SwiftVets.com

[Mary Ann Parker]

Please help with "chain of custody".
This seems like another murky report to me.
Notice that the stuff was GONE a long time ago.
It just got reported!
Who's on first etc.
Mary Ann Parker


10/25/2004 04:50 AM
IAEA Says Tons of Iraq Explosives Missing

http://home.pdq.net/src/clari_news.php?id=528578&lim_num=0

*Associated Press/AP Online

VIENNA, Austria - Several hundred tons of conventional
explosives are missing from a former Iraqi military facility that
once played a key role in Saddam Hussein's efforts to build a
nuclear bomb, the U.N. nuclear agency confirmed Monday.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei
will report the materials' disappearance to the U.N. Security
Council later Monday, spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told The
Associated Press.

"On Oct. 10, the IAEA received a declaration from the
Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology informing us that
approximately 350 tons of high explosive material had gone
missing," Fleming said.
The Iraqis told the agency the materials had been stolen and
looted because of a lack of security at governmental installations,
Fleming said.
"We do not know what happened to the explosives or when
they were looted," she told AP.
Nearly 380 tons of powerful explosives that could be used to
build large conventional bombs are missing from the former Al Qaqaa
military installation, The New York Times reported Monday.
The explosives included HMX and RDX, which can be used to
demolish buildings but also produce warheads for missiles and
detonate nuclear weaponry, the newspaper said. It said they
disappeared after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last year.

President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleeza Rice,
was informed of the missing explosives in the past month, the report
said. It said Iraq's interim government recently warned the United
States and U.N. nuclear inspectors that the explosives had vanished.
"Upon receiving the declaration on Oct. 10, we first
took measures to authenticate it," Fleming said. "Then on
Oct. 15, we informed the multinational forces through the U.S.
government with the request for it to take any appropriate action in
cooperation with Iraq's interim government."
"Mr. ElBaradei wanted to give them some time to recover
the explosives before reporting this loss to the Security Council,
but since it's now out, ElBaradei plans to inform the Security
Council today" in a letter to the council president, she said.

Before the war, inspectors with the Vienna-based
International Atomic Energy Agency had kept tabs on the so-called
"dual use" explosives because they could have been used to
detonate a nuclear weapon.
IAEA inspectors pulled out of Iraq just before the 2003
invasion and have not yet been able to return despite ElBaradei's
repeated urging that the experts be allowed back in to finish their
work.
ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council before the war that
Iraq's nuclear program was in disarray and that there was no
evidence to suggest it had revived efforts to build atomic weaponry.
Al Qaqaa, a sprawling former military installation about 30
miles south of Baghdad, was placed under U.S. military control but
repeatedly has been looted, raising troubling questions about
whether the missing explosives have fallen into the hands of
insurgents battling coalition forces.
Saddam was known to have used the site to make conventional
warheads, and IAEA inspectors dismantled parts of his nuclear
program there before the 1991 Gulf War. The experts also oversaw the
destruction of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons.
The nuclear agency pulled out of Iraq in 1998, and by the
time it returned in 2002, it confirmed that 35 tons of HMX that had
been placed under IAEA seal were missing. HMX and RDX are the key
components in plastic explosives, which insurgents have widely used
in a series of bloody car bombings in Iraq.

ElBaradei told the United Nations in February 2003 that Iraq
had declared that "HMX previously under IAEA seal had been
transferred for use in the production of industrial explosives,
primarily to cement plants as a booster for explosives used in
quarrying."

"However, given the nature of the use of high
explosives, it may well be that the IAEA will be unable to reach a
final conclusion on the end use of this material," ElBaradei
warned at the time.
"A large quantity of these explosives were under IAEA
seal becase they do have a nuclear application," Fleming said
Monday.
The nuclear agency has no concrete evidence to suggest the
seals were broken, Fleming said.
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On the Net:
IAEA, www.iaea.org