Bush: In Deep Caca Over Al QaQaa
The Bush administration is in Deep Caca over Al Qaqaa. Minnesota TV station KSTP has produced what seems to be the smoking gun video“¦ or to use Condi’s phraseology, the mushroom cloud video.
Turns out that the station’s embedded reporters arrived at Al Qaqaa on April 18 2003, nine days after the fall of Baghdad. And the footage shot at the moment clearly shows U.S. troops breaking the seal that had been earlier placed on a bunker door. Inside that bunker, barrel after barrel of the now missing 700,000 pounds of explosives — the kind used as hyper-powerful bombs and even nuclear detonators.
KSTP’s story devastates the Pentagon’s unsubstantiated suggestion issued earlier Thursday that the explosives might have been looted before U.S. troops invaded Baghdad.
No.
Not only did the troops filmed by KSTP find the clearly marked explosives that had been under seal.. but then they up and left, abandoning the material to anyone who might happen along.
Friday morning’s L.A. Times has a sharp piece on the new evidence”¦ though whatever editor wrote the sub-headline has it ass-backwards:
News Video Is at Center of Storm Over Iraq Explosives
Reporters taped troops apparently finding munitions. Pentagon photo implies otherwise.
In reality, it’s the reporter’s video that trumps the Pentagon photo””a photo that in light of the new evidence proves absolutely nothing.
The Times quotes the Bush administration’s former chief weapons inspector from an earlier appearance on CNN in which he, simply, blew up the administration cover story:
Former top U.S. weapons hunter David Kay said the video, which showed soldiers going through the explosives as well as the apparent IAEA seal on the door, was strong evidence that the weapons were still in at least one bunker weeks after the start of the war. The IAEA had placed seals on nine bunkers in the complex.
“The seal was broken [by U.S. troops] and, quite frankly, to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken, but the soldiers left after opening it up,” Kay said on CNN. “You have to provide security.”
The missing Al Qaqaa cache was a fraction of the problem, Kay said. “Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.”
Kay said Al Qaqaa “was one of the most well-documented explosives sites in all of Iraq.”
…U.S. officials were warned about safeguarding Al Qaqaa soon after the assault began. Alarmed by the rampant looting of Iraqi’s main nuclear site, Tuwaitha, IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei wrote an internal memo about the potential “explosives bonanza” available to terrorists, which was passed along to U.S. officials.
“We put it to the U.S. mission in Vienna in April” of 2003, said Jacques Baute, the IAEA’s chief inspector for Iraq. “We didn’t hear anything back.”
One year later, Iraqi interim officials say they warned coalition head L. Paul Bremer III that Al Qaqaa had probably been looted after the invasion.
This story of staggering incompetence by the Bushies will wash through the Friday and even the weekend news cycle.
I’m skeptical, however, as to what it will mean politically. As this story has evolved over the last few days, it seems whatever momentum there might be in this race has shifted once again toward George W. Bush. There’s plenty to dislike about the President and plenty reason to oppose him, heaven knows. But John Kerry’s failure to ignite significant excitement among those outside the chattering class should not be underestimated.
(photo: a still from KSTP’s video clearly showing the wax seal of the IAEA on a bunker door at Al QaQaa on April 18, 2003).
UPDATE: Thanks to Juan Cole here’s a detailed transcript of the discussion Thursday ngiht between former CIA weapons inspector David Kay and CNN’s Aaron Brown. It’s rather definitive:
BROWN: I don’t know how better to do this than to show you some pictures, have you explain to me what they are or are not, OK? First, I’ll just call it the seal and tell me if this is an IAEA seal on that bunker at that munitions dump.
KAY: Aaron, as about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it, which obviously I would have preferred to have been there, that’s an IAEA seal. I’ve never seen anything else in Iraq in about 15 years of being in Iraq and around Iraq that was other than an IAEA seal of that shape.
BROWN: And was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?
KAY: Absolutely nothing. It was he HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.
BROWN: OK. Now, I want to take a look at the barrels here for a second and you can tell me what they tell you. They obviously to us just show us a bunch of barrels. You’ll see it somewhat differently.
KAY: Well, it’s interesting. There were three foreign suppliers to Iraq of this explosive in the 1980s. One of them used barrels like this and inside the barrel is a bag. HMX is in powdered form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons.
And, particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it that’s either HMX or RDX. I don’t know of anything else in al Qa Qaa that was in that form.
BROWN: Let me ask you then, David, the question I asked Jamie. In regard to the dispute about whether that stuff was there when the Americans arrived, is it game, set, match? Is that part of the argument now over?
KAY: Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match.
There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken and quite frankly to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean to rephrase the so-called (UNINTELLIGIBLE) rule if you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.
BROWN: That raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn’t know what they had.
KAY: I think quite likely they didn’t know they had HMX, which speaks to the lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area but they certainly knew they had explosives.
And to put this in context, I think it’s important this loss of 360 tons but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.
BROWN: Could you — I’m trying to stay out of the realm of politics.
KAY: So am I. BROWN: I’m not sure you can necessarily. I know. It’s a little tricky here but is there any reason not to have anticipated the fact that there would be bunkers like this, explosives like this and a need to secure them?
KAY: Absolutely not. For example, al Qa Qaa was a site of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) super gun project. It was a team of mine that discovered the HMX originally in 1991. That was one of the most well documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented
October 29th, 2004 at 12:34 am
The pro-occupation bloggers are in classic states of denial, running out of talking points.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/international/middleeast/28bomb.html
Speaking of Eyerak, driving along 94E back into MPLS, I saw a sign hanging from a bridge that crosses the thruway that said, “Iraq WAR Paytoll Stop Ahead: Toll $ 2,546″
October 29th, 2004 at 12:37 am
“, it seems whatever momentum there might be in this race has shifted once again toward George W. Bush”
Really?
“According to the Herald poll, done by Zogby International, Kerry is positioned to win Miami-Dade by anywhere from 90,000 to 100,000 votes.
A margin that large in Florida’s most populous county would be hard for Bush to make up across the rest of the state [...]“
October 29th, 2004 at 4:50 am
Definitive? Really? Seems to be a lot of deductive reasoning and cognitive leaping going on. For an alternate, and skeptical, review of what we “know”, go here:
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/
and read the post dated Friday, October 29, 2004 titled “The Return of the RDX”.
As for the political impact, this is along the lines of: “I can’t say I know what happened but I think you should ask my opponent about his whereabouts on August 5th”.
Does The New Yorker still hold to their assertion that the Bushies have run the dirtiest campaign and that Kerry is only responding and by yelling “he started it!”? Kerry sure is getting lots of help from the MSM.
October 29th, 2004 at 5:07 am
THUS SPAKE DUBYA (without the tiniest hint of irony — or shame):
“A president needs to get all the facts before jumping to politically motivated conclusions”
October 29th, 2004 at 5:22 am
Charge, counter-charge, charge, counter-charge!
We still don’t know what if anything happened at Al QaQaa, information says as little as three tons as much as 380+ tons.
