Army continues to incinerate WMD antidote kits
Millions of dollars are wasted each year because the kits are stored in military vans rather than in cooled facilities; and there aren’t any WMDs in Iraq, right?
Almost everyone now accepts that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but that has not stopped the Pentagon from continuing to ship millions of dollars in antidote kits — continuing, that is, because the kits which expire after twelve to fifteen months in the desert, must be incinerated, and the Army makes no effort to store them properly, Government Executive reported. Known as Individual Service Member Medical Chemical Defense Materiel, the kits contain an Atropine auto-injector and tablets of ciprofloxacin (for anthrax) diazepam (nerve gas), pyridostigmine bromide (nerve gas), and potassium iodide (radiation). According to GovExec, the Army does not distribute the kits directly to soldiers, storing them instead in locked military vans, and “current theater policy is to incinerate all [kits] prior to redeployment.” Cynics say that the Army has hesitated to question this policy out of fear of upsetting the Bush administration due claims “by Vice President [Dick] Cheney and others that WMD might still be found.”
