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New Reports on Old Chemical Weapons

Here's the New York Times report on chemical weapons in Iraq at the long abandoned al Muthanna weapons plant, now under ISIS control.

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.

Here's the 2007 CIA report on the long abandoned chemical weapons plant. [More...]

The entire Al Muthanna mega-facility was the bastion of Iraqi’s chemical weapons development program. During its peak in the late 1980s to early 1990s, it amassed mega-bunkers full of chemical munitions, and provided Iraq with a force multiplier sufficient to counteract Iran’s superior military numbers. Two wars, sanctions and UNSCOM oversight reduced Iraqi’s premier production facility to a stockpile of old damaged and contaminated chemical munitions(sealed in bunkers), a wasteland full of destroyed chemical munitions, razed structures, and unusable war-ravaged facilities. In 1998 Al Tariq State Establishment took over all remaining remnants at Al Muthanna.

Conservatives will argue Bush was right all along. But he wasn't. There was no active weapons plant in Iraq. The New York Times says:

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.

What they found during 2004 to 2010, was a place where old, mostly degraded weapons, built in large part by U.S. companies. They had been used in the 1980's and 90's in Iraq's war with Iran.

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.

As Time puts it:

U.S. troops did not find plants producing weapons of mass destruction. But troops found something else: abandoned plants still stocked with chemical weapons made in the 1980s, during the Iraq-Iran war.

The NY Times:

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.

... the CW will not be in a state in which it can be loaded into rockets or artillery pieces, so we don’t expect Baghdad to be under threat immediately. But they could use improvised delivery methods such as IEDs, and Al Qaeda has used mustard shells in Iraq in the past in this manner. The key concern is that ISIS has seen the effect Assad’s use of CW in Syria, and it might consider similar use, especially if things start to go badly in Iraq.

I feel badly for any U.S. soldiers that were unexpectedly exposed to it and suffered and continue to suffer symptoms. I am not even remotely concerned that ISIS will be able to reconstitute the weapons (As bashad apparently has) and use them against the West.

I'd like to see the U.S. explain this:

[T]he 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.

Easy enough solution: Ban western countries from further design of chemical weapons in the Middle East and get the European countries to cease manufacturing new ones.

Bashad has been using chemical weapons for years. Whose job was it to destroy the decrepit weapons? Iraq'.

Finding, safeguarding and destroying these weapons was to be the responsibility of Iraq’s government. Iraq took initial steps to fulfill its obligations.

Iraq drafted a plan to entomb them in concrete. Iraq never followed through.

When three journalists from The Times visited Al Muthanna in 2013, a knot of Iraqi police officers and soldiers guarded the entrance. Two contaminated bunkers — one containing cyanide precursors and old sarin rockets — loomed behind. The area where Marines had found mustard shells in 2008 was out of sight, shielded by scrub and shimmering heat.

Back in June, it was widely reported ISIS had seized the plant.

Spokeswoman Jen Psaki added, though, that the facility does not appear to hold usable chemical weapons, "and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials."

The site contains dilapidated chemical arms inside two airtight storage chambers that extremists had yet to enter, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Armed-forces insiders said the United States would have eliminated the materials had they been usable in attacks.

"The only people who would likely be harmed by these chemical materials would be the people who tried to use or move them," one of the sources said.

In June, when ISIS took over the Muthanna plant, and then attacked the the Iraqi Military base in Saddiqua, it was widely reported they may have used some kind of chemical weapon like chlorine on the soldiers. The U.S. responded:

Spokeswoman Jen Psaki added, though, that the facility does not appear to hold usable chemical weapons, "and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials."

The site contains dilapidated chemical arms inside two airtight storage chambers that extremists had yet to enter, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Armed-forces insiders said the United States would have eliminated the materials had they been usable in attacks.

"The only people who would likely be harmed by these chemical materials would be the people who tried to use or move them," one of the sources said.