The Bushies did it… Oh, a PFC or Sgt. called bush and said “Hey, Mr. Prez, we found this stuff what do we do with it. To which Bush(or bushies) said “Oh, just leave it, it’s probably nothing.”
How tiresome, and yet, it’s the stuff of Dreams for the Kerry-ites. They can’t show their man has anything, so at least show that the bushies are clueless. Hmm, kinda clueless themselves if you will be honest about it.
Oh, and steve, posting a link to the NYTimes is silly, we all know where they stand and if you think them “non-partisan” then you think the rest of us are shallow.
October 29th, 2004 at 5:42 am
“|” writes, “”According to the Herald poll, done by Zogby International, Kerry is positioned to win Miami-Dade by anywhere from 90,000 to 100,000 votes.”
But RCP poll has Bush ahead in all but two (LATimes and Reuters/Zogby) and those two show a tie the three way (Bush/Kerry/Nader.)
in the Head to Head, Bush is UP by 1 point to 6 points, with the 6 point lead according to CNN/USA/Gallup and even the LATimes has it up by 1 in the head to head catagory.
I’m not worried about a single area such as Miami-Dade.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:18 am
OT: another completely irony-free statement for the books:
“Please do not believe everything you hear and read.”
– Bill O’Reilly, Fox Network, 10/28/04
October 29th, 2004 at 7:26 am
I’m taken aback at GMRoper’s mind-numbing reaction to the preponderance of evidence on this disturbing development. If I were a psychologist I’d suggest that…. Oh, nevermind.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:40 am
“Oh, and steve, posting a link to the NYTimes is silly, we all know where they stand and if you think them “non-partisan” then you think the rest of us are shallow.”
GM, you are not showing due appreciation to the newspaper that helped Bush sell his marketing campaign of “WMD in IRAQ” before the war. You should not be so harsh on prowar newspapers. I certainly appreciated the NYT hiring a neocon to cover the WMD sales pitch.
On polls, caution there GM, you’re talking about national polls, about as relevant to the election outcome as the fact that the Red Sox were down by 3-0. More relevant, and surely you’re aware of this I hope, are swing state polls, momentum.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:55 am
The unfortunate truth is that this al QaQaa story is just a snapshot in a much larger picture of inexplicably incompetent planning and consistent miscalculation in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
There is also a study using a very credible methodolgy being released by Lancet, the journal of the British medical association, on increases in Iraqi death rates over the past year and a half suggesting that as many as 100,000 people have died as a direct and indirect result of the war, ensuing chaos and terrorism unleashed. There comes a point at which, “But Saddam’s gone!” ceases to cut it.
These are the results of a carefully crafted policy by a rather small, identifiable group of people who acted against an enormous amount of counter-evidence and alternative advice. Their reactions even to proof of large and very consequential errors are disturbing, to say the least.
I’ve racked my brain for some witticism to wrap around this – some light, sarcastic remark to throw it all into frame. It just won’t come. Where is the crazed, blistering, irredeemably rude “bucrds” now when we need him ?
October 29th, 2004 at 8:15 am
Silent Cal writes, “I’m taken aback at GMRoper’s mind-numbing reaction to the preponderance of evidence on this disturbing development. If I were a psychologist I’d suggest that…. Oh, nevermind.”
Cal, that’s because you have a closed mind-set when it comes to the “evidence.” I on the other hand am waiting to be convinced. That hasn’t happened yet and, given when this “information” was originally “discovered” and then when the NYTimes and CBS “conspired” to present it, I have to think that maybe, just maybe it’s a lot of BS. It may be true, but we really don’t know that yet do we? And until we know for sure, I’m not willing to buy into an “october surprise.” If you want to, if the others want to fine. But to me it smacks of desperation. Mind Numbing Reaction indeed!
October 29th, 2004 at 8:16 am
I’ve actually gone to the “belmont club” link suggested by the commenter above and they are crying in the wilderness. They raise questions that have been answered definitively, unless they consider weapons inspector David Kay some kind of shill for Kerry. This answer to why the IDEA was placing seals on non-nuclear explosives is simple and known to anyone who’s done even minimal research into the story – the explosives in question are so powerful that they are considered dual use, i.e. they are the explosives used as detonators in actual nuclear weapons and therefore came under IDEA control. And of course Mr. Kay, who’s inspections unit initially put this al Qa Qaa site under control back in the nineties, has watched the embedded journalists’ tape in question and affirmed that what is seen on the tape is what he saw on the ground in Iraq. Apparently the Belmont Club isn’t merely skeptical, it’s ill-informed – perhaps deliberately so, to give our friends like the commenter above something to cling to in the final days of a closely fought election.
Give me a bit more time and I swear I’ll come up with something ironic or clever.
October 29th, 2004 at 8:18 am
“But to me it smacks of desperation.”
Indeed…
October 29th, 2004 at 8:22 am
From another website. “If you review the pictures on the KSTP web site, http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S3741.html?cat=1, that has the ABC video everyone is using you can see a very clear picture of a seal with its number (#144322). The PDF document of the UN inspections available show the numbers of the seals and none of them have that number. Therefore, it is clear that the bunkers that ABC videoed were not the ones that held the HMX the UN inspected.”
I’m not sure it’s clear, but it is one more interesting piece of the puzzle. Mind Numbing Indeed!
October 29th, 2004 at 8:22 am
Come on.
The reports on the amount of stuff ranges from 3 tons to 380 tons. The IAEA was there but no one can say for certain that they inspected the actual contents of the bunkers despite the apparent fact that they put stickers and locks on things. The IAEA would seem to be operating outside the bounds of its charter by inspecting conventional rather than nuclear/WMD weapon sites. No one seems to be able to say whether the contents were RDX, HMX, or some fractional combination of each. There is some question as to the nature and accuracy of the labels on the containers. There are surveillance photos that suggest content relocation activity. There is intelligence that suggests the Russians were involved in helping the Iraqi’s move some or all of this stuff to Syria before the war began. Even if 380 tons is right it would represent a very small fraction of the total of 400,000 tons that we have seized and or destroyed.
Now, I’m not saying that this absolves Bush and the Military on the question of proper prosecution of the war, but we are a long way from saying that this is definitive proof of a major screw up.
But what we can say for certain is that the timing of all these reports and revelations is very interesting.
October 29th, 2004 at 8:24 am
Cal, you want to be convinced! And that is OK. Just don’t expect everyone to have the same mindset that you do. OK? I am yet to be convinced and when (and if) I am, then I’ll scream and shout about it, as I have about other administration screwups. But for damn sure, not until then.
October 29th, 2004 at 8:26 am
One other thing, from the transcript above:
“KAY: Aaron, as about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it, which obviously I would have preferred to have been there…”
I would argue that everything he says followin that comment, while respecting his postion and expertise, is speculation not fact.
October 29th, 2004 at 8:36 am
Slightly OT, but connected are the predictions of the winner in the Weekly Standard. What is odd is that some of the conservative writers are predicting a Kerry win. Verrrrry Interrressstink!
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/831ikvkm.asp
October 29th, 2004 at 8:39 am
Listen to what weapons inspector David Kay said when asked about this by Aaron Brown …
AB: Was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?
