No Defense

From Bird Dog, over at Tacitus:

Update [2004-10-28 18:10:27 by Bird Dog]: Ralph Peters, McQ and Dale Franks are wrong, and so am I. ABC News confirmed that the video taken by an TV news crew on April 18th contained HMX under IAEA seal. The final two paragraphs:

After the bunkers were opened, the 101st was not ordered to secure the facility. A senior officer told ABC News the division would not have had nearly enough soldiers to do so.
It remains unclear how much HMX was at the facility, but what does seem clear is that the U.S. military opened the bunkers at Al-Qaqaa and left them unguarded. Since then, the material has disappeared.

This one hurts Bush, too. When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. The next question is how much was there at the time.

Good work. More than I expected. More than Fox News has been willing to do; they’re still fronting the “terror video” that looks like it was shot by teenagers, and the photos that purport to show that all explosives were gone in early March.

Of course, the National Review will have none of it. Sure, it’s possible that the explosive in those barrels was HMX, but they might have been some other type of deadly high explosive, in which case everything is cool! Chrenkoff hasn’t updated from “the Russians took it.” Belmont Club is silent on the new video. One of Glenn Reynolds’s stooges gives the story his master’s treatment.