The reason for going to war in Iraq �
Mon Apr 11, 2005 03:17
64.140.158.108
The reason for going to war in Iraq �
http://home.earthlink.net/~platter/articles/pilger-feith-int.html
Transcribed interview between John Pilger and Douglas Feith
The following was transcribed from a Flashpoints broadcast of portions of journalist John Pilger's documentary film Breaking the Silence:
Truth and Lies in the War on Terror
http://pilger.carlton.com/
PILGER: Isn't there a problem for us in the West of honesty about the reason for going to war in Iraq � and that was weapons of mass destruction?
FEITH: I don't think that was a lie. We went to war in large part because of the concern that weapons of mass destruction in the ... in the hands of the Saddam Hussein regime ... a regime that used such weapons ... in particular nerve gas...
PILGER: ... and was supplied by the United States and Britain with these weapons of mass destruction ...
FEITH: No, I don't believe that's accurate.
PILGER: Well, yes they were. Most, most of the weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein weren't built by him. The machine tools and the ingredients for his biological weapons all came from other countries, many of them from this country and Britain.
FEITH: I don't think that's right. I think, I really think that the...
PILGER: Well, it's on the record...
FEITH: Well...
PILGER: ... in the Library of Congress...
FEITH: I think that... I think that the premise of your question is wrong.
[...]
PILGER: Why is it wrong for dictators and terrorists to kill innocent civilians, and right or excusable for the United States to do exactly the same.
FEITH: Well, the United States doesn't do it, and if we did it it would be as reprehensible as... as what the terrorists do.
PILGER: The United States doesn't kill... innocent civilians?
FEITH: No, the United States does not target civilians.
PILGER: Hmm. Those of us on the outside who look at September 11, where 3,000 people died in that tragedy, but then look at the thousands who have died since, wonder about double standards here. Could you address that?
FEITH: I think that the... I think that the... numbers that you're... talking about are... are questionable, so let's... let's leave aside your...
PILGER: Why are they questionable?
FEITH: I... I don't accept your assertion that we've killed thousands of... of innocent people. But... let me get...
PILGER: There's a lot of... There's a lot of studies... and examination of facts on the ground that suggest indeed thousands. I mean in Iraq at the moment... there are studies that are talking about 10,000. But I don't want to get into numbers, but certainly thousands seems a fair figure.
FEITH: I don't... I don't know that that's true, and... and I don't accept the assertion.
[Cut to Dennis Halliday]
DENNIS HALLIDAY: If you ask an American student how many people died in Vietnam, he'll tell you 58,000. In other words they dismissed the 2, 3, maybe 4 million Vietnamese who were killed by the United States and its allies in that war. So this is an ongoing issue. Mr. Powell, Colin Powell, General Colin Powell I think was quoted as having said he's not interested in civilian casualties...
http://home.earthlink.net/~platter/articles/pilger-feith-int.html
================================
Defense Official Says Iraqi Disarmament Inevitable, Not War
... The disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is inevitable, either
through ... said Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, ...
MORE:
=================
This White House Scandal Finally Tips the Scale!
The leak of a CIA operative's name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company,
http://www.apfn.org/LEAK-GATE/CIA_firm.htm
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sent a notice Friday to all White House employees instructing them to turn in copies of numerous documents for the ongoing probe into who leaked the name of a CIA operative to a newspaper columnist.
http://www.apfn.org/LEAK-GATE/notice.htm
From top advisers to junior staff, nearly 2,000 White House employees were ordered to come forward by Tuesday with any documents that might help the criminal investigation into the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity.
http://www.apfn.org/LEAK-GATE/clues.htm
Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (50 U.S.C. 421 et seq.)
(governing disclosures that could expose confidential Government agents)
http://foi.missouri.edu/bushinfopolicies/protection.html
Meet the Press, online at MSNBC
MSNBC - 14 hours ago
... And the WMD Commission has found out things that ... is that the CIA's intelligence on Iraq was faulty ... in the Office of Special Plans, Douglas Feith, came directly ...
CLICK FULL STORY:
Biography - DOUGLAS J. FEITH
... Douglas J. Feith is the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. ... ed., Churchill as Peacemaker; Douglas J. Feith, et al., Israel�s Legitimacy in Law ...
HTTP://www.defenselink.mil/bios/feith_bio.html
Douglas J. Feith is the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. His responsibilities include the formulation of defense planning guidance and forces policy, Department of Defense relations with foreign countries and the Department�s role in U.S. Government interagency policy making.
Before President George W. Bush appointed him in July 2001, Mr. Feith was for fifteen years the managing attorney of the Washington, D.C. law firm of Feith & Zell, P.C.
From March 1984 until September 1986, Mr. Feith served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy.
Before becoming Deputy Assistant Secretary, Mr. Feith served as Special Counsel to Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle.
Mr. Feith transferred to the Pentagon from the National Security Council at the White House, where he worked in 1981-82 as a Middle East specialist.
Mr. Feith's writings on international law and on foreign and defense policy have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The New Republic and elsewhere. He has contributed chapters to a number of books, including James W. Muller, ed., Churchill as Peacemaker; Douglas J. Feith, et al., Israel�s Legitimacy in Law and History; and Uri Ra�anan, et al., eds., Hydra of Carnage: International Linkages of Terrorism.
Mr. Feith holds a J.D. (magna cum laude) from the Georgetown University Law Center and an A.B. (magna cum laude) from Harvard College.
http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/feith_bio.html
Douglas Feith - What has the Pentagon's third man done wrong ...
Of all the revelations that have surfaced about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal so far, the least surprising is that Douglas Feith may be partly ...
HTTP://WWW.slate.msn.com/id/2100899/
Douglas Feith: Portrait of a Neoconservative - by Tom Barry
... Douglas Feith serves as the number three civilian in the George W. Bush ... Web site of the Washington law firm of Feith & Zell, PC, as in Douglas Feith ...
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/barry.php?articleid=3545
Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper
Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60340-2004Jan6.html
BAGHDAD -- Of all Iraq's rocket scientists, none drew warier scrutiny abroad than Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi.
An engineering PhD known for outsized energy and gifts, Tamimi, 47, designed and built a new short-range missile during Iraq's four-year hiatus from United Nations arms inspections. Inspectors who returned in late 2002, enforcing Security Council limits, ruled that the Al Samoud missile's range was not quite short enough. The U.N. team crushed the missiles, bulldozed them into a pit and entombed the wreckage in concrete. In one of three interviews last month, Tamimi said "it was as if they were killing my sons."
But Tamimi had other brainchildren, and these stayed secret. Concealed at some remove from his Karama Co. factory here were concept drawings and computations for a family of much more capable missiles, designed to share parts and features with the openly declared Al Samoud. The largest was meant to fly six times as far.
"This was hidden during the UNMOVIC visits," Tamimi said, referring to inspectors from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. Over a leisurely meal of lamb and sweet tea, he sketched diagrams. "It was forbidden for us to reveal this information," he said.
Tamimi's covert work, which he recounted publicly for the first time in five hours of interviews, offers fresh perspective on the question that led the nation to war. Iraq flouted a legal duty to report the designs. The weapons they depicted, however, did not exist. After years of development -- against significant obstacles -- they might have taken form as nine-ton missiles. In March they fit in Tamimi's pocket, on two digital compact discs.
The nine-month record of arms investigators since the fall of Baghdad includes discoveries of other concealed arms research, most of it less advanced. Iraq's former government engaged in abundant deception about its ambitions and, in some cases, early steps to prepare for development or production. Interviews here -- among Iraqi weaponeers and investigators from the U.S. and British governments -- turned up unreported records, facilities or materials that could have been used in unlawful weapons.
But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.
A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
David Kay, who directs the weapons hunt on behalf of the Bush administration, reported no discoveries last year of finished weapons, bulk agents or ready-to-start production lines. Members of his Iraq Survey Group, in unauthorized interviews, said the group holds out little prospect now of such a find. Kay and his spokesman, who report to Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, declined to be interviewed.
Poxes and Professors
On Dec. 13, as a reporter waited to see the dean of Baghdad University's College of Science, two poker-faced men strode into the anteroom. One was an ex-Marine named Dan, clad in civilian clothes, body armor, a checkered Arab scarf and a bandolier of eight spare magazines for his M-16 rifle. The other identified himself to the receptionist only as Barry.
He asked to see the dean, Abdel Mehdi Taleb, immediately. Dan preceded Barry into Taleb's office, weapon ready, then stood sentry outside.
According to Taleb, Barry asked -- once again -- about the work of immunologist Alice Krikor Melconian. For months, Taleb said, the Americans had sent scientists and intelligence officers to investigate the compact, curly-haired chairman of the university's biotechnology department.
Three Iraqi scientists said U.S. investigators asserted they have reason to believe Melconian ran a covert research facility, location unknown. In July, colleagues said, Melconian emerged from her office with a burly American on each arm and was placed into the back seat of a car with darkened windows. U.S. investigators held her for 10 days in an open-air cell and then released her.
