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NBC News: Huge Cache Of Explosives Vanished From Site In Iraq At Least 18 Months Ago


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Kerry, the Democrats, and some major news organizations just may have stepped in it with just a week to go before election day:

http://www.drudgereport.com/nbcw.htm

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX MON OCT 25 2004 22:45:05 ET XXXXX

NBCNEWS: HUGE CACHE OF EXPLOSIVES VANISHED FROM SITE IN IRAQ -- AT LEAST 18 MONTHS AGO -- BEFORE TROOPS ARRIVED

The NYTIMES urgently reported on Monday in an apprent October Surprise: The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives are now missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

Jumping on the TIMES exclusive, Dem presidential candidate John Kerry blasted the Bush administration for its failure to "guard those stockpiles."

"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration," Kerry said.

In an election week rush:

**ABCNEWS Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 4 Times

**CBSNEWS Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 7 Times

**MSNBC Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 37 Times

**CNN Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 50 Times

But tonight, NBCNEWS reported: The 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives were already missing back in April 10, 2003 -- when U.S. troops arrived at the installation south of Baghdad!

An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.

According to NBCNEWS, the HMX and RDX explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.

It is not clear why the NYTIMES failed to inform readers how the cache had been missing for 18 months -- and was reportedly missing before troops even arrived.

The TIMES left the impression the weapons site had been looted since Iraq has been under US control.

[in a fresh Page One story set for Tuesday on the matter, the TIMES once again omits any reference to troops not finding any explosives at the site when they arrived in April of 2003. Attempts to reach managing editor Jill Abramson late Monday were unsuccessful.]

"The U.S. Army was at the site one day after the liberation and the weapons were already gone," a top Republican blasted from Washington late Monday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers.

Dem vp hopeful John Edwards blasted Bush for not securing the explosives: "It is reckless and irresponsible to fail to protect and safeguard one of the largest weapons sites in the country. And by either ignoring these mistakes or being clueless about them, George Bush has failed. He has failed as our commander in chief; he has failed as president."

A senior Bush official e-mailed DRUDGE late Monday: "Let me get this straight, are Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards now saying we did not go into Iraq soon enough? We should have invaded and liberated Iraq sooner?"

Top Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart fired back Monday night: "In a shameless attempt to cover up its failure to secure 380 tons of highly explosive material in Iraq, the White House is desperately flailing in an effort to escape blame. Instead of distorting John Kerry’s words, the Bush campaign is now falsely and deliberately twisting the reports of journalists. It is the latest pathetic excuse from an administration that never admits a mistake, no matter how disastrous."

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And for those of you who may has clicked that link to the NY Times page above but can't get it to work because you are not registed there, here is that article in full.

WARNING -- VERY long read:

TRACKING THE WEAPONS

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq

By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER

Published: October 25, 2004

his article was reported and written by James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."

Administration officials said Sunday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.

American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.

The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of material, and larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it. The other components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain.

"This is a high explosives risk, but not necessarily a proliferation risk," one senior Bush administration official said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Sunday evening that Saddam Hussein's government "stored weapons in mosques, schools, hospitals and countless other locations," and that the allied forces "have discovered and destroyed perhaps thousands of tons of ordnance of all types." A senior military official noted that HMX and RDX were "available around the world" and not on the nuclear nonproliferation list, even though they are used in the nuclear warheads of many nations.

The Qaqaa facility, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, was well known to American intelligence officials: Mr. Hussein made conventional warheads at the site, and the I.A.E.A. dismantled parts of his nuclear program there in the early 1990's after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. In the prelude to the 2003 invasion, Mr. Bush cited a number of other "dual use" items - including tubes that the administration contended could be converted to use for the nuclear program - as a justification for invading Iraq.

After the invasion, when widespread looting began in Iraq, the international weapons experts grew concerned that the Qaqaa stockpile could fall into unfriendly hands. In May, an internal I.A.E.A. memorandum warned that terrorists might be helping "themselves to the greatest explosives bonanza in history."

