Pentagon Tries to Account for Missing Explosives

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon said today that a U.S. military unit removed and destroyed 250 tons of munitions from a weapons depot, but it has been unable to determine whether the cache was the same one at issue in recent presidential campaign speeches.

In making its latest explanation, the Pentagon shed little light on whether the ammunition was removed under the Saddam Hussein regime or looted by insurgents while U.S. troops left the site unguarded.

Unlike the missing high-grade explosives containing a seal from the International Atomic Energy Agency, Maj. Austin Pearson, the commander of an Army unit, said today that the 250 tons of munitions his unit destroyed contained no similar marking.

“I did not see any IAEA seals at any of the locations we went into,” he said. “I was not looking for that,” Pearson said of the cache that was removed on April 13, 2003, or 10 days after U.S. forces arrived in Iraq.

Lawrence Di Rita, a Pentagon spokesman who stood next to Pearson at the Washington news conference, also said that he was unable to say conclusively that the destroyed weapons were part of the missing 377 tons previously reported.

While Di Rita suggested that some of the high-energy explosive known as RDX may have been removed from the site, he admitted: “I can’t say RDX that was on the list of IAEA is what the major pulled out.… We believe that some of the things they were pulling out of there were RDX.”

On April 18, 2003, a television news crew from Minnesota videotaped U.S. troops in Iraq using bolt cutters to break through chains and wire seals on the door of a dusty bunker and finding explosives stored inside.

The video did not appear significant at the time, particularly because it did not reveal weapons of mass destruction.

But now, it appears to be the strongest evidence so far in the debate over whether a huge cache of high-grade explosives disappeared on the Americans’ watch.

Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry this week seized on reports by the interim Iraqi government and United Nations nuclear inspectors indicating that 377 tons of high-grade explosives were plundered from the sprawling Al Qaqaa weapons site after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime on April 9, 2003.

Kerry charged that the munitions’ absence shows Bush failed to plan well, secure the site and send enough troops to Iraq.

Bush and Pentagon officials have suggested that the facility had been cleared of the explosives before the U.S.-led invasion on March 20.

The report by KSTP television of St. Paul, an ABC affiliate, said its crew was embedded with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division and reached a site that appeared to be Al Qaqaa on April 18. ABC News reported Thursday that weapons experts had said that the site the crew videotaped appeared to contain powerful HMX explosives.

The Minnesota station reported that officials with the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, said still images taken from the network’s website appeared to show the agency’s seals on the doors of the bunker. Before the invasion, the agency had been monitoring the explosive material, which can be used to detonate a nuclear weapon.

Former top U.S. weapons hunter David Kay said the video, which showed soldiers going through the explosives as well as the apparent IAEA seal on the door, was strong evidence that the weapons were still in at least one bunker weeks after the start of the war. The IAEA had placed seals on nine bunkers in the complex.

“The seal was broken [by U.S. troops] and, quite frankly, to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken, but the soldiers left after opening it up,” Kay said on CNN. “You have to provide security.”

The missing Al Qaqaa cache was a fraction of the problem, Kay said. “Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.”

Kay said Al Qaqaa “was one of the most well-documented explosives sites in all of Iraq.”

Pentagon officials claimed to have evidence of Iraqi military activity at the compound before the invasion. Thursday they released a declassified surveillance photograph showing two Iraqi trailer-trucks parked outside a bunker at Al Qaqaa on March 17, 2003.

The photograph reveals little about the fate of the 377 tons of explosives, part of an estimated 600,000 tons of explosives believed to have been scattered throughout Iraq at the time.

The controversy over the missing munitions has centered on a seven-week period. The IAEA last visited Al Qaqaa on March 9, 2003; CIA and military officials who were hunting for weapons of mass destruction reported the site thoroughly looted by early May.

Pentagon officials argue that the presence of Iraqi vehicles in the photo released Thursday — one trailer-truck about 25 feet long and another about 50 feet long — prove that Iraqi officials were at the site after U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq on March 15. In photos taken days before and after March 17, officials said, the trucks are not parked at the bunker. The Pentagon did not release those photos.

“There was a perception that this facility was under some kind of hermetic seal,” DiRita said Thursday. “The photo shows that there was activity at the facility at the time Saddam and only Saddam was in control of Iraq.”

Col. David Perkins, whose 2nd Brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division was the first to go through the area and which battled Iraqi forces over control of the site on April 3, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that he did not believe his troops saw the weapons during their brief stay at Al Qaqaa.

At the same time, he said he doubted that the explosives could have been removed after his soldiers arrived. American forces likely would have noticed anyone removing the material, he said, because the only developed road traversing the site was packed for weeks with U.S. convoys supplying troops heading toward Baghdad.

“It would be almost impossible to do that, because there is not a very well-developed road network in Iraq,” Perkins said.

Times staff writers John Hendren in Washington and Maggie Farley at the United Nations contributed to this report.