From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Monday, the New York Times, working with CBS, broke a story suggesting that Bush administration war planners left bunkers of hundreds of tons of explosives unguarded in Posadam Iraq.

That material is now missing, much of it presumably in the hands of the enemy.

Actually, there have been many documented accounts of plundered weapons dumps,

so Republicans are suspicious of the timing.

But whatever the case, the story has what's known in the biz as traction.

Thus, the final week of campaign 2004 was,

if not explosive, at least about explosives. You owe America real answers about what happened,

not just political attacks. The senators denigrating the action of our troops and commanders in the

field without knowing the facts.

But the facts are obscured in the fog of election war.

On Monday, NBC reported that its embeds arrived with the 101st Airborne Division at the site on April 10, 2003, and found no explosives.

The White House held up the NBC's story as Exhibit A in its

defense. Not so fast, said NBC's Tom Brokaw on Tuesday. For its part, the Bush campaign immediately

pointed to our report as conclusive proof that the weapons had been removed before the Americans

arrived.

That is possible, but that is not what we reported.

From there, the story shifted from moment to moment.

The explosives weren't there to begin with.

The explosives were there, but were taken care of.

Matt Drudge posted one Pentagon official speculation that the Russians had taken them before the war.

Fox News sided reliably with the administration.

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