(CNN) -- The U.S. government suppressed information about chemical weapons it found in Iraq, and several servicemembers were injured by their exposure to those weapons, The New York Times is reporting.

In an article published late Tuesday, the newspaper says it found 17 American servicemembers and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to mustard or nerve agents after 2003. They were reportedly given inadequate care and told not to talk about what happened.

"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 United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West," the newspaper reported.

It quoted a former Army sergeant who suffered mustard burns in 2007 and was reportedly denied hospital treatment.
"I felt more like a guinea pig than a wounded soldier," he told the Times.

Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby on Wednesday addressed the allegations at a press briefing in Washington.
When asked whether injured U.S. servicemembers were denied treatment, or told to keep quiet, he said he couldn't speak to "what guidance or decisions their unit commanders or medical staff may have given them at the time."
He added: "I just don't have that level of detail. This happened a long time ago and it was on an individual basis."

Kirby estimated that about 20 U.S. servicemembers were exposed to material from chemical munitions, from around the mid-2000s to 2010 or 2011.

"The Secretary's expectation is that servicemembers and their families are going to get the care and support that they need, and if they aren't, he wants to make sure that leadership address that," Kirby said about U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

"But this is an issue for their chains of command to deal with, leadership at all levels to deal with. There's no need for -- and I don't expect that there's going to be -- a Pentagon-level review of these particular cases," Kirby said.

The newspaper suggested several reasons why the U.S. government might have wanted to suppress the chemical weapons finds.

For one, in five of the six cases in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, " the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies," the newspaper reported.

For another, the weapons were old -- made before 1991 -- and therefore did not back up U.S. intelligence that at the time suggested Iraq had an active weapons of mass destruction program.

"In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. 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," the Times reported.

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/15/us/iraq-chemical-weapons/index.html?hpt=us_c2

(CNN)
"The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West," the newspaper reported."

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/15/us/iraq-chemical-weapons/index.html?hpt=us_c2

(CNN)
"The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West," the newspaper reported."

This just in, the Bush Administration lied about Iraq and sent US and allied troops in there without justifiable cause, weakening it's war effort in Afghanistan, eroding the reputation of the US by ignoring the United Nations and sacrificing the lives of thousands and thousands of Western servicemen and women and Iraqi civilians.

 whembly wrote:

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/15/us/iraq-chemical-weapons/index.html?hpt=us_c2

(CNN)
"The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West," the newspaper reported."

This just in, the Bush Administration lied about Iraq and sent US and allied troops in there without justifiable cause, weakening it's war effort in Afghanistan, eroding the reputation of the US by ignoring the United Nations and sacrificing the lives of thousands and thousands of Western servicemen and women and Iraqi civilians.

Nope... you're participating (and NYT a bit too) in history revisioning...

That war was never about an active weapons program, as NYT asserts, but rather, it was the same problems Bush had identified in numerous speeches: old stockpiled weapons, the demonstrated ambition to develop new ones as soon as our backs were turned, and the possibility that Hussein could pass them to terrorists with anti-Western aims.

squidhills wrote:

Ummm.... no. Colin Powell's presentation before the U.N. was about a suspected active program. Hence those pistures of "mobile chem wepaons labs" and such. The fact that Hussein was denying inpectors access to potential chem production sites was used as "evidence" that he was currently* up to something, not that he might get up to something if we didn't bomb him immediately.

 whembly wrote:

squidhills wrote:

Ummm.... no. Colin Powell's presentation before the U.N. was about a suspected active program. Hence those pistures of "mobile chem wepaons labs" and such. The fact that Hussein was denying inpectors access to potential chem production sites was used as "evidence" that he was currently* up to something, not that he might get up to something if we didn't bomb him immediately.

Here's the actually Rationale for the Iraq War

So where's the evidence that he actively lied just to give him casus belli for the Iraq War?

squidhills wrote:

 whembly wrote:

squidhills wrote:

Ummm.... no. Colin Powell's presentation before the U.N. was about a suspected active program. Hence those pistures of "mobile chem wepaons labs" and such. The fact that Hussein was denying inpectors access to potential chem production sites was used as "evidence" that he was currently* up to something, not that he might get up to something if we didn't bomb him immediately.

Here's the actually Rationale for the Iraq War

So where's the evidence that he actively lied just to give him casus belli for the Iraq War?

So the fact that line #2 of the resolution specifically says that Iraq possess an active chemical weapons program refutes me how? There were a lot of reasons we went to war with Iraq; the one Bush pushed the hardest in the media and before the UN was the "active" program. Which we know was not active at all.

Relapse wrote:
There were also the stories that Bush was lied to by the people who gave him the data.

Relapse wrote:
There were also the stories that Bush was lied to by the people who gave him the data.

 whembly wrote:


So where's the evidence that he actively lied just to give him casus belli for the Iraq War?

 whembly wrote:

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/15/us/iraq-chemical-weapons/index.html?hpt=us_c2

(CNN)
"The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West," the newspaper reported."

This just in, the Bush Administration lied about Iraq and sent US and allied troops in there without justifiable cause, weakening it's war effort in Afghanistan, eroding the reputation of the US by ignoring the United Nations and sacrificing the lives of thousands and thousands of Western servicemen and women and Iraqi civilians.

Nope... you're participating (and NYT a bit too) in history revisioning...

That war was never about an active weapons program, as NYT asserts, but rather, it was the same problems Bush had identified in numerous speeches: old stockpiled weapons, the demonstrated ambition to develop new ones as soon as our backs were turned, and the possibility that Hussein could pass them to terrorists with anti-Western aims.

He pounded that in speech-after-speech during the runup of that war.

But, if you insist the "Bush Lied" because of he's the reincarnate of Hitler... you keep carpping that.

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
We do have testimony that the head of the CIA was ordered by the Bush admin to produce a report with certain results.

But grats on the deploying of nazi reference so early in the thread...

And don't ever accuse me of carping, Benghazi Boy...

MeanGreenStompa = Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS)

whembly = Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS)

 Frazzled wrote:

MeanGreenStompa = Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS)

whembly = Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS)

When you combine them, do you get BO?

 Frazzled wrote:
If only we hadn't destoryed the regime of that murdering dictator who killed thousands of his own citizens daily, dropped gas on the Kurds and had fun torture parties on the shiites.

 Da Boss wrote:
Fraz: Thousands of his own citizens every day? Come on!

As you can see, Iraq is SO MUCH BETTER OFF today! Good job guys.

Other estimates as to the number of Iraqis killed by Saddam's regime vary from roughly a quarter to half a million, including 50,000 to 182,000 Kurds and 25,000 to 280,000 killed during the repression of the 1991 rebellion. Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000.

 Frazzled wrote:
If only we hadn't destoryed the regime of that murdering dictator who killed thousands of his own citizens daily, dropped gas on the Kurds and had fun torture parties on the shiites.

America, truly the most evil nation in history.

 Jihadin wrote:
But no WMD's were found in Iraq though.......

 Da Boss wrote:
I mean, I was alive at the time, and I remember the arguments being put forward. It was definitely a major argument that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. I remember because I was there. It's amazing to me that you remember things differently.

"There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn't be relied upon, and they didn't speak up. "

Guess it says something about the inherently subjective nature of perception.

Yet more evidence that the Iraq war was a colossal and tragic blunder which killed thousands to make the region less safe than it had been before the intervention for no particularly good reason.

 cincydooley wrote:
Sometimes I'd wish we'd simply say, "feth you" to that sandy wasteland and let those of you much closer (see: europeans) deal with it.

And by sometimes I mean nearly all the time.