More on Cirincione in Salon

So I took a closer look at that Salon article I mentioned in the last post, and lo and behold -- Cirincione addresses some of the questions I posed. He contends the administration knew all along that the explosives were there, but they did not do anything about it because of arrogance and because they held a disdain for the IAEA: "The administration didn't like the inspection reports they were getting out of the IAEA before the war, and they were determined to punish and humiliate them." Cirincione continues:

The administration knew it was there. Why didn't they do anything about it? It was arrogance. I think you have to say that this is not incompetence as much as it is arrogance. They simply did not believe that they were going to have an insurgent or terrorist problem after taking the country. Even when the insurgency began, apparently there was no effort to try to go back and secure these materials.

Later in the article, he identifies what to him is the question to ask from this:

A key question here is, Have U.S. officials known all along that these were the explosives that they were dealing with? People need to go back to Bush officials and start asking some hard questions about what kinds of explosives have been used.