It just keeps getting worse for Senator John Kerry (D-UN). There have been several huge developments on the story, none of them good for him, and leading me to suspect that by the time this is all over, we’ll find that there are satellite photos of Kerry and Edwards in December 2002 personally hauling explosives out of Al Qaqaa while Mohamed El Baradei and Kofi Annan sit waiting in the trucks.
Some folks might be thinking “wow, this story is moving amazingly fast,”, and I’ll admit that was my first reaction. But the reason this story looks like it is moving quickly is because other news organizations are now doing the work that the NYT should have done in the first place. And it is going fast because, frankly, it wasn’t all that damned hard.
Here’s the latest, in more or less reverse chronological order (because that’s how we bloggers do it, by golly):
On the nutty fringe, the Guardian reports this morning that a terrorist group, the Al-Islam’s Army Brigades, to be in possession of a large portion of the missing explosives:
The group, calling itself Al-Islam’s Army Brigades, made the claim in a video broadcast today and warned that it will use the explosives if foreign troops threaten Iraqi cities.
Its video statement said:”Heroic Mujahideen have managed by the grace of God and by coordinating with a…number of the officers and the soldiers of the American intelligence to obtain a very huge amount of the explosives that were in the al-Qaqaa facility, which was under the protection of the American forces.”
The choice of whether to apply ‘nutty fringe’ to The Guardian, the terrorists, or both is left as reader’s choice.
The other major revelation of the morning is that ABC News is now reporting that the amount of explosives reported by missing by the Iraqi interim government may be wildly overstated:
International Atomic Energy Agency documents obtained by ABC News and first reported on “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings” indicate the amount of missing explosives may be substantially less than the Iraqis reported:.
The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing