No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says

[geek tragedy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/politics/27bomb.html?oref=login&oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

<snip>White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.

But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the facility and had merely stopped there for the night.
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<snip>
A few days earlier, some soldiers from the division thought they had discovered a cache of chemical weapons that turned out to be pesticides. Several of them came down with rashes, and they had to go through a decontamination procedure. Colonel Anderson said he wanted to avoid a repeat of those problems, and because he had already seen stockpiles of weapons in two dozen places, did not care to poke through the stores at Al Qaqaa.

"I had given instructions, 'Don't mess around with those. It looks like they are bunkers; we're not messing around with those things. That's not what were here for,' " he said. "I thought we would be there for a few hours and move on. We ended up staying overnight."
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[Moderator]

1. Duplicate topic--Please continue discussion here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x934587