Wrong Weapons Found

[poppy]

Any chance Rep. Issa will look into this?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...t/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html

The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons

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.

 

[Lake View Too]

I'm embarrassed that I didn't respond to this, earlier. I thought, big deal, until the Colbert Report explained it to me. If you want an overview of what the Rumsfelt/Cheney/Bush regime has really been up the last couple decades, this story is a great place to start. The Middle East Debacle didn't start after 9/11. We have been sowing the seeds of this quagmire for decades. Helping Saddam Hussein build chemical weapons? Does "oops" really cover it?

 

[carson]

I'm embarrassed that I didn't respond to this, earlier. I thought, big deal, until the Colbert Report explained it to me. If you want an overview of what the Rumsfelt/Cheney/Bush regime has really been up the last couple decades, this story is a great place to start. The Middle East Debacle didn't start after 9/11. We have been sowing the seeds of this quagmire for decades. Helping Saddam Hussein build chemical weapons? Does "oops" really cover it?

This is history at its finest. Ally one day, enemy the next based on our need du jour. These people have defined enemies, we have changing needs.

 

[m1a1mg]

Our track record in the ME is horrendous, to say the least.

 

[poppy]

Looking for nonexistent active WMD program that inspectors already told us didn't exist, covering up evidence of US supplied chemical weapons killing and injuring our soldiers, VP making huge profit, young men and women dying fighting a war, while simultaneously claiming mission accomplished. Nothing to see, move along.

 

[carson]

Looking for nonexistent active WMD program that inspectors already told us didn't exist, covering up evidence of US supplied chemical weapons killing and injuring our soldiers, VP making huge profit, young men and women dying fighting a war, while simultaneously claiming mission accomplished. Nothing to see, move along.

My dog got into my nachos from la cocina, she is now a WMD.

 

[poppy]

I'm embarrassed that I didn't respond to this, earlier. I thought, big deal, until the Colbert Report explained it to me. If you want an overview of what the Rumsfelt/Cheney/Bush regime has really been up the last couple decades, this story is a great place to start. The Middle East Debacle didn't start after 9/11. We have been sowing the seeds of this quagmire for decades. Helping Saddam Hussein build chemical weapons? Does "oops" really cover it?

Here are examples of the point Colbert was making. The RW media flat out lying about the report.

"Saddam Hussein was doing and had done pretty much everything he was being accused of that justified that invasion." [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 10/17/14]

In fact, Bush did not lie about WMDs. They really existed -- and in enormous amounts. Moreover, they were sitting in the Iraqi desert, making U.S. GIs physically ill. (In yet another outrage, 17 soldiers reportedly were denied the medical attention or subsequent commendations that they deserved for handling these poisons. They also allegedly were told to clam up about what they saw.)
It is outrageous that the Pentagon and, apparently, Bush's political team concealed proof that America's chief casus belli actually existed. Instead, the howling hyenas of the Left were allowed to gnaw away at Bush's political corpse. [National Review Online, 10/16/14]

Bush appointee Paul Bremer appeared on the October 15 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom to argue that the Times' report justified Bush's rationale for the 2003 invasion. Bremer asserted that the report indeed "shows that in fact Saddam did still have weapons of mass destruction in 2003 when we invaded." [Fox News, America's Newsroom, 10/15/14]

Here is the reality, truth, facts, what really took place, no spin, etc.

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 discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government's invasion rationale.
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. [The New York Times, 10/14/14]​

Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler pointed out that the chemical weapons "were manufactured before the 1991 invasion of Kuwait," and "uch pre-1991 chemical-weapons shells (often empty) were found by the U.N. weapons inspectors just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq." He added that the weapons do not substantiate Bush's justification for the invasion because "the Bush administration, by contrast, staked its WMD claims on an active, on-going program that was restarted after the Kuwait conflict."

Kessler gave any claim that attempted to use the report to vindicate Bush, his lowest score for truthfulness, four "Pinocchios":

​

​

 

[Andy A]

It is amazing how little some remember about the main event leading up to the invasion of Iraq. By the way, I was against that and have said so many time in this forum. The event I am referring to is the one in which Colin Powell laid out the need to pursue the issue of WMDs. He, on national television for all to see, showed scenes of vehicles and other suspected items that led to the absolute assumption the Saddam Hussein was concealing WMDs. Hence, the decision to invade Iraq was made. Oh, and approved overwhelmingly by Congress, both Democrat and Republican.

 

[poppy]

And it's amazing how revisionist historians refuse to acknowledge the fact the Bush administration ignored all evidence Iraq had no active WMD program. Remember "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence or vice versa", Donald Rumsfeld, one of the greatest bullsh*t artist of modern times.

 

[Lake View Too]

To me the salient aspect of this chemical weapons find is that these are remnants from the chemical weapons used in the Iran/Iraq war that were made using American made chemicals and American expertise. We condemned Saddam for using chemical weapons that we helped him make.