Posted on 10/10/2001 3:00:57 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
As intelligence services try to prove who was behind the New York and Washington attacks, the evidence is mounting that a secret pact was forged between Osama bin Laden, Iraq and Sudan to wage a terrorist war against the US.
The pact, forged in 1998, led to Iraqi experts helping to build a chemical weapons factory especially for bin Laden's terrorists in Sudan and bin Laden and Saddam Hussein's Iraq co-operating to build several others.
In a paper for the US Congress's Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, its chairman Yossef Bodansky said the chemical weapons factory, in Soba, south-west of Sudan's capital Khartoum, was built with Iraqi know-how for Islamic terrorists affiliated mainly with bin Laden.
Bodansky's paper shows a growing brashness of Iraqi involvement in developing chemical weapons for terrorism in Sudan away from the prying eyes of US planes patrolling the no-fly zone in Iraq. It cites two other ultra-modern chemical weapons factories built in Sudan with Iraq expertise.
One, at Kafuri, houses laboratories developing chemical weapons, nerve agents and biological weapons, while another in the Mayu area has production lines for warheads, bombs and canisters utilising chemical agents. They were built three years ago.
Iraq and bin Laden both separately forged links with Sudan, in north Africa, a decade ago.
The Iraqi-Sudanese co-operation began during the 1990 Gulf War when Iraq sent guns equipped with chemical shells, SCUD-B launchers and missiles to Sudan to strike Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The fact these SCUDs originated from Iraq was confirmed in the mid-1990s when the Russians, after being asked to fix them, recognised the serial numbers were from missiles sold to Iraq.
After the Gulf war, Iraq needed to protect its chemical weapons development from US forces patrolling the Gulf.
This escalated in 1997 when Iraq moved weapons it had stored in Yemen to Sudan, and in the same year, weapons of mass destruction.
Bin Laden's involvement with Sudan began in 1991 after he was expelled from Saudi Arabia for his anti-government activities. He spent five years living in Sudan building a complex web of business and financial interests before returning to Afghanistan.
Intelligence reports claim the secret pact between Sudan, Iraq and bin Laden was made in October 1998 and there are numerous reports of meetings between bin Laden and Iraqi officials since.
Some of this evidence emerged in early 1999, when the Paris-based Arab language newspaper Al Watan Al Arabi reported that western diplomatic and security sources had warned in secret reports that Iraq, Sudan and bin Laden were co-operating to build several chemical and germ weapons factories in Sudan financed by bin Laden and supervised by Iraqi experts and technicians.
It said the Baghdad-Khartoum-bin Laden deal was regarded as the biggest act of co-ordination between extremist Islamic organisations and Baghdad "for confronting the US, the common enemy".
Late in 1998, Italian paper Corriere della Sera reported: "Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have sealed a pact."
If you were Saddam, would you want to create your anthrax weapon from an Iraqi source, or a US source? How many microseconds do you think it would take to figure out where the anthrax came from if he used an Iraqi source?
If they are single and living alone, some could already be dead or dying.
``We're not sure what to make of that yet,'' a source close to the inquiry said. ``It may mean absolutely nothing.''
Interesting. Do those newspapers run classified ads? That might have been how those eventual hijackers got their instructions.
That seems much more likely to me, if using the papers as a delivery system were the goal.
But do either the Sun or National Enquirer ever contain inserts? It's been years since I bought one. (and, even then, it was for my wife, I swear...)
If this was a terrorist action I believe that it was an attack on this paper's staff, rather than a more ambitious attack on its customers.
Maybe in response to some story that offended them, or as an experiment, or just a random jab intended to sow fear and confusion.
Who knows, the delivery system they used may have largely failed to perform. Perhaps the entire staff was intended to be contaminated, but -for some reason- were not.
It's too murky to be able to make much more than a guess.
This is very inefficient though manpower and time wise, as opposed to smallpox, truck bombs, etc.
I will make the point again, Iraq used mustard gas and nerve gas against Iran back in the 1980s. I'll reserve final judgement on what exactly this is until those tests are in, but if it were, I'd say look at Iraq.
See post #36!
It goes some way to answering the question as to whether foreign labs were able to get anthrax from the USA.
It would be interesting to know what strains of anthrax they received.
It would be interesting to know which strains the ATCC sent Iraq, but they would have been coded by letters and numbers. IOW, instead of being labeled Ames, Sterne, or Vollum, the samples sent would be numbered, right?
It would also be interesting to know if any of the destroyed vials in Iowa had the exact same identifying numbers as the ones posted in #36. Remember, Iowa didn't even know from which of their samples "Ames" came from...
I mention this only because Ames was chosen purposefully. Whomever is behind the anthrax attacks, they didn't acquire Ames by luck of the draw, or providence, but by knowing exactly where it was and how to get it.
A final thing, here, and I am totally amazed the Brits caught on before the US. In the middle of the 80's, apparently the UK denied the export of anthrax cultures to Iraq, but we still allowed exports of Class III pathogens. Major fumble, I think.
Just thoughts.
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