Pentagon Reportedly Hushed Up Chemical Weapons Finds In Iraq 376
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."
Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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)
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)
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.
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A poster on slashdot can't be a pundit?
Why the fuck not?
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I think he means be a reporter for the article, THEN be a pundit in the replies. B-)
Re:WMDs? Chemical weapons? Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
From someone that was there. Can you please fucking stop with we shouldn't have gone, is over. Now that I have developed autoimmune disease, which is hereditary, when no fucking one in my family out of 200 people has it. I cannot claim I was exposed to anything, well because it didn't happen. I know good fucking well almost everyone in Baghdad in 2003 was exposed to blood agents in the water. The water tested positive multiple times, but do you here about it anywhere?
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Anyone who defines chemical weapons as "WMDs" is doing it wrong. Very wrong.
Thank you. For a moment there I was afraid we wouldn't be able to say that Bush lied.
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> Anyone who defines chemical weapons as "WMDs" is doing it wrong. Very wrong.
You mean like the Archbishop who coined the phrase in 1937, in reference to Italian chemical weapon attacks the previous year?
More seriously though, one of the reasons they stay included in contemporary definitions is that chemicals can destroy environments or, in some cases, make large areas considered hazardous for long periods of time. Maybe "weapons of mass rendering unsafe with obnoxious cleanup requirements" would be tech
Re:WMDs? Chemical weapons? Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure where you get your definition of WMD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]
To help you out:
As defined by 18 USC Â2332 (a), a Weapon of Mass Destruction is:
(a) any destructive device as defined in section 921 of the title;
(B) any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors;
(C) any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector (as those terms are defined in section 178 of this title); or
(D) any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life;
22 million pound bomb. Gonna need a very big plane (Score:3)
> MOAB yield is 11 kilotons.
Lol. It's okay, I made a ridiculous error in a post I made here a couple of weeks ago.
Besides the obvious fact that implies one bomb would take out a major city, I guess it didn't occur to you that you were claiming the MOAB weighs MILLIONS of pounds? Sure, you might guess that current HE is twice as powerful as tnt, but that's still eleven million pounds just for the explosive composition and the metal casing is going to weigh more than that. You're going to need an awf
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As a trained combat medic, you do not understand what you're talking about.
"Weapons of MASS destruction" are named that way because they cause massive destruction over large area quickly. In case of potent modern chemical weapons, modus operandi is to not even bother going in to save those in the hit areas. Instead you set up decontamination camps on the edges of contaminated zone and wait to decontaminate those who manage to get out. You do NOT "neutralize" chemical weapons once they are dispersed, because
Re:WMDs? Chemical weapons? Wait, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is why you shouldn't get your definitions from lawmakers. Just engage your common sense for a moment.
By that definition, injecting someone with a radioactive isotope that will eventually kill them, and only them, no wait, not even kill, just "is dangerous" to them and only them, is a "weapon of mass destruction".
Which is bloody ridiculous. Where's the "mass" in that? You can kill multiple people with a stick of dynamite and that isn't a weapon of mass destruction, so wth?
It makes about as much sense as the authority to regulate interstate commerce being interpreted as the authority to regulate intrastate commerce. Who came up with that again? Oh yeah... same people... congress. Our pet collection of fumbling idiots.
Think about it for long enough to make two or three brain cells stand up. MASS DESTRUCTION. What does that mean? What should it mean? Whatever a sensible answer is, it is not what you quoted, that's for sure. However, that definition is sufficient to allow them to drop the legal world on your head if you even begin to think about doing any number of things they'd prefer you didn't do. And *that* is why it is what it is. Obviously. Not because it actually defines mass destruction. Because it doesn't, in fact it's utterly useless in such a pursuit. It's intellectually insulting, in fact. Not that such a problem ever stopped congress from making bad law, of course.