Described by associates as shaken by her arrest, Melconian said she has done no weapons research and knows of no secret labs. "I have never left the university," she said. "I have nothing more to say about this. I do not want to make any more trouble."
Like others on campus, and at a few elite institutes elsewhere, Melconian remains under scrutiny in part because investigators deem her capable of doing dangerous biological research. Investigators said they are casting a wide net at Iraq's "centers of scientific excellence" in an effort to confirm intelligence that is fragmentary and often lacks essential particulars.
Kay's Iraq Survey Group, which has numbered up to 1,400 personnel from the Defense Department, Energy Department national laboratories and intelligence agencies, is looking for biological weapons far more dangerous than those of Iraq's former arsenal. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, published in October 2002, said "chances are even" that Iraqi weaponeers were working with smallpox, one of history's mass killers. It also said Iraq "probably has developed genetically engineered BW agents."
As the Associated Press first reported, a scientific assessment panel known as Team Pox returned home in late July without finding reason to believe Iraq possessed the variola virus, which causes smallpox. Even so, interviews with Iraqi scientists led to a redoubled search for work on animal poxes, harmless to humans but potentially useful as substitutes for smallpox in weapons research.
Rihab Taha, the British-educated biologist known in the west as Dr. Germ, has generally been described by U.S. officials as uncooperative in custody since May 12. But according to one well-informed account of her debriefing, she acknowledged receiving an order from superiors in 1990 to develop a biological weapon based on a virus. That same year, a virologist who worked for her, Hazem Ali, commenced research on camelpox.
If truthful and correctly recounted, Taha's statement exposed a long-standing lie. Iraq's government denied offensive viral research. One analyst familiar with the debriefing report, declining to be identified by name or nationality, said investigators believe that Taha's remarks demonstrate an intent to use smallpox, since camelpox resembles no other human pathogen.
"Hearing that from the lips of the people involved is kind of like that MasterCard commercial: 'Priceless,' " the analyst said.
There is no corresponding record, however, that Iraq had the capability or made the effort to carry out such an intent.
Taha, according to the same debriefing account, said Iraq had no access to smallpox. Ali's research halted after 45 days, with the August 1990 outbreak of war in Kuwait, and did not resume. And Taha, like all those in custody, continues to assert that
http://home.earthlink.net/~platter/articles/pilger-feith-int.html
Transcribed interview between John Pilger and Douglas Feith
The following was transcribed from a Flashpoints broadcast of portions of journalist John Pilger's documentary film Breaking the Silence:
Truth and Lies in the War on Terror
http://pilger.carlton.com/
PILGER: Isn't there a problem for us in the West of honesty about the reason for going to war in Iraq � and that was weapons of mass destruction?
FEITH: I don't think that was a lie. We went to war in large part because of the concern that weapons of mass destruction in the ... in the hands of the Saddam Hussein regime ... a regime that used such weapons ... in particular nerve gas...
PILGER: ... and was supplied by the United States and Britain with these weapons of mass destruction ...
FEITH: No, I don't believe that's accurate.
PILGER: Well, yes they were. Most, most of the weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein weren't built by him. The machine tools and the ingredients for his biological weapons all came from other countries, many of them from this country and Britain.
FEITH: I don't think that's right. I think, I really think that the...
PILGER: Well, it's on the record...
FEITH: Well...
PILGER: ... in the Library of Congress...
FEITH: I think that... I think that the premise of your question is wrong.
[...]
PILGER: Why is it wrong for dictators and terrorists to kill innocent civilians, and right or excusable for the United States to do exactly the same.
FEITH: Well, the United States doesn't do it, and if we did it it would be as reprehensible as... as what the terrorists do.
PILGER: The United States doesn't kill... innocent civilians?
FEITH: No, the United States does not target civilians.
PILGER: Hmm. Those of us on the outside who look at September 11, where 3,000 people died in that tragedy, but then look at the thousands who have died since, wonder about double standards here. Could you address that?
FEITH: I think that the... I think that the... numbers that you're... talking about are... are questionable, so let's... let's leave aside your...
PILGER: Why are they questionable?
FEITH: I... I don't accept your assertion that we've killed thousands of... of innocent people. But... let me get...
PILGER: There's a lot of... There's a lot of studies... and examination of facts on the ground that suggest indeed thousands. I mean in Iraq at the moment... there are studies that are talking about 10,000. But I don't want to get into numbers, but certainly thousands seems a fair figure.
