A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  Bush agreed. The Times’ and Senator Kerry’s allegations were ‘wild charges’. The army had disposed of so much ordnance it deserved congratulation, not criticism. ‘We’ve seized or destroyed more than 400,000 tons of munitions, including explosives, at more than hundreds of sites,’ he told an audience in Ohio. And we’re continuing to round up the weapons every day’

  Bush and Cheney then launched the coup de grâce: a counterattack on Kerry himself. The man’s information was wrong; he was making unsubstantiated allegations; he was jumping to conclusions without knowing the facts. He was trying to score political points. Worst of all, he was attacking US troops when they were out there risking their lives for freedom.

  ‘I think it’s a cheap shot,’ Cheney informed the Sioux City audience. ‘I think it’s criticism of the troops.’ Everyone booed Kerry.

  The one factor that Bush and Cheney’s arguments shared in common was their intellectual dishonesty.

  Accusing the IAEA of bad accounting was a cheap shot. There had been 141 tonnes of RDX at Al Qa’qaa. Three tonnes were stored in the south-western bunkers, but the other 138 had been stored at Mahaweel, ten kilometres away. However, they were still under IAEA seal, so were technically part of Al Qa’qaa’s holdings. Satellite photographs of trucks at Al Qa’qaa prior to the invasion were likewise a red herring: not only were there only two trucks in the pictures, but they weren’t standing outside the bunkers containing the explosives. They weren’t removing or hiding anything. They were just trucks.

  The common-sense argument – that looting of this magnitude would have been noticed – rested on the assumption that the explosives were taken in one audacious heist. They weren’t. Rumsfeld’s assertion that air superiority meant the Americans would have detected any large-scale, post-invasion movement was therefore worthless.

  There were further flaws when it came to the testimony of Austin Pearson, who had destroyed 250 tons of munitions. Pearson may have removed 250 tons, but it almost certainly didn’t come from Al Qa’qaa (white phosphorous rounds, which he claimed were part of his inventory, were stored at Hatteen, fifteen kilometres to the south). By his own admission, Pearson and his staff had never come across any IAEA-sealed material. Contrary to the Vice-President’s claims, they were not the same explosives at all.

  On the issue of the percentage of munitions at Al Qa’qaa versus those already destroyed, there was a double deception. It may indeed have been the case that the Americans had destroyed 402,000 out of a total munitions reserve of 650,000 tons in Iraq. And 341 tonnes (377 imperial tons) out of 650,000 tons is indeed 0.06 per cent. But as we have seen, Al Qa’qaa’s administrators had already informed the United States, in writing, that the sum total of munitions looted from their facility was not 341 tonnes but 40,000. On this accounting, the missing explosives constituted more than 6 per cent of all explosives in Iraq -10 per cent of all confiscated munitions: a very great deal more than 0.06 per cent, in fact.

  Further statistical manipulation was afoot, too. While the missing materiel from Al Qa’qaa was pure high explosive, the 402,000 tons destroyed by US forces included some very heavy objects that contained no explosives at all. ‘[The Pentagon] was trying to compare the weight of the guns and stocks and metal and all of that stuff says a senior weapons-intelligence analyst. ‘They were counting tanks and guns and bazookas – metal – as opposed to the raw explosive that can be directly used . . . It’s an absolutely dishonest comparison.’

  In addition to their factual inaccuracies, the administration’s arguments were intellectually incoherent. If the materiel had been moved before the invasion, how could the Pentagon claim that its troops had destroyed it afterwards? If post-war surveillance of the site made it impossible for the munitions to have been moved without anyone noticing, why didn’t pre-war surveillance achieve the same thing? How could both the Iraqis and the Russians have moved the explosives? The ad hoc nature of the explanations meant they were contradictory.

  No one appears to have noticed. A string of ‘authoritative’ explanations from ‘authoritative’ sources effectively threw a smokescreen over the story, making it almost impossible for outsiders to determine what had really happened. Or so it seemed.

