Expert Say Risk of Bio-Weapons Has Been Great;ly Exaggerated

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Is this the world's deadliest woman?
By Lance Laytner
28Dec02

A DEADLY female scientist who has made enough biological weapons to kill everyone in the world twiceover may be one of the major reasons the US is pushing for war with Iraq.

Dr Rihab Taha is head of Iraq's germ warfare program and is the most dangerous woman in the world.
Known to UN weapons inspectors as Doctor Germ for her gruesome work, the US and its allies consider this female scientist to be one of the greatest threats since the end of the cold war -- a threat that must be dealt with at almost any cost.

The story of Dr Germ begins in 1979 when Taha travelled to England on a student visa to study plant toxins. Rihab Taha eventually earned a PhD from the University of East Anglia in Norwich where she studied biology intensely, focusing on infectious diseases.

Much to British dismay, it was in England where Taha learned the skills which would later make her a threat to the entire world.

"It's like finding your daughter has done something dreadful," says Dr John Turner, former head of the university's biology department and Taha's teacher for four years. "Finding out what Taha does now was a great shock to me. Of all the students I've ever had Taha is the last person I would suspect of doing something like this."

Dr Germ's former classmates agree. None of them can believe the quiet, shy girl they went to school with could be capable of such atrocities. But UN weapons inspectors say Taha is a master of deception and her shyness is merely a front to disguise her true intentions.

"She was an unassuming individual to look at, no one would suspect she was the head of Iraq's germ warfare program," admits Dr David Huxsoll, who headed the first UN weapons inspection team after the Gulf War in 1991.

But under questioning, the seemingly meek and mild Dr Taha would explode into rages, shouting and tossing chairs. Many UN inspectors came to see both Taha's shyness and her outbursts as a staged tactic to disrupt questioning.

It was during these interrogations the full grisly story of Dr Germ came to light.

According to investigators, after she returned to her homeland in 1980, Saddam Hussein immediately put Taha in charge of developing a germ warfare program -- the deliberate cultivation of lethal diseases to be used against Iraq's enemies.

Germ warfare is known as the "poor man's nuke" because of its potential to kill millions without the technical knowledge and vast expense required to create an atomic bomb.

This mission was given the utmost priority by the Iraqi dictator, who planned to use these gruesome weapons to take over countries such as Kuwait and to suppress rebellion at home. Saddam even executed four top scientists in the biological weapons program in 1984 because they had not made enough progress.

Many wonder if Taha informed on the scientists so she could eliminate her competition.

Dr Germ's topsecret laboratories at Salman Pak became a place of horror where Taha and her team of 100 Iraqi scientists worked to weaponise the most lethal viruses and bacteria known to man. Former chief UN biological weapons inspector Richard Spertzel says Taha made enough lethal germs to kill everyone on earth twice.

According to UN estimates, Taha created 8400 litres of anthrax -- enough to kill everyone in the western world -- and a host of other terrifying biological weapons. She worked for a decade to create the world's largest stock of biological weapons outside of the former Soviet Union.

She grew 19,000 litres of botulinum, a food poisoning that causes the tongue to swell and suffocates the victim. She cultivated 2000 litres of aflatoxin, a mould that destroys a victim's immune systems and gives them a fastgrowing and fatal cancer.

Taha created gas gangrene which causes the victim's skin to melt and fall away. And this mother of an eight-year-old girl even stockpiled a virus that kills only infants with fatal diarrhoea.

The first round of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq recovered video tapes of Dr Germ's tests on animals but the images of dying creatures in glass boxes writhing in agony were so horrifying that they have never been released. But UN inspectors believe Taha may have been responsible for even greater atrocities.

There is strong evidence Dr Germ tested her biological weapons on humans. According to Israeli military sources, Taha watched safely behind a thick glass screen as her lethal moulds, bacteria and viruses were tested on Iranian prisoners of war strapped to beds in an underground testing facility at Al Hakam.

