Here’s what Donald Rumfeld had to say on April 11th, 2003 at the time those explosives were being looted (via Matt Yglesias) :
Declaring that freedom is “untidy,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday the looting in Iraq was a result of “pent-up feelings” of oppression and that it would subside as Iraqis adjusted to life without Saddam Hussein.
He also asserted the looting was not as bad as some television and newspaper reports have indicated and said there was no major crisis in Baghdad, the capital city, which lacks a central governing authority. The looting, he suggested, was “part of the price” for what the United States and Britain have called the liberation of Iraq.
“Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things,” Rumsfeld said. “They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here.”
Looting, he added, was not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. “Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld said.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed. “This is a transition period between war and what we hope will be a much more peaceful time,” Myers said.
. . .
Rumsfeld appeared irritated by questions about the looting, asserting that repeated images of Iraqi citizens ransacking buildings represented “a fundamental misunderstanding” of what was happening in Iraq.
“Very often the pictures are pictures of people going into the symbols of the regime, into the palaces, into the boats and into the Baath Party headquarters and into the places that have been part of that repression,” Rumsfeld said. “And while no one condones looting, on the other hand one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who’ve had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime.”
. . .
Asked about weapons of mass destruction — which the United States, Britain and other nations accused Saddam of harboring and developing — Rumsfeld said he did not expect coalition forces to find the actual weapons on their own.
“We are not going to find them in my view — just as I never believed the inspectors would — by running around seeing if they can open a door and surprise somebody and find something,” Rumsfeld said, adding that the focus was on “finding the people” who could help in that effort.
So y’see, they were more concerned with tracking down people who might know about weapons than tracking down the weapons they knew about. I guess this fits into their whole “Saddam himself was a weapon of mass destruction” thing.
Doesn’t it seem odd that the IAEA told them about these explosives and where they were, yet we’re only finding out about it a year and a half after the invasion? I’d think if a U.N. agency gave them a checklist of sites to check, it would have been checked within a month or so of Saddam’s fall. And why didn’t we find out about this through the inspections of Hans Blix, David Kay, or Charles Duelfer? We know the Administration was hiding this from us, but did they hide it from the weapons inspectors too?