DK: Absolutely nothing. It was the HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.
And then a moment later …
“HMX is in powder form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons. And particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it, that’s either HMX or RDX. I don’t know of anything else in al Qaqaa that was in that form.”
Whatever else you can say about him, David Kay knows a thing or two about this subject. And he seems positive.
(I couldn’t help but imagine what GMRoper would be saying right now if David Kay were making equally persuasive comments about stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons had they been found. Can anyone honestly imagine GM being equally “skeptical” under that scenario ? And of course the notion that this is all “just politics” is…well, it’s just politics and pretty darn shabby, dishonest politics if you ask me. )
October 29th, 2004 at 8:50 am
It may not be all politics but the timing sure is interesting. The inspections and reporting of that site happened 18 months ago. There are lots of people who want Bush to lose this election. What reasonable explanation is there to explain this all being released within a week of the election?
October 29th, 2004 at 8:54 am
Surley call writes, “There is also a study using a very credible methodolgy being released by Lancet, the journal of the British medical association, on increases in Iraqi death rates over the past year and a half suggesting that as many as 100,000 people have died as a direct and indirect result of the war, ensuing chaos and terrorism unleashed. There comes a point at which, “But Saddam’s gone!” ceases to cut it.”
Credible methodology? You have GOT to be KIDDING!
This one is so easy to take down. The following does it easy, with no effort, no sweat.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/102904J.html
October 29th, 2004 at 8:56 am
Comparing tons of RDX/HDX lost to tons of disparate weapons destroyed is a false comparison because of the potency of the explosives in question. It is also a fact that huge stores of munitions and weapons in dumps all over Iraq were looted by the ton after the war by God knows who.
This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s an extreme example – so extreme that the IDEA and the Allawi government sounded an alarm.
Of course, our friends would actually have us believe that because the story is being covered by the New York Times, ABC and CBS it’s beneath their consideration and “political”. Perhaps this is helps us understand what has come to be known as “the faith-based community.”
October 29th, 2004 at 9:00 am
Cal writes, “Perhaps this is helps us understand what has come to be known as “the faith-based community.”
Cal, that was cute and I’m not being cute when I said it. It was indeed humorous/ironic/cute.
October 29th, 2004 at 9:10 am
I’m not opposed to thinking that we might have missed some of the explosives in Iraq. But over at Power Line they’ve been calculating the storage requirements for the amount that the IAEA claims was lost. The video doesn’t show enough barrels. Somebody was also pointing out that the RDX and HMX is stored wet (makes sense to me, lots of enegergetic material is stored and handled under water to desensitize it) so that rules out cardboard drums.
Given the loose handling by the IAEA prior to the invasion, and the amount of US military traffic in the area after the invasion, I have a hard time swallowing this one.
October 29th, 2004 at 9:19 am
I find it hard to believe that the same person who rather enthusiastically treated us to polling data based on 900 or so phone calls earlier in the thread provides this particular techcentral link to debunk the Lancet’s survey methodology. The point, and the only point, in the link is that a sample of 1000 families with a 95% confidence rate isn’t the same thing as absolute proof. In the course of snide remarks about “the left’s” inability to do simple math the poster asserts that a 95% confidence rate in polling samples means that there’s only a 5% chance it’s accurate.
I’m not a social scientist or statistician, so this is all Arabic to me. But the study was actually conducted out of Johns Hopkins medical school. I just have a hunch that researchers who have developed sophisticated epidemiology models over many years might just be more accurate in their methodology than is suggested by a poster at techcentral (“where free markets meet science”, whatever that means). You might even say, I have faith.
October 29th, 2004 at 9:24 am
I guess, Ron, what I have a hard time swallowing is the notion that the point of this story is that some of the explosives in Iraq were “missed”, I thought that the location and nature of these weapons was well known via the inspection process. I also thought that those were American troops examining these explosives in the embeds’ video tape. Also, the accusation, in the light of what is evident, of “loose handling by the IDEA prior to the invasion” strikes me as misdirection worthy of a DOD spokesperson.
October 29th, 2004 at 9:59 am
It would be hilarious, were it not tragic, that having invaded Iraq over weapons that did not exist, GWB now cannot manage to secure and safeguard those that did. Not only that, after rushing in without a shred of evidence, he now complains when someone makes the quite reasonable judgment that object X is missing because it’s not there. I’m laughing: Har har.
October 29th, 2004 at 10:00 am
loudmouth cal
I’m aware that the point of the story is supposed to be that the Bush administration erred badly by not having enough troops to secure these explosives. But there are enough questions about whether the stuff was there before the 3rd ID came through, and whether the drums on the video were the explosives in question, that I’m going to need something more. I don’t see where it’s been proven conclusively that they were not lost under our watch, but neither has it been proven that they were. (Has Holbrooke changed his story from “we don’t know what happened” yet?)
As for the IAEA, did you see where in 1995 we requested the stuff be removed? Did you see that they found less material in January than they placed under seal? Where they recognized that the bunkers could be accessed without disturbing the seals? The satellite photos of trucks at an IAEA site before the war? The lack of rigorous inspection in March? I can find those links if you need them. And I’m thinking it wasn’t the IAEA that put all that white powder in tubes with Arabic labels, so the site was likely accessed after the March inspection.
I’ll call that loose handling.
October 29th, 2004 at 10:04 am
Someone cogently notes: “Comparing tons of RDX/HDX lost to tons of disparate weapons destroyed is a false comparison because of the potency of the explosives in question.”
Indeed, especially in view of the typical mode of deployment for explosives in the Iraq insurgencies: IEDs (improvised explosive devices) which frequently precede other attacks, which increasingly constitute the entire attack, and which can be quite deadly with little risk to those deploying them. Garage-door opener and car alarm electronics work fine for triggering them from a distance, and these aren’t hard to find in Iraq.
Given a choice between a pound of bullets that will mostly ricochet around or end up embedded in Kevlar, resulting only in U.S. air support that blows the insurgents’ firing position to smithereens, vs. a pound of explosive which will most likely do the trick if embedded in an asphalt roadway when a fuel convoy is passing over, a smart insurgent will go for the explosive. And it sure looks like there are some smart insurgents in Iraq.
As for the timing of this revelation – well, it all comes out of a communique from ElBaradei. What goes around comes around. You might remember ElBaradei from that day when Colin Powell (who quite possibly was set up himself) strove mightily to pull off an Adlai Moment at the U.N. A moment that the U.N. weapons inspectors probably found either highly embarrassing (if they believed Powell) or excruciatingly vexing (if, as I suspect, they did not believe what he was saying.) In any case, the discomfiture of both Blix and ElBaradei was quite visible on television, and both are usually very cool and collected characters.
We all know what came of Powell’s Adlai Moment: the final nail in the coffin of public doubt about Iraqi WMD was pounded in, on the basis of sketchy evidence; and the supposed slam-dunk conclusions about chemical weapons trailers turned out to be bogus. If I were ElBaradei, I’d have it out for the Bush administration too. Imagine that you were running a professional international organization with a pro bono agenda, and you got successfully upstaged by liars. Wouldn’t you feel the same way?
