Dumb and Dumber

The links I have provided below tell an amazing story in themselves. The story of the disappearing high explosives is stunning and displays the mind-numbing stupidity of some elements of the U. S. military.

http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S3741.html?cat=1http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S3769.html?cat=1http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S3748.html?cat=1

The second story is the minimal treatment this event has received in the major media except to minimize the importance of the danger represented by the loss of 370 TONS of high-grade, high-power explosives.

As far as I can tell, the only news outlet to really pursue this story is in St. Paul, MN. The story provided by KSTP and the implications of the story are staggering. It appears the the US military opened the Al Qa qaa bunkers, poked around the tons of dangerous material (really great stuff because it is extremely stable, easy to transport, compact and terribly powerful--a dream cache for terrorists), then packed up and left. They did not lock the doors because they were not ordered to do so. How many soldiers and civilians have been killed by that very stuff packed into road-side bombs, booby traps and car bombs?

The Pentagon's response has been to blow this off, arguing that this only amounted to 1% of the available material across the country. Dear students of argument, here is a classic non sequitur. Talk about an irrelevant (and callous) response! Don't allow the Pentagon and the Bush administration to just shoulder this aside with such an argument. This event displays incompetence at all levels-from the stupid sergent who needs to be ordered to lock up an explosives dump in the middle of enemy territory to the Secretary of Defense who insisted on invading with so few soldiers that securing the country would be impossible. (BTW, did you know that at one point, Rumsfeld was set on invading Iraq-a country the size of California--with only 50K soldiers?! Frontline [PBS] reported in its most recent installment.)

The incompetence represented here is stunning and we should be angry about it. Such behavior costs lives--real lives--and some penalty is merited for behavior that directly results in loss of innocent lives be they U. S. soldiers who are killed by the explosives their leaders thought was not worth guarding or Iraqi civilians who have no part in the war.