So, Where Are The WMDs?

[Gary Sisco]

For a year or so we've been bombarded with propaganda and whispered comments about secret intelligence so secret not even the UN teams or the US's own allied intelligence agencies could hear or see it.

So ... Where are the WMDs?

The only photos I've seen of "weapons caches" discovered in Iraq so far have contained nothing that I can't find right here in my own neighborhood, and much that you wouldn't find because who would want it? I mean, I'm not the kind of guy who'll kill thousands to recover a warehouse full of SKS's, AKs, and WW2 carbines. Seems kind of an overkill. So to speak. Hell, they almost give SKS's away here in the US. I bought mine for a mere C-note.

[patricia]

Originally posted by Chris A
The Iraqi WMDs appear to be in the Bush regime's imagination.

Figuratively speaking, of course, we find one big, ugly WMD in the Oval Office. I say, bring back the blow jobs!

LOL!!! These guys are so moral that they haven't had sex for years.
OTOH, world domination is quite an aphrodesiac.

So, the WOMD better be there or perhaps some people will wonder why billions of dollars of their taxes were spent on destroying Iraq, simply to oust Saddam Hussein, his henchmen and their regime.

[lynn]

I don't think they've had enough time to hide them yet. (if you know what I mean)

[Angie]

The truth is that there never were any WMD's in Iraq and they have not been moved to Syria, either. The whole idea was a very cruel scam, to justify the invasion. The Adminsitration terrorized its own people, by telling them to live life normally, but be on high alert for terrorists. Those two things are mutually exclusive. The 9 - 11 attacks provided the incentive to fight terrorism all over the world. But, it isn't just the oil they want. Control over the Middle East was/is the objective.

Any religion I ever came across usually said, 'Thou shalt not kill'. So let's not hear how this war had moral justification, to go in and kill thousands of people and reduce their infrastructure to rubble.

[Gary Sisco]

Here are several of the real reasons for the war, which have to do with empire building more than anything else. An empire must needs have forward bases from which to be able to rapidly exert strength and suppress dissent and rebellion.

What we're seeing is a Klingon Empire in the works.

But, like the Rastman say, Kingdom rise and kingdom fall.

Has always been that way and always will be that way. This kingdom is no different and in the end will be as much dust as "the shit we broke."

No one has ever succeeded in world domination. Many have tried. And they were all tougher men than this Gang-in-Charge have ever been, even in their obviously wild imaginations.

Today's NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/in...20BASE.html?th

[Gary Sisco]

From the Independent (UK) today:

20 April 2003


So where are they? In case we forget, distracted by the thought of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, looted museums and gathering political chaos, the proclaimed purpose of this war, vainly pursued by Britain and the US through the United Nations, was to disarm Saddam Hussein and to destroy weapons of mass destruction deemed a menace to the entire world.

But, Mr Blair, where are they? A month has passed since American and British troops entered Iraq, more than a week since the fall of Baghdad. But thus far not even a sniff. Not a drum of VX or mustard gas, not a phial of botulin or anthrax, not a shred of evidence that Iraq was assembling a nuclear weapons programme.

But that wasn't what they told us. Remember Colin Powell at the Security Council two months ago (though today it seems another age on another planet): the charts, the grainy intelligence satellite pictures, the crackly tapes of the intercepted phone conversations among Iraqi officials? How plausible it all sounded, especially when propounded by the most plausible figure in the Bush ad- ministration.

And what about those other claims, wheeled out on various occasions by Messrs Bush, Blair, Cheney and Rumsfeld? The Iraqi drones that were supposed to be able to attack the US east coast, the imports of aluminium tubes allegedly intended for centrifuges to enrich uranium, the unaccounted-for lethal nerve and germ agents, in quantities specified down to the last gallon or pound, as if exact numbers alone constituted proof. All, it seems, egregious products of the imagination of the intelligence services – one commodity whose existence need never be doubted.

Maybe the Saddam regime was diabolically cunning in the concealment of these weap-ons, but the shambolic manner of its passing suggests otherwise. Maybe, as those "US officials" continue to suggest from behind their comfortable screen of anonymity, the weapons have been shipped to Syria for "safekeeping". But that theory too is dismissed by independent experts.

Indeed, it collapses at the first serious examination. Why should Saddam part with his most effective means of defence, when the survival of his regime and himself was on the line? Nor will that hoary and disingenuous line advanced by our political masters wash any longer – oh yes, we know a lot more, but if we told you, we would be showing our hand to Saddam and endangering precious intelligence sources.

Just believe us, old boy, the Government told us, and you'll see we were right all along. And the British, being on the whole a reasonable and trusting people, mostly accepted the word of their rulers.

Well, Saddam is now gone. And with him has disappeared any conceivable risk to those intelligence sources (assuming they ever existed). So just what was this information on the basis of which Washington and its faithful ally launched an unprovoked invasion of a ramshackle third world country? A country with a very nasty regime to be sure, but not a great deal nastier than some other potential candidates for "liberation" in the Middle East and elsewhere.

If only for the credibility and reputation of our country, this newspaper hopes that enough weapons of mass destruction will be discovered to justify a war that has grievously weakened the UN, strained the Atlantic alliance and split the European Union.

But they'd better be found pretty soon. Having rushed into war to suit its own military and domestic electoral timetable, the Bush administration now has the nerve to claim that a year may be required to establish the whereabouts of the WMD – and that it may never do so unless led to them by co-operative Iraqis. But no longer can London and Washington rely simply on the impossibility for the former Iraqi regime to prove a negative, that the weapons do not exist. It is up to the "coalition" of two to provide proof positive that they do.

This pointless war cannot be un-made. But we urgently need to know that the invasion was not illegal as well. With Britain and the US in full control of Iraq, a month should suffice. If no "smoking gun" has turned up by then, a full parliamentary inquiry is essential – into the competence and accountability of the intelligence services, and into how our Government used them to sell a mistaken and reckless policy.
20 April 2003 10:02

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Printable Story

[Gary Sisco]

Hey, here's some of them!

