Must reads re: NYTrogate

There are two articles that you simply must read with regard to the explosives story. In Is the U.N. Meddling in the U.S. Presidential Election?, Nile Gardiner of The Heritage Foundation discusses a concern we should all have - is the UN trying to influence US elections? In Bomb-gate, Clifford May, in a National Review article which is being called the best summation of the salient issues connects the dots to implicate Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in what would be a world-wide scandal if the world actually cared about the truth.

UPDATE: I neglected to give a hat tip to Powerline, who also has this intriguing bit of news.

A Power Line reader writes from a .mil address:
I am a reservist stationed at CENTCOM. I did a search on SIPRNET the other day and I came up with a document with the following (unclassified) subject:

IIR 7 921 0164 03/DRAGON HUNTER - DUPLICATE U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR SEALS ENABLED IRAQI REGIME TO RELOCATE PROHIBITED MATERIALS.

Other parts of the document are classified.

The subject pretty much tells it all but I do not know the final validity of the report. Perhaps you have access to people with more information. In any case, if the UN "inspectors" only checked the seals in March, then the materials could have been moved as early as January.

At this point, I feel compelled to agree with John Kerry. There is definitely incompetence involved in this scandal. Kerry is simply mistaken about who should assume the blame.

Instead of Bush, Kerry should be haranguing his first love, the UN.

UPDATE 2: Instapundit points to this WaTimes story that reveals that the Russians helped Iraq move the explosives before the war! So now we have France taking bribes from Sadaam in return for removing the sanctions and vetoing any US move to deal with Iraq, the UN displaying both gross incompetence and possibly even complicity in Sadaam's repeated violations of the sanctions, the French, Russians and Germans illegally supplying weapons to Sadaam before the war and the Russians helping Sadaam hide his weapons in Syria.

Now, what was John Kerry saying about a "global test"?

UPDATE 3: Just when you think this story couldn't get any more weird, along comes ABC News and reports that the explosives stored in al Qaa Qaa may have been as little as 3 tons, not the 377 tons reported by the NY Times.

This is history in the making. You are watching the collapse of old media credibility.

UPDATE 4: Could this be considered piling on?

Brett Baer on FNC reports that the Pentagon is reviewing sattelite imagery which reveals considerable truck activity in the days leading up to the Iraq war. The DoD is considering releasing the photographs.