http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Banner&module=span-ab-top-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons
By C. J. CHIVERS
The New York Times
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.
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.
“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.”
As for the rest of the article, despite the New York Times clinging to "but it doesn't justify the administrations justifications for going to war" leftist, idiotic pap they seem to forget that Iraq was supposed to hand over ALL of its munitions to UN inspectors. This was one of the specific points on the reasons for invading a second time.
Stuff was relabeled to "fool foreign inspectors."
Likewise, well after the invasion, some of these stockpiles were discovered as people were actively digging them up. Which means they were neither "forgotten" or "no longer dangerous."
I told you so. Did I mention that already?
Oh, and wait until the New York times decides to report on Iraq's covert nuclear weapons program. I got time...
The question everyone should ask is: why did they put a lid on this? It is clear that the Bush Administration knew all of this, and yet purposely sat on it.
Just like they sat on the covert nuclear program.
