Just in case you were tempted to believe the spin that the HMX, RDX and PETN explosives at Al-Qaqaa had already disappeared when our troops arrived:
It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad.
Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel:
The weapons were not there when the military arrived, making John Kerry’s latest ripped-from-the-headlines attack baseless and false.
Last night on this broadcast we reported that the 101st Airborne never found the nearly 380 tons of HMX and RDX explosives. We did not conclude the explosives were missing or had vanished, nor did we say they missed the explosives. We simply reported that the 101st did not find them.
For its part, the Bush campaign immediately pointed to our report as conclusive proof that the weapons had been removed before the Americans arrived. That is possible, but that is not what we reported.
Associated Press, 5 April 2003 (emphasis mine):
Closer to Baghdad, troops at Iraq’s largest military industrial complex found nerve agent antidotes, documents describing chemical warfare and a white powder that appeared to be used for explosives.
UN weapons inspectors went repeatedly to the vast al Qa Qaa complex, most recently on March 8. But they found nothing during spot visits to some of the 1,100 buildings at the site 40 kilometres south of Baghdad.
Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.
A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives. The finding would be consistent with the plant’s stated production capabilities in the field of basic raw materials for explosives and propellants.
Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (emphasis mine):
RDX stands for Royal Demolition eXplosive. It is also known as cyclonite or hexogen. The chemical name for RDX is 1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine. It is a white powder and is very explosive.
(Props to Media Matters, and to comments from Omri for prompting me to look for it.)