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ANNAPOLIS, Md. - During the anthrax mail attacks in 2001, Bill Paliscak, a gung-ho, hockey-playing postal investigator who had missed 3 days of work in 11 years, removed a filthy filter above a mail-sorting machine to preserve it as evidence. Anthrax-laden dust showered down on him. Skip to next paragraph David Scull for The New York Times Bill Paliscak cannot live at his home until an elevator is installed. Enlarge This Image Agence France-Presse Workers in October 2001 cleaned the Brentwood postal facility in Washington, where employees like Mr. Paliscak were exposed to anthrax. Four days later he began to...

BOSTON, June 1 - A federal initiative as ambitious as the Manhattan Project is needed to protect the nation from infectious diseases, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, said Wednesday in a lecture at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Frist, who studied medicine at Harvard, said the effort would defend against both bioterrorism and diseases that are spread naturally. He said that the United States and the rest of the world were unprepared for a potential pandemic despite signs that emerging viruses like the avian flu are capable of causing sharp losses of life. "Any number of known and...

In 1987, after he was exonerated of corruption charges, former Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan issued the classic plea of the wronged man: "Which office do I go to get my reputation back?" Whichever office it is, Ahmad Chalabi may want to apply there as well. The leader of the Iraqi National Congress has been the most unfairly maligned man on the planet in recent years. If you believe what you read, Chalabi is a con man, a crook and, depending on which day of the week it is, either an American or Iranian stooge. The most damning charge is...

During April 11-12 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the confirmation of John R. Bolton to be U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, a major controversy involved the use of intelligence on alleged Cuban efforts that might lead to biological weapons. Senators dissected in minute detail the drafting of a May 2002 speech that Bolton delivered to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative interest group in Washington, DC, and cleared by members of the intelligence community. According to senators at the hearing, administration officials, recorded testimony by Department of State officials, and a previous Senate Intelligence Committee report, there were...

Terrorists from al-Qaeda have been making chemical and biological weapons in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin said on Tuesday. Speaking at a world conference on bio-terrorism in Lyons that was organized by Interpol, he said that “several al-Qaeda cells have been trained in Afghanistan where they have learned to use biological agents including anthrax, ricin and botulism toxins. Later, after the fall of the Taliban regime, those groups continued their experiments in the Pankisi Gorge, on the territory of Georgia, bordering Chechnya,” Interfax news agency reported. The minister added that al-Qaeda terrorists “were able to use...

Rats spread the disease in German troops very quickly. The effect was astonishing: Tulameria, or rabbit fever is reputed to be a record-breaking infection. Humans will most likely conquer the disease in the near future: scientists have recently decoded the genome of Francisella tularensis microbe. Only ten of these bacteria are enough to cause an extremely dangerous disease. Western specialists believe that the microbe can be used as a very effective biological weapon, for it possesses an inhalational capacity. The microbe was discovered in 1911 during an outburst of rabbit fever, when the disease killed a large number ground squirrels...

California defense contractor warns employees following computer theft The Associated Press Feb 3 2005 3:16PM "Thieves stole several computers containing personal information on 45,000 current and former shareholders of defense contractor Science Applications International Corp., which began alerting those people on Thursday. SAIC is one of the nation's largest employee-owned companies. The computers stolen from an SAIC administrative building in San Diego contained the name, Social Security number, address and telephone number of current and former shareholders, including the number of shares bought, held and sold. The company said it had no evidence that the thieves accessed the information or...

THE international pursuit of Osama Bin Laden has not stopped his Al-Qaeda network from seeking to build weapons of mass destruction, senior US officials said last week. Recent intelligence indicates that the group is turning its attention to chemical and biological weapons. Despite severe technical obstacles to the launch of terrorist biowarfare, Washington believes Bin Laden has become convinced that only a WMD attack would be sufficient punishment for the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. “The overwhelming bulk of the evidence we have is that their efforts are focused on biological and chemical weapons,” said John Bolton, undersecretary of...

A trailer found by the U.S. in Northern Iraq last year likely was used by Saddam Hussein's regime as a mobile biological weapons laboratory, and not to fill hydrogen balloons as some in Britain and the U.S. have charged, a view supported by exclusive photos obtained by WorldNetDaily that for the first time offer inside views of the trailer components. Kurdish forces seized the trailer in April 2003 at a checkpoint near Mosul in northern Iraq. At the time, the unit was hailed as the closest U.S. forces may have come to finding a "smoking gun" in their search for...

Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com , show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders. One of the Iraqi memos contains an order from Saddam for his intelligence service to support...

