More About Looted Munitions.

Ever wonder what explosives are being used to kill US soldiers (and Iraqis as well)?

The Boston Globe's story today tells us : Explosives were looted after Iraq invasion

David Kay relates his experience:

David Kay, a former weapons inspector in Iraq for the US government who led the Iraq Survey Group that searched for weapons of mass destruction, said that although his team of 1,400 investigators found no such weapons, they found small amounts of HMX and RDX -- and hundreds of square miles of other conventional munitions -- at unguarded sites across Iraq.

''The RDX, HMX, is a superb explosive for terrorists," Kay said. ''The danger is that it's gone somewhere else in the Middle East."

However, Kay's team had a mandate only to search for weapons of mass destruction, not to secure conventional arms, so he could do little beyond referring the caches to the US-led coalition.

''The military did not view guarding these sites as their responsibility," Kay said, recalling that he witnessed US troops guarding the gates of the Tuwaitha nuclear facility while Iraq civilians carried away radioactive pipes and metal drums through other exits.

''There just were not enough troops to guard the number of sites. It was just crazy."

Not enough troops? Gee, I thought Rumsfeld and Bush were sure we didn't need many troops.

Wolfowitz said that Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki was "wildly off the mark" when Shinseki said the US would need "several hundred thousand soldiers" to occupy Iraq.

I guess Wolfowitz, with his genius for planning, never intended to guard stockpiles of ultra-high explosives.