The left side of the blogosphere is going loco over this KSTP TV report. Supposedly there is video that PROVES the explosives were at Al Qa Qaa AFTER the fall of Baghdad.
One of my pals on the left called it a “slam dunk.”
They have a rather wanting story on KSTP but it also made Paula Zahn. (CNN)
It seems the story has a few problems…
Zahn had the reporter on and after saying he “almost certainly” was at Al Qaa Qa, he then backed away from that remark a bit:
Zahn: First of all, Dean, are you convinced of the fact that you actually were at the al Qa Qaa weapons site?
DEAN STALEY, REPORTER, KSTP-TV: Almost certainly.
I think in terms [of whatever] I’ve been able to learn about where it is, just how big it is and where it is in relation to the place that we were camped with the 101st Airborne, I don’t think there’s any question that we were in some part of the al Qa Qaa compound.
So he did not know where he was at the time the footage was shot. Not surprising, he’s not from there after all and let’s review, it’s a freaking desert.. But even after coming home and seeing it on the map, he still can’t confirm where he was. (But he is more sure in this interview than his station was… More on that in a minute.)
After showing the “smoking gun” video, Zahn interviews an IAEA weapons inspector.
ZAHN: Let’s check in with Michael for a moment here.
What do you make of these highly conflicting stories? You hear Dean’s account. We know the date is on that tape. It’s encrypted on the tape. So, on one hand, that would seem to indicate that some of those weapons were there after the war began, and yet, the Pentagon today releases a satellite photo that they claim was taken two days before the war got under way showing activity which appear to be trucks perhaps maybe moving some of these materials away from the site.
MICHAEL LYSOBEY, FORMER WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Well, the materials at that site or the materials that I saw in the video are not necessarily the HMX, which is the high explosive used in a nuclear implosion device.
What we saw in the tape were a bunch of barrels and a bunch of explosive caps. Al Qa Qaa is an explosives facility. So that’s what we’d expect to see. The explosives that we’re worried about, we don’t know. This isn’t definitive proof that those explosives were there.
Zahn was notably deflated.
Not only could the guy not confirm where he was, the weapons inspector was underwhelmed. So much for the slam dunk.
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I am so totally more acceptable of being questioned when referred to as a friend instead of a jackass. Thanks 🙂
Just to stir things up, Bill…
Paul didn’t call you a friend, he called you a pal. Of note, when I was a kid in Texas, PAL wasn’t a word, it was a TLA (three-letter acronym): Personal Ass Licker.
I don’t know if this convention made it across the state line to Louisiana or not. 😉
Boyd,
Haha. If I had to put money on which one he meant, I wouldn’t know what to do.
ROFLMAO
Solid job; excellent fisking of what has become Shameless. The old grey mare, she ain’t what she used to be… and the Disney affiliate, as you point out, working overtime for some serious airtime.
15 seconds for them is over.
That recollection about the match set off my BS meter as well. We’ve been asked to believe some stupid things, but trained soldiers with at worst rudimentary explosives training walked into a dark weapons bunker and lit a freakin’ match?! There are so many things wrong with that story I can’t believe adults are actually discussing it. Ok, I can. Burned off their flame-resistant JSLIST uniforms? Without blowing up everything else in the munition-stuffed bunker? They had matches they were willing to waste early in a deployment, but no flashlights or nightvision goggles attached to their helmets?
It’s hard to take anything in that report seriously after reading that.
Lefties running around saying “slam dunk” on a flimsy story, like Tenet… oh the irony.
If the RDX/HDX was still there, then what did the Heavy Trucks in the satellite photos take away? I presume that Saddam would have taken away the WMDs first.
What SomeJoe and Boyd wrote (^^).
You have to *get* the suggested inflection of the use of the word, “pal,” in writing. It’s a sorta explosive sounding “p” and the rest of the word has a slight jabbing tone to it.
SomeJoe…I laughed aloud at the perfectness of what you describe, the obviousness of what you observe, the preposterousness of what the media tried to perpetuate in that one aspect of ‘the story’ alone.
Maybe the “two soldiers” were wearing flipflops, towing red wagons behind them, looking for bottles to recycle. I mean, if you believe ‘the story,’ you may as well believe the two guys were eight year olds, set for the beach.
Yes, I wonder what those trucks were removing from an explosives dump. Perhaps they were removing toys for Saddam’s toys-for-tots program. Perhaps truckloads of shoes? Perhaps the intellectual giants of the Left and their mouthpieces in the MSM can determine what the Iraqis removed from an ammo dump in the middle of the desert. Pretty soon we’ll be examining Bush’s dental records again.
Paula Zahn still has great legs.
I can’t remember exactly. Didn’t Geraldo find an IAEA seal on Al Capone’s safe?
I wonder why no one seems to think it relevant that the president went to war because of weapons (WMD’s, which have not been found), but didn’t feel it was necessary to secure weapons stores the admin had been previously apprised of? The issue isn’t the amount of weapons or when they disappeared; the issue is why would you ignore information telling you about weapons and where they were when that was, in fact, one of your major justifiactions for going to war?
Later on Paula Zahn’s show she was talking to their “poltical editor”. He commented that this last week Kerry was much more on the defensive and Bush on the offensive.
Paula abruptly interrupted “Come on! How can you say that with this missing explosives story out there?”
I see many questions about what the heavy trucks were taking away from Qa Qaa. Perhaps the question should be, what had they just brought in?
Too many ifs, ands buts and maybes in this story for Kerry to be using it as he is.