Początek misji inspektorów rozbrojeniowych w Iraku

[Gość: krzych]

dalej szukajcie igły w stogu siana

[galaxy2099]

O tak, jest to szukanie igly w stogu siana. Ale ta igla napewno istnieje.
W koncu zostala juz dwa razy uzyta : w wojnie z Iranem i przeciw irackim Kurdom w 1991r.


Gość portalu: krzych napisał:

> dalej szukajcie igły w stogu siana

[Gość: Megset]

Nie potrwa nawet 2 tygodni jak znajda. Chyba ze nie beda chcieli
znalezc.

A na igle: Made in USA

[Gość: Mietek]

FOREIGN POLICY
U.S. sent Iraq germs in mid-'80s
By DOUGLAS TURNER
News Washington Bureau Chief
9/23/2002

WASHINGTON - American research companies, with the approval of
two
previous presidential administrations, provided Iraq biological
cultures that could be used for biological weapons, according to
testimony to a U.S. Senate committee eight years ago. West Nile
Virus, E. coli, anthrax and botulism were among the potentially
fatal
biological cultures that a U.S. company sent under U.S.
Commerce
Department licenses after 1985, when Ronald Reagan was president,
according to the Senate testimony.

The Commerce Department under the first Bush administration also
authorized eight shipments of cultures that the Centers for
Disease
Control and Prevention later classified as having "biological
warfare
significance."

Between 1985 and 1989, the Senate testimony shows, Iraq
received at
least 72 U.S. shipments of clones, germs and chemicals ranging
from
substances that could destroy wheat crops, give children and
animals
the bone-deforming disease rickets, to a nerve gas rated a
million
times more lethal than Sarin.

Disclosures about such shipments in the late 1980s not only
highlight
questions about old policies but pose new ones, such as how well
the
American military forces would be protected against such an
arsenal -
if one exists - should the United States invade Iraq.

Testimony on these shipments was offered in 1994 to the Senate
Banking Committee headed by then-Sens. Donald Riegle Jr., D-
Mich.,
and Alfonse M. D'Amato, R-N.Y., who were critics of the
policy. The
testimony, which occurred during hearings that were held about
the
poor health of some returning Gulf War veterans, was brought to
the
attention of The Buffalo News by associates of Riegle.

The committee oversees the work of the U.S. Export
Administration of
the Commerce Department, which licensed the shipments of the
dangerous
biological agents.

"Saddam (Hussein) took full advantage of the arrangement,"
Riegle
said in an interview with The News late last week. "They seemed
to
give him anything he wanted. Even so, it's right out of a
science
fiction movie as to why we would send this kind of stuff to
anybody."

The new Bush administration, he said, claims Hussein is adding
to his
bioweapons capability.

"If that's the case, then the issue needs discussion and
clarity,"
Riegle said. "But it's not something anybody wants to talk
about."

The shipments were sent to Iraq in the late 1980s, when that
country
was engaged in a war with Iran, and Presidents Reagan and George
Bush
were trying to diminish the influence of a nation that took
Americans
hostages a decade earlier and was still aiding anti-Israeli
terrorists.

"Iraq was considered an ally of the U.S. in the 1980s," said
Nancy
Wysocki, vice president for public relations for one of the U.S.
organizations that provided the materials to Hussein's regime.

"All these (shipments) were properly licensed by the government,
otherwise they would not have been sent," said Wysocki, who
works for
American Type Culture Collection, Manassas, Va., a nonprofit
bioinformatics firm.

The shipments not only raise serious questions about the wisdom
of
former administrations, Riegle said, but also questions about
what
steps the Defense Department is taking to protect American
military
personnel against Saddam's biological arsenal in the event of an
invasion.

Riegle said there are 100,000 names on a national registry of
gulf
veterans who have reported illnesses they believe stem from their
tours of duty there.

"Some of these people, who went over there as young able-bodied
Americans, are now desperately ill," he said. "Some of them have
died."

"One of the obvious questions for today is: How has our Defense
Department adjusted to this threat to our own troops?" he
said. "How
might this potential war proceed differently so that we don't
have the
same outcome?

"How would our troops be protected? What kind of sensors do we
have
now? In the Gulf War, the battlefield sensors went off tens of
thousands of times. The Defense Department says they were false
alarms."

U.S. bioinformatics firms in the 1980s received requests from
a wide
variety of Iraqi agencies, all claiming the materials were
intended
for civilian research purposes.

The congressional testimony from 1994 cites an American Type
shipment
in 1985 to the Iraq Ministry of Higher Education of a substance
that
resembles tuberculosis and influenza and causes enlargement of
the
liver and spleen. It can also infect the brain, lungs, heart and
spinal column. The substance is called histoplasma capsulatum.

American Type also provided clones used in the development of
germs
that would kill plants. The material went to the Iraq Atomic
Energy
Commission, which the U.S. government says is a front for
Saddam's
military.

An organization called the State Company for Drug Industries
received
a pneumonia virus, and E. coli, salmonella and staphylcoccus in
August 1987 under U.S. license, according to the Senate
testimony.
The country's Ministry of Trade got 33 batches of deadly germs,
including anthrax and botulism in 1988.

Ten months after the first President Bush was inaugurated in
1988, an
unnamed U.S. firm sent eight substances, including the germ that
causes strep throat, to Iraq's University of Basrah.

An unnamed office in Basrah, Iraq, got "West Nile Fever Virus"
from
an unnamed U.S. company in 1985, the Senate testimony shows.

While there is no proof that the recent outbreak of West Nile
virus
in the United States stemmed from anything Iraq did, Riegle
said, "You
have to ask yourself, might there be a connection?"

Researchers at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies
said American companies were not the only ones that sent anthrax
cultures to Iraq. British firms sold cultures to the University
of
Baghdad that were transferred to the Iraqi military, the Center
for
Strategic and International Studies said. The Swiss also sent
cultures.

The data on American shipments of deadly biological agents to
Iraq
was developed for the Senate Banking Committee in the winter of
1994
by the panel's chief investigator, James Tuite, and other
staffers,
and entered into the committee record May 25, 1994.

The committee was trying to establish that thousands of service
personnel were harmed by exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons
during the
Gulf War, particularly following a U.S. air attack on a
munitions
dump - a theory that the Defense Department and much of official
Washington have always downplayed.

Bureau assistant Diana Moore and News researcher Andrew Bailey
contributed to this article.