101st Commander: No Idea Al QaQaa Was Munitions Site

Forgive me if this has been posted in a diary.  A routine (and brief) search didn't turn it up, so I thought I'd post.

Over at the NY Times they have interviewed the officer in charge of the 2nd Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq.

The officer, Colonel Joseph Anderson, not only reaffirmed the NBC embedded reporter's recollection that 101st forces did not search the facility, but he went on to say that he didn't even know it was a munitions facility until this week.

No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says

Here are some relevant segments of the article:

But the unit's commander said in an interview
yesterday that his troops had not searched the site and had merely stopped there overnight.

The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second
Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring.

Colonel Anderson, who is now the chief of staff for the division and who spoke by telephone from Fort Campbell, Ky., said his troops had been driving north toward Baghdad and had paused at Al Qaqaa to make plans for their next push.

"We happened to stumble on it,'' he said. "I didn't know what the place was supposed to be. We did not get involved in any of the bunkers. It was not our mission. It was not our focus. We were just stopping there on our way to Baghdad. The plan was to leave that very same day. The plan was not to go in there and start searching. It looked like all the other ammunition supply points we had seen already."

It is clearly obvious that since the IAEA was forced to leave Iraq before American bombs started raining from the sky, the Bush Administration has failed our soldiers and our people time and time again.

George W. Bush is the worst war president in this country's history.