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Found it. This is what I read first, but days ago, that probably sent me off on my trail of errors:
"In September 2007 Russia exploded the largest thermobaric weapon ever made. The weapon's yield was reportedly greater than that of the smallest dial-a-yield nuclear weapons at their lowest settings.[41][42] Russia named this particular ordnance the "Father of All Bombs" in response to the United States developed "Massive Ordnance Air Blast" (MOAB) bomb whose backronym is the "Mother of All Bombs", and which p
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I doubt I'll have much success in this, but I've tilted and windmills before:
Chemical Weapons are indeed "Weapons of Mass Destruction" - and the key characteristic that makes them so is *indescrimination*.
A straight-up HE bomb (or even a pie-in-the-sky KE weapon) has a known blast radius around its intended target. Pick target, apply Circular Error Probable, apply blast radius, and you now have a circle that pretty accurately defines the amount of damage that weapon will do.
With a Chemical, Nuclear, or Biol
Re:Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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.
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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)
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.
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When Progressive-liberal rags like the NY times and NPR start publishing essentially "Baby Bush was right after all", I expect the Minions of Hell to start buying ice skates.
Re:Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:5, Interesting)
In a historical sense ISIS may have actually done something useful, they concentrated the command and control of islamic extremists into one place and have united the Sunni's, Shiites, and Kurds in a fight against a common enemy. They are penned in on all sides by nations that are hostile towards them, they have no hope of expanding beyond Syria/Iraq (and possibly Afghanistan) via military means. What happens after ISIS is gone I don't know, but the idea of a caliphate where they are not in charge is scaring the shit out of all of the tribal leaders right now and may just force the three tribes to find a more civilised way of disagreeing.
This war is a muslim war, if we charge in now boots and all it will revert to a muslim vs the west war which is precisely what ISIS wants, they want us to try and root them out because they believe that would line up the tribes behind them (better the devil you know and all that). The best thing the west can do now is work with Russia to avoid falling into the old cold war pattern of fighting proxy wars using impoverished nations as their pawns. If the west and Russia start openly fighting for influence in the region, we are in a different and much more deadly ball park.
Re: Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:2, Insightful)
If you believe that, I have some very valuable mining rights on a near earth orbit asteroid that you will surely be interested in purchasing.
Re:Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:4, Insightful)
In Afghanistan the Taliban are very hard on women but on the other hand in Iraq under Saddam Hussein the women were some of the most liberated in the Middle East, but much less so now under the current government.
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Iraq definitely had chemical weapons. That's what they gassed the Shiites and Kurds with. Not to mention the Iranians.
Of course, that program by 2003 was probably not operational, but they certainly still had some around.
The major question is whether it was worth going to war over what they still had. Probably not. Gassing people is bad stuff, but if Saddam had done that to anyone other than the Iranians (or their own people), Saddam knew that it wouldn't hurt US troops much, and it would make *everyone
Re:Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:5, Funny)
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More from the NYT:
I remember this. (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
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Actually, it's so heavy it's impossible to even get enough up your nose to get heavy metal poisoning...the stuff is pretty much harmless. It's just various uranium oxides made by acids acting on uranium ore, usually made near mine at mill. Can't make a bomb with it: not nuclear, dirty or otherwise. Radioactivity is not a problem, your skin will stop alphas it emits (same as natural uranium). Even eating it to try to get heavy metal poisoning is futile because it's so inert (moreso than metallic element
Re: Designed in US, Built in EU, Filled in Iraq (Score:3)
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!"
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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)
yes, Bush WAS RIGHT (Score:2, Informative)
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!!!
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Re:Absolute BS (Score:5, Insightful)
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
CIA report dated 2007 (Score:2)
The hushing wasn't very effective (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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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)
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.
These aren't the droids you're looking for (Score:2)
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
Intriguing (Score:2)
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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)
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.
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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
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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)
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.
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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
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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.
