MISSING EXPLOSIVES STORY TAKES ANOTHER TURN

The missing explosives story is taking yet another turn as a videotape shot by a Minneapolis TV crew embedded with US soldiers in April of 2003 has turned up. The tape seems to confirm that at least some of the explosives were still locked and under UN seal at that Iraqi depot.

A videotape made by a television crew with American troops when they opened bunkers at a sprawling Iraqi munitions complex south of Baghdad shows a huge supply of explosives still there nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, apparently including some sealed earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The tape, broadcast on Wednesday night by the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, appeared to confirm a warning given earlier this month to the agency by Iraqi officials, who said that hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives, powerful enough to bring down buildings or detonate nuclear weapons, had vanished from the site after the invasion of Iraq.

This story continues to build as additional pieces of evidence get into the public arena. Conclusions, however, are hard to come by as these pieces paint a disconnected picture. Were all the explosives at the depot when the Americans arrived? Some of them? None? If some were already removed, who took them? If the removal happened after the Americans arrived, how was it done without dozens of trucks? The story is complicated even more by the efforts of each campaign team to place the story into their campaign narrative. The Kerry folks want the story to help them make the case that Bush is incompetent, while the Bush folks want it to highlight the dangerous nature of the Hussein regime. In the end, I think it won't change anyone's mind about how they vote, primarily because there doesn't seem to be any definitive conclusion to make as of yet.