Im working on a

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

I’m working on a final update for the evening on the al Qaqaa issue. But I notice that CNN has picked up the NBC news report that the explosives were already gone when the first US troops arrived.

NBC, they say, “reports that the material had already vanished by the time American troops and an NBC crew arrived there on April 10, 2003.”

You guys are awfully gullible. Did it strike you guys as odd that MSNBC doesn’t even appear to have picked up this “report”?

Setting aside the matter of whether a detachment from the 101st Airborne and an NBC news crew would have been able to make that determination, they weren’t the first US troops there.

The first American troops on the scene (from the 3rd Infantry Division) came a week earlier, on April 4th and they found lots of explosives — though what kind is unclear from contemporary wire service reports — in a series of spot checks of the 87 buildings and bunkers at the al Qaqaa complex.

Latest Editors' Blog
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: