Those WMDs in Iraq…again
The New York Times reports that the CIA’s Operation Avarice was a program designed to buy chemical weapons from a dealer in Iraq that had put old chemical weapons on the market. The New York Times admits that these particular weapons had not been inventoried by the United Nations’ arms inspectors;
It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
The effort was run out of the C.I.A. station in Baghdad in collaboration with the Army’s 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion and teams of chemical-defense and explosive ordnance disposal troops, officials and veterans of the units said. Many rockets were in poor condition and some were empty or held a nonlethal liquid, the officials said. But others contained the nerve agent sarin, which analysis showed to be purer than the intelligence community had expected given the age of the stock.
[…]
The purchases were made from a sole Iraqi source who was eager to sell his stock, officials said. The amount of money that the United States paid for the rockets is not publicly known, and neither are the affiliations of the seller.
Most of the officials and veterans who spoke about the program did so anonymously because, they said, the details remain classified. The C.I.A. declined to comment. The Pentagon, citing continuing secrecy about the effort, did not answer written questions and acknowledged its role only obliquely.
It has been the habit of the BDS crowd to tell us how the 500 tons of “yellow cake uranium” that was taken from Iraq to Canada was known by the UN arms inspectors, so it wasn’t part of the search for WMDs. These rockets in this report weren’t discovered or inventoried by those inspectors, though. So I wonder what their excuse will be this time.
Category: Terror War
What will they say, Jonn?
“Pay no attention to that undeclared Sarin being sold in the bazaar.”
Why are they bringing this up now?
Justification for potentially intervening in Iraq again would be my guess, Ex-PH2.
However, they do have a problem. Acknowledging that there may be chem/bio weapons out there that could be obtained by ISIS does rather undercut the left’s “Bush lied, there were no WMDs” mantra.
It should be entertaining to watch the left attempt to tap-dance around that “inconvenient truth”. (smile)
Hondo…
You nailed it. I constantly ask the BDS folks if they can tell me what a WMD is and then I beat them down with a lesson in NBC. My spouse and I were the peeps in charge of our unit in the FRG. They seem to believe that a WMD is “only” uranium…If it doesn’t fit their reality, it will not be reported.
Nukes don’t scare me half as much as bio, DefendUSA. And that’s all I’ll say here.
Roger that!! My micro background taught me to be afaid!! 🙂
I agree, Hondo, and if you will recall, there were news stories about large-diameter piping – what I would call drainage pipes – being loaded on a ship in the UK, bound for Iraq, that were barred from export to Iraq.
That was before all the ‘gossip’ and speculation about whether or not Saddam had unrefined uranium ore, before the discovery of his long range gun (built by Gerald Bull) during the Gulf War, and before the UN inspectors went in and found nothing.
We got all that ABC/NBC warfare stuff in boot camp. It seemed impractical to me because you can’t control the spread of a disease, and mustard gas hit both sides during WWI. I never discounted either of those things, however, because both chemicals and biologicals can be and are lethal if handled that way.
No, you don’t find dirt under the pad in the dog’s house and say it proves the maid didn’t clean the kitchen floor. Bush said there were rolling bio-chem labs. A lie. Bush said there were aluminum tubes to make nuclear weapons. A lie. Bush said Iraq was poised to attack the U.S. on U.S. soil. A lie. This is trash left over from the Iran-Iraq war, left to rot in the desert, found by a scraper who sold it to a buyer with deep pockets.
So when I tell you I personally saw 2 outta the 3 you mention while I was there in 2003, as well as undeclared warehoused stockpiles, AND video footage of convoys of weapons trucked into Syria hours before the 2003 invasion, I’m just a liar, right?
FY
You just keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel safer.
Isn’t that strange? The dummy crats all stood around yelling that there “were no weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq…gully Vern…you mean, you mean dem dummycrats lied to us’ns? AGAIN?
For those who believe that Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMD, Google the name Ion Mihail Pacepa. He was a lieutenant general in the Romanian intelligence apparat who defected to the US in 1978, the highest-ranking Eastern Bloc official to ever do so.
According to General Pacepa, the Soviet Union was complicit in the development of WMD by third-world tyrants like Gaddafi and Hussein and had plans in place to assist those countries in evacuating any WMD warheads ahead of any US invasion.
For weeks prior to the US attacking Iraq there were satellite intelligence reports of a steady stream of unmarked trucks escorted in military convoys originating in Iraq and traveling to Syria, which according to Pacepa was essentially the Soviet plan to hide the weapons from the US and its allies.
As for the liberals’ contention that Saddam wouldn’t use WMD if he had them, we know he gassed the Kurds, invaded Iran and Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, so you’d you’d have to be a limp-brained liberal to believe Saddam would not use WMD if he felt they were needed to achieve victory in some future campaign against a neighboring state. As a writer at the Heritage Foundation put it, Saddam Hussein was “as “restless as he was ruthless.”
