Talk:Al Qa'qaa high explosives controversy

message: Removed:
:* Ventilation shafts serving the facility remained open and provided easy access to the explosives, according to the IAEA. 
Two reasons. (1) IAEA is notorious for being extradorinarly anal about sealing things with thier little tamper evident seal, it is very unlikely that they would have noticed this and not taken action after noticing it (some thing which the report does not say did or did not happen). (2) Only one openly right wing news source is reporting it. Pdbailey 03:46, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: A check of google news e.g.  would show that's not quite the case. It would seem, though, that the IAEA also didnt think this was much of a problem (perhaps they were so small it would have been too difficult to remove the tonnes this way) Sbwoodside 06:18, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  I did that same search when I posted and got only FN results. Now I see that ABC is covering it as wel... I'll add it back in with an ABC link. Pdbailey 15:30, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ventilation shaft 

message: This article is ballooning with political items, who said what, who claims what, and so on. I'm not particularly interested in that. I'm interested in what actually happened prior to when the NYT story came out. So I restored the Al Qa'qaa high explosives timeline article and moved the timeline back from here to there. Hopefully we can keep documenting the political diatribes here and document the chain of events leading to the loss there.
Considering the size of this article, I don't think it's too much splitting - my opinion.
:I wonder about the wisedom of this move, I think it deemphasizes what is probably the best portion of this article for exactly the reason you gave. Why not just police it for NPOV? Pdbailey 23:04, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  moved timeline to [[Al Qa'qaa high explosives timeline]] 

message: :"NPOV doesn't come from providing two POVs (two wrongs don't make a right)."
Actually, that is the textbook definition of NPOV. When there is a dispute over facts, the Wikipedia's official policy is to present each major point of view.
The alternative, which is to try to find the objective truth -- which we can then endorse, leads only to endless edit wars and has therefore been declared as contrary to policy. I can state this quite confidently, as a senior admin; I'm user #188: I've been around almost since the beginning of the project. --Uncle Ed (El Dunce) 19:14, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Neutrality vs. objectivity

message: Correct me if I'm wrong; but wasn't Al Qaqaa one of several such facilities looted after the US invasion?  It was my understanding that there were many such lootings and that the 380 tons looted at al Qaqaa was just the tip of the iceberg.--csloat 05:48, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Other facilities 

message: I will look on BBC etc. Anyone know the outcome from the "investigation"? -max rspct 00:00, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Whats the latest then?

message: This article is long overdue for a rewrite.  There is no more need for electioneering here, and the issues surrounding al Qaqaa can be sorted out in a clearer manner instead of having two sides and a valiant but inaccurate attempt at "balance."  Nobody seriously contends anymore that the weapons were removed prior to the US arrival.  There is a quote on the page about the US having accounted for the weapons, but where are they then?  If that were the case, the US could quickly put an end to this "controversy" by producing the evidence.  This page makes it seem as if it were a big mystery where the weapons are and whether they were looted before or after the fall of Saddam but it's pretty clear where they are now; in the hands of insurgents.  There is also the issue of weapons from other facilities, including nuclear material that went missing after the looting (I will need to re-research this point; it has been a while).  But the nuclear stuff didn't get the media coverage that al-Qaqaa did because of the timing (it was discovered 2003 and forgotten by the election).  My big objection here is that the article was mostly written before the 2004 election, and it sounds as if the only important issue here is the effect this will have on the election.  Well, the election is over; what is the result of the investigation Bush allegedly was waiting for?  The NYT reported in 2005 that insurgents looted the facility systematically, with organized trucks and people who obviously knew where the weapons were -- these were weapons that were under IAEA control under Saddam.  I think it was in Dec. 2004 that they found a letter confirming that an Iraqi official sent Saddam a letter suggesting looting those explosives for suicide bombers to use in response to the US invasion.  There is no question at all anymore that the weapons were stolen by Baathist insurgents, I don't think.--csloat 09:54, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Election is long over is anyone researching this? 

