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 governments 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 harms way and from military doctors. The governments secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the wars most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If I recall, Saddam was reportedly seeking yellowcake. I do realize that a CIA agent took it on himself to personally inspect every square inch of the nation in question with a time machine to ensure that was not happening, but for some reason, I never bought his story that it was not being sought.
[Either that or he thought that people would tell him the truth if he simply asked.]
Thx for quotes.
Another way to look at this:
Obola is done. Between ISIL, Obola, Enterovirus, and the global economy going into a tailspin, what better time to air the dirty laundry than during a midterm election about three weeks prior. By the time the election hits, there will be at least 100 cases in the US, and new countries developing outbreaks, and nobody will be talking about it.
They’ve been cultivating this story for a while. The NYT gets to reclaim its creds as an institution of journalism while minimizing the real damage to the Left. I mean, what else can you do to the left that they haven’t already done themselves?
If the legislative shoe were on the other foot, and Romney was President, and the Congress was Republican, the state-run media would literally look like a cage of angry spider monkeys (flinging their own feces at anyone that got within 100 yards of their cage). It would be endless, shrill, and probably violent. There would be marches.
This is the perfect time to air this out. There is almost nobody left that is going to care about this anymore.
HF
The articl complains the military doctors were duplicitous.
Well duh,,, government care for yah.
Funny how they attach everything to global warming but cannot comment on Obamacare and military care similarities.
The article still lies.
The articles spins this as Bush was weong, there was no chemical program,mjust rusting stockpiles of thousands of rounds prior 1991.
Horsesht.
This covers it well for Russia.
Oh no, no nuke program, but only plenty of nukes around.
Wth, hypocrits.
Bttt
That could be true. I don’t remember exactly, and after years of the MSM and the rest of the Democrat Party plus a few lost souls on the Right working the subject over, who could be blamed for not remembering the initial statement.
Now that they have overrun al Muthana they could probably have anything.
Also, found this old report :
JULY 31, 2002 : (WASHINGTON POST REPORTS THAT THE CIA FOUND IRAQI WEAPONS LAB see BLUE NILE) The Washington Post runs a report (Reality is uncertainty, by Joby Warrick, Washington Post , 31 July 2002) suggesting that the CIA has found a laboratory called Talhaddy, or Challenge on the west bank of the Tigris River, employing a team of 85 scientists working on a viral strain code-named Blue Nile. Detail sound similar to Ebola Virus, a lethal hemorrahagic disease. Iraq- Scotsman Says Saddam has weapons to wipe out worlds population, nuclear bomb withing 3 years, The Scotsman Dossier- SPECIAL REPORT ON IRAQ, by Westminster Editor
Yep. And a guy named JAck Shaw had some interesting stuff to sa about that and the Russians.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/oct/28/20041028-122637-6257r/?page=all#pagebreak
Bush never made a big deal about it. He either approved or had a motivation to just let it go because it wasn’t actually a big deal to him, or had knowledge that there wasn’t really anything to it.
“Now we have to invade Syria to get the WMDs that were moved there” might have been politically and militarily counter productive to what he was trying to do in Iraq?
Freegards
Seems to me that the Slimes was at the forefront of the “Bush lied” business.
This story seems to indicate that it was the Slimes that lied.
Not that they’d ever come out and actually admit it.
I wondered if the US gave Russia time to get the stuff loaded up and out of there on purpose. The Russians didn’t really want to have Saddam use them and likely decided to diffuse the situation by taking them before Saddam could try.
There were reports later that the US and Russian program to
desgtrroy their own WMD fell behind... maybe because they were destroying someone else’s too?
1) they were still banned, and 2) they are quite distint from normal warheads. they existed to be filled with chemical weapons.they dont really work as conventional warheads unless you want to disperse liquid exlosives without setting them off.
That isn’t precisely the same as finding the chemicals themselves, but not far from it in the context.
Do you recall the 2004 elections where in October, with the IEA, they suddenly began blasting the Bush administration for not securing parts of Iraqs nuclear weapons program during the invasion(most emphatically, the MDX and RDX which the IEA had informed us was housed in a nonspecific warehouse somewhere in a 100+ square mile military zone)...and then after the election went right back to pretending it never existed?
I don’t know. Bottom line is if there were WMDs on those convoys Bush decided to not make a big deal about them to the public for some reason. I can’t think of any reasons that don’t involve some sort of cooperation with evil, even if it was to avoid what was perceived to be a greater evil.
Freegards
That was not the Bush administration’s position. There were 30 some basis given for going to war, of which WMDs were only directly involved in a few. The Administration stated that they were not an imminent threat (the “not” was edited out of many editorials for more than a year), but that in concert with other things that were going on that we couldn’t afford to wait until they were a direct threat.
As for making the case that there were never chemical weapons...you’re half right. It wasn’t flatly stated that there were never chemical weapons, but it was implied that Bush made it all up...so strongly that there are probably a hundred million Americans that believe Iraq never had them.
oh, and Bush’s description was that they had “programs” and could “reconstitute”. We found all kinds of programs and support facilities for production and deployment.
well, if you listened, he used almost exactly the same figures as the Clinton SecDefense used in January 1998 when he was making the talk-show rounds...speaking of materials we knew they had which were unaccounted for.
old”or new, it was still dangerous stuff that had been kept hidden and not turned over.”There was also information on acquisition of new materials and devices.
oh, and we found plenty of shiny new warheads for deployment of chemical weapons, just in those cases without the accompanying chemicals.
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