WARSAW, Poland -- Terrorists may have been close to obtaining munitions containing the deadly nerve agent cyclosarin that Polish soldiers recovered last month in Iraq, the head of Poland's military intelligence said Friday. Polish troops had been searching for munitions as part of their regular mission in south-central Iraq when they were told by an informant in May that terrorists had made a bid to buy the chemical weapons, which date back to Saddam Hussein's war with Iran in the 1980s, Gen. Marek Dukaczewski told reporters in Warsaw. "We were mortified by the information that terrorists were looking for these...

The Defense Department continues to work with Russia, former Soviet states, and other countries to prevent the proliferation of deadly weapons of mass destruction and to keep them out of terrorists' hands, a senior DoD official told a Senate Armed Services Committee panel last week. "Keeping Russia's bio-weapons technology, pathogen collections and expertise out of terrorist hands strengthens U.S. national security," Lisa Bronson, deputy undersecretary of defense for technology security policy and counter proliferation, noted in March 10 testimony before the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Congress passed the Soviet...

Is the federal government's expansion of biodefense research paving the way for the bioweapons of the future? It has been called a modern-day Manhattan Project—a spending spree so vast and rapid that it might change the face of biological science. In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government is funding a massive new biodefense research effort, redirecting up to $10 billion toward projects related to biological weapons such as anthrax. The Pentagon's budget for chemical and biological defense has doubled; high-security nuclear-weapons labs have begun conducting genetic research on dangerous pathogens; universities are receiving government funding to build high-tech...

Information From Iraqi Relayed By Foreign Agency, CIA Notes The Bush administration's prewar assertion that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of mobile labs that could produce bioweapons rested largely on information from an Iraqi defector working with another government who was never interviewed by U.S. intelligence officers, according to current and former senior intelligence officials and congressional experts who have studied classified documents. In his presentation before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said "firsthand descriptions" of the mobile bioweapons fleet had come from an Iraqi chemical engineer who had defected and...

The U.S. Relationship With Saddam--Fantasy vs. Reality It is an article of faith among certain members of the left that "we helped to create Saddam." What does this mean exactly? What is the U.S. being accused of and why are the alleged U.S. sins so great? Today, I review the lengthy and complicated history of the U.S. relationship with Saddam Hussein. Did we help to arm Saddam? Not really, while some U.S. arms sales were made to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war, U.S. conventional arms sales pale in comparison to those of other countries, particularly those of the U.S.S.R., France...

Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants Overview Coalition forces have uncovered the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program. * Kurdish forces in late April 2003 took into custody a specialized tractor-trailer near Mosul and subsequently turned it over to US military control.  * The US military discovered a second mobile facility equipped to produce BW agent in early May at the al-Kindi Research, Testing, Development, and Engineering facility in Mosul.  Although this second trailer appears to have been looted, the remaining equipment, including the fermentor, is in a configuration similar to the first...

<p>President Bush should insist his commission investigating the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies answer this question: What did we know about Saddam's weather balloon program, and when did we know it?</p> <p>This is not a facetious suggestion.</p> <p>Mr. Bush's decision to name a commission came after the highly respected David Kay -- who resigned as director of the Iraq Survey Group, saying he didn't believe Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction -- told the Senate Armed Services Committee an outside investigation was needed.</p>

Bio-Chemical Weapons & Saddam: A History. In recent months there has been a great deal of bad information going around in the argument over whether we should attack Iraq, and whether Iraq is a threat to us. Some of that bad information is simple ignorance concerning chemical and biological warfare, and some is deliberate dis-information. Among those charges are that we (1) sold Saddam chemical and biological weapons, (2) equipped his army, (3) helped him in his war with Iraq. These charges are specious but start with a germ of fact. These “facts” are always twisted, blown out of proportion...

<p>WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A key member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday the United States has no defense against threats to release biological weapons inside airplanes except to cancel suspect flights.</p> <p>Asked about reports that a biological or chemical agent might be used in an attack on a U.S.-bound airline, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, said the United States would have no way to counter such moves.</p>

'Ministers saw categoric WMD evidence' Press Association Sunday February 1, 2004 3:08 PM The Government has seen "categoric" evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, a Cabinet minister has insisted. Leader of the House of Commons Peter Hain said he and other ministers, including Tony Blair, had seen intelligence showing the ousted dictator had chemical and biological weapons. He also said weapons inspectors had uncovered evidence of WMD programmes, secret laboratories and "chemical and biological weapons ventures". The Government is facing mounting calls for an investigation of the intelligence that led Britain to war. The demands have escalated...