ABC 5 Eyewitness News - Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne Division, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has determined the crew embedded with the troops may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where the ammunition disappeared. The news crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa, and drove two or three miles north of there with soldiers on April 18, 2003.
During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS news crew bunker after bunker of material labelled "explosives." Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get into the bunkers and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.
"We can stick it in those and make some good bombs." a soldier told our crew.
Photos and video at the link.
If these are the explosives in question there's still a lot of questions to be asked such as how hundreds of tons of explosives were carted off from this facility without US forces spotting the activity. Remember, a standard 18 wheeler can hold somewhere between 10 and 20 tons. If there really were hundreds of tons of explosives in the facility it would have taken a massive effort, and a lot of trucks, to get the material out of there. That's not likely to have gone on unnoticed.
We also still don't know just how much of the material was at the facility. On January of 2003 the IAEA reported just 3 tons of explosives at the facility. And even if there were hundreds of tons of explosives at the facility we need to keep in mind that Saddam had hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives just like this cached all over Iraq. 380 tons of explosives would represent approximately 1/10th of 1% of all such explosives in Iraq.
Also, keep in mind that UN inspectors visited the facility several times in early 2003 and never once reported the existence of these explosives. Back in 1995 Charles Duelfer, who was then a member of the UN inspection team, recommended to the IAEA that they destroy the explosives at Al Qaqaa. This wasn't done.
All things considered, even if this film crew did see 300+ tons of explosives at the facility I'm not convinced that we should be holding anybody responsible for its disappearance.