Interesting Details On Al Qa Qaa

Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri sends along this email from someone "who was on the scene for many years in Iraq." I don't know who this person is, but it sounds like they're either from UNSCOM or the IAEA.

Al Qa Qaa consist of close to 1000 buildings and Hatteen is another very large number. It would take many weeks just to walk through them all.

Qa Qaa makes ordinary chemicals into raw explosives. They produce some finished products. The storage areas at Qa Qaa have lots of raw materials, newly produced raw explosives, and fewer finished items.

Hatteen takes explosives and turns them into finished products.

The administration is claming they have rounded up umpteen thousand tons of MUNITIONS. This includes the weight of shell casing, bomb casings, bullets etc. The weight of a lead bullet contains no explosives whatsoever and just a little propellant charge. Once again they are highly misleading. The HMX is a pure explosive, ideal for things like car bombs and very formable to the problem at hand, unlike some artillery shell that has to be jury rigged.

There are clear signs in the Pentagon press statement and other places that the US troops may not have been collecting at Al Qa Qaa. In particular the major said he collected white phosphorous shells. He said this more than once. These were made and stored at Hatteen State Establishment, a few miles south of the storage bunkers for the HMX at Al Atheer. These are two different sites! Note the major’s comment yesterday that he had never heard of Al Qa Qaa until that day, only his operations are Elmwood or something like that.

Iraq made their own RDX and it was certainly all over the country in the form of military explosive ammunition items, like the 20,000 81 mm rocket warheads.

The truck parked outside the bunker in the DoD image is not at a bunker that contained HMX. It did contain conventional items that would be of immediate use in countering the invasion. It would be quite logical to disperse them the day before a war, assuming that they were taking things out of the bunker and not putting them in.

(The second truck in the satellite photograph is a fire truck. Look more carefully. Powell used the presence of such trucks to prove that chemical munitions were being moved. Presumably this story has fallen out of favor but at least we can conclude that only one truck is moving munitions in or out and the fire truck is there for safety.)

I cannot understand why anyone would expect them to disperse raw explosive powder, which has no military value, outside the bunkers. The war was clearly going to be short so there was no time to turn the HMX into military items, especially since they hadn’t tried in the previous years.

None of this proves anything, other than when you have facts you can conduct analysis and when you are speculating without facts you can cause chaos!