Oh, By The Way...

Tucked away on page 12 of the New York Times was a quiet little AP story telling us that ANOTHER SITE WITH U.N.-SEALED ARMS WAS LOOTED!!! My God, this should have been on the front page of the paper. What drives me nuts about the story of the tons of explosives being taken from one site is the implication that it's the only one when there are COUNTLESS stories of screw-ups. The hundreds of tons from the one site, the nuclear technology looted over days (or weeks or months) from another site that we found about two weeks ago and now this.

"In a lengthy Oct. 6 report summarizing a fruitless search for banned weapons in Iraq, the inspectors known as the Iraq Survey Group disclosed that widespread looting occurred at Muthanna after the fall of the Iraqi capital in April 2003.

"An annex of the 985-page report said every United Nations-sealed location at the desert installation had been breached in the looting spree, and "materials and equipment were removed."

"Bunker 2 at Muthanna State Establishment, once Iraq's central chemical weapons production site, was put under the control of the United Nations in early 1991 after it was damaged by an American bomb in the Persian Gulf war. At the time, Iraq said 2,500 sarin-filled artillery rockets had been stored there."

Oops.