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Apr19.html

Lethal Legacy: Bioweapons for Sale

By Joby Warrick and John Mintz
First of two articles

PRETORIA, South Africa -- Daan Goosen's calling card to the FBI was a vial of bacteria he had freeze-dried and hidden inside a toothpaste tube for secret passage to the United States.

From among hundreds of flasks in his Pretoria lab, the South African scientist picked a man-made strain that was sure to impress: a microbial Frankenstein that fused the genes of a common intestinal bug with DNA from the pathogen that causes the deadly illness gas gangrene.

"This will show the Americans what we are capable of," Goosen said at the time.

On May 6, 2002, Goosen slipped the parcel into the hands of a retired CIA officer who couriered the microbes 8,000 miles for a drop-off with the FBI. If U.S. officials liked what they saw, Goosen said he was prepared to offer much more: an entire collection of pathogens developed by a secret South African bioweapons research program Goosen once headed.

Goosen's extraordinary offer to the FBI, outlined in documents obtained by The Washington Post and interviews with key participants, promised scores of additional vials containing the bacteria that cause anthrax, plague, salmonella and botulism, as well as antidotes for many of the diseases. Several strains, like the bacterial hybrid in the toothpaste tube, had been genetically altered, a technique used by weapons scientists to make diseases harder to detect and defeat. All were to be delivered to the U.S. government for safekeeping and to help strengthen U.S. defenses against future terrorism attacks.

U.S. officials considered the offer but balked at the asking price -- $5 million and immigration permits for Goosen and up to 19 associates and family members to come to the United States. The deal collapsed in confusion last year after skeptical FBI agents turned the matter over to South African authorities, who twice investigated Goosen but never charged him.

Participants in the failed deal differ on what happened and why. But they agree that the bacterial strains remain in private hands in South Africa, where they have continued to attract attention from individuals interested in acquiring them.

The episode throws new light on the extraordinarily difficult task of preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. South Africa, which built nuclear, chemical and biological arsenals under apartheid, renounced its weapons in 1993, and sought to destroy all traces of them, including instruction manuals and bacterial seed stocks. But like other countries that have attempted such a rollback, such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan, South Africa finds itself in a gray zone where weapons of the past pose serious dangers for the present.

"The weapons programs were ostensibly terminated, yet clearly they weren't able to destroy everything," said Jeffrey M. Bale of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, which is carrying out a study of South Africa's weapons programs. "The fact that Goosen and others are providing samples and being approached by foreign parties suggests that these things never really went away."

To disarmament experts, the case is especially troubling because of the kinds of terrorist-ready weapons produced by Project Coast, a top-secret biological and chemical program created by South Africa's white-minority government, which came to light in the late 1990s. Unlike U.S. and Soviet programs that amassed huge stockpiles of bombs and missiles for biological warfare, Project Coast specialized in the tools of terrorism and assassination -- including "stealth" weapons that could kill or incapacitate without leaving a trace. The program's military commanders also researched anti-fertility drugs that could be clandestinely applied in black neighborhoods, and explored -- but never produced -- biological weapons that would selectively target the country's black majority population.

Even if all of Project Coast's bacterial strains are secured, the know-how and skills acquired by dozens of its scientists may be impossible to contain, South African officials acknowledged in interviews. Several key scientists have pursued business interests overseas since the program was disbanded shortly before South Africa's transition to democracy. Others, including Goosen, have acknowledged they were approached by recruiters claiming to represent foreign governments or extremist groups. While the United States has spent tens of millions of dollars to re-train and re-employ weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union, many Project Coast scientists have been shunned by their peers and left to try to support themselves any way they can.

"It would have been galling to most South Africans to see their government take care of these scientists, after all the revelations about them," said Chandre Gould, an investigator for South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the late 1990s and now the co-author of an official United Nations study on Project Coast. "They were part of a program that tried to kill people in this society."
Novel Weapons
The failed deal with the South African scientist is documented in hundreds of pages of memos, contracts and reports. Many of the documents were provided by Don Mayes, a former CIA operative who acted as go-between in the deal, and helped arrange for the bacterial sample to be brought to the United States for testing. Mayes, Goosen, and several other South African participants were also interviewed at length for this article.

The FBI and CIA, which were jointly involved in the encounter with Goosen, declined to speak about it on the record. However, U.S. government officials, who asked not to be identified by name, have provided details of the negotiations. They say the agencies were troubled by Goosen's claims but suspected the scientist and his partners were more interested in cashing in than helping out. They viewed Goosen and his partners as naive, at best, for expecting to be rewarded for turning over what they viewed as 1990s-vintage biological material -- products that could be duplicated in any well-equipped, modern microbiology lab.

"If they thought we were going to put out good money for that kind of stuff, they came to the wrong group," said one U.S. law enforcement official who reviewed Goosen's proposal. "Thanks for being good citizens, but no thanks."

Goosen acknowledged that he had hoped to benefit financially, and sought permission to work in the United States, where he wanted to start a new business. But he says the FBI misjudged both his intentions and his ability to help them defend against future bioterrorism.

"At minimum, they should have copies and DNA fingerprints for each of the strains from Project Coast," he said. "If one of the strains were to turn up in Iraq, at least they would know where it came from."

Goosen, an affable 51-year-old who became a veterinarian like his father, was picked in 1981 as the founding director of Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, the bioweapons research arm of Project Coast.

Project Coast's notorious military commander, Wouter Basson, used the lab to create novel weapons for use against anti-apartheid activists and the black communities that supported them, according to documents and testimony in a murder and fraud case that ended last year in Basson's acquittal. One of Goosen's first assignments, he has said, was to harvest highly lethal venom from the black mambo snake for use in secret assassinations. Fangs from a dead snake were used to make impressions in the victim's skin so the death would appear accidental.

A widening rift between Goosen and Basson over the lab's direction ended with Goosen's resignation in 1986. But he continued to work as a consultant for the lab and maintained close ties with its scientists, some of whom would later work for him in his private laboratory. After Project Coast was disbanded, Goosen was among the first scientists to publicly acknowledge and condemn its offensive weapons research.

