The infantry commander whose troops first captured Al-Qaqaa said Wednesday it is "very highly improbable" that someone could have trucked out so much material once U.S. forces arrived in the area. The Associated Press:
Two major roads that pass near the sprawling Al-Qaqaa installation were filled with U.S. military traffic in the weeks after April 3, 2003, when U.S. troops first reached the area, said Col. Dave Perkins, who commanded the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, the division that led the charge into Baghdad.
While he and other military officials acknowledged that some looting at the site had taken place, he said a large-scale operation to remove the explosives using multi-ton trucks would have almost certainly have been detected.
[. . .]
Larry Di Rita, the Pentagon's top spokesman, said what ultimately happened to the explosives is unknown, although it remains under investigation by the Pentagon. But Perkins' description seemed to point toward the possibility that the explosives were removed before the U.S.-led invasion to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and not during the chaos afterward.
Part of Perkins' Brigade stayed at Al-Qaqaa until April 6, to deal with several hundred Iraqi forces at the facility. The 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, moved into the area on April 10.
According to the Associated Press:
Perkins described Iraq as littered with weapons, and the Qaqaa base as one munitions depot among many. Many other depots his forces found had been cleaned out, with weapons scattered, presumably so they wouldn't be destroyed by airstrikes.
With each additional fact that is reported it becomes more clear that the New York Times' rush to support the Kerry campaign with the faulty premature story was much more CBS RatherGate-like than something one used to expect from a rag called the paper of record.
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