Free Republic

WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (AFP) - Iraq could unleash a biological attack on the West by using unsuspecting people traveling abroad as carriers of deadly germs, a prominent Iraqi defector warned late Thursday. Nuclear scientist Khidhir Hamza, who left Iraq in 1994 and now lives in the United States, told the US Congress he suspected the Iraqi security service, which runs the country's biological weapons program, had already used people traveling abroad to reunite with relatives to infect exiled dissidents with the deadly AIDS virus. "An angle rarely reported -- and I found extensive incidents regarding it when I left...

Media presentations of the investigation into the anthrax-letter attacks that last fall killed five people and sickened over a dozen others have been driven by theories, speculation and intense political partisanship. That situation has arisen due to various political forces' desire to kidnap the case in order to cause the U.S. biodefense program to be shut down, and due to a paucity of reliable, hard knowledge. The human mind hates a vacuum and ignorance is a most hospitable host to rampant speculation. Thus do we find ourselves no better informed on the one-year anniversary of the attacks than we were at...