NY Times Just Blasted Out of Existence Biggest Myth About George W. Bush & Iraq War
While various news sources had reported the finding before, all assertions that Hussein had chemical weapons in some capacity (weapons-grade or not – they had been hidden from U.N. inspectors) were largely scoffed at as nothing more than supercilious bunk. Well, behold…
The news report from the Times explains the now not-secret revelation that there had been WMDs in Iraq, after all:
From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The NY Times even published
a map of all the cases when American military troops were exposed to
the formerly ‘non-existent’ weapons of mass destruction:
As The Blaze’s Oliver Darcy pointed out, the WMD discoveries were kept partly hidden from Congress.
Retired Army major Jarrod Lampier,
who was there when the U.S. military found 2,400 nerve agent rockets in
2006 — the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war – said of the
finding’s import, “‘Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to
say.”
WMDs in Iraq vindicated, just like
the “no blood for (no) oil” myth debunked? You know this is going to get
good on Twitter. And it is.
The obligatory sassy Tweet:Snark factor says a lot:
This report definitely looks like ‘something of significance’ to those who were told there were no wmds in Iraq.
Justen Charters assisted with the creation of this report. This article was edited after publication.
William had we left Hussein in power we wouldn't have the situation that we have today. Saddam Hussein would not have put up with ISIL for 5 minutes. he would have used those weapons on them. Bush lied when he made the imminent threat statement. Bush lied as insinuated that Hussein somehow had a hand in 911. Had we left him there the Middle East would today be a better place, yeah he lied about that too.
ReplyDeleteNow Saddam Hussein is your hero. Humanitarian. All around good guy.
DeleteAre you nuts ric?
Why don't you address the NY Times article and it's information about the Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Why, because you can't ric.
You know William Saddam is not my hero but ISIL would not of attacked his country. Whether you can see the forest through the trees or not that is a truth. I am researching you article. You think that because it's the Times I am all about it. Nope they lie too or sensationalize lets say. It's the newspaper business. There is always some supporter who comes out of the woodwork saying "I was told not to talk". Let's see where this goes.
DeleteOctober 17, 2014
DeleteReport: Rove kept discovery of Iraq's WMD secret
By Thomas Lifson
The “Bush lied/People died” chant flourished for years as the Left demonized George W. Bush for invading Iraq and finding “no” weapons of mass destruction. Except that our troops did discover vast numbers of chemical WMDs, but the administration kept the discovery -- and the injuries to our troops that handled them -- secret.
The existence of the slur-busting weapons remained largely unknown to the public (but known to AT readers) until the New York Times published a front page story Wednesday, only a day after the New York Post revealed that ISIS fighters had taken over territory where these WMDs were stored. To be sure, these were old weapons, as my colleague Rick Moran is quick to point out, but they remain evidence of Saddam’s WMD programs and stockpiles.
So what genius decided to keep these WMD stockpiles secret? Eli Lake of The Daily Beast reports:
Starting in 2004, some members of the George W. Bush administration and Republican lawmakers began to find evidence of discarded chemical weapons in Iraq. But when the information was brought up with the White House, senior adviser Karl Rove told them to “let these sleeping dogs lie.”
Rove insisted that Bush not respond to his fierce critics during his presidency, allowing their slurs to become received wisdom, not just on WMDs but in general. (snip)
Dave Wurmser—who served at the time as a senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney on national-security issues—remembers receiving a similar message from Rove.
According to Wurmser, “in 2005-6, Karl Rove and his team blocked public disclosure of these (findings) and said ‘Let these sleeping dogs lie; we have lost that fight so better not to remind anyone of it.’”
Rove declined to comment for this story.
At least part of the Bush administration’s case against Saddam Hussein was based on the fact that he never properly accounted for the chemical-weapons stockpile he had built up in the 1980s. AsSantorum himself said during his 2006 press conference, the Pentagon’s report at the time “proves that weapons of mass destruction are, in fact, in Iraq.”
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/10/report_rove_kept_discovery_of_iraqs_wmd_secret.html#ixzz3GUTh2Xeb
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SMOKING GUNINSIDERS BLAME ROVE FOR COVERING UP IRAQ’S REAL WMD
DeleteBY ELI LAKE
10.16.14
Starting in 2004, some members of the George W. Bush administration and Republican lawmakers began to find evidence of discarded chemical weapons in Iraq. But when the information was brought up with the White House, senior adviser Karl Rove told them to “let these sleeping dogs lie.”
The issue of Iraq’s WMD remnants was suddenly thrust back into the fore this week, with a blockbusterNew York Times report accusing the Bush administration of covering up American troops’ chemically induced wounds.
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To people familiar with the issue, both inside that administration and outside, the blame for the coverup falls on one particular set of shoulders: Rove’s.
From the perspective of Rick Santorum, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania who lost his seat in 2006, some of the weapons of mass destruction President Bush promised would be in Iraq before the 2003 invasion of the country began turning up as early as 2004.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Santorum said he and his staff began receiving photographs of discarded sarin and mustard-gas shells from U.S. soldiers in 2004. Two years later, when he was up for re-election, Santorum even went public with some of this information in a press conference disclosing a Pentagon report that found 500 chemical-weapons shells had been found in Iraq.
