking news.

Isn’t this story at least a week old? So, did these guys just find out about it, or were they just getting around to mentioning it?

My point is, I think this is an illustration that a heady brew of incompetence and sloth is reponsible for much of what we’re decrying here. Mix in the groupthink among peers at the major news organs, and it’s no wonder that the media is in its current state. “Conspiracy” may be too strong a word to describe an industry that’s increasingly resembling U.S. auto manufacturers in the mid-1970s – utterly oblivious to their own failures in design and quality.

Oct 26, 2004 - 9:25 am 62. cr13233:

Trying to pass this off as irresponsible reporting by the NYT is ridiculous. Given the time that the White House has known about this (10 days or 18 months, depending on who you believe) don’t you think that Scott McClellen would have been better prepared yesterday? His best answer yesterday was “look how much we have found”. Even though he couldn’t keep the numbers straight. Check MSNBC again and read it to the bottom. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6323933/

The Times did not pull this out of thin air. They did site questions about when the material went missing. Given that inspectors were there in March, 40 trailer loads of explosives would not be very easy to secret out while under intense surveillance by the US Military.

Oct 26, 2004 - 9:26 am 63. Fausta:

cr132, Maybe McClellen would be better prepared, if there were no questions as to the story’s authenticity.

1. See my prior (9:05) post re: authenticity

2. See in the NYT article By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of roughly 10 bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been leveled by titanic blasts, apparently during the war. They presumed some of the HMX had exploded, but that is unclear.

Oct 26, 2004 - 9:33 am 64. ms anne:

We need to quit wringing our hands about bias in the MSM, led by the NYTimes. It is a fact. Given. They intend to slant and twist “news” in support of their current candidate and left wing cause. Whatever dramatic fiction they can create, dusted with a few facts to make it palatable, is their bread and butter. My question is: what impact do they have on the public and the voter? Are Americans realistic enough to see through the presentation and treat it like another sitcom with a bad laugh track? Does the public believe these tales enough to vote out Bush? What correlation exists between the latest press invented scoop and voter response? Does the MSM get rich on never underestimating the gullibility of the American voter? Or do people see through the flim flam?

Oct 26, 2004 - 9:39 am 65. Old Dad:

Why am I shocked and disturbed, and I don’t mean that sarcastically. I confess that I am.

I stopped reading the Times news sections years ago. These are the folks who brought us a coverup of one of the biggest genocides in history and then gave the reporter a Pulitzer. These are the same idiots who still think that Alger Hiss was innocent. These are the lovely folks who covered up a huge Soviet spy ring. These are the folks who shamed us into abandoning our allies in Southeast Asia, leading to horrific genocides in China, Cambodia, and Viet Nam. These are the charming lovelies who slandered Clarence Thomas, and who defended a felon in the Oval Office.

Oct 26, 2004 - 9:47 am 66. Tom Grey:

Swopa is OK here.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A31589-2003Apr4&notFound=true

This article talks about the white powder, chem stuff (not WMDs), from that time.

I believe the NRO Corner, but don’t like the fact they have no link to the NBC report they cite:

Totten on Instapundit cites the Corner; Roger here cites Wretchard who cites the Corner.

Do you have a link to the NBC story?

Similarly, Swopa’s LA Times link includes:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030405-chem-readiness01.htm

“Officials and former weapons inspectors have said discoveries were likely to be made closer to Baghdad. Several large facilities, such as al Qa Qaa, are within an 80-kilometre radius of the capital.”

But in the list of stuff at the bottom, HDX and RDX are not listed.

Oct 26, 2004 - 9:50 am 67. RattlerGator:

HA, thanks for your earlier link to the Policy Review article by John Fonte. Very informative.

Oct 26, 2004 - 9:54 am 68. AlanC:

I hereby request that we stop using the term “media bias”!!

This episode when coupled with the rest of the stories from the last few years prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the MSM is a willing and active partner in the DNC machine for the CREATION and distribution of partisan propaganda.

The question was always asked “Who watches the watch-dog?” aimed at the police. Now, the question must be asked about the MSM.

Our answer, of course, is the blogosphere. But, we ain’t there yet and this proves that we need to be…. post haste.

Oct 26, 2004 - 10:00 am 69. Plainslow:

John Kerry does not want to rush to war. But he has no problems latching on to a story within hours. A story that is false. He has no problem rushing to something that attempts to belittle the military, just like he did in Vietnam.

Oct 26, 2004 - 10:00 am 70. holdfast:

Ok, so let me get this straight – the “missing” explosive is 350+ tons of RDX? Isn’t that pretty much the most common military explosive? Sure you can use it, if properly cast, to initiate a nuclear bomb but so what? Obtaining the RDX is, like, the easiest part of the whole process. Casting and shaping it properly is a lot harder, but we don’t place IAEA stickers on every milling machine in Iraq. If you can get the nuclear material and the other sophisticated components of a bomb, for damn sure you can ge a couple of hundred pounds of RDX. I beleive that miners also use the stuff.

Yeah, it sucks that the terrorirsts MAY have this stuff. On the other ahnd, it might very well be in Syria – either way it is 1/1000 of the explosive munitions in Iraq at the start of the war. Eventually we need to get it all. If someone did make a deliberate decision to leave a known stash of weapons unguarded, maybe a court-martial is in order, but so far I’ve seen NOTHING that would tend to prove it.

Why the hell should Scott McClellan know about every single Iraqi ammo dump? Tactical decisions are not made in the WH, they’re made in the field where they belong. This is not the goddamned LBJ Administration in Vietnam or Carter at Desert One – it’s the Dems who like to micromanage every military operation, not W.

Oct 26, 2004 - 10:04 am 71. Fausta:

AlanC, no link to NBC story since it was broadcast, but there’s a link to CNN Report: Explosives could not be found when U.S. troops arrived

NBC News says its crew was embedded with soldiers at time NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.

While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC

Oct 26, 2004 - 10:07 am 72. Fausta:

Pardon me, my prior post adressed the links Tom requested, not Alan.

Oct 26, 2004 - 10:10 am 73. AlanC:

Quick question….

Has anyone checked the Duelfer report for information regarding all those chem suits and “thousands of 2X5 boxes of white powder”?

Seems to me that this, if true, would be circumstantial evidence of WMD.

I remember at the time that Rantburg had a 48 hr. rule about WMD information cause it kept coming and going so fast.

Oct 26, 2004 - 10:23 am 74. jerry:

I not quite sure how this post fits the topic but hopefully I will find a link by the time I’m through.

Today’s availability of information has created a world of “instant experts” or IEs for short. All you need to become and IE is a computer and google. I am as prone to the IE syndrome as anybody else. In the pre-google days my wife used to call me the master of book jacket knowledge. Now everybody has an informed opinion about whatever the topic of the day. I don’t want to hurt ones feelings here but we all have opinions but in some realms, like having access to the SECDEF, some people’s opinion is more important then ours. [False modesty on my part with the choice of subject.]

However, what makes today’s information environment particularly dangerous is the conjunction advocacy journalism, market share and the Internet leads to all sorts of mischief. Both the blogosphere and the MSM have the ability to create false wisdom by conjoining facts, guesswork and specific agendas to create the appearance of truth. Since most people really don’t have more than the google equivalent of book jacket knowledge they are unable to evaluate the reasonableness of a news story. I don’t think either the NYT or CBS believes that this story isn’t true or of major significance. Modern journalists are IEs to the core. They really don’t know anything at all beyond the superficial.

The advantage of our environment is the diversity of knowledge in the posting community. We get the story right because someone, somewhere who has real expertise weighs in. The MSM is a closed community, made up almost entirely of IEs who end up merely quoting other IEs without getting access to real expertise.

Until the MSM regains a respect for non self-referential knowledge they will continue to put out this kind of tripe.

Oct 26, 2004 - 10:24 am 75. Knucklehead:

Tom Grey,

What is it that Swopa has “OK”? The link is to an April 5, 2003 article in the WaPo. It reports what Swopa said it reports, but so what?

