WOW - NY Times Investigative Report: The Secret U.S. Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapon

[markpkessinger]

I have no words for this . . .

[font size=5]The Secret U.S. Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons[/font]
[font size=1]BY C. J. CHIVERS[/font]

[font size=4]FROM 2004 TO 2011, AMERICAN AND IRAQI TROOPS REPEATEDLY ENCOUNTERED, AND AT TIMES WERE WOUNDED BY, CHEMICAL WEAPONS THAT WERE HIDDEN OR ABANDONED YEARS EARLIER.[/font]

< . . . . >

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.

The secrecy fit a pattern. Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United States’ encounters with chemical weapons in Iraq was neither publicly shared nor widely circulated within the military. These encounters carry worrisome implications now that the Islamic State, a Qaeda splinter group, controls much of the territory where the weapons were found.

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.

< . . . . >

[scarletwoman]

1. The invasion of Iraq - the gift that keeps on giving... nt

[markpkessinger]

2. Indeed . . .

. . . I gotta say, I really didn't think there was anything more that could come out of the mess in Iraq that would have the ability to shock me, but THIS -- a willful betrayal of soldiers by the very government they serve, withholding needed information to enable them to get proper medical treatment -- that is a real stunner, even after everything else that has been written.

[The Magistrate]

5. Too True, Ma'am

It is the single stupidest thing ever done by any U.S. government. The idea that something was 'too stupid for them to actually do it' used to be one of my sturdiest analytical tools; if it was too stupid for them to actually do they almost never actually did it. Starting about spring of 2002, it broke and reversed polarity; if something was too stupid for them to ever actually do, it was what you had better expect was going to be done, and soon.

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[deminks]

4. Weapons that in many cases were designed if not made in Amurka.

Stuff we sold them in the 1980's.