Was ElBaradei’s timing politically calculated against Bush et. al? Well, if so, then I applaud it.
October 29th, 2004 at 10:45 am
“We all know what came of Powell’s Adlai Moment: the final nail in the coffin of public doubt about Iraqi WMD was pounded in, on the basis of sketchy evidence;”
One point of clarification, in the US (due to the liberal media conspiracy) the NYT, Washington Post, NPR, Miami Herald, etc. sold the UN speech as an “Adlai moment” and repeated the mantra of “brilliant speech, brilliant speech, brilliant speech”…Here, though is the difference. The media in Britain almost immediately,within 12 hours, were picking apart point by point all the errors and distortions in Powell’s speech. Thus, in Europe, within 24 hours almost every European knew that the speech referred to a dossier based on plagiarized graduate student’s paper as ‘brilliant’. Glenn Rangwala, the professor who was responsible for revealing the fraudulent basis of the British “dossier” also provided a systematic rebuttal of the Bush/Blair claims about WMDs falling from the sky. This document rebutting the US media party line was an outstanding resource, known by most European journalists covering the preparation for the occupation of Iraq, but American journalists were blissfully unaware of it:
http://traprockpeace.org/iraqweapons.html
October 29th, 2004 at 10:48 am
“That hasn’t happened yet and, given when this “information” was originally “discovered” and then when the NYTimes and CBS “conspired” to present it,”
GM, you really should show more respect to the corporate media, they did an outstanding outstanding job selling Bush’s marketing campaign for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. They deserve far more appreciation than you seem willing to give.
October 29th, 2004 at 11:09 am
Steve writes, “GM, you really should show more respect to the corporate media, they did an outstanding outstanding job selling Bush’s marketing campaign for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.”
Steve, I long ago quit believing any thing the mainstream media (biased left OR right) purports to be true. That you still do indicates a place I’m not willing to go. That you are, willing to go there that is, says a lot about our political differences. On the other hand, your choice of baseball teams to root for indicates a high degree of intellect and perspicacity. Yea Sox, 8 straight, and beat the (damn) yankees to boot.
October 29th, 2004 at 11:23 am
As a lefty, I don’t trust everything I read in the paper either. But when the NY Times presents some piece of info as a FACT, I tend to believe them until I hear otherwise (and that does happen from time to time). That trust is the price I pay for not doing my own journalistic work.
Question for the QaaQaa doubting conservatives: What news outlets/sources do you trust, if any?
October 29th, 2004 at 12:37 pm
Mavis, what a good question. I tend to trust people from the 101st and 3ID who were there, I trust conservative sources in general (but damn sure not always – even then I question) I trust people that do not seem to have an axe to grind.
I do not trust the NYTimes, CBS, NBC, I occasionally trust ABC and Occasionally CNN’s “world wrap up” coverage (the foreign correspondent part) and I trust my personal judgment about what seems to be right according to what I know.
I cannot speak for others, thems my own views.
October 29th, 2004 at 12:38 pm
P.S.
I also judiciously trust (underline judiciously) the Washington Post and Washington Times. It depends.
October 29th, 2004 at 1:07 pm
“Steve, I long ago quit believing any thing the mainstream media (biased left OR right) purports to be true. That you still do indicates a place I’m not willing to go.”
Heck no, but the implication seems to be that the NYT is somehow especially out to get the Bush administration, which is rather odd given their bending over backwards to help him out with the marketing campaign for the WMDs scare in the lead up to the official invasion and occupation of Iraq. Certainly skepiticism is called for, but it is revealing that a newspaper that so vigorously helped out Bush to sell the war plans now has become so clearly unsettled by the war.
Now, don’t take that to mean it’s a matter of priniciple. If somehow through some miracle of divine intervention [let's say on the part of my favorite God, the Taro Plant] the invasion and occupation proved to be a popularly received idea in Iraq, the Times wouldn’t be nearly as up in arms about the present situation or Bush’s handling of it. Principled opposition Bush or the war is not what drives this, Roger Simon has got it all wrong.
October 29th, 2004 at 3:03 pm
Yes, more evidence of criminal incompetence, but I continue to maintain that Bush will win this election by 2-3 points in the popular vote, and comfortably in the electoral college.
October 29th, 2004 at 3:44 pm
Don’t know, Kerry’s looking pretty good in Ohio and Florida. The voting sabotage campaign seems to be not working.
October 29th, 2004 at 3:47 pm
Good round up on the issue, Marc.
As for the contras on today’s thread—honestly guys, to suggest that the NY Times is shilling for Kerry is…well…um… really, really partisan.
The liberal BLOGS like Kos, can hardly bear the NY Times because they believe the partisanship so often runs the other direction. (I’d happily provide cites that show their POV, but it’s Friday, and I’m working, so please just trust me that—in their minds anyway—they have a reasonable case.)
I frankly think both of y’all–Bush-boosters and Kos groupies–need to clean the ol’ partisan lenses.
(And hey, it’s not that we on the other side of the fence couldn’t hold a gargantuan grudge against the Times folks since their editors NEVER, EVER bothered to challenge Judith Miller’s ravingly irrisponsible series of pieces in the 18 month run-up to the Iraq war during which period she swallowed whole anything that Ahmed Chalibi whispered to her—all this at a time when the least bit of research—even say, talking off the record to one or two of the folks at the Mid East desk at the State Department—would have led her to realize that her main informant was a charlatan, a liar, and a flim-flam man.)
Okay, back to work.
October 29th, 2004 at 4:20 pm
I wonder what will happen to all of the voter sabotage hype if Kerry gets elected. Will anyone focus on what the Democrats did to Nader?
I am not voting for Nader but it seems funny that Kerry supporters don’t have a problem with Democratic Party sabotage.
I also do not understand why this revelation of incompetence is so controversial. It is not going to go anywhere. Bush supporters see him as infallible. He could bomb New York by mistake and they would still vote for him.
This is not going to have any effect on the outcome on Tuesday.
October 29th, 2004 at 4:41 pm
Why does the NYT incompetence have to be some sort of conspiracy? Yes they have institutional bias. But has the NYT not broken major stories over the years that have stirred things up?
Maybe personal ambition and incompetence are more to blame than the “Pravda” argument.
October 29th, 2004 at 5:21 pm
So there is inconclusive evidence that between 3 and 380 tons of garden variety plastic explosives were removed.
Yawn.
The fact that they can be used in nuclear weapons has made people think that these were really special. They are not. They are typical high explosives with very high detonation velocities. They are easily made and easy for bad guys to get hold of.
They had IAEA seals because HDX is a dual use material. It can be used for nukes and other things.
As far as use in IEDs, there is an important thing people need to know about explosives: the velocity of detonation (high mens high speed detonation ) affects the usefulness of the material.