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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
Yes, we know Iraq HAD chemical weapons... (Score:2, Redundant)
Green Zone: And here I thought... (Score:2)
Leftovers from Iran-Iraq War (Score:3)
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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yes there were chemical weapons, we found them but it was apparently a huge secret even though that is why we went to war
Re:So confused (Score:5, Informative)
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And the bush administration, though not bush himself, was pushing the (clearly bogus) nuclear line pretty hard. "Aluminum tubes! Why else would they ever need to buy aluminum tubes?"
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Really. They come free with Cuban cigars.
Re:So confused (Score:4, Funny)
And the bush administration, though not bush himself, was pushing the (clearly bogus) nuclear line pretty hard. "Aluminum tubes! Why else would they ever need to buy aluminum tubes?"
Could these tubes be used for the internets traffic?
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Re:So confused (Score:4, Insightful)
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I swear you're the only other person who gets that. Saddam wanted the same deal that North Korea got.
Clinton bought off NK when they were pursuing WMD, with a nuclear reactor, food and gas. I want to say that Saddam's biggest mistake was that it was Bush, and not Clinton, he was dealing with, but is largely irrelevant. We could not invade NK and depose the government, whereas in Iraq, we had that option. Clinton had no choice but to make a deal. (I'm not saying he would have invaded anybody in any case) Sad
Re:So confused (Score:4, Informative)
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you're revising history. it was also for chemical weapons, and yes everybody knew they had them.
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No sane person is going to think an "old" WMD is just fine and a "new" WMD is not.
You do realize that not all weaponry lasts forever right? Even nuclear weapons are retired because the components may not be as effective as when they were put into service. Since the Iran-Iraq War, the world knew Iraq had mustard and sarin gas. This is not news. [wikipedia.org]
Old or new, if the basis for the war was that Iraq had WMDs in its possession, this fits the bill.
Not when the actual claim [theguardian.com] by Colin Powell and the administration was that Iraq was MANUFACTURING new chemical weapons.
Let's look at one. This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji (ph). This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells. Here, you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines. The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers.
It's irrelevant either way at this point, we left. There's no reason to spin it unless we're going to try and hold someone accountable for them being in Iraq. Are people so hateful of Bush that this kind of spin is even seen as worthwhile?
No, it's conservatives that are spinning these discoveries that Bush was right when in reality they are not. That's dishonest. Th
Re:So confused (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that chemical weapons are treated as if they were nuclear weapons in terms of diplomatic maneuverings and consequences... or at least were considered as such. In other words, if a country decides to openly use chemical weapons on American soldiers, it is considered "justified" to go ahead and use nuclear weapons in retaliation.
Yes, this is screwed up and seems silly, but it was the chemical weapons that the Bush administration was talking about elsenwhen, not the nuclear or biological weapons.
Iraq also had a nuclear bomb program in the 1980's, but that one got bombed out of existence by Israel when Iraq tried to build a breeder reactor. There certainly wasn't anybody who was serious about finding nuclear weapons in Iraq in the early 2000's decade. The question at hand was with regards to how large and widespread their chemical weapons inventory might be.
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The chemical as WMD goes far back to the origins of the Cold War. The rule was that launching chemical would be treated just like nuclear and responded to as such.
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The reason for war was WMDs like nuclear and biological weapons
The real reason was they happened to be sitting on vast oil reserves. Now all their base are belong to us.
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They are so used to lying that they now are incapable of telling the truth. Even when the truth is better than the lie.
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Why the US would keep secret the very reason we changed our story too really makes you wonder what they were hiding given the lengths they were trying to go to to prove they were 'right' about invading Iraq....
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Re:So confused (Score:5, Interesting)
There were warehouses of chemical weapons in Iraq before Gulf War 2 - everyone knew about them, the UN inspectors went to those warehouses first, inventoried them, and sealed them. Saddam was supposed to have destroyed those weapons, by treaty, but that wasn't the point of contention as they were pretty old by then, some left over from the Iran-Iraq war (some even US-made), and likely not useful. We were looking for newly made chemical weapons.
