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Pentagon Reportedly Hushed Up Chemical Weapons Finds In Iraq
mr_mischief writes "Multiple sources report that the US found remnants of WMD programs, namely chemical weapons, in Iraq after all. Many US soldiers were injured by them, in fact. The Times reports: "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."
According to the Times, the reports were embarrassing for the Pentagon because, in five of the six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been "designed in the US, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies".
Where were they found? Next to the plants set up by Western companies that filled them in Iraq, of course. Who has control of those plants now? Why, ISIS of course. Don't worry, though, the people who thought it was better we didn't know about these things are assuring us that all those weapons were hurriedly destroyed.
My work here is dung.
So there were chemical weapons in Iraq? Hold up peeps that wasn't the story 8 years ago.
Nuf said. There were WMD's. Now will we hear a retraction from Mainstream Media? Probably not.
That's the first thing out of my mouth when I heard this story on TV this morning. I can't imagine Bush and Darth Cheney not shouting it from the rooftops if it had been found as they say. Even if they had to cover up Western involvement, those CW shells would have been trotted out before a full court press so the Bush admin could have their "I told you so!" moment.
As campaigners routinely pointed out, we knew Iraq had these because the west sold them to Saddam (and because he used the weapons we sold him on his own people).
The question is: of these 5,000 warheads, how many were serviceable? How many were actually close to deployable? Was there any evidence he had a significant defence capability with these weapons?
The clear answer from the invasion is NO he did not. Because if he had, he would have used them. And even if he had chosen not to, his control of his own forces was not such that they wouldn't have chosen to use them on their own initiative.
End of story, shut the fuck up.
I heard frequently during the war itself that we HAD found chemical weapons, mostly from pro-war proponents. I gather that it was talked about all the time on Fox News and right-wing talk radio.
And the reply, even at the time, was that these were weapons from the first Gulf War, mostly inoperable or unreliable due to age, and likely forgotten about. They weren't part of an ongoing production effort, which is what we'd been told. There was widespread support for the war, at the beginning, based on that, which faded as we realized that the danger had been badly overstated.
So I'm trying to figure out what's new here. I had the impression that this was well known. Is it that it wasn't more widely, discussed because the Pentagon wanted it not to be?
Why didn't they report this? They were accused of lying and this would have helped to save face.
It was no secret, many soldiers stated this from E1 to Generals.. No surprise how many Generals Obama has fired over the last few years eh?
American sheeple decided to listen to brainwashing media and fork tongued politicians over the people who actually lived and witnessed these type of events - the soldiers.
Bush had to be portrayed as terrible/evil in order for the American public to willfully elect an idiot like Obama, and the MSM did a nice job of it.
What, did you think that Hussein was playing his shell game with the inspectors because there really was NOTHING there??
I remember all that - how the inspectors were continuously kept from going to a certain place, then later, kept from going to some other place, until they all went home in frustration.
Hussein was a twisted bastard, but that sort of thing goes beyond his limited intellect, as far as just doing it to bother people.
It was so he could say "but nobody ever found everything".
BUSH WAS RIGHT!!!
These are not the WMDs were were told were in Iraq. While Saddam's history with chemical weapons was well known at the time, they were NOT what people were concerned about. This stuff was not what was used as the excuse to go to war and invade.
They were not part of the sales pitch.
Also, these finds were well reported when they happened. They aren't a surprise. They're hardly news.
This sounds like a bad attempt at rewriting history. Someone is hoping that we all have short memories.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So why would the Pentagon hush-up signs of chemical weapons? That just doesn't make any sense because that was used as one of the primary justifications for going to war with Iraq. The only thing that I can surmise is that it was a political move to try and make George W. Bush look bad but even that is tenuous at best because the Pentagon overwhelmingly supports the president. One would think this would not get buried but ran up the flagpole very quickly.
No wonder baby bush wanted his wars...
You know, when he pulls a quarter from behind your ear... Yes, they had weapons. Yes, they were already secured before the war even started. It's all bullshit. We are in the midst of another lie to keep the war going. The object is to stay in the game.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Saddam based his entire foreign policy on having his enemies believe he had them. He had used them on both internal and external enemies in the past, it really should come as no surprise to anyone that they were there.
The only people I can see taking this as a great revelation are those that went around shouting "Bush Lied People Died", while they went around having tourettes fits if you mentioned anything good about the man. I doubt even they believed it, but just found it a convenient way to shut down reasoned argument. You could point out that President Clinton bombed Iraq first to stop the WMD program there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... and it would sail over their heads.