ISIS doesn't need the gas. It has high tech advanced weapons, courtesy of the U.S. It can put the gas into IED's and makeshift bombs, but not use them as rockets, according to the articles. Bashad, on the other hand, uses them routinely and indiscriminately, including on children.

The republishing of this months old news is not a reason for sending ground troops to Iraq. This is Iraq's problem, let them handle it. Or not. It doesn't change my mind that we should not be entering another war costing billions of dollars that will only result in the loss of more lives -- American lives. The only groups who can beat ISIS are their competitors. In time, they will cancel each other out through their infighting. I'm happy to wait until that happens. We will not defeat ISIS. All our intervention will do is make their enemies side with them and against us. Providing arms and training to the Syria rebels is like playing russian roulette. Let ISIS have its caliphate state in Iraq and Syria. Or let Turkey and the other big countries in the region put up their troops and dollars. This just isn't our fight.

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  • Display: Sort:
    OK, NOW can we charge (5.00 / 3) (#1)
    by Chuck0 on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 08:29:24 AM EST
    Bush and Cheney with war crimes?

    Conservatives (5.00 / 2) (#6)
    by Ga6thDem on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 01:41:12 PM EST
    would be very stupid to try to defend spending a trillion dollars and thousands of lives for old rotting shells full of mustard gas.

    Especially Ones... (none / 0) (#7)
    by ScottW714 on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 03:15:48 PM EST
    ...made in the good ole US of A.

    I wouldn't mind them stirring up the pot on this one and finding out who was selling this garbage to rogue nations, or rather who authorized it.

    One has to wonder if they knew about this and believed that the weapons they sold Saddam would be found and used to validate the fiasco.  In my mind I keep picturing that infamous image of Rumsfeld and Saddam shaking hands.

    Parent

    Yeah (5.00 / 3) (#10)
    by Ga6thDem on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 04:58:27 PM EST
    I think that's why the pentagon did not want the information to come out. It is actually more embarrassing than actually not finding anything is to find these rotting ones. it provides a visual of just how laughable George W. Bush really is. Here's your WMD's georgie old shells a quarter of a century old.

    Parent
    Well, it is just that (5.00 / 2) (#11)
    by KeysDan on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 06:47:38 PM EST
    President Bush was a very humble man and did not want to be vindicated.  Besides, it would have ruined his jokes at the White House Correspondent's dinner.

    Parent
    Iraq had WMD's (2.00 / 6) (#8)
    by jimakaPPJ on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 04:53:47 PM EST
    The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government's invasion rationale.

    It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake.

    snip

    In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs,

    snip

    From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered,

    New York Times

    The finding proved they existed and that there had been an active program. That they were old in 2008 doesn't tell us anything about their condition in 2002-2003 They could have easily been usable.

    And if they were, all the more reason for us to believe that an active program still existed in 2002-2003.

    And all the more reason to believe the number two man in Iraq's air force who says that ABC weapons were trucked to Syria in the days just prior to the start of the war and  Kay's comments about seeing satellite photos of heavy truck traffic at that time.

    So.

    Was Iraq actively building? Based on AFTER THE FACT information, no.

    Did Iraq have WMD's?? Yes. All the evidence says they had hidden some of them during the UN mandated time frame for destroying them.

    Was Iraq planning on getting back into the WMD business? Yes. And that's what David Kay's report said.

    There was (5.00 / 5) (#9)
    by Ga6thDem on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 04:56:05 PM EST
    no active program if you actually read the article but I don't expect you to. LOL. They were old rusty crap left over from the war with Iran.

    Parent
    Actually I didn't say there was an active (1.75 / 4) (#12)
    by jimakaPPJ on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 09:28:14 PM EST
    program so I guess you didn't read my comment.

    And neither you or I know the condition of the weapons in 2002-2003. You don't need an active program to have previously manufactured weapons that are very usable. Supposedly Iraq had destroyed all of them and storing is not destroying. Obviously they had not in defiance of the UN's mandate.

