The White House seemed to be caught flatfooted at first in their response to the al Qa Qaa debacle. But now the spin is emerging.
One ‘senior administration official’ tells CNN that “the discovery was not made public sooner because standard intelligence practice is not to let the enemy know such information.”
The folks I’m talking to don’t think that much of that excuse. But isn’t the point that ‘the enemy’ probably already knows because the enemy took the stuff? And since the stuff’s been gone for something like a year and a half, when were people in the US going to be informed?
And is that why no one told the IAEA? Were we afraid they’d tell the enemy?
Then there’s this quickly emerging excuse, I guess we might call it the FUBAR rationale.
The same official took this one out for a spin with CNN too …
The senior administration official downplayed the importance of the missing explosives, describing them as dangerous material but “stuff you can buy anywhere.” The official added that the administration did not see this necessarily as a “proliferation risk.”
“In the grand scheme — and on a grand scale — there are hundreds of tons of weapons, munitions, artillery, explosives that are unaccounted for in Iraq,” the official said. “And like the Pentagon has said, there is really no way the U.S. military could safeguard all of these weapons depots or find all of these missing materials.”
So, given what a powder keg Iraq is, what’s another few hundred tons of plastic explosives. It’s not even “necessarily” a proliferation risk.
I’m feeling better already.
