Getting the Story Straight

Getting the Story Straight
Thursday, October 28, 2004

This is a partial transcript of "Special Report With Brit Hume," Oct. 27, 2004, that has been edited for clarity.

BRIT HUME, HOST: The story of those missing explosives in Iraq, as we’ve reported, has been all over the campaign trail today with Democratic John Kerry calling it a growing scandal and President Bush attacking Kerry’s language.

The former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Paul Bremer, joins me now.

Mr. Ambassador, welcome.

PAUL BREMER, FMR. CPA ADMINISTRATOR: Thank you.

HUME: This is the first time you have been out doing interviews of this kind since you finished your tour of duty. And the question is, why?

BREMER: Well, I think it’s important to talk about this story. I think the growing scandal is the irresponsibility of people asserting that they know these weapons disappeared, in the period between the liberation and arrival of our inspectors. And I think that’s highly unlikely.

HUME: Why do you think that?

BREMER: You know, unlike most of the people who are talking about this, I was actually there. I was in Iraq. I was on the ground. And it is highly unlikely for two reasons. First of all, it would have required a great deal of organization to move 380 tons of munitions. It is not something you do overnight with a few looters. The insurgency was not organized. It was not organized until late in the summer. And secondly, I was on the ground there. There was no traffic on the streets.

HUME: Now, we’re talking about an area that is south of Baghdad by some, what? Twenty miles, something like that?

BREMER: Yes. Yes, south of Baghdad.

HUME: Now, you’re familiar with that area? You’ve been down in that area?

BREMER: Yes. Yes. Well, I traveled in that area during this very period. I traveled down through that area to a place called Hilla, where one of the mass graves is. I traveled to Najaf . I traveled to Karbala.

HUME: So what did the roads look like?

BREMER: The roads were essentially deserted except for American military traffic. And that was the case all the way through May and into — well into June. And I traveled those roads. It is highly unlikely that you could have had dozens of heavy-duty trucks. To move this kind of stuff, you’d have to have had several dozens, three-dozen 10-ton trucks. It’s just highly unlikely that anybody could have moved those trucks on those roads without our noticing it.

Now, what we do know, however, what is plausible, we know from both the IAEA and from David Kay, our lead inspector, that Saddam had the practice of dispersing munitions when danger loomed. And there was a month between the last time the IAEA was on this site, as I understand it.

HUME: That was March 9 or something that.

BREMER: Yes, early March until our first guys got there on April 3. So there was time to move the stuff. And that is at least a plausible explanation. Certainly more plausible than to assert that one knows it happened after liberation, which I believe is highly unlikely.

HUME: Now, the American weapons inspection team got in there on something like May 8. That was the first time soldier got in there, whose principal job was to look for weapons. They did not find these explosives, fair enough? Correct?

BREMER: That’s what I read. I mean I don’t know that only from what I read.

HUME: Which means that this government has known that those weapons were not at that facility as recently — as long ago as almost a year and a half. My question is if that’s the case, and it appears to be, why do you think the IAEA would write a memo on October 10, 2004, warning the U.S. government supposedly about these so-called missing weapons?

BREMER: Well, I don’t really care to speculate on the motivation, or the timing of IAEA’s report or letter. It seems that’s a job for political pundits. But I can tell you what it was like at the time that this allegedly happened. Because I was there, I was on the ground and I consider it highly unlikely that this happened in that brief period after liberation before our inspectors got there.

HUME: Now, the principal job of our weapons inspectors was to look for weapons of mass destruction.

BREMER: That’s right.

HUME: While I guess critics of the administration are now highlighting how dangerous these weapons could be as detonators or explosives that could blow up airplanes. There was a large volume of these conventional weapons in the country, something on what order?

BREMER: Well, Saddam spent billions and billions of dollars on weapons. And we believe there was probably as much as 100 — a million tons.

HUME: A million tons?

BREMER: A million tons of weapons. We discovered and controlled and cleared more than 10,000 different munitions dumps all over the country. Some of them are tens of square kilometers in size. They’re enormous. You fly over them in a helicopter, you fly for 10, 15, 20 minutes at a couple of hundreds of miles an hour. They’re huge!

HUME: Is there any way to estimate how much of this stuff were explosives?

BREMER: High explosives?

HUME: Yes.

BREMER: I don’t know. It may be that people know that. I know we destroyed something like 400,000 tons of the munitions that we have found. I mean that’s — it’s a staggering amount of stuff that was there. And as you say, this is a big job.

