Posted on 09/16/2001 11:22:59 PM PDT by joinedafterattack
FREEPERS - A MUST READ...Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's son-in-law began a crash military program intended to give Iraq the ability to wipe out Israel's population with germ weapons, an Iraqi general told inspectors. MiG fighters, each carrying 250 gallons of microbes, were to be flown by remote control to release anthrax over Israel. One pilotless plane was flight-tested with simulated germs just before the war began, but the attack was never attempted......(Why do you need a pilotless plane if you have individuals ready to give their life on the plane. This article is a must read.)
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On a January day in 1995, Dr. Rod Barton, a United Nations weapons inspector with a gambler's instinct, decided to try bluffing the Iraqis. Ever since their defeat in the Persian Gulf war, they had steadfastly denied ever making any kind of germ weapons, despite much evidence to the contrary. Barton, a 46-year-old Australian biologist, did not have much in his hand -- just two pieces of paper. The documents proved nothing but were provocative: They showed that in the 1980s, Iraq had bought about 10 tons of nutrients for growing germs, far more than needed for civilian work, from a British company. "That was all I had," Barton recalled in an interview. "Not a full house, just two deuces. So I played them both." Sitting across from four Iraqi generals and scientists in a windowless room near the University of Baghdad, Barton laid the documents on the table. Did these, he asked, help refresh the Iraqis' memories? "They went ashen," he recalled. That meeting marked a turning point. In the months that followed, Iraq dropped its denials and grudgingly admitted that it had run an elaborate program to produce germ weapons, eventually confessing that it had made enough deadly microbes to kill all the people on earth several times over. U.N. officials say these disclosures are still seriously incomplete, as does Washington, which has come to the brink of military conflict with Baghdad over the issue. The U.N. inspectors are now poised to return to Iraq under an accord in which Iraq has promised full cooperation. But the story of the seven-year hunt for secret biological weapons, as recounted by U.S., U.N. and private experts, suggests that the inspectors may have a rocky time. It also shows why they believe that Baghdad is still hiding missiles and germ weapons, and the means to make both. Among the disclosures were these:
-- Just before the gulf war in 1991, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's son-in-law began a crash military program intended to give Iraq the ability to wipe out Israel's population with germ weapons, an Iraqi general told inspectors. MiG fighters, each carrying 250 gallons of microbes, were to be flown by remote control to release anthrax over Israel. One pilotless plane was flight-tested with simulated germs just before the war began, but the attack was never attempted.
-- The locations of more than 150 bombs and warheads built by the Iraqis to dispense germs are a mystery, as are the whereabouts of a dozen special nozzles that Iraq fashioned in the 1980s to spray germsfrom helicopters and aircraft.
-- On nearly all recent missions, inspectors have found undeclared "dual use" items like germ nutrients, growth tanks and concentrators, all of which have legitimate uses but can also make deadly pathogens for biological warfare. Today, despite progress in penetrating Iraqi secrecy, inspectors say they remain uncertain about most of Saddam's facilities to wage biological warfare. The inspectors have found traces of military germs and their seed stocks but none of the thousands of gallons of biological agents that the Iraqis made before the 1991 gulf war. Baghdad says it destroyed the older material but offers no proof. And the inspectors are unsure of the extent to which Iraq has solved the technical challenges of delivering germs to targets -- a problem that bedeviled other states experimenting with biological arms. Finally, the U.N. inspectors have suspicions -- but no proof -- that Baghdad is hiding germs and delivery systems. Their worries are based, in part, on a chilling calculus of missing weapons: The United Nations can account for only 25 of the 157 germ bombs that Iraq has acknowledged making for its air force. And inspectors have no idea of the whereabouts of some 25 germ warheads made for missiles with a range of 400 miles; Baghdad says it destroyed them but, again, offers no proof. Richard Butler, chairman of the U.N. Special Commission charged with eliminating such weapons, said in report after report that the uncertainties are disturbing and legion. He recently told the Security Council that the 639-page document that comprises Iraq's latest "full, final and complete" declaration, its fifth to date, "fails to give a remotely credible account" of Baghdad's long effort to make biological arms.
THE PROLOGUE: Iraq Renounces Germ War, but ...
