And how is it Bush's fault that the terrorists might use this against us and Iraqi civilians? That's like blaming the gun when the bad guy kills an innocent person. Makes no sense.

Mays- Don't try to make sense of it. Just accept that everything is Bush's fault.

Kerry's next statement on the subject:

"Bush actually lost the explosives before he lost them. I have always been the anti-losing of explosives candidate, and have been consistent in my opposition of losing explosives ever since I won three Purple Hearts while being shot at in Viet Nam. I mean, think of the children, for God's sake. By intentionally losing these explosives, which I opposed so strongly that I even opposed my own opposition, this President has made it clear that he wants old people and their Social Security checks to be blown up. He is clearly incompetent, despite knowing how to properly throw a football."

The UN inspectors claim the explosives were still there in March 2003 - although they didn't really look for them, but just checked that the seals they put in months before looked OK. US troops + an NBC reporter took the depot April 10, and did not find any great heap of explosives, nor did they see the inspectors' seal on anything. A few months later, the UN team came back and reported it looked like the depot was looted - and I suppose it should have been guarded better considering the other stuff that was stored there, but apparently the inspectors didn't figure out that 380 TONS of explosives were missing for a year and a half afterwards. So who is supposed to be incompetent?

At 40,000 pounds per truck (and that's a big load for a truck), that's 17 truckloads. You don't just overlook that much material when you secure the area, nor do I think it likely that casual looters could have made a clean sweep of it. At any point in our occupation could some group have put together a convoy of 17 trucks, spent days loading them up, and got them away through the checkpoints our troops were supposedly holding at road crossings?

It sounds far more likely to me that Saddam had them shifted sometime before our invasion started. You know, while Bush was trying to see if the UN inspectors could do their job, and to be "multilateral" with the French and Germans that were profiting from oil-for-food corruption...

Sure, the weapons were gone by April 10th, but Baghdad fell on April 9th. I guess that Bush's incompetence during the first 24 hours must have lead to their overnight disappearance.

A better question is why aren't the U.N. and the Dimocrats worried about where the WMD went, as much as they are throwing a hissy fit over where these conventional explosives went?

hey...maybe Kerry was implying we should have invaded earlier before we should have waited...

http://www.indcjournal.com/archives/001214.php

The Kerry campaign is now cutting new commercials about this "blunder", the new information that it never happened will not stop them. The MSM, except for NBC and Fox will not cover the second (NBC) story, just wait and see. Kerry believes that if they can get away with just one more big lie it will push him over the top. He may be right. I don't know why the White House is not screaming all over tv about this.

Here's an identity-masked e-mail from a military member who actually helped search the site for this "ordinance". http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerry200410261723.asp

The thing that bothers me is, if they had intelligence on what to expect and reported 380 tons of HE missing, why doesn't there seem to have been a follow-up to try to track it down ASAP? Hey, it's not a nuke, but it could make 50 to 100 truck bombs as powerful as the Oklahoma City one.

I think I've found the answer to that: Our troops collected something like 400,000 tons of explosives and ordinance. (What was Saddam planning to do, wire the whole country to blow?) They're still working on destroying them. A mere 380 tons is easy to lose in all that!