[Newspoetry] How many times do we have to shoot ourselves in the foot?

[Robert Porter]

Yes, it's an entire article.  But it's not that long, and I think 
it's well worth the time it'll take you to read it:

Published on Tuesday, October 1, 2002 by the Associated Press

Records Show US Sent Biological Weapons Germs to Iraq
by Matt Kelley

WASHINGTON -- Iraq's bioweapons program that President Bush wants to 
eradicate got its start with help from Uncle Sam two decades ago, 
according to government records getting new scrutiny in light of the 
discussion of war against Iraq.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent samples directly 
to several Iraqi sites that U.N. weapons inspectors determined were 
part of  Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program, CDC and 
congressional records from the early 1990s show. Iraq had ordered the 
samples, claiming it needed them for legitimate medical research.

The CDC and a biological sample company, the American Type Culture 
Collection, sent strains of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons, 
including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and the 
germs that cause gas gangrene, the records show. Iraq also got 
samples of other deadly
pathogens, including the West Nile virus.

The transfers came in the 1980s, when the United States supported 
Iraq in its war against Iran. They were detailed in a 1994 Senate 
Banking Committee report and a 1995 follow-up letter from the CDC to 
the Senate. The exports were legal at the time and approved under a 
program administered by the Commerce Department.

"I don't think it would be accurate to say the United States 
government deliberately provided seed stocks to the Iraqis' 
biological weapons programs," said Jonathan Tucker, a former U.N. 
biological weapons inspector. "But they did deliver samples that Iraq 
said had a legitimate public health purpose, which I think was naive 
to believe, even at the time."

The disclosures put the United States in the uncomfortable position 
of possibly having provided the key ingredients of the weapons 
America is considering waging war to destroy, said Sen. Robert Byrd, 
D-W.Va. Byrd entered the documents into the Congressional Record this 
month.

Byrd asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the germ 
transfers at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Byrd 
noted that Rumsfeld met Saddam in 1983, when Rumsfeld was President 
Reagan's Middle East envoy. "Are we, in fact, now facing the 
possibility of reaping what we have sown?"Byrd asked Rumsfeld after 
reading parts of a Newsweek article on the transfers.

"I have never heard anything like what you've read, I have no 
knowledge of it whatsoever, and I doubt it," Rumsfeld said. He later 
said he would ask the Defense Department and other government 
agencies to search their records for evidence of the transfers.

Invoices included in the documents read like shopping lists for 
biological weapons programs. One 1986 shipment from the 
Virginia-based American Type Culture Collection included three 
strains of anthrax, six strains of the bacteria that make botulinum 
toxin and three strains of the bacteria that cause gas gangrene. Iraq 
later admitted to the United Nations that it had made weapons out of 
all
three.

The company sent the bacteria to the University of Baghdad, which 
U.N. inspectors concluded had been used as a front to acquire samples 
for Iraq's biological weapons program. The CDC, meanwhile, sent 
shipments of germs to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and other 
agencies involved in Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. It 
sent samples in 1986 of botulinum toxin and botulinum toxoid - used 
to make vaccines against botulinum toxin - directly to the Iraqi 
chemical and biological weapons complex at al-Muthanna, the records 
show.

Botulinum toxin is the paralyzing poison that causes botulism. Having 
a vaccine to the toxin would be useful for anyone working with it, 
such as biological weapons researchers or soldiers who might be 
exposed to the deadly poison, Tucker said. The CDC also sent samples 
of a strain of West Nile virus to an Iraqi microbiologist at a 
university in the southern city of Basra in 1985, the records show.

The documents are available at:
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_cr/s092002.html
© 2002 The Associated Press