SAFETY FIRST, PEOPLE!

As everyone knows, George Bush is hanging his increasingly desperate election hopes on the idea that the War in Iraq made U.S. citizens safer. That claim has always seemed to me false in a number of obvious ways. First, our soldiers are U.S. citizens and 1104 of them have died in Iraq. Another 8016 have been wounded. Secondly, as has been widely reported, Al Qaeda’s recruitment has exploded since we invaded Iraq. There are more terrorist cells in more countries than ever before. Thirdly, our inability to find Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri is a direct consequence of our diversion of military resources away from the Afganistan-Pakistan border. There are plenty of other things I could mention, some of which came up in my post on terrorism. BUT HERE IS SOMETHING NEW AND DISTURBING: you may recall that John Kerry criticized Bush during the debates for not "securing ammo dumps" in Iraq once the initial military successes in Iraq gave him the chance to do so. Well, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo is breaking a story that will surely go national this week and reveals more mind-boggling ineptitude by the Bush Administration. Here’s a brief synopsis:

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Prior to the war, Iraq's Al Qa Qaa bunker and weapons complex had roughly 350 tons of high explosives under International Atomic Energy Agency seal. [You remember the IAEA, right? They’re the group that kept Sadam from getting nuclear weapons for a decade – the group that George W. Bush rididcules every chance he gets.] After the war, for whatever reason, the complex was either not guarded at all or inadequately guarded. And all those explosives (primarily RDX and HMX) were carted away.

What we're talking about here isn't just a bunch of dynamite. If you look up RDX in the encyclopedia, you’ll find that it "is considered the most powerful and brisant of the military high explosives." And not 350 pounds, 350 *tons*.

It is widely believed within the US government that those looted explosives are what in many, perhaps most, cases is being used in car bombs and suicide attacks against US troops…One administration official told the Nelson Report, "This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information."

You get all the facts in great detail here: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com

My bet is the story will also be in your local paper by week’s end.

IF YOU HAVE ALREADY DECIDED TO VOTE FOR KERRY, YOU CAN VOLUNTEER TO GET OUT THE VOTE IN THE FINAL WEEK.
THIS IS VERY VERY IMPORTANT. GO HERE:

http://acthere.com/

All you have to do is type in your zip code to get the information you need on how to volunteer.