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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (47133)	9/26/2002 9:03:54 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The FBI is convinced that one man is responsible but so far hasn't been able to make the case against him. If he was guilty I would have thought they would have had a ton of evidence by now. LSU last week decided to fire Hatfill from his job helping to train emergency responders to bioterrorism attacks but said that decision did not reflect any comment about his innocence or guilt. The Justice Department had sent LSU a memo the day before Hatfill was suspended, saying it would revoke funding for any program with which Hatfill was associated. The program for which Hatfill was hired to work was primarily funded by the Justice Department. American bureaucracy is typically incredibly unfair to any suspect. The guy should be suspended with pay if his ability to the job is any doubt. Innocent until proven guilty. Whats he supposed to do to pay the bills in the mean time? Just grow thinner?? If he is innocent I hope he sues someone. There were the incidents in Boca Raton too. Lots of unexplained happenings. cbsnews.com Some of the hijackers, including Alhaznawi, lived and attended flight school near American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Fla., where the first victim of the anthrax attacks worked. Some of the hijackers also rented apartments from a real estate agent who was the wife of an editor of The Sun, a publication of American Media, the Times points out. They did find Anthrax there. But Assistant FBI Director John Collingwood played down the possible anthrax connection Saturday. "This was fully investigated and widely vetted among multiple agencies several months ago," he said in a written statement. "Exhaustive testing did not support that anthrax was present anywhere the hijackers had been. While we always welcome new information, nothing new has, in fact, developed." It's all very weird still.

To: Ilaine who wrote (47133)	10/2/2002 3:40:26 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

it's generally accepted that the anthrax came from a US lab and was probably stolen or possibly home grown Is it possible that Iraqi Anthrax is the same as USA Anthrax?? Message 18060117 The infections in Florida are coincidental. cbsnews.com i.e. the authorities have a handy little scape goat in the form of Hatfill, and he is guilty until proven innocent while they are of course blameless? ----------------------------------------------------------- Records Show US Sent Biological Weapons Germs to Iraq by Matt Kelley WASHINGTON –– Iraq's bioweapons program that President Bush wants to eradicate got its start with help from Uncle Sam two decades ago, according to government records getting new scrutiny in light of the discussion of war against Iraq. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent samples directly to several Iraqi sites that U.N. weapons inspectors determined were part of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program, CDC and congressional records from the early 1990s show. Iraq had ordered the samples, claiming it needed them for legitimate medical research. The CDC and a biological sample company, the American Type Culture Collection, sent strains of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons, including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and the germs that cause gas gangrene, the records show. Iraq also got samples of other deadly pathogens, including the West Nile virus. The transfers came in the 1980s, when the United States supported Iraq in its war against Iran. They were detailed in a 1994 Senate Banking Committee report and a 1995 follow-up letter from the CDC to the Senate. The exports were legal at the time and approved under a program administered by the Commerce Department. "I don't think it would be accurate to say the United States government deliberately provided seed stocks to the Iraqis' biological weapons programs," said Jonathan Tucker, a former U.N. biological weapons inspector. "But they did deliver samples that Iraq said had a legitimate public health purpose, which I think was naive to believe, even at the time." The disclosures put the United States in the uncomfortable position of possibly having provided the key ingredients of the weapons America is considering waging war to destroy, said Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. Byrd entered the documents into the Congressional Record this month. Byrd asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the germ transfers at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Byrd noted that Rumsfeld met Saddam in 1983, when Rumsfeld was President Reagan's Middle East envoy. "Are we, in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown?" Byrd asked Rumsfeld after reading parts of a Newsweek article on the transfers. "I have never heard anything like what you've read, I have no knowledge of it whatsoever, and I doubt it," Rumsfeld said. He later said he would ask the Defense Department and other government agencies to search their records for evidence of the transfers. Invoices included in the documents read like shopping lists for biological weapons programs. One 1986 shipment from the Virginia-based American Type Culture Collection included three strains of anthrax, six strains of the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and three strains of the bacteria that cause gas gangrene. Iraq later admitted to the United Nations that it had made weapons out of all three. The company sent the bacteria to the University of Baghdad, which U.N. inspectors concluded had been used as a front to acquire samples for Iraq's biological weapons program. The CDC, meanwhile, sent shipments of germs to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and other agencies involved in Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. It sent samples in 1986 of botulinum toxin and botulinum toxoid – used to make vaccines against botulinum toxin – directly to the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons complex at al-Muthanna, the records show. Botulinum toxin is the paralyzing poison that causes botulism. Having a vaccine to the toxin would be useful for anyone working with it, such as biological weapons researchers or soldiers who might be exposed to the deadly poison, Tucker said. The CDC also sent samsamples of a strain of West Nile virus to an Iraqi microbiologist at a university in the southern city of Basra in 1985, the records show. The documents are available at: fas.org -----------------------------------------------------------