Posted on 10/22/2001 4:09:59 PM PDT by tallhappy
The following is an article on bio-warfare from an article by Al J Venter in a 1999 issue of Janes Intelligence Review.
Venter has written a number of excellent articles on bio-warafre over the past years. In this article there is a very pertinent paragraph about Iraqi plans to use biological agents to attack the media, including the BBC.
Presently in 2001 major media outlets have been the targets of bio-attack.
Here is the paragraph in question, followed by the entire article, a good read.
Then there was the report in Komsomolskaya Pravda on 25 January 1991, which provided evidence claiming that Iraq had "a network of secret agents in Europe preparing to use chemical and bacteriological bombs". One of the targets was to have been the Dutch port of Rotterdam, described as "one of the world's largest oil refineries". Media targets included the British Broadcasting Corporation. The Cairo newspaper Al Ahbar is quoted in this regard.
Jane's Intelligence Review
March 1, 1999
LENGTH: 3324 words
HEADLINE: Biological warfare: the poor man's atomic bomb
BYLINE: Al Venter
HIGHLIGHT: History records a surprisingly low incidence of biological weaponuse, with only about a hundred or so documented cases this century.However, biological warfare is far from out of fashion with mid- andsmall-sized nations, and, as Al Venter reports, this threat is onthe increase.
BODY:
A SPOKESMAN for the UN Special Commission on Iraq, Ewen Buchanan, recently told JIR in New York that Iraq's refusal to allow the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspectors to do their work "represents a black hole of uncertainty that faces the international community". It is "a serious matter with enormous long-term consequences", he added.
Particularly relevant, said Buchanan, was Baghdad's refusal to co-operate on biological warfare (BW) issues. "That side of UNSCOM's work had not only been the most difficult, but of the four options -nuclear, chemical, biological and long-range missiles - Iraq had been singularly intransigent about what it had done with its biological weapon assets." The lengths to which Baghdad has gone in order to prevent bio-warfare inspections are quite extraordinary, said Buchanan, "and it is this aspect that really worries us."
Still unaccounted for, Buchanan explained, are 30 tons of Iraq's BW agents. The tally includes 19,000 litres of botulinum toxin, 8,500 litres of anthrax and two tons of aflatoxins. While the latter agent is a very potent liver carcinogen, it does not appear to have immediate lethal effects. Iraq is also known to have produced Trichothecene mycotoxins (the by-products of fungal metabolism), which are potent blistering and vomiting agents suspected to have been used by the former Soviet Union (FSU) in a variety of wars including those in Afghanistan, Laos and Kampuchea.
The production of aflatoxins by Iraq remains a mystery. Dr Jonathan Tucker of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies believes that it could have been a red herring or possibly a cover for the production of a lethal toxin such as Clostridium perfringens toxin, which Baghdad has admitted producing only in limited quantities. "But at the present time," he added, "we just don't know."
Significantly, the 30 tons of biological agents remains only a declaration made by Iraq and one that UNSCOM has been unable to verify from the start. Also, UNSCOM told the UN Security Council last June that the quantity of yeast extract (one of the growth agents for making biological agents) known to have been imported for Saddam's bio-warfare programme by the Technical and Scientific Materials Import Division would be sufficient for three to four times more anthrax production than that declared by Iraq.
Concurrently, a comprehensive study on the spread of bioterrorism and biocrimes has been released in Washington DC. The 223-page pre-publication working paper was written by Dr W Seth Carus, a visiting fellow at the National Defense University's Center for Counterproliferation Research and one of the USA's leading authorities on biological warfare. In 1997 he published a paper seminal to the subject: The Threat of Bioterrorism. He warned then that the international community faced a much greater threat today than was previously perceived and noted the greater availability of sophisticated, technical expertise to terrorist groups. In some instances, he maintained, they had the backing of rogue-governments.
In his latest paper, Carus stresses that it is vital that the West should take this threat seriously, and that it would be a grave mistake not to do so. The US perception of the threat, suggests Carus, has been slow, but it is moving ahead and "is reflected in the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici legislation passed on Capitol Hill three years ago to provide training to 120 cities in chemical and biological incident response".
In Carus' work, he has cited more than 110 alleged cases involving biological agents this century. These range from the work of Japan's Unit 731 that conducted a series of germ warfare experiments on Chinese and Allied prisoners-of war in Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s, to more recent events such as the attacks launched by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan in 1994 and 1995. The privately funded Japanese organisation also experimented with anthrax, botulinum toxin, Q fever and even the Ebola virus. Unconfirmed reports have it that their scientists went to Africa to acquire the virus and, certainly, there were Aum Shinrikyo agents in Kikwit (present-day Congo, then Zaire) when the outbreak was at its worst.
