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United States Government The Military

Pentagon Reportedly Hushed Up Chemical Weapons Finds In Iraq 376

Posted by samzenpus from the these-are-not-the-chemicals-you-are-looking-for dept.
mr_mischief writes "Multiple sources report that the US found remnants of WMD programs, namely chemical weapons, in Iraq after all. Many US soldiers were injured by them, in fact. The Times reports: "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."
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Pentagon Reportedly Hushed Up Chemical Weapons Finds In Iraq More

Pentagon Reportedly Hushed Up Chemical Weapons Finds In Iraq

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  • The summary seems to have left out the most interesting tidbit:

    According to the Times, the reports were embarrassing for the Pentagon because, in five of the six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been "designed in the US, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies".

    Where were they found? Next to the plants set up by Western companies that filled them in Iraq, of course. Who has control of those plants now? Why, ISIS of course. Don't worry, though, the people who thought it was better we didn't know about these things are assuring us that all those weapons were hurriedly destroyed.

    • Re:Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mr_mischief ( 456295 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:05PM (#48153455) Journal

      That wasn't missing in the summary as submitted, but editors will edit.

      • Re:Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:5, Insightful)

        by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:08PM (#48153479)

        That wasn't missing in the summary as submitted, but editors will edit.

        [Checks url to make sure I'm on the same site as you]

        Well that would be a first. Editing that is. Fucking things up is par for the course.

        • Re:Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:4, Informative)

          by mr_mischief ( 456295 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:18PM (#48153605) Journal

          Honestly I think the edited summary flows better, but some of the information has been removed. The original is here [slashdot.org], which you can also find by following the links through the user's username link and then clicking on "submissions" on the top left.

    • Re:Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:5, Informative)

      by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:09PM (#48153485)

      The article makes it clear that about half of the ~5000 warheads were left behind when the Iraqi army ran away from ISIS. It's not clear if the contents of those weapons is still usable or whether ISIS has the technology to deploy them. I suppose if they can use them they will.

      Iraq got some help from Western countries (mostly illegal exports from Germany) but most of it came from India, Egypt, and China.

      • Re:Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:39PM (#48153815) Journal

        It's not clear if the contents of those weapons is still usable or whether ISIS has the technology to deploy them.

        From the NY Times

        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.

        They're still effective as IEDs and those require no special technology to set up and detonate.

        • Well... you have to keep in mind these things are almost all likely to be artillery shells. It's easy enough to pull the shell off the brass and put it on a new one. Reloading ammo isn't new or hard to do. They might lose a few workers in the process but I doubt they'd mind.

      • Re:Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:5, Interesting)

        by steelfood ( 895457 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @05:06PM (#48154631)

        Did you forget that Iraq was a U.S. ally at one point? That they used chemical weapons during their war with Iran? Oh, and that those two just so happened to occur during the same time periods?

        India, Egypt, China? Might as well include Russia in your list too if you're just going to start listing out countries. And by the way, Egypt was a very close U.S. ally up until Spring fever got to them.

    • Re:Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:5, Funny)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:15PM (#48153557) Journal
      Hence the ha-ha-only-serious joke told during the farcical run-up to the war: "How do we know Iraq has chemical weapons? We have the receipts."

    • More from the NYT:

      "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,

    • I remember this. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:24PM (#48153665)

      We did find chemical weapons. Small quantities well past its shelf life, though. It was pretty obvious that despite some old stockpiles here and there, the Iraqi government hadn't been pursuing a WMD program for many years. This revelation doesn't change the fact that our causus belli was basically a fiction.

      The article is wrong about why we kept it quite, though. The Iraqi army had a history of burying weapons systems up to and including attack aircraft in the desert sand. We didn't want local militias going out to look for chemical weapons that we thought might actually be out there. If we had found actual evidence of a WMD program, the government might have publicized it, but that wasn't the case.

      More interestingly, we were on the Iranian border for a time, and we were actively fighting with irregulars trying to cross the border and intercepting weapons shipments. Even having been there, I still don't know what to believe about what I saw.

    • Timeline! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by khasim ( 1285 ) <brandioch.conner@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:55PM (#48153967)

      The summary also seems to have left off the critically important TIMELINE.

      The "weapons" that were "found" were manufactured and abandoned in the FIRST Gulf War. Back when Bush SENIOR was the President of the USofA.

      So the troops in the SECOND Gulf War (Bush Junior) were being exposed to hazardous chemicals that were 10+ years old. THAT is what is/was being covered up. Our troops were working in/around hazardous waste disposal sites WITHOUT proper equipment or training or supervision or follow-up.

      There are not any "WMD" being "found" in Iraq now. It's hazardous WASTE.

      ISIS (stupid name) does not have "chemical weapons" from that. They have chemical waste that is a health hazard. No GA, GB, GD, VX, or anything like that.

    • I had real problems believing the story til I read that. I was thinking "can't be tru - Rumsfeld and Cheney would have had a field day with that", on,y to read the link and go "oh.... That's why!"