  Reporter Dean Staley was at work at his new job at North-West Cable News, Seattle, when he heard reports of the scoop. The story seemed familiar. After reading the Times’ description of the bunkers in question, on Tuesday night he called his old cameraman at KSTP.

  ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘I think we’ve been to the place they’re talking about.’

  Caffrey had been thinking the same thing, too. He’d been watching a report on TV when a little light went on at the back of his head. The moment Staley called, the two men realized they might be sitting on something important. The journalist went off to search his notes for GPS coordinates, which he had jotted down at the time of the pair’s joyride with the soldiers from the 101st, while the cameraman hunted down his field tapes to see what they showed.

  Within a matter of hours, it became apparent they knew a great deal more about Al Qa’qaa than the President and his staff. ‘It was clear that these people didn’t know what they were talking about,’ says Staley. ‘The [White House] message didn’t jibe with the facts.’

  Caffrey’s tape, ‘Hangar Search #2’, showed everything: the bunkers, the chained doors, the IAEA seals (still intact until the soldiers snapped them) and the hundreds of cardboard drums of off-white powder. All had been shot nine days after the toppling of Saddam’s statue. The film proved the explosives were present at Al Qa’qaa after the invasion.

  Caffrey’s footage aired locally on Wednesday, 27 October, then across the United States the next day. Weapons inspectors verified that the footage showed original IAEA seals being broken and managed to identify the specific bunkers; Caffrey had filmed the breaking of the seal on bunker #38. They also identified the sealed HMX, RDX and PETN stocks; in some cases, the numbers on the cardboard canisters matched IAEA logs exactly. The conclusion was irrefutable: 341 tonnes of high explosive had gone missing on Bush’s watch.

  After viewing the tape, former UN weapons inspector David Kay called for an end to the debate. ‘I think it’s game, set and match,’ the former leader of the Iraq Survey Group told CNN. Five days before the presidential election, it was official: the emperor had no clothes.

  The next morning, Friday, 29 October, Osama bin Laden succeeded where the White House’s spin doctors had failed. The first videotaped message from the al-Qaeda leader for more than a year, released that day, pushed the looted explosives story out of the public eye. Four days later, George W. Bush won a second term in office.

  * * *

  Abu Shujaa lights a cigarette.

  ‘The second operation was in February 2004. We used wires and coils in this operation to make sure that the radio distortion used by the Americans would not affect the devices.

  ‘We planted six bombs on the airport highway near the Al Jihad Bridge. In each of the bombs we put eight kilograms of TNT in addition to the formula which we had got from Al Qa’qaa. Three bombs exploded. The fourth one didn’t. But the fifth and sixth went off thirty seconds later, while the snipers started shooting the Americans. Enemy losses were quite convenient: they lost two Bradleys and one Humvee.’

  * * *

  News of Bush’s glorious second victory left Yusifiyans cold. Haki and his neighbours had other concerns. Top of the list came the recently arrived Arab strangers.

  For al-Qaeda, Yusifiyah was important not only because it was home to Iraq’s largest armaments facilities, but also because it was strategically extremely well positioned. Baghdad was half an hour to the northeast, Fallujah twenty minutes to the west. Over the next few years, when the situation in Fallujah became too dangerous for them, mujahedin fighters would retreat to Yusifiyah to hide. The Head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, personally visited periodically, partly to stock up on munitions, and partly when the situation in Fallujah became intolerable. />
  ‘I met him,’ boasts Yusuf. ‘He came to Yusifiyah quite a lot. It was a safe place for him. If he wasn’t in Fallujah, the next best place was here.’

  Eventually, when Fallujah became really dangerous, the Arabs settled permanently in Nahir Yusifiyah. For the locals, the situation rapidly became intolerable. Instead of buying explosives, the Arabs simply took them, forcing potato farmers to store the material in their underground bunkers, then killing them later.

  ‘Those guys started ruling the whole area,’ says Haki. ‘They weren’t guests any more.’ In fear of his life, the farmer fled to Baghdad to become a security guard.

  In 2004, al-Qaeda established a camp inside the Al Qa’qaa complex itself. ‘We had a firing range, like a tunnel. It was used to shoot small-calibre bullets,’ says Ali. ‘It became a training camp for terrorists.’

