After we invaded, acres and acres of ammo dumps were left unguarded. Insurgents were able to just walk in and take what they wanted. Many of the munitions used to kill American forces came from these (unsecured) facilities.

Add to that the Administration’s failure to provide body and vehicle armor PRIOR to the invasion and you just have to wonder how many of the 1,100 deaths could have been prevented if competent people were sitting in the White House and Pentagon.

The ammo dump story is not new. The Christian Science Monitor and ABC were reporting on it within days of the fall of Baghdad. No one listened.

So we have missing nuclear material from Tuwaitha and this. What else is missing? The insurgents are pretty well armed. They didn’t wish their weapons and ammo into existence. Regardless of whether Kerry or Bush wins on November 2, we...the world...are in much worse shape than we were the day after September 11. That’s Dubya’s legacy. Every time my son gets on a plane, my heart will be in my throat. Explosions in Madrid, Riyadh, Istanbul, Moscow, roadside bombs and car bombs in Iraq? How about the explosions that recently killed a bunch of Israeli vacationers at those hotels? Any guesses where those explosives might have come from?

Dubya has made the world a viper’s pit of danger.

Will the media pay attention this time? This morning’s samplings aren’t encouraging so far.

I posted the following comment on The Left Coaster, and will probably repeat it elsewhere as well.  This story needs to have legs.

***********

Thinking like George Lakoff…

Instead of “380 tons”, say 760,000 pounds. It’s easy to mishear the units and not envision the magnitude of this situation.

Other similes that might work:

*** enough to build 10 car bombs a day, every day for the next two centuries

*** the weight of two Boeing 767 airliners

As suggested, framing this in meaningful and resonant terms is important.

Thank you, N.  I am sure you are making these suggestions for the benefit of anyone else who might be reading since you clearly noticed the similes with which I framed my outrage. Right? ;)

50 adult elephants worth of explosives. Just melted away into the desert.

Provides the capability to blow up over one million Pan Am 103s.

The greatest explosives bonanza in history says the IAEA.

Regardless of how you say it...it is one monstrous disaster.

Yes, of course I saw (and appreciated) your similes.  They inspired me to offer my own. 

I do find 10/day for 2 centuries a more compelling image than 100/day for 2 decades.  As for elephants v. 767s, that’s a judgment call.  I’ve also seen it as something like 40 semi-trailer loads.

The money paragraph in Josh’s initial post (I thought) was this one:

A highly informed official offered the assessment that, “this is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information."

It’s not just criminal negligence.  It’s wilfull concealment of critical information for political purposes.  As somebody on CNN said, “We went to war because of WMD.  Then we don’t guard the WMD we find?”

They were not the kind of WMD they were looking for. Garden variety high explosives are not sexy. Had any of them had half a brain, it might have occurred to them that a few hundred tons of the stuff can make quite an effective WMD. It doesn’t have to be exotic to be massively destructive. Fine points (?) lost on small minds.

Should we remind of Dubya looking under furniture in the WH wondering if they were hiding under here...or over there? Dumb ass.

LOL. I’m tweakin’ you, N.

Are there any similes that can truly illustrate what a colossal screw-up this is?

I really am frightened to think of that much capacity for destruction being passed around in the hands of people who want us dead. There are so many of them now.

For now, the ones who are tasting it up close and personal are our troops. The ones who are being told to cruise around in unarmored vehicles and without sufficient body armor despite the apparent knowledge that hundreds of thousands of pounds of this stuff have been at large and it’s being used daily against them with horrific results.

The Hague is too good for these criminals.

Um. So how about the information that the NY Times conveniently forgot to add - that an NBC reporter was embedded with the troops who initially took that ammo depot in April 2003 and found it empty. Whatever was in that depot was moved before the war started.

http://tinyurl.com/3mymq - Embedded Reporter Saw No Explosives Search - Washington Post