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.
So based on this logic I can safely assume that you felt it was a mistake to force regime change in Nazi Germany? So you feel that although Hitler was bad, he should have been left alone by the U.S. and Britain, even though he attacked first? Wow, I'm amazed. I know you didn't say that word for word, but that's the same logic you just used.
It's well-known that the U.S. propped up the Iraq side in the Iraq-Iran war. There were valid geopolitical reasons for doing this. Now that those reasons are no longer pressing, it behooves us to take Saddam down before he can use those weapons further. In fact we have a responsibility to do so.
Stories like this help reinforce the urgency of the pro-war argument. After all if they are true then we know Saddam has these weapons, not from intelligence, but firsthand, because we gave them to him. All the more reason to go in now and take him out.
Thanks for the posting.
How is that comment off base? The revisionst comments on FR are typically directed towards how the civil war happened. Revisionists of history like to call the civil war the "war of northern aggression." Just making an observation. :)
Is this English? It resembles that language, but it's unclear whether it actually is.
heh heh.
I assume that the reason you know this is that (1) you have access to classified intelligence information regarding the involvement of various regimes with terrorism, and (2) you've personally run various extensively detailed War-game scenarios, and scenario #7 (Attack Iraq Next) came out a loser, to various other scenarios (Attack Syria Next, Cut Ties With Saudi Arabia Next, Surprise Attack On And Takeover of Canada Next, etc.), in the long haul.
I mean, how else could you support a statement such as "there are other regimes far more worthy of being targeted"? How, exactly, do you know? More to the point: what makes you a more qualified judge of who to attack next then the President, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, and people like that? I'm just curious.
I see. And what, then, was the essential meaning of the sentence? Without the pidgin shorthand words and colloquialisms, I mean.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Like I said in an earlier post, arming Iraq had a logic which made sense at the time (i.e. Iran) and we do not now know what the world would have been like had we not armed Iraq and (perhaps as a result) Iran won that war. Perhaps the result would have been even worse and we would now be dealing with other threats. But we will never know.
In any event, these connections you refer to are certainly interesting and worth investigating, but I still don't see how they add up to an antiwar argument. If we gave Saddam weapons, then we know he has those weapons (loosely speaking... some were presumably lost/broken/sold/stolen/buried in the desert somewhere). The more weapons we gave Saddam, the more he now has. If there was a vast intricate secret CIA weapons-funneling operation to get a whole bunch of nasty stuff to Saddam back then, well...
....all the more reason to take him out now, now that we no longer need him as a buffer against Iran. Right?
Neo-cons seem to have put the story in the memory hole and will settle for a United Nations war
I don't see how you can get away with calling it a "United Nations war" when as it stands the United Nations is going to have to be dragged into this thing kicking and screaming.
rather than take their case to the American people.
No need. The American people are already on board. The rest (like hijacking the UN in the cause) is just logistics.
And you have no moral problem with this? Amazing. I would expect this kind of rationalization to come from the mouth of a demented serial killer or communo-fascist dictator, but from a US political hack? Amazing.
Go ahead and hide behind political intrigue and complexity if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy when people are killed in your name. Once upon a time we at least pretended that the moral authority of our government was sourced in the consent of the governed. That means we were an informed electorate and were able to be accountable for the actions of our government. However, what you seem to be advocating is a system of elitist secrecy where death is dealt in our name, but we are expected to just close our eyes and trust the murderers. If that works for you, so be it. It doesn't work for me. I still retain a sense of decency and morality. I still hold some respect for individual rights and justice. War is not a team sport to be played for fun just to show the world how macho we can be.
I agree with you that our dealing of these germs was not sinister, and that leftists are indeed desperately latching onto this story like parasites, but I maintain that it's very ill-advised to allow the dispersal of pathogens throughout the world - for either scientific or military purposes - that could be used as bioweapons, especially to Islamic countries. Hopefully, we've learned our lesson.
A moral problem with what?
With taking out Saddam cuz he has WMDs? In a word, no.
With the fact that we armed him against Iran? Perhaps, but what's done is done and we have to deal with reality as it is, right now. What should we do, gaze at our navels and feel sorry, while Saddam uses those weapons?
I would expect this kind of rationalization to come from the mouth of a demented serial killer or communo-fascist dictator,
What "rationalization"? Saddam has nasty weapons and I advocate taking him out before he can use them. You're the one who's trying to rationalize doing otherwise. Why?
but from a US political hack?
Wow, I didn't know I'd been promoted to the vaunted position of "political hack"... I'm so proud *sniff*
Seriously, what are you talking about? You seem to have completely misunderstood what I wrote.
Saddam's got nasty stuff. Let's take him out. If it's our fault he's got the nasty stuff, that makes it even more imperative for us to take him out (because it's our fault). In fact, that's the "moral" imperative in all this - to undo whatever damage we may have done.
Where's the "morality" in saying "oh well, he's got the nasty stuff but let's leave it in his hands and just hope he doesn't use it anymore"?