In another test, a group of 12 Iranian prisoners were tied to posts at an open air test site near Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia. Shells loaded with anthrax were blown up a few yards away. The prisoners were given helmets to protect them from shrapnel so the full effect of the bacteria could be properly monitored. Each died from the disease a couple of days later.

The first UN inspectors also suspect Dr Germ deliberately exposed Iraqi prison populations to certain diseases to gauge their effect as weapons of war.

Among the diseases doomed prisoners were reportedly exposed to were haemorrhagic conjunctivitis, which temporarily blinds the victim and makes their eyes bleed, Crimean Congo Fever, and Camel Pox, a grisly disease that slowly kills the sufferer from blood loss through open skin lesions.

Many on the original UN inspection team believe Iraq risked another war by barring access to Abu Gharib jail near Baghdad to coverup these terrifying experiments conducted on human prisoners.

Says Raymond Zilimskas, a former germwarfare analyst at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, "in Iraq there probably has to be unsavoury activities, including unethical experimentation. It is the records of this work that Iraq will go to any lengths to hide."

These horrors may have never come to light except for the defection of General Hussein Kamal, soninlaw of Saddam Hussein and a weapons of mass destruction expert in his own right. In 1995, General Kamal defected from Iraq to Jordan where he told the world about the dangers of Dr Germ.

Kamal was the first to expose the work of Dr Germ and the killer diseases that Iraq still holds in reserve. Hussein Kamal painted a very different picture of Rihab Taha, the softspoken scientist, which UN inspectors had previously dismissed as inconsequential. It was Kamal who triggered the investigations that brought to light the terrible atrocities committed by the Britishtrained scientist.

But Kamal never completed his testimony. He was personally convinced by Saddam Hussein to return to Iraq. The dictator assured his son-in-law that it was more important that his daughter have a husband than any political differences they might have. Once Kamal set foot in Iraq he was immediately killed.

But the truth about Dr Germ was out. UN inspectors again called in Taha and confronted her with the new evidence. Instantly the shy, quiet disguise fell away and the scientist coldly told them that she could not be more proud of her work. She spoke of her work with passion -- as if she had found the cure to horrible diseases instead of working to spread them.

"She suddenly had no hesitation about presenting herself as the brains behind biological weapons in Iraq. She is proud of her country and proud of her work. I don't think she had a qualm in the world about her misdeeds," says one former UN inspector.

Armed with little more than the knowledge biological weapons do exist in Iraq, the original UN weapons inspectors tried to find out where Iraq's weapons were and destroy them.

Unfortunately they were largely unsuccessful.

The Iraqi Government would not cooperate. Asked for detailed evidence of its biological weapons program, it submitted six different reports, each of which were rejected as lies.

When UN forces raided facilities they suspected of housing biological weapons, they often found warehouses that appeared to be recently emptied with documents still burning in rubbish bins. Dr Germ and her agents were always one step ahead of the inspectors.

Finally, UN inspectors were tippedoff that the cunning Dr Germ was the lover and secret wife of Lieutenant General Amer Rashid, the Iraqi official whose job was to work with the UN inspectors.

It's now believed Rashid simply warned his wife of possible raids giving her time to get rid of the evidence. For years, weapons inspectors tried to pin down Iraq's terrible disease weapons but failed.

At one point inspectors were convinced that huge amounts of anthrax were being driven round and round the country in refrigerated trucks by Saddam Hussein's Special Republican Guard. At other times UN officials were held for several hours by armed soldiers before being allowed into certain areas. Once inside they found hurriedly emptied laboratories.

The evidence strongly suggests Iraq still has a large amount of biological weapons. One warning sign -- 17 tonnes of anthrax growth material, the food that the bacteria eats until it infects a victim, are still unaccounted for by the Iraqi Government.

After UN inspectors were thrown out of Iraq in 1997 the problem got worse. Saddam Hussein disabled all monitoring cameras and hid production equipment.

Former weapons inspector Richard Spertzel warns even if Iraq didn't have any biological weapons left when UN officials were in the country they almost certainly do now. By changing a few components at medical factories producing antibiotics, Iraq could create huge amounts of anthrax.

