Folks have pooh-poohed the idea that Iraqi WMDs — raw materials, equipment, etc. — might have been buried. Burial is so obvious, they say. We would have seen it on satellite. There’d be big mounds of disturbed dirt. Even if we’re talking about drums of chemicals, crates of machine parts, or even mobile lab trucks, such things are way too large to effectively hide.
Which is why, of course, teeny-tiny, insignificant, and certainly unmonitored things like fighter jets have gone undetected until now.
Search teams, some hunting for Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, found dozens of fighter jets from Iraq’s air force buried beneath the sands, U.S. officials say.
At least one Cold War-era MiG-25 interceptor was found when searchers saw the tops of its twin tail fins poking up from the sands, said one Pentagon official familiar with the hunt. He said search teams have found several MiG-25s and Su-25 ground attack jets buried at al-Taqqadum air field west of Baghdad.
I mean, presumably we were keeping track of something big and visible — and militarily important — like military jets. We were, I would assume, trying to keep an eye on them by satellite. Not to mention by whatever human intelligence assets we had on the ground.
And yet, there they are. Found not because of ‘disturbed Earth,” or spy satellite pictures, or even by interrogation. Found because the sand around the frickin’ tail fins had blown away.
Of course, finding buried aircraft, even decades after the fact, isn’t a new story.
Just a thought.
Odd…
I remember reading about the fact that the Iraqi’s had buried their airforce back before the war (February-ish), and that we had satellite photos of the locations.
Sounds to me like another case of change the story.