Perhaps, or perhaps not. I'd imagine that neither you or I are as informed as Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs concerning this matter. But let's just assume for the sake of argument that you're right, and that other regimes deserve our (military) attention more than Iraq does. What makes you think that these regimes (like Saudi Arabia or Syria) aren't on our hit list as well? Did it ever occur to you that it just may not be strategically viable to go after these "more worthy" regimes first?
Should I ask again? More slowly? More simply?
Once again: How do you know that Iraq isn't a valid Next Target in the war on terror (tm)?
However, what you seem to be advocating is a system of elitist secrecy where death is dealt in our name, but we are expected to just close our eyes and trust the murderers.
I think I'll just go ahead and ask you to please cite the post in which I advocated this. Thanks.
Jolly Rodgers said:Funny that the administration isn't singing the same tune you are. They seem to think that the things you've mentioned aren't sufficient justification............
GOPyouth said: Was I the only one who saw the U.N. speech Bush made 2 weeks ago?
No you weren't. I saw it and here is an excerpt of what he said.
..........Above all, our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions. In the attacks on America a year ago, we saw the destructive intentions of our enemies. This threat hides within many nations, including my own. In cells and camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction, and building new bases for their war against civilization. And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale.
In one place -- in one regime -- we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront.
Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation. And the regime's forces were poised to continue their march to seize other countries and their resources. Had Saddam Hussein been appeased instead of stopped, he would have endangered the peace and stability of the world. Yet this aggression was stopped -- by the might of coalition forces and the will of the United Nations.
To suspend hostilities, to spare himself, Iraq's dictator accepted a series of commitments. The terms were clear, to him and to all. And he agreed to prove he is complying with every one of those obligations.
He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge -- by his deceptions, and by his cruelties -- Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.
In 1991, Security Council Resolution 688 demanded that the Iraqi regime cease at once the repression of its own people, including the systematic repression of minorities -- which the Council said, threatened international peace and security in the region. This demand goes ignored.
Last year, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights found that Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights, and that the regime's repression is all pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents -- and all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state.
In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolutions 686 and 687, demanded that Iraq return all prisoners from Kuwait and other lands. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke its promise. Last year the Secretary General's high-level coordinator for this issue reported that Kuwait, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini, and Omani nationals remain unaccounted for -- more than 600 people. One American pilot is among them.
In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolution 687, demanded that Iraq renounce all involvement with terrorism, and permit no terrorist organizations to operate in Iraq. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke this promise. In violation of Security Council Resolution 1373, Iraq continues to shelter and support terrorist organizations that direct violence against Iran, Israel, and Western governments. Iraqi dissidents abroad are targeted for murder. In 1993, Iraq attempted to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait and a former American President. Iraq's government openly praised the attacks of September the 11th. And al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.
In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.
From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks. U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.
United Nations' inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.
And in 1995, after four years of deception, Iraq finally admitted it had a crash nuclear weapons program prior to the Gulf War. We know now, were it not for that war, the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993.
Today, Iraq continues to withhold important information about its nuclear program -- weapons design, procurement logs, experiment data, an accounting of nuclear materials and documentation of foreign assistance. Iraq employs capable nuclear scientists and technicians. It retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon. Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year. And Iraq's state-controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.
Iraq also possesses a force of Scud-type missiles with ranges beyond the 150 kilometers permitted by the U.N. Work at testing and production facilities shows that Iraq is building more long-range missiles that it can inflict mass death throughout the region.
In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the world imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions were maintained after the war to compel the regime's compliance with Security Council resolutions. In time, Iraq was allowed to use oil revenues to buy food. Saddam Hussein has subverted this program, working around the sanctions to buy missile technology and military materials. He blames the suffering of Iraq's people on the United Nations, even as he uses his oil wealth to build lavish palaces for himself, and to buy arms for his country. By refusing to comply with his own agreements, he bears full guilt for the hunger and misery of innocent Iraqi citizens.
In 1991, Iraq promised U.N. inspectors immediate and unrestricted access to verify Iraq's commitment to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles. Iraq broke this promise, spending seven years deceiving, evading, and harassing U.N. inspectors before ceasing cooperation entirely. Just months after the 1991 cease-fire, the Security Council twice renewed its demand that the Iraqi regime cooperate fully with inspectors, condemning Iraq's serious violations of its obligations. The Security Council again renewed that demand in 1994, and twice more in 1996, deploring Iraq's clear violations of its obligations. The Security Council renewed its demand three more times in 1997, citing flagrant violations; and three more times in 1998, calling Iraq's behavior totally unacceptable. And in 1999, the demand was renewed yet again.
As we meet today, it's been almost four years since the last U.N. inspectors set foot in Iraq, four years for the Iraqi regime to plan, and to build, and to test behind the cloak of secrecy.
We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take.
Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than patient. We've tried sanctions. We've tried the carrot of oil for food, and the stick of coalition military strikes. But Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a -- nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one. We owe it to all our citizens to do everything in our power to prevent that day from coming...........................
Here is a URL to the full speech. UN Speech
Thank you for posting the transcript.
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