Many experts fear the last four years without inspections have given Iraq the opportunity to make more biological weapons than they ever had before.

Now emerging evidence of Iraq's association with terrorist groups has made America and its allies very nervous and steeled their resolve for war.

While public debate continues overseas and in Australia about whether war with Iraq is right or wrong or inevitable, investigators of the September 11 terrorist attacks are pursuing possible links between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's alQaeda terrorist network.

UN inspectors say Iraqi agents meet periodically with bin Laden agents. And Mohammed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the World Trade Centre attacks, met twice with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in Czech Republic in the summer of 2001.

In a world where terrorist organisations are becoming increasingly more organised and are openly seeking a means to trump the New York attack, the US and its allies may feel they can simply no longer ignore the threat of Rihab Taha and her ability to give America's enemies a poor man's nuke.

In the end, America may be going to war to eliminate one woman.

This report appears on news.com.au.

 

A terror attack has the principles of undermining the public's sense of security within a border and also has some message to be displayed to the people. Though high casualty numbers are a plus, chaos and panic are more effective tools. Just look at the sniper attacks. You had an entire eastern region paralyzed by fear from their daily routines because the deaths seem so random and casual. The death count was relatively low and will probably be lower than any biochem attack. A bio/chem terror attack at a strategic location would do just the same or even more damage because of the multiplier effect.

Yes, the Administration seems to be fanning those fears, but elected officials usually look out for their necks. And as we've already seen, warning or no warning, people are going to panic after an event and they're going to want some assurances of safety.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55750-2002Dec14?language=printer

...

Rihab Taha
Taha is perhaps the most colorful of Iraq's senior weapons scientists, and arguably one of the most dangerous. Since assuming her first post in one of Iraq's early bioweapons labs in 1984, she has been something of an oddity: a rare female scientist and manager in a world dominated by men. A British-trained microbiologist, Taha in 1987 was put in charge of Iraq's top-secret biological research lab at Al Hakam, which explored the weaponization of the pathogens that cause anthrax and plague, among others. It was around this time that she ordered and received biological specimens from U.S. companies that would later be used in the production of weapons.

Her reputation as "Dr. Germ" was well established when she met and married the Iraqi oil minister, Lt. Gen. Amir Mohammad Rasheed, in 1993. Taha's position ensured that she would be a frequent subject of U.N. interrogations during weapons inspections in the 1990s. Under intense questioning, the normally soft-spoken Taha often showed her famous temper, storming out of the room and sometimes leaving overturned furniture in her wake.

The frustrations were apparently mutual. Richard Spertzel, a former head of the U.N. inspectors' bioweapons teams, recalled his exasperation when Taha clung to false accounts of her lab's activities even when confronted with contradictory evidence. "It is not a lie," Spertzel recalled Taha saying, "when you're being ordered to lie."

 

http://www.nzz.ch/english/background/background1999/background9902/bg990206irak.html


Saddam's Potential for Mass Destruction
The UN Special Commission's Years of Detective Work in Iraq
Heidi Blattmann
Eight years after the end of the Gulf war, verification of Iraq's arsenal of missiles and weapons of mass destruction by Unscom, the UN Special Commission, is still far from complete. There are large gaps in the data, especially in the area of biological weapons. This is of special concern to the experts, because deadly germ-warfare agents can be quickly and unobtrusively manufactured.

In the 1991 cease-fire negotiations at the end of the Gulf war, Saddam Hussein was compelled to agree to reveal all his weapons of mass destruction and their development programs, and to have them checked, as well as having all missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers destroyed under UN supervision. On 3 April the UN Security Council passed Resolution 687, specifying those conditions and demanding that Iraq declare, within 15 days, the location, quantity and type of all weapons and components mentioned in the resolution, along with related research and production facilities.

