What were they thinking?

[pecunium]

Anybody here know what C4 is good for? For those who don't, it's the Army's preferred plasitc explosive. It's what makes the ball-bearings in a Claymore mine so effective. Carefully applied one could use a pound, or so, to take out a one story home.

We let looters get at 350 tons, or so, go missing, during the war.

I'd let this go, but for a couple of things... the most important being we knew exactly where it was. It was under seal in Al Qa Qaa. They were locked up because of the sanctions in place, from the last fracas.

Becaause they can be used as triggering charges for nukes, they were off limits, so long as the sanctions were in place. But, because they can be used in construction, and for other, non-military functions, they weren't removed. Just kept locked away.

The IAEA offered to help us look for WMD, and to police up known sites, after the shooting stopped, but we rebuffed them.

Anyone care to guess what those explosives are being used for now?

TK

Comments

I don't get the implication

[rosetta--stone.livejournal.com]

Besides who are "they"?

Re: I don't get the implication

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

They would be the people running the war (the one's who had a slide just weeks before the invasion which said, "to be provided" for plans on how to stabilise the area, once the shooting was done).

The implication is that some 350 tons of materiel, most useful for manufacturing anti-personell and anti-vehicular devices, as well as car bombs, were allowed to go missing.

When the existence, and location of same, was known in advance.

TK

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Why do I want a new administration? Because this is the sort of asininity that can easily be avoided, and they haven't avoided it. It seems like every single blessed time they had a chance to make an intelligent decision, they ran right out and made a dumb one instead.
Even as an ignorant civilian, I can grasp the concept of "Easily handled explosive material--should be kept safe and out of public circulation." What's their blind spot?

Everyone I've ever known in the military (that is, that the military didn't take steps to get rid of ASAP) was a past-master at the art of contingency planning--the school of "What if?"--an old marine I know says "What if can be the difference between alive and dead." Rumsfeld & Co. seem to treat "What if" as doubting and naysaying, instead of simple prudence. It's like they're operating on the Jiminy Cricket school of planning--"If you wish upon a star..."

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I've known businesses that were run like that -- save a nickle, spend a dime later; all that matters is this month's balance sheet. They all went downhill sooner or later -- mostly sooner. The present Administration appear to be trying to run the Government as if it were a business, which I don't consider a reasonable approach, and they're doing it with dreadful ineptness at that. They tried to operate The Iraq Project on the cheap, not sending in nearly enough troops to handle, adequately, the obvious potential problems many prudent people foresaw. It's possible (and all too often done, usually with poor results) to operate a science-fiction convention, say, on the basis of coping with the (many) problems and emergencies after they arise, but I don't consider that a sensible, moral, or acceptable way of handling something in which human lives are at stake. There are no dependable figures on the death toll in the Iraq Adventure, but the number is almost certainly above 20,000, more than half of them civilian non-combatants, and is increasing daily. And of course the original idea behind it all -- establishing a satrapy to serve as a base for American military domination of the Arab World -- was reprehensible to start with and is pretty much down the tubes by now.

[eirehound.livejournal.com]

I'd like to think that at least some of them are being used to blow up terrorists who make mistakes in handling high explosives, but that's really playing Pollyanna, now isn't it? :-)

Besides, it's too much to ask for - C4 has to be treated with respect, but it's not that touchy.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

C4... one can scorn it, so long as the blasting caps aren't out.

So long as one doesn't step on it too. Because, with something to raise the pressure, C4 actually doesn't need a detonation to set it off.

It's playdo... with extras.

Dynamite, on the other hand? Or mining unexploded ordanance, that's risky. 'Course with 350 x 2000 bombs at one's disposal (and those are generous bombs, one could do it with about half a lb.) one need not take the risky way.

TK

[eirehound.livejournal.com]

The present Administration appear to be trying to run the Government as if it were a business, which I don't consider a reasonable approach, and they're doing it with dreadful ineptness at that.

Well, all you have to do is look at the business track records of the executive officers. :-( If I were a shareholder and I saw their sort in the driver's seat, I'd start selling shares.

[dekarch.livejournal.com]

C-4 is FUN.

It's also incredibly safe, as long as you don't run current through it or apply heat and pressure at the same time.