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dk20 ( 914954 )

      Everyone who is surprised by this please raise your hand..

      Didn't the same thing happen with Anthrax, where they did a DNA analysis and determined that strain was sold to them in the 1980's?

  • Absolute BS (Score:2, Insightful)

    by snobody ( 990539 )
    That's the first thing out of my mouth when I heard this story on TV this morning. I can't imagine Bush and Darth Cheney not shouting it from the rooftops if it had been found as they say. Even if they had to cover up Western involvement, those CW shells would have been trotted out before a full court press so the Bush admin could have their "I told you so!" moment.

    • yes, Bush WAS RIGHT (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What, did you think that Hussein was playing his shell game with the inspectors because there really was NOTHING there??
      I remember all that - how the inspectors were continuously kept from going to a certain place, then later, kept from going to some other place, until they all went home in frustration.
      Hussein was a twisted bastard, but that sort of thing goes beyond his limited intellect, as far as just doing it to bother people.
      It was so he could say "but nobody ever found everything".

      BUSH WAS RIGHT!!!

    • Well Fox News of course will be spinning it as vindication. To be clear, the position of the Bush administration was that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons and had mobile biological weapons factories. Both of these claims were never found to be true. Since the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq has used chemical weapons like nerve agents, and the world has known about it. They used them against the Kurds since 1988. This was most likely what was found. Why it might have been hushed up was that the handling of this aspe
      • That was part of the position of the Bush administration, but you are being deliberately dishonest by ignoring the entire position.
        • What part is being ignored? Everyone knew Iraq had mustard and sarin gas since 1984. The Bush administration claimed specifically that Iraq was manufacturing new chemical weapons. Such weapons were never found.

    • Re:Absolute BS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:25PM (#48153681) Homepage
      The reason Bush and Cheney did not shout it out was that Republicans made them and sold them to bad guys. All of those weapons, while not reported by the news during the 2nd war, were reported after the first Iraq war.

      Bush and Cheney specifically said that they were looking for facilities to make new weapons. Specifically nuclear weapons and biological weapons, with maybe some new chemical weapons. But that was not a big deal, because we knew they had saved some chemical weapons. That was a known thing, and not new.

      After the first Iraq war, we destroyed massive stockpiles of chemical weapons but we knew we could not have gotten them all. We had however destroyed the factories.

      They specific claims made by Bush and Cheney were for factories capable of making weapons, and the main fear was bio and nuke, not more chemicals.

      The factories are the most important thing, and this new information does not indicate that Iraq had kept or created any new factories at all. It is entirely about old stockpiles of chemical, not biological nor nuclear weapons that were never destroyed during the first war. Some of them were used in the second war. Others apparently may have survived to be used by ISIS.

      But no one has made a credible claim for new factories that successfully made chemical weapons after the first Iraq war, let alone ever making biological or nuclear weapons

  • The hushing wasn't very effective (Score:5, Informative)

    by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:11PM (#48153515) Homepage Journal

    I heard frequently during the war itself that we HAD found chemical weapons, mostly from pro-war proponents. I gather that it was talked about all the time on Fox News and right-wing talk radio.

    And the reply, even at the time, was that these were weapons from the first Gulf War, mostly inoperable or unreliable due to age, and likely forgotten about. They weren't part of an ongoing production effort, which is what we'd been told. There was widespread support for the war, at the beginning, based on that, which faded as we realized that the danger had been badly overstated.

    So I'm trying to figure out what's new here. I had the impression that this was well known. Is it that it wasn't more widely, discussed because the Pentagon wanted it not to be?

    • How many times did you hear about US troops being injured when handling them? Or about them being disposed of by being detonated remotely without warnings to nearby villages? Or about some of them being still there, in Daiesh/ISIL areas?

      Is that all old news from during the war?

  • Simple bait and switch. (Score:4, Informative)

    by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:17PM (#48153591) Homepage

    These are not the WMDs were were told were in Iraq. While Saddam's history with chemical weapons was well known at the time, they were NOT what people were concerned about. This stuff was not what was used as the excuse to go to war and invade.

    They were not part of the sales pitch.

    Also, these finds were well reported when they happened. They aren't a surprise. They're hardly news.

    This sounds like a bad attempt at rewriting history. Someone is hoping that we all have short memories.

    • They aren't even weapons at this point. (You know, the "W" in "WMD")

      They are toxic waste.

      Saddam had ammo dumps everywhere. Saddam wasn't a big fan of maintenance and upkeep, so you are going to find a lot of old, dangerous junk in these places.

      The NY Times article suggests that the Pentagon did not crow about these finds precisely because they were pre-1991 junk and not the WMDs that we were promised. The press would have laughed at them. As to keeping the number of injured servicemen secret, that is

  • So why would the Pentagon hush-up signs of chemical weapons? That just doesn't make any sense because that was used as one of the primary justifications for going to war with Iraq. The only thing that I can surmise is that it was a political move to try and make George W. Bush look bad but even that is tenuous at best because the Pentagon overwhelmingly supports the president. One would think this would not get buried but ran up the flagpole very quickly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Short answer: Someone with an agenda decided to do it. The same reason why Holder is now looking at a contempt charge. And why he spent two years stonewalling on the current administrations gun-walking, where weapons were deliberately by choice not tracked and put in the hands of cartel members which led to the deaths of not only children, but americans.

