From the NYT article:
The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
The effort was run out of the C.I.A. station in Baghdad in collaboration with the Army’s 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion and teams of chemical-defense and explosive ordnance disposal troops, officials and veterans of the units said. Many rockets were in poor condition and some were empty or held a nonlethal liquid, the officials said. But others contained the nerve agent sarin, which analysis showed to be purer than the intelligence community had expected given the age of the stock.
A New York Times investigation published in October found that the military had recovered thousands of old chemical warheads and shells in Iraq and that Americans and Iraqis had been wounded by them, but the government kept much of this information secret, from the public and troops alike.
My emphasis. The standard Lib/Prog fallback position the old=deteriorated=harmless is ludicrous. Toward the end of WW2 a German cargo ship carrying mustard gas weapons was sunk in the Baltic Sea. To this day they are a deadly danger. Think of the deterioration to 25% or 10% purity as meaning 75% or 90% fewer killed - not much comfort to the friends/families of the 10-25% who are killed!
Why would the Bush Administration keep this secret? I can only speculate. By denying the Jihadis certainty that there were WMDs "out there", it kept them from focusing their search, while also leaving them searching (and therefore less well hidden). The value of denying one's enemy certainty - about events and about other sources of information - seems not well understood among many DC pols who sport a
D after their names.
One thing I wonder about is the timing of the NYT's "revelations". The "Bush lied ..." narrative has become so firmly ensconced in people's minds and in Lib/Prog parrot-points that the narrative is almost impervious to the truth. OTOH, the NYT (and any other outlet that might give the story two seconds' air time or 1/4 of a column inch) have their, "We covered that," ass-covering. What I wonder about in particular is
how long has the NYT had this info? The secret buying program apparently ended in 2006. Did it really take the NYT nearly 8 years to learn of it? And the other discoveries of tons of gas shells? Or have they held back, cynically balancing letting the "Bush lied ..." narrative get firmly established and publishing for CYA points?