    In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads

    So when they were hidden is unknown. What we do know is that these weapons existed. And if these existed, how many others weren't destroyed and were hustled into Syria just before the invasion started??

    I mean, "Everything was destroyed except for the ones we hid."

    And remember. David Kay noted the traffic into Syria which backs up the #2 Iraqi's claim.

    "There is ample evidence of movement to Syria before the war -- satellite photographs, reports on the ground of a constant stream of trucks, cars, rail traffic across the border. We simply don't know what was moved," Kay said.

    CNN

    Parent

    If you say so.... Course your own words.... (5.00 / 2) (#13)
    by Molly Bloom on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 09:47:20 PM EST
    "The finding proved they existed and that there had been an active program."

    Parent
    Yes (none / 0) (#18)
    by jimakaPPJ on Thu Oct 16, 2014 at 02:02:05 PM EST
    there had been an active program.

    That program produced the weapons. We have no reliable information as to when the program ended.

    If it ended when Saddam agreed to destroy his WMD's why did he only destroy part of them?

    The issue continues to be the same. Did Bush act with an abundance of caution while seeking to defend America?

    I say that, based on what he knew then, and what this proves, is that he did.

    Abundance of caution.

    Parent

    You skipped a few parts ... (5.00 / 1) (#14)
    by Yman on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 10:09:50 PM EST
    ... as usual.

    Everyone knows that Iraq had chemical weapons - hell, your fellow Repubs helped Saddam develop his WMD programs.  But you skipped a few, important parts of the article.


    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.

    ... and

    In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war's outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find.

    ... and


    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."

    ... and


    The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government's invasion rationale.

    But the fact that there were old, abandoned chemical shells proves that there might have been other, imaginary WMDs smuggled out of Iraq because vehicles were (GASP!) going from Iraq into Syria, and we can't prove they didn't carry the imaginary weapons we can't prove didn't exist!!!

    Heh, heh, heh ...


    Parent

    Let's Pretend for a Minute... (5.00 / 1) (#16)
    by ScottW714 on Thu Oct 16, 2014 at 10:30:43 AM EST
    ...you are right, then I would consider leaving those munitions in tact to be grossly negligent.

    So which one do you prefer, the invasion was based on BS, or the invasion was valid except we forgot to destroy the very weapons we invaded a county to destroy, and now now those weapons are under terrorist control.

    Can't have it both ways.  

    Parent

    Plus the fact that if these were (5.00 / 1) (#17)
    by Mordiggian 88 on Thu Oct 16, 2014 at 10:42:16 AM EST
    the WMDs that were the raison d'être for the invasion in the first place, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, et al, would be blaring it from the rooftops or going on Fox Noise to confirm that they were right all along.

    Parent
    I agree that it was (2.00 / 2) (#19)
    by jimakaPPJ on Thu Oct 16, 2014 at 02:19:53 PM EST
    grossly negligent to leave any of them not destroyed.

    And, since their existence neither proves or disproves whether or not Saddam had an active program after he after he agreed to destroy them I can't understand why their existence was concealed.

    It makes no sense. It does prove, again, that military intelligence is often an oxymoron.

    And since you want to bring the current situation into the conversation....I remind you that Obama with drew the troops and that his actions opened the door for ISIS.

    Had he followed the recommendations of his advisers that would not have happened.

    Parent

    Incorrect... (5.00 / 1) (#20)
    by ScottW714 on Thu Oct 16, 2014 at 04:20:38 PM EST
    ...if Bush & Company had wrapped up the war, as stated, it would have never crept into Obama's presidency.  Wasn't in something like we would be welcomed as liberators and it would take a month or so...

    Exactly how long is America obligated to stay in wars republicans start without getting blamed for the chaos their war almost guaranteed ?

    I am looking for a number, Jim.

