The New York Times yesterday reported that the CIA, working with American troops during the US 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.” In their report NY Times journalists C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt report, “The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a non-proliferation 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-defence 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”
Looking at the points raised in a reddit post lordderplythethird commented the following :
“It’s been long known there were chemical weapons still in Iraq after the US invaded in 2003, but people seem misinformed on what that means
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Western Nations (Germany was the largest culprit, followed by the US, UK, France, etc) supplied Saddam with chemical and biological weapons, and the compounds required for the production of both, during the Iraq-Iran War. Germany practically built Saddam the nuclear reactor that Israel bombed in the 80s.
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These same biological and chemical weapons were still around Iraq when the US invaded in 2003, just in highly degraded, non usable states
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These are not the chemical and biological weapons Bush/Cheney/Powell/etc were referring to.
The Bush Administration was stating that Iraq had a current chemical and biological weapons program
He comments that the Bush Administration refused to acknowledge that the only weapons they uncovered, were ones given to Iraq by Western forces over 2 decades previously, because the administration who authorized this was headed by George Bush Snr, was then Vice President. “It’s still not admitted that the US gave Iraq chemical and biological weapons during the Iraq-Iran War (not sure if places like Germany have admitted to it though), so the W Bush Administration covered it up, and refused to acknowledge that WMD were in fact found in Iraq”
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Because of this, US soldiers who were exposed to these weapons when they came across them, are developing severe medical conditions to which they’re not to claim happened during military service, because the Administration refused to admit those weapons were there
“So now we see documented proof that there were in fact WMD in Iraq, that a previous US administration gave them to Iraq, and US service members are getting sick because of those weapons, but the administration refused to acknowledge the actions of the previous administration”
This is perhaps why US service people are being denied access to help and compensation due to developing sickness to these weapons that did not originate in their entirety from Iraq but rather the possible reason for the US and UK going to war on the threat of the chemical weapons threat was perhaps due to the embarrassment of previous US and European assistance in Iraq developing these weapons in the first place.
Below is the original document that was classified and now de-classified that is forwarded by Tony Blair’s on the ‘Iraqi Chemical Weapon Threat’ this document was the precursor to the Iraqi war
Cicero Lounge Files Area:
http://cid-e853ab142560c964.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Documents/24_01_08_24sep_final.pdf
or
the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/24_01_08_24sep_final.pdf