Madman Saddam’s Lurking Doomsday Weapon
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax
Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2002
An estimated 500 million people perished of smallpox in the twentieth century. This staggering figure overwhelms the 320 million deaths that resulted from all the century’s catastrophic wars, raging influenza in the 1918 pandemic, and AIDS. Chillingly, experts opine that Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein has the deadly scourge poised as a weapon - in its most virulent and deadly form, "blackpox.”
Opposition Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi recently warned the world: "Saddam has advanced chemical weapons, he has advanced biological weapons, and he has produced and engineered biological weapons which contain a combination of viruses such as smallpox and Ebola [blackpox].”
Chalabi’s revelations to the Western media included the admonition that Saddam is "working very hard ... to position people and to move with biological and chemical terrorism across the important centers of the world.”
Propaganda? Guesswork?
Not according to America’s resident expert, Dr. Ken Alibek, defector and former assistant director of Russia’s intensive bio-warfare program, who says that on his watch Russia and Iraq both were hard at work on a recombinant virus combining smallpox and Ebola. The disease is called blackpox or Ebolapox.
According to Alibek, the resulting contagion is hardy, can be aerosolized, and is 100 percent lethal. Furthermore, there is no known vaccine for prevention and no treatment.
Alibek added grisly details. "In a blackpox infection, the skin does not develop blisters. Instead, the skin becomes dark all over. Blood vessels leak, resulting in severe internal hemorrhaging…. As a weapon, the Ebolapox would give the hemorrhages and high mortality rate of Ebola virus, which would give you a blackpox, plus the very high contagiousness of smallpox.”
There is some potential confusion in literature about blackpox. In addition to the hybrid smallpox-Ebola strain described by Alibek, the term blackpox is also used in association with a massive terror assault of garden-variety smallpox.
As expert Richard Preston told Congress: "There’s a bloody, hemorrhagic form of smallpox, which looks like the crash and bleed-out that happens with Ebola virus. Blistering and bleeding occur inside the body, in the stomach and intestines… This is called blackpox.”
Preston added, "In a military release of smallpox, the victims would be receiving extremely high doses of smallpox, far higher than in a natural outbreak, and we can suspect that many of the victims would be developing blackpox and having smallpox bleed-outs. Blackpox is even more contagious than so-called ordinary smallpox.”
Preston summed up with a telling warning: "Many people have the mistaken idea that smallpox is like an exaggerated form of chicken pox. It isn’t ... One human with smallpox can infect 20 or 30 more people.”
In either case of blackpox, one is dealing with a weapon with the potential to give new meaning to man’s historic inhumanity to man. And if there is a person on the planet with the will and instinct to obtain it and use it, that person is Saddam Hussein.
The Past is Prologue
Smallpox aside, United Nations records show that Iraq has in the past churned out more than 22,000 gallons of anthrax and 100,000 gallons of botulinum toxin, one of the world’s most lethal poisons. In 1999, weapons inspectors concluded that Iraq had successfully concealed almost 160 bombs and more than two dozen Scud missile warheads filled with anthrax.
Despite victory in the Gulf War and the subsequent flights of inspections, not even the ubiquitous Scott Ritter maintains that there was ever a clean sweep of the killer arsenal.
And the concealment continues to this day, according to reports. Saddam’s current modus operandi: keeping his bio-weapons and scientists on the go in a train of mobile van laboratories. The plan: use the contagions not to attack directly but to supply to a front terrorist group to launch against the U.S. and Israel.
As to Saddam’s unholy fascination with smallpox as a weapon, the circumstantial evidence abounds.
During the Gulf War, U.S. intelligence officers uncovered that many Iraqi soldiers had been vaccinated against the disease. Because of medical successes against the disease, vaccination is no longer routine. Even in the U.S., the vast majority of the population received immunizations decades ago – immunizations no longer considered safeguards.
As far back as In 1994, U.N. inspector teams discovered an industrial sized freeze-drier at the State Establishment for Marketing Drugs and Medical Appliances. The machine was labeled "Smallpox Machine” in Arabic.
Iraqi officials insisted that the machine was not for drying the smallpox virus, but for drying the vaccinia virus, a component of smallpox vaccine. The problem, however, with accepting such an explanation is the history of Iraq’s subterfuge when it comes to its special weapons.
For instance, Iraq vehemently denied supporting any kind of germ warfare program until 1995 – and then only after the cat was let out of the bag by Hussein Kamel, Hussein’s brother-in-law, who defected to Jordan with dramatic evidence about Saddam’s sophisticated germ warfare program.
Raw Materials
Russian sources aside, experts say Iraq may have obtained its original supply of the virus from a natural outbreak of the disease that swept Iraq in 1971 and 1972, according to "Smallpox and its Eradication,” a publication of the World Health Organization.
And as Preston explained to Congress, once you have the raw material, the rest is not rocket science:
"Smallpox virus is easy to make in large quantities. I’m not going say exactly how to do it, but basically you can grow it in glass bottles the size of wine bottles. A room full of these bottles constitutes a national biological-weapons laboratory. Virtually any nation can have such a facility, and hide it easily. All you need is a master seed strain and a few Ph.D. scientists and perhaps $200,000 worth of equipment, which can be bought on the open market.” |