Let’s have a look at some of the article and keep in mind that this report was published ~3 weeks into the war. The ellipsis will be to try and maintain brevity (I don’t willfully engage in Dowdifying).

It tells us a bit about Iraq’s petrochem industry…

Iraq has the most extensive petrochemical industry in the Middle East… nearly all of them are dual-use facilities, capable of civilian or military employment…

Moving warily through that industrial landscape, U.S. and allied ground forces will inevitably find, as U.N. inspectors have found since 1991, thousands of potential weapons sites but few, if any, that could be nothing else…

In the first of yesterday’s discoveries, the 3rd Infantry Division entered the vast Qa Qaa chemical and explosives production plant and came across thousands of vials of white powder, packed three to a box…. initial tests indicated the white powder was not a component of a chemical weapon….

U.N. inspectors have surveyed Qa Qaa some two dozen times, most recently last month. But some 1,000 structures there, organized into 10 or more factory complexes, have mainly been devoted to such conventional military industries as explosives and missile fuels. Neither is forbidden under U.N. Security Council mandates. Qa Qaa was last linked to proscribed activity in 1995 — and somewhat peripherally then….

The report then goes on to tell about other finds and issues and various quotes. Its at the link Tom gave.

Given that that Qa Qaa was … a vast chemical and chemical and explosive productions plant organizied into some 1,000 structures organized into 10 or more factory complexes and

“Based on [the powder and antidotes] you couldn’t form any real judgment,” said Terence Taylor of Britain, a former inspector with the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM). “It is a place where there would be a lot of chemicals, not necessarily related to chemical or biological weapons. More likely in that place it would relate to some form of rocket propellant.”

it would seem that jumping the gun and somehow linking Swopa’s eureka moment to the missing explosives story is, at best, a stretch.

Other’s have linked to the NRO and Wretchard pieces. An NBC News report (whether or not this is the one cited by NRO or Wretchard I can’t say) is here

and contains this

An NBC News crew that accompanied U.S. soldiers who seized the Al-Qaqaa base three weeks into the war in Iraq reported that troops discovered significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives.

and goes on.

Nothing I have seen so far on this represents anything even in the same solar system as a smoking gun proving anything whatsoever. Nothing says RDX or HMX were on site there when US troops arrived or that they failed to secure anything. Its clear they searched the “vast” complex and found “stuff”, but not clear they searched every nook and crany.

The amount of “missing explosives” in question (350 or 380 tons) is clearly a relatively small proportion of the explosives and ammunition cached around Iraq. Not that I’m any expert about “vast” petrochemical plants, but I’ve seen some pretty darned big trainloads of various powders moving into and out of chemical plants I don’t consider to be “vast”, so I’d guess that 380 tons of most anything in a “vast” complex such as this is not a particularly large proportion of the stuff even just there.

Sorry, but there’s no story in this. The NYT endorsed their candidate and is now attempting to make something of nothing.

Oct 26, 2004 - 10:40 am 76. charlotte:

Rick, “So a story that even CBS won’t drop their pants for winds up at the Times.”

The Drudge Report story says that CBS was going to run this repackaged old news/ faux news story on October 31, but that the NYT beat them to it. In other words, 60 Minutes had planned to air the Halloween trick just 24 hours before the election. Rather’s network is so terribly contrite after the Rather memogate fiasco, is it not? Mapes’ name even has been mentioned in conjunction with the story, but I can’t confirm where I saw that.

According to the LA Times, someone shopped this story to both CBS and the NYT. Also, the UN is looking more and more as if it had a hand in this story, as well. The Bush administration recently has been putting pressure on the UN to replace El Baradei who doesn’t want to go… But there’s no confirmation of this speculative connect-the-dots, either.

Wonderful comments all on the MSM. Thibaud’s idea is especially tempting.

Oct 26, 2004 - 10:53 am 77. jukeboxgrad:

“Nothing was mentioned of the NBC report that imbedded reporters have revealed the fact that the munitions in question were already gone by the time US troops pushed forward to this particular storage area.”

You mean by the time we got around to paying attention to something we never should have ignored to begin with?

This is from a press briefing dated 3/24/03: “our forces are operating through Iraq, on the ground and in the air … we are now more than 200 miles into Iraqi territory.” On 3/25, we were told “on the ground, our forces are nearing Baghdad.”

In other words, days or weeks before we bothered to check the place, our generals had been bragging that our forces were in that vicinity.

Also, we had complete air superiority, flying 1,000 sorties a day. This was a known major weapons site, with high potential for hidden WMD. But somehow we looked the other way while the joint was looted? You haven’t explained why this is anything other than criminal negligence.

Also, this is a massive complex. According to Fox News, the site includes 1,100 buildings. It’s true there are reports of troops who say the stuff wasn’t there on 4/4 and/or 4/10. But these weren’t WMD experts, and there’s no indication they did a thorough search. It seems entirely possible they just didn’t look carefully enough. And it seems clear they didn’t stick around to make sure, and to secure the site.

“The reference to nuclear weapons in the first sentence led me initially to misread it as saying that nuclear materials had been taken.”

Negroponte saw fit to mention HMX to the Senate, and it was part of a long paragraph that strictly discussed numerous nuke-related items. In other words, when it was politically helpful to beat the nuke-scare drum, HMX was treated as scary. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and McClellan tells us “move along here, nothing to see, it’s just conventional.” This is hypocrisy.

“Doesn’t it seem likely given the logistics of loading,transporting and then storing 380 tons of material that it would be done during the last ordered days Saddam’s rule?”

Jim Geraghty’s latest theory is that Saddam moved the stuff between 3/8 (the date of the last IAEA inspection) and 3/19 (when our invasion started). He thinks that even though we knew this was a large and sensitive site, with known dual-use (i.e., nuke-related) materials, and even though our satellites would have seen the traffic, we would have decided to look the other way. Why? Because we were too polite to start the war early, he says.

Geraghty doesn’t bother explaining this: UN inspectors were on the ground until approximately 3/18. If we suddenly saw suspicious activity at this site, and we didn’t want to drop bombs, why didn’t we ask the UN to send some inspectors to take a look? Surely it would have been a great opportunity to prove to the world that Saddam was trying to cheat. We would have been happy to have one more reason to pull the trigger.

Geraghty thinks it’s implausible that the stuff got moved after we showed up. Really? They had weeks or months to do it, in the post-invasion chaos. By all accounts, our troops passed through roughly 4/4 and/or 4/10, but they didn’t stay. After all, they had an oil ministry to guard. The country was in utter disorder after Baghdad fell (and of course it still is). Lots of opportunity for enterprising Iragis with a truck to haul this stuff around. We know this: looting was rampant, everywhere. Why shouldn’t this site have also been looted? Again, by all accounts, we made no effort to secure it during this period.

“During the chaos of combat and post combat Iraq who would be able to organize such an operation and why would they bother?”

The whole country was being looted. Why not this site too?

“Iraq is awash in HE weapons.”

Please refer me to information concerning any other location that had 377 tons of MDX et al.

“Given the amount of weapons dispersed through out Iraq why would the WH have some particular knowledge about this batch?”

Because the IAEA repeatedly warned us about this site, both before and after the invasion.

“Is it possible that they needed to get back to the people who are in charge of such things, contact witnesses, check records, etc to get their facts straight.”

You mean they had to take time to put a story together about why they’ve been covering this up for 18 months?

“How many troops would have been enough for perfection?”

The bottom line is that if political and/or military contraints existed to prevent getting the job done right, those contraints should have been addressed before we jumped headfirst into the manure pile. Either do the job right or don’t do it at all. And be big enough to take the blame when you screw up. We’re less safe now, and we’re tired of being lied to.

“I guess finding 0.05% of Iraq’s conventional munitions was more important than actually fighting the war.”

