Posted on 02/20/2003 10:29:31 PM PST by PsyOp
Bio-Chemical Weapons & Saddam: A History.
Qusay Hussein coordinated Iraq special operations with bin Laden’s terrorist activities
YOSSEF BODANSKY - National Press Club
Now that Saddam’s sons are dead, there is talk the “resistance” againts US troops should decrease.
This makes sense in that these two brothers most likely oversaw the cash to pay those attacking US troops. And it has killed their liason with al Qaeda, Qusay.
Back in 1999 Yossef Bodansky had this to say:
The other state that is rising up — and I’ve elaborated a lot in the book about that — is Iraq. Bin Laden has been dealing with Iraq intelligence since the early 1990s, where they cooperated in Sudan and in Somalia. This has been a love-hate relationship because of the Iraqi secular policies and Saddam Hussein’s disdain for Islamism and even persecution of Iraqi Islamists, including veterans of Afghanistan. But in recent years, Hassan al-Turabi, the spiritual leader of Sudan and bin Laden’s patron, if you want, spiritual patron, mediated a deal between Iraq and bin Laden that has since been cemented and became practical.
The important thing of the recent development that should be a cause of tremendous worry is that Saddam Hussein empowered his son, Qusay to deal with the day-to-day relationship with bin Laden and coordinate the Iraqi special operations with bin Laden’s terrorist activities. Last week, Qusay Hussein has been elevated into the declared successor and had taken a tremendous amount of new powers, particularly in issues of national security, intelligence operations and the like. And that will of course elevate also the standing of bin Laden and the cooperation that they have been working on. And we should be very worried about that development.
Source is Federal News Service, AUGUST 6, 1999, FRIDAY, HEADLINE: PRESS CONFERENCE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB MORNING NEWSMAKER WITH YOSSEF BODANSKY, AUTHOR SUBJECT: INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM NATIONAL PRESS CLUB WASHINGTON, D.C.
How soon all the “guerilla attacks”, as they are more and more being referred to as, continue will be reflected in how much Qusay and his also dead brother oversaw the coordination and payment for the attacks and whether or not they have anyone who was a top aide to them who can or will take over.
Dems have been loving the “guerilla attacks”. Flashbacks of their perceived past glory — Vietnam — dance in their heads.
They ignore or downplay any relation or coordination of the Hussein regime with al Qaeda or terrorist groups. They will most likely be disapointed by the decrease in attacks on our troops in the same way the CA legislators were overheard discussing how a crisis in the state would benefit them politically.
Yet it was under the Clinton administration that the info about Iraq and al Qaeda came forth near the end of 1998, early 1999.
It came in wake of the visit of Farouk Hijazi, Iraq’s Ambassador to Turkey at the time, to bin Laden in Afghanistan.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/951911/posts
The Al Qaeda Connection AND The Al Qaeda Connection, cont.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/ ^ | 5/12/03 AND 7/11/03 | Stephen F. Hayes
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/944617/posts
The Al Qaeda Connection: Saddam’s links to Osama were no secret.
OOPS. In what could go down as the Mother of All Copyediting Errors, Babil, the official newspaper of Saddam Hussein’s government, run by his oldest son Uday, last fall published information that appears to confirm U.S. allegations of links between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. It adds one more piece to the small pile of evidence emerging from Iraq that, when added to the jigsaw puzzle we already had, makes obsolete the question of whether Saddam and Osama bin Laden were in league and leaves in doubt only the extent of the connection.
In its November 16, 2002, edition, Babil identified one Abd-al-Karim Muhammad Aswad as an “intelligence officer,” describing him as the “official in charge of regime’s contacts with Osama bin Laden’s group and currently the regime’s representative in Pakistan.” A man of this name was indeed the Iraqi ambassador to Pakistan from the fall of 1999 until the fall of the regime.
Aswad’s name was included in something Babil called an “honor list.” Below that heading, in boldface type, came a straightforward introductory comment: “We publish this list of great men for the sons of our great people to see.” Directly beneath that declaration came a cryptic addendum—included by accident?—in regular type: “This is a list of the henchmen of the regime. Our hands will reach them sooner or later. Woe unto them. A list of the leaders of Saddam’s regime, as well as their present and previous posts.”
Then comes the list of regime officials. It is in alphabetical order until, halfway down the page, it starts over with officials whose names begin with the letter “A.” It includes Baath party leaders, military heroes, ambassadors, intelligence chiefs, the commander of the “Saddam Cubs Training Center,” governors of Iraqi provinces, chemical and biological weapons experts, and so on.
U.S. intelligence experts have not conclusively determined what the list means. One possible explanation they have entertained is that part of the list came from an opposition source, and that Babil republished it as a gesture of defiance. This would account for the reference to “henchmen of the regime” whom “our hands will reach”—to say nothing of the candid description of Aswad’s duties.
Sounds plausible. But that explanation leaves unanswered one important question: Why would the regime, at a time when it was publicly denying any link to al Qaeda, publish anything admitting such a link?
Even if the identification of Aswad in the Babil list was nothing more than an embarrassing editorial oversight, several recent developments have bolstered the Bush administration’s case that Saddam Hussein had connections to the al Qaeda leader.
On April 28, senior administration officials announced that the United States had captured an al Qaeda terrorist operating in Baghdad. The operative is believed to have been an associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a top al Qaeda figure who plotted the assassination of Laurence Foley, an American diplomat gunned down in Jordan last fall. Zarqawi is also believed to have received medical treatment in Baghdad after he was wounded fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
That arrest came shortly after U.S. troops patrolling the Syrian border captured Farouk Hijazi, long believed to have been an outreach coordinator of sorts between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda. Hijazi, formerly a high-ranking Iraqi intelligence official, has confirmed to U.S. officials that he met Osama bin Laden in Sudan in 1994. He denies meeting with al Qaeda officials in 1998, but U.S. officials don’t believe him. At that time, a leading newspaper in Rome reported that Hijazi traveled to Afghanistan on December 21, 1998, to offer asylum to bin Laden. The Corriere della Sera described Hijazi as “the person who has been responsible for nurturing Iraq’s ties with the fundamentalist warriors since 1994.”
Back then, reports about a budding Hussein-bin Laden partnership were not limited to the foreign press. Newsweek magazine, in its January 11, 1999, issue, ran the headline “Saddam + Bin Laden.” The subhead declared, “America’s two enemies are courting.” The article was written by Christopher Dickey, Gregory Vistica, Russell Watson, and Joseph Contreras. The authors cited reports from an “Arab intelligence source” about the alliance.
According to this source, Saddam expected last month’s American and British bombing campaign to go on much longer than it did. The dictator believed that as the attacks continued, indignation would grow in the Muslim world, making his terrorism offensive both harder to trace and more effective. With acts of terror contributing to chaos in the region, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait might feel less inclined to support Washington. Saddam’s long-term strategy, according to several sources, is to bully or cajole Muslim countries into breaking the embargo against Iraq, without waiting for the United Nations to lift it formally.
(Interestingly, after Colin Powell’s presentation last month to the U.N. Security Council linking Hussein and al Qaeda, Dickey reversed course and referred to the evidence of these links as “egregious smokescreens.”)
The timing here is critical. Operation “Desert Fox” began on December 16, 1998, and ended after just 70 hours, on December 19, 1998. Two days later, Hijazi was dispatched to meet with al Qaeda leaders. And the Newsweek report detailing the increased collaboration appeared shortly thereafter. And it wasn’t just Newsweek.
In fact, Time magazine, in an issue also out January 11, 1999, one-upped its competitor by quoting bin Laden himself on the Iraq issue. “There is no doubt that the treacherous attack has confirmed that Britain and America are acting on behalf of Israel and the Jews, paving the way for the Jews to divide the Muslim world once again, enslave it and loot the rest of its wealth. A great part of the force that carried out the attack came from certain Gulf countries that have lost their sovereignty.”
U.S. intelligence officials who have expressed skepticism about a Hussein-bin Laden relationship often point to religious differences as the reason for their doubts. Hussein was secular, they say, bin Laden a fundamentalist. True enough. But, as bin Laden’s comments suggest, there were bigger concerns—that America and “the Jews” might “divide the Muslim world once again”—that would trump these differences and unite the two men against a common enemy.
The Hijazi meeting wasn’t the only Iraq-al Qaeda around that time. Eleven months before bin Laden spoke to Time, then-President Bill Clinton traveled to the Pentagon, where he gave a speech preparing the nation for war with Iraq. Clinton told the world that Saddam Hussein would work with an “unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals.” His warning was stern.
We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. . . . They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein.
The timing, once again, is critical. Clinton’s speech came on February 18, 1998. The next day, according to documents uncovered earlier this week in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein reached out to bin Laden. A document dated February 19, 1998, and labeled “Top Secret and Urgent” tells of a plan for an al Qaeda operative to travel from Sudan to Iraq for talks with Iraqi intelligence. The memo focused on Saudi Arabia, another common bin Laden and Hussein foe, and declared that the Mukhabarat would pick up “all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden.” The document further explained that the message “would relate to the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him.” The document also held open the possibility that the al Qaeda representative could be “a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden.”
There is certainly much more to learn about the “contacts with bin Laden” after this meeting. What is clear, though, is that it is no longer defensible to claim there were no contacts. The skeptics, including many at the CIA, who argued that previous evidence of such links was not compelling, ought to be convinced now. They may well argue that, given the timing of the contacts, Saddam reached out to al Qaeda only when he felt threatened. The facts as we know them today are consistent with such a conclusion. But as journalists continue to pore over documents, and military analysts begin to do the same, it would be hasty to imagine that we’ve already uncovered everything there is to find on the bin Laden-Saddam tie.
Whatever the differences between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime, the two shared a hatred of America. One Iraqi official, some weeks after the September 11 attacks, publicly criticized the United States for rooting out al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The official was quoted in a report in broken English carried on The Pakistan Newswire of October 29, 2001, which said: “He stressed the US to stop bombardment on Afghanistan resulting in death of innocent children, women and elderly people.” The official, who had been in his job since 1999, also expressed doubt that bin Laden was even a terrorist and responsible for 9/11. He “said the US President Bush should knock the door of international court of justice to address the situation because only court had authority to declare Prime suspect of September 11 tragedy ‘Osama Bin Laden’ terrorist or not.’”
You might recognize the official’s name. It was published in Babil last fall: Abd-al-Karim Muhammad Aswad, “intelligence officer, official in charge of regime’s contacts with Osama bin Laden’s group and currently the regime’s representative in Pakistan.”
____________________________________
The Al Qaeda Connection, cont. More reason to suspect that bin Laden and Saddam may have been in league.
by Stephen F. Hayes 07/11/2003 5:45:00 PM
THE INDISPENSABLE Glenn Reynolds has linked to an article in the Nashville Tennessean written by a Tennessee judge who believes he is in possession of documents linking Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
The judge is Gilbert S. Merritt, a federal appeals court judge invited to help Iraqis construct a legal system in postwar Iraq. He is, according to Reynolds, “a lifelong Democrat and a man of unimpeachable integrity.”
Here is an excerpt of his account:
The document shows that an Iraqi intelligence officer, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, assigned to the Iraq embassy in Pakistan, is ‘’responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group.’’
The document shows that it was written over the signature of Uday Saddam Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein. The story of how the document came about is as follows.
Saddam gave Uday authority to control all press and media outlets in Iraq. Uday was the publisher of the Babylon Daily Political Newspaper.
On the front page of the paper’s four-page edition for Nov. 14, 2002, there was a picture of Osama bin Laden speaking, next to which was a picture of Saddam and his ‘’Revolutionary Council,’’ together with stories about Israeli tanks attacking a group of Palestinians.
On the back page was a story headlined ‘’List of Honor.’’ In a box below the headline was ‘’A list of men we publish for the public.’’ The lead sentence refers to a list of ‘’regime persons’’ with their names and positions.
The list has 600 names and titles in three columns. It contains, for example, the names of the important officials who are members of Saddam’s family, such as Uday, and then other high officials, including the 55 American ‘’deck of cards’’ Iraqi officials, some of whom have been apprehended.
Halfway down the middle column is written: ‘’Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan.’’
The story Judge Merritt relates is similar to an account reported in The Weekly Standard last May. Splashed across the front page of the November 16, 2002, edition of Uday Hussein’s Babil newspaper were two “honor” lists, one of which included Aswod (spelled “Aswad”) and identified him as the “official in charge of regime’s contacts with Osama bin Laden’s group and currently the regime’s representative in Pakistan.”
