Chemical Weapons in Iraq: Part III - The Colossal Screw Up

[Brainonska511]

http://nyti.ms/1EVJYeW

The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons

It seems like once again, we are greeted by the Ghost of Christmas Past. A long-term, colossal screw up by the military. We go into Iraq on the basis of removing chemical weapons, but then when we find them, we cover up our findings, screw over the people that are exposed, and/or outright ignore them. Utterly outrageous.

Edit:
Note that these aren't new weapons (eg: post 2000). They are remnants of a previous era that were never destroyed but are still quite potent. Regardless, even if they weren't the weapons that we though Iraq had or was making, the military shouldn't have covered it up its findings, told veterans to keep quiet about their exposure, treated soldiers and veterans exposed so poorly in terms of treatment, nor done such a sloppy job disposing of and guarding the weapons.

 

[Jaskalas]

Dear Mr. President (Bush),

Why the !@#$ are there still chemical weapons in Iraq?

I wouldn't mind seeing him dragged before Congress to answer for this.

 

[Brainonska511]

Dear Mr. President (Bush),

Why the !@#$ are there still chemical weapons in Iraq?

I wouldn't mind seeing him dragged before Congress to answer for this.

I'd also like to see all the Pentagon and military officials that tried to keep this under wraps dragged in front of Congress. Why all the damn secrecy and mistreatment of the soldiers exposed? Why didn't they report the weapons to Congress as they were supposed to when giving their reports?
---
But I'd actually like to see Congress do it's damn job in oversight and not just bloviating in front of cameras about the made-up scandal du jour.

 

[Fern]

I'm curious to see how this story unfolds.

Fern

 

[maddogchen]

This story sounds like total bullshit to me. its like they are trying to re-write history by saying hey we did find WMDs. yeah right!

Or hey there still may be WMDs in Iraq and ISIS might get its hands on it, we need to invade again. Seriously? you're going with that story again?

 

[Brainonska511]

This story sounds like total bullshit to me. its like they are trying to re-write history by saying hey we did find WMDs. yeah right!

Or hey there still may be WMDs in Iraq and ISIS might get its hands on it, we need to invade again. Seriously? you're going with that story again?

Maybe you should read the article. It's not re-writing history. It's exposing how some people tried to cover up history and people were harmed in the process. The problem with the WMDs we found was that they were not new (as the Bush Administration claimed at the time), they were from days long past, so letting that information out may not have put the administration in such a good light and further exposed the nightmare of unsecured chemical weapons stockpiles.

Or you can bury your head in the sand, dismiss the well-documented NYT article and claim it's just beating the drums to re-invade.

 

[Fern]

This story sounds like total bullshit to me. its like they are trying to re-write history by saying hey we did find WMDs. yeah right!

It was the NYT that broke the story. It's highly unlikely that they would be trying to rewrite history to support GWB.

Fern

 

[cliftonite]

It was the NYT that broke the story. It's highly unlikely that they would be trying to rewrite history to support GWB.

Fern

How is this supporting GWB?

 

[K1052]

Well that's pretty terrible.

It would have taken a relatively modest amount of effort to destroy these stocks properly. The Army built a portable containerized hydrolysis rig in under six months to take care of the Syrian stockpile once the political pressure was on.

 

[maddogchen]

Maybe you should read the article. It's not re-writing history. It's exposing how some people tried to cover up history and people were harmed in the process. The problem with the WMDs we found was that they were not new (as the Bush Administration claimed at the time), they were from days long past, so letting that information out may not have put the administration in such a good light and further exposed the nightmare of unsecured chemical weapons stockpiles.

Or you can bury your head in the sand, dismiss the well-documented NYT article and claim it's just beating the drums to re-invade.

i think that excuse is total bullshit! We all saw how much tons of crap that the Bush administration got poured on their faces when no WMDs were found.

Say you quantify it at 5 tons of manure poured on their face. This story that they found really old WMDs might have eased that manure to 4 tons.

I don't see why they would hide this story because it would somehow put them in bad light. There was already no light from how much crap they got!

 

[werepossum]

How is this supporting GWB?

Well, it's going to be difficult to simultaneously argue that Iraq had no WMDs and accuse Bush and/or the military of covering up all the people harmed by them.

 

[cliftonite]

Well, it's going to be difficult to simultaneously argue that Iraq had no WMDs and accuse Bush and/or the military of covering up all the people harmed by them.

If there were the WMDs that Bush was speaking about why would they cover it up from 2004+?

 

[Fern]

How is this supporting GWB?

Seriously?

He suggests the NYT is rewriting history to now claim that Saddam had WMD and you don't see how that would obviously support GWB?

Fern

 

[werepossum]

i think that excuse is total bullshit! We all saw how much tons of crap that the Bush administration got poured on their faces when no WMDs were found.

Say you quantify it at 5 tons of manure poured on their face. This story that they found really old WMDs might have eased that manure to 4 tons.

I don't see why they would hide this story because it would somehow put them in bad light. There was already no light from how much crap they got!

Every WMD found and recognized as such at the time was reported to Congress and reported in the media - I've linked at least one of the media reports several times. This appears to be a bit different as it's addressing how many times our troops mishandled WMDs due to improper education or mis-marking or just plain bad luck, such as an Iraqi cache of WMDs being hidden underneath or within a conventional munitions cache. The cover-up was apparently to reduce the bad press for the military at Bush's expense. That's understandable since as CINC, Bush also had the responsibility to make sure that proper protocols were in place to prevent such accidents, so whatever rebounded against the military (as an institution) also tended to rebound against Bush. Military policy is that a leader is responsible for all his unit does or fails to do.