HUME: Now, let’s assume, for example, let’s assume that these forces that came through there, first the Third I.D., which as far as we can tell now, searched the facility enough to find a lot of white powder that they thought was suspicious. They didn’t see, apparently, any of these sealed IAEA sealed weapons. That was true as well of the 101 that came in a couple days later.

BREMER: And so have been true of several reporters who were embedded with these units as well.

HUME: Right. Our own Dana Lewis didn’t see them.

BREMER: No. No.

HUME: We haven’t proved that they weren’t there, but nobody has seen them or that they were there. The question is, whether in your view — I mean if someone missed these, whose fault would that have been?

BREMER: Well, I don’t know. I think you’re asking a hypothetical question here, Brit. It seems to me very irresponsible to assert that one knows what happened here. There certainly was time. It is more — a much more plausible explanation to look at that four-week period between the last time the IAEA was on the site, and first time the Third I.D. arrived, about a month, as a chance for Saddam to do what he practiced doing. Which was to move munitions when they were threatened, he moved them into mosques and schools all over the country.

HUME: Well, hadn’t El Baradei in fact told the U.N. Security Council that some of those explosives, RMX, had been moved?

BREMER: Apparently he did. I understand that from what I’ve read in the press. He apparently told them that. And that was some time before the liberation.

HUME: All right. Well, Ambassador Bremer, I appreciate your coming to give us your perspective on this.

BREMER: Good to be with you.

HUME: Thank you very much. Go back into retirement. Enjoy yourself.

BREMER: I intend to.

HUME: Good to have you.

BREMER: Nice to be here.

What Really Happened at Al-Qaqaa?

What Really Happened at Al-Qaqaa?
Wednesday, October 27, 2004

This is a partial transcript of "Special Report With Brit Hume," Oct. 26 2004, that has been edited for clarity.

BRIT HUME, HOST: As you saw earlier, when the 101st Airborne Division (search) stopped overnight at that weapons facility south of Baghdad, there was an NBC News reporting team embedded with them, including correspondent Dana Lewis, who is now with Fox News in Moscow, where he joins me now.

Dana, tell me what happened. Now, this was the day after Baghdad had fallen. You were with the 101st. You were making your way up the spine of Iraq toward Baghdad. How did you come to stop there, and what happened?

DANA LEWIS, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brit, I mean, you know, put it into context of what was going on at that moment. The fighting wasn’t over; there was chaos everywhere on the roads. And we were with the 101st as it was pushing north to take the southern suburbs of Baghdad (search). And as we were driving up the road, I can remember seeing this amazing wall that just seemed to go on forever. This thing was about 10 feet tall and it went on for at least a mile or two. I’ve never seen such a big compound in Iraq since I’ve been there for two years now. It was a tremendous compound.

The 101st was ordered to go into the compound and spend the night there. They were not ordered to search that compound there. They simply used it as a pit stop so that they could then continue their mission on to Baghdad. In fact, I can tell you I was with the colonel of the Strike Brigade, the Second Brigade, Colonel Joe Anderson. He was frustrated they had to spend the night there because they wanted to get on to their mission in Baghdad.

HUME: So you got inside this facility. I suppose some members of the unit might have heard of the place. What did you see when you got in there?

LEWIS: Sure, they may have had information on what may have been in there, because they generally had that kind of information. It was a tremendously large facility. You got in and saw all sorts of bunkers inside. And Brit, because we spent 24 hours in there, I had a chance to walk that facility and I took it. It was a long walk as we went from bunker to bunker with me and my cameraman.

Most of the bunkers were locked at that point. You could not get inside. Some of them, though, appeared to have been hit by air strikes and we were told by some of the soldiers on the ground that they had been hit by bombs. So some of the concrete was split open and you could see munitions in a few of the bunkers. And at one end of the facility, I can remember seeing hangars full of rockets. I’ve never seen so many rockets in one place. It looked like that facility had also been bombed from the air and most of those rockets were bent out of shape and inoperable.

HUME: Right. Now, we have seen pictures of these seals that the International Atomic Energy Agency (search) and the weapons inspectors used to identify, and to close off the bunkers where some of these explosives were believed to have been kept. Did you see any of those seals on any of the facilities as you were walking through there?

LEWIS: I had those seals described to me. And I can tell you that as we went from the bunkers, certainly there were wires and there were locks. But I don’t recall ever seeing an IAEA stamp on any of them. It doesn’t mean that there weren’t any of them.

HUME: I got you.