I thought we had invaded the country specifically for the purpose of securing its weapons and keeping them out of unfriendly hands. If we weren’t equipped to get that job done, we had no business being there.

As far as “0.05%,” please call my attention to at least one other weapons site that was several square miles in area, with 1,100 buildings, and with known nuke-related materials that were under IAEA surveillance. This place was huge, and important, and we still looked the other way. Please explain why this isn’t unacceptable negligence.

“And no, we invaded the country to defeat its military and depose its government.”

I guess you must have been tuned to some other channel the scores of times the Administration reminded us that we had to go specifically to make sure his scary weapons didn’t end up in the hands of terrorists. Now, as a result of poor planning by Bush and Rummy, Iraq is a stunning bonanza for arms smugglers. Stuff that was locked up by Saddam, and also monitored by the UN, is now being dispersed all over the Middle East and probably beyond. I’m glad this makes you feel safer. I’m not drinking that Kool-Aid.

“Cool, you know for sure that the explosives in question did not disappear between January and mid-March?”

IEAE inspectors checked the seals on 3/8/03. Look it up. Also, we had the country under constant satellite surveillance. 40 big trucks are hard to miss.

“Maybe because this isn’t news because it happened 18 months ago and Scott McClellan doesn’t remember where every hand grenade in Iraq has been during that period.”

Another attempt to trivialize something that’s far from trivial. This is like Rummy telling us that widespread looting was unavoidable “messiness.” Or Limbaugh comparing Abu Ghraib to fraternity pranks.

Again, please call my attention to at least one other weapons site that was this large. Until and unless you do, your specious trivialization is disingenuous.

No one was expecting perfection. No one was expecting us to be able to collect every hand grenade, spitball and fireworks, to use your asinine examples. But this site is huge, certainly one of the biggest single weapons sites, if not the biggest. The fact that we looked the other way is mind-boggling. Remember that even after we dropped in on 4/4 and 4/10, we couldn’t be bothered to stay. We had more pressing business at the oil ministry.

“I can easily make it at home … Looks pretty conventional to me.”

David Kay is the CIA’s former chief weapons hunter in Iraq. Is he a source you dismiss? If so, please explain how your credentials compare with his. According to the LA Times Kay said “HMX and RDX were ’superb explosives for terrorists’ because they were stable compounds that could be transported safely and used for large-scale attacks.” More valuable to terrorists than ordinary shells, in other words.

“If it had been left up to most of the people at the UN and in the anti war movement Saddam could have made a gift of this stuff to anyone from Arafat to Zarqawi and they could have cared less.”

In other words we’ve gone from a situation where Saddam may have, potentially, hypothetically, in the future, given the stuff to terrorists, to a situation where we can be pretty certain the stuff is now in the hands of terrorists. That was a good result for 1,000 lives and $200 billion, wouldn’t you say?

Oct 26, 2004 - 10:58 am 78. Knucklehead:

The Kerry Spot has a link to the The Daily Recycler. Watch the video. Those few seconds accurately sum up about all one needs to know about this “story”.

Oct 26, 2004 - 11:00 am 79. cr13233:

This morning MSNBC interviewed one of the producers from their news crew that visited al Qaqaa as embeds with the 101st Airborne, Second brigade on April 10th, 2003.

This is the ’search’ that the White House and CNN are hanging their hats on (empahsis added)…

Amy Robach: And it’s still unclear exactly when those explosives disappeared. Here to help shed some light on that question is Lai Ling. She was part of an NBC news crew that traveled to that facility with the 101st Airborne Division back in April of 2003. Lai Ling, can you set the stage for us? What was the situation like when you went into the area?

Lai Ling Jew: When we went into the area, we were actually leaving Karbala and we were initially heading to Baghdad with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. The situation in Baghdad, the Third Infantry Division had taken over Baghdad and so they were trying to carve up the area that the 101st Airborne Division would be in charge of. Um, as a result, they had trouble figuring out who was going to take up what piece of Baghdad. They sent us over to this area in Iskanderia. We didn’t know it as the Qaqaa facility at that point but when they did bring us over there we stayed there for quite a while. Almost, we stayed overnight, almost 24 hours. And we walked around, we saw the bunkers that had been bombed, and that exposed all of the ordinances that just lied dormant on the desert.

AR: Was there a search at all underway or was, did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?

LLJ: No. There wasn’t a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was ? at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there.

AR: And there was no talk of securing the area after you left. There was no discussion of that?

LLJ: Not for the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. They were — once they were in Baghdad, it was all about Baghdad, you know, and then they ended up moving north to Mosul. Once we left the area, that was the last that the brigade had anything to do with the area.

AR: Well, Lai Ling Jew, thank you so much for shedding some light into that situation. We appreciate it.

Oct 26, 2004 - 11:32 am 80. rumblestrip:

HA

Let me, also, thank you for the link to: Why There Is A Culture War by John Fonte. This is a subject near and dear to my heart. This is not the right thread to make an extended comment but I will when the right thread presents itself. However, I cannot resist a couple of comments.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Marxist (socialist) perfectionism against American goodness: this is the war ahead of us.

What does John Kerry think? He said, a couple of weeks ago, in answer to a question about what kind of person he would like to see on the Supreme Court that he would like a person who would “interpret the Constitution according to the law.” WTF is that about?

Kerry, the far left of the DNC and their supporters want to turn America on its head.

I recommend to everyone the article by John Fonte. Understanding the enemy is the first step toward victory.

Oct 26, 2004 - 11:37 am 81. Knucklehead:

Junkbox,

This is from a press briefing dated 3/24/03: “our forces are operating through Iraq, on the ground and in the air … we are now more than 200 miles into Iraqi territory.” On 3/25, we were told “on the ground, our forces are nearing Baghdad.”

In other words, days or weeks before we bothered to check the place, our generals had been bragging that our forces were in that vicinity.

When’s the last time you were in the vicinity of a clue? You open your diatribe with a statement so stupid that that the sheer idiocy of it is the only thing that makes it quotable. By your apparent definition of “vicinity” I am in the vicinity of the Gigantic Graveyard Formerly Known As the WTC.

But it doesn’t take long for you to become even more stupid…

Also, this is a massive complex. According to Fox News, the site includes 1,100 buildings. It’s true there are reports of troops who say the stuff wasn’t there on 4/4 and/or 4/10. But these weren’t WMD experts, and there’s no indication they did a thorough search. It seems entirely possible they just didn’t look carefully enough. And it seems clear they didn’t stick around to make sure, and to secure the site.

The troops who were there were combat troops moving on Baghdad, you bozo! They weren’t WMD experts and that is totally irrelevant because the RXD and HMX in question here as “disappeared” are not WMD – they are a perfectly common components of HE and are mixed with various other HE components. This has NOTHING to do with WMD – nothing. You are an idiot and the rest of your post isn’t even worth the trouble.

The troops on the scene looked around as carefully as the combat situation allowed and they then moved on after sealing the roads around the complex.

You then go on to babble about air-superiority and satelite surveillance and some phantom 40 trucks. Somebody somewhere said 380 tons is 40 truckloads and idiots like you want to know how the satelite surveillance missed the 40 trucks as if trucks never came and went at this massive chemical production complex.

And then you go on to blather about how people mentioned HMX in reports about WMD and terrorism – no shit, Sherlock. Well, there’s your proof that this is the worst disaster that has ever befallen US military efforts and could there be any more clear proof that the Bu$hitlerEvilGeniusChimpPuppet is a moron?

There was some RDX and HMX at the place once upon a time. Its not there now and nobody has any evidence it was there when US troops were there or that it “disappeared” as the result of any failure on the part of a single US soldier.

You moonbats really can get yourselves worked up over the most ridiculous nonsense. Does you mom know how stupid you are? Here’s your homework assignment you young idiot. If you are old enough to do so, drive your mom’s car to the nearest “vast chemical production complex” and observe how many trains and trucks haul how much stuff in and out over the course of a couple weeks. If you’re lucky you’ll have an epiphany and realize how stupid you are. If the rest of us are lucky a bored secutiry guard will shoot your dumb ass for loitering.

