Posted on 10/14/2014 8:07:35 PM PDT by ironman
The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West.
The New York Times found 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to nerve or mustard agents after 2003. American officials said that the actual tally of exposed troops was slightly higher, but that the government’s official count was classified. The secrecy fit a pattern. Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United States’ encounters with chemical weapons in Iraq was neither publicly shared nor widely circulated within the military. These encounters carry worrisome implications now that the Islamic State, a Qaeda splinter group, controls much of the territory where the weapons were found.
The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from military doctors. The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Bttt
This CYA article by the Times must be coming out now for a reason. Something coming up that needs to be headed off. While attempting to blame the US and Bush, anyway, for being correct, it does release a ton of info that needs explaining... ‘Rockets designed by the US...” Does that mean by private companies? By the Government? If so, Which administration supplied these rockets to Iraq?
It’s possible that they wanted to keep secret that they found them in order to avoid a terrorist stampede to Iraq to find and acquire them or other weapons, especially since they didn’t know where all of the weapons were. Better to take the media hit about “not finding any” until they all could be secured.
Or maybe there’s another reason.
Think Hillary 2016.
Nobody — not even Bush’s harshest critics — ever made the case that Iraq NEVER produced chemical weapons. In fact, one of the issues that led up to the war was that Iraq’s accounting of old chemical warhead stockpiles and supplies was incomplete (but there were published inventories). The chemical attack on the Kurds was well known. Clearly, Iraq had chemical weapons. That’s not the issue. The issue was whether they were still actively producing chemical weapons at the time we went to war. I haven’t read the entire article yet but I don’t see anything in this article that supports Bush’s position that Iraq was actively producing chemical weapons prior to the invasion.
Iraq was forbidden from having the weapons. Period.
Looks like Iraq had the weapons.
So what’s the problem?
Yes, and they upped the goalpost from the original - making Iraq comply with the terms of the Gulf War cease fire [return of prisoners, accounting of precursors and documented destruction under UN supervision of existing stockpiles and equipment, etc... to just finding huge ready-to-fire stockpiles .... to finding recent ready-to-use stockpiles ... to having to find recent stockpiles and an ACTIVE wmd program. They also ignoring that we went in there to prevent the regime from RECONSTITUTING their weapons program and swapping tech with terrorists. I don’t recall Bush saying we were going in there just to catch an active program but I heard him say many times we had to prevent Saddam from reconstituting his WMD program.
All those 50 gallon drums of “insecticide” securely stored on an Iraqi airbase that was apparently where Iraqi Orkin guys typically store their civilian bug spray. /s
I used to think I needed some sleep and a day off when I thought that. More and more that seems to be the only answer which fits events.
They made alQaeda disappear from Iraq the same way - just call it Ansar al Islam and keep insisting Zarqawi never swore the bayat to bin Laden [at least until he publicly said he did].
That was the Harmony Database. It might still come up if you search for the keywords harmonydocs or harmonydatabase.
That was why I assumed they let the no-wmd lies stand.
I also noticed that in the summer after the invasion when Duelfer was romping all over that the Russian and US wmd destruction programs of their own stockpiles mysteriously “fell behind schedule.”
That was not Bush’s position. He repeatedly asserted that we needed to prevent Saddam from reconstituting its programs. The one thing that was ongoing right up to the end was Iraq’s long range missile development program as it had just constructed a test stand for the rocket motors.
UN inspectors found a lot of stuff right before the invasion as Iraq was starting to take us seriously. Then the lefties said that was evidence that Iraq was cooperating now so we should stand down.
bttt
They know that is how readers will interpret that even though European countries supplied most of Iraq's weapons and military infrastructure.
Never let them see you bleed. If Bush had been candid about US casualties from WMDs, it would have encouraged copycats.
“The issue was whether they were still actively producing chemical weapons ...”
That’s called ‘moving the goalpost’ on an issue.
There was also a report that CIA satellites tracked truck convoys pouring into Syria [when we invaded Iraq].
>>“The issue was whether they were still actively producing chemical weapons ...”
That’s called ‘moving the goalpost’ on an issue.<<
So, when Colin Powell went before the UN with his slide show, he was warning the world about a bunch of old leaky warheads?
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