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Iraq

The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons

2016-09-24

[NYT - 14 Oct 2014] 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.
Dated article? Yes, but the recent WMD rocketing by ISIS of U.S. troops necessitates a re-look at the all too familiar WMD false narrative. The graphic depicts the destruction of Iraqi WMD by UNSCOM inspectors and technicians.

We discussed it here at Rantburg the day after the New York Times article was published, including links to several reports about Iraqi WMDs over the years. I recall more articles as well as reports from Rantburgers over the years, but will leave that archive search to others. Suffice it to say, the reason people believe there were no WMDs is because the mainstream media and the anti-Bush Democrats loudly shouted down all claims to the contrary the start of the Iraq invasion until the NYT report came out.

Posted by:Besoeker

#8 #4 Tennessee note well - Declassified report on the recovery of chemical munitions. Procopius2k and TW

Thanks for the link - am familiar with it - one of our guys was on the assessment team that contributed to that report.

Three points:
1 - The Iraq Resolution stated that we were mad at Iraq over their pursuit of a "significant" Chem/Bio and Nuclear programs, as well as Iraq harboring AQ. No "significant" CBRN program existed. There were remnants of pre-91 munitions no doubt and you refer to these in your articles. Certainly not enough to go to WAR over. In fact, our "threat" of use of military force assisted the IAEA efforts. Saddam was weak and mitigated.
2 - The Iraq Resolution also stated that we were mad because Iraq harbored in AQ. AQ WAS NOT in Iraq in 2003 - Saddam and OBL were at odds and OBL was plotting against Saddam's regime. Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad - Zarqawi - was in the AO and only gained support only after the invasion...pledged to OBL/AQ...and this planted the seeds for ISIS.
3 - In 1991, we did not remove Saddam and destroy the Republican Guard in order to avoid occupation and the consequences we face today. We were told if we break it, we own it...on the last night of the ground war...we in the convoys pointed north understood this. We would rather a weakened Saddam control his own people and counter Iran than us stay and put up with that mess. Daddy Bush was wiser than his son.

If we did need to employ force, so be it, a raid to go in and break things would have been sufficient. Not invasion, "regime change" and occupation. This is my point.

So, by whose bidding and influence did we go to war? The KSA (AQs Daddy - see declas 9/11 report), Israel, pontificators like Cheney and VDH? All of the above? Probably.

Actions have consequences. Iraq broke our Army, Iraq and Bush and Obama's failures gave us ISIS.

We HAVE to finish ISIS. An honest assessment leads a reasonable individual to the conclusion that things are worse today than prior to the invasion in 2003.

Bottom line - We conservatives have to conduct hard, honest AARs of our policy. We have to talk this and argue it in order to make the right decisions in the future and prevent poor decisions from re-occurring.

Posted by: Tennessee 2016-09-24 14:22

#7 TW's memory is sadly spongelike. TW has therefore developed a reflex to googling anything that sounds vaguely familiar, followed by a stroll through the Rantburg archives.

You are very welcome, Besoeker dear.

Mr. Tennessee, your service was clearly performed on other battlefields. Thank you for stepping forward and doing what you did there; I hope your lot were permitted to finish winning. But if all you knew about Iraq was what you read and heard from the mainstream media, it's no wonder you came to believe nothing was found.

Posted by: trailing wife 2016-09-24 13:25

#6 TW forgets nothing, remember that.

Posted by: Shipman 2016-09-24 12:57

#5 Thanks for that Rant-link and memory jogger TW.

I blame movie maker Nakoula Basseley, polio vaccine project manager Dr. Shakil Afridi, along with physician, virologist and biological weapons expert David Hatfill.

[sarc off]

Posted by: Besoeker 2016-09-24 12:30

#4 Tennessee note well - Declassified report on the recovery of chemical munitions.

And the stuff was still around when ISIS overran it.

Posted by: Procopius2k 2016-09-24 12:07

This is a photo of one of the reactor buildings at Osirak following Operation Opera in June of 1981. Saddam never gave up on his quest for WMD. In fact, the administration buildings at Osirak were used for WMD research long after the reactor was destroyed. Iraqi officials believed Osirak would be an ideal research site since the reactor had already been obliterated by Israel. Aerial photo imagery betrayed their ruse.

Posted by: Besoeker 2016-09-24 12:05

#2 CNN's report on that day had a different take on the facts than the report we had at Rantburg, which followed the line laid down by the CIA: "However, a CIA official refused to call the discovery the "smoking gun" that would validate the Bush administration's claims that Iraq had an active program to develop a nuclear weapon."

From the CNN article:

Obeidi also said he was not the only scientist ordered to hide that type of equipment.

"I think there may be more than three other copies. And I think it is quite important to look at this list so they will not fall into the hands of the wrong people," he said.

And

David Kay, who led three U.N. arms inspection missions in Iraq in 1991-92 and now heads the CIA's search for unconventional weapons, started work two days ago in Baghdad. CNN spoke to him about the case over a secure teleconferencing line.

"It begins to tell us how huge our job is," Kay said. "Remember, his material was buried in a barrel behind his house in a rose garden.

"There's no way that that would have been discovered by normal international inspections. I couldn't have done it. My successors couldn't have done it."

Kay said he had mixed emotions when he saw the centrifuge components: "It was a realization that I hadn't gotten all the parts [of Iraq's nuclear program]. So there was a moment of regret, but there was also an exhilaration that now maybe we have a chance to take this to the very bottom."

CNN had this story last week but made a decision to withhold it at the request of the U.S. government, which cited safety and national security concerns.

And

Experts said the documents and pieces Obeidi gave the United States were the critical information and parts to restart a nuclear weapons program, and would have saved Saddam's regime several years and as much as hundreds of millions of dollars for research.

David Albright, who was a U.N. nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s, said inspectors "understood that Iraq probably hid centrifuge documents, may have had components, and so it is very important that those items be found."

"What it is that Obeidi was ordered to keep was all the information and some centrifuge components, so that if he was given the order, he could restart the centrifuge program," said Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

"In a sense, the program was in hibernation. He was the key to the restart of this centrifuge program, and he never got the order. So in that sense it doesn't show at all that Iraq had a nuclear program. And Obeidi told me that he never worked on a nuclear program after 1991."

Posted by: trailing wife 2016-09-24 11:57

#1 Then there were the nuclear weapons parts buried in that Iraqi scientist's rose garden... Revealed in a Fox evening news report on 25. June, 2003, with fuller details the next day.

Posted by: trailing wife 2016-09-24 11:44

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