South African officials claimed to have destroyed all of Project Coast's biological materials in 1993, several months before the outgoing government of Frederik W. de Klerk revealed the secret program to Nelson Mandela, the first president of post-apartheid South Africa. But Goosen says many scientists kept copies of organisms and documents in order to continue work on "dual-use" projects with commercial as well as military applications. Goosen's vaccine production lab ended up with hundreds of strains, at least half of which were from Project Coast. At his home in Pretoria, he showed a visiting reporter two trays of what he described as vaccine strains that he kept in a freezer.

"The products should have been destroyed. The products were not destroyed," he said.

After the U.S. anthrax attack in October 2001, at the urging of American friends, Goosen approached the U.S. Department of Defense with an offer of "open cooperation" in sharing Project Coast's extensive research in anthrax vaccines and novel antidotes known as antiserums. The Pentagon was sufficiently interested to arrange a meeting in January 2002 between Goosen and Bioport Corp., the Michigan company that produces anthrax vaccines for the military. But interest from the U.S. side evaporated quickly, to Goosen's amazement.

"At that time there was a massive amount of good will toward the United States, and a feeling that we could contribute," Goosen said. "My thinking was: If George Bush had contracted anthrax, our technology could have cured him."
Clandestine Deals
The two men who finally brought Goosen to the FBI's attention knew little of germ warfare but were old hands in the shadowy world of arms trading and secret deals. Goosen had met neither until May 4, 2002, just two days before the toothpaste tube filled with genetically-altered bacteria began the journey across the Atlantic.

One of the men, retired South African Maj. Gen. Tai Minnaar, was a former military intelligence officer who had worked undercover for the CIA in Cuba in the 1970s, according to his resume. After Goosen's unsuccessful meeting with Bioport, Minnaar phoned Goosen, offering to put him in touch with U.S. officials who would appreciate the value of his work. And, Minnaar said, the Americans might be willing to pay money -- perhaps tens of millions of dollars, Goosen recalled.

Minnaar's first call was to Mayes, the former CIA operative, whom he had met and befriended during Mayes' frequent business trips to South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. On March 4, Minnaar wrote to Mayes warning that dangerous biological material from Project Coast still existed in South Africa and posed unacceptable risks.

"With the current situation here at present, we need to ensure that the technology as well as 'stock in hand' (at present stored safely in a private facility) are safeguarded from finding its way to the people on the wrong side of the fence," Minnaar wrote in an e-mail to Mayes. "This is a very real danger, as some of the other technology we fear has already been sold."

Mayes, 64, a missiles expert who had built a career out of making clandestine deals to acquire foreign-built weapons and air-defense systems for the CIA, said he became quickly convinced that Minnaar was right. Within three weeks, he arranged the first of a series of meetings with FBI and CIA officials to discuss the feasibility of bringing Goosen and his bacterial collection to the United States.

Mayes said that he sought "not a penny" of compensation for himself because "it didn't seem like the patriotic thing to do." Mayes acknowledged he was hoping to shore up his reputation with the U.S. intelligence community following a series of highly publicized legal troubles in the late 1990s. Mayes had been investigated for alleged offenses ranging from the mishandling of classified documents to violating export regulations. Two separate grand juries found no evidence that Mayes had broken the law. His ex-wife made the allegations during a difficult divorce.

To remove the bacterial strains from South Africa, Mayes and an associate, Robert Zlockie, a former CIA officer, drew up an extraction plan in the event an agreement was reached to sell the pathogens to the United States.

A private aircraft would land at a remote airfield 600 miles from coastal city of Durban. From a waiting camper-trailer on the runway, the bacteria in two cryogenic canisters would be loaded onto the plane along with two of the South African scientists. The canisters were to be labeled "oxygen" to avoid suspicion. One of the canisters was to contain more than 20 liters of antiserum and other antidotes, documents show. The other would contain 200 glass vials of biological material described as "extremely harmful to people and the environment." An inventory later provided to the FBI listed the contents of those vials as more than 150 strains of bacteria, including six that were marked as "genetically modified."

Before the large transfer of pathogens could be made, Goosen first sent a sample to the FBI, which they insistently sought. It was meant to ice the deal and dispel any doubts about Goosen's credentials. Goosen recalled that he thought carefully before selecting a strain and settled on "Escherichia coli 078:K80 (+K60 GM)," a common intestinal bacterium that had been spliced with a toxin-producing gene from Clostridium perfringens. C. perfringens causes several potentially fatal conditions including gas gangrene, a rare and severe form of gangrene in which in bacteria aggressively attack living tissue.

Biodefense experts have long worried about the implications of genetic modification for biological warfare or terrorism. The kind of engineering accomplished by Project Coast could theoretically be used to transfer lethal properties to ordinary bacteria. Or, conversely, it could be used to inoculate people and animals against disease.

The problem of how to transport the sample to the United States was quickly solved by Goosen himself. Microbes can easily be transported, he said, in a sealed glass cylinder inserted inside an ordinary toothpaste tube. A few grams of cooling gel squirted into the tube would ensure a stable temperature for a trip of up to several days.

"I can take it all over the world," Mayes quoted the scientist as saying.
Offer Declined
At 5 p.m. on May 9, 2002, Robert Zlockie, the retired CIA officer who had couriered the toothpaste tube across the Atlantic, delivered the package to an agent at the FBI's office in Key West, Fla. In return, he was given a hand-written receipt on FBI letterhead. "One toothpaste tube containing one ampul of E. coli genetically coded with epsilon toxin," it read.

Within days, the bacteria arrived at the Army's top biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md. for scientific analysis. Government biodefense scientists were consulted about the findings, and helped the FBI in assessing the implications. By May 15, the FBI arrived at several conclusions, according to officials who participated in the discussion.

They decided that Goosen's altered bacteria was precisely as the scientist had described it and that the pathogens listed in his collection were likely "legacy" materials from Project Coast, just as Goosen claimed. They also decided that the FBI would not offer a penny for any of it.

