From the memory hole (1997): US DoD Brief on Iraq's Chemical & Biological Weapons Capability

Mr. Bacon: Many of you have asked questions about the chemical and biological weapons capability of Iraq, so we' gotten a senior military official and several of his civilian assistants to come down and answer your questions. The senior military official will begin with a brief opening statement, and then he and the senior civilian officials will respond to your questions for the next 20 minutes or so.

I am, of course, the unnamed senior military official, and I have accompanying me these two gentlemen sitting on the end of the chairs here who are unnamed civilian officials from the Department of Defense. One of them is an expert in general on Iraq and the Middle East, and one of them is an expert on chemical and biological weapons issues, so I will defer questions appropriately to them if the issue comes up.

I'd just like to say before I take any questions that, as you know, some questions we may not be able to answer because of operational circumstances, and we'll tell you directly if that's the case, and we'll do our best to give you some information.

Q: The first obvious question would be how much chemical weapons and biological weapons exist in Iraq today, and to what extent do you know where they are?

A: That's a broad question. I'll give my answer and then I'll defer to my expert on that issue.

First we do know that, or we believe that there are residual chemical capabilities and biological capabilities which Saddam Hussein and his regime have successfully concealed from UN inspection regimes. If we knew where they were with precision and how much they were and other details about them, of course we would have acted on that.

We know that compared to what the Iraqis publicly disclosed originally, after the DESERT STORM war, and what we later found, there was great divergence. They disclosed very little, we found a great deal.

To give you an example of a round number, they disclosed a small amount of a biological agent for research and development purposes, but we discovered in the course of UN inspections a large amount, a substantial amount -- in the tons -- of biological materials which...

A: It's a good question. I'll defer to this gentleman, if he can give you a more precise number than me. I don't want to give you the wrong answer.

A: Anthrax is one biological agent. There were several. But that's certainly the leading, most deadly, most difficult biological agent.

But as an example, that trend has occurred throughout our dealings with Iraq. Their public statements and our subsequent inspection under the UN monitoring regime has led to a finding which leads us to believe they have never told the truth, they have many more possible stored materials, hidden materials, materials which we cannot account for, because we have found great divergence between what they told us they had and what we proved they had later.

When you ask about a number of given agents, Iraq has declared almost 9,000 liters of anthrax, and they said, "and we destroyed it all." They declared several thousand liters of botulinum toxin, and they told us they produced other agents like aflatoxin and said they had it on missile warheads, etc. So Iraq has declared a lot, said they destroyed it.

I think the real issue is to understand what makes a difference in terms of biological agents. I think one of the key things here is to talk maybe about anthrax as an example.

Anthrax is a spore and if you, to get into numbers, if you inhale 10,000 spores of anthrax, it's sort of generally accepted as a lethal dose for anthrax. If you try to imagine what it is, you're talking about something that's smaller than a speck of dust -- something you wouldn't even see that you're breathing. It's not like imagining you're walking into a dust cloud and you're saying wow, I'm in anthrax. No. We're talking about inhaling something that's really the size of a speck of dust, that's generally lethal. And by generally lethal I mean that if a group of people inhaled this amount, this number of spores, about 80 percent of them are going to die. It doesn't kill everybody. It's not like everybody getting a bullet through the heart and you're dead. About 80 percent of the people that get this amount of anthrax are going to die.

One of the key issues here too, I think, is if an attack occurs in a clandestine way symptoms don't come for one to three days, depending on how much you get. This initial exposure to anthrax is when you have a window for treatment. So if you've been exposed and you've inhaled anthrax in your system, you've got a short window where you've got to take some medical action in order to enhance your survival chances. After that, you develop flu-like symptoms and die within a matter of a few days.

That gives you a sense of what we're talking about with anthrax. So a kilogram of anthrax has literally millions and millions of potential deaths in it, and the key issue for biological agents is how you're going to disperse it. How you're going to take something that's sitting in a flask in a laboratory and turn that into a militarily significant weapon.

This is, I think, where it's really key to understand that Iraq did that step. They admitted to weaponizing anthrax on missiles. They admitted to conducting open air tests with both simulants and live agents. So they have an understanding of how to use anthrax. They understand how to go beyond the laboratory vial of anthrax and put it on a delivery system and understand how that can impact the population.