Oct 26, 2004 - 11:43 am 82. Lonewacko:

The Belmont Club informs us that NBC reporters (no neocon stooges they!) embedded with troops at the beginning of the war found no evidence of those explosives when they arrived at the now ironically named Al Qaqaa.

Unfortunately, the NBC reporters arrived six days after the first U.S. troops. The first troops did find explosives, which might have been the ones in question.

And, the NBC producer who was with those NBC reporters says “There wasnít a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us.”

Details here.

Oct 26, 2004 - 11:45 am 83. Old Grouch:

The New York Times prints it. The vast majority of the MSM vomits it out to the world without checking it, examining it, or giving it proper perspective. Instead of using their reporters to check to see whether what the Times got it right they take it as truth the way a preacher quotes the Gospel. — Kevin P, upthread

And what’s more, even if the Times sees fit to correct errors, the outlets that reprinted the story usually don’t bother following up with the correction. This makes for what I’ve called “plausible-deniability” coverage, and it’s a real problem outside of the major media markets.Readers here may recall the flap about last August’s New York Times story that reported relatively poorer performance of charter schools as compared to public schools. Within hours after the story had appeared (IIRC on Monday, August 16th), the blogosphere had found flaws in the analysis of the data (it failed to correct for the higher number of “at risk” children in charter schools), and shortly later linked the Times story to a press release from the American Federation of Teachers, hardly a disinterested party regarding charter schools. Yet although these shortcomings became known within hours I was completely unsurprised to see the Times story on the front page of my local Gannett paper the following day with no corrections or caveats. And while the controversy stayed alive on the internet and in the New York media (including this Opinion Journal story), which ultimately led to a Times correction, you’d never have known it here in the heartland, because Gannett never did any follow up. Yet if confronted, I’m certain Gannett’s editors would have taken the position that it was a Times story– not a Gannett story– and therefore Gannett “wasn’t responsible” for the bias: Plausible Deniability.This is why problems at major papers and news services are so pernicious: Local media, by laziness or by design, give prominent play to the initial biased reports, while the corrections never seem to appear. (If you’re interested in an example of this at the state level, the folks over at Daschle v. Thune have this thing about the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader…)

Oct 26, 2004 - 11:49 am 84. Immolate:

The 40-truck thing that is being bandied about as if it were correct is obviously not. Nobody hauls 380 tons in ten-ton trucks. Ten to fifteen trucks is probably more accurate. Less is very possible.

Oct 26, 2004 - 11:57 am 85. Fresh Air:

Juke, cr and other trolls–

Did you read this part of Knuckle’s post?

U.N. inspectors have surveyed Qa Qaa some two dozen times, most recently last month. But some 1,000 structures there, organized into 10 or more factory complexes, have mainly been devoted to such conventional military industries as explosives and missile fuels. This was the highest profile of all the munitions sites. It was the incubator for Saddam’s nuclear program prior to Gulf I.

1. Can you imagine a complex with 1,000 structures? How big would it be? How long would it take to search 1,000 structures?

2. If Al Qa Qaa was as big and well-known as this, don’t you think it would have been on the “let’s-assign-a-company-or two-of-soldiers-to-guard-the-place” list? Is it even remotely possible that 20, 30, 40 truckloads of high explosives were smuggled out under the watch of the 101st Airborne? In the middle of a sandstorm?

Bear in mind, most of Saddam’s troops fled before we arrived. How probable is it that some brave souls (a) returned and snuck in to spirit away the high explosives; (b) had trucks and know-how to do so; and (c) escaped into the desert when AWACs controllers would have spotted them immediately, not to mention infrared sensors?

3. Even if all these remote possibilities are true, do you mean to suggest that George Bush is somehow responsible for not micro-managing this? Or do mean to suggest that the Screaming Eagles are a bunch of incompetents?

Oct 26, 2004 - 12:18 pm 86. Knucklehead:

Immolate,

If or how many trucks would be needed is just a back of the envelop calculation to get some idea of how much “stuff” it is. What the Barking Moonbats do, however, is take that “information” and immediately assume George Bush himself was standing guard duty while a convoy of 40 trucks arrived, loaded up with RDX and HMX powder, and then drove away. Were there no rail lines into this “vast chemical production complex of 1,100 buildings and 10 factories”?

They conveniently (or perhaps they really are that stupid) neglect to imagine that a vast industrial complex could have many dozens of trucks per day moving in and out and even if 100 trucks were used to move the “missing explosives” that could have been accomplished by 10 trucks/day for a stinking 10 days. If one listens to these idiots one would think nothing ever moved in Iraq w/o a UN inspector attached or a US spy satelite filming it. I can just hear their pissy, moaning voices, “How can 40 trucks move without us knowing it!?!? That Bush is so stupid!”

And, of course, the fact that the stuff is almost useless in pure form is conveniently neglected. No need to stop and acknowledge that the stuff needs to be mixed with other chemicals and plasticized to make it into a useful explosive for whatever purpose. Nope, all they need is “it was there, the UN said so. Now its gone, Bush screwed the pooch!” I used to view moonbats as one of life’s annoyances. But I’ve grown to loathe their willful ignorance and I’m really starting to hate them with a passion.

Oct 26, 2004 - 12:27 pm 87. flenser:

I thought the story-line from the left was that there were no WMD programs in Iraq? That nothing was found? Now it seems that there were in fact some explosives that were a Very Big Deal?

Twelve years after the first Gulf War, twelve years after Iraq was supposed to disarm, twelve years after the UN started “inspecting”, the IAEA is going around placing stickers on these explosives. In January 2003? And from this, we are supposed to conclude that there was a “rush to war”, and that the war itself was unjustified? If these explosives actually merit all the attention they are receiving, then presumably they also justify the invasion. What were these explosives doing in Iraq if the UN was doing it’s job?

But I guess it’s a waste of time expecting any logical consistency from the left.

Oct 26, 2004 - 12:28 pm 88. jerry:

YO Wacko and comrades:

You guys are pretty good at regurgitating MSM/Kerry talking points so why don’t you bother to tell us what credentials you have to analyzing the information in these stories. Are you explosive experts? Chemists? Physicists? Do you have experience in military operations? Do you know how national intelligence systems operate? Do you even have a good layman’s knowledge in any of these areas?

I have asked the wacko several times and I know its a bit tedious for the regular readers but we really must know whether you are an IE as I put it above or do you really know something of value.

As I have said before I don’t subscribe to the ìbeen there/doneî that requirement to have something of interest or value to say. In fact if, as I suspect, you are deficient in knowledge of such things I feel an obligation to recommend numerous books to help you understand how military operations work. If you take the time to educate yourself you might not change your mind but you will at least have a more coherent argument then you do now.

I donít expect you to respond because you hold the ABB faith as strongly as any Islamicist holds to the Koran.

Oct 26, 2004 - 12:34 pm 89. Fresh Air:

Awesome post by a linear thinker at Captain Ed’s. Like RatherGate, this thing makes no effing sense.

Oct 26, 2004 - 12:34 pm 90. charlemagne:

Let’s note a few more problems with what I guess we should call the Di Rita/Drudge/NBC ‘It was gone when we got there’ hypothesis.

To refresh our memories, this is the claim that the explosives at the al Qaqaa facility were removed by the former

Iraqi regime before the first US troops ever arrived on the scene. That wouldn’t make the loss of the material any less dangerous. And it would raise serious questions about why the material was allowed to be dispersed. But it might go some way to mitigating the charge of incompetence since this would mean that the material was already gone before US ground troops were able to start guarding it.

On Monday, the Pentagon gave mixed signals about what the first troops on the scene found. Or rather, an official whom the AP describes as closely involved in the Iraq survey work says the explosives were there, while Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita says they weren’t.