The most mind boggling thing is apparently both sides are singularly polarized on the current president who has been implementing the exact same policies as his predecessor. Albeit, a Republican president might have permanently stationed troops in Iraq and prevented ISIS.
I've been on a SEAL/SpecialOps book kick for the last few years and some of the operators that went into Iraq in the early days and were tasked with finding these WMD's on the front end do think they found evidence of developmental weapons programs in addition to the caches of already developed weapons. They basically conclude that stuff was being developed, and hurriedly dismantled and relocated, in country as well as likely to Syria. One of them goes as far as suggesting the only effect of the "diplomatic process" before the war was giving Hussein the time to hide the evidence. The NYT piece only alludes to the old chem weapons they used against Iran, but the SEALS seem to think the stuff they found was part of development programs that were active before the war.
I guess what's really news is how many chem weapons were still available and the extent to which the Pentagon went to keep it hush. As to why, I can only guess.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
We did find chemical weapons. Small quantities well past its shelf life, though. It was pretty obvious that despite some old stockpiles here and there, the Iraqi government hadn't been pursuing a WMD program for many years. This revelation doesn't change the fact that our causus belli was basically a fiction.
The article is wrong about why we kept it quite, though. The Iraqi army had a history of burying weapons systems up to and including attack aircraft in the desert sand. We didn't want local militias going out to look for chemical weapons that we thought might actually be out there. If we had found actual evidence of a WMD program, the government might have publicized it, but that wasn't the case.
More interestingly, we were on the Iranian border for a time, and we were actively fighting with irregulars trying to cross the border and intercepting weapons shipments. Even having been there, I still don't know what to believe about what I saw.
This comes up about once a year. Iraq had chemical weapons and everyone knew about it BUT this was during the Iran/Iraq war. They were largely destroyed before the second gulf war. What we're cleaning up NOW is still remnants from way back then. What Bush said was that we had to go to war due to imminent threat of actual weapons being used. That was not the case at the time -- when Bush was justifying invasion -- nor is it the case now. We're finding debris and remnants that are hazardous, sure, but no longer weaponized. And they have not been weaponized since well before Bush referenced them as "weapons".
Here's a recent reference:
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/conservatives-continue-get-iraqi-wmd-story-wrong
And here's one from a nearly identical situation in 2011:
http://www.wired.com/2011/11/iraq-wmd-seal-target-geronimo/
And here's a fantastic timeline that CNN put together back in 2010:
http://cns.miis.edu/stories/100304_iraq_cw_legacy.htm
The old spin: Bush lied, people died! There never were any WMD in Iraq!
The new spin: Bush claimed that Iraq had an ongoing WMD program, but it was not ongoing, but of course there were WMDs; we said all along there were WMDs. When you look at the nuance, Bush was lying all along, but WMDs in Iraq are a problem even today.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/352462.php
BULLSHIT!
After all the excuses for going into Iraq, I have no doubt they would have talked about it non-stop if it were found.
As a comedian famously said at the time :-)
...because Reagan sold them to them. This has been reported in left wing media for years, I am glad the right wing media if finally on to this story also. Perhaps because they hope by giving misleading headlines they can confuse people into thinking Iraq had an active WMD program, which they didn't, and to worry people about ISIS now having access to these weapons. On the bright side these weapons are decades old and poorly maintained, so other than the shock value of being able to say "ISIS has chemical weapons stolen from Iraq", don't be surprised if you see limited or no use of them. ISIS *MAY* find some use, but it won't greatly affect their combat effectiveness.
Once again, Onion & friends ahead of the news curve.
Table-ized A.I.
They basically conclude that stuff was being developed, and hurriedly dismantled and relocated, in country as well as likely to Syria.
Was anyone ever curious where ISIS found the chemical weapons in Syria, or why Obama specifically told the president of Syria not to use chemical weapons when fighting off ISIS?
The only people who didn't know that Saddam sent his chem. labs to Syria during the stalling phase (with a spoken promise that he'd get it back after things cooled down) are willfully ignorant civilians. It stayed quiet because the Pentagon and diplomats would prefer a chemical-weapon-armed neutral Syria than have yet another war going on in the Middle-East.
The summary also seems to have left off the critically important TIMELINE.
The "weapons" that were "found" were manufactured and abandoned in the FIRST Gulf War. Back when Bush SENIOR was the President of the USofA.
So the troops in the SECOND Gulf War (Bush Junior) were being exposed to hazardous chemicals that were 10+ years old. THAT is what is/was being covered up. Our troops were working in/around hazardous waste disposal sites WITHOUT proper equipment or training or supervision or follow-up.
