Iraq Veterans Not Told of Chemical Weapons Exposures

C.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons 
New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS and ERIC SCHMITT
FEBRUARY 15, 2015

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.

United Nations workers prepared for the destruction of
Iraqi nerve-agent weapons by sealing leaks in the rockets.
BRITISH MINISTRY OF DEFENSE

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. United Nations workers prepared for the destruction of Iraqi nerve-agent weapons by sealing leaks in the rockets.

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.

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 military’s commitment to the well-being of those it sent to war.

“If we were aware of these compounds, and as it became clear over the course of the war that our troops had been exposed to them, why wasn’t more done to protect the guys on the ground?” he said. “It speaks to the broader failure.”
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Members of Congress didn't take war serious enough to read reports

When I watched this last night I was waiting and hoping it would be brought up that sending troops into Iraq was something that should have surprised no one.

This report was exceptionally good and anyone who gave a damn at the time would have known how much was right in this but there is one thing that was left off. The warnings that came after the Gulf War.

The lives gone, maimed, money gone and missing all came because members of Congress voted for it but didn't read what was in the reports. None of them remembered what President G.H.W. Bush said about troops in Iraq and the loss of life. None of them remembered what Dick Cheney said about a "quagmire" and even less remembered what Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf said about the troops being stuck there "like a dinosaur in a tar pit."

So now that it is all out there, who is going to be held accountable, who will resign from office and who is going to jail? If history is any example, no one will. Obama was right all along on this and so were many in the Senate but they were called traitors and against the troops. The elected blindly supporting the Bush Administration on both sides were wrong but no one can bring back what was lost.

Maddow: Many in Congress never read Iraq intel briefs before authorizing war
By David Ferguson
Tuesday, February 19, 2013

On Monday night, Rachel Maddow presented “Hubris: Selling the Iraq War,” a documentary about the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, one of the biggest military blunders in U.S. history. In one segment, she reported that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who were charged with determining whether or not the country should go to war, never read the pertinent briefs before giving then-President George W. Bush the go-ahead to launch the Iraq War.

The segment began in September of 2002, when Congress returned from its summer recess. Bush administration officials were lobbying heavily for an invasion of Iraq, using a flawed intelligence brief, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, which wildly oversold the case for Saddam Hussein having a nuclear and biological weapons program.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, told MSNBC that the main “shop” behind a large amount of slanted, pro-invasion intelligence was the office of Doug Feith, undersecretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005, who was key in positing that Iraq was working with al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that attacked the U.S. on Sep. 11, 2001.
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Source of Iraq WMD Claim Admits He Lied

With all the talk from the tea party folks, you'd think they'd mention this as if it was an important story and part of our budget problem. So why do they ignore this? Why have they ignored it all along instead of demanding accountability?

Source of Iraq WMD Claim Admits He Lied

April 03, 2012
The Independent
by Jonathan Owen

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq -- starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of dollars -- told British television Monday that his tales of WMD were lies. "Curveball," the Iraqi defector who made claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up.

It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war. He tries to defend his actions: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression."

 The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" by Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. But Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, "Modern Spies," says none of it was true. When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replied: "Yes."
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Intel official: Iraq was intel, policy failure

After Shock Iraq
by
Chaplain Kathie

After the shock of the invasion of Iraq, the news reports we should have had all along come dribbling out. Usually these kinds of reports receive spotlight treatment after the current president has been replaced, but these reports have been surfacing for years. The problem is, too few have paid attention to them and even far less have taken a seriously look at the ramifications.

Intel official: Iraq was intel, policy failure

By Pamela Hess - The Associated Press
Posted : Tuesday Dec 9, 2008 21:00:20 EST

WASHINGTON — Gently admonishing President George W. Bush, the nation’s newly retired chief intelligence analyst on Tuesday suggested that the Iraq war was as much the failure of policymakers as it was the flawed intelligence on which they relied.

Bush told ABC News last week his biggest regret was “the intelligence failure in Iraq.”

“I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess,” Bush said.

Thomas Fingar, until this week the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, declined to directly address the president’s swipe. But he said: “I learned something a long time ago in this town. There are only two possibilities: policy success and intelligence failure.”

