Iraq:  Kay Says Order Was Given to Use Chemical Weapons

Iraqi military leaders were ordered to use chemical weapons during the recent Iraq war, according to the leader of the team conducting the WMD hunt in Iraq, the Boston Globe reported Friday (see GSN, Aug. 11).

David Kay, leader of the Iraq Survey Group, testified to Congress last week that the team had collected solid physical and documentary evidence that the order was given, according to the Globe.

“They have found evidence that an order was given,” said a senior intelligence official with access to a pending report by Kay.

Kay’s report says that no chemical weapons have yet been found but does not explain why the orders to launch chemical attacks were not carried out, according to the Globe.  A senior defense official said the United States might have persuaded Iraqi commanders to not use chemical weapons by warning them that they could face war crimes charges if they did so.

“We tried to dissuade them in very public ways, and there were clearly covert ways as well,” the official said.

Some officials suggested that the weapons may not have been delivered to front-line units or that they were destroyed by Iraqi officials or U.S. airstrikes, the Globe reported.  Some officials also said the chemical strike orders might have been a ruse intended to deter a U.S.-led invasion.

U.S. officials said they were confident that Kay would both back up the claims that Iraqi units were ordered to conduct chemical attacks and account for the weapons themselves.

“It sounded like they had something that they could hold up and say ‘Here is the reason why it didn’t take place,” a defense official said  (Bryan Bender, Boston Globe, Aug. 8).

Tenet Defends October 2002 NIE

Meanwhile, CIA Director George Tenet has defended an October 2002 national intelligence estimate on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, saying it provided the best assessment of Iraq’s capabilities at the time.

“We have no doubt … that the NIE was the most reasonable, well-grounded and objective assessment of Iraq’s WMD programs that was possible at the time it was produced,” Tenet said in a statement released yesterday.

The Bush administration has come under increasing criticism for its handling of prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.  The Washington Post Sunday detailed a number of instances wherein White House claims on Iraq’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons exceeded available intelligence.

In his statement, Tenet said the U.S. intelligence community agreed on the assessment that Iraq was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program and on the pieces of evidence included in the NIE to support that claim.  Tenet noted that the now-disputed claim that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from Africa was not included among the evidence used to support the nuclear assessment.

Another piece of evidence oft-cited by Bush administration officials as a sign that Iraq was seeking to develop nuclear weapons — attempts to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes — has also been the subject of intense scrutiny.  The Post reported yesterday that U.S. experts had told U.S. intelligence agencies that Iraq was producing copies of an Italian-made conventional rocket that matched both the alloy and the dimensions of the tubes.  In addition, two U.S. agencies — the U.S. Energy Department and the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research — said during the preparation of the NIE that the tubes were most likely for conventional military uses, according to Tenet.

Even so, Tenet said, all U.S. intelligence agencies agreed that the tubes could have been used to produce gas centrifuges to enrich uranium.  He added that the agencies differed in intent — a natural outcome taking into account that Iraq went to “great lengths” to hide their WMD efforts.

Tenet also said that even though the Energy Department differed on the purpose of the tubes, it still agreed that Iraq was attempting to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.  “Obviously, the tubes were not central to DOE’s view on reconstitution,” he said (CIA release, Aug. 11).

British Dossier

Senior British defense officials yesterday told an inquiry panel into the death of former U.N. weapons inspector David Kelly that concerns were raised over the wording of a September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Two officials had expressed concerns over the wording of the dossier, which included a now-disputed claim that the Iraqi military could deploy biological and chemical weapons within 45 minutes of receiving an order to do so, Deputy Chief of Defense Intelligence Martin Howard said.  He added, however, that such concerns were “quite normal.”

“There was not a difference of view about whether the intelligence should be included or not, it was more about how the intelligence should be described,” Howard said.

The inquiry was established to investigate why Kelly, who was identified prior to his death as the source for a BBC report that the British government had exaggerated intelligence, died in an apparent suicide, according to the Financial Times (Bob Sherwood, Financial Times, Aug. 12).

Back to top

North Korea:  Taiwan Seizes Suspected WMD Material from North Korean Freighter

Taiwanese customs officials yesterday seized hundreds of barrels of a suspected WMD-related material from the North Korean freighter Be Gaehung, according to the Christian Science Monitor (see GSN, Aug. 8).

Taiwanese customs officials Sunday asked the ship, docked at Kaohsiung Harbor, to unload 158 barrels of phosphorus pentasulfide, according to the Monitor.  Although a private consultant working for North Korea at the port had argued that the cargo should not be unloaded because it was a general chemical product, the barrels yesterday were voluntarily unloaded and then seized.

