Until now. Why now?From 2004 to 2011, U.S. and Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered chemical weapons remaining from Saddam Hussein’s rule. On at least six occasions, troops were wounded by the weapons.
In all, U.S. troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and U.S. officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
And troops can keep secrets better than Congress.
The secrecy fit a pattern. Since the outset of the war, the scale of the U.S. encounters with chemical weapons in Iraq was neither publicly shared nor widely circulated within the military.
Why, Newshound, why?
The U.S. 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.
Aha! Boosh! Boosh bad, The Lightbringer is good!
Congress, too, was only partly informed, while troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found.
Can't keep a secret if you tell Congress - everybody knows that.
“‘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.
You'd think the KGB was in control.
Many chemical weapons incidents clustered around the ruins of the Muthanna State Establishment, the center of Iraqi chemical agent production in the 1980s.
We're about to get to the "Why now?"
Since June, the compound has been held by the Islamic State, the world’s most radical and violent jihadist group. In a letter sent to the United Nations this summer, the Iraqi government said that about 2,500 corroded chemical rockets remained on the grounds, and that Iraqi officials had witnessed intruders looting equipment before militants shut down the surveillance cameras.Even the Iraqi government was in on the secret?
The U.S. government says the abandoned weapons no longer pose a threat. But nearly a decade of wartime experience showed that old Iraqi chemical munitions often remained dangerous when repurposed for local attacks in makeshift bombs, as insurgents did starting in 2004.
Participants in the chemical weapons discoveries said the U.S. suppressed knowledge of finds for multiple reasons, including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong about Hussein having an active weapons program.
'Scuse me? Did anyone proofread that paragraph?
Others pointed to another embarrassment. In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.
Well, that was to use on the Iranians, so that was O.K.
Nonproliferation officials
Nonetheless, several participants said the U.S. lost track of chemical weapons that its troops found, left large caches unsecured, and did not warn people — Iraqis and foreign troops alike — as it hastily exploded chemical ordnance in the open air.
Here's another 'why now' -
C.J. Chivers, The New York Times