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| 'Dr. Germ' |
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Posted on 10/06/2002 7:25:27 AM PDT by Ranger
WASHINGTON - She is a middle-aged mom, a cultured woman with a British accent and doctorate who married well, to a general.
In a rare picture, she has chipmunk cheeks, thick gray-streaked black hair and cradles a handbag as she squints at the camera from under carefully plucked half-moon eyebrows.
Dr. Rihab Taha, 47, is said to be the most dangerous woman in the world.
Dubbed Dr. Germ by the press, Saddam Hussein's biological weapons chief has made enough doses of enough lethal germs to kill every human on the planet. Her handiwork is a large part of the reason America is planning to go to war again.
Taha, widely described as shy and unassuming, has spent most of the last two decades spinning a web of horrors: bugs that make eyes bleed, bacteria that peels skin off the body, viruses that cause fever and pox and lingering, agonizing death.
Little has been heard of Taha since the United Nations Special Commission weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998. She may be there to greet them if they go back in the next few weeks.
Popular student
The product of a well-heeled family, Rihab Rashida Taha graduated from the University of Baghdad and went to England in the late 1970s to study microbiology.
She spent five years studying plant diseases at the University of East Anglia and received her doctorate in tobacco pathogens in 1984.
Though quiet, she was well liked by fellow students and brought back gift-wrapped boxes of Iraqi dates from trips home. She went to the theater, read poetry and never joined political discussions in the lab. As the Iran-Iraq war dragged into its third year, she rented a flat with two Iranian girls.
Her mentor and friend, chief of East Anglia's biology department John Turner, remembered her as shy, hardworking and not markedly gifted.
Taha returned to Baghdad in 1984 and became the protege of top microbiologist Abdul Nassir Hindawi, who was urging the government to relaunch its long-defunct bioweapons program.
With the war against Iran going badly, the government decided it wanted germ weapons and put Taha in charge of making them.
The United States sent Taha her first bugs in April 1986.
Back then, secular Iraq was an ally against Iran's Islamic fundamentalists, and the Reagan administration okayed the mailings of dozens of samples of anthrax, botulinum toxin, E. coli, a gangrene-causing bacteria and West Nile virus.
Five years later, when UN weapons inspectors first arrived in Iraq after the Persian Gulf War, Taha told them only a tiny number of biological weapons had been produced and all had been destroyed.
They didn't believe her, and when they pressured her, she frequently turned to theatrics, bursting into tears, and storming out of rooms, inspectors reported.
(One of these stormy meetings took place in 1993 in New York, where Taha and Iraqi oil minister Amer Rashid spent time discussing UNSCOM (the now-defunct inspection agency) problems with the UN. Romance apparently bloomed, because Rashid subsequently left his wife to marry Taha. They have an 8-year-old daughter.)
In a bold stroke in March 1995, Taha took a group of Western reporters to the al Hakam plant to show them it was just a chicken farm.
But a few weeks later, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, defected and told Western intelligence what Taha and her research counterparts were really up to.
Iraq then gave the UN 600,000 pages of documents outlining its weapons program. It turned out the Iraqis had made thousands of gallons of toxins.
Iraq also admitted that during the Persian Gulf War, 166 bombs and 25 long-range missile warheads had been loaded with biological agents, ready to rain agonizing death on U.S. troops. They were never used because Iraq feared nuclear retaliation.
Still, UNSCOM was skeptical that the whole truth was being told and they didn't believe Iraq's claims that all the biological agents were destroyed in the summer of 1991.
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Leni
Hope a “daisy-cutter” has her and her husbands name on it!
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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(BTW, I am not excusing her participation in the creation of hideous bio-weapons. However, we too have many talented microbiologists in this country engaged in similar activity. The creation of bio-weapons is a waste of talent that could be used to fight cancers and other maladies afflicting humanity, but such is war and the state of affairs between nations...)
The difference is that our talented microbiologists are working on defensive measures to either prevent or minimize the effects of the use of bioterror weapons against us, rather than building/making such weapons for offensive use against others.
And there still are liberals who think "peace through strength" doesn't work...
Good enuff, and I agree.
Any connection to this and the current outbreak of WEST NILE VIRUS
outbreak here are purely conicidental.
Thank heaven for small mercies.
Just a reminder of why weapons inspections are worse than useless. The weapons inspectors found nothing -- in fact, they were ready to give Saddam a clean bill of health -- when Kamel defected and blew the lid off the whole thing.
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