He also deals with the controversial issue as to whether the UK labour leader Hugh Gaitskell was murdered by the Russians in 1963 using an obscure pathogen and which MI5 at the time referred to as Lupus disseminata. Unquestionably, Gaitskell's death was unusual. It was also untimely. It seems that it happened not long after he had visited the Soviet Embassy in London.
Subsequently, a KGB defector told MI5 that Soviet Department 13, responsible for 'wet affairs' (intelligence argot for assassinations) had targeted "a senior West European politician". The mistaken consensus in Moscow then was that, with Harold Wilson as Prime Minister, the UK might be more amenable to communist overtures. Curiously, the entire affair is still cloaked in controversy and at one stage the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was brought in to help.
Another subject dealt with is Kenya's Mau Mau, which, in late 1952, was responsible for using a plant toxin to poison livestock. Another is Dark Harvest, a little-known group which took anthrax-contaminated soil from Gruinard Island (where the UK military tested anthrax bombs in the Second World War) and dumped it on to the grounds of Porton Down, the site of the UK's biological and chemical weapons research establishment.
A curious sidelight is the use of BW by the Polish resistance against the Nazis. At least one official claimed that 200 Germans were killed in this way and that they never did establish the cause. One of the tactics used was to coat the glue on envelopes with a toxic carcinogen. The Polish resistance also succeeded in killing horses used for transport in the German war effort using Bacillus anthracis.
The British claim responsibility for killing the arch-Nazi Richard Heydrich. The Special Operations Executive initiated a plot to assassinate the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. Czech agents finally used UK-supplied grenades filled with botulinum toxin which they hurled at Heydrich's car as he was driving near Prague on 27 May 1942. Some of the fragments hit the German and he died a week later of botox poisoning.
Certainly, Dr Carus opens a dozen cans of worms, and the effects are likely to cause a storm of protests once the document is released. He tells, for instance, of an interview with a man who claimed to have been a bomb-maker for the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the anti-Turkish terrorist organisation. The 31-year-old Kurd, Seydo Hazar, claimed that his people were receiving assistance from the Greek Government and that they were considering the use of chemical and biological weapons in the struggle against Ankara.
Dr Carus also mentions 'Zionist' terrorists planning to use biological agents against Egypt and Syria in 1947/8. The Palestinian Arab Higher Committee submitted a 13-page report to the UN at the time, claiming that the 'Zionists intended to use this inhuman weapon against the Arabs in the Middle East in their war of extermination'. The report contended that there was 'some' evidence to link Palestinian Jews to cholera outbreaks in Egypt in November 1947 and in Syria in February 1948. Not long afterwards, it was said that 'Zionists' had contaminated wells in Gaza with a liquid that the Egyptians maintained was 'discovered to contain the germs of dysentery and typhoid'.
Similarly Dr Carus also details Brazil's Indian Protection Service (SPI) "reportedly using biological agents as part of a campaign of genocide against Brazilian aborigines". That is followed by a report in the Jordanian newspaper Al-Bihad on 8 April 1998, in which Asad Bayud At-Tamimi, a leading figure in Islamic Jihad-Jerusalem talked about the possibility of using BW agents at a memorial service for Muhyuddin Ash-Sharif, the bomb-maker who was supposedly murdered by a competing group within Hamas.
Case 1971-01, in contrast, details an attempt on the life of Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In 1992 the Russian newspaper Sovershenno Sektretno claimed that the KGB tried to kill the dissident writer by "rubbing a jelly-like substance on him". Solzhenitsyn became violently ill shortly afterwards and it took him months to recover. For long periods he was barely able to get out of bed or write. It is thought that Ricin, one of the most easily produced plant toxins which is extracted from the bean of the castor plant (and is more powerful than cobra venom), was used in the attack.
Also documented is one of the most infamous incidents of the Cold War involving the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who was murdered by the Bulgarian secret police in September 1978. Once again the agent used was ricin. He was jabbed in the back of his right thigh with an umbrella which had been tipped with a tiny pellet filled with the poison.
Then there was the report in Komsomolskaya Pravda on 25 January 1991, which provided evidence claiming that Iraq had "a network of secret agents in Europe preparing to use chemical and bacteriological bombs". One of the targets was to have been the Dutch port of Rotterdam, described as "one of the world's largest oil refineries". Media targets included the British Broadcasting Corporation. The Cairo newspaper Al Ahbar is quoted in this regard.
