NEW YORK — The United States recovered thousands of old chemical weapons in Iraq from 2004 to 2009 and destroyed almost all of them in secret and via open-air detonation, according to a written summary of its activities prepared by an international body that monitors implementation of the global chemical weapons treaty.
The summary was prepared by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, after quietly held meetings between the organization’s technical staff and US officials in Washington in 2009. It was provided to The New York Times by the Pentagon on Friday.
It included a table disclosing limited details on 95 separate recoveries and destructions of chemical warheads, shells, or aviation bombs for a total of 4,530 separate munitions from May 2004 through February 2009 — a period of often intense fighting in Iraq.
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The United States later recovered more Iraqi chemical weapons, pushing its tally to 4,996 by early 2011, according to redacted intelligence documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.
The weapons destroyed through early 2009, the newly released report said, included some that contained chemical agents, others that were corroded and degraded, and some that appeared to have been previously demilitarized but the United States destroyed “to err on the side of safety and security.”
Its authors noted that none of the weapons had been made recently. All were legacy items from Iraq’s chemical weapons program in the 1980s and early 1990s. That program had been rushed into production during the Iran-Iraq War and then destroyed in the 1991 Gulf War and the period of UN inspections that followed.
The report by the organization, which is based in The Hague and is often referred to as an international watchdog on chemical weapons and treaty compliance, was the result of an unusual moment in the US occupation.
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In early 2009, at American prodding, Iraq’s fledgling government joined the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international treaty that has largely banned chemical weapons worldwide. With that, Iraq assumed obligations to declare and ultimately destroy under the organization’s supervision any chemical weapons remaining from Saddam Hussein’s rule.
Until that point, US forces had been quietly finding and destroying old chemical weapons in the country; at times, the weapons were being used by militants in improvised bombs.
As American forces had taken possession of the weapons, the US government kept the bulk of these activities and their complications secret, including chemical wounds, especially from sulfur mustard blister agent, sustained by US troops.
The report explicitly noted that in many cases the American records were scarce and that “this activity was not a verification measure” and “was not conducted in accordance with rules contained in the Verification Annex” — the part of the treaty that delineates procedures for destroying chemical weapons and confirming compliance.
Almost no reference is made to people wounded while handling the chemical weapons. And the list of incidents is not complete; it is missing, for instance, the September 2006 recovery of a repurposed mustard shell from an improvised explosive that wounded two Navy ordnance disposal techs — Chief Petty Officer Ted Pickett and Petty Officer 3d Class Jeremiah Foxwell.
Further, the United States declined to share precise locations for the recoveries of chemical munitions. “US representatives indicated that the exact locations are considered sen-sitive,” the report said.
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