Yesterday’s seizure is the first instance of North Korean cargo being confiscated since the June creation of the Proliferation Security Initiative — a U.S.-led effort to interdict suspect shipments of WMD-related cargo (see GSN, Aug. 6; Robert Marquand, Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 12).

Back to top

Syria:  Damascus Maintains Suspected WMD Programs

Despite recent pressure from Washington, Syria has not moved to rid itself of the weapons of mass destruction the United States suspects it has, the Los Angeles Times reported today (see GSN, July 16).

Visiting Damascus in May, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell cautioned that the United States could impose trade sanctions if Syria did not dispose of its suspected WMD arsenal (see GSN, May 5).

Citing Syrian opposition figures and Western diplomats, however, the Times reported that Damascus refuses to abandon its chemical — and potentially biological — weapons programs.

Syrian President Bashar Assad is hoping that the White House will overlook his country while dealing with other issues, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rebuilding effort in Iraq and U.S. elections, according to the Times.

“They are playing for time,” said a Western diplomat of the Syrian leadership.

The U.S. Congress is currently debating the Syrian Accountability Act, which would push the president to impose economic penalties on Damascus if Assad refuses to abandon his weapons programs.

Syria has not acknowledged accusations that it has WMD stockpiles (Christian Miller, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 12).

Back to top

British Response:  Officals Plan Simulated WMD Attack on London Subway

The United Kingdom plans to simulate a WMD attack on the London Underground next month, the British Transport Department announced yesterday (see GSN, Aug. 6).

The exercise is scheduled to be conducted at the Bank subway station in London Sept. 7, a department spokeswoman said.  She added that the exercise — scheduled to involve several hundred police, fire and emergency response personnel — was not being conducted in response to a specific threat (Evening Standard/ThisisLondon, Aug. 11).

Back to top

Iraq:  White House Description of Nuclear Threat Exceeded Intelligence

Leading up to the recent war in Iraq, the Bush administration made a number of allegations heightening the threat posed by Iraq’s nuclear weapons program that went beyond what the available intelligence would support, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, Aug. 3).

In August 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card created the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which was to create strategy for each stage of the U.S. confrontation with Iraq, according to the Post.  Regular participants in the group’s meetings included Karl Rove, U.S. President George W. Bush’s senior political adviser; national security adviser Condoleezza Rice; deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley; and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. 

One senior official described the group as “an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities.”

A WHIG “strategic communications” task force was created to begin preparing speeches and white papers on the threat posed by Iraq, according to the Post.  The first white paper that examined specific Iraqi WMD programs was the never-published A Grave and Gathering Danger: Saddam Hussein’s Quest for Nuclear Weapons.  During the paper’s creation and revision, the WHIG wanted to use vivid imagery that was not available in the typically hedged language of intelligence reports, according to three officials who followed the paper’s creation.

The draft white paper contained a number of exaggerated, or false claims, later made by Bush administration officials, such as the now-disputed claim that Iraq attempted to obtain uranium from Africa, according to the Post. 

The draft paper also said that U.N inspectors had said that satellite imagery showed “many signs of the reconstruction and acceleration of the Iraqi nuclear program.”  However, the inspectors said no such thing, the Post reported.  A national intelligence estimate prepared by the CIA in October 2002 on Iraq’s WMD programs cited new construction at facilities once linked to the Iraqi nuclear program, according to the Post.  By February, however, U.S. specialists had visited the sites and had seen that no forbidden activities were being conducted.

In addition, Bush and other officials claimed that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein held a number of meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists.  They did not say, however, that the work the scientists were known to have been conducting was mostly peaceful, such as for industrial purposes, the Post reported.

In January, a CIA analyst described by the Post as “Joe” traveled to the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to present the U.S case that Iraq was attempting to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes for use in gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, according to the Post.  The IAEA, however, believed that the tubes were for use in conventional rockets.

During his meeting, Joe told the IAEA that the aluminum in the tubes Iraq had sought to purchase was “overspecified,” “inappropriate” and “excessively strong,” according to people familiar with his presentation.  No country would waste the aluminum by using it in a rocket, Joe said.

There was a rocket, however, that used such aluminum tubes — the Italian-made Medusa 81, the Post reported.  Experts from the U.S. national laboratories told the Energy Department and U.S. intelligence analysts that Iraq was producing copies of the Medusa 81.  The aluminum tubes in dispute matched both the alloy and the dimensions of the Medusa 81, according to the Post.