I stumbled upon this passage doing research for another piece. So I brought the article to the attention of administration officials, who hadn’t yet seen it, and asked for comment. Intelligence analysts were perplexed, particularly because of a passage in the text preceding the list. It read: “We publish this list of great men for the sons of our great people to see.” And below that: “This is a list of the henchmen of the regime. Our hands will reach them sooner or later. Woe unto them. A list of the leaders of Saddam’s regime, as well as their present and previous posts.”
The second description was clearly hostile in tone—”henchmen of the regime” and “woe unto them.” Analysts weren’t sure what to make of the introduction or the list, but suggested Uday Hussein may have simply republished a list of “henchmen” distributed by an Iraqi opposition group without realizing he was publicly linking his father to Osama bin Laden.
That still seems like the most plausible explanation to me. (Although Judge Merritt’s report that the front page of the four-page newspaper carried side-by-side photographs of bin Laden and Saddam is interesting.) Still, some intelligence officials believe that Aswad—who publicly raised doubts after September 11 about whether Osama bin Laden is a terrorist—was an important link between Iraq and al Qaeda.
If the newspaper reports are interesting but inconclusive, two other recent reports are more compelling. Jessica Stern, a Harvard professor and Clinton administration national security official, discusses the links in a fascinating and sober analysis of the Al Qaeda threat in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.
Under the subheading, “Friends of Convenience,” she writes:
Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s claims that al Qaeda was cooperating with the “infidel” (read: secular) Saddam Hussein while he was still in office are now also gaining support, and from a surprising source. Hamid Mir, bin Laden’s “official biographer” and an analyst for al Jazeera, spent two weeks filming in Iraq during the war. Unlike most reporters, Mir wandered the country freely and was not embedded with U.S. troops. He reports that he has “personal knowledge” that one of Saddam’s intelligence operatives, Farooq Hijazi, tried to contact bin Laden in Afghanistan as early as 1998. At that time, bin Laden was publicly still quite critical of the Iraqi leader, but he had become far more circumspect by November 2001, when Mir interviewed him for the third time.
Hijazi has acknowledged meeting with al Qaeda representatives, perhaps with bin Laden himself, even before the outreach in 1998. According to news reports and interviews with intelligence officials, Hijazi met with al Qaeda leaders in Sudan in 1994.
Former Navy Secretary John Lehman, a member of the congressional commission investigating the September 11 attacks, added to the intrigue this week when he flatly declared, “there is evidence” of Iraq-al Qaeda links. Lehman has access to classified intelligence as a member of the commission, intelligence that has convinced him the links may have been even greater than the public pronouncements of the Bush administration might suggest. “There is no doubt in my mind that [Iraq] trained them in how to prepare and deliver anthrax and to use terror weapons.”
The Western nightmare: Saddam and Bin Laden versus the world
Iraq’s half-built chemical arsenal, and the planet’s most prolific terrorist - Julian Borger and Ian Black on a marriage made in hell
Saturday February 6, 1999
Guardian
It must have been a bitterly cold and uncomfortable journey. In the last days of December, a group of Iraqi officials crossed the Hindu Kush border from Pakistan to Afghanistan on their way to keep an appointment deep in the remote eastern mountains.
At the head of the group was a man by the name of Farouk Hijazi, President Saddam Hussein’s new ambassador to Turkey and one of Iraq’s most senior intelligence officers. He had been sent on one of the most important assignments of his career - to recruit Osama bin Laden.
Thus the world’s most notorious pariah state, armed with its half-built hoard of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, tried to embrace the planet’s most prolific terrorist. It was the stuff of the West’s millennial nightmares, but United States intelligence officials are positive that the meeting took place, although they admit that they have no idea what happened.
This was not the first time that President Saddam had offered Mr Bin Laden a partnership. At least one approach is believed to have been made during the Saudi dissident’s sojourn in Sudan from 1990 to 1996. On that occasion, the guerrilla leader turned the emissaries away, out of a pious man’s contempt for President Saddam’s secular Ba’athist regime.
But this time round Mr Bin Laden’s options have been rapidly diminishing. His hosts, the hardline Taliban militia which rules Afghanistan under Islamic auspices, have vowed publicly to stand by him. But they are at the same time discussing with his worst enemies - the Saudi monarchy and the American government - his eventual departure from Afghan soil.
Mr Bin Laden must surely have felt the noose begin to bite when he heard the news of the Taliban’s meeting this week with a US assistant secretary of state, Karl Inderfurth, in Islamabad.
But the most wanted man in the West may be at his most dangerous when cornered. And the increased pressure makes the prospect of a Saddam Hussein-Osama bin Laden alliance, once an improbable marriage of opposites, seem a more credible threat.
The US has been braced for more bombings since the attacks on its east African embassies in Tanzania and Kenya last August, in which more than 250 people died, most of them Africans. Retaliatory US cruise missile strikes followed, against Mr Bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan and a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant believed (mistakenly as US intelligence now privately admits) to be producing the nerve gas VX on his behalf.
US embassies throughout the Middle East have been on alert since December, when the CIA found what it called ‘strong and credible evidence’ of an imminent attack by members of Mr Bin Laden’s multinational organisation al-Qaeda (the Base).
The CIA also claimed to have foiled a plot last September by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group, an al-Qaeda affiliate, to bomb the US embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, The Egyptian suspects were deported to Cairo.
The US government has spent $2 billion (£1.2 billion) on counter-terrorist measures since the August embassy bombings. The Pentagon has set up national guard rapid response teams in 10 states around the country.
Overseas, US embassy windows are being coated with protective film to prevent them disintegrating into lethal shards under the impact of a blast. And the FBI is kitting out a Gulfstream 5 long-range business jet to fly specialist teams of agents at short notice to a terrorist incident anywhere in the world.
Amid these preparations are signs that the threat of non-conventional terrorist attacks looms ever larger on the American horizon. The justice department has distributed equipment and training grants to local fire departments to help them deal with possible chemical or biological weapons incidents, and it recently organised a huge multi-agency operation, codenamed Poised Response, to rehearse a co-ordinated reaction to such an attack on Washington.
But it is not just the US which finds itself in the putative firing line. Since RAF bombers took part in air strikes on Iraq in November, British citizens have also become primary targets.
Talking to the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat a month after the air strikes on Iraq, Mr Bin Laden explicitly added British civilians to his ‘divinely-ordained’ list of targets.
‘The British and American people have widely voiced their support for their leaders’ decision to attack Iraq, which makes all those people, in addition to the Jews who occupy Palestine, into people warring [against God],’ he warned.
As Mr Bin Laden plans more attacks on the ‘infidels’ he regards as a contaminating presence at the Islamic holy sites of his home country, American and British intelligence services plot their own strategy. They aim to block his moves and contain him while waiting for a chance to strike themselves.
It is an unending game of chess between terrorism and counter-terrorism in which last year’s multi-million dollar cruise missile strikes are merely the bluntest of weapons.
Even before the embassy bombings in Africa, US special forces had been rehearsing daring ‘grab raids’ aimed at fighting their way into Mr Bin Laden’s mountain lair in Afghanistan and either abducting or assassinating him. But such an operation would almost certainly involve high American casualties and - like missile attacks - would require highly accurate information about the whereabouts of Mr Bin Laden.
According to journalists who visited him in December, the ascetic Saudi radical is these days more cautious than ever, continually shifting between tented camps and caves and never using satellite phones lest they betray his position to the US spy satellites that constantly hover overhead.
There has been at least one assassination attempt in recent months, carried out by Saudi intelligence.
Mr Bin Laden accused the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz (whom he also blamed for stripping him of Saudi citizenship in 1994) of offering $267,000 to three men to carry out the execution.
The terrorist financier told a Pakistani journalist that one of the would-be assassins, Siddiq Ahmed, had confessed, but did not say what had happened to him.
Prince Salman denied the accusation, saying that he had never heard of Siddiq Ahmed. But Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of CIA counter-terrorist operations, who maintains close contact with US and Middle Eastern intelligence networks, said an assassination bid did indeed take place.
‘The Saudis hired someone among his followers to poison him, probably in November. He suffered kidney failure but recovered, at least partially,’ Mr Cannistraro said.
Whether as a result of the assassination attempt or not, Mr Bin Laden is unwell, said Mr Cannistraro.
‘There is definitely something wrong. The intelligence people here described him as gravely ill.’
Mr Bin Laden has denied such reports and claimed that he remains sufficiently vigorous to play football and ride horses. But the journalists who met him in December said he was walking stiffly and leaning on a walking stick. And when a Pakistani reporter, Rahimullah Yusufzai, filmed him hobbling, Mr Bin Laden’s aides erased the tape.
While waiting for a chance to grab Mr Bin Laden or get a clear shot at him, his enemies are constantly striving to narrow his room for manoeuvre and fold up his sprawling financial network one bank account at a time.
‘He’s certainly feeling the pinch; he can’t use his satellite phone and he can’t travel for fear of being kidnapped,’ said one British counter-terrorism expert.
‘He’s pretty much in a box and there are signs that action against his financial resources may have started to work.’
Mr Cannistraro believes that Mr Bin Laden’s financial resources (originally estimated at up to $300 million) are dwindling fast.
‘He went through his personal fortune long ago,’ he said. ‘He gets some income from trading through his companies. But his major source of income these days is fundraising, mostly among religious businessmen in the Gulf.’
The Saudi royal family, presumably stirred into action by last year’s bloodbaths in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, have closed down a number of Mr Bin Laden’s front charities, and have been tightening the screws on their erstwhile Taliban clients, whose ‘embassy’ in Riyadh was closed down in September.
The Taliban’s guiding light, Mullah Omar, has also rejected the entreaties of Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi general intelligence, who visited Afghanistan twice last year in an attempt to lever Mr Bin Laden out of his hiding place.
‘Prince Turki also returned empty handed,’ Mr Bin Laden crowed soon after the last attempt in November.
‘It is none of the business of the Saudi regime to come and ask for handing over Osama bin Laden, who was stripped of his identification card, which is his right by birth, and whose assets were frozen, and who was forced to sever all relations with his kin.’
The Taliban’s reluctance to surrender Mr Bin Laden is understandable. An estimated 300 of the multi-ethnic volunteers under his command are thought to have died in the war against the Soviet Union, turning the Saudi guerrilla leader into a legend in Afghan hearts - and in his own mind. He once claimed to have ‘reduced the Soviet Union to a myth’.
But even the fanatics of the Taliban are dependent on a steady supply of funds, if only to wipe out their adversaries’ last remaining pockets of resistance. And in the last few months the Saudis have cut the flow of cash to a trickle.
Mamoun Fandy, a politics professor at Washington’s Georgetown University, believes that the pressure will eventually take effect. In his new book, Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent, to be published later this month, Mr Fandy writes: ‘The Taliban protection is not likely to continue forever. Taliban as a movement is subject to global pressures, especially from the United States and Saudi Arabia. Previously, under pressure from both, Sudan expelled Bin Laden from its territory. Under similar pressure, the Taliban may find it profitable to do likewise.’
In fact, in recent interviews with Mr Fandy, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah said he had won the personal assurances of Mullah Omar that Mr Bin Laden’s welcome was not indefinite.
‘Omar promised Crown Prince Abullah that ‘once things settled down’ in Afghanistan, it would be no place for Osama. It is a matter of time,’ Mr Fandy said.
This week’s meeting between US and Taliban officials in Islamabad shows how the sands can shift, less than a year after Mullah Omar sent Bill Richardson (who was then the US ambassador to the United Nations) away empty handed from secret talks about Mr Bin Laden in Kabul last April.
It is at this moment, with Mr Bin Laden increasingly vulnerable, that the Iraqi offer of shelter materialised from the mysterious figure of Farouk Hijazi.
Mr Hijazi’s arrival as Iraqi ambassador to Ankara last year was seen by Western intelligence analysts as President Saddam’s attempt to beef up his espionage and weapons procurement network in the region.
Despite being Palestinian born, the secret policeman won the Iraqi ruling family’s favour by the zeal with which he went about executing their opponents, both in Iraq and abroad. In the past decade he rose to become the head of external operations in the special security organisation run by President Saddam’s son Qusay.
An attempt to place him in North America failed when Canada refused to accept him as ambassador. After a few months’ hesitation, Turkey consented to his nomination late last year.
In a telling sign of the true function of the embassy, the outgoing ambassador, Rafi Daham al-Tikriti, was made head of the Iraqi mukhabarat intelligence service on his return to Baghdad.
