Just a pit stop.
This morning MSNBC interviewed one of the producers <$NoAd$>from their news crew that visited al Qaqaa as embeds with the 101st Airborne, Second brigade on April 10th, 2003.
This is the ‘search’ that the White House and CNN are hanging their hats on (empahsis added)…
Amy Robach: And it’s still unclear exactly when those explosives disappeared. Here to help shed some light on that question is Lai Ling. She was part of an NBC news crew that traveled to that facility with the 101st Airborne Division back in April of 2003. Lai Ling, can you set the stage for us? What was the situation like when you went into the area?
Lai Ling Jew: When we went into the area, we were actually leaving Karbala and we were initially heading to Baghdad with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. The situation in Baghdad, the Third Infantry Division had taken over Baghdad and so they were trying to carve up the area that the 101st Airborne Division would be in charge of. Um, as a result, they had trouble figuring out who was going to take up what piece of Baghdad. They sent us over to this area in Iskanderia. We didn’t know it as the Qaqaa facility at that point but when they did bring us over there we stayed there for quite a while. Almost, we stayed overnight, almost 24 hours. And we walked around, we saw the bunkers that had been bombed, and that exposed all of the ordinances that just lied dormant on the desert.
AR: Was there a search at all underway or was, did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?
LLJ: No. There wasn’t a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was â at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there.
AR: And there was no talk of securing the area after you left. There was no discussion of that?
LLJ: Not for the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. They were — once they were in Baghdad, it was all about Baghdad, you know, and then they ended up moving north to Mosul. Once we left the area, that was the last that the brigade had anything to do with the area.
AR: Well, Lai Ling Jew, thank you so much for shedding some light into that situation. We appreciate it.
Of course, as we noted last evening, contrary to the Drudge/CNN account, this wasn’t the first detachment of troops to visit al Qaqaa. That came a week earlier when explosives were in fact found in a quick spot check of the facility.
Bear in mind the the al Qaqaa facility contains a vast number of buildings. Different press reports put the number anywhere from 87 to 1100. The discrepancy, I believe, is a definitional one, depending on whether one counts major buildings or individual bunkers and storage units.
