Oops. Are you better off now than you were a week ago? Not so much, after you read this article. Oh, and the explosives missing in Iraq were under the protection of the US - ha! - but not really. They were SUPPOSED to be under our protection, but we didn't protect them. Even better, these are the explosive they used to blow up the Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, blow up the Moscow apartment building, blow up the foreign housing in Riyadh, you get the picture. And even better, they're also used to ignite nukes. George Fucking Bush. Our president.
The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.I just can't quote any more from this article or I'm going to hit somebody. We fucking gave them THEIR EXPLOSIVE OF CHOICE. Oh, oh, must hit something. Just read it. How can this utter total asshole remain our president?
The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year....
American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could be used to produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings. The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa, and somewhat larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.
The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it....
The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.