Ahmed Allawi, who has been keeping tabs on Hijazi for the opposition Iraqi National Congress, said: ‘Turkey is the Iraqis’ biggest intelligence station abroad, and Hijazi is deeply involved in the secret overseas operations of the mukhabarat. He is the perfect man to send to Afghanistan.’
Mr Fandy believes that if Mr Bin Laden had to leave his Afghan stronghold he would prefer to seek refuge in the mountains of Yemen.
Although he was born in Riyadh, his family came from the Hadramout region of southern Yemen, and he has since cultivated contacts with the influential Sanhane tribe.
But Mr Fandy argues that even Yemen would not offer an entirely safe haven if the Saudi monarchy was determined to root him out. ‘Saudi Arabia can threaten the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh more than Bin Laden can threaten the Saudis.’
If Mr Bin Laden can be winkled out, it will be a significant victory for the West’s billion-dollar counter-terrorism machine, but no one on either side of the Atlantic believes it will spell the end of hostilities with radical Islamic groups.
‘It’s dangerous to characterise him as the be all and end all of this problem,’ said one British-based expert. ‘Political Islam is on the rise and terrorist groups will continue to organise in spite of all the security measures. And Bin Laden has faithful lieutnants so even if he’s assassinated the phenomenon isn’t going to go away.’
The paradox of the Bin Laden manhunt is that its target is, in many ways, the joint creation of the Saudi and Western intelligence services, a result of their covert war to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan.
Even then, some had qualms about cultivating that sort of client. ‘We did worry then about these wild bearded men,’ admits one British official. ‘But there was a lot of naivety around.’
Under the great organising principle of the cold war, with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan doing their double act against the evil empire, their enemy’s enemy was their friend.
Yet after the Soviet army left Afghanistan, it soon became clear that a dangerous genie had been let loose, as thousands of Egyptians and Algerians, Saudis and Yemenis, fired up by their victory over a superpower, went home to give a critical edge to indigenous Islamic fundamentalist movements which had yet to turn violent.
Now, while trying to undo the mistakes of the past, the US and Britain have to steel themselves for Mr Bin Laden’s promised next move.
If his flirtation with Baghdad is consummated, the struggle with the implacable zealot from Saudi Arabia could be drifting towards an exceedingly bloody end-game.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,3818220-111026,00.html
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
Saddam link to Bin Laden
THE GUARDIAN ^ | 2/6/1999 | Julian Borger
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/866105/posts
Saddam Hussein’s regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials.
The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. The Iraqi delegation was led by Farouk Hijazi, Baghdad’s ambassador in Turkey and one of Saddam’s most powerful secret policemen, who is thought to have offered Bin Laden asylum in Iraq.
The Saudi-born fundamentalist’s response is unknown. He is thought to have rejected earlier Iraqi advances, disapproving of the Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime. But analysts believe that Bin Laden’s bolthole in Afghanistan, where he has lived for the past three years, is now in doubt as a result of increasing US and Saudi government pressure.
News of the negotiations emerged in a week when the US attorney general, Janet Reno, warned the Senate that a terrorist attack involving weapons of mass destruction was a growing concern. “There’s a threat, and it’s real,” Ms Reno said, adding that such weapons “are being considered for use.”
US embassies around the world are on heightened alert as a result of threats believed to emanate from followers of Bin Laden, who has been indicted by a US court for orchestrating the bombing last August of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which 259 people died. US delegations in Africa and the Gulf have been shut down in recent weeks after credible threats were received.
In this year’s budget, President Clinton called for an additional $2 billion to spend on counter-terrorist measures, including extra guards for US embassies around the world and funds for executive jets to fly rapid response investigative teams to terrorist incidents around the world.
Since RAF bombers took part in air raids on Iraq in December, Bin Laden declared that he considered British citizens to be justifiable targets. Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of CIA counter-terrorist operations, said: “Hijazi went to Afghanistan in December and met with Osama, with the knowledge of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. We are sure about that. What is the source of some speculation is what transpired.”
An acting US counter-intelligence official confirmed the report. “Our understanding over what happened matches your account, but there’s no one here who is going to comment on it.”
Ahmed Allawi, a senior member of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC), based in London, said he had heard reports of the December meeting which he believed to be accurate. “There is a long history of contacts between Mukhabarat [Iraqi secret service] and Osama bin Laden,” he said. Mr Hijazi, formerly director of external operations for Iraqi intelligence, was “the perfect man to send to Afghanistan”.
Analysts believe that Mr Hijazi offered Mr bin Laden asylum in Iraq, most likely in return for co-operation in launching attacks on US and Saudi targets. Iraqi agents are believed to have made a similar offer to the Saudi maverick leader in the early 1990s when he was based in Sudan.
Although he rejected the offer then, Mamoun Fandy, a professor of Middle East politics at Georgetown University, said Bin Laden’s position in Afghanistan is no longer secure after the Saudi monarchy cut off diplomatic relations with, and funding for, the Taleban militia movement, which controls most of the country.
Mr Fandy said senior members of the Saudi royal family told him in recent weeks that they had received assurances from the Taleban leader, Mullah Mohamed Omar, that once the radical Islamist movement secured control over Afghan territory, Bin Laden would be forced to leave. “It’s a matter of time now for Osama.” He said Bin Laden would have a strong ideological aversion to accepting Iraqi hospitality, but might have little choice.
US Government - Bin Laden and Iraq Agreed to Cooperate on Weapons Development
New York Times, Facts on File World News Digest | Novemeber 1998 | BENJAMIN WEISER
Breaking News from 1998. The US released an indictment on November 4, 1998 stating bin Laden and al Qaeda were working with the Saddam and the Iraqi regime to develop weapons of mass destruction.
From New York Times and Facts on File — articles from November 1998.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
November 5, 1998, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; Foreign Desk
HEADLINE: SAUDI IS INDICTED IN BOMB ATTACKS ON U.S. EMBASSIES
BYLINE: By BENJAMIN WEISER
BODY:
A Federal grand jury in Manhattan returned a 238-count indictment yesterday charging the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden in the bombings of two United States Embassies in Africa in August and with conspiring to commit other acts of terrorism against Americans abroad.
Government officials immediately announced that they were offering two rewards of $5 million each for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Mr. bin Laden and another man charged yesterday, Muhammad Atef, who was described as Mr. bin Laden’s chief military commander.
Mr. bin Laden is believed to be living in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist movement that rules that country.
Mr. Atef’s whereabouts are unknown.
It is uncertain whether Mr. bin Laden will ever stand trial in the United States. But if he does, prosecutors said, he could face life in prison or the death penalty if he is convicted.
Prosecutors also unsealed an earlier indictment, issued in June, that included similar but less detailed charges against Mr. bin Laden.
That indictment was returned before the embassy bombings and resulted from a two-year grand jury investigation of his activities in Somalia and Saudi Arabia, as well as reports that he had connections to a circle of Islamic militants in Brooklyn.
The new indictment, which supersedes the June action, accuses Mr. bin Laden of leading a vast terrorist conspiracy from 1989 to the present, in which he is said to have been working in concert with governments, including those of Sudan, Iraq and Iran, and terrorist groups to build weapons and attack American military installations. Excerpts, page A8.
But the indictment gives few details of Mr. bin Laden’s alleged involvement in the embassy attacks. The indictment does not, for example, specify whether prosecutors have evidence that Mr. bin Laden gave direct orders to those who carried out the attacks.
Nothing in the document indicates why the original indictment was kept secret for months. But the secret charges were returned about the time that American officials were plotting a possible military attack into Afghanistan to arrest Mr. bin Laden.
Mary Jo White, the United States Attorney in Manhattan, said, “It’s very common to have sealed indictments when you’re trying to apprehend those who are indicted.”
Both indictments offer new information about Mr. bin Laden’s operations, including one deal he is said to have struck with Iraq to cooperate in the development of weapons in return for Mr. bin Laden’s agreeing not to work against that country.
No details were given about whether the alleged deal with Iraq led to the development of actual weapons for Mr. bin Laden’s group, which is called Al Qaeda.
The Government said yesterday that Mr. bin Laden’s group had made use of private relief groups “as conduits for transmitting funds” for Al Qaeda.
The groups were not identified.
Prosecutors also said Mr. bin Laden’s group had conducted internal investigations of its members and their associates, trying to detect who might be acting as informants, and had killed those who had been suspected of collaborating with enemies of the organization.
The Government indicated earlier that its knowledge of Mr. bin Laden’s activities stemmed in part from the cooperation of one such informant, who it said yesterday had worked for Mr. bin Laden, transporting weapons to terrorists, helping to buy land for his training camps and assisting in running his finances.
The June indictment against Mr. bin Laden suggested that the Government had a considerable amount of knowledge of his dealings in the months before the attacks on the embassies, one in Tanzania and one in Kenya.
But the new charges are an indication of how quickly the Government has worked to solve the embassy attacks, which occurred just three months ago.
Ms. White said that Mr. bin Laden was charged with “plotting and carrying out the most heinous acts of international terrorism and murder.”
Citing the more than 250 people killed in the embassy attacks and the more than 1,000 wounded, she added, “In a greater sense, all of the citizens of the world are also victims whenever and wherever the cruel and cowardly acts of international terrorism strike.”
The investigation of Mr. bin Laden is continuing, said Ms. White and Lewis D. Schiliro, assistant director of the F.B.I. in New York, whose agents have fanned out around the world to investigate the embassy attacks.
“Our investigative strategy is clear,” Mr. Schiliro said.
“We will identify, locate and prosecute all those responsible, right up the line, from those who constructed and delivered the bombs to those who paid for them and ordered it done.”
In charging Mr. Atef, the Government reported new details about what it called his role as Mr. bin Laden’s military commander, referring to his “principal responsibility for the training of Al Qaeda members.”
Mr. Atef was a member of a committee under Mr. bin Laden that approved all terrorist actions by Al Qaeda, the indictment said, and he also played a major role in coordinating attacks on United States and United Nations troops in Somalia in October 1993.
In those attacks, 18 American soldiers and hundreds of Somalis were killed. Americans were shocked by the images of the body of one of the Americans being dragged through the streets, and the violence provoked a furor over the United States role in Somalia as part of the United Nations effort to pacify the country and supply food and medicine to the Somalis.
At the time, the battle was seen as one with Somali warlords. But yesterday’s charges made clear that the Government now contends that Mr. bin Laden had a critical role in instigating the fighting.
In late 1992 and 1993, when Mr. bin Laden’s group was based in Sudan, Mr. Atef went to Somalia to determine “how best to cause violence to the United States and United Nations military forces stationed there,” and reported back to Mr. bin Laden at his headquarters in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, the indictment said.
Prosecutors said that in the spring of 1993, Mr. Atef and other members of Al Qaeda, including Haroun Fazil and Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, both of whom have been charged in the embassy attacks, traveled to Somalia and trained Somalis opposed to the United Nation’s intervention.
On Oct. 3 and 4, 1993, in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, Somali soldiers trained by Al Qaeda took part in the attacks on the soldiers, according to the June 10 indictment that was unsealed yesterday.
GRAPHIC: Photos: Mary Jo White, a United States Attorney, at a news conference yesterday with a portrait of Osama bin Laden, a Saudi exile indicted on charges of conspiracy in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. (Ruby Washington/The New York Times); Prosecutors say this photo shows Osama bin Laden, left, and Muhammad Atef, who were indicted yesterday on terrorism charges. (United States Attorney’s Office)(pg. A8)
Copyright 1998 Facts on File, Inc.
Facts on File World News Digest
November 12, 1998
SECTION: UNITED STATES
HEADLINE: Saudi Millionaire Indicted In African Embassy Blasts ; —Bin Laden Also Linked to Other Attacks; Other Developments.
BODY:
A federal grand jury in New York City November 4 issued a 238-count indictment against fugitive Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, charging him in the August bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The indictment also charged five members of bin Laden’s alleged international terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, in the bombings. (See p. 710E1)
Federal prosecutors charged bin Laden and four Al-Qaeda members with murder for all of the more than 200 victims killed in the embassy bombings. Bin Laden allegedly had planned and financed the attacks, which were then carried out by his followers. Prosecutors also charged the suspects with conspiracy for their alleged roles in those attacks, as well as for their alleged participation in the killing of U.S. soldiers in Somalia. One of the Al-Qaeda members charged was Muhammed Atef, who was described as bin Laden’s top military commander.