Di Rita’s claim that the explosives were already gone was picked up this evening by NBC news which reported that one of its news crews embedded with the 101st Airborne visited the facility on April 10th and found no weapons. This was in turn trumpeted by a number of conservative news outlets like Drudge and the Washington Times.

So, let’s review some of the problems.

First, military and non-proliferation analysts say that a detachment of soldiers not specifically trained in weapons inspections work and certainly an NBC news crew simply wouldn’t be in a position to make such a determination. We’re not talking about a storage unit with a few boxes in it, but a massive weapons complex made up of almost a hundred buildings and bunkers.

Former weapons inspector David Albright was asked about this on CNN Monday evening and he said, “I would want to check it out. I mean it’s a big site. These bunkers are big and it could get lost in that complex and it may be that they just didn’t go to the right places and didn’t see it.”

In any case, that visit wasn’t the first time US troops went to the facility. That happened a week earlier, on April 4th, as was reported at the time. According to an AP account from the following day, the troops made spot visits to some of the buildings and found chemical warfare antidotes but no WMD.

The same report says they also found “thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder” which were initially believed to be chemical agents but were later determined to be “explosives.”

Like the visit on the 10th, this visit seems to have been far from exhaustive and thus far from conclusive about what was there. Neither visit seems to provide clear evidence that the explosives were gone — and the first may point in the opposite direction. (Further details about this first visit to al Qaqaa are contained in this April 5th article by the Post’s Barton Gellman.)

Next comes the question of whether this really could have been pulled off at all under the circumstances.

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.

As the LA Times notes in Tuesday’s paper, it’s just not particularly credible …

Given the size of the missing cache, it would have been difficult to relocate undetected before the invasion, when U.S. spy satellites were monitoring activity at sites suspected of concealing nuclear and biological weapons.

“You don’t just move this stuff in the middle of the night,” said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Baghdad.

If we had seen something like that happening, it’s hard to figure we wouldn’t have bombed the convoy, since the US had complete air superiority through the entire campaign. And if the thought that WMD might be on those trucks had prevented such an attack, certainly there would have been running surveillance of where the stuff was going and where it ended up.

My point here is not to say that this could not have occurred. What I am trying to show is that Pentagon appointees like Di Rita don’t seem to have any clear idea what happened to this stuff. And in an attempt to push back the story, they’re cooking up various theories, most with very short half-lives, that just don’t seem credible to a lot of folks who follow these issues.

If you look at the multiple contradictions in the different stories administration officials told reporters over the course of Monday, it’s hard not to get the sense that they’re caught without a good explanation and they’re just making this stuff up as they go along.

The folks who really understand this stuff don’t seem to put much stock in what guys like Di Rita and Scott McClellan are saying. The LA Times piece, notes that one of them is former chief weapons inspector David Kay, that notorious bush-basher and left-winger. Kay thinks the stuff was carted off after the old regime was history. Kay told the Times he visited the site in May 2003 “and it was heavily looted at that time. Sometime between April and May, most of the stuff was carried off. The site was in total disarray, just like a lot of the Iraqi sites.”

Oct 26, 2004 - 12:51 pm 91. flenser:

An observation; left wingers are extraordinarily long-winded. Do you people think you could keep it down to a few short paragraphs? It’s not like you actually say anything in your interminable screeds.

Another observation; left-wingers are strangers to logic. The claim is made that the explosives disappeared after the war began, and after American troops were in the area. No evidence is provided for this claim. It is simply asserted.

What I am trying to show is that people such as charlemagne don’t seem to have any clear idea of what happened to the stuff.

They also seem to have a hard time describing why these explosives are so significant. The storyline from the left has always been that the inspectors found nothing. Is the new claim that Iraq was in fact in possession of banned substances? If true, does that not constitute further justification for the invasion?

Oct 26, 2004 - 1:18 pm 92. jerry:

Charlemagne:

I guess I can easily tell that you don’t know what you are talking about. US National Sensors don’t operate the way you see them used in Tom Clancy novels or movies like “Enemy of the State.” They aren’t there all the time and they can see everything when they are. If you have the requisite clearances then tell me where you are and we can discuss this in the proper venue.

If you don’t have the clearances then I suggest you stop talking about how effective US national sensors would be in noticing the movement of 380 tons of stuff since you donít know what you are talking about. After all, these same sensors gave indications of the presence of vast quantities of chemical munitions. Given the failure to find any of these chemicals why are you so confident that they could have found 40 trucks worth of stuff in all the clutter

Oct 26, 2004 - 1:18 pm 93. cr13233:

Jim Miklaszewski just went on MSNBC with this follow-up.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_24.php#003805

Oct 26, 2004 - 1:19 pm 94. flenser:

Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. According to NBC, troops from the 101st Airborne arrived the next day and could not the material.

At the Pentagon, officials said that the site had been repeatedly searched but the high explosives the IAEA described were never found.

The Pentagon said the Al Qaqaa facility was a “level 2″ priority on a list of 500 sites to be searched and secured. U.S. officials say it was visited dozens of times by U.S. troops in the months following the invasion, and — after searching 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings — they never came upon the stockpile.

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/26/iraq.explosives/

Of course, the unasked and unanswered question in all this is, how come Iraq had these munitions, after supposedly “disarming” for twelve years.

Oct 26, 2004 - 1:31 pm 95. Charlie (Colorado):

Ralph, the problem is that EVEN IF the stuff was somehow “looted” in that interval (as opposed to moved out by Saddam’s own forces, and you’re telling me that Saddam secured his weapons dumps with a padlock some looter with a bolt-cutter could manage?) and EVEN IF there was some interval between the time the first US soldiers arrived in which it could be looted (as someone pointed out, driving a pickup truck full of RDX in a combat zone doesn’t seem very smart), and EVEN IF this is somehow a new or suprising story since it was reported the first time 18 months ago and EVEN IF there’s nothing to the story that this was “leaked” by el Baradai and EVEN IF you’re not distressed that CBS News is trying to manipulate the election again (which I presume you’re not, since they’re on the side of the angels in your opinion)

THEN

you still haven’t explained how it is such a big story that we know 0.0005 PERCENT of the explosives Saddam was known to have, are missing.

Oct 26, 2004 - 1:34 pm 96. Sandy P:

–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.—

Why assume a convoy?

1 or 2 18-wheelers a day, maybe 1 every 12 hours.

Who really pays attention?

There were trucks going into Syria from January, IIRC.

And we never bombed the railroad tracks into Syria.

Oct 26, 2004 - 1:50 pm 97. Sandy P:

And how many UN inspectors were at that site?

How do they know everything was accounted for?

Oct 26, 2004 - 1:55 pm 98. Charlie (Colorado):

I’m beginning to think these are all political science majors bringing in these comments. Look at the way this is going:

“380 tons! That’s, like, really big! No one could move 380 tons of something without the all-knowing Eye seeing it.”

“Five centimeters by twelve centimeters! Those are, like, really big! They must be where the 380 tons of stuff were!”

“Seven days! Why, it’d be easy to move all those boxes in seven days!”

Grasp of reality? Where?

Oct 26, 2004 - 2:03 pm 99. greenleer@earthlink.net:

Flenser:

I’ll make it short. The NBC story on which Roger based his rant and CNN based it’s story is now debunked — by NBC. But of course I’m sure this won’t make any difference to you and Roger. Fighting the so-called MSM is soooo much more important than fighting terrorism.

Oct 26, 2004 - 2:40 pm 100. Old Dad:

Greenleer:

The NBC story is not debunked. Sure they’ve backed off a little, but the fact is that neither NBC, nor the NYTimes, nor CBS, nor the UN, nor John Kerry, nor you, nor me know what in the hell happened to the HE, who took it, how, or when.

Given these great uncertainties, don’t you find it a little odd that the Times ran with it, and that John Kerry continues to have apoplexy about something about which no one knows the truth?

I can’t tell you what happened to the HE, but I know a smear when I see one.