Both the Rhodesian and South African armies of the apartheid era come under close scrutiny. In the years prior to the country's settlement in 1980, the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation was involved in numerous 'biological attacks' against members of the Zimbabwe African National Union and Zimbabwe African Peoples' Union: the two insurgent movements that opposed continued white rule. Not only were watering holes, and in one case the Ruya River, contaminated with 'bacteriological agents' which included cholera, but there is also evidence that anthrax was introduced into Matabeleland, resulting in several hundred human deaths.
From his own contacts during the Rhodesian war, the author is aware that cans of tinned food (corned beef, in particular) were systematically contaminated and, in a number of instances, bottles of liquor had tiny holes drilled into them and the contents laced with poison. It is worth noting that Japan has recently had people poisoned in a similar fashion by beverages containing cyanide.
Case 1989-03 provides coverage of the use of BW against South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) guerrilla insurgents by the South African Army in present-day Namibia (then South West Africa). A covert government unit with 300 members, referred to as the Civilian Co-operation Bureau, had blanket authority to operate inside South Africa and in the neighbouring territories. Apparently, water supplies were targeted for contamination with cholera and yellow fever organisms at Dobra, a refugee camp south of the Angolan border. Nothing happened because of the high chlorine content of treated water at the base.
Dr Carus goes into detail about the 500 products produced over a five-year period by South Africa's paramilitary Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL). Among the items 'doctored' were chocolates and cigarettes laced with anthrax, beer contaminated with botulinum toxin and sugar containing an unidentified salmonella bacterial strain. One of those testifying before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Dr Schalk van Rensburg, claimed that they had infected three Russians advising Nelson Mandela's African National Congress with anthrax and that one of them had died.
There are numerous instances where Dr Carus does not have evidence of an actual attack having taken place, but where everything points to the use, or the intention to use, chemical or biological weapons. In a section headed 'Threatened Use (No Known Possession)', he cites several cases including one involving the Western Sahara's Polisario Front making contact with ETA (Spanish Basque Nationalists) to plan the poisoning of the water supplies of Paris, Madrid, Rabat in Morocco and Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital. These attacks were to be in retaliation for the policies of these countries regarding Polisario's guerrilla efforts. Then come details, quoting the Rand-St Andrews Terrorism Chronology, that sometime in 1974 "a Middle East firm was reported to be engaged in the development of means of poisoning the Jordan River by bacteria".
In his original treatise, Dr Carus made the following points regarding the threat of Bioterrorism: "While some terrorist groups had explored biological weapons as a potential tool, only a handful had attempted to actually acquire agents, and even fewer tried to use them. Yet there is strong reason to worry that bioterrorism could become a much greater threat. An increasing number of foreign and domestic groups were adopting the tactic of inflicting mass casualties to achieve ideological, vengeful or 'religious' goals, which were often hard to define or understand."
In this regard, biological weapons are ideal for the purpose. Moreover, terrorist groups could employ such agents to incapacitate rather than kill, and biological agents are useful for the purposes of extortion. The greater availability of expertise and resources at their command could overcome past technological barriers to effectively disperse biological agents, especially if the perpetrators were to gain access to a state-sponsored BW programme. In the USA there is a growing concern that terrorists will use this medium. Already, law enforcement agents have arrested individuals associated with white supremacist and militia groups for acquiring biological agents.
It is significant that almost the entire edition of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published on 6 August last year was devoted to biological warfare and the implications for the Free World. Subjects included the threat of bioweapons, the clinical (and suggested strategies of) recognition of symptoms as well as a host of related issues. Many of the lessons learnt in Iraq are cited. Certainly, it makes for a grim assessment.
Take one example: smallpox. This is a disease which is no longer a threat; the last inoculations, in any country, took place more than a decade ago. Consequently, while, in theory, it should not happen, an outbreak of smallpox today would have an enormously destructive effect. It could affect millions of people everywhere.
In the introductory section in JAMA, three doctors make the point that while most of the nations of the world (including Russia, Iraq and Iran) signed and ratified the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC), there is still no really intrusive international monitoring mechanism in place. The doctors venture that, had there been, the Gulf War might never have happened. They go on: "The events of this decade alone, reveal the challenges confronting arms control negotiators. Russia admitted that the [FSU] had violated the BWC. It did so with impunity because there was no system in place to investigate concerns about suspicious activities." It is true that, even today, Western officials and scientists are still not allowed into a string of establishments in Russia where it is believed that research work into bioweapons goes on.