"The material was just as advertised, but the hands-down reaction was, 'So what?' " said one law-enforcement official familiar with the assessment.

U.S. officials involved in the decision say they saw no compelling reasons for paying Goosen or for excluding the government of South Africa, a U.S. ally, from an operation affecting the security of biological material in that country. Mayes, in an urgent note to the FBI, pleaded against alerting South African authorities, saying the scientists "have no faith that the material would ever reach" the United States government. But within days of the note, the FBI reported the matter to South Africa in an official letter relayed through the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria. "From that point on, it became a police matter for South Africa," the law enforcement official said.

The FBI also was not convinced that buying Goosen's vials would make Americans safer, the official said. Deadly anthrax and c. perfringens can be found in nature, the official noted. And, while Project Coast's experiments in genetic engineering were state-of-the-art at the time, technology had advanced so rapidly that similar kinds of genetic alterations are now performed by microbiology students "at the graduate or even undergraduate level," the official said.

Other biological weapons experts have criticized the FBI's decision, saying the agency missed the point. While genetic engineering has become increasingly common, there are few known instances where scientists have deliberately tried to adapt organisms for germ warfare. Soviet bioweapons scientists were beginning to produce genetically altered prototypes when their program was shut down in 1992, according Ken Alibek, a former Soviet scientist who defected to the United States.

Back in Pretoria, Goosen heard not a word from the United States after sending his toothpaste tube. But he assumed the deal was off when local authorities obtained a warrant to search his laboratory. Nothing was confiscated, said Goosen, who has never been charged with a crime.

The experience left Goosen embittered and disillusioned, but otherwise little has changed in his circumstances -- except that more people are aware of his bacteria collection and are inquiring about it. In the past nine months, the scientist has been offered money by a German treasure-hunter and a man claiming to be an Arab sheik. Goosen says he turned the offers down, but worries about future bioterrorism.

"A small container of pathogens could kill a million people," he said. "It's hard enough to secure fissile materials, which are large and easy to detect. How do you begin to control a substance that looks like nothing more than sugar?"

Bale, the Monterey Institute researcher, believes U.S. officials should have jumped at the opportunity to secure the South African strains. "Here was a guy who had worked in a former chemical and biological program and was willing to provide information and assistance to the United States," Bale said. "That's worth following up on. If a person like Goosen decides to collaborate with a foreign party, it's far better that he collaborates with us and not with rogue elements in other parts of the world."

Washington Post staff writer Joby Warrick will answer reader questions about this series in a video interview Monday. Submit questions for Warrick at www.washingtonpost.com.

*********

By the by, it was long rumored circa 80s in circles who monitor such things that the racist state also had a nuclear program going and perhaps functionable bombs.

Wonder who'll be selling those ...

[lynn]

Do you think the point of this article is to say, "We already have this stuff. Take a hike."

[Monte Smith]

My best guess is that they were in a glass case at the Baghdad museum and now we'll never find them.

[RainyDay]

The WMD are in Syria. It's like an Easter Egg hunt. The US will keep invading Middle Eastern countries until they find Iraq's WMD.

BTW, now that the US is in Iraq, will they tell the Saudis to kiss US butt now? Talk about a place that needs a regime change...

[patricia]

Originally posted by lynn
Do you think the point of this article is to say, "We already have this stuff. Take a hike."

I think that it's pretty well understood that the U.S. has every known WOMD, chemical and biological agent which exists. How this is squared with the rest of the world is, presumably, that the U.S. are on the side of goodness and rightness. They will use their terrible weapons for GOOD and not for EVIL.
For anyone to shop their new and even more terrible WOMD, chemical and biological is useless in that if it exists, the U.S. has it, or them. Even though they say they will never use any of them, except for defensive purposes, how any of these weapons figure into defensive use is the question. But they do exist, right here, stockpiled and.....for what???

[Clay Fink]

It's like the old story:

Little kid in a barn with a pile of dead ponies. The kid's yanking the ponies out of the pile with unrestrained glee. Dad walks into the barn and asks: "what are you so happy about, son?".

Boy: "I just know there's some shit under this pile of ponies!!".

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Domestically I don't think WMDs matter anymore. I think a poll taken last week said so.

Internationally it may be a problem. But the Administration could care less.

[Gary Sisco]

You're right, Darryl, for two reasons: One, the most important, being that WMDs were one (of many constantly changing) excuses for a war that had no real political rationale that could be voiced, because the real rationale was both personal and imperial. And we all know the US has never been an imperialistic country, wishing to control other countries. Right? And, two, the shrinking American attention span (no down to just about the length of the average television ad) and absolute lack of logic will allow idiot ideas like "they hid them in Syria" to become fact overnight. As it has in idiot circles where I live. People just parrot whatever they hear.

I'm just fuckin' with the repubs, here. They're going to have a hard time explaining to *themselves* where the WMDs are.

[Gary Sisco]

The real question of course is: Who *will* pay five million for it. There are plenty who'd think it a bargain.

Global risk. Hey, does that mean we're going to war with South Africa next?


Biotoxins Fall Into Private Hands
Global Risk Seen In S. African Poisons


Wouter Basson, former commander of South Africa's biological weapons program, testified before the nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission prior to a murder and fraud trial in which he was acquitted. (1998 File Photo/Benny Gool -- AP)





By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 21, 2003; Page A01


Second of two articles

PRETORIA, South Africa -- In three days of secret meetings last July, the man known throughout South Africa as "Doctor Death" astounded U.S. law enforcement officials with tales of how the former white-minority government carried out unique experiments with chemical and biological weapons.

Wouter Basson, the bearded ex-commander of South Africa's notorious 7th Medical Battalion, spoke candidly of global shopping sprees for pathogens and equipment, of plans for epidemics to be sown in black communities and of cigarettes and letters that were laced with anthrax. He revealed the development of a novel anthrax strain unknown to the U.S. officials, a kind of "stealth" anthrax that Basson claimed could fool tests used to detect the disease.

