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The Day I Realized I Would Never Find Weapons of Mass Destruction in IraqBy J.D. Maddox Jan. 29, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETI rolled west from Baghdad in a convoy of soft-side Humvees. It was a morning in late June 2003, and I had traded a bottle of whiskey for the use of an American military police detachment as protection for a daylong mission to Abu Ghraib prison. As an intelligence officer for the Department of Energy assigned to the Iraq Survey Group — the American-led team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — I was scheduled to interview an Iraqi prisoner who had been captured weeks before, on suspicion of transporting stolen nuclear material. I couldn’t know it that morning, but the interview would entirely change my perspective on America’s involvement in Iraq, and set me on a decades-long course of struggling with the false narratives used to persuade us to march into that conflict and other ones.I gripped my pistol tightly as we moved along in the doorless vehicles, occasionally pointing it in the direction of anything that came near the convoy. I had borrowed the weapon — no more than a party favor in that bacchanal of R.P.G.s and gold-plated Kalashnikovs — from a fellow intelligence officer, who asked me to return it with all of its bullets.As we approached the outskirts of the prison, the road narrowed, and we drove through a frenetic marketplace. During Saddam Hussein’s long rule, families of Abu Ghraib prisoners had made the area their home, and many stayed there after Hussein had released his prisoners in the lead-up to the war. As our oversize vehicles stalled traffic and disrupted local business, men cursed us and spat on the ground. A butcher stared me in the eyes and hacked deeply into a hanging goat carcass. Children came within an arm’s length, demanding handouts and laughing mockingly.Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/magazine/iraq-weapons-mass-destruction.html
"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt (search), the chief military spokesman in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy."The round detonated before it would be rendered inoperable, Kimmitt said, which caused a "very small dispersal of agent."...Two weeks ago, U.S. military units discovered mustard gas that was used as part of an IED. Tests conducted by the Iraqi Survey Group (search) — a U.S. organization searching for weapons of mass destruction — and others concluded the mustard gas was "stored improperly," which made the gas "ineffective."
"Since 2003, Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent," said an overview of the report unveiled by Senator Rick Santorum and Peter Hoekstra, head of the intelligence committee of the House of Representatives."Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf war chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf war chemical munitions are assessed to still exist," the report read.
A reflection.Mustard Gas is not a Weapon of Mass Destruction.Developed by German Chemists, it was first used in 1917, causing casualties of 2% in the British and French trenches. Its purpose was to disorganize and terrorize rather than to kill.
Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) are devices capable of inflicting deaths several orders of magnitude greater than conventional ordnance. Examples include nuclear warheads, missiles designed to deliver biological agents such as anthrax, and shells carrying mustard gas or sarin. They are sometimes referred to as "chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear" (CBRN) or "atomic, biological and chemical" (ABC) weapons. ...
The classic scenario of WMD use against civilians (the basis of many current exercises) is the release of the nerve agent sarin in the Tokyo subway. In this attack the actions of first responders and medical staff helped keep the final fatalities down to 12. Because they lacked protective clothing, however, many of these people absorbed sarin from victims' clothing and developed serious long term neurological complications. Other agents—such as mustard agent, VX, anthrax, and radiation—are more persistent and thus pose greater risks: doses to victims would be higher, attending staff would face protracted periods in protective clothing, and the threat would remain until full decontamination was achieved.
Chemical weapons did not become true weapons of mass destruction (WMD) until they were introduced in their modern form in World War I (1914–18). The German army initiated modern chemical warfare by launching a chlorine attack at Ypres, Belgium, on April 22, 1915, killing 5,000 French and Algerian troops and momentarily breaching their lines of defense. German use of gas and mustard was soon countered by similar tactics from the Allies. ... Altogether, the warring states employed more than two dozen different chemical agents during World War I, including mustard gas, which caused perhaps as many as 90 percent of all chemical casualties (though very few of these casualties were fatal) from that conflict.
How about nerve gas?That's essentially what was in the thousands of drums labeled "Insecticide" in Iraq.