message: I'm going to suggest that the "evidence" sections be removed entirely after the information is incorporated into the narrative below.  The representation of this as a debate with two sides that is still ongoing is absolutely fallacious.  Nobody at all has been arguing in any published source since Nov. 2004 that the weapons were removed before the US invasion.  Nobody.  The arguments made before the election were contradictory -- they said the US moved the explosives, then they said the Iraqis took them before the invasion (both can't be true, and the first should be verifiable, but no evidence was presented).  It's clear it was an election strategy to defeat the story, which is fine -- that's to be expected.  But the election is over, and nobody in the public sphere is pretending anymore that the admin's stories are true.  We can include a section indicating there was a dispute about this during the election, but wikipedia is meant to withstand the test of time; I'm hoping we can move beyond this silly right-wing/left-wing breakdown of such issues.--csloat 23:15, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, I dont think I like that idea much. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 23:33, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This is the problem.  TDC doesn't "talk it out"; he simply rejects the other side and then censors whatever information he is displeased with.--csloat 23:38, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sections on Evidence For & Against 

message: I'm going to ask you again to please stop reverting TDC.  Every change has been refuted.  Let's go one by one:
#.  The LAT article you keep deleting and hiding this deletion under #2.  You haven't given a reason to censor this article, you just point out that it's not a "fact."  That is not at issue; the LAT is clearly cited as a source of information.
#.  The Frank Rich quote -- if you have a quote to counter it, post it.  If you have quotes or summaries of the points he is making that can be put in instead, we can take out the quote.  But stop removing it; that is pure censorship and not too far from vandalism.
#.  The "documentary evidence" -- you keep moving it, insisting it says the opposite of what it says.  Please read it more carefully.
#.  Pentagon official section -- your summary is inferior; it makes it sound as if the fellow is anonymous in his daily life.  
#.  NYT quote -- you keep censoring it, asserting that you understand what the video shows better than the NYT.  That's nice, but that's original research.  Check WP:NOR for more information on this topic.
Now, please stop reverting.--csloat 23:30, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Stop the edit war please

message: I agree it's a good idea, but the page protection should not be a move to favor one version of the page.  I have been trying to insist on talking this out from the beginning!  I have justified every part of the article that TDC wants to change and even summarized the points above with numbers so they are easy to understand.  TDC insists on censoring information that he doesn't like, in one case claiming his own perceptions are more valid as wikipedia sources than published articles in the NYT!--csloat 23:38, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Page protection

message: This excerpt comes from the May-June 2005 issue of Military Review:
: The insurgency's ability to construct IEDs depends on the availability of bombmaking materials, particularly explosives. The widespread availability of explosives in Iraq means the insurgency will have the material resources to build IEDs for many years to come. Currently, approximately 80 tons of powerful conventional explosives (mainly HMX and RDX) are missing from the former Iraqi military base at Al Qaqaa. These explosives could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings and are probably already in the hands of the insurgency. The director of the Iraqi police unit that defuses and investigates IEDs notes: "One of the coalition's fatal mistakes was to allow the terrorists into army storerooms.... The terrorists took all the explosives they would ever need."
: Montgomery McFate, J.D., Ph.D., "Iraq: The Social Context of IEDs", Military Review, May-June 2005 
And this in December 2005 from the Strategic Studies Institute:
: That additional U.S. forces would have been useful can scarcely be denied. Iraq’s borders were left unguarded for a year, according to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and clearly more might have been done on that score. Also, a large number of ammunition dumps across the country were left unguarded for months, including critical facilities like the al-Qaqaa one south of Baghdad. U.S. forces were clearly shorthanded in dealing with the anarchical conditions in Iraq.
: David C. Hendrickson and Robert W. Tucker, "Revisions In Need Of Revising: What Went Wrong In The Iraq War", December 2005) 
SMB 17:35, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Military Review

message: It's recently been reported, in an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Dominic Streatfeild, that the total quantity of explosives stolen from the Qa'qaa site was not 340 tonnes, as reported in 2004, but 40,000 tonnes. See here: I'm not sure how accurate that claim is, but it seems significant enough to be inserted into this article. Robofish (talk) 12:47, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Theft much larger than initially reported 

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