Truespeak

If anyone is still undecided about next Tuesday's Presidential election, today provided all the information thay should need to make up their minds. For days now, the top story has been the missing explosives in Iraq. John Kerry has run with the story to bolster his claim that President Bush has mishandled the war but the President has been claiming that the explosives may have been moved prior to the US invasion. President Bush has even gone so far as to say Senator Kerry is jumping to conclusions without the facts. But today, all the evidence needed has come to the surface.

It turns out that ABC affiliate 5 Eyewitness News from Minneapolis/St. Paul had a crew embedded in Iraq that filmed some video at the al QaQaa weapons facility after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, clearly showing the IAEA seals on the door. Soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division cut the chains to the bunkers allowing the reporters in where they were able to film the explosives still inside. (You can read the story here, here, and here.) On this evening's Newsnight With Aron Brown on CNN, former weapons inspector David Kay confirmed that the items in the video were indeed the explosives in question.

Truth of the matter is, we actually knew they were there. On April 5, 2003, the Washington Post ran an article which included the following passage:

In the first of yesterday's discoveries, the 3rd Infantry Division entered the vast Qa Qaa chemical and explosives production plant and came across thousands of vials of white powder, packed three to a box. The engineers also found stocks of atropine and pralidoxime, also known as 2-PAM chloride, which can be used to treat exposure to nerve agents but is also used to treat poisoning by organic phosphorus pesticides. Alongside those materials were documents written in Arabic that, as interpreted at the scene, appeared to include discussions of chemical warfare.

This morning, however, investigators said initial tests indicated the white powder was not a component of a chemical weapon. "On first analysis it does not appear to be a chemical that could be used in a chemical weapons attack," Col. John Peabody, commander of the division's engineering brigade, told a Reuters reporter with his unit.

U.N. inspectors have surveyed Qa Qaa some two dozen times, most recently last month. But some 1,000 structures there, organized into 10 or more factory complexes, have mainly been devoted to such conventional military industries as explosives and missile fuels. Neither is forbidden under U.N. Security Council mandates. Qa Qaa was last linked to proscribed activity in 1995 -- and somewhat peripherally then.

"Based on [the powder and antidotes] you couldn't form any real judgment," said Terence Taylor of Britain, a former inspector with the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM). "It is a place where there would be a lot of chemicals, not necessarily related to chemical or biological weapons. More likely in that place it would relate to some form of rocket propellant."

The same day, the Associated Press ran their own article stating this:

Closer to Baghdad, troops at Iraq's largest military industrial complex found nerve agent antidotes, documents describing chemical warfare and a white powder that appeared to be used for explosives.

UN weapons inspectors went repeatedly to the vast al Qa Qaa complex, most recently on March 8. But they found nothing during spot visits to some of the 1,100 buildings at the site 40 kilometres south of Baghdad.

Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives. The finding would be consistent with the plant's stated production capabilities in the field of basic raw materials for explosives and propellants.

Both articles clearly show the existence of the explosives at the al QaQaa site on April 4, 2003, well after the invasion had begun. So all that talk about the weapons being moved prior to the invasion, and all that talk by Drudge and the Washington Times about the Russians being involved is bullshit! Complete and total bullshit!

As many of us have known for a long time now, the President has been lying to the American people. The simple truth is, our current administration has FUCKED UP! But they still can't admit it. Kerry has been right all along: The President has made us less safe.

Anyone who is still undecided after today's revelations is clearly not paying attention.

Kerry is going to win in a landslide!