FEITH: I don't... I don't know that that's true, and... and I don't accept the assertion.
[Cut to Dennis Halliday]
DENNIS HALLIDAY: If you ask an American student how many people died in Vietnam, he'll tell you 58,000. In other words they dismissed the 2, 3, maybe 4 million Vietnamese who were killed by the United States and its allies in that war. So this is an ongoing issue. Mr. Powell, Colin Powell, General Colin Powell I think was quoted as having said he's not interested in civilian casualties...
http://home.earthlink.net/~platter/articles/pilger-feith-int.html
================================
Defense Official Says Iraqi Disarmament Inevitable, Not War
... The disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is inevitable, either
through ... said Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, ...
MORE:
=================
This White House Scandal Finally Tips the Scale!
The leak of a CIA operative's name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company,
http://www.apfn.org/LEAK-GATE/CIA_firm.htm
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sent a notice Friday to all White House employees instructing them to turn in copies of numerous documents for the ongoing probe into who leaked the name of a CIA operative to a newspaper columnist.
http://www.apfn.org/LEAK-GATE/notice.htm
From top advisers to junior staff, nearly 2,000 White House employees were ordered to come forward by Tuesday with any documents that might help the criminal investigation into the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity.
http://www.apfn.org/LEAK-GATE/clues.htm
Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (50 U.S.C. 421 et seq.)
(governing disclosures that could expose confidential Government agents)
http://foi.missouri.edu/bushinfopolicies/protection.html
Meet the Press, online at MSNBC
MSNBC - 14 hours ago
... And the WMD Commission has found out things that ... is that the CIA's intelligence on Iraq was faulty ... in the Office of Special Plans, Douglas Feith, came directly ...
CLICK FULL STORY:
Biography - DOUGLAS J. FEITH
... Douglas J. Feith is the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. ... ed., Churchill as Peacemaker; Douglas J. Feith, et al., Israel�s Legitimacy in Law ...
HTTP://www.defenselink.mil/bios/feith_bio.html
Douglas J. Feith is the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. His responsibilities include the formulation of defense planning guidance and forces policy, Department of Defense relations with foreign countries and the Department�s role in U.S. Government interagency policy making.
Before President George W. Bush appointed him in July 2001, Mr. Feith was for fifteen years the managing attorney of the Washington, D.C. law firm of Feith & Zell, P.C.
From March 1984 until September 1986, Mr. Feith served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy.
Before becoming Deputy Assistant Secretary, Mr. Feith served as Special Counsel to Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle.
Mr. Feith transferred to the Pentagon from the National Security Council at the White House, where he worked in 1981-82 as a Middle East specialist.
Mr. Feith's writings on international law and on foreign and defense policy have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The New Republic and elsewhere. He has contributed chapters to a number of books, including James W. Muller, ed., Churchill as Peacemaker; Douglas J. Feith, et al., Israel�s Legitimacy in Law and History; and Uri Ra�anan, et al., eds., Hydra of Carnage: International Linkages of Terrorism.
Mr. Feith holds a J.D. (magna cum laude) from the Georgetown University Law Center and an A.B. (magna cum laude) from Harvard College.
http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/feith_bio.html
Douglas Feith - What has the Pentagon's third man done wrong ...
Of all the revelations that have surfaced about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal so far, the least surprising is that Douglas Feith may be partly ...
HTTP://WWW.slate.msn.com/id/2100899/
Douglas Feith: Portrait of a Neoconservative - by Tom Barry
... Douglas Feith serves as the number three civilian in the George W. Bush ... Web site of the Washington law firm of Feith & Zell, PC, as in Douglas Feith ...
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/barry.php?articleid=3545
Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper
Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 7, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60340-2004Jan6.html
BAGHDAD -- Of all Iraq's rocket scientists, none drew warier scrutiny abroad than Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi.
An engineering PhD known for outsized energy and gifts, Tamimi, 47, designed and built a new short-range missile during Iraq's four-year hiatus from United Nations arms inspections. Inspectors who returned in late 2002, enforcing Security Council limits, ruled that the Al Samoud missile's range was not quite short enough. The U.N. team crushed the missiles, bulldozed them into a pit and entombed the wreckage in concrete. In one of three interviews last month, Tamimi said "it was as if they were killing my sons."
But Tamimi had other brainchildren, and these stayed secret. Concealed at some remove from his Karama Co. factory here were concept drawings and computations for a family of much more capable missiles, designed to share parts and features with the openly declared Al Samoud. The largest was meant to fly six times as far.