Following Joe’s presentation to the IAEA, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and other administration officials denied that the tubes could have been used for rockets.  They did so even after intelligence analysts photographed in Iraq a near-identical tube marked with the logo of the Italian company that produces the Medusa 81 rocket and the words “81mm rocket” in English, the Post reported.

Two senior U.S. policy-makers that supported the U.S. decision to go to war with Iraq said the White House exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq’s nuclear efforts.

“I never cared about the ‘imminent threat,’” said one of the policy-makers.  “The threat was there in (Hussein’s) presence in office.  To me, just knowing what it takes to have a nuclear weapons program, he needed a lot of equipment.  You can stare at the yellowcake (uranium ore) all you want.  You need to convert it to gas and enrich it.  That does not constitute an imminent threat, and the people who were saying that, I think, did not fully appreciate the difficulties and effort involved in producing the nuclear material and the physics package,” the policy-maker said (Gellman/Pincus, Washington Post, Aug. 10).

Iraqi Diplomat Denies Traveling to Niger to Purchase Uranium

Meanwhile, Iraqi diplomat Wissam al-Zahawie has denied that the reason for his visit to Niger in 1999 was to purchase uranium for Iraq, according to the London Independent.

The United States and the United Kingdom have previously accused Iraq of attempting to obtain uranium from Africa.  One of the key pieces of evidence used to support that claim though — documents purporting to show an attempt by Iraq to purchase uranium in Niger — was later revealed to be fraudulent.  Al-Zahawie said he believed he was suspected of attempting to arrange a uranium purchase during his visit because his name appeared on the forged documents.

Al-Zahawie, former Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican, said he traveled to Niger to invite the then-president to visit Iraq.

“My only mission was to meet the president of Niger and invite him to visit Iraq,” al-Zahawie said.  “The invitation and the situation in Iraq resulting from the genocidal U.N. sanctions were all we talked about.  I had no other instructions, and certainly none concerning the purchase of uranium,” he said (Raymond Whitaker, London Independent, Aug. 10).

Back to top

Iraq I:  Iraq Survey Group Set to Release Report Next Month

British officials have said that the Iraq Survey Group, which is currently conducting the WMD hunt in Iraq, has found enough evidence to release a report of its findings next month, the London Times reported today (see GSN, Aug. 4).

The group’s report is expected to include evidence of a long-term biological weapons program, the Times reported.  Coalition forces have also received a large amount of evidence from Iraqi scientists as to how former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sought to hide his WMD efforts from U.N. inspectors, British officials said (Michael Evans, London Times, Aug. 8).

The group’s findings are also expected to be included in a report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction the British government is planning to publish in September, according to the London Independent.  The British intelligence service MI6 believes the group’s findings will help to support a now-disputed report the British government released in last September on Iraq’s WMD programs (Sengupta/Waugh, London Independent, Aug. 8).

White House Officials Repeated Africa-Uranium Claim

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported today that senior Bush administration officials reiterated the now-disputed claim that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from Africa shortly before, and then after, U.S. President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address (see GSN, Aug. 5).

Bush aides have said that the claim was included into Bush’s address because of miscommunications between the CIA and White House staff, according to the Post.  In the month that the State of the Union was delivered, however, the claim was also included in two White House documents and in speeches and articles prepared by four senior White House officials.

In January, U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz all made the claim at various times, according to the Post.  In addition, the African uranium claim was also included in a report sent to Congress as part of the Bush administration’s request for authorization to use military force against Iraq and in a publicly released report on Iraq’s weapons concealment activities, the Post reported.

The inclusion of the Africa uranium claim in the State of the Union address “made people below feel comfortable using it as well,” White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said yesterday.  There was some “strategic coordination” as to what claims should have been included in statements against Iraq, Bartlett said, adding, “I don’t know of any specific talking points to say that this is supposed to be used” (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, Aug. 8).

Back to top

Iraq II:  Al-Qaeda Links With Baghdad Were Exaggerated

By Peter H. Stone

National Journal

As criticism over the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction continues, a new wave of accusations seems ready to break — this time, over complaints that in its efforts to sell the war, the White House also hyped claims about the links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Three former Bush administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues have told National Journal that the prewar evidence tying al-Qaeda to Iraq was tenuous, exaggerated, and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies.  The Bush alumni, as well as other intelligence veterans and some members of Congress, say they see parallels between how the administration painted the Qaeda connection to Iraq and the way that the White House often portrayed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.

