The most important story of the last week which you undoubtedly did hear, updated

I have no doubt that you heard about the 380 tons of high explosives that vanished from the Al Qaqaa military facility in Iraq. The White House has been trying to pass the buck on this by claiming the explosives were already gone when US forces reached the site, particularly jumping on an NBC report that when troops of the 101st Airborne - with an embedded NBC reporter - arrived at the facility on April 10, 2003, a day after the fall of Baghdad, they found conventional explosives but not the high explosives that are the source of the issue here.

Don't believe the spin.

First, as the Daily Mislead said on Tuesday,

According to an AP report, U.S. solders visited the Al Qaqaa in April 2003[, five days before the 101st got there,] and "found thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder." Officials who tested the powder said it was "believed to be explosives." Yesterday, "an official who monitors developments in Iraq" confirmed that "US-led coalition troops had searched Al Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact." Thereafter, according to the official, "the site was not secured by U.S. forces."

(Sources for the quotes are with the Daily Mislead post, which is here.)

The important points here are that the site had been under IAEA seal until we kicked the inspectors out, the site was intact in March, and it then went unsecured. Equally important is something noted by David Brock at Media Matters for America, which is that the NBC report the White House pointed to did not, in fact, mean anything.

NBC's Miklaszewski clarified on October 26 that there was another reason why the troops arriving April 10 didn't find explosives - they weren't looking for them. Following up on his report on NBC's Nightly News, Miklaszewski offered this additional clarification on MSNBC on October 26:

"Following up on that story from last night, military officials tell NBC News that on April 10, 2003, when the Second Brigade of the 101st Airborne entered the Al Qa Qaa weapons facility south of Baghdad, that those troops were actually on their way to Baghdad, that they were not actively involved in the search for any weapons, including the high explosives HMX and RDX. The troops did observe stockpiles of conventional weapons but no HMX or RDX, and because the Al Qa Qaa facility is so huge, it's not clear that those troops from the 101st were actually anywhere near the bunkers that reportedly contained the HMX and RDX."

So we're left with what we started with: 380 tons of high explosives, previously marked, sealed, and contained, were left unsecured by US forces and now they have disappeared to who knows where and into who knows whose hands. Once again, our invasion has created the very danger we have been repeatedly lied to that it was supposed to prevent.

Footnote: There have been some rather silly statements made in the course of all the reportage and discussion of this. So let me run down four:

- On the left, there were a number of references to the fact that these explosives are used to trigger nuclear weapons. True, but irrelevant. Regular TNT can do that. It's just that these are better: More powerful (about 1.7 times the bang of the same amount of TNT) and easier to shape (the compression of the nuclear material must be precise to get the chain reaction explosion you want), they are more, you'll pardon the expression, "efficient."

- It took only roughly one pound of such explosives to bring down PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. Some have suggested that means that 380 tons = 760,000 pounds = 760,000 car bombs. Well, no. Remember that to bring down a plane you only have to blow a hole in the side. Physics will do the rest for you. Put a hole in the side of a building and you have a standing building with a hole in it. And since a car bomb will be at least a little ways from its target and since the force of an explosion drops by the inverse square rule (twice as far away = one-fourth as powerful), you have to pack in a lot more. Still, 380 tons is a hell of a lot of car bombs. Just nowhere near 760,000.

- On the right, the argument has been made that this is no big deal since the explosives are commercially available. In addition to wondering how they'd react to a story that a local drug gang had broken into a local gun shop and stolen a bunch of high-powered rifles and ammunition (both of which are available commercially), I'd have to say you're right, technically, they are available commercially. But, uh, 380 tons?

- Finally, we have the White House demanding to know why the media isn't focusing on all the ordnance they're destroying in Iraq. Yeah, why? And speaking of that, why don't they focus on how many planes did not crash into buildings on 9/11? Damn liberal media.