In Iraq, the resignation of UNSCOM's Scott Ritter apart (see JIR, December 1998), there is another lesson: that the UNSCOM experience challenges the conventional wisdom that intrusive inspections can provide convincing proof of violations and resolve suspicions. Simply put: no measures - or even a combination of measures, to date - have been found to be perfect for detecting violations of the BWC. Clearly, inspection does tend to deter violations and make it more difficult for the proliferators to cheat, but there is still the problem of getting into countries such as Libya, Iran, Syria, North Korea and others to see exactly what is going on. While that situation holds, the USA and several other Western governments fear that the threat of biowarfare is increasing.
Yet Dr Tucker also points to an up-side: "Everyone knows that the BWC Compliance Protocol currently being negotiated in Geneva will not be a panacea, but it will strengthen the treaty (and the associated norm against acquisition and use) and hence is worth pursuing."
The UNSCOM experience has important lessons for negotiators seeking to strengthen the BWC. Iraq successfully deceived, denied and hid from UNSCOM inspectors information concerning its BW programme for four years after the Gulf War and for some time after UN monitoring began in April 1995. Despite comprehensive mandatory declarations, numerous routine and challenge inspections to 80 bio-capable facilities - including breweries, food production plants, pharmaceutical factories and medical laboratories - UN personnel found 'no incriminating evidence that would identify any of the sites as linked to a proscribed biological weapons programme'. Yet as we know now, almost all of it was classified as 'dual use' material which was put to good effect under the noses of UNSCOM personnel, although the New York headquarters disputes this, saying there is no evidence.
The JAMA report, in contrast, is most concerned with the global diffusion of dual-use biotechnology, largely because it is ideally suited to countries with small budgets. Also, biological weapons offer the same potency as nuclear weapons, which could be one of the reasons why Iraq had remained steadfastly in denial mode.
Certainly, in the words of Dr Tucker: 'There are rogue states that might view biological weapons as a useable force-multiplier that can compensate for the weakness of conventional military capa-bilities in the face of a numerically or technologically superior adversary." Israel is especially vulnerable, since just about every country in the region is involved in BW research.
Conversely, Tucker makes a powerful case against the sort of media hype that has come to surround the threat of bioterrorism, particularly the claim that terrorists can wipe out entire cities with aerosol clouds of anthrax and other lethal germs 'delivered by a crop duster'.
In fact, Tucker states that the "difficulty of obtaining sufficiently virulent microbial strains, as well as the significant technical hurdles associated with weaponisation and delivery, makes it extremely unlikely that terrorists could carry out massive attacks that would inflict hundreds of thousands of casualties". He says that part of the confusion has been a misleading tendency in the press and in popular fiction to conflate the capabilities of states such as Iraq and the FSU with those subna- tional groups such as Aum Shinrikyo. According to Tucker: "Although unconventional terrorists such as millennium cults, religious fanatics, racial suprema- cists and deranged individuals may be motivated to inflict mass casualties, very few possess the financial, technical and organisational resources needed to carry out such an attack."
Thus, he concludes: "While the threat of bioterrorism is real, historical experience suggests that it is much more likely to involve small to medium-scale attacks involving tens to hundreds of casualties, along the lines of the 1995 sarin release on the Tokyo subway."
Al J Venter is a JIR special correspondent, based in Washington.
The MO described in this old article where major media would be targetted has played out.
Thanks for the bump.
What we do not have is an attack on major news media. Let's name a few who have not been attacked:
Washington Post
New York Times
Los Angeles Times, any of the "talking heads".
OK, OK, we here in FR don't consider them "major" or "news", but they are considered serious sources by some folks.
What does it mean when the TV folks get their poison letters and the newspaper people don't?
It means that the folks who mounted the attacks don't read English very well! (There is an alternative meaning to the effect that those folks know who their friends are, but I won't include that since it might offend someone)
And if they don't read English very well, and get all their news from network television, they are undoubtedly foreign and mis-informed to a degree the typical FreeRepublic reader cannot even imagine.
Anyhow, thanks for the bump.
Why should we consider any of the rest of the posting if a mistake is made on something as fundamental as that - or is it the case that you guys are like the terrorists - you get all your "news" from television?
Yeah, that must be it - bye!
"It means that the folks who mounted the attacks don't read English very well!"
If I may rain on your hypothesis, you left out several targets: American Media Corp (the tabloids) and the St. Petersburg Times. Plus, didn't the Rio de Janeiro office of the New York Times receive an anthrax letter, too?
Moreover, if "they don't read English very well, and get all their news from network television, they are undoubtedly foreign...", why has CNN escaped infection, thus far?
Or maybe they obtained exclusive coverage rights from the instigator and are maintaining a "professional silence", except for tipping HQ not to open the mail...
Heads up to the FBI, CIA, DOJ, DoD, US State Dept., etc.
Pull your thumbs out, boys.
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