The baffling thing is: why weren't these chemical weapons destroyed in the 10 years we were in Iraq? That makes no sense at all to me. WTF? So now ISIS has a warehouse or two of Iraqi chemical weapons. We went to war partially to prevent just that - terrorists getting WMDs not because Saddam was selling them directly, but because shit happens. Well, shit happened. What were we doing for 10 years following going into Iraq for the stated purpose of destroying these WMDs?
Fortunately, they may all be so old that they're only a danger to ISIS. It's really any WMDs made more recently that are a threat. If Saddam actually had a weapons program active soon before the war, the weapons likely ended up in Syria - certainly Iraqi military convoys carrying something crossed into Syria in the weeks before we attacked - but ISIS is strong in Syria too. Guess we'll find out soon enough.
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What were we doing for 10 years following going into Iraq for the stated purpose of destroying these WMDs?
Making LOTS of money of the war and rebuilding of Iraq
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That's a myth. It cost a lot, since you have to pay a civilian quite a bit to go into a hostile area to do engineering (and engineers made quite a premium in the area even in peacetime), but e.g. Haliburton earnings were unimpressive (I bought the stock, hoping the conspiracy theorists were on to something, but it seems they were merely on something).
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There was never any question about whether Iraq had chemical weapons. After all, Saddam used them against Iran and his own people. The question has always been, "where are they now?"
The possible answers are that he still had them somewhere, that he gave them away, that he destroyed them, or that he had run out. Each of these answers presents problems. If he still had them, then where were they and who might still have access to them? If he gave them away, who did he give them to and why? If he destroyed the
CIA report from 2007 (Score:2)
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Back in 2004 or 2005, I recall some friends whose son was over in Iraq saying that their son had told them he had been with a team that discovered Iraqi chemical weapons and that he saw them with his own eyes. His parents insisted that it was just a matter of time before it hit the news in a big way.
And then nothing.
I don't know what to think at this point. I guess it's a sad state we're in, since I can honestly say that neither the notion that we used them as a pretext for war, nor the notion that we cover
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i've known people from the first gulf war and they swore that iraq used chemical weapons against the USA then or that the demolition of some of the ammunition exposed them. a lot of people after the war suffered from light symptoms known to be caused by exposure to nerve agents
Issue was whether there were NEW ones. (Score:3)
As I understand it (in hindsight):
- Saddam was supposed to stop his production of new WMDs and estroy the old stuff.
- He apparently complied, at least with stopping new production. (His guys - maybe at his orders, maybe on their own - apparently hid some of the key components of the nuclear program so it could potentially be restarted at some later date without starting from zero.)
- But a lot of the old stuff was still around.
- Meanwhile, he had enemies all around, and one of the de
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Why would the Mainstream Media say a retraction of the CIA report that said there were no WMD stockpiles?
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These are weapons from the 80s. Weapons we helped Iraq to obtain when they were one of the people we were supporting in opposition to Iran.
They do not in any way vindicate Bush, and that is the reason that Bush covered it up.
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Why would they retract?
It was known of and reported at least a decade ago that there were chemical weapons plants in Iraq. Also, it has been known of and reported, as stated in the summary, that the plants were from early in Hussein's rule and had been in disuse for years by the time the US invaded in 2003.
Re:No WMD's...Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its no secret Iraq had chemical weapons. They used them liberally against Iranian human wave attacks during the Iran Iraq war.
The reason they were hushed up is because they were provided by western countries. You do know the U.S. and Europe backed Saddam in the Iran Iraq war and most probably encouraged the use of chemical weapons against Iranian teenagers right? Iran had a huge population advantage, Iraqi Shias weren't that keen on fighting Iranian Shia, so Iraq needed technology to level the field and the West helped with that edge.
The West was really happy about a lengthy, bloody stalemate in that war bleeding both countries white.
