Posted on 09/20/2002 7:20:00 AM PDT by HAL9000
WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (AFP) - Iraq could unleash a biological attack on the West by using unsuspecting people traveling abroad as carriers of deadly germs, a prominent Iraqi defector warned late Thursday.Nuclear scientist Khidhir Hamza, who left Iraq in 1994 and now lives in the United States, told the US Congress he suspected the Iraqi security service, which runs the country's biological weapons program, had already used people traveling abroad to reunite with relatives to infect exiled dissidents with the deadly AIDS virus.
"An angle rarely reported -- and I found extensive incidents regarding it when I left Iraq and worked in Libya from Iraqi expatriates -- was the use of humans as disease carriers," Hamza told the House Armed Services Committee.
He said he knew of Iraqi dissidents living abroad, who suddenly got word from Baghdad that their families had been allowed to leave Iraq and reunite with them.
Under Iraqi public health procedures, people going abroad must be vaccinated against several standard infectious diseases before they can obtain passports.
Hamza said some of these inoculations may have been used by the security service, Mukhabarat, to infect people with viruses like HIV in the hope that they would be passed on to targeted dissidents.
"There were many incidents of whole families infected this way with HIV and other diseases," he said.
Iraqi people with AIDS are sent to a remote facility in the western desert called Salman Hole, presumably for treatment, the scientist said.
But he said nobody had ever come back from the camp and he suspected the patients were being used by Mukhabarat for biological experiments and virus collection.
"If smallpox is to be sent abroad from Iraq, one should expect unwitting carriers being sent to the destination targets, possibly not even Iraqis, to achieve deniability," Hamza said.
US President George W. Bush bases his push for a regime change in Iraq on the argument that Baghdad has a secret program to develop weapons of mass destruction.
In the mid-1990s, when UN weapons inspectors were still working in Iraq, the Iraqi government admitted producing 8.5 tonnes of concentrated anthrax and 19.4 tonnes of concentrated botulinum toxins, according to a recent report issued in Washington by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
But the report said the inspectors believed Iraq might have actually manufactured three to four times more anthrax than it had declared and twice as much botulinum.
Iraq says it has destroyed 25 missile warheads, 157 aerial bombs and four airplane aerosol tanks specially designed to deliver biological weapons.
But the CSIS report said the weapons inspectors had seen the remains of only 23 bombs and none of the warheads or tanks.
US Central Intelligence Agency officials say Baghdad has also been trying to convert L-29 jet trainer aircraft, acquired in Eastern Europe, into unmanned aerial vehicles, possibly so they can deliver chemical and biological agents.
Richard Spertzel, who headed the biology section of the UN inspection team in Iraq, said earlier this month the threat of Iraq using biological weapons as a terrorist tool was "enormous".
"It is worth recalling Iraq's developing and alleged weaponization of aflatoxin," Spertzel told the same congressional committee.
Experts refer to aflatoxin as a possible "sleeper" biological agent, which has carcinogenic and liver damaging effects that manifest themselves up to 10 years after its use.
"There is no doubt in my mind that Iraq has a much stronger BW (biological weapons) program today than it had in 1990," Spertzel pointed out.
If true, this would be reason enough to overthrow the regime. Possibly one of the most despicable acts I can think of.
Since there was no obvious powder in the envelopes, the authorities decided not to do any testing and they decided that it must have been from someone who wanted to cheer people up on 9/11.
Those bills could have been coated with anthrax spores or something else.
Nope, they'd rather be re-elected.
Not by me.
The whole family has sex when they reunite? It does not compute...
The defector would be infected by sexual transmission, presumably from their spouse, and the rest of the family would be infected by the "inoculation".
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.