Earlier this month, in a letter to the I.A.E.A. in Vienna, a senior official from Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology wrote that the stockpile disappeared after early April 2003 because of "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."

In an interview with The Times and "60 Minutes" in Baghdad, the minister of science and technology, Rashad M. Omar, confirmed the facts described in the letter. "Yes, they are missing," Dr. Omar said. "We don't know what happened." The I.A.E.A. says it also does not know, and has reported that machine tools that can be used for either nuclear or non-nuclear purposes have also been looted.

Dr. Omar said that after the American-led invasion, the sites containing the explosives were under the control of the Coalition Provisional Authority, an American-led entity that was the highest civilian authority in Iraq until it handed sovereignty of the country over to the interim government on June 28.

"After the collapse of the regime, our liberation, everything was under the coalition forces, under their control," Dr. Omar said. "So probably they can answer this question, what happened to the materials."

Officials in Washington said they had no answers to that question. One senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex where the explosives were stored was listed as a "medium priority" site on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of more than 500 sites that needed to be searched and secured during the invasion. "Should we have gone there? Definitely," said one senior administration official.

In the chaos that followed the invasion, however, many of those sites, even some considered a higher priority, were never secured.

A No Man's Land

Seeing the ruined bunkers at the vast Qaqaa complex today, it is hard to recall that just two years ago it was part of Saddam Hussein's secret military complex. The bunkers are so large that they are reminiscent of pyramids, though with rounded edges and the tops chopped off. Several are blackened and eviscerated as a result of American bombing. Smokestacks rise in the distance.

Today, Al Qaqaa has become a wasteland generally avoided even by the marines in charge of northern Babil Province. Headless bodies are found there. An ammunition dump has been looted, and on Sunday an Iraqi employee of The New York Times who made a furtive visit to the site saw looters tearing out metal fixtures. Bare pipes within the darkened interior of one of the buildings were a tangled mess, zigzagging along charred walls. Someone fired a shot, probably to frighten the visitors off.

"It's like Mars on Earth," said Maj. Dan Whisnant, an intelligence officer for the Second Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. "It would take probably 10 battalions 10 years to clear that out."

Mr. Hussein's engineers acquired HMX and RDX when they embarked on a crash effort to build an atomic bomb in the late 1980's. It did not go smoothly.

In 1989, a huge blast ripped through Al Qaqaa, the boom reportedly heard hundreds of miles away. The explosion, it was later determined, occurred when a stockpile of the high explosives ignited.

After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the United Nations discovered Iraq's clandestine effort and put the United Nations arms agency in charge of Al Qaqaa's huge stockpile. Weapon inspectors determined that Iraq had bought the explosives from France, China and Yugoslavia, a European diplomat said.

None of the explosives were destroyed, arms experts familiar with the decision recalled, because Iraq argued that it should be allowed to keep them for eventual use in mining and civilian construction. But Al Qaqaa was still under the authority of the Military Industrial Council, which ran Iraq's sensitive weapons programs and was led for a time by Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein's son-in-law. He defected to the West, then returned to Iraq and was immediately killed.

In 1996, the United Nations hauled away some of the HMX and used it to blow up Al Hakam, a vast Iraqi factory for making germ weapons.

The Qaqaa stockpile went unmonitored from late 1998, when United Nations inspectors left Iraq, to late 2002, when they came back. Upon their return, the inspectors discovered that about 35 tons of HMX were missing. The Iraqis said they had used the explosive mainly in civilian programs.

The remaining stockpile was no secret. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the arms agency, frequently talked about it publicly as he investigated - in late 2002 and early 2003 - the Bush administration's claims that Iraq was secretly renewing its pursuit of nuclear arms. He ordered his weapons inspectors to conduct an inventory, and publicly reported their findings to the Security Council on Jan. 9, 2003.