But most disturbing was the question Basson could not answer: Who controls the microbes now?

Nearly a decade has passed since the last South African president under apartheid, Frederik W. de Klerk, dismantled the top-secret biological and chemical weapons program known as Project Coast, of which Basson was the director. In 1993, South Africa declared all the weapons, pathogen strains and documents destroyed. Since then, South Africa has been held up as a model -- an example for Iraq and other nations of "what real disarmament looks like," as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in a speech in January.

But in reality, Project Coast's legacy continues to haunt South Africa in ways that bode poorly for countries seeking to roll back programs for weapons of mass destruction, according to government officials and weapons experts. South Africa is still struggling to answer basic questions about the kinds of weapons developed in the program, how they were used and what happened to them, the officials said. Bacterial strains that supposedly were destroyed continue to turn up in private hands. Law enforcement officials remain concerned that former weapons scientists may share secrets with extremist groups or foreign governments.

The lingering threats from Project Coast attest to the existence of a gray zone, the combination of weak states, open borders, lack of controls and a ready market of buyers and sellers for weapons of mass destruction.

"So many of the past problems occurred because there weren't enough checks and balances in the system," said Torie Pretorius, one of two lead prosecutors in the state's case against Basson on murder and fraud charges stemming from Project Coast, of which he was acquitted. "Are those checks and balances any better today? I don't think so," he said.

"The rollback in South Africa is incomplete," said Milton Leitenberg, an arms control expert and senior research scholar at the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs. "It's unclear that the government ever wrapped these programs up, and they need to wrap them up. The fact that you've got a guy with a walking collection of bacteria traveling around the world is just more evidence of that."

Novel Methods


Project Coast was a closely guarded state secret, created as a unit of the South African National Defense Force (SADF) in 1981, at a time when the white-minority government saw itself under siege from all sides -- from communist-led insurgencies in neighboring countries and from an increasingly restive majority black population within its borders.

"The SADF viewed the liberation movements as terrorist organizations, a view that held that every white South African was a potential target," South African researchers Chandre Gould and Peter Folb wrote in a major study on Project Coast released in January for the United Nations.

The first authoritative accounts about Project Coast surfaced only in 1998 when Basson and other top scientists were called to testify before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. In 1999, state prosecutors began a 21/2-year trial of Basson on murder and fraud charges, alleging that he had directed the use of weapons in assassinations and misused state money. The trial resulted in the release of thousands of pages of documents, and produced sensational disclosures about South Africa's use of chemicals and pathogens. In a stunning rejection of the state's case, a South African judge acquitted Basson on all counts last April, finding that Basson did not break any laws. Prosecutors are appealing the case.

Testimony in the trial portrayed Basson as a skillful and wily manager who built a sophisticated weapons program on a modest budget with little oversight from the country's political and military leadership. Unlike the vastly larger Soviet weapons program, Project Coast produced no warheads or missiles and no "weaponized" agents that would be considered militarily significant. Instead, it focused entirely on small-scale, custom-made weapons intended to terrorize, weaken and kill opponents of the apartheid government, testimony and documents showed.

"The most characteristic feature of the South African program was the development, testing and utilization of a wide array of hard-to-trace toxic agents to assassinate 'enemies of the state,' " said Gary Ackerman, a South African weapons expert with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies.

Project Coast scientists collected hundreds of strains of deadly pathogens, including 45 types of anthrax and the bacteria that cause cholera, brucellosis and plague, according to documents released by the government. They also developed novel methods for distributing toxins. A 1989 sales list released by the government provided a partial inventory: sugar cubes laced with salmonella, beer bottles and peppermint candies poisoned with pesticide, cigarettes and letter-size envelopes sprinkled with anthrax spores.

More sinister were the attempts -- ordered by Basson -- to use science against the country's black majority population. Daan Goosen, former director of Project Coast's biological research division, said he was ordered by Basson to develop ways to suppress population growth among blacks, perhaps by secretly applying contraceptives to drinking water. Basson also urged scientists to search for a "black bomb," a biological weapon that would select targets based on skin color, he said.

"Basson was very interested. He said, 'If you can do this, it would be very good,' " Goosen recalled. "But nothing came of it."

Toxic Trail


When South Africa announced destruction of its nuclear weapons program in 1993, teams of international observers were flown in for verification that the warheads as well as thousands of pages of blueprints and documents were destroyed. But the process was different for biological and chemical weapons -- the only witnesses to the destruction at Project Coast were the program's top managers. Their claims came into question as early as 1997, when steamer trunks filled with Project Coast documents belonging to Basson turned up in the home of an associate. The trunks contained financial and scientific records as well as a sales list of clandestine weapons.

When questioned by U.S. officials in July, Basson said he could offer no assurances about the possible existence of other documents, or bacterial strains and chemicals that he previously claimed were incinerated or dumped at sea.

"His suspicion was that people working in the labs had probably taken things with them," said a knowledgeable U.S. law enforcement source. "As the program ended, an effort was made to destroy or sell off as many assets as possible. That's because the white leadership didn't relish the prospect of this technology ending up in the hands of the new black government."

Goosen acknowledged in an interview that scientists had retained copies of bacterial strains to continue work on vaccines and antidotes with commercial applications. Goosen said he ended up with scores of such strains in his private laboratory, a collection he attempted unsuccessfully to sell to the United States last May. Goosen did not destroy them, he said, because he considered them vital to his continued research and vaccine business.

Documents and e-mails generated as part of that attempted sale to U.S. officials suggested that additional "replica" copies of Project Coast strains existed. Tai Minnaar, a retired South African general who represented Goosen in the attempted sale, wrote to a retired CIA official describing one such replica that "is in fact a copy of the original in every way." Goosen said he had no knowledge of such a replica.

Reconstructing what happened to Project Coast materials is made more difficult because of uncertainties over the identities of outside companies and institutes that may have provided assistance. Most of Project Coast's scientists worked for one of two front companies, Roodeplaat Research Laboratories and Delta G Scientific. But based on interviews with former South African military leaders, some U.S. researchers have concluded that other entities were deeply involved.