What the party or parties unknown got was not, however, C-4.

What they got was RDX and HMX. I don't trust the Stars and Stripes 100%, but they are IMHO a lot more reliable on technical issues than say, the Washington Post.

RDX and HMX are several orders of magnitude more tricky to work with. RDX, or Cyclothrimethlenetrinitramine has an RE of 1.60 (C-4 has 1.34, TNT has 1.00) It's a good bit more sensititve. C-4 is 84% RDX, plus inert substances uses to stabilize it and make it more plastic.

At any rate, this stuff was under seal because it was of a quality that had no commercial use, little military value (you do NOT give Arabic EMs this stuff, you let them play with Semtex, which you can ball up and use as baseballs), and was high enough to serve as the initiating charges for nuclear weapons.

I doubt they are using it for something as mundane as IEDs, aside from the logistical issues in moving a couple hundred tons of explosive. Far more likely, someone nipped across the border and sold it to the Iranians. Which isn't good, but is more bad in the long run, when Hizbollah detonates a nuclear bomb in Tel Aviv or Los Angelos.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't get my info from the WaPo.

As for the compounding of C4, well I plead ignorance of the dilution... that's what I get for talking with rocket scientists who specialise in propulsion... lack of detail.

I'd have to look at the map before I was willing to buy that some 60 truckloads were hauled all the way to Iran.

The dual use aspect of it is more heat than light, since TNT is useful, just not as compact, nor stable (it was, after all TNT which we used to initiate Fat Man and Little Boy, as well as the test bombs at Alamogordo).

Regardless, not securing it was a stupid, and dangerous thing, and speaks to one of several types of incompetence.

TK

[dekarch.livejournal.com]

http://www.belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/10/rdx-problem-resolves-itself-little.html

Apparently this little story was basically manufactured from whole cloth.

More press idiots holding forth on what they do not understand, and it is being seized on by people who do not know what they are babbling about (Kerry, most notably).

If Kerry has made one statement about Iraq which is verifiably true, I have yet to hear about it.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No, that isn't what that says. What that says is maybe it was taken before hand.

Even that isn't well supported by the other people who have information.

David Kay says it was pretty much impossible for the stuff to have gone missing before the war.

"I must say, I find it hard to believe that a convoy of 40 to 60 trucks left that facility prior to or during the war, and we didn't spot it on satellite or UAV. That is, because it is the main road to Baghdad from the south, was a road that was constantly under surveillance. I also don't find it hard to believe that looters could carry it off in the dead of night or during the day and not use the road network."

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/27/wbr.01.html

Furthermore, the white powder referred to in that piece wasn't chem, and the guy who did the inspections says, "very highly improbable" that enemy forces could have trucked out such a huge amount of explosives in the weeks after U.S. forces first arrived there, considering the high level of U.S. military presence and how clogged the roads around the site were with U.S. convoys."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=3&u=/nm/20041027/ts_nm/iraq_explosives_pentagon_dc

Remember this would have been a fleet of some 30 trucks, minimum.

As for what that white powder was, "Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives. The finding would be consistent with the plant's stated production capabilities in the field of basic raw materials for explosives and propellants.

According to UN weapons inspectors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Iraqis filled warheads and artillery shells with explosives at the site and manufactured bomb casings there. The activities, for conventional weaponry, were allowed under UN resolutions. But the resolutions, passed after the 1991 Gulf War, ban Iraq from possessing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles to deliver them.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030405-chem-readiness01.htm

So the attempt to blithely dismiss this as made up from whole cloth is less than completly fair.

As for Kerry and you lack of belief in anything he's said, Bush hasn't been a paragon of virtue, and I know he lied about things, and see no reason he's stopped.

One of the more amusing is his decrying Kerry saying we need more troops, when Bownlee is telling Soldiers Magazine the Administration is planning to increase end-strength by 30,000.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

And I just found this

Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the science ministry's site monitoring department and worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam, said "it is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall."

He said he and other officials had been ordered a month earlier to insure that "not even a shred of paper left the sites."

"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."

He said officials at Al-Qaqaa, including its general director, whom he refused to name, made contact with US troops before the fall in an effort to get them to provide security for the site."

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=31993

The whole article is worth reading.

TK