For example, the bomb which took down the Federal Building in Oklahoma City would have been significantly less effective if it was a high velocity explosive like RDX or HDX. Instead it used ANFO, ammonium nitrate and fuel oil,The main value of those explosives in munitions like IED’s is as a trigger, which requires a very small amount. It has half the detonation velocity of HDX, which makes it better for attacking structures because it puts large forces against it rather than a narrower shock wave which tends to shatter things.
The typical IED uses bombs or explosive munitions (mortar shells, artillery), not a bunch of plastique (a tiny bit to trigger it).
If one wants to build a nuke, getting an appropriate explosive is utterly trivial compared to getting the fissile material, so tying this huge amount of explosive to nuclear weapons is silly. Furthermore, only a little bit of HE is needed to trigger a bomb – pounds, not tons.
Logistically, there’s the issue of how the hypothesized looters were able to transport 380 tons. That is a lot of material implying a lot of trucks. We know that much material was moved to Syria on Saddam’s behalf right before the war. Whether some of it was these explosives is still an open question. After all, the video showed something, probably some of the explosives, but did it show 380 tons of it?
Someone asked if El Baradei had it in for Bush. The answer is yes, as he knows that Bush plans to have him replaced in the IAEA. The timing was no accident. It is in his interest for Bush to lose the election.
—-
As far as the 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed, that number is obviously wrong. The number per day is way too high not to be noticeable by the media as it was happening, and airstrikes have been limited to just a few areas of the large country. None in the north, few in the South.
Experts from NGO’s, which are generally not at all friendly to the US have criticized the numbers as being way too high, with the maximum (not best estimate) from these folks is about 20,000.
Add to this the fact that the lead researcher was an opponent of the war and then note that he gave it to Lancet on the express condition that it be published before the election.
Now, what kind of disinterested scientist want’s his results to be guaranteed to be published before a certain political event?
Yes, Johns Hopkins is good. My daughter was a scientist there until a few months ago. But this is going to stain the reputation of Hopkins, because it is a very poor study.
Experts in surveys have already attacked it for inappropriate methodology for the circumstances. You don’t need to be an expert to see this. In fact, if you take Fallujah out of the numbers, a very small number of phony death reports gives you the total excess. This study relies on self-reporting, and did not includes some areas because the researchers wanted to minimize travel. The farthest away areas were Shia country and Kurdistan, and those are also the most peaceful areas.
False death reporting is common in Sunni areas. Every time there are casualties in a strike, the hopitals report them as women and children. In Fallujah during the first Marine effort there, the hospital reported 600 women and children killed. It turned out that almost all of that number were male fighters killed in combat,which is not surprising since the marines were using no artillery and almost no air strikes. It is big bombs that produce the most undesired casualties. Bullets and hand-held rockets (American equivalent of the RPG) are going to rarely kill civilians. Furthermore, a significant percentage of the deaths was due to Marine snipers. Snipers don’t miss – their bullets don’t hit innocents. They have the optics and the skill to solidly identify targets and kill them.
Oh, and the margin of error in the study gives upper and lower bounds around 10000 and 190000. Now that’s a mighty poor study.
Forget this study. It’s total crap designed to hurt Bush.
October 29th, 2004 at 5:31 pm
“The number per day is way too high not to be noticeable by the media as it was happening, and airstrikes have been limited to just a few areas of the large country. None in the north, few in the South.”
In John’s version of the war and current US occupation of Iraq, Fallujah, Nasyirhia, Najaf, Samaara,…never happened. And why would the media report widely on such stuff anyways? It’s primarily interested in the issue of how many Americans die. Iraqis are entirely down low on the list or reporting priorities. And snipers don’t miss targets or hit the wrong targets? wow!
October 29th, 2004 at 5:46 pm
“I also do not understand why this revelation of incompetence is so controversial. It is not going to go anywhere. Bush supporters see him as infallible. He could bomb New York by mistake and they would still vote for him.”
You’re right. Every time a new revelation of Bush incompetence or delusion or whatever comes out (whether its Richard Clarke or the Plame thing or what have you) the Democrats pounce all over it the desperate hope that Kerry’s numbers will somehow go through the roof, and lo and behold they never do.
October 29th, 2004 at 5:52 pm
I don’t really buy that either, there a re a good number of high profile repubs who aren’t voting for shrub this time. is it really that black and white at this point?
and all those leaks coming from within indicate there’s not a small amount of ruling class dissent, though whether it is that deep remains to be seen.
October 29th, 2004 at 5:52 pm
“Don’t know, Kerry’s looking pretty good in Ohio and Florida. The voting sabotage campaign seems to be not working.”
Kerry may squeak by in Ohio, but I don’t think he wins Florida (60,000 missing ballots in Broward cty doesn’t help), and I believe Kerry’s in genuine trouble in Iowa and Wisconsin, in addition to having no real chance of taking Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, or any of the southern border states. Kerry will take libertarian New Hampshire, but who cares. I’m not going to add up all the numbers on this (electoral calculus makes my head heart), but it don’t add up to a Kerry win.
Some polls are better than others, but the futures markets are generally better than all of them at predicting election outcomes, and Bush has been ahead pretty much since the beginning. The best Kerry can hope for I think is a contested election.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:18 pm
I don’t think that John Moore either understands what the John Hopkins study claimed, nor what the conditions are in Iraq. To say that the Iraqi death rate would be “noticeable to the media” in a country where reporters are afraid to leave the green zone shows Moore is out of touch. (I think we knew that about Moore, incidentally.) And all of Moore’s razzle-dazzle about the U.S.’ high-tech weaponry misses most of the point. The increase in the death rate included all deaths – that means deaths from acts of war coming from any direction, an increase in violent deaths due to breakdown of civil order, deaths attributable to the collapse of the medical system and other services that impact health, etc. It’s conclusion was that there was an approximately 50% increase in the death rate since the onset of the war and the only variable discernible was the war itself. The areas sampled were picked randomly. Fallujah was initially included because it turned up by chance. The researchers were so skeptical of using Fallujah as a typical sample that they essentially deducted it from their study. This of course diminished their sample.
I don’t know how accurate this study is because I’m not a statistician and I have only read the initial news reports that make it appear credible. Credible doesn’t mean the last word. It means credible – i.e serious and worthy of consideration as evidence. In this case, it’s credible enough that Jack Straw, British foreign minister, has determined to look into the issue. One thing that I DO know is that John Moore has no credibility whatsoever, except as a rather vicious partisan. After all, this is a man who sincerely believes – or so he wrote – that the people who published the facts about Abu Ghraib prison are as evil as as the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg. Reasonable grounds for dismissal from the circle of serious commentary or criticism, in my humble opinion.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:20 pm
No, in my world, numbers count. Study design counts, and a study with error bands of 10,000 and 190,000 is not meaningful.
Furthermore, looking at sources for error in the study counts.
And yes, if the number of excess deaths were as high as reported, we would know about it, and Iraqi’s – the ones who are friendly to us – would be hollering about it. Check the Iraqi blogs and see what they have to say.