There are not any "WMD" being "found" in Iraq now. It's hazardous WASTE.
ISIS (stupid name) does not have "chemical weapons" from that. They have chemical waste that is a health hazard. No GA, GB, GD, VX, or anything like that.
US military: CoD players volunteering their services to invade, occupy and murder for a meager salary because they don't want to use their high school education to flip burgers. Have fun playing with chemicals that were put there by the same people who told you Iraq needs freedom and democracy and sent your dumb ass there.
I could imagine the US being keen not to openly advertise the presence of these horrible weapons to the terrorists overrunning the place.
The reasons for wanting to keep it quiet are very pragmatic and sensible.
Iraq is already in a bad situation, with us having to wipe the arabs' stupid, corrupt and inept backsides for them as it is, without having to worry about additional complication of ISIS getting any more ideas, and trying to get their hands on Sarin and mustard gas.
The evil motherfuckers have already been experimenting with chemical and germ agents. Why push our luck any further?
Common sense, really.
As to why, I can only guess.
You (or the SEAL books you refer to) make several contentions:
1) Iraq was actively engaged in new WMD production prior to the American invasion
2) The "diplomatic process" was intended (by whom?) to give Hussein time to hide this
3) The evidence as dismantled and relocated, likely to Syria
4) And the one we all agree on: the old stockpiles were found in Iraq
I've heard these claims before, particularly the one about Syria. The problem for anyone who takes this line of attack is explaining why the Bush Administration didn't put any of this together to make a case for the invasion and occupation after it was all discovered?
So what's your guess as to why the Bush Administration kept all this quiet?
Were they completely incompetent and let the military cover things up? If that's the case, why did the military cover things up?
Did Administration officials know all this--including the stockpiles etc being moved to Syria--and cover it up for their own reasons? If so, what were they? "A momentary lapse of reason" won't cover it. What is the plausible strategic, tactical, diplomatic or political reason for an Administration that made the invasion of Iraq a signature policy based on a pretext that was widely believed to be false to cover up evidence that would have proven that pretext substantially true?
This is the question that has to be answered.
Finally: if all the WMDs were moved to Syria, why are these WMDs still all over Iraq? (they were presumably in a lot better shape in 2002 than they are today, twelve years later.)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
You're straying from the narrative.
If USFOR found chemical weapons development facilities, it would have been shouted to the heavens as justification for the war.
Why in the world would USG keep this secret?
The answer is that it is a load of BS.
Does this really make sense to you?
Is it logical to you that USSOCOM, the Pentagon, and the Administration would keep evidence that the war was justified a secret?
Would Colin Powell not break this news to repair the catastrophic damage to his legacy?
They aren't even weapons at this point. (You know, the "W" in "WMD")
They are toxic waste.
Saddam had ammo dumps everywhere. Saddam wasn't a big fan of maintenance and upkeep, so you are going to find a lot of old, dangerous junk in these places.
The NY Times article suggests that the Pentagon did not crow about these finds precisely because they were pre-1991 junk and not the WMDs that we were promised. The press would have laughed at them. As to keeping the number of injured servicemen secret, that is the default behavior of the Pentagon going back to Agent Orange in Viet Nam. I have heard rumors that the Pentagon is keeping the number of servicemen injured by depleted uranium secret, also.
I believe that the Pentagon actually thought that Saddam had an active chemical weapons program going on when we invaded Iraq. A modern army such as the U.S. army has little to fear from chemical weapons. What they didn't know was that Saddam had given up making chemical munitions when Clinton bombed all the chemical plants.
AC above is totally wrong. Saddam was cooperating fully with the inspectors when we attacked him. He was begging us to inspect whatever we wanted. There were UN inspectors on the ground when George W. Bush told them to get out because he wanted to start bombing.
This is how they're going to justify going back into Iraq, especially since Oil prices are Crashing.
Cheney's crowd can't handle that, so Something has to happen.
Who is "They"? Wait a week and we'll see, won't we? :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
I 100% AGREE.
ALSO.
CHEMTRAILS!
Several units were downwind when a large chemical munitions dump was destroyed the VA contacted me to inform several years after the first gulf war.
As I understand it (in hindsight):
- Saddam was supposed to stop his production of new WMDs and estroy the old stuff.
- He apparently complied, at least with stopping new production. (His guys - maybe at his orders, maybe on their own - apparently hid some of the key components of the nuclear program so it could potentially be restarted at some later date without starting from zero.)
- But a lot of the old stuff was still around.
- Meanwhile, he had enemies all around, and one of the deterrents was that they thought he had all this nasty weaponry.
