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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Richnorth who wrote (35712)	7/17/2004 12:05:43 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

These charges have been researched on SI long ago: Message 18679253 New York Times reporter Judith Miller does a creditable job of debunking this tired old assertion in her recent book about biological warfare, Germs. amazon.com. Once again, I'll boil it down to the essentials. "We" (meaning the US government, or the US people, or US corporations) did not sell WMD to Iraq. They had, and have, their own bioweapons program, and bought small samples of biologicals from ATCC, a global tissue repository which is located in the US, as well as obtaining some others from various universities. atcc.org The way it was done was that they pretended the samples would be used for legitimate research by universities and other legitimate organizations. Admittedly, in retrospect it is regrettable that these samples were provided to Iraq, but that is all that was done. We did not provide them with bioweapons. They made their own. siliconinvestor.com Before you get all excited, you should know the rest of the story. The bacteria samples were shipped from ATCC, a non-profit science lab which exists solely to receive, catalogue, and transmit biological samples to legitimate researchers. They were also shipped from the Pasteur Institute, and others in Europe, but that's beside the point. At the time, ATCC would ship any biological sample to anyone who requested it using official letterhead, sent a handling fee ($78), after interviewing them via telephone in order to insure that the recipient had sufficient scientific knowledge to actually use the samples for research. The materials sent to Iraq were sent to a university, which is an obvious place for biological research of a benign nature. In retrospect, this was naive, but not an atrocity.