The basic problem with this study is it uses self reporting. This is notoriously error prone. In this case, the odds of exaggerating deaths are much more likely than the odds of not reporting deaths. That is an inherent bias. If you actually look at the study, you will see that a very large percentage of the excess deaths were from one neighborhood in Falluja, and that neighborhood is in the area where there has been the most precision bombing because it is where the bad guys are concentrated. Now I would expect two things: reports of excess deaths, and exaggeration – after all, we are at war with the people being surveyed in that neighborhood.
So this one isn’t going to fly.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:23 pm
“I don’t really buy that either, there a re a good number of high profile repubs who aren’t voting for shrub this time.”
It doesn’t matter what “many high profile repubs” think. It matters what his base thinks, and they think he’s Doing God’s Work.
“and all those leaks coming from within indicate there’s not a small amount of ruling class dissent, though whether it is that deep remains to be seen.”
Look: the shit may very well finally hit the fan in a Bush second term, and indeed not two or three years into a Bush second term but in the next year. The trouble for Kerry is that while there’s a big ol loose snowpack on the side of the mountain, the avalanche hasn’t happened yet.
The only thing that has kept this economy from serious heartache (and quite possibly a deflationary spiral) over the past four years is the housing bubble, and its only a matter of time before that goes. As for Iraq, there may well be a Sunni fundamentalist Tet in the coming months, or some other cataclysm, that convinces Americans once and for all that this war was a very bad idea, but that hasn’t happened yet, and so a good portion of the broad center still believes in Bush’s vision for democratizing the Arab world.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:28 pm
Somewhat OT to the original post but the topic of polls and trends in this election has been mentioned. You might want to check out Dresner’s post on the decreasing reliability of polls as we get closer to the election.
http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/
the relevant post is from Thursday titled “So who’s going to win the election?”. He argues, and points to other sources, that the polls are less and less reliable because of problems with sampling. Interesting.
Drezner is generally a small “l” libertarian but has come out in support of Kerry – if that affects your opinion of his credibility.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:31 pm
A Sunni Fundamentalist Tet would be a great deal for us. In the Tet offensive of 1968, the Viet Cong was destroyed. The North Vietnamese were ready to sue for peace until they discovered that our press, let by Cronkite, was reputing Tet as a defeat for the US.
So to me, a Tet is a suicide offensive where the attacker is wiped out.
Seriously, cataclysms are possible in any nasty situation like this. For example, the bad guys may have gotten some of those Sarin binary shells (you know, the WMDs that we found that everyone ignores). They could extract the material (it’s safe in binary form), make a sarin munition of some sort, and have either launch it into the green zone by mortar or send in some suicide folks who carry it in and release it.
But another thing could happen too: we are about to crush Fallujah. When we do so, we may destroy the insurrection. We already have the place surrounded, so the bad guys either can’t get out or have to really work at it.
It’s just a few days until we go in in force – it may be withheld until after the election to avoid the appearance of trying to influence the election, or it may go ahead.
October 29th, 2004 at 6:38 pm
I forgot to put in a link on debunking of the study.
Read this including the comments: http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/002543.html
October 29th, 2004 at 6:46 pm
Mr. Moore – if you didn’t get my drift, whatever comes from your direction carries with it a certain odor. I’ll reserve further comment.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:03 pm
Mr. Moore,
You’re crazy.
Affectionately,
God
October 29th, 2004 at 7:06 pm
Lancet Study: After excluding the Fallujah data (because Fallujah has seen such violence that it might skew the nationwide averages), they found that Iraqis were about 1.5 times more likely to die of violence during the past 18 months than they were in the year and a half before the war. Before the war, the death rate was 5 per thousand per year, and afterwards it was 7.9 per thousand per year (excluding Fallujah). My own figuring is that, given a population of 25 million, that yields 72,500 excess deaths per year, or at least 100,000 for the whole period since April 9, 2003.
The methodology of this study is very tight, but it does involve extrapolating from a small number and so could easily be substantially incorrect. But the methodology also is standard in such situations and was used in Bosnia and Kosovo.
I think the results are probably an exaggeration. But they can’t be so radically far off that the 16,000 deaths previously estimated can still be viewed as valid. I’d say we have to now revise the number up to at least many tens of thousand–which anyway makes sense. The 16,000 estimate comes from counting all deaths reported in the Western press, which everyone always knew was only a fraction of the true total. (I see deaths reported in al-Zaman every day that don’t show up in the Western wire services).
The most important finding from my point of view is not the magnitude of civilian deaths, but the method of them. Roberts and Burnham find that US aerial bombardments are killing far more Iraqi civilians than had previously been suspected. This finding is also not a surprise to me. I can remember how, on a single day (August 12), US warplanes bombed the southern Shiite city of Kut, killing 84 persons, mainly civilians, in an attempt to get at Mahdi Army militiamen. These deaths were not widely reported in the US press, especially television. Kut is a small place and has been relatively quiet except when the US has been attacking Muqtada al-Sadr, who is popular among some segments of the population there. The toll in Sadr City or the Shiite slums of East Baghdad, or Najaf, or in al-Anbar province, must be enormous.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:13 pm
Is “precision bombing” an oxymoron ?
October 29th, 2004 at 7:31 pm
Fred Kaplan has published a critique of the Lancet Study over at Slate that appears to be fair and informed. Kaplan’s even more skeptical than Juan Cole.
Mr. Moore might well be substantially correct in the particulars, thus proving once again the “stopped clock” phenomenon.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:46 pm
rosedog writes, “would have led her to realize that her main informant was a charlatan, a liar, and a flim-flam man.”
Hmm, could the same be true here? Of course and that is my point.
October 29th, 2004 at 7:51 pm
rosedog writes, “As for the contras on today’s thread—honestly guys, to suggest that the NY Times is shilling for Kerry is…well…um… really, really partisan.”
Ah, my beloved friend. Don’t you suppose that we see that your claim that the NYTimes doesn’t shill for Kerry is really…well..um…really, really, really partisan?
October 29th, 2004 at 8:03 pm
Steve writes, “And snipers don’t miss targets or hit the wrong targets? wow!”
Steve, you obviously know very little about military snipers (regardless of the side they are on.) Snipers do not use automatic weapons, they use single shot bolt action rifles or, multi shot, but still bolt action. Snipers may take days to identify the target, or, stay undercover for hour after hour until they are quite sure of the target. Snipers are well trained at what they do, perhaps better than the SF types. Go see “Enemy at the Gates” with Jude Law and Ed Harris for an example of how snipers work. And know that that movie was based on real life 60 years ago. Snipers today are far better trained and far more accomplished.
October 29th, 2004 at 8:41 pm
I have taught statistics to undergrads and they can be as dense as Pb. However, let me try to make some very simple sense of this.
The Lancet used a confidence level of 95% or, .95. This means that statistically speaking, the chances of error that they have the wrong data are 1 in 20. Now, the “chances of error” means that the statistic given will be the correct statistic (regardless of the type) 95 times out of 100. For example, I could estimate the death of Iraqi civilians due to direct and indirect military action at being between 1 and 7 billion and be fairly certain my number is very close to the 100% level of confidence.