- So to keep them at bay, he made it look to his neighbors like he really was posturing about stopping and destroying, while still having much and making more. ("I got rid of all that stuff." Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) As a "good client dictator" he counted on the US diplomatic and intelligence communities to know that he really did it, was tellnig the truth to us, and putting on a show for his neighbors.
- Unfortunately for him, the show he put on for his neighbors convinced the US that he still had and was still making. Oops!
- Meanwhile, his neighbors planted stories, disguised as intelligence reports, about his continuation. (One such that hit the press was the forged documents for the "yellowcake" uranium ore purchase. The guy who fabricated it bragged about it after the war.)
- So the US decided he'd gone (too) rogue and had to be taken out.
- The US went in looking for the NEW stuff and the CURRENT production and research. Oops! Didn't find it. Found a bunch of old stuff, but that didn't support the argument for going to war. Either it didn't exist (and the US had done a BIG boo-boo) or it was just well enough hidden that it hadn't been found yet.
- So it was politically expedient for the administration to not mention the old stuff while they kept looking for the new stuff they still believed was there.
- It was also politically expedient for the opposition to crow about not finding the stuff that was the reason for the war. The old stuff weakened the message, so they didn't mention it.
- Most of the mainstream press was solidly in the opposition's pocket. So they didn't mention the old stuff, either. This made any reports of it from the remainder of the press look like a pro-administration fabrication.
Thus, if you weren't watching many sources and making really good estimates of what was correct, important, fluff, and/or fabrications, you either didn't hear about the old weaponry or thought such stories were disinformation, and came away with the idea that there wasn't any WMD material to be had in Iraq
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Matt Daemon didn't find anything and nearly died trying to prove it was all a conspiracy... Oh well, All this would make a good movie I guess.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This is old news. There are forgotten caches of weapons from the Iran-Iraq War (mostly produced by the U.S.) that were left to rot out in the desert, as well as munitions that Saddam had laying around in case the Kurds got out of hand.
Anyone that ever said he didn't have *any* WMDs *ever* would simply be ignorant of the well-known facts. What was clearly a bald-faced lie was that he was currently producing nerve gas and nukes in preparation for invading his neighboring countries. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Show me the nukes and I will personally apologize to George Bush. Until then, no, this ain't that.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Seems to be kosher... but fails to answer the real questions https://www.cia.gov/library/re...
https://www.cia.gov/library/re...
https://www.cia.gov/library/re... so that's not it
While the US and Western Europe had been complicit in Saddam's weapons programs up to GW1, after that it was speculated that the main supplier of many weapons systems and tech after 1991 were the Soviets/Russians.
So, if the narrative is that much of this was relocated to the local Soviet/Russian client Syria...one doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to then wonder that, at the collapse of the civil situation there, that (surprise?) Russia jumped up to volunteer to go 'deal' with the chem stockpiles in Syria. Likely they would have cleaned up any Iraqi leftovers as well, and we (the current administration) were likely fine with that.
-Styopa
The "diplomatic process" was intended (by whom?) to give Hussein time to hide this
To be fair, the GP didn't make this claim. He claimed that the effect of the diplomatic process was to give Hussein time to hid the WMD project(s), not that that was the purpose of the process.
I agree with the rest of your post.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Politics for politicos. Stuff that doesn't matter.
Invade Belgium and you'll probably find 50000 tonnes of 'hidden' chemical weapons. UNSC resolution 1441 was a pretext, and I'm not falling for it that the islamic state suddenly got WMD capabilities . None of these remnants can actually be fired and deliver the originally intended result. It is just a pile of toxic waste.
There's been a lot of talk that the US led invasion of Iraq or GW2 laid the foundations for the trouble being experienced now in Iraq and Syria, that those insurgencies by faux-Islamic nut-jobs were initially able to organize and arm themselves as a direct result of the US's bungled attempt at regime change.
I think this is an initial attempt to start rewriting the history of why the US went into Iraq the second time for GW2, the justifications for that invasion and what was found once they went in. Discussion of discovered chemical weapons old or not serves to confuse the actual history and provide a point that pundits can point to and say see there was a reason for us to go there, there was an existential threat and we were forced to do what we did.
It's all bullshit of course, it was a land grab pure and simple. Saddam and the Iraqi armed forces had been smashed pretty well in GW1, the intelligence reports detailing the Iraqi armies remaining strength showed that any serious invasion attempt, especially by the US would essentially be a cake-walk. Iraq at the time held the second largest known oil reserves in the world, the cost benefit came back: "go" so they did.
