Posted on 10/15/2014 5:35:37 AM PDT by shuck and yall
After the U.S. invaded Iraq, American soldiers found, and in some cases were wounded by, thousands of chemical-weapons munitions and the U.S. government has been loath to talk about it, the New York Times’ C. J. Chivers reports tonight. Soldiers repeatedly uncovered caches of expired or degraded chemical weapons in the country and even had to deal with the munitions being incorporated by insurgents, perhaps unwittingly, into improvised explosive devices.
It isn’t quite news that there are non-negligible numbers of chemical weapons left in Iraq, but Chivers’s story suggests they are much more numerous and more widely dispersed than had been disclosed. And disturbingly, as soldiers were exposed to hazardous, if maybe not deadly, weapons, almost none of these events were made known to the public.
This seems to have been partly because the military didn’t have the resources to deal with the weapons, especially after it became clear that Saddam hadn’t had an active program or new munitions. High-level investigations, such as the 2004 Iraq Study Group, kept the discoveries quiet, even as the Pentagon was finding out some of the defunct chemical weapons could still be dangerous. The U.S. military could have been accused of not adequately complying with international law in dealing with the munitions now under its control (though the Pentagon says, given the circumstances, it followed the rules). Moreover, many of the weapons were developed or bought by Iraq with U.S. help, when Saddam Hussein was fighting Iran in the 1980s.
The existence of these weapons doesn’t affect the debate over the war’s justification either way: They’re not evidence that Saddam Hussein was, as proponents of the war contended, in the process of resuming chemical-weapons production or starting other WMD programs. But on the other hand, as the existence of thousands of hidden or mislabeled chemical-weapons munitions reported in Chivers’s article could suggest, Saddam was clearly not complying with United Nations requirements about exposing and dismantling his chemical-weapons stores.
The largest concentration of acknowledged chemical weapons, which the Iraqi government has been responsible for monitoring and dismantling after the U.S. withdrawal, is at the Al-Muthana chemical-weapons complex, northwest of Baghdad. That facility was in the news this summer: The Islamic State took control of it and all its contents in July. These old chemical weapons aren’t likely to be very useful militarily, but that doesn’t mean they cannot be dangerous, destructive, or terrifying, as the Pentagon seems to know.
Here are the soldiers explaining a cover-up in their own words:
“I felt more like a guinea pig than a wounded soldier,” said a former Army sergeant who suffered mustard burns in 2007 and was denied hospital treatment and medical evacuation to the United States despite requests from his commander.
Congress, too, was only partly informed, while troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. “ ’Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.
Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of “wounds that never happened” from “that stuff that didn’t exist.” The public, he said, was misled for a decade. “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’ ” he said. “There were plenty.”
The good news is that the Pentagon is now being forced into action, and will make sure that affected soldiers are getting the attention they need:
Prompted by the Times reporting, the Army acknowledged that it had not provided the medical care and long-term tracking required by its chemical exposure treatment guidelines. It said it would identify all troops and veterans who had been exposed and update and follow their cases.
“We’re at the point of wanting to make this right,” Col. Bill Rice, director of Occupational and Environmental Medicine of the Army Public Health Command said last Friday. “We can’t change the past, but we can make sure they are pointed in the right direction from this point forward.”
Chivers’s whole piece, which includes a number of multimedia features on the soldiers affected, is here.
Did Obama know?
**********
Probably not until today — when he read it in the newspapers. /sarc
It wasn’t a secret. I distinctly recall a NYT article in 2007 or so that discussed 500 tons of yellowcake in Iraq and what to do with it.
well then, WHY IN THE FRACK did the Bush Administration keep a lid on this and allow the Democrats to thrash them repeatedly about the head and neck for five years?
Leading directly to the reign of Barack the Incompetent?
I remember troops coming back from Iraq saying they had taken part in destruction of chemical weapons. Every engineer unit that deployed there was part of incinerating the warheads. They were told to shut up about the 'finds'.
he would not get into the demonRAT gutter to defend himself
*************
That’s a good point. By remaining silent Bush became a punching bag for the Democrats and their attack dogs in the media. He simply refused to defend himself, a practice he continues to this day. He wants to give the impression that he is above the political fray but at some point that posture is no longer believable or defensible. Many correctly perceive it as weakness and a failure to stand for one’s convictions.
No shit. Everybody knows that.....
Well everybody with any intelligence........
I cannot help that there is manipulation in the NYT story, i.e., the timing this story comes out (why now?), the previous administrations that “are” involved in creating WMD’s in Iraq, the story coming out AFTER Pres. Obola has made a mess of Iraq/middle east, etc.
Typical Slimes BS.
maybe protecting Dad?
Notice that the newspaper doesn’t want to make things right.
What the NYT, and every other newspaper, which headlined the lack of WMD to print - above the fold on page one - the fact that there were WMDs and they elected not to truthfully report what was going on.
Until this happens the NYT and other newspapers will watch their readership, and hence add revenues, continue to fall.
George Bush knew if this was 2006, 2007 so why cover it up? I am guessing a guy named Karl Rove.
The first President Bush kicked butt with DESERT STORM and had a 92% approval rating......92%!!!!! The American press then methodically attacked him and he lost re-election. The American Press think they are paid by the Democrats, so they were lined-up to make sure the second President Bush didn’t get a big bump in his approval rating from the war in Iraq. The President of The United States told the people of the United States that Saddam had WMDs and had used them in the past. It was the American Press that worked to downplay this and ruin Bush’s approval rating which gave us Barrack Hussein Obama as President. The American Press deserves to have their asses kicked.
Because we had a hand in helping Sadam obtain the materials/weapons. It's time the American people stop the actions of our rogue government. I don't know how but it's imperative. This is no government 'of the people, for the people'.
The comments at the nyslimes site are ridiculous, yet expected.
How many times did we hear, “There are NO weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, bush lied, etc.”
This article comes out and the left says, “We never claimed that there were NO weapons of mass destruction, just that there were no NEW wmd’s ready for saddam to use.”
Lying liars.
I am appalled, not just at the cover-up but at this attitude that, “Well, now that it’s out, we’re doing the right things.” Sounds waaaaayy too much like a certain former SOS after Benghazi.
I am ashamed that the military in which I have served for nearly 30 years would refuse its own soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines medical treatment simply in order to keep a lid on the fact that WMD were found. There is no excuse. None.
"Then to what shall I compare the people of this generation? What are they like? They are like children who sit in the marketplace and call to one another,
‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance. We sang a dirge, but you did not weep.’
For John the Baptist came neither eating food nor drinking wine, and you said, ‘He is possessed by a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking and you said,
‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’
No matter what George Bush did he could not win with this crowd, so why bother? They just did what they had to do.
The existence of these weapon most certainly DOES justify the war. These weapons are clear evidence that Iraq was NOT complying with the terms of the Gulf War cease fire.
It doesn't affect the debate over the "nation building" that occured after the war, but it most certainly justifies the decision to invade Iraq.
More NYT BS.
Yes I read these reports too. At the time the NYT was saying they were paltry finds and Bush was still guilty because these weren’t stockpiles.
What is the NYT trying to pull here?
Bush did NOT cover it up. It was widely reported. The media though at the time said these were paltry finds and old degraded weapons so not worth invading for.
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