John Forbes Gets "Al-Qaqaa" on his $600 shoes

The MSM, in their desperate attempts to elect the Junior Senator from the People’s Republic, I mean Commonwealth, of Massachusetts to the Presidency, put out the story this past Monday that the Coalition (read: our troops) failed to secure some 380 tons of high-powered explosives (RDX, PETN) in the Al-Qaqaa munitions dump in Iraq – and that, of course, it was all the fault of George W. Bush. I suppose they think Bush himself should have been guarding the gate and that he fell asleep, or something of that nature.

Let’s ignore for the moment that the Coalition (read: our troops) have found and either have destroyed or presently will destroy some 400,000 tons of ammo, weapons and explosives in the former munitions-dump known as Iraq. The fact is that this stuff (PETN in particular) is nasty stuff. I’ve worked with it and seen it in action. One or two GRAINS of this stuff can launch a 2-kg slug some 20-meters in the air (forgive my slipping into euro-speak with the weights-and-measures, but I am an engineer after all). It is extremely powerful, dangerous stuff that we do not want in the hands of our enemies either in Iraq or anywhere else for that matter.

However, we simply do not yet know all of the facts surrounding the “disappearance” of this material. Frankly, we’re not even sure, as of mid-morning today, how much of this extremely dangerous material may have gone missing.

Then along comes Major Austin Pearson of the U.S. Army Ordinance Corps – late of the 101st Airborne in Iraq. Here, as summarized by Fox News, is what we know about Major Pearson’s side of the story…

A U.S. Army officer came forward Friday and said a team from the 3rd Infantry Division took about 200 tons of explosives from the Al-Qaqaa munitions base soon after Saddam Hussein's regime fell last year.

Major Austin Pearson appeared at a Pentagon news conference to say it was his mission to go the facility and clear explosives from the base. He said he did not discover that the International Atomic Energy Agency had reported 377 tons of explosives were missing until Tuesday night and he said he promptly contacted military officials.

Major Pearson’s mission, it turns out, was to remove potentially hazardous materials (not just plastic explosives) from Al-Qaqaa and bring them to a rear area (a Logistical Support Area - or LSA - as he continually referred to them) for destruction. One would think that if Major Person, under order to remove hazardous and dangerous materials, had come across hundreds of tons of extremely dangerous PETN or RDX, particularly materials marked with IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency, the people who leaked the story in the first place in an obvious attempt to effect the outcome of OUR election) seals, that Major Person and his unit would have removed them and taken them away from destruction. Is that too much of a stretch?

That said, is it therefore too much of a stretch to conclude that either the explosives (which a Pentagon spokesman apprearing with Maj. Pearson said could be more like THREE tons, not the 380 tons reported in Pravda on the Hudson) was gone before our troops ever got there - or that the Coalition (read: our troops) took care of the stuff and therefore it never went "missing"?

Major Pearson admits that he is not an explosives expert, but one has to wonder what basis is left for this story.

This has not stopped John Forbes from hammering away at this issue, though reports are that he’s removed all traces of Al-Qaqaa from his web site and has ordered ads attacking Bush on this point removed from the airwaves (they’re moving on to their old standby, Halliburton - which is also old news recycled for the stretch-run). However, this does reveal a great deal about the type of President Kerry would be.

Kerry has been (at times deservedly) critical of GWB for his seeming willingness to “cherry-pick” intelligence that fits what he wants to believe. But isn’t that exactly what we have here?

Kerry grabs a single New York Times story, one where his own campaign flacks admit that key facts are still unknown, and bases his entire stretch-run on slamming Bush over the allegations contained within. Now it turns out that the story may be made entirely of whole cloth and John Forbes is left with a big, stinking pile of Al-Qaqaa on his shoes. He looks weak, and increasingly desperate to be willing to grab something so flimsy when the states are so high. He flailing in the air, grasping at anything that could sustain him.

I'm left to wonder aloud what his campaign's internal polling is telling them.

One can only hope this episode is enough to convince the mass voting population of two things:
1) that you can no longer trust what you read or see in the MSM, and
2) that John Forbes Kerry cannot be elected President of the United States