Insect Free Munitions

Douglas Hansen, at the American Thinker, has an article that examines the strange locations of barrels of “pesticides” found by WMD teams in Iraq, and questions why such discoveries have been dismissed.

Specifically, the DIA noted that Baghdad had rebuilt segments of its industrial chemical infrastructure under the “guise of a civilian need for pesticides, chlorine, and other legitimate chemical products.”� Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical agent arena.� In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the “grandfather” of modern day nerve agents.� Pesticides are also precursors of many other chemical weapons including Mustard-Lewisite (HL), Phosgene (CG) a choking agent, and Hydrogen Cyanide (AC) a blood agent.�
It was not surprising then, as Coalition forces attacked into Iraq, that huge warehouses and caches of “commercial and agricultural” chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists.� What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces, and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches.
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One of the reported incidents occurred near Karbala where there appeared to be a very large “agricultural supply” area of 55-gallon drums of pesticide.� In addition, there was also a camouflaged bunker complex full of these drums that some people entered with unpleasant results.� More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to nerve agent.� A full day of tests on the drums resulted in one positive for nerve agent, and then one resulted in a negative.� Later, an Army Fox NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] Recon Vehicle confirmed the existence of Sarin.� An officer from the 63d Chemical Company thought there might well be chemical weapons at the site.�
But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into non-existence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers six feet underground.� The “agricultural site” was also co- located with a military ammunition dump, evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.
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Then in January of this year, Danish forces discovered 120mm mortar shells with a mysterious liquid inside that initially tested positive for blister agents.� Further tests in Southern Iraq and in the US were, of course, negative.� The Danish Army said, “It is unclear why the initial field tests were wrong.”� This is the understatement of the year, and also points to a most basic question: If it wasn’t a chemical agent, what was it?� More pesticides?� Dishwashing detergent?� From this old soldier’s perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy.

Read the whole thing.
hat tip – Occam’s Toothbrush