“Secret” WMD casualties in Iraq

Eggs sends us a link from the New York Times which reports on the “secret” casualties of the Iraq War, they tell how there were casualties from Saddam Hussein’s non-existent chemical weapons program. The excuse for keeping the weapons and their casualties secret was that the weapons containers were old and degraded and didn’t fit the Bush Administration’s definition of WMDs.

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

You can read the entire 45-page FOIA here.

To me, 5000 chemical warheads is indicative of a chemical weapons program, and 500 tons of yellow cake uranium tells me that there was a nuclear program in Iraq. The concern now is that those 5000 warheads are in the hands of ISIS. The Obama Administration says that the weapons are degraded and not worth worrying about, but one of the encounters that US troops had with chemical weapons that the New York Times recounts happened in 2011.

The NYT stops short of blaming the US for the weapons troops found in Iraq, but they do say that the weapons were “US designed” as if we were designing Hussein’s chemical weapon program. But the weapons were activated by unnamed European manufacturers.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims.

Then, during the long occupation, American troops began encountering old chemical munitions in hidden caches and roadside bombs. Typically 155-millimeter artillery shells or 122-millimeter rockets, they were remnants of an arms program Iraq had rushed into production in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.

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.

But, regardless, the things still existed, Hussein wasn’t disposing of them and they were still potent enough to wound US troops as they tried to dispose of the things. So can we admit that there were indeed WMDs in Iraq now?

Category: Terror War