Posted on 09/25/2002 12:42:34 PM PDT by Jolly Rodgers
U.S. sent Iraq germs in mid-'80s
By DOUGLAS TURNER News Washington Bureau Chief 9/23/2002
WASHINGTON - American research companies, with the approval of two previous presidential administrations, provided Iraq biological cultures that could be used for biological weapons, according to testimony to a U.S. Senate committee eight years ago. West Nile Virus, E. coli, anthrax and botulism were among the potentially fatal biological cultures that a U.S. company sent under U.S. Commerce Department licenses after 1985, when Ronald Reagan was president, according to the Senate testimony.
The Commerce Department under the first Bush administration also authorized eight shipments of cultures that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later classified as having "biological warfare significance."
Between 1985 and 1989, the Senate testimony shows, Iraq received at least 72 U.S. shipments of clones, germs and chemicals ranging from substances that could destroy wheat crops, give children and animals the bone-deforming disease rickets, to a nerve gas rated a million times more lethal than Sarin.
Disclosures about such shipments in the late 1980s not only highlight questions about old policies but pose new ones, such as how well the American military forces would be protected against such an arsenal - if one exists - should the United States invade Iraq.
Testimony on these shipments was offered in 1994 to the Senate Banking Committee headed by then-Sens. Donald Riegle Jr., D-Mich., and Alfonse M. D'Amato, R-N.Y., who were critics of the policy. The testimony, which occurred during hearings that were held about the poor health of some returning Gulf War veterans, was brought to the attention of The Buffalo News by associates of Riegle.
The committee oversees the work of the U.S. Export Administration of the Commerce Department, which licensed the shipments of the dangerous biological agents.
"Saddam (Hussein) took full advantage of the arrangement," Riegle said in an interview with The News late last week. "They seemed to give him anything he wanted. Even so, it's right out of a science fiction movie as to why we would send this kind of stuff to anybody."
The new Bush administration, he said, claims Hussein is adding to his bioweapons capability.
"If that's the case, then the issue needs discussion and clarity," Riegle said. "But it's not something anybody wants to talk about."
The shipments were sent to Iraq in the late 1980s, when that country was engaged in a war with Iran, and Presidents Reagan and George Bush were trying to diminish the influence of a nation that took Americans hostages a decade earlier and was still aiding anti-Israeli terrorists.
"Iraq was considered an ally of the U.S. in the 1980s," said Nancy Wysocki, vice president for public relations for one of the U.S. organizations that provided the materials to Hussein's regime.
"All these (shipments) were properly licensed by the government, otherwise they would not have been sent," said Wysocki, who works for American Type Culture Collection, Manassas, Va., a nonprofit bioinformatics firm.
The shipments not only raise serious questions about the wisdom of former administrations, Riegle said, but also questions about what steps the Defense Department is taking to protect American military personnel against Saddam's biological arsenal in the event of an invasion.
Riegle said there are 100,000 names on a national registry of gulf veterans who have reported illnesses they believe stem from their tours of duty there.
"Some of these people, who went over there as young able-bodied Americans, are now desperately ill," he said. "Some of them have died."
"One of the obvious questions for today is: How has our Defense Department adjusted to this threat to our own troops?" he said. "How might this potential war proceed differently so that we don't have the same outcome?
"How would our troops be protected? What kind of sensors do we have now? In the Gulf War, the battlefield sensors went off tens of thousands of times. The Defense Department says they were false alarms."
U.S. bioinformatics firms in the 1980s received requests from a wide variety of Iraqi agencies, all claiming the materials were intended for civilian research purposes.
The congressional testimony from 1994 cites an American Type shipment in 1985 to the Iraq Ministry of Higher Education of a substance that resembles tuberculosis and influenza and causes enlargement of the liver and spleen. It can also infect the brain, lungs, heart and spinal column. The substance is called histoplasma capsulatum.
American Type also provided clones used in the development of germs that would kill plants. The material went to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission, which the U.S. government says is a front for Saddam's military.
