NY Times: C.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons

[alp227]

The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.

The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

The effort was run out of the C.I.A. station in Baghdad in collaboration with the Army’s 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion and teams of chemical-defense and explosive ordnance disposal troops, officials and veterans of the units said. Many rockets were in poor condition and some were empty or held a nonlethal liquid, the officials said. But others contained the nerve agent sarin, which analysis showed to be purer than the intelligence community had expected given the age of the stock.

A New York Times investigation published in October found that the military had recovered thousands of old chemical warheads and shells in Iraq and that Americans and Iraqis had been wounded by them, but the government kept much of this information secret, from the public and troops alike.

These munitions were remnants of an Iraqi special weapons program that was abandoned long before the 2003 invasion, and they turned up sporadically during the American occupation in buried caches, as part of improvised bombs or on black markets.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have-bought-and-destroyed-iraqi-chemical-weapons.html

[pkdu]

1. ...and despite what is stated VERY clearly in Paragraph 5...Dick (Five Deferments) Cheney will be on

on the Sunday Talk Shows spewing more of his bullshit.

[JDPriestly]

2. Very hard to believe that this report is true because if our troops or the CIA had purchased

or found WMDs (and chemical weapons are WMDs), they would have bragged about it.

The weapons in the photo in the NYT look rusted and useless.

Either this story is untrue and being told to justify yet another foray into Iraq or the amount of chemical weapons found were either embarrassingly negligible or nearly non-existent,

There was so much criticism of the war. Even Bush made fun of the search for WMDs. Remember the presidential roasting in which he pretended to be looking for WMDs.

Had the Bush administration been able to save just a bit of face with the news of an even ridiculously small cache of WMDS found by our troops, they would have sung their own praises to the high heavens.

This story does not have me convinced at all.

[old guy]

3. This has an odor to it.

It sounds like an attempt prop up the bush legacy to perhaps make Jeb more palatable.

[malaise]

6. Thread winner

Clear the deck for Jeb - what an evil bunch of LIARS

[Punkingal]

4. Bull!

They would never have kept this quiet so long.

[underpants]

5. ... In three part harmony - retread by Chivers , sarin shelf life , CIA waste of money

The October article referenced in this article was also written by Chivers. Much exploited by the right.


Sarin degrades after a period of several weeks to several months. The shelf life can be shortened by impurities in precursor materials. According to the CIA, some Iraqi sarin had a shelf life of only a few weeks, owing mostly to impure precursors.[17]

Its otherwise-short shelf life can be extended by increasing the purity of the precursor and intermediates and incorporating stabilizers such as tributylamine. In some formulations, tributylamine is replaced by diisopropylcarbodiimide (DIC), allowing sarin to be stored in aluminium casings. In binary chemical weapons, the two precursors are stored separately in the same shell and mixed to form the agent immediately before or when the shell is in flight. This approach has the dual benefit of solving the stability issue and increasing the safety of sarin munitions.




The CIARA wasted money on dubs