A statistic at the 99% level of confidence is much more frequently used in behavioral analysis (and the .999 is also used on occasion depending on the rigor the statistician wants) and other statistics because it is a MUCH TIGHTER limit. So, when the Lancet reports that the number of deaths is between 10,000 and 190,000 they are 95% certain that the number is in that range 95 times out of 100.
But the number could be ANYWHERE in that range, from 10,001 to 189,999. Anywhere people, not the 10 to 20 thousand that is generally used by other NGO’s not alligned with Bush and for damn sure not the 100 thousand that is capturing everyones imagination. Needless to say that range is a very, very large fudge factor.
It’s not out right cheating, but it is damn close. In fact, if a lengthy study were performed perhaps they could find with a 99% level of confidence that the number of deaths is infact between 10,000 and 10,250. OR, between 180,001 and 180,250.
If any of my students ever turned in a study with that kind of range, they would receive, and rightly so, an “F” for their efforts.
So, anyone touting the 95% confidence level without mentioning the huge fudge factor as in fact a fudge factor is being, to use rosedogs phrase “really, really partisan.”
What could really make this study interesting is to see what the standard deviation is (assuming they used one). A standard deviation of say 10 would indicate (with a large sample) that the cluster around the mean (average) was pretty damn tight. A sd of 25,000 would mean that the scores are all over the place and should be ignored. The closer the sd comes to 1, the closer the scores are clustered around the mean.
What would really be interesting is to calculate an Anova (Analysis of Variance). I suspect that this was not done, and I’m not even sure that they used stats that an Anova would/could be useful.
October 29th, 2004 at 9:11 pm
None of the babble about “confidence levels” explains much of anything to a layman. Whateve it all means, it’s a narrow argument that fails to account for something that no one here has claimed is not true. One thousand Iraqi families were surveyed in as close as one could reasonably come to a random sample in a war zone, The most atypical regional sampling (Fallujah) was ultimately excluded from the collated result and a mortality rate among those families surveyed on the basis of their responses would compute at 50% higher than prior to the war. A segment of those sampled were also asked to produce death certicates as verification.
I don’t know a darn thing about statistical models, polling methodology, etc., but I find that 50% figure disturbing. The respondents could be lying, they could be not precisely representative, etc. etc. ad nauseum. But the results of this experiment – even if the methodolog has flaws – suggests that the casualties attributable to the war and it’s “unintended consequences” are greater than thought. What’s most telling is that the Pentagon doesn’t even consider the issue worth tracking. I’m sure they have chosen that course for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with politics.
(What’s been most interesting about this for me has been comparing the commentary and analysis of Fred Kaplan and Juan Cole to the links that have been offered up by the “faith based community.” Make the comparison of the approach of these various critics of the Lancet Report yourself for some insight into the difference between informed analysis and agenda-driven pot-shots.)
October 29th, 2004 at 9:35 pm
GM… I appreciate the gentleness of your point.
Yet, if we were to sit down together and do an uber analysis of the NY Times news coverage, I suspect each of us would find instances in which we felt they’ve gotten it dreadfully wrong, and would also agree on a plethora of instances that they seem (against all odds) to have gotten it right. The same goes for the Wall Street Journal, the Wa Po, the LA Times etc. (WSJ, for example, is self-admittedly, a very conservative paper. But, it also works hard to keep a firewall between editorial and the newsroom. Most of the time, it succeeds.)
All that said, I’m in a state of apoplexy at the mainstream press half the time, particularly cable TV news. But that may merely suggest I’m in need of therapy, a strong course of serotonin reuptake inhibitors….or a really long vacation.
October 29th, 2004 at 9:36 pm
Dear God-on-Marc’s-Blog,
It’s about TIME we heard from you!
October 29th, 2004 at 10:06 pm
One more thing… On the Iraqi body count issue:
As Juan Cole suggested, the Iraqi civilian death count—based solely on western news reports—stands currently at 16,300. So, knowing as we do that all too often deaths are never picked up by our news coverage—in the light of the Lancet estimates—isn’t it reasonable to suspect that the real Iraqi civilian death count hovers in the 30,000 to 50,000 range?
So let’s think about that for a minute: We invade a country that has never attacked us, that had no plans to attack us. The good news is that, in doing so we get rid of that country’s brutal dictator. Bad news: we kill somewhere between 17,000 and 50,000 non-combatants in the process, more often than not, women and kids. And the whole sorry mess is far from resolved, in fact it’s getting worse.
(But, if someone shoots back at us, they are, of course, an islamofascist terrorist.)
October 29th, 2004 at 11:03 pm
Toomanysteves,
Drezner makes good points about polling. If Kerry is able to pull this off, it will be because of intangibles, namely undecideds, new voters, and who wins the turnout wars. So far, it appears that Democrats are winning the turnout wars by significant margins in some crucial swing counties in both central Florida and New Mexico, but who knows how this thing will play out. I think fear really is the operative word in this election, but which fear will triumph, fear of terrorism, or fear of Bush?
October 29th, 2004 at 11:09 pm
More about Florida:
“There are no statewide totals of early voters, and votes will not be counted until polls close on Election Day. But some counties have made numbers available, and Democrats appear to be considerably outstripping Republicans in turnout — significantly, in the belt of counties across the state’s midsection, from St. Petersburg to Orlando, the prime battleground for swing voters.
In Orange County, home to Orlando with a 5 percent Democratic edge in registration, 50,839 early votes had been cast by Friday morning — 48 percent of them Democrats and 33 percent Republicans. In Pinellas County, home to St. Petersburg, where Republicans have a slight edge in registration, Democrats have a slight edge in early voters. In heavily Democratic Broward County, almost 130,000 votes were cast, with no party breakdown; and in Miami-Dade, almost 180,000.
Mindy Tucker Fletcher, a GOP strategist, said the Democratic advantage in early voters is irrelevant because Republicans have a bigger advantage in absentee ballots.
But Colleen Murphy, a Republican official in Orange County, posted an alarmist message on the party’s Web site about the intensity and numbers of Democrats casting early ballots there.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10559-2004Oct29.html
October 30th, 2004 at 12:40 am
Per the right twice a day comment, unlike most commenters before me, I read the debunking articles before posting.
Beware the sttatistics. The statistics are probably correct for the experimental design. But they don’t capture many of the sources of error.
For example, hostile areas, where the most casualties are likely to be found, are also likely to inflate their death numbers – they’re hostile, after all. At the same time, nobody has an incentive to underreport. So this fact automatically skews the numbers too high. The statistics do not include this uncertainty, and thus the real uncertainty is greater than the statisticfal uncertainty. The fact that many experts are calling this study meaningless is because of things like this. Google around and you will find these experts. When Fallujah is factored out, the number of excess deaths in the remaining samples is small. So we are seeing an extrapolation from a few tens of deaths to the whole country. I don’t think this study will go anywhere, because so many people have debunked it.
The credibility of the study should also be suspect when you realize that the lead author submitted it to Lancet on the condition that it be published before the election, and Lancet rushed the peer review and other processes and published it early.
