NBC reporter Jim Miklaszewski on yesterday's Nightly News (via Jim Geraghty):

April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad.

But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon.

Former Iraqi Survey Group head and United Nations weapons inspector David Kay, on the Today show in late January of this year:

It was absolutely prudent to go to war. The system was collapsing, Iraq was a country with desire to develop WMDs, and it was attracting terrorists like flies to honey.

What strange things come from peerage politics and chronological manipulation. We now understand that from the mid-1990s onward, Saddam's inclination to overtly possess WMD stockpiles and facilities depended on the likelihood of his getting caught. The transfer of conventional weaponry, on the other hand, is the currency of strongmen, a market with far less audit: most of Saddam's own arsenal came from the Soviets. Big guys give to little guys for a price. Or as David Kay might put it, any Ba'athist with enough clout to anyone with enough cash. Some small arms here, some C4 there, some HMX or RDX over there; what's ordnance among friends? Its sensational charge against President Bush now disproven, the New York Times faces a question it and the American left have been avoiding for nearly two years: was the stewardship of a bottomless weapons trove best left to the deranged, tyrannical enemies of the United States?

CONTINUED: The day's developments here.