"There were a number of different research and testing centers at universities and companies, and scientists in various parts of South Africa assisted," professors Helen E. Purkitt and Stephen F. Burgess wrote in a June 2002 article in the Journal of Southern African Studies. Over time, Basson was able to acquire or develop "pathogens that had never before been seen," they wrote.

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During his trial, Basson boasted of logging many tens of thousands of miles visiting foreign capitals, from Taipei to Tripoli. According to his own testimony, his trips included a visit to Iran to acquire samples of chemical weapons used in the Iran-Iraq war, and a trip to Russia to purchase sophisticated equipment used in genetic engineering. Along the way he built a network of foreign contacts who later became business partners.

Although weapons experts dismiss many of Basson's claims, travel records confirm that he made at least five trips in the 1990s to Libya -- a country the CIA believes is attempting to establish a biological weapons program. The State Department became so concerned about his visits that a formal complaint was made to the South African government in 1995.

Other former Project Coast officials have made extended visits to Libya as well as China, and still others have received visitors from countries regarded by the United States as proliferation concerns. Gould and Folb, in their U.N.-sponsored study, describe a visit by a group of Syrian businessmen to meet with former Project Coast scientists Andre Immelman and Jan Lourens some time after the program was shut down.

One of the visitors was "quite open in his request for technology in the form of documentation or skills," Lourens was quoted as saying. He said the Syrians returned home empty-handed, and no further contact was made.

Deciphering the intent of the foreign contacts was a key objective of U.S. officials who met with Basson during a secret three-day session last summer. Basson, who did not respond to requests for an interview for this story, has kept a relatively low profile while awaiting the outcome of the state's appeal of his acquittal. But in July, he offered himself to U.S. government officials for questioning at the fortress-like U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, the capital.

Officials knowledgeable of the meeting agreed to discuss some of the revelations on the condition they not be identified. They recalled Basson had requested the meeting, saying he wanted to clear his record with U.S. law enforcement officials who had tracked his movements in recent years to determine whether he was trying to sell biological agents or secrets to other countries. During three days of questioning, Basson answered questions and told stories with the assurance that none of his statements could be used against him in any criminal or civil court, the officials said.

In past statements, Basson told extraordinary tales that later turned out to be either fabricated or unverifiable. The U.S visitors were not convinced of his candor on many points, particularly about his foreign travels. Basson acknowledged the trips but offered innocuous explanations. For example, he said that in Libya he consulted with senior government officials about plans to construct a hospital and a railway.

"He was having one hell of a time going all over the world," said a law enforcement official familiar with details of the embassy meetings. "He told us about Libya, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Israel. He mentioned meeting officials from North Korea. And of course, we're convinced he only told about the things he thought we already knew."

The officials did find disturbingly credible Basson's account of an unknown "stealth" anthrax strain. South Africa's most tightly guarded anthrax weapon was a native bacterial strain, known to be lethal to humans and animals -- one of 45 anthrax types in Project Coast's collection. But the strain achieved a whole new significance, he said, when his scientists were able to induce a change that rendered the microbe invisible to standard field tests commonly used in South Africa and neighboring countries.

"They ended up with an organism that would confound conventional detection," said one U.S. law enforcement official who reviewed Basson's claim. "That way, the spread of the disease is not stopped, and more people would become ill." The official said more sophisticated anthrax tests commonly used in the United States would not be fooled by the stealth microbe.

Anthrax experts who learned details of Basson's claim said the reported accomplishment was possible, but likely not very effective as a weapon. The alterations described by Basson would likely have severely reduced the virulence of the strain, said Martin Hugh-Jones, an anthrax specialist at Louisiana State University.

"It might make a few goats sick but it wouldn't do very well at killing people," Hugh-Jones said. "It appears he turned a pathogenic organism into a nonpathogenic one."

Basson acknowledged to U.S. officials that the modifications stripped the microbe of some of its virulence, but said Project Coast scientists remained interested because of the strain's ability to sicken and debilitate targets without leaving a trace.

Basson also told U.S. officials he had learned the technique from Israeli government scientists, a claim that could not be independently verified. Israel has persistently denied having biological or chemical weapons programs, although many U.S. weapons experts believe such programs exist. Israel also is widely believed to have assisted South Africa with the development of its former nuclear weapons program, a claim Israeli officials also deny. Basson and at least one other member of South Africa's biological and chemical weapons team made extended trips to Israel in the 1980s, according to testimony and documents cited by authors Gould and Folb.

"The two countries at the time shared a similar mind-set: Both saw groups inside their own borders that threatened the country's survival," said a U.S. government weapons analyst with first-hand knowledge of Project Coast and its aftermath, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The enemy wasn't another nation-state but pockets of individuals within their own population."

Washington Post staff writer Joby Warrick will answer reader questions about this series in a video interview that can be viewed online this afternoon. Submit questions for Warrick at www.washingtonpost.com.



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Gary Sisco]

Fascinating that these articles can completely avoid the words "racist" and "terrorist," not to mention "state terrorism," though clearly the racist state of South Africa was a state terrorist regime. Of course, the US's position was "constructive engagement" at the time, since it has no real problems with state terrorism. Only with certain state terrorisms. Similarly, of course, it has no problems with WMDs, so long as they're kept within the circles of which they approve, racist South Africa having been well within that circle of approval, as was and is Israel, though it's known for certain that Israel has WMDs for sure, including nukes.

[Gary Sisco]

Does kind of get me wondering again, for the first time in many years, about how dengue fever ("the bonecrusher," the Nicas called it) appeared in Nicaragua, and the western hemisphere, for the first time ever, during the darkest days of Raygun, Inc's "secret" war against Nicaragua. My best friend's girlfriend caught it and it damned near killed her from dehydration.

[clinthopson]

They couldn't have invented the WMD fantasy to hide their other failures and get their mitts on the oil could they?

Could they?