Now, in addition to — you saw evidence of bombing, obviously. Was there any sign that this facility had been looted that you could see?

LEWIS: I would say at that point, no, Brit. I mean as we went north, you could certainly see looting in Baghdad. And I know what looting looks like. Hundreds of kids and hundreds of people everywhere. This facility was basically abandoned at that point. There were lots of Russian tanks that had been abandoned on the road around it. But it looked like it had been well guarded right up until the point that the Army got in there.

But I don’t know what happened between the point that the Iraqi army left that facility and then the U.S. Army (search) came in there. There would have been a gap. And who knows what would have gone on in there? But when I was there, we didn’t see any looting. And that’s not to say there couldn’t have been looting after we left, either.

HUME: Right. Now, after you left, describe if you can — I mean obviously, we’re talking about a fairly large amount of explosives. The IAEA says it was 30 — 380 tons. That would be, we estimate, about 38 truckloads. That’s quite a lot.

LEWIS: That’s a lot.

HUME: Was the situation that you witnessed around the facility such that it would have been easy for somebody to spear it, 38 tons of explosives, or 38 tons of anything else out there, undetected by U.S. forces in the area?

LEWIS: I think it would have been pretty tough. I mean the roads for the most part were closed down. Not very many people were driving those roads, because there was still some shooting going on and people were worried about getting caught in the crossfire. It would have been hard to move trucks in there right under the Army’s nose. But at the same time, certainly there were vehicles moving on the roads, as we got closer to Baghdad.

But at that moment, I certainly didn’t see any lines of trucks heading for that facility. And remember, who would have been ordering those trucks down there? For all intent and purposes, the regime had fled.

HUME: So it would have taken an operation of some size, if the stuff was still there, to get it out of there. And you didn’t see, at least, any indications at the time you were there that such a thing could easily have been done.

LEWIS: We didn’t see any sign of that when we were there, no.

HUME: All right. Dana Lewis, glad to have you. Thanks very much for staying up late in Moscow to be with me. Thank you very much.

Search Showed No Explosives at Iraqi Base Before War's End

Search Showed No Explosives at Iraqi Base Before War's End
Wednesday, October 27, 2004

WASHINGTON — U.S. forces searched several times last year the Iraqi military base from which 380 tons (now 150 tons less according to actual IAEA After-Action Report) of explosives vanished — including one check a week before Saddam Hussein was driven out of power. But the military saw no signs of a huge quantity of munitions, Pentagon officials told FOX News.

A timeline provided by the Defense Department is significant because officials from the new Iraqi interim government told the International Atomic Energy Agency two weeks ago that the explosives were stolen sometime after coalition forces took control of Baghdad.

The IAEA reported the disappearance to the U.N. Security Council on Monday, the same day the New York Times ran a front-page story on the topic. The story started a firestorm of debate that has consumed the presidential race in its closing days, forced the Pentagon to account for its actions and raised questions of media bias.

The explosives were being kept at the Al-Qaqaa installation south of Baghdad. The munitions included HMX and RDX, key components in plastic explosives, which insurgents in Iraq have used in bomb attacks. The IAEA was monitoring the munitions because HMX is a "dual use" substance powerful enough to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb and set off a nuclear chain reaction.

On April 3, 2003, elements of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division made it to Al-Qaqaa, where they were engaged by Iraqi forces from inside the facility, Defense officials told FOX News.

The 3rd Infantry soldiers stayed long enough to battle the Iraqis and to give the facility a brief inspection before heading out to continue on their prime objective — reaching the Iraqi capital.

A day or so after Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, troops from the 101st Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade arrived at Al-Qaqaa.

One officer with the 101st said looters had already gone through the facility.

The soldiers "secured the area they were in and looked in a limited amount of bunkers to ensure chemical weapons were not present in their area," Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, deputy public affairs officer for the unit, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "Bombs were found but not chemical weapons in that immediate area.

"Orders were not given from higher to search or to secure the facility or to search for HE type munitions, as they [high-explosive weapons] were everywhere in Iraq," he wrote.

On May 8, 2003, a team from the 75th Exploitation Task Force arrived at Al-Qaqaa to search it. The task force followed up with additional searches on May 11 and May 27.

The 75th Exploitation Task Force, which was in charge of directing the search operation for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, did not find any evidence of the explosives.

The Pentagon investigation is continuing, and there is some thought that trucks operated by Saddam's regime may have been in the vicinity of the facility in late March.