"designed in the US, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies", reads Arthur Daniels Midland, Monsanto, Bechtel and the other big Agro-chemical Pharma and their European subsidiaries and Governments (UK and Germany).
No wonder this stuff was top secret.
I thought everyone knew that Iraq had no WMDs (yes, chemical weapons are WMDs), so how could our soldiers be injured by chemical weapons in Iraq?
Likewise, we don't have to worry about ISIS capturing any chemical weapons in Iraq, since Iraq had no WMDs, therefore no chemical weapons....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The real lie was that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. Unfortunately, he was one of the biggest terror actors (i.e., America haters) in the Middle East. Just like Iran continues to be today. Maybe there's no photo of him chumming with Bin Laden, but that doesn't matter because there is no point in eliminating Al Qaeda if Saddam continues funding and exhorting for more terror. You have to remember that Bin Laden was said to be a multimillionaire, but Saddam was sitting on a gusher of oil easily worth trillions. Which do you think had more influence? The big and appalling chagrin of course is that while Saddam and Bin Laden are each dead (and you know who likes to brag about it), Al Qaeda is alive and kicking with new volunteers joining daily, and Iraq is their massive blood-soaked killing field. So when the Commander in Chief whines that he can't control that, just remember that he inherited the control that was being maintained by American service men and women, and that probably only a few thousand of them would have sufficed as an effective deterrent to the current mess. The Democrats could have easily honored their primary constituents by bringing home most of the troops and then taking a centrist position that some troops should stay, not to wage war, but to keep the peace.
There is one politician in Australia who has made a career out of claiming that there were never any WMDs in Iraq. I guess his little world of delusions just imploded, I wonder if he will resign now?
Anyone who defines chemical weapons as "WMDs" is doing it wrong. Very wrong.
There are two practical kinds of WMDs at this time: Biological weapons that introduce contagion(s), and nuclear weapons. In the future (probably not that far away), we can also look forward to kinetic energy weapons, IE big rocks coming down very fast from space onto a target area. Cheap, yields below, to, and above nuclear levels (almost arbitrarily above... these will be the primo WMD of the future -- want a hundred gigaton explosive yield? No problem, a KIW is your weapon of choice. Cost, fuel and time, nothing else), totally practical CEP (circular error probable... in other words, they can miss by more than they actually will miss, and they will still totally destroy the target. Even if the "target" was something the size of Texas. Or the asian continent.) And oh, yes, there will be side effects. That's the only thing that introduces practical limits to the yield of a KIW, in fact. If you want to live on the same planet afterwards, you're going to have to limit your ambitions to be known as "the big banger."
Chemical weapons can be defended against, rendered harmless via other chemicals, rendered ineffective via protective devices, and in any device I've ever heard of, are small-area denial weapons more than anything else. The most annoying thing about them is persistence, so a really wide dispersal weapon literally denies the area to anyone not properly suited up until the dispersal can be remediated. That's a very useful trick in warfare, by the way, though somewhat less effective these days what with various non-ground transport being so easily accomplished. Still, if you don't have to worry about ground troops, you can concentrate on the air. The most useful thing about chemical weapons is they inconvenience the heck out of the enemy you deploy them against; infrastructure becomes unusable, required operations in the affected area become enormously cumbersome, food supplies are rendered useless, agriculture is knocked back to the stone age... very much a "reduce enemy capacity to operate / make war" kind of weapon.
Calling Saddam's stuff WMDs is like calling an infantryman an army. (oh wait, we do that, don't we? "army of one" lol)
Sure, they can kill more than one person at once. But so can a conventional dumb bomb, a grenade, a machine gun (in fact, a machine gun, if you really think about it, has almost unlimited killing capacity, given that it is maintained correctly. If a machine gun kills a thousand, and a chemical weapon simply makes people wear funny suits, which one is the WMD? Have we inadvertently redefined "destruction" entirely here?)
And what about FABs like the MOAB? (typically fuel-air bombs, "Massive Ordnance Air Blast / mother of all bombs") You want wide-area destruction and death? Holy crap, they'll give you what you want. MOAB yield is 11 kilotons... the Hiroshima nuke was only ~16 kilotons. And the Russians, bless their competitive little hearts, have come up with a FAB with 44 kiloton yield.
Saddam's crap... those weren't exactly high end chemical weapons anyway. Mustard gas, etc.
Tempest in a teapot. And certainly NO reason to start a war with them. That was a complete bungle/lie/fuckup on the part of the Bush administration.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So the Americans were there for how many years, yet seemingly left these weapon lying around? And suddenly now with this amazing news article ( because we know that a government would never concoct a story and get is published by the highly moral and ethical fact checking Press) appears.