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Clint,

I've come to the opinion that while oil is why we're interested in the region it wasn't THE primary reason for the war. We're talking bigger stakes, the transformation of the region's politics and greater security for Israel. Oil is just the icing on the cake.

Wolfowitz, Kristol, and Perle are the "soul" of this exercise. They truly believe that the Arab nations can be transformed into democracies (of their liking). Secular, with at least a neutral position towards the US.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that if we do see one-man-one vote type of democracy (with emphasis on MAN) we'll wind up with a bunch a radical theocracies that the Bush Administration wasn't planning on.

Right now the best I'm hoping for is that Iraq doesn't collapse into chaos.

As for the WMDS, who knows? I expect something will be found, but not at the level of 100s of tons of the stuff. That's a lot of shit to hide.

[patricia]

A rather interesting news item, this morning, on CBC.
Apparantly, there were some soldiers found buried in a shallow grave, in Iraq.
Tony Blair said, in his speech in the House of Commons, that these soldiers were executed and that this was further proof of the viciousness of the enemy. Now, it turns out that they don't know that they were executed, in fact, but were probably soldiers who died in battle and were buried where they were found. It seemed that Mr Blair was using this as a way to maintain the hatred toward the Iraqis to bolster his going into the conflict, given that no WOMD are being found.

[Monte Smith]

Another rather interesting news item from today's NYT:

April 21, 2003


Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert

By JUDITH MILLER

WITH THE 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION, south of Baghdad, Iraq, April 20.

A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said.



They said the scientist led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons, which he claimed to have buried as evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs.



The scientist also told American weapons experts that Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990's, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda, the military officials said.



The Americans said the scientist told them that President Saddam Hussein's government had destroyed some stockpiles of deadly agents as early as the mid-1990's, transferred others to Syria, and had recently focused its efforts instead on research and development projects that are virtually impervious to detection by international inspectors, and even American forces on the ground combing through Iraq's giant weapons plants.



An American military team hunting for unconventional weapons in Iraq, the Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, or MET Alpha, which found the scientist, declined to identify him, saying they feared he might be subject to reprisals. But they said that they considered him credible and that the material unearthed over the last three days at sites to which he led them had proved to be precursors for a toxic agent that is banned by chemical weapons treaties.



The officials' account of the scientist's assertions and the discovery of the buried material, which they described as the most important discovery to date in the hunt for illegal weapons, supports the Bush administration's charges that Iraq continued to develop those weapons and lied to the United Nations about it. Finding and destroying illegal weapons was a major justification for the war.



The officials' accounts also provided an explanation for why United States forces had not yet turned up banned weapons in Iraq. The failure to find such weapons has become a political issue in Washington.



Under the terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of MET Alpha, this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials.



Those officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted. They said they feared that such information could jeopardize the scientist's safety by identifying the part of the weapons program where he worked.



The MET Alpha team said it reported its findings to Washington after testing the buried material and checking the scientist's identity with experts in the United States. A report was sent to the White House on Friday, experts said.



Military spokesmen at the Pentagon and at Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, said they could not confirm that an Iraqi chemical weapons scientist was providing American forces with new information.



The scientist was found by a team headed by Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, the leader of MET Alpha, one of several teams charged with hunting for unconventional weapons throughout Iraq. Departing from his team's assigned mission, Mr. Gonzales and his team of specialists from the Defense Intelligence Agency tracked down the scientist on Thursday through a series of interviews and increasingly frantic site visits.



While this reporter could not interview the scientist, she was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he said that material from the arms program was buried.



Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection.



Military officials said the scientist told them that four days before President Bush gave Mr. Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war, Iraqi officials set fire to a warehouse where biological weapons research and development was conducted.



The officials quoted him as saying he had watched several months before the outbreak of the war as Iraqis buried chemical precursors and other sensitive material to conceal and preserve them for future use. The officials said the scientist showed them documents, samples, and other evidence of the program that he claimed to have stolen to prove that the program existed.



MET Alpha is one of several teams created earlier this year to hunt for unconventional weapons in Iraq. Supported by the 75th Exploitation Task Force, a field artillery brigade based in Fort Sill, Okla., the teams were charged with visiting some 150 top sites that intelligence agencies have identified as suspect.



But the Pentagon-led teams, which include specialists from several Pentagon agencies, have been hampered by a lack of resources and by geography.



Because the task force has two expensive, highly sophisticated, transportable labs in which chemical and germ samples can be analyzed quickly, it was kept at a safe distance from fighting at a desert camp in Kuwait, just across the Iraqi border.



Unable to move their task force closer to Baghdad, where most of the suspect sites and scientists who worked in them are situated, the mobile exploitation teams have had to rely on scarce helicopters to travel to suspect sites in the Baghdad area. Until recently, these were reserved mainly for soldiers going to battle. As a result, most of the teams had done almost no weapons hunting until the fighting had largely concluded.



Two weeks ago, MET Alpha was finally given a mission of inspecting barrels filled with chemicals that were buried on the outskirts of Al Muhawish, a small town south of Baghdad. A small team with little equipment and virtually no supplies traveled to the town for what was supposed to be a half-day survey. The barrels turned out to contain no chemical weapons agents.



But during the survey of that site, Maj. Brian Lynch, the chemical officer of the 101st Airborne Division, told MET Alpha members about a report of suspect containers buried in the area that fit the description of mobile labs.



Other officers mentioned that a man who said he was an Iraqi scientist had given troops a note about Iraq's chemical warfare program. No one had yet followed up the report, they said, because of the fighting and also because similar tips had failed to produce evidence of unconventional weapons.



The team, with vehicles and supplies from the 101st Airborne Division, went out on its own to survey other sites and pursue the tip about the buried containers and the scientist. After completing a lengthy survey of one installation, Mr. Gonzales and other team members from the Defense Intelligence Agency's Chemical Biological Intelligence Support Team decided to try to find the scientist.



Mr. Gonzales tracked down the scientist's note, which had never been formally analyzed and was still in a brigade headquarters, along with the scientist's address, military officials said.