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No. Bush said that Saddam was actively making WMDs. Bush never said we needed to go to war in Iraq because there are chemical weapons leftover from the 80s. If this legitimizes the war in Iraq then we better get busy making bombs and soldiers. http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/cbwprolif
Re:No WMD's...Really? (Score:4, Informative)
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No, Bush was still wrong (Score:5, Informative)
This comes up about once a year. Iraq had chemical weapons and everyone knew about it BUT this was during the Iran/Iraq war. They were largely destroyed before the second gulf war. What we're cleaning up NOW is still remnants from way back then. What Bush said was that we had to go to war due to imminent threat of actual weapons being used. That was not the case at the time -- when Bush was justifying invasion -- nor is it the case now. We're finding debris and remnants that are hazardous, sure, but no longer weaponized. And they have not been weaponized since well before Bush referenced them as "weapons".
Here's a recent reference:
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/conservatives-continue-get-iraqi-wmd-story-wrong
And here's one from a nearly identical situation in 2011:
http://www.wired.com/2011/11/iraq-wmd-seal-target-geronimo/
And here's a fantastic timeline that CNN put together back in 2010:
http://cns.miis.edu/stories/100304_iraq_cw_legacy.htm
Add this CIA report (Score:2)
Re:No WMD's...Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
When they searched the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist, they uncovered roughly 2,000 pages of documents. You see them here being brought out of the home and placed in U.N. hands. Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq's nuclear program. . . This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji (ph). This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells . . . The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers. . . . First, you will recall that it took UNSCOM four long and frustrating years to pry - to pry - an admission out of Iraq that it had biological weapons. . . One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.
The Bush administration claimed that Iraq had biological, chemical, and maybe nuclear weapons. As for biological weapons, especially the mobile weapons factories, were never found. The nuclear weapons were also never found as Iraq never had the capability. As for chemical weapons, the world has known that Iraq already had mustard gas and sarin since the end of the Iran-Iraq war. The claim by the Bush administration was that they were manufacturing more and newer chemical ones. This was never substantiated. Most likely US soldiers uncovered the old mustard gas and sarin stockpiles.
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Iraq's nuclear program was basically stopped by the Israeli attack on the Osirak reactor.
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The nuclear weapons were also never found as Iraq never had the capability.
Correction, it wasn't found because the program was destroyed during and after the first gulf war and by a unilateral bombing run from Israel earlier.
The claim by the Bush administration was that they were manufacturing more and newer chemical ones. This was never substantiated.
But that presumes the burden of proof was on Bush. Saddam was proven to have chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs in the first gulf war. One of the most important conditions for allowing Saddam to remain in power and for the end of first gulf war short of his removal was the admittance and allowing of international inspectors to verify the termina
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Really? Huffington post is your bible? Seriously?
What about all the scrap metal missile parts [taipeitimes.com] that went through the port of Rotterdam? Did Huffington post knock that story down too?
Re:What a load of nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
That's really just the beginning of the story. Why the cover-up of US troops being injured by them? Why weren't they disposed of according to international accords on chemical weapons? Are we sure they were all destroyed before ISIL started scrounging old bases and ammo dumps?
Here's the original submission. [slashdot.org] If you read the multiple articles linked from the original or edited summaries you'll see that just finding them was far from the end of the story.
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As campaigners routinely pointed out, we knew Iraq had these because the west sold them to Saddam (and because he used the weapons we sold him on his own people).
The question is: of these 5,000 warheads, how many were serviceable? How many were actually close to deployable? Was there any evidence he had a significant defence capability with these weapons?
All of the chemical weapons being found now, and that have been found in the past 10 years, were manufactured in the 1980s during Iraq's war with Iran. Almost none are deployable now (too old, rusted, whatever) but theoretically the chemicals could be removed and used elsewhere.
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Why didn't they report this? They were accused of lying and this would have helped to save face.
Report what? That they've found chemical weapons that were sold to Iraq by the U.S. ????