During the following weeks, the I.A.E.A. repeatedly drew public attention to the explosives. In New York on Feb. 14, nine days after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented his arms case to the Security Council, Dr. ElBaradei reported that the agency had found no sign of new atom endeavors but "has continued to investigate the relocation and consumption of the high explosive HMX."

A European diplomat reported that Jacques Baute, head of the arms agency's Iraq nuclear inspection team, warned officials at the United States mission in Vienna about the danger of the nuclear sites and materials once under I.A.E.A. supervision, including Al Qaqaa.

But apparently, little was done. A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces "went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal." It is unclear whether troops ever returned.

By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of roughly 10 bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been leveled by titanic blasts, apparently during the war. They presumed some of the HMX had exploded, but that is unclear.

Other HMX bunkers were untouched. Some were damaged but not devastated. I.A.E.A. experts say they assume that just before the invasion the Iraqis followed their standard practice of moving crucial explosives out of buildings, so they would not be tempting targets. If so, the experts say, the Iraqi must have broken seals from the arms agency on bunker doors and moved most of the HMX to nearby fields, where it would have been lightly camouflaged - and ripe for looting.

But the Bush administration would not allow the agency back into the country to verify the status of the stockpile. In May 2004, Iraqi officials say in interviews, they warned L. Paul Bremer III, the American head of the occupation authority, that Al Qaqaa had probably been looted. It is unclear if that warning was passed anywhere. Efforts to reach Mr. Bremer by telephone were unsuccessful.

But by the spring of 2004, the Americans were preoccupied with the transfer of authority to Iraq, and the insurgency was gaining strength. "It's not an excuse," said one senior administration official. "But a lot of things went by the boards."

Early this month, Dr. ElBaradei put public pressure on the interim Iraqi government to start the process of accounting for nuclear-related materials still ostensibly under I.A.E.A. supervision, including the Qaqaa stockpile.

"Iraq is obliged," he wrote to the president of the Security Council on Oct. 1, "to declare semiannually changes that have occurred or are foreseen."

The agency, Dr. ElBaradei added pointedly, "has received no such notifications or declarations from any state since the agency's inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in March 2003."

A Lost Stockpile

Two weeks ago, on Oct. 10, Dr. Mohammed J. Abbas of the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology wrote a letter to the I.A.E.A. to say the Qaqaa stockpile had been lost. He added that his ministry had judged that an "urgent updating of the registered materials is required."

A chart in his letter listed 341.7 metric tons, about 377 American tons, of HMX, RDX and PETN as missing.

The explosives missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in common use by militaries around the globe. The Iraqi letter identified the vanished stockpile as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, which stands for "high melting point explosive," 141.2 metric tons of RDX, which stands for "rapid detonation explosive," among other designations, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, which stands for "pentaerythritol tetranitrate." The total is roughly 340 metric tons or nearly 380 American tons.

Five days later, on Oct. 15, European diplomats said, the arms agency wrote the United States mission in Vienna to forward the Iraqi letter and ask that the American authorities inform the international coalition in Iraq of the missing explosives.

Dr. ElBaradei, a European diplomat said, is "extremely concerned" about the potentially "devastating consequences" of the vanished stockpile.

Its fate remains unknown. Glenn Earhart, manager of an Army Corps of Engineers program in Huntsville, Ala., that is in charge of rounding up and destroying lost Iraqi munitions, said he and his colleagues knew nothing of the whereabouts of the Qaqaa stockpile.

Administration officials say Iraq was awash in munitions, including other stockpiles of exotic explosives.

"The only reason this stockpile was under seal," said one senior administration official, "is because it was located at Al Qaqaa," where nuclear work had gone on years ago.

As a measure of the size of the stockpile, one large truck can carry about 10 tons, meaning that the missing explosives could fill a fleet of almost 40 trucks.

By weight, these explosives pack far more destructive power than TNT, so armies often use them in shells, bombs, mines, mortars and many types of conventional ordinance.

