- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- The committee oversees the work of the U.S. Export Administration
of the Commerce Department, which licensed the shipments of the dangerous
biological agents.
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- "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."
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- The new Bush administration, he said, claims Hussein
is adding to his bioweapons capability.
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- "If that's the case, then the issue needs discussion
and clarity," Riegle said. "But it's not something anybody wants
to talk about."
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "Some of these people, who went over there as young
able-bodied Americans, are now desperately ill," he said. "Some
of them have died."
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- "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?
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- An unnamed office in Basrah, Iraq, got "West Nile
Fever Virus" from an unnamed U.S. company in 1985, the Senate testimony
shows.
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- 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?"
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Bureau assistant Diana Moore and News researcher Andrew
Bailey contributed to this article.
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- http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20020923/1048504.asp
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