In the 1950s and '60s, the world's major armed forces experimented widely with germ warfare. Eventually they concluded that the nightmarish weapons were too repugnant and too difficult to use. By 1972, the global threat of biological war seemed to recede as Iraq joined the United States, the Soviet Union and more than 100 other nations in signing the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The accord banned possession of deadly biological agents except for defensive work like research into vaccines, detectors and protective gear. But it was only a pledge. It had no formal means of enforcement and plenty of room for activities that were ambiguous as to whether they were defensive or offensive. Indeed, Iraq's clandestine effort to acquire biological weapons, some inspectors now suspect, actually began shortly after it lent its support to the convention. The allure was great. Unlike nuclear arms, dangerous germs are cheap and easy to come by. Yet their effects on people are potentially just as extensive and grim as those of a nuclear bomb, if slower to act. A microbe that divides every 30 minutes can produce more than a billion descendants in hours, and a bubbling vat of offspring in a week or so. Even a few can be dangerous. Anthrax, normally a disease of cattle and sheep, can kill a human after exposure to less than 10,000 germs, all of which would fit comfortably onthe period at the end of this sentence. Signs of pulmonary anthraxinfection include high fever, labored breathing and vomiting. It is usuallyfatal within two weeks. A vaccine can prevent the infection, and it can be treated with huge doses of antibiotics if caught in its early stages. U.S. military and intelligence officials in the 1980s gathered much evidence that Iraq had developed a large program to build biological arms, with the work focused on anthrax. The West tried to block the effort. In 1988 the Iraqis ordered a 1,325-gallon fermenter to grow germs from a Swiss company, Chemap, and arranged to buy several more. But the United States and its allies persuaded Switzerland to drop the sale, said Dr. Jonathan B. Tucker, a former federal arms-control official who is now a germ-weapon expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. The perceived threat was so great that on the eve of the gulf war, President George Bush warned Saddam that Iraq would pay a "terrible price" if it used biological or chemical weapons. But the intelligence about germ warfare was generally imprecise, and as the U.S.-led coalition prepared for war after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, planners could identify only one potential germ factory in Iraq. That site, Salman Pak, not far from Baghdad, was bombed in the gulf war. Though only one factory was identified, the U.S. military started a crash program to vaccinate as many troops as possible against anthrax and opened a campaign to knock out refrigerated bunkers suspected of holding biological arms. After the war, U.S. officials were embarrassed to find that the suspicious bunkers held only conventional arms, sheltered from the desert sun. After losing the war, Saddam, as a condition of surrender, agreed to declare within 15 days all his nuclear, chemical and biological arms and the long-range missiles needed to deliver them, and then to destroy them all. The United Nations set up a group to make sure he kept his word. Until it verified destruction of the weapons, Iraq was barred from selling oil, virtually its sole source of foreign exchange. Later, the United Nations relented a bit and allowed some oil exports to pay for food and medicine and to make reparations to Kuwait.
THE HUNT: Hide and Seek In the Wilds
Dozens of science detectives, many with military backgrounds, were assembled from several nations after the war to discover the truth about the biological arms. The inspectors, men and women ranging in age from their 20s to their 60s, worked out of dingy, roach-and-rat-infested hotels in Baghdad. Their first foray was to Salman Pak, a town and military center southeast of Baghdad on an isolated bend of the Tigris River. About 30 inspectors with the commission, known as Unscom, went there in August 1991 because the site was considered the heart of Iraq's germ-warfare complex. Sheltered by high walls, air defenses and a military unit, the installation had been bombed during the war, and inspectors were eager for a close-up look at what remained. They were shocked, inspectors recalled. Two weeks before the team's arrival, the Iraqis had leveled much of the site, removing production gear, demolishing two buildings and bulldozing the rubble. Piles of ashes and melted binders suggested that the Iraqis had kindled bonfires of documents. Iraqi officials insisted that research at the site was peaceful, intended to develop vaccines and other protection against dread diseases. But the investigators suspected the site had a military purpose, and eventually found a chamber for dispersing germs on test subjects that was big enough to hold "large primates, including the human primate," one inspector recalled. The Iraqis said the chamber had been used merely for testing the effectiveness of vaccines on such animals as sheep, donkeys, monkeys and dogs. But they had hauled the chamber to a garbage dump some 20 miles from Salman Pak and then crushed it with a bulldozer, apparently trying to keep it out of sight. Tucker, of the Monterey Institute, a former Unscom member, said the inspectors had detected "a pattern of circumstantial evidence" of germ-weapon production at Salman Pak but had found no smoking gun. While at Salman Pak, the Iraqis told the inspectors of another plant at Al Hakam, a site an hour's drive southwest of Baghdad that sprawled across seven square miles of isolated desert. Filling some of the buildings at Al Hakam were mazes of pipes, valves, pumps and stainless-steel tanks. The Iraqis said they were for making animal feed and bacterial pesticide. But the buildings were spaced unusually far apart and surrounded by barbed wire, dummy bunkers, air defenses and many guard posts. Again, the evidence was equivocal. The inspectors suspected much but had no proof. In May 1992, Baghdad finally gave the United Nations its first "full,
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