Global Security Newswire

U.S. and British weapons inspectors working in Iraq have found evidence of hidden WMD research by the former regime of President Saddam Hussein, but little evidence that such research was used to build new or advanced WMD programs, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, Dec. 31, 2003).

Reviews of available evidence have found that prewar Iraq possessed a WMD infrastructure that was far less useful than was believed by U.S. analysts prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to the Post. Iraqi industry and science officials have described facilities that were crippled by conflict and international sanctions. In addition, the remnants of Iraq’s WMD programs were filled with internal conflicts among personnel, many of whom attempted to use the programs for personal financial gain, the Post reported.

In one instance, interviews with Iraqi scientists led coalition inspectors to search for Iraqi work with animal poxes, which are harmless to humans on their own but can be used as substitutes for smallpox in research, the Post reported. One Iraqi biologist, Rihab Taha, has told interrogators that she received an order in 1990 to develop a biological weapon based on a virus. Also in 1990, virologist Hazem Ali began research on camelpox. 

If Taha’s statement were true, it would counter the long-standing Iraqi claim that it did not conduct research on offensive viral weapons, the Post reported. An analyst said that investigators believed that Taha’s statement indicated an intent to use smallpox as a weapon.

“Hearing that from the lips of the people involved is kind of like that MasterCard commercial: ‘Priceless,’” the analyst said.

Taha, however, also told interrogators that Iraq did not have access to smallpox, according to Post. In addition, Ali’s research was stopped after only 45 days due to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and did not resume, the Post reported.

In addition to crippled research and production capabilities, investigators have also found widespread instances of corruption within prewar Iraq’s WMD efforts, the Post reported. George Healey, a Canadian nuclear physicist and weapon inspector, said that entire programs were invented or had their efforts distorted in attempts to steal funding.

“They had a system to graft money out of oil-for-food,” Healey said, referring to the U.N. program that supervised Iraqi exports and imports after 1991. “What you had to have was a project — the more expensive the better, because the more you can buy, the more you can graft out of it. You’d have difficulty believing how much that explains,” he added.

Sufiyan Taha Mahmoud, who worked for the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, said that the invented and exaggerated research programs also led to conflicts with U.N. inspectors.

“They couldn’t build anything … but they had to hide the documents because they related to prohibited activities,” Mahmoud said (Barton Gellman, Washington Post, Jan. 7).