 

[werepossum]

If there were the WMDs that Bush was speaking about why would they cover it up from 2004+?

Because literally everyone with a brain knew Iraq had WMDs, but the Bush administration went further in alleging that Iraq had not dismantled its WMD programs.

 

[Jhhnn]

Because literally everyone with a brain knew Iraq had WMDs, but the Bush administration went further in alleging that Iraq had not dismantled its WMD programs.

Hogwash. What chemical weapons that were found existed as random artifacts of poor inventorying & accounting by the Iraqi military. That, & caches lost & buried in the back & forth trench warfare that the Iraq-Iran conflict became. It's not like they were hiding any by design at the time of the invasion.

There are places in France where they're still finding unexploded ordnance of all sorts from WW1.

Literally everybody with a brain knew that the case for the invasion of Iraq was trumped up bullshit created by the Bush Admin & their sycophants.

 

[Newell Steamer]

All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.

I think back to 2003, and the sensationalism that the Bush administration caused over WMDs and chemical weapons in Iraq; had these findings poured out into the media, Bush would have been bashed into oblivion (more so) - possibly even brought up on war crimes.

Get into the '03 mindset - we had our asses handed to us in '01 and were hankering to get some sort of revenge. Bush could have been eating a baby on live TV and people still would have rallied behind him on the invasion of Iraq,.. but, once decades old ordinance was found (and reported), people would have had a case for W to step down; since he directed and led us into a war over rusted and useless "WMDs" - which is certainly not a valid reason to invade.

What an embarrassment - the Bush legacy just keeps on giving,...

I am not surprised, but saddened, to see that this crap was hidden, just to save face. For shame.

 

[JEDIYoda]

Hogwash. What chemical weapons that were found existed as random artifacts of poor inventorying & accounting by the Iraqi military. That, & caches lost & buried in the back & forth trench warfare that the Iraq-Iran conflict became. It's not like they were hiding any by design at the time of the invasion.

There are places in France where they're still finding unexploded ordnance of all sorts from WW1.

Literally everybody with a brain knew that the case for the invasion of Iraq was trumped up bullshit created by the Bush Admin & their sycophants.

still in denial I see....
You never read THE article or you would have seen that this just was not a chemical weapon here and there...it was a massive amount of chemical weapons being stumbled upon after the fact!!

In fact a retired General in the Yahoo article I read about this said that he was instructed what to say in his report on this matter. He went on to say that basically he was told to say there is nothing of significance.....

 

[JEDIYoda]

What an embarrassment - the Bush legacy just keeps on giving,...

I am not surprised, but saddened, to see that this crap was hidden, just to save face. For shame.

The republican were real winners weren`t they..lolol

 

[Engineer]

Removed....

 

[MongGrel]

Not really surprising to me.

Not agent orange either, as it wasn't we using it, but still not surprising.

It was always known he had some at one time, I wouldn't be surprised if more weren't dumped like that haven't been found.

 

[iGas]

Pentagon Reportedly Hushed Up Chemical Weapons Finds In Iraq

"In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies," the Times says.

The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons

The United States government says the abandoned weapons no longer pose a threat. But nearly a decade of wartime experience showed that old Iraqi chemical munitions often remained dangerous when repurposed for local attacks in makeshift bombs, as insurgents did starting by 2004.
Participants in the chemical weapons discoveries said the United States suppressed knowledge of finds for multiple reasons, including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong. “They needed something to say that after Sept. 11 Saddam used chemical rounds,” Mr. Lampier said. “And all of this was from the pre-1991 era.”
Others pointed to another embarrassment. In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.

Syria, Iraq and moral obscenities big and smalll

"CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran", which I would argue are more important to consider.

It is quite obvious that the US knew that there were chemical weapons in Iraq, and the administration fully knew that the it was chemical weapons that the American & EU helped Saddam acquired.

 

[unokitty]

US military denied treatment to soldiers exposed to chemical weapons in Iraq

The New York Times's C.J. Chivers has dropped a bombshell of a scoop that details 17 US troops and seven Iraqi policemen who were exposed to old chemical weapons in Iraq, some of whom were declined appropriate medical care and service awards on the grounds of secrecy.

... 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.

“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 issue concerns lies told to US soldiers and health care denied.

Of course the US public was also deceived.

But if you are familiar with the history of chemical weapons, you know that that deceiving the public has always been the status quo.

For example, take the 6,000 sheep killed by VX nerve gas in Utah's skull valley on 13 March 68 (photo above). For 30 years, the US Army, whose nerve gas leak killed the sheep, denied their involvement.

Expect the US Government, or Military, to tell the truth?

Now that's a gas.

Uno

 

[cliftonite]

Seriously?

He suggests the NYT is rewriting history to now claim that Saddam had WMD and you don't see how that would obviously support GWB?

Fern

Did you read the article? These weren't the WMD's Bush promised us:

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.

 

[Thebobo]

Seriously?

He suggests the NYT is rewriting history to now claim that Saddam had WMD and you don't see how that would obviously support GWB?

Fern

The weird part is later on Bush said it himself they were wrong and there were no chemical weapons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_A77N5WKWM

Did he know about these? Not that they represent a reason we should go to war. But I would of assumed they would of tried to use these as a reason?

Very strange.