More evidence on the looting of Al QaQaa

US soldiers describe the looting of Al Qaqaa, which they were powerless to stop:

In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material away from the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.

The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers with one unit — the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany — said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply.
[…]
The soldiers, who belong to two different units, described how Iraqis plundered explosives from unsecured bunkers before driving off in Toyota trucks.

The U.S. troops said there was little they could do to prevent looting of the ammunition site, 30 miles south of Baghdad.

“We were running from one side of the compound to the other side, trying to kick people out,” said one senior noncommissioned officer who was at the site in late April 2003.

“On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave” so looters could come in and take munitions.

“It was complete chaos. It was looting like L.A. during the Rodney King riots,” another officer said.

He and other soldiers who spoke to The Times asked not to be named, saying they feared retaliation from the Pentagon.

Further evidence that Al Qaqaa remained unguarded, as if any more were needed, is gathered here by BruceR of Flit:

Nouvel Observateur article confirms Al QaQaa unguarded in November

Well, I’ve read Sara Daniel’s original piece for the French magazine La Nouvel Observateur, which ran in November, 2003. I’ve translated it here. It repeats her claim in the magazine this week that she spent time with a guerrilla group, the one responsible among other attacks for the SAM attack on the DHL Airbus last November, and that it was still using the Al QaQaa munitions dump to supply itself with TNT that month, seven months after the fall of Baghdad, and that the depot was effectively unguarded when she drove on to it and wandered around in broad daylight along with the guerrillas. Daniel’s website has a photo from the dump apparently taken Nov. 6, 2003.

The rest of the interview with “Abou Abdallah,” the guerrilla leader, is interesting in its own right, specifically on how the guerrillas were organizing themselves a year ago (at the doors of mosques), and how he and others specifically disavowed either loyalty to Saddam (then still at large), suicide bombing, or foreign Muslim influences. It’s well-read in company with the contemporaneous Paris-Match interview, apparently with a leader of this same group of insurgents (“Abou Abdallah” again?). One thing you can say for sure… a year ago, the French periodical industry seems to have had a much better human intelligence penetration into the Iraqi resistance than the Americans did.

Read the rest.

3 Black Watch troops killed; 8 wounded

Three Scottish Black Watch soldiers and a translator have been killed by a suicide bomber at a checkpoint while 8 others were wounded in the subsequent mortar attack. “Soldiers manning a vehicle checkpoint were targeted by a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device in a suicide attack, followed shortly afterwards by mortar fire,” Junior Defense Minister Adam Ingram told a news conference in London.

Blackwatch_flyer


The Scotland-based unit has been trying to lower tension by playing down its Britishness, handing out flyers which read “please allow me to introduce myself — I am a Scottish soldier with the Black Watch Regiment.”
The flyers have a Scottish flag, rather than a British flag.

Re: What’s Up, CNN?

In response to Brad Biggers’ letter, Sandra writes:

    In fact, the Al-Jazeera transcript of the entire (18 minute) speech is incorrect and wrongly omits the word “not” from the following
    sentence:

    “This is due to many factors, chief amongst them that we have
    (not) found it difficult to deal with the Bush administration in light of
    the resemblance it bears to regimes in our countries…”

    CNN correctly includes the word “not”.

    Why is this sentence correctly translated by CNN? A couple of reasons:-

    1. All other translations published, including those done by The Guardian,
    The Independent, etc., all include the word, “not” in the sentence, thereby
    making the Al-Jazeera transcript the odd one out; but more importantly, it is clear from Osama’s speech that he is stating that the Bush administration is easy to deal with, viz:-

    a) He states that his war/attack on America has been successful, “As for its
    results, they have been, by the grace of Allah, positive and enormous, and
    have by all standards exceeded expectations. This is due to many factors,
    chief among them, that we have (not) found the Bush administration difficult
    to deal with….” One can hardly leave out the word “not” and still see
    sense in that sentence as the chief factor for success could hardly have
    been the difficulty of the US administration;

    b) OBL goes on to state a familiarity with the Middle East regimes, which
    resemble the first Bush administration, so again the implication is that
    the US administration was familiar to Al-Qaeda and thus was not found
    difficult to deal with;

    c) Further, OBL states, “All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us
    to provoke and bait this administration”.

    Seems like he is clearly stating that Al-Qaeda can read the Bush
    Administration well and do NOT find it difficult to deal with. Most
    probably the Al-Jazeera transcript was simply a misprint at that point.

Even Blind Chickens …

find a kernel of corn every now and again. William F. Buckley on our War President:

    What exactly will President Bush do about the Iraqi mess? He has said over and over that a president must be prepared to make decisions, however difficult, and stick to them. But surely one decision he can have arrived at during the political purgation is that things are not going well in Iraq. It is one thing to reiterate during a political campaign that a president must make hard choices and stick to them, quite another to say that a president cannot draw back and recalculate at very basic levels.

Too bad the jubilant young “conservatives” over at Natty Review don’t listen to their elders.

In other news, Matt “Don’t Sweat the Dead Babies” Welch pretty accurately pegs what libertarians and everyone else should expect of Bush 2.0:

    1) There is zero reason to believe Bush will ever listen to libertarians, about anything. …

    2) Energized Republican majorities in Congress will seek to re-write rules at the expense of the “obstructionist minority.” I heard Republican congressmen use that exact phrase twice during Election Night.

    And look for the congressmen to continue spending money like drunken sailors. Pork works, especially if there is no veto to scale it back, and now that this approach has been given a handsome popular-vote mandate, why change now? …

    3) Bush will even feel less constrained in conducting an aggressive, occasionally go-it-alone foreign policy. In the words of Bush voter Stephen Green, “On the plus side, we’ll stop jerking around with the insurgents in Fallujah. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and CENTCOM won’t have to worry any longer about delicate domestic sensibilities. Finally, they’ll be free to do the killing—and there’s no nicer word for it—that needs to be done there.” …

I’ll resist the temptation to say “I told you so” and just link two of my own essays – one from February, the other from last Saturday. For posterity’s sake, of course.

Mutilated bodies found near Green Zone

THREE mutilated bodies have been found under a suspension bridge in central Baghdad, an Iraqi interior ministry spokesman said yesterday.

The river patrol police found the unidentified corpses on Tuesday beneath a bridge that leads across the Tigris river into the Green Zone, home to the Iraqi interim government and the United States and British embassies, the spokesman said.

Well, at least there won’t be any gay people getting married legally in the US. Nobody can say Americans don’t have their priorities straight.