    If only they had a viable candidate, they would get to clean up their own mess, but sadly the war ensured 8, 12, and maybe 16 years of Democratic presidency.  16 years because republicans thought they would like to drink a beer with a recovering alcoholic.

    Yeah Jim, the stuff you are defending is most certainly ensuring you will not see another R president in your lifetime.

    Parent

    Scott, how long (none / 0) (#22)
    by jimakaPPJ on Fri Oct 17, 2014 at 10:53:46 AM EST
    should Americans have stayed in Japan and Germany after a Democrat started WWII by helping Germany's enemies and threatening to stop Japan's quest for natural resources???

    The answer, of course, is we should have stayed as long as it was to our benefit. That it was also to the benefit of the new democratic governments in those countries and protected them from Soviet take over as in Eastern Europe is a secondary benefit.

    Our benefit was that it kept pressure on our enemy and provided a trip wire in case they attacked.

    That we botched the handling of the Iraqi situation after the initial win is not in dispute. But... in the end it was Obama who allowed the collapse.

    In them, Panetta explained that Iraqi leaders privately wanted some U.S. forces to stay behind after the formal 2011 withdrawal, though they would not say so publicly. The former secretary, though, said the U.S. had "leverage" to strike a deal, and the Defense and State departments tried to do exactly that.

    "But," he wrote, "the President's team at the White House pushed back, and the differences occasionally became heated. ... and those on our side viewed the White House as so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and interests."

    He said the negotiations with then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki went down to the wire in December 2011, but the White House never stepped up.

    Link

    I again note that none of this proves whether or not Iraq had an active WMD program after they agreed to destroy the weapons. It does prove that they didn't destroy 5000 of them and lends credence to the story of the # 2 air force general who said many were trucked into Syria and Kay's satellite photos confirmation of high truck traffic into Syria at that time.

    It also raises this question. If you are concerned, as I am, that ISIS may use some of these weapons now.....

    Why weren't you concerned that Saddam would sell/give some of them to the terrorists?? After all, he had them.

    And since I am 76 any future event happening in my  lifetime is highly speculative....

    :-)

    Parent

    If the existence of these ... (5.00 / 1) (#21)
    by Yman on Thu Oct 16, 2014 at 05:58:25 PM EST
    ... abandoned chemical weapons that we helped Saddam produce isn't even relevant to the WMD claimed, then why do you bring it up and follow it with fairy tales about imaginary WMDs going to Syria?  Because you think that baseless, unsupported fairy tales about imaginary WMDs will fool someone?

    Too funny.

    BTW -If your unhappy about the tryouts being withdrawn from Iraq, perhaps you should take it up with the guy who signed the SOFA that mandated their withdrawal.  The guy started the war over your imaginary weapons.  The guy you voted for.


    Parent

    There is nobody so desperate right now (none / 0) (#15)
    by Mordiggian 88 on Thu Oct 16, 2014 at 08:14:33 AM EST
    As anyone  who, more than a decade after the Iraqi invasion, is still trying to justify it by distorting the facts we do know about Saddam and his old CW programs.

    Nobody believes Jim about the Iraq invasion here?
    Boo-hoo!

    Parent

    One of the things I get from this outrage... (none / 0) (#4)
    by lentinel on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 10:18:41 AM EST
    is that when the government says, "HE gassed his own people"... it means, "WE gassed his own people".

    This gets sicker and sicker.

    Bizarro World Reality TV (none / 0) (#5)
    by Mr Natural on Wed Oct 15, 2014 at 01:28:26 PM EST
    We spend a trillion bucks invading and blowing up the place using the WMD excuse.

    But when we find them all we do is point a couple of cameras at them and watch them on TV?

    Did I miss an episode?  Didn't we take over?  Didn't we have the run of the place?  How many years were we there?  More to the point, why were we there?

    I'm going to take a flyer on that last question.  What we were really taking care of was the oil.