Long-Standing Chemical Weapons
The fact that Iraq had such weapons, especially chemical warfare materials, had long been known - with certainty at least since 1984, when Baghdad employed poison gas against Khomeiny's Revolutionary Guards in its war with Iran. Some victims were subsequently sent to the West for treatment, a few to Switzerland. They showed skin burns from contact with the poison substance Yperit, which had been used back during World War I and which, if breathed in, causes fatal damage to the respiratory system. Iraq also used C-weapons in 1988 against its own Kurdish populace.
Moreover, Saddam's regime had long been suspected of also working on atomic and biological weapons. For that reason, Allied soldiers had been inoculated against anthrax (among other things) during the Gulf war. At that time, President George Bush threatened massive retaliation against Iraq if such weapons were employed in the fighting. After the war's end, it seemed especially urgent to insure that those classes of weaponry were eliminated. But Iraq denied having any weapons programs in the nuclear and biological areas, and in the cease-fire agreement it promised full cooperation in efforts to verify its declaration.

In reality, however, the Baghdad regime did everything possible to prevent discovery of its weapons programs and to deceive the inspectors of the UN's Special Commission (Unscom) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). As a result, the phase of verification of the Iraqi declaration and the associated destruction of weapons, carrier systems and related research and production facilities extended over years instead of the few months that had been projected - and it has not been completed to this day, especially with regard to biological and chemical weapons and missile systems. Accordingly, the sanctions imposed on Iraq have not been lifted as had been conditionally promised.

In the realm of chemical weapons, investigations showed that enormous quantities of poison gas were present. The arsenal destroyed under Unscom supervision alone comprised tens of thousands of missiles, bombs and grenades equipped with chemical agents, 400,000 liters of mustard gas and 83,000 liters of nerve agents. Baghdad also reported more than 2 million liters of precursor substances and other chemicals used in the manufacture of C-weapons. But Iraq seldom stuck to its commitments, declaring that it had itself destroyed large quantities of these substances on its own initiative, which greatly complicated and sometimes made impossible a thorough check of its data and inventories. Moreover, various Iraqi statements did not accord with the results of independent analysis - such as the assertion that Yperit becomes useless with the passage of time and had therefore become irrelevant. Examination of Yperit samples showed that the substance maintains an extremely high level of potency even after years.

Another point: After a long period of Iraqi denials about having ever produced the nerve agent VX, Baghdad admitted in 1997 that it had manufactured 3.9 tons of the deadly substance. (To poison a military area, it is reckoned that between 1 and 10 grams of VX are needed per square meter of ground.) Unscom thinks that as much as close to 200 tons of VX were actually produced. Iraq denies this, claiming that it had failed to manufacture the poison in stable form. But here too, there are doubts as to whether its well-trained specialists were really incapable of that feat. What is most unsettling, in Unscom's view, is that some missile warheads were filled with VX and it is not certain whether all those warheads have been destroyed.

Aggressive Biological Weapons Program
Even more ominous are Iraq's efforts to develop biological (or germ warfare) weapons. There was obviously a reorientation in the country's armaments programs following the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. Previously the emphasis had been on tactical weapons for use against battlefield troops. But now Iraq began to develop longer-range strategic weapons that could be deployed against entire cities. Aside from the nuclear program (see the accompanying box), the effort to develop biological weapons received greater emphasis. But for four years, until the summer of 1995, Saddam's generals persistently denied having worked on biological weapons at all.
The turning point came in July of that year, when Unscom inspectors had apparently driven the Iraqis into a corner on the matter, based on the large quantities of cultivating medium that Iraq had ordered during the 1980s. Such substances had been ordered by the ton, far more than could possibly have been used in hospitals and enough for the production of enough biological agents to arm hundreds, if not thousands of bombs and missile warheads. Rihab Taha, the official chief of the Iraqi biological warfare program - and sometimes termed "the mother of Iraq's B-weapons" - made a number of revelations in early July 1995, among them that Iraq had produced thousands of liters of anthrax and botulin toxins. Shortly thereafter, Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law who had risen to the rank of general and for a long time had headed Iraq's organization for military industrialization, defected to Jordan. At the end of August, on Kamal's chicken farm, Iraqi officials handed Unscom huge piles of documents which, as they said, they had discovered on "the traitor Kamal's" premises. What are now known to Unscom as "the chicken farm documents" showed that Kamal's people had been working at a frantic pace to develop operational biological weapons.

