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.
Many of us always believed there were WMD. W covering it up is unacceptable.
What they are doing is spinning the historical record. Number one, they can excuse past reporting by citing this report. Number two, they can still claim that what is found now in Syria or shows up being battled with ISIS is still left over from “Bush’s War.”
It is all backfilling the record to support positions they will take later.
Because "expired and degraded chemical" weapons were not the kind of WMDs we were duped into go to war for. "Mushroom Clouds" was the picture they were painting.
The media are scum.
Remember this story headline from July 2008... “Uranium shipped to Montreal from Iraq in top secret mission”... “The removal of 550 metric tones of “yellowcake,” the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment, included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a voyage across two oceans.”
Yes... There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but then again. Why advertise that fact to your enemies?
“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.”
My 2¢…In hindsight, I completely agree that it would have been better to leave Saddam at the wheel. But at the time I figured Iran would eventually get it's hand on Iraq, so going in was at least an attempt to head that off. Well, THAT didn't work….
Anyone wanting to read the principle speech that Bush gave to the UN can look the text up at the link below.
Bush did not claim that Iraq had nuclear weapons. He outlined how Iraq had had a program which was dismantled in part but the main issue was the ten year failure to comply with the UN inspections and settlements of the first Iraq war in a manner that let the world know it was a safe and compliant nation.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/text-of-bush-iraq-speech-to-un-12-09-2002/
It was the repeated failure to comply and the inability of the world to ascertain if WMD programs were proceeding that led to the declarations from the UN.
During the questioning of Sadam after capture it became apparent that he wanted everyone to think he had a more active program to keep other Arab nations and Iran in fear of his possible abilities. That is why he didn’t comply.
The older WMDs were hidden and sent to Syria but what was found was from that earlier period and never met the media’s standard for the narrative that THEY adopted about the war. A narrative the Bush administration never outlined in a manner that the media later knocked down as a “straw man” argument.
And this was only one of the reasons we invaded. Saddam was shooting at our pilots, playing footsie with the inspectors and had violated UN resolutions for years. All very very good reasons for invasion.
I remember clearly that WMD was only one of the reasons for invasion. Saddam needed to be gotten rid of. He was removed successfully and everyone was better off until Obama refused to allow a residual force.
The Bush administration was it’s own worst enemy. If they had fought back against the democrats and leftist media the way they did against Saddam it would have made a world of difference.
So...the invasion was sold on the basis of obsolete weapons that might not work and in any case could not be delivered to the US?
So all that talk from the White House about mushroom clouds and uranium enrichment and aluminum tubes is down the memory hole? Condi Rice’s continuing assertions that “this regime was pursuing a nuclear weapon” are now inoperative?
Also, Saddam was in bed with Osama. Don’t forget that; it also was part of the narrative you fell for and amazingly to this day can’t admit to yourself was a pile of steaming BS.
No, it was sold on WMD dangers as well as the flaunting of UN rules, shooting at our planes in no fly zones, funding suicide bombers and now allowing inspectors access.
No, I never thought Saddam was in bed with Osama. Saddam himself was enough to justify invasion.
And you conveniently ignore the fact that the Duelfer Report reported that hundreds of Iraqis had looted Saddam's WMD sites when we attacked. No one knows what they took. Also, Duelfer said Saddam would have re constituted his weapons if allowed to stay in power.
Well we certainly taught those Iraqis a lesson they won’t forget! I gather no one you care about had to die or suffer grievous injury for it. I gather you are fine with the entire islamic middle east in flames, with Christians butchered in the streets. I’ll put you down as a Satisfied Customer.
Personally, I miss Saddam. He’s looking better every day.
Nonsense. This is the very reason Obama should have left a residual force...to keep this from happening. I am not happy with it at all.
If we had not done this in Japan and Germany they would have slumped back into totalitarianism. Why wouldn't you leave a force in Iraq as well?
It is Obama who has squandered the gains made in Iraq. Bush won the war...Obama is losing it.
But Bush should have made it clear that once we moved in, we would occupy Iraq for at least 20 years.
If we didn’t have the will to do it, we never should have gone in.
more like Ronald Reagan
You can't make prognostications like this before the war starts.
But good people had the will to do it. It was the rabidly anti war left that did not.
Well we sure as heck didn't say we'd leave right away, neither.
No, it was Obama who said that. Bush would never have said it. He would have negotiated at least 10,000 troops staying which would have been the correct thing to do.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.