So now we have the pretext as with Iraq, we MUST go to war before these weapons we left lying around after all these years will be used in Main Street Buttfuck USA?
Really?
"Bush told the truth! People Died!"
Seeing that the whole raison d'etre for Gulf War 11 was the non-existent WMDs, it's most curious at this coming to light just now. Is this part of some propaganda effort, talking up the war against ISIL/ISIS/al-Qaeda/ ...
Obviously TFA is written to vindicate Bush's agenda to steal oil from Iraq.
The problem becomes that Saddam had chemical weapons, but I believe during the Regan era Regan sold Iraq the weapons, however there's no doubt Russia and other countries where selling them as well to Iraq. This was already reported on about 10 years ago, they found barrels and other containers buried in soil, they were rusted, and or the chemicals dried up, or the weapons were duds/disarmed.
The Troops that claimed to have been exposed were either careless when they came across weapons IE, they were unsure of them or they unknowingly came into contact with contaminated soil, buildings or arms/weapon bunkers.
And Bush Jr sat there, and first said Iraq was funding terrorists groups, then made of some idiotic bullshit that Saddam was trying to kill his father, then he steered it into WMD's. It was no secret to the world over WMD's in Iraq, but Washington DC claimed he was manufacturing chemical weapons, and even believe they made the claim that he had Nuclear weapons, or he was also getting ready to make them.
I remember one of the morons in Washington (maybe that dumb twat Hillary Clinton) making a moronic statement that if the US didn't invade the US would find out the hard way, by way of a mushroom cloud. I still have yet to see or hear anything on how that search went! (sarcasm)
The people who sold chemical weapons tech to Iraq were European countries like Germany, assisted by France and others. The weapons casings were from Spain and China. The ones made in Spain were based on old US designs (which is mentioned in the article, but the part where they were knockoff designs without US input was glossed over).
The US sold Iraq some smaller helicopters and some agricultural insecticides (which were not, in any reasonable fashion, convertible to chemical weapons). We didn't sell them any sort of chemical weapons - or weapons of any kind, for that matter.
We did send them some biological agents - again, for agricultural purposes, like anthrax. Look up "American Type Culture Collection" for how this works. Iraq tried to repurpose the anthrax for weapons (and failed, apparently).
> MOAB yield is 11 kilotons.
Lol. It's okay, I made a ridiculous error in a post I made here a couple of weeks ago.
Besides the obvious fact that implies one bomb would take out a major city, I guess it didn't occur to you that you were claiming the MOAB weighs MILLIONS of pounds? Sure, you might guess that current HE is twice as powerful as tnt, but that's still eleven million pounds just for the explosive composition and the metal casing is going to weigh more than that. You're going to need an awfully big plane to carry a 22 million pound bomb.
Didn't think there were many of you left - you must have epic Twister competitions with Obamabots in contorting yourselves into rationalizing this stuff.
Have you sued Obamabots for ripping off the Bushie "criticism must first be balanced by acknowledging accomplishments" shtick? They've been shamelessly ripping you guys off for years.
You could also point out there's no comparison between that an invasion that ended up with a million dead Iraqis and thousands of American deaths, but that would sail over your head.
Not the same - Bush got Congressional authorization for his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama, not so much for his wars in Libya or Syria. Make sure and taunt the Obots with that factoid at your next Twister game.
Obama wanted to extend the Iraq occupation, but had to follow Bush's SOFA with Iraq when, for some odd reason, the Iraqis refused to grant continued immunity to U.S. forces for war crimes.
Yah, yah, mea culpa, dammit. You're right. Everyone who pointed it out is right. I'm getting old and my brain is really beginning to suck at little things like... the facts. :)
Sigh.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Refresh your memory... western countries gave chemical weapons, means to distribute them, and MONEY to saddam to fight iranians so, after gulf war 1 most of em were destroyed and stuff they found now were hushed up becouse they were PRE gulf war 1 weaponry...
Found it. This is what I read first, but days ago, that probably sent me off on my trail of errors:
"In September 2007 Russia exploded the largest thermobaric weapon ever made. The weapon's yield was reportedly greater than that of the smallest dial-a-yield nuclear weapons at their lowest settings.[41][42] Russia named this particular ordnance the "Father of All Bombs" in response to the United States developed "Massive Ordnance Air Blast" (MOAB) bomb whose backronym is the "Mother of All Bombs", and which previously held the accolade of the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in history.[43] The bomb contains an about 7 tons charge of a liquid fuel such as ethylene oxide, mixed with an energetic nanoparticle such as aluminium, surrounding a high explosive burster[44] that when detonated created an explosion equivalent to 44 metric tons of TNT."
Blah. Details. Why are they so hard?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes, Clinton did some stupid violent pounding of Iraq -- bombing -- for about four days. You'll not get me to defend that action -- more abject stupidity from our Dear Leaders, fine, I'm onboard. Idiotic. Didn't result in any useful gains of any kind for anyone but bomb-makers -- and perhaps beer vendors in redneck towns.
That doesn't make Bush II's war, his, though.
Bush II, however...
Nearly five thousand dead American service members (and more of our co-warmakers) plus somewhere between 170 thousand and a million civilians dead (depending on whose survey you take seriously), 1.1 trillion dollars spent, the employment of 80 M1 abrams tanks, 55 M2 bradleys, 20 strykers, 20 M113 APCs, 250 humvees, 500+ mine clearing vehicles, heavy/medium trucks, and trailers, and 10 AAVs, not to mention the aerial and major naval assets... now that's something you might reasonably characterize as someone's war. At least IMHO. Perhaps I just think too small. But in that case, Clinton's actions... irrelevant.
But hey, Mission Accomplished, right? Right? We... were saved from the those highly dangerous aluminum rods coming from southern africa somewhere, shut down all the WMD plants, and destroyed all terrorist threats, you betcha! Plus NOW Iraq is TOTALLY a proud bastion of US Style Democracy!!! And we sure taught the Saudis who funded and comprised the majority of those who executed the entire WTC acts of terror a lesson didn't we! I mean, they'll NEVER Try THAT again!!! Saudi Arabia is rebuilding to this day, right? RIGHT? 'MERKA, BITCHES! Thank JEBUS Geo Bush II saved us from those Highly Dangerous Iraqis!
All that, and Bush II is a truly execrable painter, too. Probably should go back to his coke habit, wave his hands towards jebus some more. The only thing he was ever good at was royally hosing our economy, getting Americans and Iraqis killed to no purpose at all, giving a presidential blow job to the military industrial complex, and grinding our civil rights into the smallest, most meaningless remainder he could possibly manage. Real hero, Bush II.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
...which of course he was committing, when he was America's puppet dictator, and in the business of slaughtering 500000 Iranians, and gassing a few thousand Kurds.
Don't you love American foreign policy, and how they get it wrong, in a very bloody, and very murderous way, EVERY single time.
I think a reliable rule to getting foreign policy right, would be to look at what America wants, and do the opposite. History teaches us, at least that much.
Go back to your bridge little troll.
ISIS (stupid name) does not have "chemical weapons" from that. They have chemical waste that is a health hazard
Well, chemical waste is easily weaponized. Found an old mustard gas device where the pipes are clogged with rust and the electrics doesn't work at all? No problem, for mustard gas last forever. Europe still have problems with places where mustard gas were used in the first world war. Weaponization is simple - take that old rusty device and stick it on top of a conventional bomb. The bomb will disperse the mustard gas when it explodes. Efficiency might only be 1%-5% of a proper spraying device, but who cares? When you have several of these, your enemy will be in trouble. And the sites you hit will be polluted forever - especially in a dry climate. There are places in Halabja where you cannot go today too - there will probably be many more such sites in the middle east now.
No.
No.
No.
Just no.
No. Those guys wouldn't have a clue what was a weapons program and what was a beer factory. The CIA even produced a false smoking gun - mobile vans for making "biological weapons" that, oh wait, turned out to be used for making hydrogen for weather balloons. Read this 2-year 1,400-person team report:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Survey_Group
https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004/index.html
The history of this report is that the CIA was pressuring the writers to draw no conclusions to create ambiguity - especially about the aforementioned hydrogen van. So people were resigning from the survey group in protest and Charles Duelfer was brought in and ended up producing a report that is actually legit. A friend of mine, who was part of the gang of 4 in the 1990s that uncovered Iraq's BW program, worked on it.
It's over man, let it go.
> MOAB yield is 11 kilotons.
I guess it didn't occur to you that you were claiming the MOAB weighs MILLIONS of pounds?
Pretty clueless aren't you? That term means that the explosive forcs is equivalent to one produced by 11 kilotons of tnt not that it weighs that. This is a standard definition used for explosives, even nukes are measured in kilotons. It's a measure of effectiveness not weight.
