American troops found nearly 5,000 abandoned chemical weapons in Iraq from 2004 to 2011, but their discoveries were kept secret by the U.S. government, the New York Times reports.
According to the 10,000-word, eight-part interactive report ("The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons") by C.J. Chivers published on the paper's website late Tuesday, at least 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers were exposed to nerve or mustard agents in Iraq after 2003.
On at least six occasions, American troops and American-trained Iraqi troops were wounded by the abandoned munitions, but news of the encounters was neither shared publicly nor widely circulated among the troops, the victims told the Times. Others said they were told to be vague or deceptive about what they found.
"'Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” Jarrod Lampier, a retired Army major, said of the 2006 discovery of 2,400 nerve-agent rockets at a former Republican Guard compound, the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war. The paper also published heavily redacted intelligence documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Among the reasons for the secrecy? "The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale," Chivers writes. "After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, [President George W.] Bush insisted that [Iraqi leader Saddam] Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims."
The discovery of pre-Gulf War chemical weapons — most of them "filthy, rusty or corroded" — did not fit the narrative.
“They needed something to say that after Sept. 11 Saddam used chemical rounds,” Lampier said. “And all of this was from the pre-1991 era.”
“I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’” Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant, told the paper. “There were plenty.”
The troops began encountering the munitions in hidden caches and roadside bombs.