The explosives at Al-Qaqaa had been housed in storage bunkers at the facility. U.N. nuclear inspectors placed fresh seals over the bunker doors in January 2003. The inspectors visited Al-Qaqaa for the last time on March 15, 2003, and reported that the seals were not broken; therefore, the weapons were still there at the time. The team then pulled out of the country in advance of the invasion.

Reporters Offer First-Hand Accounts

Reporters who were embedded with the U.S. military at the time also have offered first-hand accounts of what they saw at Al-Qaqaa.

FOX News' Dana Lewis was with the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division when it stopped at the site on April 10 for 24 hours before continuing on to Baghdad.

"It was sealed in the sense that when we arrived, no one was inside," Lewis said, adding that there were dozens of abandoned Iraqi tanks outside the facility.

"Inside, we walked around dozens of concrete bunkers, which were still sealed. Many still had padlocks on the doors and in another part of this giant walled compound, we saw dozens and dozens of rockets, most of them damaged from air strikes."

Lewis noted that he did not see any IAEA tags during his brief time at Al-Qaqaa.

Associated Press correspondent Chris Tomlinson, who was embedded with the 3rd Infantry but didn't go to Al-Qaqaa, described the search of Iraqi military facilities south of Baghdad as brief, cursory missions to seek out hostile troops, not to inventory or secure weapons.

The enormous size of the bases, the rapid pace of the advance on Baghdad and a limited number of troops made it impossible for U.S. commanders to allocate any soldiers to guard any of the facilities after making a check, Tomlinson said.

NBC correspondent Lai Ling Jew, who was with the 101st, told MSNBC that "there wasn't a search" of Al-Qaqaa.

"The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad," she said. "As far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away."

Wellman, the 101st Airborne spokesman, said he does not know if any troops were left at the facility once combat troops from the 2nd Brigade left.

The IAEA had pulled out of Iraq in 1998, and by the time it returned in 2002, it confirmed that 35 tons of HMX that had been placed under IAEA seal were missing.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei told the United Nations in February 2003 that Iraq had declared that "HMX previously under IAEA seal had been transferred for use in the production of industrial explosives, primarily to cement plants as a booster for explosives used in quarrying."

"However, given the nature of the use of high explosives, it may well be that the IAEA will be unable to reach a final conclusion on the end use of this material," ElBaradei warned at the time.

He did not specifically mention Al-Qaqaa in his February 2003 briefing to the United Nations, and the agency has not said whether it separately informed the United States.

FOX News' Bret Baier, Dana Lewis and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

I made up a table of the timeline for easier reference (and for you "visual" people out there).

00.00.1998	IAEA Pulls Out of Iraq	35 Tons of HMX Placed Under Seal
00.00.2002	IAEA Returns to Iraq	35 Tons of Sealed HMX Missing
01.00.2003	UN Weapons Inspectors	Fresh Seals on Bunker Doors
02.00.2003	Mohamed ElBaradei, IAEA Chief UN Nuclear Watchdog	Informs UN of HMX Movement by Iraq Unknown if UN Informed USA al-Qaqaa Not Specifically Identified in Briefing to UN
03.15.2003	UN Weapons Inspectors	Final Visit to al-Qaqaa, Seals Unbroken
03.19.2003	War Begins	After Defying Numerous UN Resolutions, Weeks of Failed Diplomacy Attempts, and a 48-Hour Warning Given and Ignored by Hussein
04.03.2003	3d ID Arrives 34 Days After Final UN Inspection Fighting Their Way Into al-Qaqaa	Facility Briefly Inspected Only Conventional Weapons Found
04.10.2003	101 AD, 2d Brigade	Arrive at al-Qaqaa Bunkers No IAEA Seals Seen Only Conventional Weapons Found
05.01.2003	Major Combat Operations End After 44 Days	President Bush Requests UN Security Council Remove Sanctions on Iraq Despite Sharp Divisions in the 15-Member Body
05.08.2003	75th ETF - Arrives	Only Conventional Weapons Found
05.11.2003	75th ETF - 2d Search	Only Conventional Weapons Found
05.27.2003	75th ETF - 3d Search	Only Conventional Weapons Found
06.03.2003	Kofi Annan Secretary General, United Nations	Sanctions on Iraq Lifted
Late.2003	IAEA Satellite Photos	At Least Two of Ten Bunkers at al-Qaqaa Destroyed by Titanic Blasts, Presumably from War
10.25.2004	Mohamed ElBaradei (IAEA) Again Reports Missing Weapons	New York Times Breaks Story in Conjunction With 60 Minutes (IAEA and UN?)