MINNEAPOLIS ABC AFFILIATE HAS MISSING EXPLOSIVES ON TAPE

Well, well, well. It looks like the spin cycle might be ending.

THE PROOF IS IN. It looks like the final blow to the official spin on Al Qaqaa will be dealt by KSTP, a local ABC affiliate out of Minneapolis, which via Laura Rozen has the explosives on tape. The station had a crew embedded with the 101st Airborne during their visit to Al Qaqaa:

There were what appeared to be fuses for bombs. They also found bags of material men from the 101st couldn't identify, but box after box was clearly marked "explosive."

In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name "Al Qaqaa", the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

"We weren't quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn't appear that this was being secured in any way," said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. "It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents".

So that's that. And to be clear, the point here is not that the soldiers in the 101st Airborne didn't do their jobs properly -- they didn't know what they were looking at, and didn't have any orders to secure the facility. The higher-ups in the chain of command, on the other hand, new exactly what was in the facility and, had they used some common sense, would have ordered it secured. But they didn't.

UPDATE: A top Iraqi science official denies that the explosives could have been moved before or during the war.

"It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the Science Ministry's site monitoring department, said.
"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall.

"I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."

Mr Sharaa also warns that other nearby sites with similar materials could have also been plundered.