Oct 26, 2004 - 2:56 pm 101. Knucklehead:

Boy, those IAEA and UNMOVIC inspection teams must have been far more thorogh than the 101st and 3ID.

After all, they spent, like, entire man-hours at Al Qaqaa…

From the UN inspection reports themselves, via IraqWatch (hattip – The Corner)

At 9:00 a.m., the group reached Al-Qaqaa State Company… representative who submitted the group a list that represents the final balance of the explosive material HMX. Later, the group paid a visit to the site of preparing Al-Qaqaa explosive and took specimen from the site soil, and took video pictures to the mixture. Afterwards, the group paid a visit to Al-Qaid Factory and took a look at the material HMX stored there and videoed it. The visit was concluded at 11:05 a.m….

There’s 2 hours spent at the “vast chemical and explosive complex” by FOUR, count ‘em, FOUR inspectors.

The inspection reports go on… 2 hours here, three there, even one that lasted almost 4 hours! Talk about rigorous and thorough – I bet they had all sorts of meetings with key officials and wriggled and vigorously shook those seals they’d placed on those bunkers.

But we can’t believe the US soldiers who were there, and found those thousands of boxes of vials and huge piles of other munitions, and apparently had specific information of where to look and for what, when they say they didn’t find RDX or HMX when they first arrived or after repeated searches.

Nope, let’s believe UNMOVIC and the IAEA who have shown time and again they couldn’t find their asses with both hands and a divining rod. Must have all been carted off by looters with wheelbarrows and donkeys and Glad Brand sandwich bags while the Bu$hitler and his Evil Minions slept and had dreams of Blood For Oil and Imperial Hegemony.

Sorry, moonbats, but you lose this one too. Your beloved UN and your lapdog lackies in the MSM are, like y’all, lying sacks of…

Oct 26, 2004 - 2:57 pm 102. The Bugger That Beats the French:

Hi again jukie.

“You mean by the time we got around to paying attention to something we never should have ignored to begin with?”

I thought we were supposed to be paying attention to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons? And, you know, fighting the enemy.

“This is from a press briefing dated 3/24/03: ‘our forces are operating through Iraq, on the ground and in the air … we are now more than 200 miles into Iraqi territory.’ On 3/25, we were told ‘on the ground, our forces are nearing Baghdad.’

Do those ellipses perhaps include the part where the briefer said “at the Al Qaqaa facility?” Looked at a map lately? Here’s a hint: how far is Baghdad from Kuwait? You’re allowed to use a ruler. You also need to include the part of that second brief that says “our forces are at the Al Qaqaa facility” and that they weren’t doing anything else at the time, like, you know, fighting the enemy.

“In other words, days or weeks before we bothered to check the place, our generals had been bragging that our forces were in that vicinity.”

Wow, nothing gets by you. I mean, the Germans were 30 miles from Moscow in December 1941. Hmm, yeah, but they were, you know, busy. Fighting. War. And Moscow didn’t even have 6 million people in it at the time.

“Also, we had complete air superiority, flying 1,000 sorties a day.”

That’s 345 more than 655. What’s your point?

“This was a known major weapons site, with high potential for hidden WMD.”

That’s why our guys checked in, didn’t find any chemical or biological or nuclear weapons, then downgraded the site’s importance. That’s how military plans work, you know, that whole adaptation to changing circumstances thing.

“But somehow we looked the other way while the joint was looted?”

We did? You tell me. Come on, why aren’t you drawing on your 20 years of experience at the NRO and your eight years as chief of staff in an army corps headquarters? Wait, you *do* know what the NRO is, right?

“You haven’t explained why this is anything other than criminal negligence.”

Burden, meet proof. Do you even know what “criminal negligence” is? Don’t you feel even sillier? Is that possible?

“Also, this is a massive complex. According to Fox News, the site includes 1,100 buildings. It’s true there are reports of troops who say the stuff wasn’t there on 4/4 and/or 4/10. But these weren’t WMD experts, and there’s no indication they did a thorough search. It seems entirely possible they just didn’t look carefully enough. And it seems clear they didn’t stick around to make sure, and to secure the site.”

So you wanted a division to stick around this massive site for days or weeks to do a thorough search before the end of hostilities? Hot damn, why aren’t you the next Army Chief of Staff? You clearly know more about this than anyone here.

“Negroponte saw fit to mention HMX to the Senate, and it was part of a long paragraph that strictly discussed numerous nuke-related items. In other words, when it was politically helpful to beat the nuke-scare drum, HMX was treated as scary. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and McClellan tells us ‘move along here, nothing to see, it’s just conventional.’ This is hypocrisy.”

Machine tools can be “nuke-related.” Copper wire can be “nuke-related.” And “nuke-related” things can be used for non-”nuke-related” activities. Consider, for example, the case of common military high explosives. Their primary use is highly exploding. Use in nuclear weapons is somewhere down the list, possibly tied with imitation cocaine. You *do* know how implosion trigger fusion devices work, right?

“Geraghty doesn’t bother explaining this: UN inspectors were on the ground until approximately 3/18. If we suddenly saw suspicious activity at this site, and we didn’t want to drop bombs, why didn’t we ask the UN to send some inspectors to take a look? Surely it would have been a great opportunity to prove to the world that Saddam was trying to cheat. We would have been happy to have one more reason to pull the trigger.”

Yep, because ordinary military high explosives are obviously chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. And because Saddam didn’t move around identical explosives at the same site under IAEA seal years before. And because we didn’t have plenty of other instances of Saddam’s cheating, like banned ballistic missiles developed at the same site. Sure. I forgot you’re also a FSO at the embassy in Paris and that you know all about what and how to “prove to the world.”

“Geraghty thinks it’s implausible that the stuff got moved after we showed up. Really? They had weeks or months to do it, in the post-invasion chaos. By all accounts, our troops passed through roughly 4/4 and/or 4/10, but they didn’t stay. After all, they had an oil ministry to guard. The country was in utter disorder after Baghdad fell (and of course it still is). Lots of opportunity for enterprising Iragis with a truck to haul this stuff around. We know this: looting was rampant, everywhere. Why shouldn’t this site have also been looted? Again, by all accounts, we made no effort to secure it during this period.”

I guess you never bothered to explain how easy it would be to move 380 tons (and about 250 cubic meters) of a fine white powder without any resources to do so. I suppose a million guys could have each put a handful in their pockets, but that seems a little far-fetched, even for you, doesn’t it?

“The whole country was being looted. Why not this site too?”

Didn’t one of those reports you’ve been whining about say that road access to the site was very difficult? Or did guys in Baghdad decide to drop their TVs and just hop over to Al Qaqaa, 30 miles away, to pick up some cornstarch that they didn’t know what to do with?

“Please refer me to information concerning any other location that had 377 tons of MDX et al.”

What the f*** is “MDX?” Oh, I forgot that you’re a demolitions expert too.

“Because the IAEA repeatedly warned us about this site, both before and after the invasion.”

Would this be what ElBaradei said last week once he decided he needed Kerry to win to keep his job? Just checking.

“You mean they had to take time to put a story together about why they’ve been covering this up for 18 months?”

A “coverup” assumes anyone was asking about this 18 months ago, which they weren’t, because it isn’t news.

“The bottom line is that if political and/or military contraints existed to prevent getting the job done right, those contraints should have been addressed before we jumped headfirst into the manure pile. Either do the job right or don’t do it at all. And be big enough to take the blame when you screw up. We’re less safe now, and we’re tired of being lied to.”

You didn’t answer. How many troops would have been necessary to secure over 99.95% of Iraq’s conventional munitions within a week of the initiation of hostilities? Please provide a number. You may round to the nearest division. While you’re at it, please identify instances of “being lied to.” You may NOT include instances in which you just thought you were being lied to because you’re too ignorant to know what’s going on.

“I thought we had invaded the country specifically for the purpose of securing its weapons and keeping them out of unfriendly hands. If we weren’t equipped to get that job done, we had no business being there.”