An organization called the State Company for Drug Industries received a pneumonia virus, and E. coli, salmonella and staphylcoccus in August 1987 under U.S. license, according to the Senate testimony. The country's Ministry of Trade got 33 batches of deadly germs, including anthrax and botulism in 1988.
Ten months after the first President Bush was inaugurated in 1988, an unnamed U.S. firm sent eight substances, including the germ that causes strep throat, to Iraq's University of Basrah.
An unnamed office in Basrah, Iraq, got "West Nile Fever Virus" from an unnamed U.S. company in 1985, the Senate testimony shows.
While there is no proof that the recent outbreak of West Nile virus in the United States stemmed from anything Iraq did, Riegle said, "You have to ask yourself, might there be a connection?"
Researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said American companies were not the only ones that sent anthrax cultures to Iraq. British firms sold cultures to the University of Baghdad that were transferred to the Iraqi military, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said. The Swiss also sent cultures.
The data on American shipments of deadly biological agents to Iraq was developed for the Senate Banking Committee in the winter of 1994 by the panel's chief investigator, James Tuite, and other staffers, and entered into the committee record May 25, 1994.
The committee was trying to establish that thousands of service personnel were harmed by exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons during the Gulf War, particularly following a U.S. air attack on a munitions dump - a theory that the Defense Department and much of official Washington have always downplayed.
Strictly routine. In the interest of improved public health, better animal husbandry and more productive agriculture, national and university labs regularly exchange pathogens.
There is nothing sinister involved. Nor is it any news, much less secret. The intention of these exchanges is strictly humanitarian: the saving of lives and boosting food production. The 72 "clones", etc., that were cited doubtless also included varieties of hybrid corn and wheat seeds.
The report is, thus, almost certainly factual. But could also be written about any of a hundred-or-so other countries.
Yeah, that old Constitution is just a joke anyway. Right?
You don't really expect me to believe that, do you? The nature of our relationship with Iraq during that period was of a somewhat different character.
Providing cultures for agricultural research is a far step from genetically altering, weaponizing and manufacturing bio-warfare materials in quantity.
Might as well trash the USA for shipping scrap iron to Japan prior to WW II "because they could build tanks out of it."
Congress has already given him authority to deal with Iraq.
I'm desperate? Hey, I'm not the one running around begging for permission to kill people in order to advance the globalist agenda. Nor am I the one bouncing around trying to suppress the truth every time it pops up.
But that relationship had nothing to do with the routine exchange of these materials. Ag colleges and the Dept of Agriculture routinely exchange anthrax, foot & mouth, etc. cultures with ag schools and the equivalent departments of foreign countries.
It's a fact. You could look it up...
A Populist for Pat? Or an anarchist?
And you think that by protecting the national security of the United States is the definition of "advancing the globalist agenda?" I guess we're just some globalists then, because Bush is upholding the oath he took in January 2001 when he promised to provide for the common defence of this country.
Neither. You've been around long enough to know exactly where my sentiments reside.
Hmmm, let's see, in the 1980s a lab in the US sent a sample of West Nile Virus, a virus endogenous to the Middle East, to a lab in the Middle East, where they have a public health problem with West Nile Virus. And the significance of this is what, exactly?
The significance is that the libs and the peaceniks are desperate to come up with something, however irrelevant and bogus, to muddy the waters, deflect blame from the malfeasance of the Clinton administration, and distract from the clear and present danger Saddam Hussein's megalomania, terrorist sponsorship and pursuit of WMD presents to the world. That's the significance of it, and the *only* significance of it. Sorry to disappoint you, but not everyone is as stupid, intellectully dishonest and ignorant as you are, you know.
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice recently told the BBC, "There is a very powerful moral case for regime change" in Iraq. On Thursday at the United Nations, President Bush made a similar case for an attack on Iraq, calling liberty for Iraqis a "great moral cause" and justifying a regime change on the grounds that "Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980" and "gassed many Iranians and 40 Iraqi villages."
Future U.S. actions against Iraq will be guided by many considerations. We must not deceive ourselves that "morality" is one of them. During the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, the United States was deeply complicit both in Iraq's invasion and its gas attacks.
