The New York Times had published a new report detailing the numerous cases of American and Iraqi soldiers accidentally exposed to chemical agents from Saddam Hussein’s decaying Gulf War era weapons. But as disturbing as the fact that there were “17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to nerve or mustard agents after 2003″ is the secrecy the U.S. government has maintained ever since. To put it another way, first the Bush administration lied to the American people about the weapons of mass destruction Saddam did not have, only then to stay silent about the chemical munitions he actually had hidden or abandoned many years earlier.
But as the Times makes clear, far from confirming ongoing conservative claims that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD ready for use in 2003, the new revelations prove the reverse:
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.
“‘Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” said Jarrod Lampier, an Army major whose unit discovered 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound. And as the Times C.J. Chivers explained:
Participants in the chemical weapons discoveries said the United States suppressed knowledge of finds for multiple reasons, including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong. “They needed something to say that after Sept. 11 Saddam used chemical rounds,” Mr. Lampier said. “And all of this was from the pre-1991 era.”
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