Federal prosecutors had brought conspiracy and murder charges against other Al-Qaeda members in September and October. As of the November 4 indictment, five Al-Qaeda members had been indicted in the U.S. on charges of murder and conspiracy in the embassy bombings, and four others had been charged with conspiracy. Four of the nine were in custody in New York. One suspect was to be extradited from Germany, and one from Britain. Three were fugitives. Bin Laden was thought to be hiding in Afghanistan. (See p. 666A1; 1993, p. 743B2)
Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney for the Southern Distict of New York, at a November 4 news conference said that bin Laden was charged with “plotting and carrying out the most heinous acts of international terrorism and murder.”
Accused of Terrorism Campaign— The November 4 indictment charged bin Laden with leading an extensive terrorist conspiracy that started in 1989. Bin Laden allegedly worked in collusion with governments—including those of Sudan, Iraq and Iran—as well as with terrorist groups, to construct weapons and carry out attacks on American military installations.
The indictment also alleged that Al-Qaeda had tried to obtain nuclear and chemical weapons; supported extremists in more than 20 countries; trained Somalis who killed 18 American soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993 and carried out the two U.S. embassy bombings in Africa.
Federal presecutors November 4 also made public a sealed indictment that had been returned June 10—before the embassy blasts—naming bin Laden and members of Al-Qaeda in many of the broad conspiracy charges listed in the November document. The June indictment, which indicated that the U.S. government had known a considerable amount about bin Laden’s activities before the embassy bombings, had been returned after a two-year grand jury investigation into the Saudi millionaire’s activities in Saudi Arabia and Somalia, as well as into his reported connections to a New York group of Islamic militants. The grand jury was set up after 19 U.S. military personnel were killed in the 1996 bombing of a military complex in Saudi Arabia. (See p. 608B3)
The November 4 indictment incorporated and expanded upon charges made in June, which would be added to the current case. The later indictment did not explain why the June charges, which were returned at approximately the time that American officials were considering the use of military force to capture bin Laden in Afghanistan, had been kept a secret. The November indictment superceded the previous one.
The November indictment also alleged that bin Laden provided training camps and housing for members of Al-Qaeda, ran money and guns worldwide, recruited American citizens to work for him and established companies as fronts to allow Al-Qaeda to obtain arms and explosives.
The November 4 document named as co-conspirators, but did not indict, several Islamic extremists, including Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted in 1995 on conspiracy charges stemming from failed plots to bomb targets in New York City and to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. (Prosecutors had accused Abdel Rahman of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, but he was not convicted on those charges.) The indictment did not specify the extremists’ exact links to Al-Qaeda. In an attempt to link Al-Qaeda to the Alkifah Refugee Center in New York, a now-defunct mosque that Abdel Rahman and his followers dominated in the early 1990s, the indictment alleged that Alkifah was an “office” of an earlier incarnation of Al-Qaeda. The indictment gave no details about such an alleged link and did not mention the World Trade Center bombing. (See p. 237B3; 1996, p. 20F1; 1994, p. 376B2)
The November 4 indictment included new charges that Al-Qaeda had shipped weapons and explosives to the Arabian peninsula from Sudan in the mid-1990s during a period of attacks on Americans in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The indictment made no direct allegations, however, that bin Laden had played a role in attacks on American soldiers in those countries.
The indictment also charged that Al-Qaeda had reached an arrangement with President Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq whereby the group said that it would not work against Iraq, and the two parties agreed to cooperate in the development of weapons.
The indictment did not offer a precise description of bin Laden’s alleged role as sponsor of global terrorism or give many details about bin Laden’s alleged role in the embassy bombings. It did not indicate whether prosecutors had proof that the embassy attacks occurred on bin Laden’s direct orders.
Al-Qaeda Accused of Conspiracy— The November 4 indictment also charged that bin Laden and Al-Qaeda had played a crucial role in instigating fighting in Somalia during a 1992-93 United Nations relief mission. The indictment alleged that during that operation, at which time Al-Qaeda was allegedly based in Sudan, Atef had traveled to Somalia to determine how best to attack U.S. and U.N. forces there. According to prosecutors, in the spring of 1993, Atef and other members of Al-Qaeda, including Haroun Fazil and Mohammed Saddiq Odeh—both charged in the embassy attacks—traveled to Somalia and trained Somalis who opposed the intervention by the U.N. According to the June indictment, Al-Qaeda-trained Somali soldiers participated in the October attacks on U.S. and U.N. soldiers in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
The indictment disclosed new information about Atef’s alleged role as bin Laden’s top military commander. In addition to the key role he was said to have played in the Somalia attacks, he allegedly had “principal responsibility” in the training of members of Al-Qaeda.
U.S. Offers Record Reward— The State Department November 4 announced rewards of $ 5 million each for information leading to the arrest or conviction of bin Laden and Atef. The reward was the largest sum of money the U.S. had ever offered for the capture of a terrorist.
Kenya Embassy Warning Confirmed— U.S. intelligence officials had received a detailed warning about the Nairobi embassy attack nine months before it occurred, the New York Times reported October 23, citing unidentified U.S and Kenyan officials. In November 1997, Mustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed, an Egyptian who stood accused of participating in the Dar es Salaam bombing, went to the Nairobi embassy and warned officials of a planned attack on the building. According to U.S. officials, Ahmed reportedly said that a group of Islamic radicals would detonate a truck filled with explosives inside the building’s underground parking garage—which is what happened in the August bombing.
The Times article reported that in a separate interrogation by Kenyan intelligence officials, Ahmed had said that he had taken surveillance photographs of the embassy in preparation for the attack.
The U.S. State Department had officially denied since the bombings that it had received specific threats regarding the attacks. However, an unidentified official late October 22 said that the State Department had received from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) two reports about Ahmed, according to the Times article. The official said that the reports resulted in several weeks of heightened security at the embassy, but because there was no attack, the extra security precautions were removed.
Tanzanian officials had arrested Ahmed after the twin bombings, and local prosecutors September 21 charged him with the Dar es Salaam attack. The Times article said that the U.S. had not sought to extradite Ahmed, but that officials would not say why. It also said that U.S. officials believed Ahmed to be involved in both embassy bombings, although CIA analysts had not been able to link Ahmed to any terrorist group. (See p. 668G2)
The article said that, in its two warning reports to the State Department, CIA officials had said that they believed that Ahmed might have fabricated the threats. (The Washington Post October 31 quoted an unidentified U.S. diplomat in Nairobi as saying that Ahmed had a history of fabrication and that his warning was a generalized description of any terrorist attack.) The CIA, however, also said in the report that it had not ruled out that the threats might be serious, the Times reported. CIA officials had suggested that Ahmed’s warning might have been a ploy by the terrorists to allow them to observe the defense measures the embassy would take in the event of a terrorist attack.
Ahmed denied involvement in the bombings. His lawyer, Abdul Mwengela, said that Ahmed had overheard details of the bomb plot in the lobby of a Nairobi hotel in 1997.
‘Dozens died in Syrian-Iranian chemical weapons experiment’
Jerusalem Post ^ | 9/18/2007 | Staff
Proof of cooperation between Iran and Syria in the proliferation and development of weapons of mass destruction was brought to light Monday in a Jane’s Magazine report that dozens of Iranian engineers and 15 Syrian officers were killed in a July 23 accident in Syria.
According to the report, cited by Channel 10, the joint Syrian-Iranian team was attempting to mount a chemical warhead on a scud missile when the explosion occurred, spreading lethal chemical agents, including sarin nerve gas.
Reports of the accident were circulated at the time, however, no details were released by the Syrian government, and there were no hints of an Iranian connection.
The report comes on the heels of criticism leveled by the Syrains at the United States, accusing it of spreading “false” claims of Syrian nuclear activity and cooperation with North Korea to excuse an alleged Israeli air incursion over the country this month.
According to Global Security.org, Syria is not a signatory of either the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), - an international agreement banning the production, stockpiling or use of chemical weapons, or the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
Syria began developing chemical weapons in 1973, just before the Yom Kipper War. Global Security.org cites the country as having one of the most advanced chemical weapons programs in the Middle East.
Syria’s WMDs
Waterbury Republican-American ^ | September 20, 2007 | Editorial
While Americans fret over Britney’s child-custody troubles, Sally’s “censored” anti-war rant and O.J.’s encounters with Las Vegas police, some very scary and troubling reports are seeping almost unnoticed from the Middle East.
The French news agency AFP and others reported this week that dozens of Iranian weapons engineers and Syrian troops were killed in a July explosion in northern Syria. Jane’s Defense Weekly, a reputable British journal, quoted Syrian military sources as saying “VX and Sarin nerve agents and mustard blister agents” were involved in the explosion, which occurred as engineers were installing a warhead on a Scud missile.
Meanwhile, details are slowly emerging about an Israeli air raid in northeastern Syria. Reports indicate the target was a nuclear-weapons installation being built by Syria in cooperation with North Korea, which is known to have nuclear bombs and know-how. Another possibility is the Israeli raid destroyed conventional weapons intended for Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.
Amid this talk about nuclear and chemical weapons, we couldn’t help but wonder: Where did Syria get them? Jane’s says Damascus has been buying the stuff by the ton from Iran since 2004. That’s frightening enough on its face, but a little hard to swallow because the Israelis have been known to intercept illicit weapons shipments, and they’ve never scored VX, sarin or mustard blister agents, let alone nukes.
Before the Iraq war, every intelligence agency in the world believed Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, but no weapons of mass destruction were found after U.S. and British armies toppled his regime in 2003. At the time, there was speculation and even some evidence that Hussein had trucked the materials across Iraq’s western border to Syria. The possibility the warhead that exploded was one of Hussein’s missing WMDs should not be discounted, especially when one considers that such weapons grow increasingly unstable as they age.
More to the point: If Syria is trying to get nuclear bombs, already has weapons of mass destruction and is mounting them on missiles, and if Iran and North Korea are cooperating in this endeavor, what do the civilized nations of the world intend to do about it?
http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2007/09/21/opinion/285725.txt
"A colleague of famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey, a prolific Ames strain researcher, has been convicted of sedition and sentenced to life in prison. He worked in a program co-sponsored by the American Type Culture Collection and had access to ATCC facilities, as well as facilities of the George Mason University Center for Biodefense. The Center for Biodefense was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Center was run by Dr. Alibek and Dr. Bailey. The bionformatics grad student once had a high security clearance for mathematical support work for the Navy. In the 1990s, Ayman Zawahiri had Ali Mohammed infiltrate the CIA and US Army, and dupe the FBI. He did it all over again with Ali Al-Timimi. If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it."
BTT
"On the tapes, you hear Saddam discussing the assistance of Russia and Brazil in dealing with the United Nations. He laughs off inspections, as his son-in-law who later defects, Hussein Kamil, reports how as late as 1995 their chemical and biological programs were being hidden from the world. They also discuss keeping the ingredients for these weapons separate, so that should they be found, they will be looked at as innocent dual-use items. They were not destroyed in 1991 as the Duelfer Report concludes. There are even indications on the tapes that Iraq may have had a role in the 2001 anthrax attacks...."
"It has been confirmed across the board that 18-wheelers were seen going into Syria before the war, crossing the border soon after Iraqi intelligence replaced the border guards and cleared nearby areas for their passage. There are also eyewitness reports of the trucks going into Syria, and eyewitness reports of their burial in Lebanon."
"The trucks with the weapons were tracked to three locations in Syria and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, currently controlled by the Syrians, Iranians and Hezbollah. Sources I've spoken with that have seen satellite photos of the movements confirm that the WMD in Syria are at military bases, while the ones in Lebanon are buried. A fourth site in Syria, the al-Safir WMD and missile site, should also be looked at. From spring to summer 2002, there was a lot of construction here involving the expansion of underground complexes.
bump
bump
The list has 600 names and titles in three columns. It contains, for example, the names of the important officials who are members of Saddam’s family, such as Uday, and then other high officials, including the 55 American ‘’deck of cards’’ Iraqi officials, some of whom have been apprehended.
Halfway down the middle column is written: ‘’Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan.’’
The story Judge Merritt relates is similar to an account reported in The Weekly Standard last May. Splashed across the front page of the November 16, 2002, edition of Uday Hussein’s Babil newspaper were two “honor” lists, one of which included Aswod (spelled “Aswad”) and identified him as the “official in charge of regime’s contacts with Osama bin Laden’s group and currently the regime’s representative in Pakistan.”
From post #162............above.
Interesting thread, with all you will ever want to know about WMD in Iraq.
Thank you to Psyop for pulling this thread into a valuable resource about WMD.
Salman Pak: The Saddam/Iraq-Al Qaeda connection Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybvc2RcbZKw&feature=related
Salman Pak: Saddam’s Al Qaeda Connection (more details)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cSSKsUOVjE&feature=related
Biopreparat, we believed, was our Manhattan Project.
p.14.
The third floor was home to our "First Department," the unit responsible for maintaining our secret files and all communications with Biopreparat facilities around the country. The only people allowed in, besides security personnel, were Kalinin and myself. It was administered by the KGB.
p.14.
At the height of the U.S. offensive biological weapons program, American scientists restricted themselves to developing armaments that could be countered by antibiotics or vaccines, out of a concern for protecting troops and civilians from potential accidents. The Soviet government decided that the best agents were those for which there was no known cure. This shaped the entire course of our program and thrust us into a never-ending race against the medical profession. Every time a new treatment or vaccine came to light somewhere, we were back in our labs, trying to figure out how to overcome its effects.
p.18.
Trafficking in germs and viruses was legal then, as it is today. In the name of scientific research, our agents purchased strains from university research laboratories and biotech firms around the world with no difficulty. Representatives of Soviet scientific and trade organizations based in Europe, as well as in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, had standing instructions to look out for new or unusual diseases. It was from the United States, for instance, that we obtained Machupo, the virus that causes Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. We picked up Marburg, related to the Ebola virus, from Germany.
The KGB was our most dependable supplier of raw material. They were known within Biopreparat by the code name "Capturing Agency One." Vials arrived in Russia almost every month with exotic fluids, powders, and cultures gathered by our intelligence.
p.18.
The skittish behavior of microorganisms leads many experts to question their effectiveness as weapons. One of the problems has always been to find a reliable means of delivery, one that prevents biological agents from losing virulence when they are dispersed. It is the equivalent of what biologists call a "vector" for the transmittal of disease.
p.20
Over the centuries, armies have often used primitive methods to spread pestilence. The Romans dropped poison into wells to contaminate their enemies' water supplies. The English gave blankets smeared with smallpox to Indians in the eighteenth century during the French and Indian Wars. Confederate troops in the American Civil War left corpses of animals to rot in ponds along the path of Union forces. And during World War II, Japanese planes dropped porcelain bombs containing billions of plague-infected fleas over Manchuria.
p.20
The most effective way of contaminating humans is through the air we breathe, but this has always been difficult to achieve. Soviet scientists combined the knowledge gained from postwar bio-chemistry and genetic research with modern industrial techniques to develop what are called "aerosol" weapons—particles suspended in a mist, like the spray of an insecticide, or a fine dust, like talcum powder.
Temperature and weather conditions will determine the success of an aerosol's dissemination. Bacteria and viruses are generally vulnerable to sunlight; ultraviolet light kills them quickly. Heavy rain or snow, wind currents, and humidity impede their effectiveness.
Such obstacles complicate the planning of a biological attack, but they are not insurmountable. A bioweaponeer will know to strike at dusk, during periods when a blanket of cool air covers a warmer layer over the ground—a weather condition called an inversion, which keeps particles from being blown away by wind currents. We packed our biological agents in small melon-sized metal balls, called bomblets, set to explode several miles upwind from the target city. Meticulous calculation would be required to hit several cities at the same time with maximum effectiveness, but a single attack launched from a plane or from a single sprayer perched on a rooftop requires minimal skill.
pp.20-21
Tularemia is a debilitating illness, rife among wild animals and common in the Rocky Mountains, California, Oklahoma, parts of eastern Europe, and Siberia. It is a hardy organism, capable of surviving for weeks, sometimes months, in decaying animal corpses. Tularemia is primarily transmitted to humans by ticks, mosquitoes, and wild rabbits, though squirrels, sheep, cats, and dogs have also been identified as carriers. While highly infectious, it almost never spreads directly from one person to another.
Victims can be laid up for weeks with chills, nausea, headaches, and fever. If left untreated, symptoms usually last two to four weeks, but they can continue for months. Francisella tularensis is lethal in 30% of untreated cases.
p. 25.
The first victims of tularemia were German panzer troops, who fell ill in such large numbers during the late summer of 1942 that the Nazi campaign in southern Russia ground to a temporary halt. Thousands of Russian soldiers and civilians living in the Volga region came down with tularemia within a week of the initial Ger- man outbreak. The Soviet high command rushed ten mobile military hospitals into the area, a sign of the extraordinary rise in the number of cases…. Seventy percent of those infected came down with a pneumonic form of the disease, which could only have been caused by purposeful dissemination…. Soviet troops must have sprayed tularemia at the Germans. A sudden change in the direction of the wind, or contaminated rodents passing through the lines, had infected our soldiers and the disease had then spread through the region.
pp.30-31.
The moral argument for using any available weapon against an enemy threatening us with certain annihilation seemed to me irrefutable. I came away from that assignment fascinated by the notion that disease could be used as an instrument of war. I began to read everything I could find about epidemiology and the biological sciences…. Over time, carefully, so as not to draw attention, I managed to find out more through conversations with old-timers who remembered what the records did not, or would not, say. This is how I learned that the Soviet Union's involvement with biological warfare began long before World War II.
pp.31-32.
A year after taking power in 1917, the Bolshevik government plunged into a savage conflict with anti-Communist forces determined to bring down the fledgling workers' state. Red and White armies clashed from Siberia to the Crimean Peninsula, and by the time hostilities ended in 1921, as many as ten million people had lost their lives. The majority of the deaths did not result from injuries on the battlefield. They were caused by famine and disease.
p.32.
In 1928, the governing Revolutionary Military Council signed a secret decree ordering the transformation of typhus into a battlefield weapon. Three years earlier the fledgling Soviet government had signed an international treaty in Geneva banning the use of poison gas and bacteriological weapons. The weapons program was placed under the control of the GPU (the State Political Directorate), one of the predecessors of the KGB. It would continue to be supervised by state security organs until the early 1950s.
p.33.
The first Soviet facility used for biological warfare research was the Leningrad Military Academy. Small teams of military and GPU scientists began to explore ways of growing significant quantities of typhus rickettsiae….
The biological weapons program soon expanded to harness other diseases. The Leningrad Military Academy sent some of its scientists and equipment one hundred miles north to the White Sea, a barren Arctic expanse flecked with tiny islands used to house political prisoners. By the mid-1930s Solovetsky Island, one of the largest, was the second major site of the Soviet biological warfare program.
At Solovetsky, a Soviet prison which later became the hub of Stalin's "Gulag Archipelago" concentration-camp system, scientists worked with typhus, Q fever, glanders, and melioidosis (an incapacitating disease similar to glanders). Solovetsky's large laboratory compound was built by prison labor. Many of the prisoners may also have been involuntary participants in our earliest experiments with biological agents.
The summary reports compiled by the Ministry of Defense describe several dozen cases of melioidosis from that period. The material I saw was intentionally vague as to whether humans were involved, but the way the case reports were arranged—with nineteen in one group, eleven in another, and twelve in yet another—suggested an irregular pattern not usually associated with animal testing. And the symptoms described could only have been experienced by human subjects. There have been repeated allegations in the West about Soviet germ warfare experiments on humans, but I have seen no other reports to indicate that these took place after the 1930s.
pp.34-35.
…an outbreak of Q fever among German troops on leave in Crimea in 1943 was the result of an attempt to use another one of the biological warfare agents developed by [the Kirov] facility. I was never able to investigate this further, but Q fever was practically unheard of in Russia prior to that outbreak.
p.36.
The Soviet Union's approach to biological warfare took a new turn in September 1945, when Soviet troops in Manchuria overran a Japanese military facility known as Water Purification Unit 731.
Unit 731 operated Japan's secret germ warfare program. Ru- mors of the unit's activities in northern China had been circulating in Russia and the West since the late 1930s, but the details finally emerged through captured documents and the testimony of Japan- ese prisoners of war. The unit, commanded by Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, experimented with anthrax, dysentery, cholera, and plague on U.S., British, and Commonwealth paws. During the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, porcelain canisters of fleas infected with plague and other primitive biological weapons were used in air raids that killed thousands of rural Chinese.
The captured Japanese documents were sent to Moscow, where they made absorbing reading. They included blueprints for biological warfare assembly plants, far larger and more complex than our own. Japan's program had been organized like a small industry, with a central production facility fed by continuous research and development.
Stalin ordered his most trusted aide, the sadistic KGB chief Lavrenty Beria, to match and if possible surpass what the Japanese had accomplished. In 1946, a year after the war ended, a new army biological research complex was established at Sverdlovsk. Construction engineers followed the designs laid out in the captured Japanese blueprints.
pp.36-37.
Smirnov was an impassioned advocate of biological weapons. He believed that they would dominate the battlefield of the future. A physician who had served briefly under Stalin as minister of health, he transformed the program into a strategic arm of the military and remained a dominating presence in the Soviet biological warfare program for the next twenty years. Smirnov worked so swiftly that Defense Minister Marshal Georgi Zhukov could announce in 1956 that Moscow was capable of deploying biological as well as chemical weapons in the next war—an announcement that set off a flurry of new offensive research in the West. Few Soviet citizens were aware of it.
p.37.
Scientists at the agriculture ministry developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease and rinderpest for use against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and ornithosis and psittacosis to strike down chickens. Like anti-personnel biological weapons, these agents were designed to be sprayed from tanks attached to Ilyushin bombers and flown low over a target area along a straight line for hundreds of miles.
This "line source" method of dissemination could cover large stretches of farmland. Even if only a few animals were successfully infected, the contagious nature of the organisms ensured that the disease would wipe out agricultural activity over a wide area in a matter of months.
Many of the ministry's facilities were installed in the centers of towns and cities, to keep their military connection camouflaged. This suggests how little those who ruled our lives worried about our health.
Across the street from the apartment block where I grew up in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), the former capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan, a large, rusting factory served as a makeshift playground for children in the neighborhood. It was a fantastic world of hulking machinery and cavernous tunnels, made all the more alluring by the large Keep Out signs posted conspicuously on the property. We would crawl through the fence on afternoons after school and, shifting through piles of metal, would occasionally stumble on odd-smelling canisters, painted in army green. Luckily, we never managed to open them.
Many years later, going through some old reports, I discovered that the factory was used by the Ministry of Agriculture until the early 1960’s to make anti-crop and anti-livestock agents. It was called Biokombinat.
p.38.
Lysenko came to national attention in the late 1920s, when he reported a successful experiment breeding winter peas in a remote farm station in Azerbaijan. His cultivation of several generations of plants resistant to cold temperatures led him to conclude that genetic theories about humans were wrong: rather than being a slave of his genes, man was capable of changing his essential traits through exposure to different environmental conditions…. Calling genetics a bourgeois discipline that insulted the proletariat, he emerged as a paragon of the “new” Soviet science based on Marxist materialism. By the late 1940’s Lysenko was a confidant of Stalin…. Dissenting scientists were condemned to prison camps or publicly humiliated.
pp.39-40.
Launched by a secret Brezhnev decree in 1973, the program aimed to modernize existing biological weapons and to develop genetically altered pathogens, resistant to antibiotics and vaccines, which could be turned into powerful weapons for use in intercontinental warfare. The program was called Enzyme.
The 1973 decree led that same year to the founding of Biopreparat. The nation's best biologists, epidemiologists, and biochemists were recruited in an effort that would soon absorb billions of rubles from the state treasury and spawn the most advanced program for genetically engineered weapons in the world.
The Enzyme project focused on tularemia, plague, anthrax, and glanders—all diseases that had been successfully weaponized by our military scientists but whose effects had been undermined by the development of antibiotics. But there were many other agents under review, including viral agents such as smallpox, Marburg, Ebola, Machupo, Junin, and VEE.
The Soviet Union's biowarfare research was concentrated at army factories in the cities of Sverdlovsk, Kirov, and Zagorsk. These were the only sites classified as "hot mode"—sufficiently insulated for work with highly infectious organisms.
Over the next decade, dozens of biological warfare installations disguised as centers of pharmaceutical or medical research were built throughout the country. In Leningrad, the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations was created to develop new techniques and equipment for cultivating pathenogenic agents.
pp.41-42.
When [the Soviet] biological warfare program was operating at its peak level, in the late 1980s, more than sixty thousand people were engaged in research, testing, production, and equipment design throughout the country. This included some thirty thousand Biopreparat employees.
p.43.
Ovchinnikov had rescued Soviet biology from the morass of ideological politics, only to harness it to Soviet militarism. Although his name now graces a prominent Moscow science institute, he is remembered by many of us as the father of our modern biological warfare program. As Ovchinnikov recognized, such a program can only be as good as its scientists. The challenge was to find scientists willing to lead secret lives.
p.44.
Bacteria are cultivated identically whether they are intended for industrial application, weaponization, or vaccination. Working first with harmless microorganisms, we were taught how to make nutrient media, the broths in which they multiply. Making these potions is an art in itself. Bacteria require highly specialized mixtures of proteins, carbohydrates, and salts—often culled from plant or animal extracts—to achieve the most efficient growth rate.
p.53.
Rumyantsev and I built a microbiology lab from scratch. We planned the layout of the room from the sterile working tables to the sinks and water pipes. Gradually unpacking the boxes, we pulled out microscopes, test tubes, ovens, and a collection of equipment gathered from every part of the world. There were U.S. and Japanese fermenters, Czechoslovak reactors, French-made flasks. The bulk of our equipment came from the United States and Great Britain. We owed a lot more to our old allies than anyone could publicly concede. The fact that we could use standard fermenting machinery was a vivid illustration of the dual nature of the tools of our trade.
p.60.
It was a world of invisible perils. One false step, a fumble, an unthinking gesture, could unleash a nightmare. We all knew enough to fear the hazards of the two hot zones, but we were young and felt invincible. We saw ourselves as custodians of a mystery that no one else understood, warriors or high priests of a secret cult whose rituals could not be revealed.
p.63.
The story went public a few months later—In a way. In November 1979, a Russian magazine published by anti-Soviet emigres in what was then West Germany reported that an explosion in a military facility in the southwest section of Sverdlovsk had released a cloud of deadly bacteria the previous April. It claimed that as many as a thousand people had died. Western news agencies picked up the story, quoting U.S. intelligence officials who claimed that the accident was clear evidence of Soviet violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
Moscow denied the reports. On June 12, 1980, a statement published by the official Soviet news agency TASS declared that there had only been a "natural outbreak of anthrax among domestic animals" in the Sverdlovsk region…. This was a lie, of course.
p.72.
On the last Friday of March 1979, a technician in the anthrax drying plant at Compound 19, the biological arms production facility in Sverdlovsk, scribbled a quick note for his supervisor before going home. "Filter clogged so I've removed it. Replacement necessary," the note said.
Compound 19 was the Fifteenth Directorate's busiest production plant. Three shifts operated around the clock, manufacturing a dry anthrax weapon for the Soviet arsenal. It was stressful and dangerous work. The fermented anthrax cultures had to be separated from their liquid base and dried before they could be ground into a fine powder for use in an aerosol form, and there were always spores floating in the air. Workers were given regular vaccinations, but the large filters clamped over the exhaust pipes were all that stood between the anthrax dust and the outside world. After each shift, the big drying machines were shut down briefly for maintenance checks. A clogged air filter was not an unusual occurrence, but it had to be replaced immediately.
Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Chernyshov, supervisor of the afternoon shift that day, was in as much of a hurry to get home as his workers. Under the army's rules, he should have recorded the in- formation about the defective filter in the logbook for the next shift, but perhaps the importance of the technician's note didn't register in his mind, or perhaps he was simply overtired.
When the night shift manager came on duty, he scanned the logbook. Finding nothing unusual, he gave the command to start the machines up again. A fine dust containing anthrax spores and chemical additives swept through the exhaust pipes into the night air.
Several hours passed before a worker noticed that the filter was missing. The shift supervisor shut the machines down at once and ordered a new filter installed. Several senior officers were informed, but no one alerted city officials or Ministry of Defense headquarters in Moscow….
The Soviet Union later claimed that 96 people were stricken with the disease and 66 died. The scientist who was working in the Sverdlovsk facility at the time told me the death toll was 105, but we will probably never know for sure. What is certain is that it was the worst single outbreak of inhalational anthrax on record this century.
There could have been no illusions in Moscow as to the cause of the outbreak. Chernyshov's lapse in judgment was reported as soon as the first deaths occurred….
No one wanted to set off a panic or to alert outsiders. Sverdlovsk residents were informed that the deaths were caused by a truckload of contaminated meat sold on the black market. Printed fliers advised people to stay away from "unofficial" food vendors. More than one hundred stray dogs were rounded up and killed, on the grounds that they represented a danger to public health after having been seen scavenging near markets where the meat was sold. Meanwhile, military sentries were posted in the immediate neighborhood of the plant to keep intruders away, and KGB officers pretending to be doctors visited the homes of victims' families with falsified death certificates.
Whether resident suspected the truth or not, military and KGB control ensured that the city remained orderly.
pp.73-75.
Sverdlovsk's anthrax was the most powerful of the dozens of the strains investigated over the years by army scientists for their weapons potential. It was called Anthrax 836 and had been isolated, ironically, after another accident.
In 1953, a leak from the Kirov bacteriological facility spread anthrax into the city's sewer system. Vladimir Sizov, the army biologist who discovered the strain, came to work for Biopreparat years later and told me the story.
According to Sizov, an unknown quantity of liquid anthrax was accidentally released by a defective reactor at the Kirov plant. Army workers disinfected the sewer system immediately but soon found evidence of anthrax among the rodent population. Disinfections were ordered regularly after that, yet the disease continued to lurk underground for years. In 1956, Sizov found that one of the rodents captured in the Kirov sewers had developed a new strain, more virulent than the original. The army immediately ordered him to cultivate the new strain. It was eventually used as the basis for the weapon we planned to install in the SS-18s targeted on Western cities.
…The Communist Party chairman of Sverdlosk at the time of the accident was Boris Yeltsin, the first leader of post-Soviet Russia.
… The truth about Sverdlovsk, or at least some of it, finally emerged in Russia during an interview granted by Boris Yeltsin to a Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter, published on May 27, 1993.
pp.78-86.
On May 8, 1980, the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been eradicated from the planet. The last naturally occurring case was reported in Somalia in 1977, and no new cases had been detected in three years. The WHO recommended the discontinuation of smallpox immunization programs, observing that there was no longer any need to subject people to even the negligible risk connected with vaccination….
Soon after the WHO announcement, smallpox was included in a list of viral and bacterial weapons targeted for improvement in the 1981-85 Five- Year-Plan.
Where other governments saw a medical victory, the Kremlin perceived a military opportunity. A world no longer protected from smallpox was a world newly vulnerable to the disease. In 1981, Soviet researchers began to explore what the Kremlin hoped would be a better version of a smallpox weapon that had been in our arsenal for decades. The work was at first cursory. Military commanders were reluctant to devote energy and resources to an enterprise that promised no immediate results. The Soviet Union, they reasoned, had already gone further with smallpox weapons than any other country.
pp. 110-111.
In the 1970s, smallpox was considered so important to our biological arsenal that the Soviet military command issued an order to maintain an annual stockpile of twenty tons. The weapons were stored at army facilities in Zagorsk. Annual quotas of smallpox were required as it decayed over time. We never wanted to be caught short.
p.112.
The Five-Year Plan, signed in his characteristic scrawl by Mikhail Gorbachev, outlined the most ambitious program for biological weapons development ever given to our agency. It included a three-hundred-million-ruble viral production plant (then equivalent to four hundred million dollars) at Yoshkar-Ola in the autonomous republic of Mordovia. The plan established a new military facility at Strizhi, near Kirov, for the production of viral and bacterial weapons and, most significantly, it funded the construction of a 630-liter viral reactor to produce smallpox at the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, a facility known within The System as Vector. Our military leaders had decided to concentrate on one of the toughest challenges of bioweaponeering—the transformation of viruses into weapons of war.
Gorbachev's Five-Year Plan-and his generous funding, which would amount to over $1 billion by the end of the decade—allowed us to catch up with and then surpass Western technology.
When I went to Vector in 1987, our new smallpox project was just getting off the ground. The facility, founded by Biopreparat in the early 1970s to specialize in viral research, was located in the small Siberian town of Koltsovo. It had been left to stagnate while we focused on improving our bacterial weapons, but Gorbachev's decree gave it a new lease on life.
pp.117-118.
Sandachiev was determined to protect his employees. He repeated time and again that he would not sacrifice the health of a single worker to the pressure of a deadline. But running a biological weapons plant was not like managing a small research facility. New rules had to be enforced, and there were higher expectations. To keep the country—and our program—safe from exposure, Moscow imposed quarantine conditions on all Vector employees engaged in smallpox research. The staff was confined to special dormitories near the compound and guarded around the clock by security police. In a compromise, we granted them periodic leave to visit their families.
Considering that outsiders might be suspicious if they saw hundreds of people with the distinctive marks of fresh smallpox inoculations on their arms years after the Soviet Union had discontinued all immunization, we decided, after some deliberation, to issue a directive that workers be inoculated on their buttocks. We assumed this part of their anatomy was safe from prying foreign eyes.
…We calculated that the production line in the newly constructed Building 15 at Koltsovo was capable of manufacturing between eighty and one hundred tons of smallpox a year. Parallel to this, a group of arrogant young scientists at Vector were developing genetically altered strains of smallpox, which we soon hoped to include in this production process.
pp.119-122.
A strain of Marburg arrived in the Soviet Union a decade after it was first isolated, during one of our periodic global searches for promising material. It wasn't clear from the records whether we obtained it from the United States or directly from Germany, but it was immediately added to our growing collection of viral warfare agents. We were already investigating a number of microorganisms that weaken blood vessels and cause hemorrhagic fevers, such as Junin from Argentina and Machupo from Bolivia. Marburg quickly proved to have great potential.
p.126.
A virus grown in laboratory conditions is liable to become more virulent when it passes through the live incubator of a human or an animal body. Few were surprised, therefore, when samples of Marburg taken from Ustinov's organs after his autopsy differed slightly from the original strain. Further testing showed that the new variation was much more powerful and stable.
No one needed to debate the next step. Orders went out immediately to replace the old strain with the new, which was called, in a move that the wry Ustinov might have appreciated, "Variant U."
At the end of 1989, a cryptogram from Sandakchiev arrived in my office with the terse announcement that Marburg Variant U had been successfully weaponized. He was asking for permission to test it.
Construction at Vector was running far behind the schedule set out in Gorbachev's last decree, and test chambers were still not ready. There were only three other spots where Marburg could be tested: Omutninsk, Stepnogorsk, and a special bacteriological facility at Obolensk, in the Moscow region. Obolensk had to be ruled out because it was too close to the capital, and Omutninsk was just embarking on tests for a new plague weapon. That left Stepnogorsk….
A brace of bomblets filled with Marburg and secured in metal containers was sent on the long journey by train and truck from Siberia to Kazakhstan, accompanied by scientists and armed guards. It took nearly twenty-seven hours for the shipment to reach Stepnogorsk. Another caravan with twelve monkeys followed shortly afterward….
After testing the weapon in explosive chambers, we applied it to the monkeys. Everyone of the twelve monkeys contracted the virus. They were all dead within three weeks.
In early 1990, Marburg Variant U was ready for approval by the Ministry of Defense.
pp.132-133.
In 1988, a year before congressional hearings into biological warfare began in Washington, Gorbachev signed a decree, prepared by the Military-Industrial Commission, ordering the development of mobile production equipment to keep our weapons assembly lines one step ahead of inspectors.
p.145
We were told at Biopreparat that the Americans and British had agreed to keep the Pasechnik affair quiet in return for a "full" Russian response to the diplomatic demarche. Our response was anything but full, but they kept their side of the bargain. Pasechnik's defection became public only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Why did our rivals cooperate in guarding our secret? Disclosure of the information Pasechnik gave them would have caused us more harm than a dozen Sverdlovsks. After I settled in the United States, a senior official who had served in President Bush's administration told me American and British leaders believed that a public quarrel would endanger progress in other areas of arms control and perhaps weaken Gorbachev. They were also convinced that their covert pressure would force us out of the biological warfare business.
The West's diplomatic tact may have seemed sensible at the time, but it gave us unexpected breathing space. We continued to research and develop new weapons for two more years.
p.152.
Scientists have spent decades trying to manufacture killing agents from the venom of snakes and spiders and the poisonous secretions of plants, fungi, and bacteria. Most nations with biological weapons programs, including the Soviet Union, eventually gave up on harnessing the toxins produced by living organisms. They were considered too difficult to manufacture in the quantities required for modern warfare. In the early 1970s the Soviet government was persuaded to try again, following a remarkable discovery by a group of molecular biologists and immunologists at the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
p.154.
The rabbits all developed high temperatures and symptoms commonly associated with pseudotuberculosis. In one test, several rabbits also displayed signs of another illness. They twitched and then lay still. Their hindquarters had been paralyzed—evidence of myelin toxin.
The test was a success. A single genetically engineered agent had produced symptoms of two different diseases, one of which could not be traced.
The room was absolutely silent. We all recognized the implications of what the scientist had achieved.
A new class of weapons had been found. For the first time, we would be capable of producing weapons based on chemical substances produced naturally by the human body. They could damage the nervous system, alter moods, trigger psychological changes, and even kill. Our heart is regulated by peptides. If present in unusually high doses, these peptides will lead to heart palpitations and, in rare cases, death.
The mood-altering possibilities of regulatory peptides were of particular interest to the KGB—this and the fact that they could not be traced by pathologists. Victims would appear to have died of natural causes. What intelligence service would not be interested in a product capable of killing without a trace?
It was a short step from inserting a gene of myelin toxin into Yersinia pseudotuberculosis to inserting it into Yersinia pestis, or plague. In the process, we would have a new version of one of mankind's oldest biological weapons.
p.164.
The earliest recorded use of Y. pestis in war was in the fourteenth century, when Tatar army conquered Kaffa, in present-day Crimea, by catapulting the bodies of plague victims over the walls of the town. During WWII, leaders of the Japanese bacteriological warfare program turned to plague because an attack could be concealed as a natural outbreak. But there were drawbacks: when they tried to drop bombs filled with plague from aircraft, the explosion killed the bacteria. The commanders finally settled on a more effective method of delivery: they blanketed the target area with billions of plague-infected fleas.
Americans tried to develop a plague weapon but found that its virulence deteriorated quickly. The bacteria lost virulence so rapidly—sometimes in less than thirty minutes—that aerosols were useless. U.S. bioweaponeers eventually lost interest, but we persevered. Plague can be grown easily in a wide range of temperatures and media, and we eventually developed a plague weapon capable of surviving in an aerosol while maintaining its killing capacity. In the city of Kirov, we maintained a quota of twenty tons of plague in our arsenals every year.
p.166.
The myelin toxin report was the last in a series of successes reported that day. Another team had developed a genetically altered strain of anthrax resistant to five antibiotics. And there was a new drug-resistant strain of glanders.
p.167.
In the late 1940s, a powdered version of plague was manufactured for use in a tiny toiletry container, like talcum powder. An assassin could approach a target from behind, spray the lethal powder, and vanish before his victim knew there had been an attack. The assassin would of course have to be vaccinated against plague beforehand to protect him from stray particles.
This device was to be used against Marshal Tito, the Communist partisan who became head of postwar Yugoslavia.
Tito provoked Stalin's anger in 1948 with his plan for a Balkan federation that would dramatically reduce Moscow's control over the region. At the last moment, Stalin decided against assassina- tion. Tito lived to take Yugoslavia down the road of nonalignment and died an old man in 1980.
"Why did Stalin change his mind?" I asked. Butuzov laughed.
"The only person who knows that is Stalin," he said. Laboratory 12 was kept busy during the 1970s. In September 1978, Georgy Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was taken to a hospital in London suffering from a mysterious ailment. Before he died, he casually mentioned that a stranger had grazed him with the tip of an umbrella while walking across Waterloo Bridge. Puzzled doctors were unable to trace the cause of death until a Bulgarian emigre in Paris reported falling sick after a similar scrape with an umbrella. When a second autopsy was performed on Markov, the coroner found the remains of a tiny pellet with traces of ricin, a toxin made from castor beans.
The ricin came from Laboratory 12.
p.173.
One of the principal advantages of biological agents is that they are almost impossible to detect, which complicates the task of tracing the author of a biological attack. This makes them as suitable for terrorism and crimes as for strategic warfare.
Many former KGB intelligence agents have been hired by the Russian mafiya. Some run their own criminal organizations. They would have ready access to the former colleagues and to the techniques and substances we developed in the Soviet era. The “achievements” of the Flute program would command a good price on Russia’s private market.
On August 3, 1995, Ivan Kivelid, chairman of the Russian Business Roundtable, was rushed to a Moscow hospital from his office, where he was suddenly taken ill. His secretary, Zara Ismailova, was brought to the emergency room a few hours later with a similar unexplained illness. The secretary died that night, and Kivelidi the next day.
Kivelidi was an outspoken critic of several high-ranking officials in the Yeltsin government, whom he accused of corrupt dealings. The Business Roundtable was composed of leading bankers and entrepreneurs who had banded together to put an end to mafiya control of the burgeoning private sector. Of the original nine member, only Kivelidi was left. The others had all been murdered in mob-style shootings, joining a list of more than five hundred victims of contract killings in 1995.
p.176.
As part of my duties at Biopreparat I reviewed our budget regularly with Gosplan, the state economic planning agency. Every time I visited the block-long building on Gorky Street, the resources available to us seemed to increase. General Roman Volkov, the balding, scholarly official in charge of funding Ministry of Defense programs, practically begged me to look for ways to spend money.
"I've got three hundred million rubles for you in this year's budget," he told me in 1990. "You still haven't supplied me with programs on which to spend them."
When I suggested civilian medical projects, he brushed me off irritably.
"If you give me more suggestions like that, you'll never get any money," he said.
This made little sense to me. Our health-care system was getting worse every day, and conditions in our hospitals were abysmal. The previous year, Biopreparat had shipped boxes of disposable plastic syringes to medical facilities around the country in response to an AIDS scandal in Elista, a small city on the northern steppes of the Caspian Sea. Two hundred and fifty children at the city's main pediatric hospital had been diagnosed with HIV after having been infected by contaminated syringes. Nurses complained that shortages of equipment and staff prevented them from employing adequate sterilization methods. Stories like these were rife throughout the country.
pp.184-185.
Russia's army is demoralized. The disastrous war in Chechnya exposed the shortcomings of conscript troops, and officers have gone without pay for months at a time. Yet the weakened Russian military machine confronts a greater variety of challenges than it ever faced during the cold war. These include armed separatist movements in the Caucasus, civil wars in central Asia, the spread of Muslim fundamentalism from Iran and Afghanistan, and pressure from a resurgent China. The late-twentieth-century specter of "total war" has been replaced by the growth of ethnic, nationalist, and religious conflicts. Biological weapons can play an important part in such conflicts, often compensating for the weakness or ineffectiveness of conventional forces.
Several months before Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, I was told by a senior officer in the Fifteenth Directorate that the Soviet Union used biological weapons during its protracted struggle with the mujaheddin. He said that at least one attack with glanders took place between 1982 and 1984, and there may have been others. The attack, he claimed, was launched by llyushin-28 planes based in military airfields in southern Russia.
It was a casual remark, but the officer was evidently proud of the operation, and of the fact that he could tell me a secret about a project I knew nothing about.
When I mentioned this conversation during one of my debriefing sessions, an American intelligence official in the room was visibly startled. She told me there had been periodic reports of disease outbreaks among guerrilla groups in Afghanistan during the war. No one had ever come up with an explanation.
I grew more convinced after reading an April 1998 article in Top Secret that disclosed that the army facility in Sverdlovsk had manufactured "anti-machinery" biological weapons in the 1980s for use in Afghanistan. I knew of no projects involving such agents when I became deputy director of Biopreparat, but one of the bacterial strains investigated in the 1970s for its corrosive properties came from a bacterial genus known as Pseudomonas. The source for Top Secret's report could have unwittingly, or intentionally, confused it with glanders, which was then classified as part of the same genus.
p.268.
The services of an ex-Biopreparat scientist would be a bargain at any price. The information he could provide would save months, perhaps years, of costly scientific research for any nation interested in developing, or improving, a biological warfare pro- gram. It is impossible to know how many Russians have been recruited abroad, but there is no doubt that their expertise has been attracting bidders. At least twenty-five former specialists in the Soviet Union's biological warfare program are now in the United States. Many more have gone to Europe and Asia or have simply dropped out of sight. I've heard that several went to Iraq and North Korea. A former colleague, now the director of a Biopreparat institute, told me that five of our scientists are in Iran. The New York Times reported in December 1998 that the Iranian government dispatched a "scientific advisor" attached to the office of the presidency to Moscow to recruit former scientists from our program. In May 1997, more than one hundred scientists from Russian laboratories, including Vector and Obolensk, attended a Biotechnology Trade Fair in Tehran. Sandakchiev told me soon after that Iranians had visited Vector a number of times and were actively promoting scientific exchanges. Last year, Top Secret reported that a Biopreparat official turned up at the Chinese embassy in Moscow to offer his services.
The disastrous economic conditions in Russia have driven many of our brightest scientists and technicians to seek work wherever they can get it. In some labs, scientists haven't been paid for months. I know of one leading researcher who sold flowers on the Arbat Mall in Moscow to feed his family.
pp.271-272.
To our knowledge, none of our satellites in Eastern Europe ran biological weapons programs, though some of our fermenting and drying equipment was manufactured in East Germany. Espionage reports provided evidence of a biowarfare program in Iraq as of 1988 and identified a large biological warfare research complex near Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. In northwestern China, satellite photos detected what appeared to be a large fermenting plant and a biocontainment lab close to a nuclear testing ground. Intelligence sources found evidence of two epidemics of hemorrhagic fever in this area in the late 1980s, where these diseases were previously unknown. Our analysts concluded that they were caused by an accident in a lab where Chinese scientists were weaponizing viral diseases. A "BW related" facility was identified in Germany (in Munster) and two in France, but much slipped by unnoticed by our intelligence gatherers.
p.273.
When Yury Ovchinnikov died in 1987, I joined a group of Biopreparat scientists at his funeral services in Moscow. The conversation eventually turned to Cuba's surprising achievements in genetic engineering. Someone mentioned that Cuban scientists had successfully altered strains of bacteria at a pharmaceutical facility just outside of Havana.
p.273.
The situation in Cuba illustrates the slippery interrelation between Soviet support of scientific programs among our allies and their ability to develop biological weapons. We spent decades building institutes and training scientists in India, Iraq, and Iran. For many years, the Soviet Union organized courses in genetic engineering and molecular biology for scientists from Eastern Europe, Cuba, Libya, India, Iran, and Iraq, among others. Some forty foreign scientists were trained annually. Many of them now head biotechnology programs In their own countries. Some have recruited the services of their former classmates.
In July 1995, Russia opened negotiations with Iraq for the sale of large industrial fermentation vessels and related equipment. The model was one we had used to develop and manufacture bacterial biological weapons. Like Cuba, the Iraqi’s maintained the vessels were intended to grow single-cell protein for cattle feed. What made the deal particularly suspicious was an additional request for exhaust filtration equipment capable of achieving 99.99 percent air purity—a level we used only in our weapons labs.
Negotiations were called off by the time reports of the deal surfaced in the Western press, but a United Nations employee told me Iraq obtained the equipment it needed elsewhere. United Nations Special Commission inspection teams, established after the Gulf War to monitor the dismantlement of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons program, had not been able to find this equipment by the time they were ejected from Iraq in late 1998. Many similar deals have gone ahead undetected.
One of the Russian officials involved in negotiations with Iraq was Vilen Matveyev, formerly of the Fifteenth Directorate and later a senior deputy at Biopreparat. Matveyev specialized in developing weapons-manufacturing equipment. He is still working as a technical adviser to the Russian government.
In 1997 Russia was reported to be negotiating a lucrative deal with Iran for the sale of cultivation equipment including fermenters, reactors, and air purifying machinery. The equipment was similar to that which was offered to Iraq.
pp.275-276.
Nations engaged in chemical or nuclear weapons programs almost invariably add biological weapons to their inventory. This is particularly true in cases when a country is bent on doing everything possible to protect itself against its neighbors. India faces two hostile neighbors on its borders—China and Pakistan—with whom it has fought repeatedly over the last fifty years. Its decision to conduct nuclear tests in May 1988 showed it was willing to defy international opinion for the sake of national security.
p.277.
A report submitted by the US Office of Technological Assessment to hearings at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in late 1995 identified seventeen countries believed to possess biological weapons—Libya, North Korea, South Korea, Iraq, Taiwan, Syria, Israel, Iran, China, Egypt, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Bulgaria, India, South Africa, and Russia. More have joined the list since.
p.277.
Ordinary intelligence and surveillance techniques cannot prove the existence of a biological warfare program. Even the highest resolution satellite imagery can't distinguish between a large pharmaceutical plant and a weapons complex. The only conclusive evidence comes from firsthand information. Western suspicions about the Soviet program were only confirmed with Pasechnik's defection. South Africa's efforts to develop biological assassination agents were first revealed when the program's director testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a government appointed panel investigating the abuses of the apartheid era. It was not until Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected in 1995 that the West came to know the extent of Iraq's germ warfare program. Kamel confirmed that Iraq had begun its program a decade earlier at the Muthanna State Establishment, eighty miles northwest of Baghdad, where researchers were cultivating anthrax, botulinum toxin, ricin, and aflatoxin, a poison that can be found in corn, pistachio nuts, and other crops. By the time the United Nations inspectors identified and destroyed Iraq's principal germ warfare facility at Al Hakun in 1996, Iraq had amassed hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid anthrax and many other pathogens. Iraq is still suspected of harboring germ weapons and continues to resist all attempts to probe further.