"HMX and RDX have a lot of shattering power," said Dr. Van Romero, vice president for research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, or New Mexico Tech, which specializes in explosives.

"Getting a large amount is difficult," he added, because most nations carefully regulate who can buy such explosives, though civilian experts can sometimes get licenses to use them for demolition and mining.

An Immediate Danger

A special property of HMX and RDX lends them to smuggling and terrorism, experts said. While violently energetic when detonated, they are insensitive to shock and physical abuse during handling and transport because of their chemical stability. A hammer blow does nothing. It takes a detonator, like a blasting cap, to release the stored energy.

Experts said the insensitivity made them safer to transport than the millions of unexploded shells, mines and pieces of live ammunition that litter Iraq. And its benign appearance makes it easy to disguise as harmless goods, easily slipped across borders.

"The immediate danger" of the lost stockpile, said an expert who recently led a team that searched Iraq for deadly arms, "is its potential use with insurgents in very small and powerful explosive devices. The other danger is that it can easily move into the terrorist web across the Middle East."

More worrisome to the I.A.E.A. - and to some in Washington - is that HMX and RDX are used in standard nuclear weapons design. In a nuclear implosion weapon, the explosives crush a hollow sphere of uranium or plutonium into a critical mass, initiating the nuclear explosion.

A crude implosion device - like the one that the United States tested in 1945 in the New Mexican desert and then dropped on Nagasaki, Japan - needs about a ton of high explosive to crush the core and start the chain reaction.

James Glanz reported from Baghdad and Yusifiya, Iraq, for this article, William J. Broad from New York and Vienna, and David E. Sanger from Washington and Crawford, Tex. Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad.

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he doesnt have to spin it, as a matter of fact he could keep stumping it right through the election. His leftist lovers will stump it when they can get away with it, and the media will print the correction deep in their pages and drop the story.

The message will get out, the ignorant well say hey hes right Bush is bad, and the goal will be accomplished.

That is if the story about it being empty before we got there is true. It certainly seems to be that way.

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Originally posted by visionary

Whoops I missed this thread...odd, I looked around, but couldn't find anything about this. I must not have looked hard enough...or maybe the title wasn't eye catching enough ;)

Sorry that is wasn't eyecatching enough there dude, but I just pasted the title from Drudge Report and well, it basicly took up the WHOLE thread title

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Strange. Here's an AP story from April 5, 2003.

http://www.dailyherald.com/special/iraq/wwi_paststory.asp?intID=3771619

"Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of 2-inch by 5-inch 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."

I wonder if NBC searched all 1,100 buildings.

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From MSNBC:

"At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said U.S.-led coalition troops had searched Al Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives were intact. Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6326367

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Originally posted by LC80

From MSNBC:

"At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said U.S.-led coalition troops had searched Al Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives were intact. Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6326367

Where in that Giant Kerry Ad was the article on Weapons again...

Ohh an anonymous source in the Pentagon.. vs. an embedded reporter that came out and gave his name..

I'd give it more credit if he gave his name: He does monitor things in IRAQ afterall, he should be held accountable right?

I love it when Candidates are Pumping up our Troops:

Kerry’s running mate, Sen. John Edwards, campaigning in Ohio, added, “After today, it’s hard to imagine that even they’ll continue believing things are going well.”

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Okay -- so if we're to believe Drudge, than 380 tons of explosives were moved to gawd knows where before the invasion, and we don't know where they are.

If we are to believe the NY Times, 380 tons of explosives were pilfered by former regime loyalists and terrorists after the invasion.

Regardless of which conclusion is correct, the universal bottomline here is: Iraq had a lot of bad toys; and it was all too easy to move these bad toys before/after the invasion without us being able to track them.

And HOW doesn't this lead any news "analysts" to the inevitable conclusion that maybe, just maybe -- the WMDs which all major intelligence agencies thought Iraq had prior to the war might have been moved/hidden?

