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sonofghandi
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16 Oct 2014, 9:54 am

Chemical weapons that were buried before 1991, of US design were discovered in Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html

Quote:
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.


Quote:
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.


Quote:
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.


Quote:
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.


Quote:
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.


The lengthy piece goes on in much more detail, if you have the time to read it. The heavily redacted documents obtained under FOIA are linked at the bottom of the page.


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Humanaut
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16 Oct 2014, 12:23 pm

This has been known for some time, but they didn't find nearly enough to account for Saddam's entire stockpile. According to Georges Sada, most of the weapons were moved to Syria just before the invasion.



Jacoby
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16 Oct 2014, 2:41 pm

I know sarin has a very short shelf life and mustard gas somewhat longer but both would be totally useless militarily after 20 years, some sitting in some warehouse doesn't pose any threat to anyone besides maybe those cleaning them up. We've heard this before, it was reported sporadically throughout the Iraq War but it obviously isn't the ongoing WMD program that the Bush administration scared us into going to war over, it seems likely that these pre-1991 chemical weapons may of actually came from the US that we gave to Saddam to use against the Iranians in the 80s. The timing of this story is interesting, trying to justify the last war to justify the next one it seems.