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.
It’s bad enough that the POS democrat party kept this hidden but it also appears that the Bush admin kept a lid on the early finds as well. That is a bunch of crap.
The Democratic chickens are coming home to roost?
Our government is sick
I heard about this on FOX NEWS this am. WHY exactly would the Bush administration and the military want to keep this a secret?
I can understand why the dems did, but why would Bush want to keep this a secret? This was one of the main reasons for invading Iraq. I just do not get it.
Worry not! The Left has an answer for this! You see, nobody EVER disputed that these OLD weapons were present in Iraq. That is their line on this. Prepare accordingly. Meanwhile, it appears that Bush did lie, but not the way they say.
NYT trying to spin fast before isis attacks using Iraqi wmd. They say we hid info to protect from embarassment of us shells. Nice try. Only two questions matter. Did Saddam destroy all of his wmd? Did Saddam hide illegal wmd?? NO FURTHER QUESTIONS YOUR HONOR!
I think the Bush administration reported it without much hoopla and hype because they were timid due to the failure to find ready for use stockpiles. The reporting that was done at the time was downplayed by the mainstream media as minor, very old, not significant in an unrelenting drone.
There was testimony at hearings about these findings but the media repetitive drone was that Bush lied, soldiers died and the truth never was carried in a way that people became aware of it. But these same reports were made then, I read them.
“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.”
No, the US government talked about it. The media and the Democrats(sorry for the redundancy) said they didn’t exist. Coin Powell went to the UN and said they existed. The Rats claimed that the only reason we went into Iraq was to get rid of WMD that didn’t exist.
IIRC, we found a bunch of chem weapons in the dessert. The media and the rats kept saying, “no, those don’t count.” it’s now coming back to bite the rats on the ass.
So true, but why?
I really liked Bush 43 but he held the Office of the President in such high regard, that he would not get into the demonRAT gutter to defend himself and that was a very big mistake {both Hugh and huge}.
But but but. There were no WMDs in Iraq! Bush lied! It was all for oil! (/sarcasm)
Can’t believe the Feral Govt. nor the NY Slimes. Everything gets triangulated with Dem liars in control. To be fair GWBoooooosh fluxed up by going into Iraq. Saddam was bad but look at Iraq now plus ISIS has our weapons thanks to scum Bam. We wasted brave military lives and mega billions for a disaster in return plus all the lies. What a cluster goat copulation.
Agreed.
Reports of these things have been trickling out since the war. About six years ago a Liberal friend of mine called BS on another friend, who was a military officer who had encounter some of these remnants during one of his tours there.
So the issue here isn’t that the information wasn’t out there; it’s that the press wouldn’t report it because it didn’t fit the no WMDs narrative. And because there was no active weapons program found, the Bush Admin didn’t feel it appropriate to push the issue.
Providing help or actual chemical weapons to another country is a No-No. It appears that Bush was protection the USA from previous government actions.
Our government is sick
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Power corrupts. The more power government gets, the more corrupt it will be. Its all about protecting and enriching the powers that be.
Given that Benghazi was 2 months before an election....are we repeating the history of Obama and his lies. What lies will this story produce.
the press wouldn’t report it because it didn’t fit the no WMDs narrative
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Exactamundo. Good post.
Instructed by whom? There's a curious lack of specific finger-pointing in this article. There was a study group that didn't report everything to Congress? Who commissioned this "study group?" Who were they? Who was "instructing officers" to keep quiet, and to keep quiet to whom? The government? The media?
This is incredibly vague and looks to me like the media's way of pre-emptively covering their butts when Isis makes it more and more clear that WMD WERE there, WERE found, and were NOT reported to the public by the MSM. Suddenly "Oh, we were instructed not to tell ..."
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