We should never forget that Saddam’s regime and his evil sons were perpetrating horrible acts of cruelty against the Iraqi people back then that were every bit as bad as what ISIS is doing now. No one will ever convince me that we were wrong in taking down that evil bastard and his sorry-ass sons.
My thanks to all of you who read here who were part of that mission. You should be proud that you helped rid the world of that scum.
Poetrooper…”My thanks to all of you who read here who were part of that mission. You should be proud that you helped rid the world of that scum.” Here-Here! My highest regards and esteem go to those who took up this fight.
Former Romanian General Mihail Pacepa has been dismissed as a profligate liar on several fronts, as this article emphasizes. Relying on Pacepa to legitimize any claim is a lot like asking O.J. to vouch for his own innocence: Veracity is not a factor. Survival is everything.
http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/disinformation-and-a-dubious-source
Thanks Poetrooper.
I’ve read a couple of different accounts from different sources that support the intel reports you mention. One of the most facinating things to me is the possibility that Bush intentionally took the political hit on WMD’s as part of a much larger geopolitical manuvering where Russia was concerned, hiding the fact that we knew Russia was moving them out before we invaded in order to win unrelated political concessions from them.
And no, WMD’s or no WMD’s, taking down Saddam’ house of cards was absolutely the right thing to do.
Yet more evidence of chemical WMDs. It’s not the first time the NYT has reported on it: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html
I’d love to see more of this stuff declassified, but until that happens, WHO ARE THESE SONS OF BITCHES THAT DISCUSS THIS SHIT?!?!?!?!? Because they need some SERIOUS jail time. They gave away their rights to decide what should and should not be discussed when they signed that SF-312, and anonymously talking with a goddamn reporter proves that their honor isn’t worth a smear of shit. Fuck them.
You’re assuming the folks who leaked this have actually signed an SF312, SSG E.
DoD has a pretty good record in getting people who are cleared to sign the SF312 as required. However, it’s my impression that in certain other parts of the Federal government, well, . . . maybe, maybe not.
I’d also be willing to bet that a rather large number of cleared political appointees never get around to the “pesky little formality” of signing that SF312. I could be wrong.
I sure hope that’s the case – if so, they’re still breaking the law, but it could, at least theoretically, be out of ignorance and not out of hubris/dishonor.
In either case, I’m not buying the “ignorance” theory. I’m more inclined to believe a conscious effort to evade consequences on the part of the leaker via “conveniently” not having signed a SF312.
Well SSG, can’t really argue with you on that one. But in retrospect there were a lot of young American men in the desert of Iraq who saw things that if they thought too much about might make them wonder.
Maybe one or two smarter-than-average, yet naïve, boys might say at the smoke pit, “Damn SGT, they really had chemical weapons out here.”
And the seargent would reply, “Naw, Son, there ain’t no chemical weapons out here until Uncle Sam says there were chemical weapons out here. Just keep your mouth shut and make it to your ’20’.”
We only got about 10 to 15 more years and maybe we will start getting the whole story.
When the government dishonors itself and breaches the contract in failing to treat those wounded by these munitions while dealing the destruction of these warheads it would seem to me that the contract is null and void and the government can go fuck itself with respect to SF 312s and confidentiality.
Additionally this was public knowledge reported to the UN in 2006 so one could argue the information was already available for review for anyone sharp enough to look through the UN website.
I’m getting tired of seeing the government fuck the troops at every turn and then expect those troops to honor an agreement that the government is unable to honor on its end at every turn.
Fuck those guys who keep this shit secret from our own medical personnel and allow troops to get shitty treatment so we don’t upset some terrorist enabler hoarding nerve agent warheads.
Don’t forget this old news: http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=15918
Yep. The left’s been ignoring that for nearly 9 years now too.
How does one learn of the availability of WMDs from a private dealer, CraigsList? Ebay? This whole thing stinks. And how much more evidence of WMDs is required before my favorite ‘baker’ and his fellow travelers concede that imperialist Amerika had it right in the first instance? One more thing: who else made a purchase from the secretive dealer?
I thought WMD’s were part of the banned list on Craig’s list…
Hmmmm…
The 2006 report to the UN discussed this issue, that some troops have been exposed to this material and their treatment not appropriate due to the classified nature of their work is reprehensible at every level.
http://www.un.org/depts/unmovic/new/documents/technical_documents/s-2006-701-munitions.pdf
Nothing secret. VA acknowledged years ago that Soldiers exposed to sarin in DS and later have developed MS and have deemed it “service connected”.
Only people arguing that Saddam didn’t have WMD are delusional morons lying to themselves. Facts are irrelevant and nothing will change their position. They are as delusional as 9/11 truthers.