An OUNCE of PREVENTION
or LOOTED HOPES by Michael Hammerschlag
http://hammernews.com/prevention2.htm
There has been much commotion over the lack of armor on Iraq vehicles and vests, but that's always been a trade-off: if you reinforce a HUMV enough to survive an RPG strike, you may make it too heavy to accelerate or go fast enough to avoid getting hit, and full body armor suits are great except when 120° temperatures makes the soldier collapse from heat prostration. The far more egregious outrage is why these hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance were allowed to be looted by insurgents in the first place.
A breathtaking 250,000 tons of heavy ordnance (out of 650,000 tons total): aircraft bombs, artillery and tank shells, mines, rockets were allowed to be looted by our undermanned army in the 4-30 weeks after invasion through gross negligence at the top- equivalent to 1 million 500 lb bombs. At ten 500 lb. roadside mines or market closeouts a day, that's enough for 274 years of attacks.
---"During the fall of 2003, what you would see was Iraqis going in at night, individually and in trucks," US weapons inspector David Kay told U.S. News . "They would pull ordnances out and drive off." Security was so bad after Saddam Hussein's regime fell, Kay recalled, that his team was often shot at by insurgents when they went to inspect the sites: "There were just not enough boots on the ground, and the military didn't give it a high enough priority to stop the looting. Tens of thousands of tons of ammunition were being looted, and that is what is fueling the insurgency." -US News+WR report
David BeBatto, a Military counterintelligence officer at the massive Camp Annaconda 50 miles north of Baghdad, in charge of hunting the deck-of-cards Baathists, found a 5 square mile ammo dump under 2 miles south of the camp in April 2003 "littered with anti-aircraft missiles, land mines, rocket-propelled grenades, plastic explosives" in dozens of bunkers. He reported it again and again in written reports to his battalion commander Lt. Col. Timothy Ryan, even giving him a tour of the dump. "Local Iraqis told us- `these guys' - and they would point to looters in the distance- `are fedayeen. They're going to take this and make it into bombs and use it against you,'" he said in an interview. Nothing was done. "We had enough people.. if we had placed 4,5,6 guys at the main entry to that facility, that would have been enough!.. Every time I went back there, there was less."
2 other intelligence agents also reported seeing that and many unsecured ammo dumps all over Iraq bursting with deadly material- all of which were massive looted. "They were wasting people for really menial things: KP, when there were a thousand Iraqis begging to do it for a jug of water. I would have feasts with shieks and ministers- when I came back me and my team of counterintelligence special agents would be.. emptying out latrines. Bottom line is they ignored it- (because of) a lack of people, ignorance, and .. absolute lack of planning for the occupation. Every day was a new day- you made it up as you went along." Ryan's commander from July 2003 was Col. Thomas Pappas, convicted of dereliction of duty and relieved for his part in Abu Graib abuse scandal, who directed Ryan to take no action about the looting.
When questioned about the looting*, Donald Rumsfeld, famously replied with the blithe insolence of a drunken teenager who had crashed the family car, "Freedom's untidy. And free people are free to commit mistakes, and to commit crimes and do bad things.... Stuff happens." The looting was "part of the price" for the liberation of Iraq and not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. Incredibly Rumsfeld seemed to think the looting was a finger in Saddam's eye and a healthy release of "pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression", although after the invasion America owned Iraq and would have to fix any damage.
* questions were about looting of Baghdad infrastructure and Museum; deadly munitions never came up
The First Rule of Occupation since the Sumerians is: disarm the population, but Rumsfeld knew better, wanting to test his faster lighter cheaper invasion theories, and blindly convinced we would be feted as liberators. DeBatto says, "They made a decision at the highest level- Rumsfeld- to just let it go. They wanted not to be seen as brutal occupiers and didn't react at all. You had these heavily armed Americans who could have stopped anything, yet they let these looters take everything they wanted. We have given every weapon Saddam stored for 30 years.. to every terrorist and 2-bit thug in the Middle East."
Worst was the Manhattan-sized weapons dump of Al Qaqa'a (an issue before the 2004 US election), loaded with 380 tons of HMX, RDX, PETN high explosives, so powerful they are used in nuclear bombs, and useable in making near undetectable IED's out of rubble (no metal). The 101 Airborne Div., who swept the area April 7-10, 2003, said they "did not receive orders to search and secure the entire facility or search for high explosive-type munitions." By May 27, it was stripped of all explosives by looters.
CONTINUED: http://hammernews.com/prevention2.htm