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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsC.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons
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 Husseins Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
Army and Navy technicians prepare unexploded ordnance for demolition in 2003 near Baghdad.
The effort was run out of the C.I.A. station in Baghdad in collaboration with the Armys 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.
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The purchases were made from a sole Iraqi source who was eager to sell his stock, officials said. The amount of money that the United States paid for the rockets is not publicly known, and neither are the affiliations of the seller.
Most of the officials and veterans who spoke about the program did so anonymously because, they said, the details remain classified. The C.I.A. declined to comment. The Pentagon, citing continuing secrecy about the effort, did not answer written questions and acknowledged its role only obliquely.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have-bought-and-destroyed-iraqi-chemical-weapons.html
arcane1
(38,613 posts)JonLP24
(29,322 posts)Not long after Operation Avarice had secured its 400th rocket, in 2006, American troops were exposed several times to other chemical weapons. Many of these veterans said that they had not been warned by their units about the risks posed by the chemical weapons and that their medical care and follow-up were substandard, in part because military doctors seemed unaware that chemical munitions remained in Iraq.
In some cases, victims of exposure said, officers forbade them to discuss what had occurred. The Pentagon now says hundreds of other veterans reported on health-screening forms that they believed they too had been exposed during the war.
Aaron Stein, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said the belated acknowledgment of a chemical-rocket purchases, as well as the potentially worrisome laboratory analysis of the related sarin samples, raised questions about the militarys commitment to the well-being of those it sent to war.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?action=click&contentCollection=Middle%20East&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article
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 harms way and from military doctors. The governments secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the wars most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds.
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.
Others pointed to another embarrassment. In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?action=click&contentCollection=Middle%20East&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article
American Firms Supplying Iraq's Chemical Weapons Production
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/american-firms-supplying-iraqs-chemical-weapons-production.html
arcane1
(38,613 posts)I'll leave it at that.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)KingCharlemagne
(7,908 posts)a nom de plume. That's about all the credibility the Times has left regarding Iraq.
JonLP24
(29,322 posts)Spends great detail detailing the coverups by the military detailed with several additional links.
KoKo
(84,711 posts)and how if they revealed the source of many of these weapons it would have been embarrassing and caused more questions to be asked about why we invaded Iraq.
I think some might be confusing this that the articles say "Yes Saddam had Chemical Weapons and the NYT is trying to cover for Cheney/Bush"....when in fact what was found was pre 1991 with markings indicating we and others had given or sold the chemical weapons Saddam had and they weren't in any shape to be used by him...contrary to Judith Millers lying reporting and the Cheney lies.
That solders were harmed because of the cover up and that there was a cover up is the Real Story...And, well worth the re-visit, although one wonders if anyone will ever be held accountable while they are still alive for that Invasion which has caused chaos and death, destruction, dislocation to millions in the ME.
Thanks for posting the extra links...
stonecutter357
(12,697 posts)stonecutter357
(12,697 posts)RandiFan1290
(6,242 posts)obxhead
(8,434 posts)them in the 80's
Very kind of them.
Unknown Beatle
(2,672 posts)Everyone with a brain knows the CIA is behind propaganda that it feeds the NYT as well as other news outlets.
JonLP24
(29,322 posts)who released two articles, the secret casualties is well sourced with documents. Just one of many secrets kept by the Bush administration.
This is a prior article by one of the two journalists.
\http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/world/25military.html?_r=0
They reported recently revealed information & combined with what appears to be solid investigative reporting.
quarbis
(314 posts)Anything the C.I.A. Says they ran Vietnam from 1954 until 1967. They only know how to LIE.
hobbit709
(41,694 posts)given the CIA's history in such matters.
Botany
(70,581 posts)n/t
GreatCaesarsGhost
(8,585 posts)If it were true.
Seem a little rusty. Old, useless, degraded junk supplied by the west decades ago now being used to justify the Iraq war? I thought Bush found them in 2003, why weren't these 'weapons of mass destruction' destroyed then? http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/11/13/george-w-bushs-claims-on-weapons-found-and-not-found-in-iraq/
They knew where these were, they'd been locked up for years prior to the invasion.
bhikkhu
(10,724 posts)looking for chemical weapons frantically for years to justify their war and finding none.
And the CIA was happy to buy weapons piecemeal on the black market, and never investigated where they came from, preferring to trust the vendor deal with that end of it.
And of course they wouldn't say anything, because that might scare the seller who might quit selling and then they just wouldn't know what to do...