Wednesday, October 15, 2014

NYT reports Iraqi Chemical Weapons coverup.

It's history by now, but the Times reports that US troops occupying Iraq discovered sizable quantities of artillery shells filled with poison gas.  The troops claim they were told to hush the matter up.  This just came on the TV news this morning.
    Somehow this just doesn't sound right.  Much of the justification for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein came from the belief that Saddam was building nukes.  Colin Powell went before the UN and laid his reputation on the line accusing Saddam of having or building weapons of mass destruction.  After the occupation of Iraq we launched a serious search for the weapons which continued for a year.  When it failed to find much, if anything, of nuclear weapons it was a serious embarrassment to the Bush administration.  It is to Bush's credit that he refused to allow the manufacture of evidence  of nuclear weapons.  A few small caches of rockets with chemical warheads were discovered and made the news.  Small means they would have fit in back of a single pickup truck.
  There was a strong desire to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam's Iraq, and I cannot believe that a sizable cache, like the NYT is talking about, was not publicized at the time.

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