Fingar is in a better position than many in the intelligence agencies to assess those possibilities. Before the Iraq invasion, he was second in command of a small group of State Department analysts that notably cast doubt— albeit behind closed doors — on a key Bush administration rationale for the 2003 war.

A 2002 intelligence assessment pushed by the administration contended that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear, chemical and biological weapons program. Fingar’s office dissented on the nuclear question.

His office “got it less wrong,” he told reporters Tuesday during a valedictory round-table discussion.
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Yesterday I posted on my blog how the up armored MRAPS were delayed in being delivered to Iraq long after the intelligence reports had shown exactly what tactic would be used with IED's planted all over Iraq. This caused deaths, amputations, burns, traumatic brain injury and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In all of this, the most puzzling thing of all is how could anyone simply dismiss all of this? It is a shock to the men and women serving to discover how little their lives were worth.

When you look into the eyes of a Vietnam veteran, especially when they are talking about how the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are treated compared to how they were treated, you see tears well in their eyes. The pain is that deep.

Vietnam veterans are not that much different from today's veterans in that they do not want to believe their country would not do everything possible to avoid sending them into combat instead of doing whatever it took to do it. Who wants to believe their lives hold so little value to the President, the Commander-in-Chief making the decisions with their lives?

We are also deluded. We believe that if we show up at airports to greet them, hold parades in our home towns to honor them, line the streets as their funeral procession passes by, we're showing how much we appreciate them. The truth is, we don't do nearly enough.

Holding the people making the decisions accountable would go a long way in beginning to really honor their lives. Anything less, is lip servicing our own conscience.

We allowed the administration to betray these men and women and we allowed them to get away with it. We allowed them to do whatever they wanted when it came to the DOD and the VA taking care of the wounded. This is the most reprehensible thing of all when it comes to us.

Claims got tied up, we complained and the VA said they were hiring more people to process the claims. When they didn't hire enough, not enough of us were paying attention to the fact they were just trying to appease us for the moment. What this did was leave wounded veterans feeling yet again betrayed.

It does not take much imagination to put yourself into their place. You just have to be willing to honestly look at how you would feel suffering for being wounded topped off with the fact you were serving the country when it happened.

When claims are tied up or denied while clearly the veteran was wounded in service to the nation, it is a knife in the back to them. They look at their wound, look at bills piling up because their wounds prevent them from working, and they wonder what support the troops really means. Is it only supporting them when they have the uniform on and then leaving them to fend for themselves when they take that uniform off? Does anyone notice a veteran is a veteran for the rest of their lives and that uniform has become part of their soul?

I will never understand the majority of the American public and how detached they really are from all of this. "PTSD? What's that?" they still ask. Doesn't matter the term was used going back to 1976 even though it was not officially termed by the government until the 80's. Doesn't matter that every generation has paid the price with physical wounds as well as this wounding to their souls. It didn't seem to matter that PTSD is a human wound and comes from a whole host of traumatic events. None of this seems to matter to them because they have their own problems, their own income issues and health issues.

The point they are missing is that while they do in fact have some very serious personal problems, especially in this economy, they miss the point they wouldn't have any of what they do have if it were not for the men and women willing to risk their lives for their sake.

When we talk about the amount of money wasted in Iraq, we talk about how our own infrastructure has suffered from neglect. We talk about all the things the American public needs but has done without. We never seem to talk about how the veterans have done without or how if just the money lost in Iraq through contractors no-bid and cost plus contracts had gone to take care of the wounded, there would be hardly no legitimate claims in backlog piles. There would be enough research done to solve a lot of their problems. There would be very few homeless veterans because the shelters would be fully funded and programs to help them would have been geared up appropriately. Outreach work would have been fully funded and no American would ever question what the term PTSD means. They would have been exposed to it so much they would use it as easily as they use the term "web site" in conversation.

There is so much we miss in all of this and we will never really fully support the troops if we neglect them when they become veterans or if we ignore what happens to them while they are serving. If we look into the eyes of a Iraq veteran or an Afghanistan veteran 30 years from now, what will we see in their eyes when they talk about how they were treated when they came home?



Senior Chaplain Kathie "Costos" DiCesare
Namguardianangel@aol.com
www.Namguardianangel.com
www.Woundedtimes.blogspot.com
www.youtube.com/NamGuardianAngel
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington