And look what pops up.
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-chemi ... aq-2014-10US Troops Found Huge Caches Of Chemical Weapons In Iraq — And The Pentagon Tried To Keep It A Secret
Numerous US troops found and were exposed to chemical weapons while serving in Iraq after the 2003 invasion of the country, and they were plagued by not only the terrible after effects, but substandard medical care and little recognition after the military attempted to keep the discovery of the munitions a secret.
In a long expose highlighting the "secret U.S. casualties" posted Tuesday evening at The New York Times, journalist C.J. Chivers brings to light what has been suppressed for years by military officials. Between 2004 and 2010, according to the Times, soldiers found thousands of rusty, corroded chemical munitions throughout Iraq, though all were manufactured before 1991.
“I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’ ” former Army Sgt. Jarrod L. Taylor told Chivers. “There were plenty.”
In the run-up to the Iraq war in March 2003, the Bush administration made the case that Saddam Hussein was actively working to build and obtain weapons of mass destruction. These included claims of building biological weapons, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons. The Times report, while revealing that Hussein did in fact have chemical munitions, notes that all were made before the 1991 Gulf War, and quite embarrassingly, often with US help.
Chivers writes:
In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war’s outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find.
In many of the cases Chivers highlights, explosive ordnance disposal personnel — believing they were dealing with old artillery or mortar shells on a roadside used as improvised explosive devices (IED) — disarmed them and sometimes put them in their trucks, being exposed to leaking chemicals such as mustard and sarin.
“This is mustard agent,” Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling told his men over the radio, according to Chivers. “We’ve all been exposed.”
The soldiers at the blast crater sensed something was wrong.
From 2004 to 2011, American and Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and at times were wounded by, chemical weapons that were hidden or abandoned years earlier.
It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake. The blast, part of an effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs, uncovered more shells.
Two technicians assigned to dispose of munitions stepped into the hole. Lake water seeped in. One of them, Specialist Andrew T. Goldman, noticed a pungent odor, something, he said, he had never smelled before.
He lifted a shell. Oily paste oozed from a crack. “That doesn’t look like pond water,” said his team leader, Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling.
The specialist swabbed the shell with chemical detection paper. It turned red — indicating sulfur mustard, the chemical warfare agent designed to burn a victim’s airway, skin and eyes.
All three men recall an awkward pause. Then Sergeant Duling gave an order: “Get the hell out.”
Five years after President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, these soldiers had entered an expansive but largely secret chapter of America’s long and bitter involvement in Iraq.
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.”
(read the rest at the link)
Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant
