The burden is on them to prove that we gave Iraq anthrax, which that statement by a Democrat congressman does not do.
At the time, Iraq's attitude was "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" and accepted our military aid. After we accidently shot down an Iraqi AirBus, we even were for a period providing Iraq with AWACS surveillance.
However, as signatory to the ban on Biological weapons, we at no time provided Iraq with Anthrax. We may indeed have supplied laboratory equipment that allowed them to grow and refine Anthrax, but this same equipment is also used in medical research.
The biological materials included:
Thiodiglycol, which is used to make mustard gas, was also exported.For more information check out the article, "Anthrax for Export" by William Blum in the April, 1998, issue of The Progressive or his article, The United States vs. Iraq - A Study in Hypocrisy.
One thing I remember from films in high school history class was that the draconian provisions imposed on Germany by the Allies after WWI led to the destruction of their economy and directly to Hitler and WWII. I thought of that many times during the ten year persecution of Iraq by the U.S. following the end of the Gulf War.
Germ culture to grow the anthrax was freely imported from the US military's centre for chemical and biological research at Fort Detrick, Maryland, via civilian laboratories operated by ATCC, the American Type Culture Collection.
American investigators have established that several shipments of biological material, including 21 batches of anthrax , were licensed for export from the US to Iraq between 1985 and 1988. They were sent to the Ministry of Higher Education and the Ministry of Trade in Baghdad.
and
A Nobel laureate who headed a 1994 Pentagon study that dismissed links between chemical and biological weapons and Persian Gulf War illnesses was also a director of a U.S. firm that had earlier exported anthrax and other lethal materials to Iraq before the 1991 conflict, according to federal records.
Renowned geneticist Joshua Lederberg of New York served as chairman of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Persian Gulf War Health Effects. At the time of the 1994 study, Lederberg was also one of 10 directors on the board of American Type Culture Collection, or ATCC.
Newsday has found that the nonprofit Rockville, Md., firm made 70 government-approved shipments of anthrax and other disease-causing pathogens to Iraqi scientists between 1985 and 1989, according to congressional records. Lederberg became a director, an unpaid position, in 1990, a year after the shipments were halted by the Bush administration. Lederberg resigned from ATCC last year.
....ATCC's role as a supplier of anthrax to Iraq became public on Feb. 9, 1994, when Sen. Donald Riegle (D-Mich.) delivered a Senate speech outlining ATCC's shipments and criticizing Commerce Department export controls.
"I think the U.S. government approving export of these materials to a government like that and to someone like Saddam Hussein violates every standard of logic and common sense," Riegle said. By then it had been widely reported that Iraq had inflicted heavy casualties on Iranian troops with chemical weapons since 1981.
The senator noted that ATCC shipped "bacillus anthracis," twice - in May, 1986, and September, 1988. There were also two shipments of clostridium botulinum - a bacteria used to make botulinum toxin - on the same dates. The batches, frozen in tiny vials, were shipped to Baghdad's Ministry of Education.
and
"By 1986, Iraq had proven itself better at the use of chemical weapons than any fighting force in the world," said a former senior U.S. diplomat involved in Iraq. By 1988, Iraq's use of gases had also repeatedly been documented by U.N. specialists. "It was all done with a wink and a nod," said a former U.S. intelligence official. "We knew exactly where this stuff was going, although we bent over backwards to look the other way." Washington knew Iraq was "dumping boatloads" of chemical weapons on Iranian positions, he added.