NYT comes out swinging in last week of campaign

While there are real horrors going on in Iraq -- like Saturday's execution-style murder of 50 Iraqi military recruits by Al Queda -- the NYT decided to anchor its front page with a 2,500 word story about how a massive stockpile of high explosives disappeared during the chaotic days after the collapse of Saddam's regime in April 2003.

You have to look pretty closely to realize that this all happened a long time ago, and that the only "news hook" to make this item newsworthy is the recent report to the UNSC by Mohammed El Bareidi saying that this stuff is missing an unaccounted for. The implication of the story (though not clearly stated) is that these explosives may have been used by terrorists, etc. to blow up American soldiers, and that it was due to administration incompetence that it was not safeguarded. Of course, there is no mention that there were literally millions of tons of munitions scattered all over Iraq and that most of the IEDs used to kill Americans (and Iraqis) were made from traditional munitions like old artillary shells or rocket warheads.

Politics as usual... Sheesh.

Update

As Drudge is reported yesterday, NBC news is reporting that US troops did search the bunkers at Al-Qaqaa in early April 2003 and found no sign of the 380 tons of high explosives that had been there in January 2002 when the UN had last inspected.

This seems to have been an anti-Bush hit job by the NYT. Amusingly, they managed to preempt CBS, who had been planning to break the story on 60 Minutes this Sunday, two days before the election.

Further Update

Well, it looks like that at least some of those missing explosives really were there when US troops first passed through Al Qaqaa on their way to Baghdad. Here is a link to an April 5, 2003 report from The Scotsman reporting on what (at the time) was suspected to be chemical weapons:

US TROOPS yesterday found thousands of boxes of white powder and unidentified liquid at an industrial site south of Baghdad, just hours before the "non-conventional" threat from Baghdad again raised the spectre of chemical warfare.

Initial tests showed the substance was probably just explosives, although a nerve agent antidote and Arabic documents on how to wage chemical warfare were also recovered from the Latifiyah industrial complex.

Colonel John Peabody of the 3rd Infantry Division said of the find: "It is clearly a suspicious site."

But a senior US official later said: "Initial reports are that the material is probably just explosives, but we’re still going through the place."

(Hat tip to the dkosopedia for the reference, though they didn't manage to track down the actual link.)

I guess the military did screw up in not securing the site. Although given all that had on their plate at the time, I'm sure there were other, more urgent priorities. And while it is unfortunate that perhaps several hundred tons of sophisticated explosives were stolen, we have to remember that hundreds of thousands of tons of munitions and explosives have already been destroyed and/or secured in Iraq.

If John Kerry were blessed with the power of 20/20 hindsight before the fact, hell, even I might vote for him. But, as Max Boot pointed out in a syndicated column today, Kerry's past predictions on Iraq haven't proven to be too accurate.