August 17, 2002
Did the Reagan Administration Supply Saddam Hussein With Anthrax?
by Dan Kritchevsky
Dear BuzzFlash,
I was puzzled at first by the New York Times story reporting Reagan administration knowledge of Iraq's development and use of "weapons of mass destruction" as if this was a new revelation.
(See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/18/international/
middleeast/18CHEM.html)
My impression was that it's been a matter of public record for four-odd years at least. But now that I've checked my original source, I find it was a 2/28/98 item in Slate's International Papers, which covers the foreign press:
"The Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro led Thursday with the 'revelation' that both the United States and France had supplied Iraq with strains of the anthrax bacillus in the mid-1980s, just when Saddam Hussein was starting the production of biological weapons. It said that the American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Md., and the Pasteur Institute in Paris had responded favorably to Iraqi requests for the bacillus for research purposes. Britain, which was also approached, had refused to help, it said."
So it may be true that the New York Times is scooping the rest of the "homeland" media after all.
Tsk, nothing like actively assisting a weapons-development program to demonstrate knowledge of the program's existence. And we should note that Le Figaro is a conservative source, so it would have been especially unlikely to report on the seamy underbelly of the Reagan administration (which also includes CIA knowledge of Contra cocaine-trafficking to the U.S., according to the CIA's own admission to the House Intelligence Committee in 1999) without solid evidence.
Dan Kritchevsky
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