Now revealed: Chemical weapons have been found in Iraq..
Even more, the new work times reports:
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.”
So the problem was not as the Bush administration said.. The problem for these secret missions have not been active chemical weapons but instead only and abandoned ones..
Even more from the TIMES:
The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from military doctors. The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds.”
The TIMES goes on to say:
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.”
The scandal here is that we have NOT been told that chemical weapons have actually been found–instead we let the talking point survive that no chemicals were located..
The broader implications here are also that ISIS may be able to get into a stash tucked away somewhere.. The problem created over the secretive actions is that we believe, in essence, that Saddam’s Iraq was free of WMD. That clearly is not true.. While there may have been no active nuclear or chemical facilities creating anything new, there certainly is enough of the ‘old’ laying around to cause problems..