Did you pay attention to anything at all that I wrote? Obviously not, since you’re not capable of doing more than parroting Joshua Micah Marshall. You can’t secure anything in a country until you defeat its armed forces. And besides, we were concerned about chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, not ordinary military high explosives, so your point is not only stupid and irrelevant, but wrong too.

“As far as 0.05%,’ please call my attention to at least one other weapons site that was several square miles in area, with 1,100 buildings, and with known nuke-related materials that were under IAEA surveillance. This place was huge, and important, and we still looked the other way. Please explain why this isn’t unacceptable negligence.”

But I just said soldiers went in, did a quick survey for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, didn’t find any, and moved on to the more pressing task of, you know, fighting the enemy . . . oh never mind.

“I guess you must have been tuned to some other channel the scores of times the Administration reminded us that we had to go specifically to make sure his scary weapons didn’t end up in the hands of terrorists. Now, as a result of poor planning by Bush and Rummy, Iraq is a stunning bonanza for arms smugglers. Stuff that was locked up by Saddam, and also monitored by the UN, is now being dispersed all over the Middle East and probably beyond. I’m glad this makes you feel safer. I’m not drinking that Kool-Aid.”

It’s abundantly clear that you can’t actually read. Yes, the sole purpose of sending in 200,000 troops to Iraq was to get Saddam’s “scary weapons,” which apparently now include his 1,000,000 tons of ordinary military high explosives. I guess they weren’t supposed to worry about, you know, getting shot at by the Iraqi Army. Nope, wouldn’t be prudent.

“IEAE inspectors checked the seals on 3/8/03. Look it up.”

I can make stickers too. Yep. And you’ve still not yet explained why you’re so certain this stuff was not moved before March 24 or March 17. That will be due tomorrow. 500 words or less. Do your own work. Stop plagiarising talkingpointsmemo.com.

“Also, we had the country under constant satellite surveillance. 40 big trucks are hard to miss.”

Of course, you would know, what with your 20 years at the NRO.

“Another attempt to trivialize something that’s far from trivial.”

No, it really is trivial. Had you been paying attention at BUDS, you’d know these really are just conventional military high explosives, like the other 999,620 tons in Iraq, only far less dangerous, since they are fine white powders in their raw form and nearly impossible to detonate. An artillery shell has explosive packaged in a usable form with a detonator and is much more readily convertible to an improvised bomb. Please, enlighten us and tell us why this stuff is so dangerous, since none of the terrorist in Iraq have actually used it against us. Surely your SEAL training taught you that much.

“Again, please call my attention to at least one other weapons site that was this large. Until and unless you do, your specious trivialization is disingenuous.”

I thought we were talking about why these explosives are so dangerous? Now we’re talking about Iraq’s weapons manufacturing infrastructure? Golly, I just can’t compete.

“No one was expecting perfection. No one was expecting us to be able to collect every hand grenade, spitball and fireworks, to use your asinine examples. But this site is huge, certainly one of the biggest single weapons sites, if not the biggest. The fact that we looked the other way is mind-boggling. Remember that even after we dropped in on 4/4 and 4/10, we couldn’t be bothered to stay. We had more pressing business at the oil ministry.”

Yes, you were. The logical conclusion is that you demand that greater than 99.95% of the military explosives in Iraq be secured within one week of the invasion. That’s the simple truth. Again, please state precisely how many divisions were necessary for this. Also include your operation plan for doing so. Surely your course at the Army Command and General Staff College taught you how to do this? It should be a breeze for you.

“David Kay is the CIA’s former chief weapons hunter in Iraq. Is he a source you dismiss? If so, please explain how your credentials compare with his. According to the LA Times Kay said ‘HMX and RDX were “superb explosives for terrorists’ because they were stable compounds that could be transported safely and used for large-scale attacks.”‘ More valuable to terrorists than ordinary shells, in other words.”

Yes, when such a statement conflicts with what military explosives experts and basic chemistry say. Like I said, those explosives are far less useful than ordinary shells since it would be extremely difficult for some terrorist to make any use of them. You could prove me wrong by cataloging the number of attacks against American or Iraqi government forces using RDX, HXM, or PETN. Should be a simple task for you.

Oct 26, 2004 - 3:04 pm 103. The Bugger That Beats the French:

Flesner, Jerry:

They’re so long-winded because they have no original thoughts and regurgitate what talkingpointsmemo.com and dailykos.com feed them. It takes longer when you actually write your own material and research what you write.

Joshua Micah Marshall is by far the worst offender in the “instant expert” category. That’s how I know jukeboxgrad is ripping everything off from him, and I haven’t even read talkingpointsmemo.com today.

Oct 26, 2004 - 3:08 pm 104. Fresh Air:

Another nice tidbit:

Dana Lewis was the embedded reporter with the 101st for NBC, not whatever her name is. Can’t these guys even get their retractions straight?

“It has been an amazing experience,” said Dana Lewis, a correspondent for U.S. television network NBC, who spent the war with the Second Brigade of the army’s 101st Airborne Division.

Link

Oct 26, 2004 - 3:11 pm 105. jerry:

I’m all for open discussion but I see an emerging pattern. When you challenge ABBers to less us know what expertise they have you never hear from them. I am getting old and slow so it took me a while to understand that our friends like Wacko are employing a standard left wing tactic, i.e., when challenged by a question which they cannot answer ignore the questioner. Left wing activists are taught this tactic at an early age. This often works when the lefties have control of the venue. Well, they donít control this one. Roger does. I think its time to start ignoring posters who will not admit that they do not have the background to honestly evaluate claims and counter claims in the Military, Intelligence and Counter- terrorism arena. The critics who have this kind of background won’t be afraid to let us know. By engaging these know-Nothing in debate beyond one or two posting is futile. So I think we should start ignoring the Wacko crowd until they put up or shut up.

It is pretty clear that 380 tons of raw HDX/RDX could not be casually looted. This material does not come in solid bricks that could easily be stacked up to maximize the weight per volume. The material had to be removed before US forces arrived on scene.

Oct 26, 2004 - 3:13 pm 106. WichitaBoy:

Pardon me if someone has already mentioned this but I don’t have time to read all the comments today.

The problem with this story is that is pure “gotcha” politics. It’s like little kids running around saying “your underwear’s showing! your underwear’s showing”. It does nothing whatsoever to constructively address the real issues we face in trying to destroy terrorist-supporting states like Iraq.

The real issue–the only issue–is which of the two candidates will handle the terrorists and their supporters better. Assuming for the sake of argument that somehow this represents a screwup by Bush (which by itself makes no sense to me, but let’s leave it), the case that has to be made is that somehow an invasion launched by Kerry would have performed significantly better in finding and locking down these munitions under combat conditions than did the invasion under Bush.

That doesn’t even meet the laugh test, for three important reasons.

First, Kerry wouldn’t have launched an invasion in the first place. He would have allowed Saddam Hussein all the time in the world to collect and distribute munitions and WMDs while he continued to try to negotiate a global test with the French, Germans, Russians, and other recipients of oil-for-palaces largesse. Kerry is a ditherer, not a doer.

Second, how the armed forces behave in battle positions should in principle be a test of their professionalism, and not a function of who occupies the Presidency.

Finally, if a Kerry Presidency were to have any demonstrable effect on combat effectiveness of the United States armed forces, it would almost surely be immensely in the negative direction. Kerry’s prior behavior as a self-professed war criminal guarantees that.

Accepting that this news is bad, which I don’t, it would surely have been immensely worse under Kerry.

Oct 26, 2004 - 3:13 pm 107. Sandy P:

KerrySpot has a lot of good information.

One could pour this powder on the table, hit it w/a hammer and it would NOT explode.

Oct 26, 2004 - 3:16 pm 108. The Bugger That Beats the French:

jerry:

Simpler than that is that tactic of throwing out a lame, half-baked charge that is just plausible enough to a third party that it can’t be laughed down and must be rebutted. It takes them 10 seconds to make it and it takes you 10 minutes to rebut using facts and logic. This is a common litigation tactic, for example.

