Friends of Bush? Wait, are you still there? I can hardly see through all this spin.

*sigh*

This morning MSNBC interviewed one of the producers from their news crew that visited al Qaqaa as embeds with the 101st Airborne, Second brigade on April 10th, 2003.

This is the 'search' that the White House and CNN are talking about:

Amy Robach: And it's still unclear exactly when those explosives disappeared. Here to help shed some light on that question is Lai Ling. She was part of an NBC news crew that traveled to that facility with the 101st Airborne Division back in April of 2003. Lai Ling, can you set the stage for us? What was the situation like when you went into the area?

Lai Ling Jew: When we went into the area, we were actually leaving Karbala and we were initially heading to Baghdad with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. The situation in Baghdad, the Third Infantry Division had taken over Baghdad and so they were trying to carve up the area that the 101st Airborne Division would be in charge of. Um, as a result, they had trouble figuring out who was going to take up what piece of Baghdad. They sent us over to this area in Iskanderia. We didn't know it as the Qaqaa facility at that point but when they did bring us over there we stayed there for quite a while. Almost, we stayed overnight, almost 24 hours. And we walked around, we saw the bunkers that had been bombed, and that exposed all of the ordinances that just lied dormant on the desert.

AR: Was there a search at all underway or was, did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?

LLJ: No. There wasn't a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was – at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there.

AR: And there was no talk of securing the area after you left. There was no discussion of that?

LLJ: Not for the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. They were -- once they were in Baghdad, it was all about Baghdad, you know, and then they ended up moving north to Mosul. Once we left the area, that was the last that the brigade had anything to do with the area.

AR: Well, Lai Ling Jew, thank you so much for shedding some light into that situation. We appreciate it.

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Contrary to the Drudge/CNN story, this wasn't the first time troops visited al Qaqaa. That came a week earlier when explosives were found in a quick check of the facility.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/ne...eadiness01.htm

That would be April 4, 2003. This visit was not from a complete search of the facility, which has anywhere from 87 to 1,110 buildings, depending on which report you read and how you define a building.

This is a relatively brief window of time we're talking about when this stuff could have been moved - actually, from March 8th (when the IAEA last checked it) until April 4th (when the first US troops arrived).

This is enough time to move the stuff - but it would be a a huge operation, quite visible to anyone. Moving this material would have taken a fleet of about forty big trucks each moving about ten tons of explosives, according to the NYT article. (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/in...=all&position=)

And this was at a time -- the week before and then during the war -- when Iraq's skies were full of American aerial and satellite reconnaissance. Remember "Shock and Awe?" So does the Bush administration want us to believe that we would not have noticed all this stuff being hauled away from a well-known munitions site? I think our troops are better than that.

From the LA Times today: Given the size of the missing cache, it would have been difficult to relocate undetected before the invasion, when U.S. spy satellites were monitoring activity at sites suspected of concealing nuclear and biological weapons. "You don't just move this stuff in the middle of the night," said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked in Baghdad.

My point here is not to say that this could not possibly have happened. What I am trying to show is that the administration clearly has no idea what happened to this stuff. If you look at the multiple contradictions in the different stories administration officials told reporters over the course of Monday, it's hard not to get the sense that they're caught without a good explanation and they're just trying to cover their - um - butts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/po...=all&position=