“This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information.” [quoted in Talking Points Memo] Marshall quite rightly points out that this story perfectly weds the misadministrations incompetence and its dishonesty; the Americans have known for the year-and-a-half since the occupation that this enormous amount of high-potency explosives had gone missing and had not revealed it, and took great pains that the story not emerge after supposedly ceding power back to the Iraqi transional authority. But what I am dying to hear more about, and what Marshall does not discuss, is how the Bush cabal lost control of this desperately necessary coverup at just the wrong time. Whoever in the Iraqi regime reported the theft to the IAEA just two weeks before Nov. 2 obviously knew the potential implications it would have for the Bush reelection re-defeat effort.