  • Was this ever anything but a slogan for sheep ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Crashmarik ( 635988 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:23PM (#48153655)

    Saddam based his entire foreign policy on having his enemies believe he had them. He had used them on both internal and external enemies in the past, it really should come as no surprise to anyone that they were there.

    The only people I can see taking this as a great revelation are those that went around shouting "Bush Lied People Died", while they went around having tourettes fits if you mentioned anything good about the man. I doubt even they believed it, but just found it a convenient way to shut down reasoned argument. You could point out that President Clinton bombed Iraq first to stop the WMD program there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org] and it would sail over their heads.

    The most mind boggling thing is apparently both sides are singularly polarized on the current president who has been implementing the exact same policies as his predecessor. Albeit, a Republican president might have permanently stationed troops in Iraq and prevented ISIS.

    • There is a genuine question as to why we invaded Iraq, which has had numerous repercussions. The warning of nuclear weapons possibly available in a year seems to have been made up. Iraq did have pieces of a nuclear weapon program going on, some of which were buried in a scientist's rose garden. The biological weapons facilities seem not to have existed. The chemical weapons actually found were at least twelve years old, and not in any shape to be directly used.

      In other words, Iraq had no real capabil

    • You could point out that President Clinton bombed Iraq first

      You mean Bush Sr.

      Of course, that was a good idea and universally recognized as such.

  • SEALs possibly found WMD evidence early in the war (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PseudoCoder ( 1642383 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @03:24PM (#48153663)

    I've been on a SEAL/SpecialOps book kick for the last few years and some of the operators that went into Iraq in the early days and were tasked with finding these WMD's on the front end do think they found evidence of developmental weapons programs in addition to the caches of already developed weapons. They basically conclude that stuff was being developed, and hurriedly dismantled and relocated, in country as well as likely to Syria. One of them goes as far as suggesting the only effect of the "diplomatic process" before the war was giving Hussein the time to hide the evidence. The NYT piece only alludes to the old chem weapons they used against Iran, but the SEALS seem to think the stuff they found was part of development programs that were active before the war.

    I guess what's really news is how many chem weapons were still available and the extent to which the Pentagon went to keep it hush. As to why, I can only guess.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by radtea ( 464814 )

      As to why, I can only guess.

      You (or the SEAL books you refer to) make several contentions:

      1) Iraq was actively engaged in new WMD production prior to the American invasion

      2) The "diplomatic process" was intended (by whom?) to give Hussein time to hide this

      3) The evidence as dismantled and relocated, likely to Syria

      4) And the one we all agree on: the old stockpiles were found in Iraq

      I've heard these claims before, particularly the one about Syria. The problem for anyone who takes this line of attack is explaining why the Bush Administr

      • The "diplomatic process" was intended (by whom?) to give Hussein time to hide this

        To be fair, the GP didn't make this claim. He claimed that the effect of the diplomatic process was to give Hussein time to hid the WMD project(s), not that that was the purpose of the process.

        I agree with the rest of your post.

    • While the US and Western Europe had been complicit in Saddam's weapons programs up to GW1, after that it was speculated that the main supplier of many weapons systems and tech after 1991 were the Soviets/Russians.

      So, if the narrative is that much of this was relocated to the local Soviet/Russian client Syria...one doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to then wonder that, at the collapse of the civil situation there, that (surprise?) Russia jumped up to volunteer to go 'deal' with the chem stockpiles in Syr

  • ...because Reagan sold them to them. This has been reported in left wing media for years, I am glad the right wing media if finally on to this story also. Perhaps because they hope by giving misleading headlines they can confuse people into thinking Iraq had an active WMD program, which they didn't, and to worry people about ISIS now having access to these weapons. On the bright side these weapons are decades old and poorly maintained, so other than the shock value of being able to say "ISIS has chemical
  • Matt Daemon didn't find anything and nearly died trying to prove it was all a conspiracy... Oh well, All this would make a good movie I guess.

  • Leftovers from Iran-Iraq War (Score:3)

    by tgrigsby ( 164308 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @04:53PM (#48154505) Homepage Journal

    This is old news. There are forgotten caches of weapons from the Iran-Iraq War (mostly produced by the U.S.) that were left to rot out in the desert, as well as munitions that Saddam had laying around in case the Kurds got out of hand.

    Anyone that ever said he didn't have *any* WMDs *ever* would simply be ignorant of the well-known facts. What was clearly a bald-faced lie was that he was currently producing nerve gas and nukes in preparation for invading his neighboring countries. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

    Show me the nukes and I will personally apologize to George Bush. Until then, no, this ain't that.

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