Sen. John Kerry yesterday accused Bush of demonstrating “incredible incompetence” for failing to secure 380 tons of highly explosive materials from a military site in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. Kerry said, “Now we know that our country and our troops are less safe because the president has failed to do the basics. This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of the administration.” Bush did not address the missing explosives yesterday but administration officials gave varying accounts of what happened. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan initially claimed that Bush had only learned about the missing explosives 10 days earlier. Later in the day, a chief Pentagon spokesperson claimed the Pentagon had known about the missing explosives for 18 months and that the explosives were already missing when the U.S. took control of the military base in April 2003. NBC News has confirmed the Pentagon’s report but the Iraqi government has told the International Atomic Energy Agency that the explosives were taken after the U.S. invasion.