  Anyone entering the facility without permission was killed. Al-Qaeda spread horror stories about its activities, intimidating locals into collaborating. An execution room was set up with a makeshift gallows.

  Yusuf was part of the operation. ‘We were making up rumours. We used to kill people in terrible ways, torturing them to give al-Qaeda more influence.’ Mutilations, murders and decapitations were filmed and copies were distributed around Yusifiyah to discourage dissent. The violence increased. Anyone suspected of attempting to join the Iraqi military or police was executed. Shias were executed. People with Shia names were executed. People who did anything regarded as Shia-like were executed. When Haki’s uncle was caught smoking a cigarette, al-Qaeda broke all his fingers with a hammer. Then they killed him.

  Soon even Yusuf recognized that things had gone awry. The Arabs weren’t the cure for anything. They were parasites, an infection that wouldn’t stop. ‘We realized that al-Qaeda didn’t come to rescue us. They were killing all kinds of people, saying they were atheists and that they idolized statues,’ he recalls. ‘They planted those kinds of ideas in our minds. Now we realize that it wasn’t true. What happened here in Yusifiyah is something you can’t imagine.’

  When he returned from his work in Baghdad in 2005, Haki found the main road into town littered with corpses, bound, tortured and shot. ‘We hadn’t seen anything like this before in our lives. Whatever I tell you about Yusifiyah at that time, there was more. It was like a horror film.’

  By 2005, commentators were dubbing the Yusifiyah region the ‘Triangle of Death’: the most dangerous sector in all Iraq. Palm-tree plantations were rigged with explosives to bring down low-flying helicopters; soldiers were abducted, tortured and murdered. Bombs went off everywhere.

  It was, of course, no coincidence that Nahir Yusifiyah was so favoured by insurgents. It was where all the weapons were.

  * * *

  I arrived in Baghdad on 26 March 2009, keen to get to grips with the Al Qa’qaa story. Almost immediately it became apparent that government officials did not want to discuss it. Apologies were made, rendezvous forgotten, telephone calls ignored. Within a week, I had resorted to driving around town attempting to doorstep interviewees before they had time to flee. Ambushed at his former office, Mohammed Abbas – the man who first informed the IAEA the explosives were missing – chatted amiably until he discovered I was writing about Al Qa’qaa, at which point he decided it was time to leave. The new head of his department, Sami al Araji, declined to answer questions. Privately, I wondered whether this reticence was related to the findings of the official investigation – one half of which had apparently been headed up by Araji himself.

  Certainly, the investigation had been a long time coming. The moment news broke in October 2004 that Al Qa’qaa had been looted, White House spokesman Scott McClellan assured journalists on board Air Force One that the Department of Defense had ordered an inquiry. The President, he said, ‘wants to get to the bottom of this’. The next day Donald Rumsfeld commented that a ‘detailed investigation’ was underway. A day later, President Bush himself promised the citizens of Vienna, Ohio, that the investigation was ‘important and ongoing’.

  Where is it?

  Ali, Al Qa’qaa’s senior administrator, says it never took place. Certainly, no one contacted him about it. Asked if an investigation could have happened without his involvement, he shakes his head. ‘Impossible. If there was an investigation, it would have to go through the correct processes. Our legal department, the head of our legal department, would have represented us. He hasn’t been contacted.’

  The American investigation, if there was one, also seems to have vanished. Other than a GAO report into securing weapons sites in future operations, nothing.

  Perhaps a proper investigation would have turned up the same kind of material I eventually found. Over the course of two weeks in Iraq, twenty-five witnesses described how the looting of Al Qa’qaa and the munitions sites around Yusifiyah had taken place (one informed me, from his rooftop in Iskandariyah, that he could see looting still going on at Hatteen). Two of them explained in detail how they had looted and sold explosives from Al Qa’qaa. Two named the tribes responsible for the theft and sale of the high explosive. Three told how they had stored powdered high explosive from the facility in their potato cellars. Two described how they had used the looted material to manufacture roadside bombs.