A good many pieces of the puzzle that would be necessary for a somewhat full picture of Baghdad's B-weapons program are still missing. According to Iraqi declarations, many toxins and biological agents were produced, including 95,000 liters of anthrax, 25,000 liters of botulinus toxin and 24,000 liters of aflatoxin. These substances were used to fill the warheads of 25 Al-Hussein missiles, 16 with botulin, five with anthrax and four with aflotoxin. In addition, more than 150 model R-400 bombs were also filled with these agents. The R-400 is an Iraqi glider bomb equipped with a parachute to lower it slowly from altitude, while a conventional explosive core triggers the spraying of biological or chemical agents over a broad area. Iraq admits having produced more than 1,500 of these devices, and claims to have destroyed almost all of them itself. But the aggressiveness of Iraq's biological weapons program is underscored by consideration of the long list of munitions considered as carriers of biological agents - from artillery shells through land mines to remote-controlled aircraft which were flight-tested and whose tanks could spray hundreds of liters of deadly biological agents to cover large areas of the ground.

According to Unscom inspectors, the B-weapons program is especially ominous not only because some of those weapons were actually ready for use during the first Gulf war, but also because too many questions remain unanswered to permit any credence to be given to Iraqi assertions that they destroyed biological agents, media for their cultivation, and weapons to carry them, on their own initiative, without surveillance by Unscom. There are no unequivocal proofs that the job was done completely. Hence experts emphasize that, even if large-scale destruction of the biological materials actually did occur, Baghdad still has the capability to produce large quantities of biological weapons quickly and largely unobserved. The possibility of an Iraqi deployment of anthrax appears to be a special danger. While anthrax can be countered with inoculation and antibiotic treatment, left untreated it is fatal within just a few days. Even a billionth of a gram of anthrax spores can have deadly results.

Open Questions About Missiles
Finally, questions also remain open about the destruction of Iraqi missiles, especially the Al-Hussein missile, which has a range of 600 kilometers. The latter is an adaptation of imported Soviet-made Scud-B missiles, though some were built entirely in Iraq. It has not been absolutely shown that all of these have been rendered completely unusable. Discrepancies in the inventories of Baghdad's large supplies of missile fuel, as well as Iraq's attempts to acquire highly specialized components for missile manufacture, are indications that, contrary to Iraqi assertions, such projectiles may still be hidden somewhere.

Baghdad Reaches for the Nuclear
UN Resolution 687, passed by the Security Council after the Gulf war, not only created Unscom but also assigned the International Atomic Energy Agency to verify Baghdad's declaration about the state of its nuclear weapons program and to destroy, remove or otherwise neutralize relevant materials and facilities. Iraq denied having violated its commitments under the IAEA Non-Proliferation Agreements or having carried on a nuclear weapons program. But, after their release, America's CIA purchased and analyzed the clothing of Western business people who had been held by Saddam as hostages during the Gulf war and used as human shields at sensitive sites. The analyses revealed traces of highly enriched uranium, unmistakable evidence of an Iraqi atomic weapons program - of which rumors had long been circulating.
Iraqi Admission
Until October 1991, Baghdad consistently denied to the IAEA having done any development work on nuclear weapons. Previously, in violation of Iraq's agreements with the UN, inspectors had been hampered in their investigations whenever they were on the trail of new, damning evidence or wanted to examine relevant documents. But as the indications became increasingly clear and the inspectors had gotten their hands on extensive documentation of the Iraqi efforts, Baghdad finally admitted in the autumn of 1991 that it had had a program to develop atomic bombs. Today it is known that the site of development and production of nuclear weapons was in Al Athir, and experts say that Iraq was about two or three years away from completing a roughly 20-kiloton, uranium-based bomb (about the size of the Hiroshima bomb). A total of some 20 facilities and thousands of scientists were involved in the program, with expenditures estimated at $10-15 billion.
Iraq's Osirak research reactor, delivered by France, was still under construction when it was destroyed by the Israelis in a surprise attack in 1981. After that, the Iraqi appeared to be relying mainly on highly enriched uranium for their atomic program. They purchased large quantities of natural uranium abroad and also mined some themselves. At the same time they worked on perfecting several, technically different methods of enriching it to produce fissionable, weapons-grade uranium-235. They also tested the separation of plutonium, small quantities of which they derived from the IRT research reactor which Russia had delivered. Further, inspectors uncovered wide-ranging Iraqi efforts to acquire abroad a diverse assortment of equipment and components for atomic bomb production. The extent of the procurement showed that work had been proceeding on creating facilities on an industrial scale. There was also an extensive program to divert highly enriched uranium from research reactors that were under IAEA supervision. According to the Vienna agency, the Iraqi program aimed at giving the country its first nuclear weapon by the year 1991.

