This was probably not the kind of October Surprise the Bushies wanted to see.
Call it poor planning, call it arrogance, call it stupidity -- all or the above of none of the above. The long and the short of it is, there was a particularly large cache of very high-end explosives in Iraq that the US government left unguarded after the invasion. 370+ TONS of explosives have vanished.
The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year.
How much damage can that much explosive do?
The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa
There's much more. Go read it.