"This was hidden during the UNMOVIC visits," Tamimi said, referring to inspectors from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. Over a leisurely meal of lamb and sweet tea, he sketched diagrams. "It was forbidden for us to reveal this information," he said.
Tamimi's covert work, which he recounted publicly for the first time in five hours of interviews, offers fresh perspective on the question that led the nation to war. Iraq flouted a legal duty to report the designs. The weapons they depicted, however, did not exist. After years of development -- against significant obstacles -- they might have taken form as nine-ton missiles. In March they fit in Tamimi's pocket, on two digital compact discs.
The nine-month record of arms investigators since the fall of Baghdad includes discoveries of other concealed arms research, most of it less advanced. Iraq's former government engaged in abundant deception about its ambitions and, in some cases, early steps to prepare for development or production. Interviews here -- among Iraqi weaponeers and investigators from the U.S. and British governments -- turned up unreported records, facilities or materials that could have been used in unlawful weapons.
But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.
A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
David Kay, who directs the weapons hunt on behalf of the Bush administration, reported no discoveries last year of finished weapons, bulk agents or ready-to-start production lines. Members of his Iraq Survey Group, in unauthorized interviews, said the group holds out little prospect now of such a find. Kay and his spokesman, who report to Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, declined to be interviewed.
Poxes and Professors
On Dec. 13, as a reporter waited to see the dean of Baghdad University's College of Science, two poker-faced men strode into the anteroom. One was an ex-Marine named Dan, clad in civilian clothes, body armor, a checkered Arab scarf and a bandolier of eight spare magazines for his M-16 rifle. The other identified himself to the receptionist only as Barry.
He asked to see the dean, Abdel Mehdi Taleb, immediately. Dan preceded Barry into Taleb's office, weapon ready, then stood sentry outside.
According to Taleb, Barry asked -- once again -- about the work of immunologist Alice Krikor Melconian. For months, Taleb said, the Americans had sent scientists and intelligence officers to investigate the compact, curly-haired chairman of the university's biotechnology department.
Three Iraqi scientists said U.S. investigators asserted they have reason to believe Melconian ran a covert research facility, location unknown. In July, colleagues said, Melconian emerged from her office with a burly American on each arm and was placed into the back seat of a car with darkened windows. U.S. investigators held her for 10 days in an open-air cell and then released her.
Described by associates as shaken by her arrest, Melconian said she has done no weapons research and knows of no secret labs. "I have never left the university," she said. "I have nothing more to say about this. I do not want to make any more trouble."
Like others on campus, and at a few elite institutes elsewhere, Melconian remains under scrutiny in part because investigators deem her capable of doing dangerous biological research. Investigators said they are casting a wide net at Iraq's "centers of scientific excellence" in an effort to confirm intelligence that is fragmentary and often lacks essential particulars.
Kay's Iraq Survey Group, which has numbered up to 1,400 personnel from the Defense Department, Energy Department national laboratories and intelligence agencies, is looking for biological weapons far more dangerous than those of Iraq's former arsenal. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, published in October 2002, said "chances are even" that Iraqi weaponeers were working with smallpox, one of history's mass killers. It also said Iraq "probably has developed genetically engineered BW agents."
As the Associated Press first reported, a scientific assessment panel known as Team Pox returned home in late July without finding reason to believe Iraq possessed the variola virus, which causes smallpox. Even so, interviews with Iraqi scientists led to a redoubled search for work on animal poxes, harmless to humans but potentially useful as substitutes for smallpox in weapons research.
Rihab Taha, the British-educated biologist known in the west as Dr. Germ, has generally been described by U.S. officials as uncooperative in custody since May 12. But according to one well-informed account of her debriefing, she acknowledged receiving an order from superiors in 1990 to develop a biological weapon based on a virus. That same year, a virologist who worked for her, Hazem Ali, commenced research on camelpox.
If truthful and correctly recounted, Taha's statement exposed a long-standing lie. Iraq's government denied offensive viral research. One analyst familiar with the debriefing report, declining to be identified by name or nationality, said investigators believe that Taha's remarks demonstrate an intent to use smallpox, since camelpox resembles no other human pathogen.
"Hearing that from the lips of the people involved is kind of like that MasterCard commercial: 'Priceless,' " the analyst said.
There is no corresponding record, however, that Iraq had the capability or made the effort to carry out such an intent.
Taha, according to the same debriefing account, said Iraq had no access to smallpox. Ali's research halted after 45 days, with the August 1990 outbreak of war in Kuwait, and did not resume. And Taha, like all those in custody, continues to assert that