According to the IAEA, all relevant facilities discovered in Iraq have since been made unusable, some of them blown up, some filled with concrete. Their equipment was destroyed, removed or otherwise rendered useless, and fissionable materials were shipped out of the country under IAEA control. And the official word in Vienna is that there are "no signs" that Iraq has retained the materials or the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. But Mohammed el-Baradei, general director of the IAEA, recently stated clearly that a degree of uncertainty still remains, particularly since certain questions have gone unanswered.

Major Technical Know-How Retained
El-Baradei stressed that continued surveillance is therefore essential. And there must be verification that, first, the entire nuclear program has indeed been halted, and second, that it is not being resuscitated. For experts are agreed that there is still a large number of skilled specialists with the necessary technical know-how in Iraq, and it may be assumed that they would be technically capable of developing and constructing atomic weapons.
According to the IAEA, there are no indications that the Iraqi ever actually succeeded in producing a nuclear weapon; the one thing they presumably lacked was enough fissionable material. But no documents have thus far come to light showing what stages the various Iraqi efforts had reached when they were interrupted. Even a continuous monitoring and verification regime, the IAEA adds, cannot guarantee that easily hidden activities, such as computer modeling for weapons development or small uranium enrichment units, would be discovered. Further, proving the direct purchase of weapons-capable fissionable material also constitutes a serious technical problem, according to sources in Vienna. And the fact that inspections have now been halted entirely seriously complicates the situation. As early as last October, the IAEA had pointed out that the limits imposed on inspectors, preventing them from examining any new sites, had gravely reduced the certainty that no banned activities were being carried on in Iraq.

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15 February 1999 / Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 6/7 February 1999

 

Originally posted by glynch
...
2) No evidence at this point that Iraq has an effective bio weapons program, given the difficulty of effective weaponinizing these agents. 3) Of course we can always concoct frighteneing scenarios.

The US Administration aren't the only ones concocting frightening scenarios, eh? (see articles above)

...
One frightenening scenario has occurred. Apparently, the United States using the world's most sophisticated facilities has apparently weaponized anthrax. Anybody remember the anthrax crisis? It is sort of like bin Laden, no need to talk about it and let's have all the emphasis on removing Sadam. Best guesses I've heard is that the stuff came from US gov. labs. It may have been made in violation of international treaties that the US signed, brags about signing and gets upset because Iraq might be violating.

The US admits that it experimented with weaponizing anthrax in the 50's and 60's, and also that it has some on hand to develop countermeasures, which is permitted under the treaty.

Can't help but try to take a shot at the US, even when you're purely speculating?

Hypocritical of course, but so is the whole US approach to all these weapons.

Hybprocrisy? We created these weapons 40 or 50 years ago so we're hyprocritical to demand that an aggressive country abide by a peace treaty with the UN?

Iraq is violating it's treaty with the UN, not just a nonproliferation treaty..oops!