XPost: ba.politics, dc.media, soc.penpals
XPost: alt.burningman
From: snickers@dont-email.me
In article
Gronk wrote:
Looks like Gronk is going to be sucking cock again. Looks like
Bill Clinton was supplying Sadam Hussein with chemical weapons!
The soldiers at the blast crater sensed something was wrong.
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.”
CHEMICAL WEAPONS FOUND BY AMERICAN FORCES IN IRAQ
Between 2004 and 2011, American forces in Iraq encountered
thousands of chemical munitions. In several cases, troops were
exposed to chemical agents.
SOME EXPOSURES DETAILED IN THIS ARTICLE
1 MAY 2004 Two soldiers exposed to sarin from a shell near
Baghdad’s Yarmouk neighborhood. 2 SUMMER 2006 Over 2,400 nerve-
agent rockets found at this former Republican Guard compound. 3
JULY 2008 Six Marines exposed to mustard agent from an artillery
shell at an abandoned bunker. 4 AUGUST 2008 Five American
soldiers exposed to mustard agent while destroying a weapons
cache. 5 2010 OR EARLY 2011 Hundreds of mustard rounds
discovered in a container at this Iraqi security compound.
Rear Adm. John Kirby, spokesman for Defense Secretary Chuck
Hagel, declined to address specific incidents detailed in the
Times investigation, or to discuss the medical care and denial
of medals for troops who were exposed. But he said that the
military’s health care system and awards practices were under
review, and that Mr. Hagel expected the services to address any
shortcomings.
“The secretary believes all service members deserve the best
medical and administrative support possible,” he said. “He is,
of course, concerned by any indication or allegation they have
not received such support. His expectation is that leaders at
all levels will strive to correct errors made, when and where
they are made.”
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.
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.
In case after case, participants said, analysis of these
warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the
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