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One might think a politically vulnerable Bush White House would’ve seized on Santorum’s discovery. After all, Bush and his subordinates famously accused Iraq of having active weapons of mass destruction programs.
But at least in 2005 and 2006, the Bush White House wasn’t interested. “We don’t want to look back,” Santorum recalled Rove as saying (though Santorum stressed he was not quoting verbatim conversations he had more than eight years ago). “I will say that the gist of the comments from the president’s senior people was ‘We don’t want to look back, we want to look forward.’”
Dave Wurmser—who served at the time as a senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney on national-security issues—remembers receiving a similar message from Rove.
According to Wurmser, “in 2005-6, Karl Rove and his team blocked public disclosure of these (findings) and said ‘Let these sleeping dogs lie; we have lost that fight so better not to remind anyone of it.’”
DeleteRove declined to comment for this story.
At least part of the Bush administration’s case against Saddam Hussein was based on the fact that he never properly accounted for the chemical-weapons stockpile he had built up in the 1980s. As Santorum himself saidduring his 2006 press conference, the Pentagon’s report at the time “proves that weapons of mass destruction are, in fact, in Iraq.”
Santorum on Thursday stood by that claim. “There was no active chemical-weapons operation in Iraq—that doesn’t mean there were no chemical weapons,” he said. “That was the point we were making. It’s clear from The New York Times’ article that the military as well as the administration didn’t want to have that conversation because they missed it.”
Santorum said that in 2005 he began raising the issue with the White House himself. “I had discussions over a period of a year or two. Why aren’t we mentioning this? Why aren’t we doing anything on this?” he recalled. But Santorum later became so frustrated that by 2006, his message to the White House was: “I am going to do this [go public] whether you do it or not.”
One former senior White House official who requested anonymity confirmed that the White House had no interest in 2006 in re-engaging the public debate over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He said that other lawmakers had recommended Bush give a press conference with some of the discarded weapons wearing a protective suit.
Delete“We killed that idea at the time,” the former official said. “It’s not a good idea to have the president near this stuff, it’s very dangerous.” This former official said that there were attempts from the White House in 2004 to get some in the media to write about the issue, but the narrative about Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction was already fixed in the mind of the public and the press. “There was not much we could do on this,” this official said.
DeleteNonetheless, Santorum and others continued to press the White House. In the House, Pete Hoekstra, who was then the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, conducted his own investigation into the older chemical weapons that were showing up in Iraq.
In an interview Thursday, Hoekstra declined to name Bush administration officials with whom he spoke. But he said he felt stonewalled during his own investigation in 2005 and 2006 into the issue. “This was an active investigation by the intelligence committee and they chose not to answer our questions truthfully and fully,” Hoekstra said.
Indeed, when Hoekstra teamed up with Santorum in 2006 to present the Pentagon finding about 500 chemical-weapons warheads, he said the Pentagon was much more critical of the information than the media or the Democrats.
“They came out and said these were not the weapons we were looking for,” Hoekstra said. “Somewhere along the line we were talking to people who were lying to us. This has to reach fairly far and fairly high. I am absolutely furious about it.” At the time, David Kay, the first head of the team of weapons inspectors in post-invasion Iraq, said the munitions publicized by Hoekstra and Santorum in 2006 were “less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point.”
One explanation for why the White House was not interested was so as not to tip off Sunni insurgents in Iraq. As The New York Timesreported this week, some of the main areas in Iraq used to store chemical weapons are in areas now controlled by ISIS.
Wurmser said that in 2004 and 2005 “chemical-weapons shells began turning up in arms markets in Iraq in small numbers, but eventually in batches of 100 or so.” He said that when he asked the U.S. intelligence community to go public with the information, they “quite properly asked it be kept quiet until they track down the source of the weapons so that they can secure it and not tip off Sunni insurgents to go and retrieve them themselves.”
Eventually, Wurmser said, Sunni insurgent groups did gain access to the shells in 2005. “There were to my memory at least two attacks on our soldiers using chemical weapons-rigged shells as [improvised explosive devices]. Fortunately, they were ineffectively weaponized and soldiers were wounded but not killed.”
Wurmser, however, grew more frustrated over time. “After waiting a year—during which we asked that the source of the batches be traced and followed to the location where the shells were being retrieved—we continued to see the trickle, but then discovered nobody was making any effort to track the source to the location of retrieval,” he said. “Instead, we were continuing to try to buy up some of the stuff in the market.”
After the U.S. found thousands of the old chemical-weapons shells, Wurmser and others at one point argued that they had an obligation to declare the stocks of chemical weapons under the Chemical Weapons Convention and destroy them. The United States was, after all, the occupier of Iraq and had assumed the country’s sovereign responsibilities as a signatory to the convention.
“It was all for nothing; Rove wanted the issue buried,” Wurmser said.
At the end of the day, Santorum said he would not call the White House behavior at the time a coverup, as was implied in The New York Timesstory. “I don’t know if I would use the term coverup,” he said. “I would just say they simply didn’t want to discuss it.”