Over almost a decade, the United States gave Iraq about $5 billion in aid and encouraged allies to provide it with billions worth of arms, including technology reportedly used in plants making mustard and nerve gas. According to a 1994 Senate Committee Report, U.S. firms also supplied Iraq with biological materials, including anthrax, botulism and E. coli bacteria.
On April 14, 1980 -- five months before Iraq's invasion --Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor, signaled U.S. willingness to work with Iraq: "We see no fundamental incompatibility of interests between the United States and Iraq."
According to Abul Hassan Bani-Sadr, then Iran's president, Brzezinski met directly with Saddam Hussein in Jordan two months before the Iraqi assault. Journalist Robert Parry reported that in a secret 1981 memo, Secretary of State Al Haig noted, "It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Fahd." Fhad was Saudi Arabia's crown prince and is now king.
After Iraq's invasion, the United States opposed punitive U.N. sanctions. Within two years it was directly aiding Iraq. "In the spring of 1982, Iraq teetered on the brink of losing its war with Iran," stated Howard Teicher, a staff member to the Reagan National Security Council in a 1995 court affidavit. He said President Reagan decided to do "whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran."
Teicher said Washington provided Iraq with intelligence, advice and billions in credits, and made sure other countries helped supply weapons.
The U.S. military was complicit in Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Kurdish rebels. In August, the New York Times reported that a team of more than 60 officers from the Defense Intelligence Agency "provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war."
In 1986, the Washington Post reported that the CIA had been giving Iraq intelligence it used to "calibrate" its mustard gas attacks. Some 50,000 Iranians were killed or wounded by Iraqi gas warfare.
One CIA officer told the Times that the Pentagon "wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas. It was just another way of killing people -- whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference."
While aiding Iraq, the U.S. was also secretly encouraging Israel to ship arms to Iran, and then began directly supplying the Islamic Republic with U.S. weapons in 1985 as part of the infamous Iran-Contra affair.
In February 1986, Iran captured Iraq's Fao Peninsula, scoring a major victory. In 1987, the New York Times reported that Iraqi officials believed that their defeat "was due to faulty U.S. intelligence." Iraq detected Iranian troop movements, an Iraqi official said, but the United States "kept on telling us that the Iranian attack was not aimed against Fao."
Indeed, the Times reported that "American intelligence agencies provided Iran and Iraq with deliberately distorted or inaccurate intelligence data in recent years." The motive was captured in the headline: "Keeping Either Side From Winning."
By mid-1986, the United States feared Iraq might lose, and its backroom dealings with Iran had collapsed. Washington increased aid to Iraq, encouraged it to "step up its air war" on Iranian cities, and directly intervened in the Gulf by reflagging Kuwaiti tankers and engaging Iranian vessels. It was during this time that a U.S. Navy vessel shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing all 290 passengers aboard in an incident Washington called accidental.
In 1988-89, following an Iraqi gas attack that killed some 5,000 Kurds at Halabja -- an event Bush referred to at the United Nations -- U.S. aid to Iraq actually increased. In 1991, intelligence sources told the Los Angeles Times that American-supplied helicopters had been used in such chemical attacks.
President Bush appears on the road to another war, which in all likelihood will cost the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis. The U.S. record in the Gulf -- including its intimacy with the Hussein regime during the 1980s -- demonstrates that this war's motives will include oil and empire, but certainly not morality.
Bwahahaha. You are the one apologizing for an administration that is begging for the opportunity to attack another nation without moral justification.
Attacking Iraq has to do with him violating a ceasefire agreement he made in 1991. He invaded Kuwait, had their women raped, their men murdered, and attempted to overtake their oil fields. Hussein used biological weapons on his own people. He has repeatedly had his military lock their SAMs onto our planes. He has fired missiles into Israel. He has repeatedly attempted to acquire the materials needed for a nuclear weapon. Need I go on?
Hussein could avoid this by abiding by the 1991 ceasefire agreement.
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