Mine didn't refer to a Reed Irvine report.
Rumsfeld notwithstanding, there has never been any question that suppliers like American Culture Depository, under contract from the CDC, shipped anthrax cultures (among others) to Iraq in the eighties.
However, this was the kind of exchange conducted routinely with agricultural colleges and public health authorities in scores of nations.
Anybody that asserts "the U.S. provided Iraq with bioweapons" fails to recognize that a research sample is far removed from a production-run of weaponized spores. It is akin to claiming that "the U.S. provided Japan with the bombs they dropped on Pearl Harbor", simply because we sold the Japanese scrap iron.
...Anybody that asserts "the U.S. provided Iraq with bioweapons" fails to recognize that a research sample is far removed from a production-run of weaponized spores. It is akin to claiming that "the U.S. provided Japan with the bombs they dropped on Pearl Harbor", simply because we sold the Japanese scrap iron.
I do understand and thank you for your sources. My point was validated when a small group of folks on this board debunked the point of Irvine's column in less than an hour.
Irvine put forward an equally incomplete and wrong facing article a few months back on BioPort, the DOD's Anthrax vaccine source. Besides simple info available from BioPort's website, many factual articles appeared in my local paper, the Lansing State Journal. He didn't bother to use any sources except the one questioning why Adm. Crowe, who supported Clinton after he retired from the JCS, had a stake in the sole supplier which benefited from the increased orders from the Clinton DOD. Plenty of sources exist describing the public bidding process by the State of Michigan for the labs. Other articles point out the heavy political battle over selling the labs, so acute it scared off all the major drug companies. Irvine ignored all of this quickly found material to come to an incomplete and error filled idea about Crowe's group that bought the Labs.