“Our conclusion was that Saddam would certainly not provide weapons of mass destruction or WMD knowledge to al-Qaeda because they were mortal enemies,” said Greg Thielmann, who worked at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research on weapons intelligence until last fall.  “Saddam would have seen al-Qaeda as a threat, and al-Qaeda would have opposed Saddam as the kind of secular government they hated.”

Other Bush veterans concur that the evidence linking al-Qaeda to Iraq was overblown.

“Anyone who followed al-Qaeda for a living would not have considered Iraq to be in the top tier of countries to be worried about,” said Roger Cressey, who left the administration last fall after working on counterterrorism issues at the National Security Council and as a top aide to cyberterrorism czar Richard Clarke.  “I’d argue that Iraq would be in the third tier.”  By contrast, Cressey said, Iran would rate in “the top tier.”

And Flynt Leverett, who worked on Middle East issues at the National Security Council until earlier this year and is now with the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said that some administration officials pushed the intelligence envelope on the al-Qaeda connection.

Generally, these and other former intelligence officials who talked to National Journal believed that the United States needed to confront Saddam Hussein.  But the analysts questioned the war’s timing and wondered whether the attack should have come before the battle against al-Qaeda was sufficiently far along.

In the reviews that the Senate and the House Intelligence panels are conducting into the accuracy of prewar intelligence, the claims on Iraq and al-Qaeda are also a topic of inquiry.  Republican leaders of those committees have generally defended the administration’s prewar assessment of al-Qaeda-Iraq links.  Democrats, however, have been skeptical.

“I have never believed that the prewar links between al-Qaeda and Iraq were very strong,” said Representative Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who voted in favor of the war last fall.  “The evidence on the al-Qaeda links was sketchy.”

Her counterpart on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence also sounded dubious about the administration’s effort to link al-Qaeda and Iraq.  “I think the ties were always tenuous at best,” said Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who also voted for the war.  “The evidence about the ties was not compelling.”  Rockefeller said that his panel has a staff group focusing on the question and that the panel may hold a hearing just on this issue in the fall.

In two periods during the run-up to the war against Iraq — in late September and early October of 2002, just before the vote in Congress, and then this year in the weeks before the war — administration heavyweights highlighted what they portrayed as significant ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda.  President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice all weighed in on this point, sometimes in a broad-brush way, sometimes with hints of tantalizing specifics.

Powell, in his major speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, cited the presence of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist who was in Baghdad in May 2002 receiving medical treatment for wounds he received in Afghanistan.  Powell referred to al-Zarqawi as “an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants.”

But several intelligence experts say Powell overstated these ties.  Al-Zarqawi “is at best seen as having linkages to al-Qaeda, instead of being a card-carrying member,” Cressey said.  “There’s no question that Zarqawi is a terrorist, but there are real questions about whether he’s a member of al-Qaeda,” said Vince Cannistraro, a former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA.

In his State of the Union address in January, Bush made the al-Qaeda-Iraq connection.  “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody,” the president said, “reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”  Bush darkly added, “Secretly and without fingerprints, [Hussein] could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop their own.”

In perhaps the boldest assertion before the war, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on Sept. 27 stated that the administration had several “bullet-proof” sentences in intelligence reports about ties between Iraq under Saddam and al-Qaeda.  “We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade,” Rumsfeld said.

Bush echoed Rumsfeld’s remarks in his major address in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, asserting as well that al-Qaeda and Iraq had “high-level contacts that go back a decade.”  He also stated that “we’ve learned” that Iraqis trained Qaeda members in “bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”  And Bush posited that Iraq “could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.”

But even as the president made these comments, the key classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq making the rounds in the Bush administration presented a more nuanced and less alarmist view.  For instance, according to a recent Washington Post account, Bush didn’t mention a key conclusion of the intelligence report: that although high-level contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq had taken place in the early 1990s when bin Laden was based in Sudan, these contacts had not been followed by any significant ties between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government.  Similarly, intelligence sources have said that the claim that Bush made about Iraq training Qaeda members in bomb making or poison gas use had not been fully verified.

“There wasn’t the kind of link between Iraq and al-Qaeda that people wanted,” said one Bush administration alum.  The CIA, he added, had “some measure of intellectual responsibility and didn’t come up with a case.”

Moreover, the president failed to mention the report’s conclusion that the prevailing view in the intelligence community was much more guarded about the prospect of Hussein’s transferring weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.  In fact, CIA Director George Tenet wrote to Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who was then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence panel, that only if a U.S. attack against Iraq seemed imminent or inevitable might Hussein “decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the U.S. would be his last chance to exact vengeance.”

Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Iraq expert who is now director of research at the Saban Center at Brookings, said he also believed before the war that it was “extremely unlikely” that Hussein would have turned over weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda.  Furthermore, Pollack has since concluded that there’s a “much stronger” argument to be made that “the administration exaggerated its case for war in terms of the al-Qaeda issue than on the WMD issue.”

Bush particularly irked intelligence analysts when he landed on an aircraft carrier right after Baghdad fell and proclaimed that the U.S. had just “removed an ally of al-Qaeda.”  Thielmann, the former State Department analyst, calls the statement “an outrageous distortion” and a “shameless falsehood.”

Bush, when specifically asked at his news conference on July 30 whether the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda were exaggerated and whether he now had more definitive evidence pointing to them, gave a long answer justifying the war on other grounds.  But on the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, he said only that David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector now in Iraq looking for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, was also going through piles of documents to look for such links.  “It’s going to take time for us to gather the evidence and analyze the mounds of evidence, literally the miles of documents that we have uncovered,” Bush said.

Some critics argue that by linking al-Qaeda and Iraq, the administration has not only misled the public about Iraq but about the real and continuing danger from al-Qaeda.

The Bush administration “created a powerful impression for the American public that al-Qaeda and Iraq were joined,” said Dan Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror.  Benjamin added, “People don’t understand that al-Qaeda is a global insurgency distinct from states, and is eager to topple some states.”

Other former intelligence officials are also dismayed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s recent statement that the fight against Iraq is the “central battle” in the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.  “The idea that the battle in Iraq is the central battle in the war on terrorism flies in the face of reality and all that we know about al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other globally active terrorists,” Leverett said.

Looking ahead, some critics worry that the Iraq war could ultimately help al-Qaeda more than hurt it.  “A lot of people who could have been very helpful working on al-Qaeda were working on Iraq,” Graham, a presidential candidate, said.  “We shifted intelligence assets as well as military and intelligence people

Other Democrats concur.  “The war enormously deepened the pool of eager recruits for al-Qaeda,” Rockefeller said.  “I think that al-Qaeda was, is, and always will be a greater threat than Iraq.”

Back to top

Iraq I:  U.S. Sanctions Jordanian for Allegedly Aiding Iraqi WMD Programs

By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The United States has imposed sanctions against a Jordanian national for allegedly making a “knowing and material” contribution to Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs, a U.S. State Department official told Global Security Newswire today (see GSN, March 12).

According to a notice published in the Federal Register today, the United States has imposed sanctions against Mohammed al-Khatib for biological and chemical proliferation activities in violation of the Arms Export Control Act and the 1979 Export Administration Act.  The sanctions, which took effect today, prohibit the United States from entering into any contracts with al-Khatib and prevent him from exporting goods to the United States for at least one year.

Today’s sanctions against al-Khatib were imposed for the same activities that resulted in sanctions being imposed against him earlier this year for violating the 1992 Iran-Iraq Arms Control Act, the State official said.  The official also said that Khatib was part of a network that included the Indian company NEC Engineers Private Ltd.  Earlier this year, the United States imposed sanctions against NEC Engineers and a second Indian company, Protech Consultants Private Ltd., for allegedly aiding Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs (see GSN, Feb. 20).  The United States could possibly soon announce new sanctions against NEC Engineers, the State Department official said.

Back to top

Iraq II:  Army Examining Possible Role of Vaccines in Pneumonia Outbreak

The U.S. Army is planning to examine the possible role of vaccinations against diseases such as anthrax as officials study recent pneumonia cases among U.S. soldiers in Iraq and southwestern Asia, an official said yesterday (see GSN, Aug. 6).

“Among all of the possible causes or contributing factors, we are looking at the immunizations that the soldiers received as well,” said Col. Robert DeFraites of the Army Surgeon General’s Office.  “It is premature to say that there is any relationship at all,” he said.

John Sever of the George Washington University’s medical school, a co-author of a study that examined the possible side effects of the anthrax vaccine, has also said the Army should examine if the vaccine has played any role in the pneumonia cases.  That study found that the vaccine might have been the cause of two earlier pneumonia cases, according to the Washington Times (Mark Benjamin, Washington Times, Aug. 7).

Back to top

Iraq III:  Hundreds of Radioactive Sources Still Missing From Tuwaitha

A spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency has said that hundreds of radioactive sources are still unaccounted for from the Tuwaitha complex in Iraq, the main center in former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, the Glasgow Sunday Herald reported Sunday (see GSN, July 16).