The problem with WMD is who defines what the mass is? If a person go into a mall and take out a bunch of people during a holiday time with a weapon. That is a mass of people. Or is WMD only used for something that takes out x number of people that has been delivered by a payload? rocket, bomb or some other large object. If a person goes into a mall during a holiday time with a bio weapon and infects a few that then infects more and more as time goes on. That would be a WMD also.
I just never under stood the liberal views that WMD have to be something they are not looking for. When really anything can be a WMD.
Read the words on the page:
" Sure, you might guess that current HE is twice as powerful as tnt, but that's still eleven million pounds just for the explosive composition "
Don't you hate it when you act like a complete ass, then it turns out you're the dummy.
I've been on a SEAL/SpecialOps book kick for the last few years and some of the operators that went into Iraq in the early days and were tasked with finding these WMD's on the front end do think they found evidence of developmental weapons programs in addition to the caches of already developed weapons. They basically conclude that stuff was being developed, and hurriedly dismantled and relocated, in country as well as likely to Syria. One of them goes as far as suggesting the only effect of the "diplomatic process" before the war was giving Hussein the time to hide the evidence.
That's nice.
The review of all available intelligence available after the fact concluded that it was all bullshit:
The United States effectively terminated the search effort for unconventional weaponry in January 2005, and the Iraq Intelligence Commission concluded that the judgements of the U.S. intelligence community about the continued existence of weapons of mass destruction and an associated military program were wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMD_conjecture_in_the_aftermath_of_the_2003_invasion_of_Iraq
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Intelligence_Commission
Seriously: the only chemical weapons in Iraq were the ones given to Saddam during the 1980s by the West. Iraq manufactured them using money from the US and UK, and with technology from Germany.
While there may have been valid reasons for going into Iraq in 2002, WMDs (the reason bandied about to the press and at the UN) was not one of them.
Bush was do desperate to find WMD in order to justify the invasion, there is NO WAY they would keep it a secret. And the pictures are pictures of a fuel, not a WMD.
This is just another attempt by the new boss (same as the old boss) to convince the public to support him as he continues his illegal, unconstitutional, treasonous acts of insurrection and rebellion against the United States by attacking Syria/Assad by pretending to attack ISIL/ISIS.
Not happening. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Who there pardner, are you saying G.W. Bush was right all along? I'm not a big Bush fan but all the muck raking the media has done on the former president might just have come off their own feet and not the presidents. Wow, how does a thing like this not get shusshed up?
I live in America.
The numbers describe the actual situation and that is, the number of uninsured has dropped under the ACA.
You see, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts. And the facts tell the story without any doubt: Obama got his citizens more access to healthcare. Anyone's claims otherwise are utterly without foundation.
It is unfortunate that many gullible people trust the right-wing agitprop that spreads false data and assertions. But we're well into this now, and the facts are well established. Eventually, as public awareness grows, Rush and crew will find something new to lie about. So it goes.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Still doesn't stop you from runnin that cocksucker like you know the "truth" though does it?
I'm not failing to say anything.
First of all, the only reasons an employer healthcare plan gets cancelled WRT anything to do with the ACA, is 1, they don't meet the minimum standards (which means the plan sucked and its former members need to get themselves onto a plan that doesn't) or that 2, your employer decided to cancel it, in which case, your beef is with your employer. There no even moderately adequate plan, anywhere, that the ACA caused to stop working or otherwise interfered with.
Health care does the best for the most when it is available to all people who are sick and/or injured. Not just for people who make money. If you want diseased people walking the streets without treatment, you're clueless. If you think ER treatment is sufficient to deal with that, you're clueless. If you think ER care is cheaper than proper prophylactic care, you're clueless. If you think forcing sick people to come to work is good for the most important things -- the economy, the other workers, the individual -- you're clueless. If you think people suffering in pain and without adequate treatment is ok if they're not working, you're not only clueless, you're an ass. If you think the government making sure that no one (ok, fewer people... but it's a start) goes without health care is a *bad* idea, then you have failed to rub enough brain cells together to create the required spark of intelligence you need to properly evaluate these issues. So you probably want to rethink this, preferably this time with the facts at hand instead of drooling right wing agitprop.
Now, what has your lack of a job got to do with the ACA, other than the fact that you have more options for healthcare, assuming your state isn't one where the right wingers have destroyed the bottom rung of the ACA by rejecting the medicare expansion?
Yes, the tree of liberty has some very severe problems right now, but the ACA isn't one of them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It wasn't covered up, I sat and watched the reports.
But the news services stopped reporting it as the election approached, apperently because they wanted to avoid calling their party a liar... 8-P
It sounds like the news people are trying to blame the silence on someone other than themselves.