Kerry’s 377 Ton Pile of B.S.

I’ve been following the story about the missing ammunition at Al-Qaqaa, a former Iraqi military installation, while on the road. When I read about it in the New York Times it occurred to me that this was a recycling of old news, but I didn’t have time to check it out thoroughly. Rush, on his program, confirmed that indeed this story was suspiciously resurrected from some time ago. As you all know by now, it’s worse than that.

All signs indicate that there were probably no significant stockpiles of weapons in the site by the time our troops arrived in the Spring of 2003. Recent developments also lead increasingly to the conclusion that the New York Times deliberately manipulated this story not only to make it appear like new “news,” but to make it appear like news at all. If there was no ammo when we arrived, there is no story. But that hasn’t kept John Kerry from hammering on President Bush and our troops on the campaign trail, as if the story has not been the least discredited. As others have also pointed out, the timing of the Kerry harangues make reasonable people wonder whether there was conspiratorial collusion between the Times and the Kerry campaign as a Hail Mary October Surprise of sorts.

But despite this sordid string of developments, I am gratified that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney have confronted Kerry directly on this issue.

President Bush really took Kerry to task for his irresponsible and reckless statements criticizing our troops and their commanders. In a speech in Lancaster, Pennsylvania the president hit Kerry hard:

After repeatedly calling Iraq the “wrong war” and a “diversion,” Senator Kerry this week seemed shocked to learn that Iraq was a dangerous place full of dangerous weapons. (Scattered laughter.) The senator used to know that, even though he seems to have forgotten it over the course of the campaign. But after all, that’s why we’re there. Iraq was a dangerous place run by a dangerous tyrant who had a lot of weapons. We have seized or destroyed more than 400,000 tons of munitions, including explosives, at more than — thousands of different sites, and we’re continuing to round up more weapons every day. I want to remind the American people if Senator Kerry had his way, we would still be taking our “global test,” Saddam Hussein would still be in power, he would control all those weapons and explosives, and could have shared them with our terrorist enemies.

Now the senator is making wild charges about missing explosives when his top foreign policy adviser admits, quote, “we do not know the facts.” Think about that. The senator’s denigrating the action of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts. Unfortunately, that’s part of a pattern of saying almost anything to get elected, like when Senator Kerry charged that our military failed to get Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora even though our top military commander, General Tommy Franks, said the senator’s understanding of events does not square with reality and our intelligence reports placed bin Laden in any of several different countries at the time.

Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site. This investigation is important and it’s ongoing, and a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief

.This is exactly right. Kerry doesn’t know the facts, but in his selfish desperation to win he again places his political ambitions above the national interest and the interests and morale of our troops. But he’s been doing that since he returned from Vietnam, hasn’t he? Some things just never change.

The Kerry Spot blog (National Review Online) has an interesting post on the Bush campaign hitting Kerry back on these bogus missing ammo charges. The post includes a time line and some interesting comments on the matter from Vice President Cheney, who is mincing no words. Cheney, said, among other things:

John Kerry doesn’t know if those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad. The senator’s foreign policy adviser Richard Holbrooke admitted as much yesterday when he said twice, ‘I don’t know the truth.‘ John Kerry, though, is not one to let a shortage of facts [get the] better [of] him. He rushed out to put up a TV ad saying there was a failure to contain these explosives when he had no idea if they were there to be secured.

You’ve just got to love V.P. Cheney. This says it all: “John Kerry is not one to let a shortage of facts get the better of him.” Amen.

Update: Ralph Peters has an excellent piece in the New York Post with a timeline that nails Kerry to the wall on this one.