As many as 400 sources are still missing from Tuwaitha, which was found in April to have been looted, according to IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming.  A source for the Sunday Herald said he was approached to help sell uranium oxide in the southern Iraqi city of Basra for $250,000.  The source said he believed the material came from the Tuwaitha complex (Pratt/Arbuthnot, Glasgow Sunday Herald, Aug. 3).

Back to top

Iraq:  Biological, Chemical Weapons Largely Ruled Out in U.S. Pneumonia Cases

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has dispatched two epidemiological teams to Iraq and the surrounding region to investigate a recent rash of pneumonia cases among U.S. troops in the region, U.S. Defense Department officials said yesterday.  Of the 100 cases diagnosed since March, two soldiers have died and more than a dozen have been hospitalized.

“We’re sparing no effort to fully analyze and diagnose this condition,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Clinical and Program Policy David Tornberg said at a Pentagon briefing.

Streptococcus has been identified as the cause of pneumonia in at least two of the cases, Col. Robert DeFraites of the Office of the Army Surgeon General said at the briefing, but no such cause has been established for the two deaths.

No evidence so far indicates any biological warfare agent has played a role in any of the cases, DeFraites said.

“We’ve found no evidence of anthrax, smallpox or any other biological agent [to which] we can attribute the pneumonia,” DeFraites said.

“Based on all the information we have to date, there’s been no positive findings of any anthrax or smallpox or any other biological weapons.  So [I have come] pretty close to ruling it out,” he said.

DeFraites added after the briefing that chemical weapons have also been ruled out as a cause of the pneumonia cases.

Pneumonia is generally caused by infections, usually bacterial, or by noninfectious factors such as inhalation of dust, metals or smoke.  The American Lung Association lists inhaled food, liquid, gases and dust as noninfectious causes of pneumonia.  The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Web site indicates a kind of “chemical pneumonia” can result from exposure to mustard gas.

Deaths Led to Dispatch of Special Teams

Fifteen of the U.S. troops with pneumonia have been placed on respirators, 10 of them in Iraq, DeFraites said, adding that the last confirmed case emerged last Wednesday.  No link has been established so far among the troops that developed pneumonia, and none of them appears to have transmitted any infection to any of the others, he said.

DeFraites said the total number of cases, at about 100, is within the range one would expect under normal conditions, given that up to 500 pneumonia cases are registered worldwide each year in the U.S. Army.

Nevertheless, the two deaths, which both occurred over the last two months, spurred the Army to send in the investigative teams, DeFraites said.  Seventeen Army troops died of pneumonia during the five-year period ending last year, he said.

Back to top

International Response:  U.S. Delays Call for South Korea to Join Proliferation Security Initiative

A rough draft of a speech given yesterday by Gen. Leon LaPorte, the top U.S commander in South Korea, included a call for Seoul to join an international effort to intercept shipments of WMD-related cargo, but the general left out that section when he delivered the speech, according to the Korea Times (see GSN, Aug. 4).

“The navy of the future must join in the effort to interdict WMD (weapons of mass destruction) delivery,” said the draft of LaPorte’s speech, which was prepared for the eighth International Sea Powers Symposium, hosted by the South Korean Navy.

LaPorte did not mention that South Korea should join the Proliferation Security Initiative, however, when he actually gave the speech, according to the Korea Times.  Lee Ferguson, a spokeswoman for U.S. Forces Korea, said the rough draft of the speech had been provided to reporters by mistake.

A South Korean official said no decision has been made yet on South Korea joining the initiative.

“Nothing has been decided on South Korea’s participation in the PSI so far, as the meeting itself has not yet progressed to a stage where it can court new members,” the official said.

The official also said that South Korea may be asked to join the initiative during the next meeting of PSI members, scheduled to be held next month in Paris (Seo Soo-min, Korea Times, Aug. 6).

Back to top

British Response:  Hundreds Have Received WMD Response Training This Year

More than 700 British health care workers have received training this year in responding to incidents involving weapons of mass destruction, the British Health Protection Agency said yesterday (see GSN, May 29).  The agency is also “scanning the horizon” for new biological and chemical threats, agency Chief Executive Pat Troop said (Xinhua News Agency, Aug. 6).

Back to top

About Newswire  |  Contact National Journal  |  Re-Use Guidelines

HOME  |  CONTACT US  |  GET INVOLVED  |  SITE MAP