  Perhaps a proper investigation would have contacted members of Iraq’s various bomb-disposal units, all of whom admitted – on the condition of anonymity – that the vast majority of their work was the result of looted explosives.

  ‘The explosives were available everywhere,’ says the head of one directorate. ‘They were the main reason for the violence in Iraq. If they had been protected and guarded, Iraq would be a different story.’ Asked what percentage of the violence following the invasion was the result of the looting, he thinks for a moment. ‘I’d give it 90 per cent.’

  The second-in-command of another unit goes higher: ‘I would say 98 per cent.’

  By September 2007, 4.6 million Iraqis – one in seven of the country’s entire population – had fled the violence. The result was the biggest migration in the Middle East since the creation of Israel in 1948: more refugees, more migrants, more asylum seekers. Iraq’s borders simply couldn’t hold them.

  Perhaps a proper investigation would have tracked down Abu Shujaa, who used the explosives from Al Qa’qaa to kill and maim both Iraqis and members of the coalition forces. Who knows? Perhaps a proper investigation might even have found Yusuf, who was proud to show off his potato cellar, still stacked to the ceiling with flour sacks filled with ten tons of what appeared to be HMX.

  Perhaps, however, an investigation that uncovered this kind of stuff would have been politically embarrassing.

  When he arrived back in Washington in June 2003, Jay Garner, the first Head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, was greeted by the President in the Oval Office. Bush, all smiles, was basking in the recent swift victory.

  ‘You want to do Iran for the next one?’ he asked Garner.

  ‘No, sir,’ Garner joked back. ‘Me and the boys are holding out for Cuba.’

  6

  The Egyptian

  The war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm [that] requires new thinking in the law of war.

  George W. Bush, February 2002

  They caught The Egyptian on New Year’s Eve 2003. The operation – discreet, well out of the public eye – was a triumph of simple, effective policing combined with rapid, accurate, communications: a perfect example, in fact, of the kind of international co-operation that European and American intelligence services had striven for since 9/11. It was also a potent demonstration of the necessity for proper border controls.

  They found him on a bus at the Tabanovce checkpoint between Serbia and Macedonia. It was a bit of luck, really: a routine travel-document check indicated an irregularity. His passport was not quite like those of his fellow travellers. Macedonian border guards, sensing it merited a second opinion, instructed him to step off the bus. Where was he going? What was the p
urpose of his visit?

  At first The Egyptian played it cool. He was on holiday, he told them. He planned to stay in Macedonia for a week. When it came to more concrete plans, however, he stumbled. He appeared to have no idea where he was going to stay.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. A hotel?’

  The story didn’t stack up.

  Macedonian officials then played a trick on The Egyptian, telling him to step back on to the bus and proceed to the capital, Skopje, but to report to the central police station the moment he arrived. Craftily, they neglected to return his passport. It was a low-risk strategy. If it checked out, they could return the document to him, apologize and claim incompetence; without it, he wasn’t going anywhere.

  The Egyptian was smarter than that. A few kilometres down the road, he noticed he didn’t have his documents. Realizing that without them he would be trapped inside Macedonia’s capital, he brazenly instructed the driver to turn the bus around and return to the border checkpoint. Al-Qaeda operatives often travel with several passports. This character, it seemed, had just the one.

  In an astonishing display of nerve, The Egyptian attempted to wrong-foot the immigration officials back at Tabanovce, demanding an explanation for the error: why had they not returned his passport?

  There was a problem, the Macedonians confessed. They didn’t know exactly what it was, but they were trying to sort it out. Politely, they then suggested a compromise. It would be best if the bus were allowed to depart for Skopje – why keep the other passengers waiting? – while they ran a few routine checks. Once the matter had been cleared up, they promised, one of the officers would drive The Egyptian to a hotel of his choice. No doubt sensing a free taxi ride in the offing, he agreed. The bus departed, leaving The Egyptian alone with the guards. He was ushered inside the border post and his possessions, retrieved from the bus, were unpacked in front of him. Then a young border official started questioning him.