Oct 26, 2004 - 3:18 pm 109. MDP:

Tom Grey: “I believe the NRO Corner, but don’t like the fact they have no link to the NBC report they cite: Totten on Instapundit cites the Corner; Roger here cites Wretchard who cites the Corner.”

Is this what you’re looking for?

Link 1

Link 2

Oct 26, 2004 - 3:38 pm 110. veteran330:

I think I’ll take away the “this administration won’t admit its wrong” blather point.

There are two reasons for the administration’s behavior: the first is that Democrats are the sort of disingenuous people who were the president to do such a thing would have an ad on the air in 10 minutes saying “SEE THEY ADMIT THEY’RE WRONG”

The second reason is that, the last time I checked, we were in a war. It is very poor policy for an administration at war to admit to mistakes. Surely even Moonbats are able to see that.

“A tale told by an Idiot, full of sound and Fury, signifying nothing.” That is a perfect description of Democratic blather points. On the surface, delivered forcefully, they look like something, but having no substance to them they fall apart if you look at them very hard.

Here is a Republican Talking point: Why don’t you ask Commodore Kerry about the Vietnam commendation that isn’t on his web site, you know the one don’t you? The one the Vietnamese gave him in 1983: “Hero of Communist Victory”. Surely you know about that one don’t you? It was all over the TV News and in the newspapers back 21 years ago.

See now there is a real talking point: when you first hear it you go “That can’t be true.” but if you look into it you find out it is true.

Oct 26, 2004 - 4:21 pm 111. Syl:

The 40-truck thing that is being bandied about as if it were correct is obviously not. Nobody hauls 380 tons in ten-ton trucks. Ten to fifteen trucks is probably more accurate. Less is very possible.

Wrong.

There are about 25 million people in Iraq and each carried off a handful of the powder in their underwear.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:11 pm 112. iwritethebook:

For those of you who don’t know, Walter Duranty went to the Soviet Union during the famine in the Ukraine – a famine created by Stalin to punish the “reactionary” farmers of the area and to facilitate collectivization. Duranty’s reporting for the New York Times was even rosier than Pravda and Izvestia. Other American newspapers could not afford to send reporters to Russia, so they all relied on Duranty and the Times.

Today, we have the Internet and talk radio to counter the media monoliths, but I worry about all those people who just skim a few headlines from a newspaper or semi-watch the news while making dinner.

In the 60s and 70s, Soviet citizens would get the truth by listening to Radio Free Europe or by gleaning the real story from the last few paragraphs of a story in Pravda. . . kind of like the Times today. Dezinformatsia is still being promulgated, only today its biggest disseminator is the MSM.

Oct 26, 2004 - 6:51 pm 113. RepublicanBikergirl:

To the bugger who beats the French: I just thoroughly enjoyed the thrashing you delivered to LiberalWeiner#NNNN. Keep it going and I’ll come back for more.

To all of the MSM junkies out there: tip your head back and open wide for your next dose of special brand NYT-LSD.

Oct 26, 2004 - 9:55 pm 114. HA:

RattlerGator and rumblestrip,

I’m glad you guys found that Fonte article interesting. The article was published back in Dec 2000. Since then, the Culture War has escalated into a full-blown Cold Civil War over what kind of nation America will be going forward. Will American be transformed into European-style Gramscian Marxists like the Democrats want? Or will America transmit our Tocquevillian heritage to our children? Time will tell, but this election may be decisive. God help us if we make the wrong choice.

Oct 27, 2004 - 4:19 am 115. Potato:

Umm, why do we even believe there ever was an extra 300 tons of explosive? So far as I can tell, we have in the first place just the IAEA’s own inventory, which was prepared with the assistance of Saddam Hussein, who, um, had kind of an issue with telling the truth. Kept all kinds of stuff secret, as I recall.

And then there’s the poor guy in the interim government who said it disappeared during the looting. Now look, you can almost see how this might have went. Guy gets appointed, just moved into his office, sweeps out the broken glass, trying to figure out how to get a couple of chairs with all four legs, maybe a Mr. Coffee. . .and he’s looking glumly over the eighteen big file cabinets, full of twelve years of water-stained documents left over from his predecessor in the Hussein government, half of which are almost certainly outrageous lies prepared by government flunkies afraid of telling Saddam something he doesn’t want to hear. All delivered this morning by someone from Allawi’s office who says the PM is going to want a complete report on it all before a Cabinet meeting in four days’ time. . .

So then he gets a little phone call from the PM’s office. Hey, Mohammed, how’s it hanging? All moved in? Need anything? Yeah, well, we’ve got to send out for our coffee and half the time it’s cold before it gets back. Anyway, listen, I just got a call from some fussbudget at the IAEA. Says he needs to close the books on some dual-use high explosive they were monitoring out at al-Qaqaa. Sure, I realize we’ve got bigger fish to fry than doing a post-mortem on Saddam’s nuke program. But listen, can you just tell me where the stuff is now? Confirm it’s still out there? Give me the building number, so I can tell them they can come look at it sometime, make sure their precious seals are still on it? No?! Well, damn it, get me a report on this by tomorrow, OK? I’ve got a million things to do, I don’t want to waste time with this.

Poor Mohammed puts down the phone and contemplates the wall of filing cabinets. Big secret nuke-research base. What are the chances the paper trail is neat and complete? Oh boy, forget it. So he gets a jeep, drives out to the place. A God-damned mess, huge place, hundreds of buildings, pits, shacks, some locked, some not. Not clear who he’d have to get permission from to start opening locked doors. Hidey-hole for Saddam’s weird toys for two decades. Where to even begin? No way he can poke through this mess in 24 hours.

But on the way back, lighting strikes. Hah! Everyone knows there was all that chaos and looting in the first week of the war. It was on the TV. Lots of stuff vanished! Guns, ammo, whole fighter jets for God’s sake. Why not some plastique? Who could doubt it? More importantly, who could blame me? Added benefit: I don’t have to throw the blame on the Americans (who hadn’t arrived yet) or the UN (who hadn’t returned). Everybody wins!

So poor Mohammed writes out the memo and sends it on up the line, after which it’s dutifully passed on to the UN chair polishers. Mohammed gets a nice call back from the PM: Good work, Mohammed, glad you were able to nail that down. All serene.

Except, in the middle of the night, Mohammed sits up in a sweat. Wait a minute, HOW much explosive did I say just walked off in the fog of war? Four hundred tons? Fuck! Well, maybe no one will notice. I mean, what sensible person would even give a damn, anyway? This has nothing to do with security in Iraq — plenty of unexploded ordnance for a hundred years of civil war yet, and besides, who’s ever heard of a terrorist having trouble getting ahold of explosives? It’s like some kind of unofficial licensing test, probably, showing you can get the stuff. It’s the least important component of a nuke program, too, and it’s got nothing to do with rebuilding Iraq. Plus it happened a year ago at least and nothing’s happened in all that time.. . .nah, only a complete birdbrain would worry about this. . .

Oct 27, 2004 - 5:20 am 116. Oscar:

Roger,

As a writer, can you explain the phrase “sitting president” which you and others use? The is only one American President at a time, unlike some other republics, so what does the word “sitting” add to the mix? Certainly, former Presidents are addressed as Mr. President, but they are referred to as former or “ex-” Presidents. (I leave from consideration the odd examples of J.Q. Adams or W.H. Taft, who both held high political office AFTER being president, as there are no similar people alive today.”

Oct 27, 2004 - 11:21 am 117. Knucklehead:

Oscar,

Roger may know better than I, but I’ll make a guess regarding the etymology of the term “sitting president”. I suspect (can’t prove) that the term is a result of office being referred to as a “seat” – the person who holds an particular office has long been referred to as “sitting” in that office or “holding the seat”.

Oct 27, 2004 - 1:26 pm

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