BTW - Iraq had absolutely massive stockpiles of conventional weapons that we were simply unable to control after the invasion. There WERE other more important things that we were trying to do for quite some time; and there were only so many Explosives Ordnance Disposal folks available to destroy weapons caches; and only so many soldiers to guard the thousands of weapons caches scattered across Iraq. In the end, it resulted in a lot of these weapons growing feet and being used against us by insurgents/terrorists. Definitely a bad thing, but a piece of news which should have been reported on a while back now.

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that's funny. How can they actually confirm when it went missing if they weren't watching it?

What sticks in peoples minds is that the weapons are gone, not when.

Coupled with the 9/11 Commish getting pissed after 90 something days and not a single recomondation being carried out by the federal gov't.

What are we doing? This should be in the "Do you feel safe" thread

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Originally posted by Son of Sniglet

that's funny. How can they actually confirm when it went missing if they weren't watching it?

What sticks in peoples minds is that the weapons are gone, not when.

Coupled with the 9/11 Commish getting pissed after 90 something days and not a single recomondation being carried out by the federal gov't.

What are we doing? This should be in the "Do you feel safe" thread

I would think that the over 400,000 Tons that WERE found and secured might mean something too.

I get so sick of the doom and gloom Dems.

Son of Sig, can't you see that this was a purely political partisan article and a "revenge" move from the corrupt IAEA branch of the corrupt UN?

Gert real dude!:doh:

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Originally posted by Son of Sniglet

so is Foxnew.com's front page.

I'm begining to wonder if that 18 month deal is legit.

Nobody is running with the story that "Its Not Bush's fault"

I mean, this is the Pass the Buck admin, right?

how can you confirm they weren't there before? There must be something documented.

Of course it's been hidden in the MSM! NBC stepped up to the plate and corrected the situation as it should be. I was actually surprised.

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Originally posted by Son of Sniglet

that's funny. How can they actually confirm when it went missing if they weren't watching it?

What sticks in peoples minds is that the weapons are gone, not when.

Coupled with the 9/11 Commish getting pissed after 90 something days and not a single recomondation being carried out by the federal gov't.

What are we doing? This should be in the "Do you feel safe" thread

the IAEA is saying they put seals on the sites January of 2003 so if that is correct you can say when it was there last...

When we got there in April or whenever of 2003 it was gone if the NBC crew is correct...

Somewhere in-between it is gone.. Do I feel safe?

Thats got to be the ******** question of all time.. Of course I feel safe. Our Troops are fighting all of the Terrorist in IRAQ right now and dying and getting hurt just so we can ask that question from that nice comfy chair.

We havent had an attack that worked in the US since 9/11/01... Do you feel safe? Countries all over the world are catching terrorists that used to harbor them.. Do you feel safe?

3 Muslim just killed / turned in some terrorist for the 1 million payout covered from head to toe so not to be recognized... do you feel safe?

The real question should be: Do you feel enough is being done by the US and the World to beat this threat...

Do you feel safe is a scare tactic...

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Originally posted by Thiebear

the IAEA is saying they put seals on the sites January of 2003 so if that is correct you can say when it was there last...

When we got there in April or whenever of 2003 it was gone if the NBC crew is correct...

Somewhere in-between it is gone.. Do I feel safe?

Thats got to be the ******** question of all time.. Of course I feel safe. Our Troops are fighting all of the Terrorist in IRAQ right now and dying and getting hurt just so we can ask that question from that nice comfy chair.

We havent had an attack that worked in the US since 9/11/01... Do you feel safe? Countries all over the world are catching terrorists that used to harbor them.. Do you feel safe?

3 Muslim just killed / turned in some terrorist for the 1 million payout covered from head to toe so not to be recognized... do you feel safe?

The real question should be: Do you feel enough is being done by the US and the World to beat this threat...

Do you feel safe is a scare tactic...

I feel that there are more terrorists now in the world than there were on 9/11

No, I don't feel any more or less safe.

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