A cunning woman scientist who heads Saddam Hussein's bio-terrorism team may be the mastermind behind the world's anthrax scare, a leading American germ warfare expert says.Rihab Taha, 45, is so notorious that United Nations weapons inspectors have nicknamed her "Dr. Germ" for deadly experiments she conducted ...
The British-trained Taha gained a biology degree at the University of East Anglia after arriving in 1979 to study crop diseases.
But when she returned to Iraq, Taha led a team that made germs causing victims' eyes to bleed and produced a bacteria that gave babies a deadly diarrhea.
U.N. inspectors believe Taha, who has a 5-year- old daughter, tests her poisons on human guinea pigs.
In 1995, she admitted that a secret germ factory she set up near Baghdad had made thousands of gallons of anthrax and botulism - enough to kill millions.
Military officials in Washington recently identified Taha as "the leading official in charge of Iraq's biological weapons program."
She is also politically well-connected. Her husband is Iraqi oil minister Amir Rashid Ubaydi, who helps direct the country's relations with the U.N. weapons-inspection teams ...
Over the years, Iraq has produced great quantities of liquid anthrax for deployment in missile warheads, U.N. inspectors say, and Iraqi agents are known to meet periodically with bin Laden operatives.
Investigators have been looking with renewed interest at two reported meetings last summer between Mohamed Atta, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 hijackings, and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.
See: Ritter: Iraq 'No Threat' [Free Republic], NewsMax.com, November 19, 2001, by Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff (posted by JeanS).
NewsMax has reported before how former UN Arms Inspector Scott Ritter has become an apologist for Saddam Hussein's regime.As the administration has pointed a clear finger at the Iraqi regime for building weapons of mass destruction, Ritter took to the airwaves to pour cold water in the allegations.
Ritter said he had "no doubt" Hussein was building such weapons -- but only up until 1993.
Since then, Ritter told Fox News' John Gibson, Iraq's "determination to acquire such weapons isn't there."
He claimed Iraq's doesn't have the "industrial infrastructure" to build such weapons, and that their number one goal is to have "sanctions lifted."
It all sounds good, but diametrically contradicts what Ritter said in 1996, when he quit the UN team claiming the Clinton administration had not allowed inspectors to do their job ...
See: Scott Ritter blames right wing "McVeigh Groups" for Anthrax, FoxNews interview with Scott Ritter, October 19, 2001 (posted by GuillermoX ).
Scott Ritter on Fox and Friends doesn't believe the anthrax is from Iraq but from "McVeigh" type "right wing" groups here in the USA.[FRPR GuillermoX 's reply 2:]
[Ritter said,] " ... clearly it's not weapons grade or weaponized anthrax ... "[At that time, it may be that only the first batch had been so analyzed.]
[FRPR angkor's reply 38:]
Appearing in a panel discussion on the History Channel last week ...First he insisted that "there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq". Then he said his UN team was forced out with "90 percent of the job done." When asked how he knew there was nothing in Iraq - since they left with 10 percent of the job undone, Ritter insisted that the remaining 10 percent was "only documentation and inventories."
He insisted he had "complete access" because "I was in Saddam HUssein's bathroom" and talked to the highest levels of Iraq's intelligence agencies. But when pressed, he could not answer the repeated questions about his certainty that there were no WMD in Iraq, since he hadn't gotten the inventories, as he previously admitted.
Throughout the discussion he was hostile, angry, combative, and just plain rude (while the other panelists were quite accomodating to his wierd outbursts).
Ritter became nearly apoplectic when Iraq's potential involvement in WTC 9/11 was raised, saying that the alleged sightings of bin Laden in Bhagdad were sheer nonsense, and that other sightings of Atta and Iraqi intelligence were also nonsense. He offered as proof that "I was in the el Rasheed Hotel in March 1998, and I didn't see bin Laden."
Mr. Ritter has enjoyed the "boot," so to speak, a "Goodbye and good riddance!" --- the "portfolio" of an agent who has been turned --- see: Ritter [is a] Mossad/CIA Agent, Claims Iraq [Free Republic], Reuters, August 29, 1998 (posted by Mayor Loz).
BAGHDAD --- Iraqi newspapers on Saturday lashed out at resigning American U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, accusing him of having links with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, and the U.S. Central intelligence Agency."It seems that Ritter's mates in the Mossad have burdened him with anti-Iraq duties, thus prompting him to resign for being restless and sleepless of these duties,'' the daily newspaper Al-Jomhuriya said.
"By submitting his resignation, Ritter and his backers wanted to put a red seal on his intelligence past which proved recently that, thanks to his post, he was transferring information on Iraq to the Mossad,'' the paper added.
Ritter, who was involved repeatedly in stand-offs with Iraq, resigned on Wednesday and leveled an angry blast at the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. secretary-general for not standing up to Baghdad.
In a letter to chief weapons inspector Richard Butler, he said the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) in charge of disarming Iraq, "hobbled as it is by unfettered Iraqi obstruction and non-existent Security Council enforcement of its own resolutions,'' was not the organization he joined almost seven years ago ...
Ritter said on Thursday that he resigned to sound a "wake-up call'' that Iraq must be compelled to give up its weapons of mass destruction ...
Mr. Ritter did not apparently quit to warn the world. Instead, he quit to function as perhaps Ms. Rosenberg's F.A.S. has, in the above Wall Street Journal article.
He perhaps quit to discredit the once-more-firm stance of the U.N. versus Iraq --- to break up the alliance against Iraq.
Perhaps this return address leads, in his past, to its creation:
4th Grade
Greendale School
Franklin Park, NJ 08852