As to precision bombs being oxymoronic, it helps to look at real numbers. These weapons are accurate to a few meters (3, I think). If it is a large bomb, that error makes no difference, and dropping big bombs in high density areas is going to kill people in surrounding buildings. For smaller bombs (and the tend to use smaller ones in the city), it means that the unintended deaths are reduced.
Another factor is that when civilians are killed, they are always close to the enemy (except for the rare weapon that goes unguided). What percentage of those civilians are providing aid to the enemy as opposed to being forced to put up with enemy fighters? I would guess that an awful lot of them are providing aid to the enemy. That doesn’t make them fair targets, but it is a bit hard to fault killing of civilians when targeting an enemy concentration, when the enemy concentration is in the middle of the civilians and approved and supported by them. It has long been true in guerilla warfare that civilians who host enemy fighters do so knowing that they are placing themselves and, horribly, their children at risk.
Let me put it another way. If you are a civilian and you allow enemy to concentrate in your house, then you should get away from there. It is obviously going to become a battleground at some point – otherwise the enemy wouldn’t be there. If you don’t get away, you are placing your kids at risk. In that case, it is the fault of the adults in the family when the whole family is blown up.
To give an idea of the accuracy of precision munitions, and one means the US used to minimize casualties during the invasion, cocnsider the following. The bombers did not want to target tanks sitting next to homes, because the explosion would be likely to kill people in the homes, and the homes would certainly be destroyed.
They came up with the idea of using non-explosive bombs – 2000lb bombs filled with concrete – a training round. The concrete bomb would flatten the tank, rendering it unusable, without causing damage to anything nearby. I spoke with a B-1 WSO who used these successfully.
October 30th, 2004 at 1:16 am
“Steve, you obviously know very little about military snipers (regardless of the side they are on.) Snipers do not use automatic weapons, they use single shot bolt action rifles or, multi shot, but still bolt action. Snipers may take days to identify the target, or, stay undercover for hour after hour until they are quite sure of the target.”
Yeah, but the problem with that is you’re talking under the best circumstances really. Reality tends to diverge from the model I’m afraid. There are simply too many reports out there of random shootings by ‘snipers’ in the battles the US engages in in Iraq. Their reputation is well known, shoot first, ask questions later, it’s happened too often to really change the perception–even if not entirely accurate. How could it be otherwise in an unpopular occupation after all?
October 30th, 2004 at 1:20 am
I would note no less accurate are the ‘precision bombs’, which were supposed to target Sodom. And not a one sodomite was killed by over 50 precision bombs. many others were killed, injured, horrified,…but being Iraqi, not that terribly important in the overall scheme of things.
October 30th, 2004 at 5:34 am
WITNESS ACCOUNT OF DEPOT LOOTING WON’T BE PRINTED TIL WEDS — AFTER ELECTIONS
Reporter saw insurgents loot Qaqaa arms depot
By Katrin Bennhold International Herald Tribune
PARIS A French journalist who visited the Qaqaa munitions depot south of Baghdad in November last year said she witnessed Islamic insurgents looting vast supplies of explosives more than six months after the demise of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The account of Sara Daniel, which will be published Wednesday in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, lends further weight to allegations that American occupying forces in Iraq failed to protect hundreds of tons of munitions from extremists plotting attacks against their own troops.
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2004/10/29/news/explode.html
October 30th, 2004 at 9:13 am
Funny how that reflects on the “liberal” media, eh?
I was comparing the “liberal” CNN and FOX btw today, webpages. “Liberal” cnn’s homepage lead is the election, pictures of Kerry and Bush campaigning…death of 8 marines and other chaos in Iraq is only a sidebar article, about 3 down.
On Fox, on the other hand, there is the lead of the campaign, but the 8 Marines dead is accompanied by a dramatic photo of a tank burning or some such thing and feature headlines.
That darned “liberal” media does it again!
October 31st, 2004 at 11:08 am
Perspective on missing weapons from USA Today OVER A YEAR AGO, 10/05/04
What happened to looted Iraqi nuclear material?
By Brett Wagner
The release Thursday of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay’s report detailing America’s six-month search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has reinflamed the debate over whether anyone will ever uncover that country’s alleged stockpiles of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
A great irony, however, seems to have gotten lost in that debate: As a direct result of President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq without sufficient forces to secure and protect its nuclear research and storage facilities from rampant looting, enough radioactive material to build scores of dirty bombs now is missing and may be on its way to the international black market.
It didn’t have to turn out this way. In the weeks before the invasion, the U.S. military repeatedly warned the White House that its war plans did not include sufficient ground forces, air and naval operations and logistical support to guarantee a successful mission. Those warnings were discounted — even mocked — by administration officials who professed to know more about war fighting than the war fighters themselves.
Undermanned
But the war fighters were right. Military commanders weren’t given enough manpower and logistical support to secure all of the known nuclear sites, let alone all of the suspected ones.
It wasn’t until seven of Iraq’s main nuclear facilities were extensively looted that the true magnitude of the administration’s strategic blunder came into focus.
The White House knew all along, for example, that enormous quantities of dangerous nuclear materials were at the Tuwaitha nuclear storage facility near Baghdad, sealed and accounted for by the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency. Soon after the war began, the IAEA warned the White House that it should strive to secure the facility quickly. When word of looting at the site began to leak out through the international media, the IAEA again warned the White House.
The looting, however, went on for more than two weeks before the U.S. took any action. When the site was finally secured and U.S. authorities permitted a brief inspection by IAEA officials, the inspectors were inexplicably forbidden to check the status of highly radioactive materials that could be used in dirty bombs. Many of these materials are now unaccounted for. What the inspectors were allowed to verify is how much uranium is now missing: at least 22 pounds.
Other looted nuclear sites include the Baghdad Nuclear Research Center, where significant quantities of partially enriched uranium, cesium, strontium and cobalt were stored. U.S. survey teams have not been able to determine how many of those materials are missing.
Small amount, huge effect
It takes only a small amount of such materials to arm a dirty bomb. The 22 pounds of missing uranium, for example, could arm a device that could shut down Capitol Hill or the New York Stock Exchange for weeks, if not months.
Properly built and encased with radioactive materials, a dirty bomb can kill thousands and render large areas uninhabitable for months or years. While their destructive capacity pales in comparison to that of actual nuclear bombs, a dirty bomb’s capacity to inflict terror should never be underestimated.
Should an organization such as al-Qaeda acquire a dirty bomb, it is unlikely authorities could keep it out of the U.S. or prevent it from being detonated. Under such circumstances, a terrorist group would not even actually need to possess a second device; it would merely just have to say one was planted in a U.S. city. Imagine what the outbound highways would look like or the overall effect on our economy, our security, our civil rights, our way of life.
Several terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, have shown interest in acquiring the radioactive materials necessary to transform an ordinary bundle of explosives into a weapon of mass terror. The blueprints and other components are commonly available. And now, thanks to sloppy war planning by the White House, the only missing component — radioactive materials — may be readily available, too.
Sort of takes the “pre-emptive” out of pre-emptive war, doesn’t it?
Brett Wagner is president of the California Center for Strategic Studies and a professor at the U.S. Naval War College.
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