So I'd like to maybe say, to ask me how many kilograms of anthrax there are, as the General said, if we knew where they were and how much there were, we'd go get them. I think it's important to understand that a small amount delivered in the right way can make a tremendous impact.

Q: How long would it take to produce let's say a kilo or a half a kilo of anthrax?

A: I think it's important to understand that Iraq succeeded in doing this before the war, they've claimed they did. So they've got the expertise resident. I think it's also important to understand that you can do this with dual-use equipment. By dual use I mean you're taking stuff that you would use for normal pharmaceuticals or other benign applications and you're turning this into something that is potentially deadly.

So to get at your question, if you buy commercial equipment and put it in a room maybe from this over to there, so a very small room, within a month you can be producing kilogram quantities of anthrax.

To do that, if you're interested in more details in doing that, some of the key things are buying a growth media. If you've ever brewed beer, you know you mix up barley or wheat or some other protein-rich substance like that, then you introduce a culture and you let it grow in a fermenter, you separate out the anthrax you produce using a centrifuge -- all these are things you can buy on the open market. You dry it out and put it in a delivery system.

You have to take some precautions to make sure you don't kill yourself doing this. You can set up air hoods that are found in normal laboratories and are part of any research project. So taking standard, dual-use equipment that can be bought for literally a few hundred thousand dollars on the open market, in a small room you can be producing kilogram quantities of anthrax literally within a month.

Q: You mentioned that the important thing is having a delivery system to deliver this anthrax, which you suspect they have. Do they still, in your belief, have the delivery system to do so, and where can they deliver it?

A: There are several concerns we have about the delivery of anthrax. A practical means of delivery that we were concerned about during the war is by missile. We're concerned that Iraq has components to assemble missiles and also had the launch capabilities for these missiles.

But this is not the only way to deliver anthrax. Iraq also admitted to looking and modifying tanks on airplanes to use them as a sprayer for delivering anthrax. Agricultural sprayers are another means of delivering anthrax. So you shouldn't think of delivery of anthrax as a classical military jet flying in or missile coming in. Those are certainly very effective ways, but also people driving down the street with an agricultural sprayer can do that.

A: One point that I need to make to clarify this a little bit is that one of the reasons we are so concerned about the absence of UNSCOM monitoring officials in Iraq is the possibility that even though much of their capability may have been lost, as you can tell from this answer, they can rapidly regenerate a capability at least a rudimentary capability, if not a fairly sophisticated capability to deliver this kind of weapon. That's why we believe that UNSCOM inspectors must be back in Iraq as soon as possible.

Q: Two related questions, if I may, to our expert here. One, a delivery system could also be by terrorist, could it not, carrying something or smuggling it into a water system such as a reservoir or something else?

Secondly you said, and I believe quoting the senior military official, talking about tons of an agent possibly. You said if you know where it is you'd go get it. But isn't there a danger that if you go get it, that you can set this off and spread it throughout that part of the world, if not farther, by winds or... How permeable is it and how persistent is it?

A: Thinking about delivering anthrax through a water system is not the way to think about the problem. It is a respiratory hazard primarily, so what you want to do to dispense anthrax is to put it in the air and put it in the right size particle so if people inhale it, it's trapped in the lungs, and as a result causes sickness and death.

Q: Can it be done by terrorists say in the United States or some other country using equipment they can purchase on the open market such as equipment that sprays things, what have you?

A: The answer is yes. Terrorism is very much an issue when it comes to biological agents.

Q: To what extent do we believe that he has buried his capability? I know you've talked about moving it around, but to what extent has he buried it, and also what do we think he is protecting with these human shields, and how many places has he put human shields at this point?

A: We do believe that Saddam Hussein practices burying items that he would like to avoid disclosing to the UN or to protect. That's a well known fact. We have discovered sites where material has been buried. So we don't know the extent of that. Once again, that's kind of a circular question. If we did, we would have done something about it.

Bear in mind that this presentation was given during the Clinton "Golden Age" (/sarcasm), by Clinton's DoD.

And -- the question the 9-11 Democrat-shill kangaroo court should be focusing on -- what did the Clintoons do about it? Not much.

There have been reports that as high as forty billion dollars are spent to purchase this type of information. It proves the adage, garbage in, garbage out.

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