Some Western analysts maintain that evidence of biological warfare research is not proof that viable weapons are being produced. They argue that countries with "low-tech" scientific establishments often can't make weapons or delivery systems matching their ambitions. But even the most primitive biological weapons lab can produce enough of an agent to cripple a major city.
pp.277-278.
On March 20, 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. sprayed sarin gas in the Tokyo subway. Twelve people were killed and over fifty-five hundred were injured. Subsequent testimony at the cult leaders' trial revealed that Aum Shinrikyo had tried nine times between 1990 and 1995 to spread botulinum toxin and anthrax in the streets of Tokyo and Yokohama. Seiichi Endo, a onetime graduate student in genetic engineering who headed the cult's "Ministry of Health and Welfare," testified that their delivery methods—spraying the agents from a rooftop or from the back of a van—had proven faulty, and their strains were not sufficiently virulent. But it is not difficult to find better strains….
Six weeks after the Aum Shinrikyo attack, Larry Harris, a member of a white supremacist group in Ohio, ordered three vials of plague from the American Type Culture Collection catalog. R quests must be made on the letterhead of a university or laboratory, so Harris designed his own stationery. The order was being processed when he phoned less than two weeks later to ask why it was taking so long. Company officials grew suspicious—legitimate medical researchers would have known it normally takes more than a month to fill an order—and eventually turned him in.
pp.278-279.
Viruses and bacteria can be obtained from more than fifteen hundred microbe banks around the world. The international scientific community depends on this network for medical research and for the exchange of information vital to the fight against disease. There are few restrictions on the cross-border trade in pathogens.
I was told by American biowarfare experts that Iraq obtained some of its most lethal strains of anthrax from the American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Maryland, one of the world's largest "libraries" of microorganisms. Iraqi scientists, like ours, discovered which strains to order by reviewing American scientific journals. For thirty-five dollars they also picked up strains of tularemia and Venezuelan equine encephalitis once targeted for weaponization at Fort Detrick.
pp.278-279.
Partly as a result of this incident, Congress passed a law in April 1996 requiring germ banks and biotech firms in the United States to check the identity of all prospective buyers. This is a useful deterrent, but it has not closed off opportunities for trade. Whether cultured by state-run organizations, terrorist groups, or crazed individuals, biological weapons have moved from a closely held secret of the cold war to the international marketplace.
p.279.
On December 27, 1998, in Pomona, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, 750 people were quarantined after police received a call claiming that anthrax had been released in the Glass House nightclub. It turned out to be a hoax, but the men and women in the club were quarantined for four hours. This was the last in a series of anthrax hoaxes—more than a dozen over the previous two weeks, the last two weeks of December 1998. How much worse will things be in December 1999?
p.279
Few terrorists will choose to warn us of their activities. A small amount of Marburg or Ebola released in the subway system of Washington, D.C., Boston, or New York, or in an airport, shopping mall, or financial center, could produce hundreds of thousands of victims.
p.281.
In the past twenty years, scientists have created antibiotic- resistant strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, and glanders. Biopreparat research proved that viruses and toxins can be genetically altered to heighten their infectiousness, paving the way for the development of pathogens capable of overcoming existing vaccines. The arsenal of a determined state or terrorist group could include weapons based on tularemia, anthrax, Q fever, epidemic typhus, smallpox, brucellosis, VEE, botulinum toxin, dengue fever, Russian spring-summer encephalitis, Lassa fever, Marburg, Ebola, Bolivian hemorrhagic fever (Machupo), and Argentinean hemorrhagic fever (Junin), to name a few of the diseases studied in our labs. It could also extend to neurological agents, based on chemical substances produced naturally in the human body.
p.281.
It is easier to make a biological weapon than to create an effective system of biological defense. Based on our current level of knowledge, at least seventy different types of bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae, and fungi can be weaponized. We can reliably treat no more than 20 to 30 percent of the diseases they cause.
p.281.
Few Americans are aware that they are living under a state of national emergency relating to weapons of mass destruction. On November 14, 1994, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12938, asserting that the potential use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons by terrorist groups or rogue states represented "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States." The order made it illegal for Americans to help any country or entity to acquire, design, produce, or stockpile chemical or biological weapons and placed the country in a state of emergency. It has been renewed every year since. In 1998, it was amended to include penalties for trafficking in equipment that could indirectly contribute to a foreign germ warfare program.
p.281.
[A] determined state is likely to find ways to circumvent [international rules]. Consider Iraq, where the United Nations Special Commission has been given virtually unlimited authority to monitor every aspect of the disarmament program imposed by the U.N. Security Council since the Gulf War. These measures are far tougher than any contemplated under the ad hoc process and constitute an intrusion into national sovereignty that would not be tolerated by most countries. Yet despite the periodic threat (and implementation) of military strikes, Iraq has defied U.N. inspections at will. How likely are we then to impose a similar degree of compliance on larger and less isolated world powers, such as China, India, or Russia?
In America, the loudest protests have come from commercial biotechnology companies, who argue that open-ended inspections of their labs and production facilities will leave them vulnerable to industrial espionage. Biotechnology is a multi-million-dollar industry. Between 1989 and 1996 the number of firms in the United States developing new-generation drugs soared from 45 to 113. Today's medical, industrial, and agricultural research often involves work with the same pathogens used in the development of weapons.
pp.284-285.
Vaccines work by inducing the creation of antibodies that fight specific diseases. Some are given orally, but most are injected into the muscle to insure maximum efficacy. Vaccines made of live but weakened microorganisms are generally more effective than those made of nonliving cellular or subcellular components. Both types are usually benign, but in rare cases they can trigger significant changes in the blood and endocrine systems. Some have been known to affect the functioning of the heart, lungs, kidneys, and other organs. It is not medically advisable to combine too many different courses of vaccination.
There are currently no known vaccines for brucellosis, glanders, and melioidosis or for many viral diseases, such as Ebola and Marburg. The plague vaccine was found to be ineffective against aerosol dissemination in animal studies. The tularemia vaccine is difficult to culture and potentially dangerous. Of the four possible strains available for viral encephalitis, the first and most potent (a live vaccine) produces adverse reactions in 20 percent of all cases and is ineffective in 20 percent. The second is of restricted effectiveness (it only works against three subtypes of the disease), and the third and fourth are poorly immunogenic and require multiple immunizations. The smallpox vaccine, only available in the United States to lab workers and military personnel, can be administered either before or after infection. It requires periodic boosters and wears out after ten years, though revaccination is required after three years in case of infection. Skin testing is recommended for Q fever and botulinum toxin.
p.286.
Despite American efforts and expenditures, vaccines have limited value for the protection of civilians. Who would be deemed vulnerable? And which agents should they be protected against? A crash program to increase the available doses of smallpox vaccine in the United States (currently seven million) might deter a country or a terrorist group from launching a smallpox attack, but there are plenty of other options. And who would get those seven million doses if several cities are attacked at once? The city of New York alone has a population of over seven million. Will each city have its own stockpile?
p.288.
The discovery of cytokines and other elements of nonspecific immunity represent an important step forward for medicine. Scientists in America have developed a treatment for AIDS that includes interleukin-2, another cytokine, and research into the effects of cytokines on tuberculosis and other diseases is under way in the Netherlands, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Canada. At least eighteen interleukins are well known to scientists today, and each year more are discovered.
Nothing will replace the long-term protection provided by vaccines against specific diseases, but boosting our nonspecific immune system may offer at least temporary protection from pathogenic agents and possibly could go even further. If administered in the crucial first hours after an attack—when authorities are still trying to identify which agent was used and organize a medical response—such a booster could help contain the crisis. It is a long shot, but everything I know about biological weapons tells me that this is far more promising than attempts to rig office buildings and public monuments with detection devices or to stockpile vaccines.
p.290.
On May 20, 1998, I had presented to the U.S. Congress a proposal for developing nonspecific immunological defense against biological weapons. At the time, national efforts were devoted almost exclusively to detection and vaccination—a week later president Clinton would propose a reserve stockpile of vaccines—and this unconventional approach was greeted with widespread skepticism.
p.291.
In helping my adopted country create a new system of defense against the weapons I once made, I often remember Russia, which I loved and continue to love. I want this country to have a different fate. In an interview with a Russian paper, one of my friends called me a betrayer. I am certain he is not alone in thinking this. As I return to this question again and again, I have come to the conclusion that I did not betray Russia so much as it has betrayed its people. As long as it makes heroes of the people who create prohibited weapons, as long as it continues to help foreign dictators who murder civilians and to wage wars against its own people, as long as it trains its physicians and teachers to kill and considers as criminals those who try to speak against this—to call what is immoral by its name—as long as this continues, there can be no hope for a better future. We talk about economic and structural reform, but what is needed in Russia is moral reform, and until that happens, Russia will not change.
p.292.
SARGAT, Iraq, April 4 - Preliminary tests conducted by MSNBC.com indicate that the deadly toxins ricin and botulinum were present on two items found at a camp in a remote mountain region of northern Iraq allegedly used as a terrorist training center by Islamic militants with ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network. The field tests used by MSNBC.com are only a first step in the evidentiary process and are typically followed by more precise laboratory testing that MSNBC.com has not conducted. U.S. intelligence agents were conducting their own tests in the same area and had not yet released their results, according to officials in northern Iraq.
MSNBC.COM CONDUCTED the tests over a two-day period at Sargat, an alleged terrorist training camp a mile from the Iraq-Iran border. MSNBC.com purchased the test kits commercially. The field tests, developed by Osborn Scientific Group in Lakeside, Ariz., are regarded by some experts as very effective and have been used by U.N. weapons inspectors and federal government agents around the Sept. 11, 2001, attack site in New York City.
The Sargat camp, set back in an isolated valley and surrounded by snow-capped peaks, was home to the radical Islamic militant group Ansar al-Islam, which counts among its some 700 followers scores of al-Qaida fighters.
In a Feb. 5 speech to the U.N. Security Council, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell showed a satellite photo of the Sargat camp and described Ansar al-Islam as “teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons.” U.S. officials have repeated the allegations in recent weeks.
In an operation timed to coincide with the war on Iraq, U.S. special operations forces have targeted Ansar al-Islam’s militants in northern Iraq. Hundreds of Islamists, including al-Qaida fighters who took refuge in northern Iraq after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, have been killed.
Although U.S. officials for months have leveled charges that the Ansar al-Islam and al-Qaida militants were producing poisons in northern Iraq, it wasn’t until this week that specialist U.S. teams were able to gain access to the Sargat camp to test for traces of biological and chemical weapons.
Experts believe the Islamic group was producing the substances in the camp. Both toxins can be created from everyday products and simple procedures.
TERRORISTS TEMPTED BY TOXINS *****************************************
And from today's Flopping Aces:
MSNBC Confirms Pre-War Al Queda Camp in Iraq Tests Positive For Bio/Chem weapons
********************EXCERPT**********************
24 Jun 2008
Posted by: Scott @ 6:28 am in Bush Derangement Syndrome, Fanatical Islam, Iraq/Al-Qaeda Connection, Middle East, Moonbats, Politics, Pre-Invasion, Saddam Documents, The Iraqi War, The Shadow Party, WMD, War On Terror Positive test for terror toxins in Iraq Evidence of ricin, botulinum at Islamic militants’ camp
EXCLUSIVE By Preston Mendenhall MSNBC
Now, let’s face it…Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews aren’t gonna change their minds and suddenly face the reality that Saddam’s regime was willing to work with AQ groups, did work with AQ groups and leaders, and the threat of the so-called “Nexus of Evil” connection even existed.
Captured members of Al Queda groups from this same camp claim that they were assisted, trained, supplied, and funded by Saddam’s IIS as well as taking orders from Saddam’s IIS. Captured documents confirm their claims.
Captured regime members confirm their claims. Now even highly anti-war/pro-Democrat MSNBC confirms the claim itself.
Al Queda leaders confirm the claims (Zawahiri and Zarqawi specifically).
Why believe “Bush Lied”? Because it’s easier to believe that the solution to today’s problems can be solved by changing a circle to a dot on a ballot than it is to face the real and scary threat as well as own up to the failures of the past.
Do you doubt there were links between Saddam and Bin Laden? ABC says there were....
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/016745.php
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