Rare News Desk
A recently published New York Times piece has lifted the veil off attempts by the Pentagon to hide the fact that numerous United States soldiers were exposed to chemical weapons following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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“I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’” former Army Sgt. Jarrod L. Taylor told Times reporter C.J. Chivers. “There were plenty.”
Chivers revealed that from 2004 to 2010, American soldiers came in contact with chemical munitions that were manufactured before the 1991 Gulf War.
The soldiers who suffered from the after-effects of those deadly chemicals were, for all intents and purposes, hidden from the public eye as the military tried to keep the exposure a secret.
“In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures,” Chivers writes. “First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war’s outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find.”
Chivers also points out that many military members were exposed to mustard and sarin gas after mistaking the chemical weapons for disarmed improvised explosive devices and bringing them into their vehicles.
“This is mustard agent,” Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling told his men over the radio, according to Chivers. “We’ve all been exposed.”
