Eight Days To Go: A Big Story Breaks

Coming into the final week of the 2004 US Presidential Elections campaign, I recommend you keep your eyes on the following sites:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

The Daily Kos

Juan Cole: Informed Comment

The big question this week is, what's Karl Rove got up his sleeve? Expect something big toward the end of the week, so there won't be enough time to fully analyze, investigate and refute it before voting on Tuesday.

Today's big news, though, could put Rove & Co. into damage control mode for a few days at least. A story that the Bush team has been desperately trying to suppress for over a year has broken in the New York Times and should soon be picked up by other mainstream media:

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Saturday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year...

American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could be used to produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings. The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa, and somewhat larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material. But the other components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain. "This is a high explosives risk, but not necessarily a proliferation risk," one senior Bush administration official said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week.

In other words, the neo-cons total lack of pre-war planning included failing to plan how to safeguard deadly weapons depots that the IAEA had been monitoring for years. Worse yet, when it became clear the stuff was missing, the Bush administration tried to hide the facts and would not even let IAEA officials back into the country! The political implications are huge. As Josh Marshall writes:

It is apparently widely believed within the US government that those looted explosives are what in many, perhaps most, cases is being used in car bombs and suicide attacks against US troops. That is, according to TPM sources and sources quoted in this evening's Nelson Report, where the story first broke.

One administration official told Nelson, "This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information."

Of course, these are just FACTS... Whether voters choose to believe them or not is another question.

Gonna be an interesting week!