The next morning, MET Alpha weapons experts found the scientist at home, along with some documents from the program and samples he had buried in his backyard and at other sites.



The scientist has told MET Alpha members that because Iraq's unconventional weapons programs were highly compartmented, he only had firsthand information about the chemical weapons sector in which he worked, team members said.



But he has given the Americans information about other unconventional weapons activities, they said, as well as information about Iraqi weapons cooperation with Syria, and with terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. It was not clear how the scientist knew of such a connection.



The potential of MET Alpha's work is "enormous," said Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.



"What they've discovered," he added, "could prove to be of incalculable value. Though much work must still be done to validate the information MET Alpha has uncovered, if it proves out it will clearly be one of the major discoveries of this operation, and it may be the major discovery."






Copyright 2003_The New York Times Company

[Darryl G. Thomas]

Monte,

The most important thing for the US to do as far as these allegations go is to have international inspectors in Iraq as soon as possible. Preferably the UN, because at this moment the US has zero credibility internationally.

As for Iraq destroying chem/bios beginning in 1995, isn't that what we wanted them to do?

[Gary Sisco]

Not a day longer than necessary to accomplish what? is the question unanswered. And who decides what's necessary and how long it is? Iraqis? Not likely.

I've long held that the oil is incidental. If they wanted the oil, they could as easily have taken it last time out.

This is something much heavier and more serious. These guys are out to re-order the world -- and believe themselves on a mission from God to do so -- and so it is necessary to deal with the mid-east, for obvious reasons. But it's not only the mid-east they'll need to "pacify" to officially establish Babylon worldwide. That'll take a lot of pacifying.

That's why they have to go, 2004. Out, out, out.

Blair's just taken the role of the useful idiot.

[Ron Thorne]

Originally posted by Gary Sisco
I've long held that the oil is incidental. If they wanted the oil, they could as easily have taken it last time out.

This is something much heavier and more serious. These guys are out to re-order the world -- and believe themselves on a mission from God to do so -- and so it is necessary to deal with the mid-east, for obvious reasons. But it's not only the mid-east they'll need to "pacify" to officially establish Babylon worldwide. That'll take a lot of pacifying.

Precisely, Gary!

[Tom Storer]

Originally posted by Monte Smith
Another rather interesting news item from today's NYT:

April 21, 2003


Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert

By JUDITH MILLER

WITH THE 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION, south of Baghdad, Iraq, April 20.

A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said.

I believe anything an American military team says. After all, the United States has been so open and truthful throughout this affair.

[Tanager]

Not to mention, of course this informant couldn't possibly be making unprovable charges to ingratiate or insulate himself, either.

[lynn]

Well, they found some.....right here in Tacoma! Another post office shut down and this time its the plague. Can somebody please give us a break from all this. So much for increased security measures.

[Gary Sisco]

Editorial: WMD in Iraq
4/23/2003

23 April 2003


In addition to the question: “Where is Saddam Hussein?” the other question which the US needs to answer for the whole world — and very soon — is: “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?”

It is not a question, we suspect, that the US wants to concentrate on, a suspicion reinforced by the accusation from UN chief arms inspector Hans Blix that US officials tried to discredit his work in Iraq in order to further the case for war. As we said in an earlier piece, Washington’s prime aim in invading Iraq was to get rid of Saddam Hussein. He was an easy and convenient target for a Bush administration out to wipe away the pain and stain of Sept. 11 by showing the world that no one stands in America’s way and gets away with it; weapons of mass destruction were merely Washington’s pretext for toppling a tyrant regime it disliked.

But having chosen them as the key reason for war, Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will forever believe that it paved the road to war with lies. The Bush administration knows that its credibility is at stake, which is why it has now sent in its own teams to look for weapons — although so far none have been found.

But sending in its own teams is not good enough. Just as no one was prepared to take Saddam Hussein’s word when he said that Iraq no longer had chemical or biological weapons, and instead insisted that there had to be independent verification, so too there are going to be a lot of people who will say that the US is making it up if its inspectors find any weapons. In fact, it would be insanity for the Bush administration to try that. The US government is notoriously leaky and the American press loves nothing better than exposing conspiracies in high places. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, the truth will out.

There are many people who are prone to believe in conspiracy theories where the US is concerned. The matter of fake documents passed on to the International Atomic Energy Agency supposedly indicating a supply of uranium from Niger to Iraq, which neither US nor British intelligence challenged and which still requires an answer as to who was behind the fraud, has not helped. For the sake of its own credibility, the search for weapons of mass destruction has to be in the hands of a team demonstrably independent of Washington. That means the IAEA and the UN inspectors led by Hans Blix. There is no one else that has the credibility, the authority and the skills. Washington’s repetition yesterday that it foresees no immediate role for Blix’s team is out of order. There is implied contempt for the work it did in Iraq, as if it deliberately failed to find the weapons Washington insists are there. That is not the case; the statement raises doubts about the Bush administration’s impartiality than it does about that of Blix’s team. There is no doubt that it was given the runaround by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen, but they are no longer on the scene. The team can be relied on to search out and find whatever is there. If there is nothing, then the US inspectors are not going to find it either. Blix’s team should be allowed to return immediately and find out once and for all whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They are the only people the world trusts to tell the truth on the matter. The truth told and seen to be told is surely what Washington wants most of all.



__________________________________________________
Arab News
Saudi Arabia's First English Language Daily
http://www.arabnews.com/

[Gary Sisco]

Hey, how do you move a secret, underground nuclear facility to Syria, anyway?

[Darryl G. Thomas]

France is a WMD.

I was watching the News Hour on PBS and a NY Times reporter was talking about how the evidence was going to be reaccessed. Instead of producing huge supplies of bio/chems I guess the Administartion is going to talk about the intentions of the Iraqis (yeah we can't find the stuff, but we know they were planning to make it).

The problem is the evidence they produced at the UN and for the world stated that literally tons of this stuff was in Iraq and ready for use.

That means two things: either their intelligence sucked (supplied by the Israelis?), or they stretched meager evidence.