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In early
2003, as war fever built in Washington, an Iraqi
scientist faced a fateful choice.
Rihab Rashid Taha could try to lower the heat by
finally telling U.N. inspectors what happened to
Iraq's "missing" anthrax.
Or she could remain silent, rather than risk Saddam
Hussein's wrath.
The microbiologist's dilemma, she has told U.S.
interrogators, was that her team 12 years earlier
had destroyed the lethal bacteria by dumping it
practically at the gates of one of Saddam's main
palaces, and the feared Iraqi despot might grow
enraged at news of anthrax on his doorstep.
Taha chose silence in 2003, thus stoking suspicions
of those who contended Iraq still harbored
biological weapons. Soon thereafter, two years ago
this month, the United States invaded.
"Whether those involved understood the significance
and disastrous consequences of their actions is
unclear," the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group says of Taha
and colleagues in its final report on Iraq
weapons-hunting. "These efforts demonstrate the
problems that existed on both sides in establishing
the truth."
It also demonstrates anew that the war was launched
on the basis not of hard fact, but of speculation
and untruths, especially about Iraqi motives and
actions.
"We ourselves had a lesson to learn there," one
ex-arms inspector, Australian microbiologist Rod
Barton, says of the account by Taha, still in U.S.
detention in Iraq.
The anthrax mystery had bedeviled U.N. inspectors
since the 1990s.
The Iraqis claimed then that before the 1991 Gulf
War they had made 2,191 gallons of anthrax,
considered highly suited for biowarfare because its
spores are relatively easily produced, durable and
deadly when inhaled. They said they destroyed all of
it in mid-1991 at their bioweapons center at Hakam,
50 miles southwest of Baghdad.
The U.N. experts, who scoured Iraq for banned arms
from 1991-98 and again in 2002-03, confirmed anthrax
had been dumped at Hakam. But they also found
evidence indicating Iraq produced an additional,
undeclared 1,800 gallons of anthrax.
In early 2003, chief inspector Hans Blix put the
seeming discrepancy high on his list of Iraq's
"unresolved disarmament issues," complaining the
Iraqis must be withholding information. Colin Powell
dwelled on an anthrax threat in his February 2003
speech seeking U.N. Security Council authority for
war.
Warning of "tens of thousands of teaspoons" of
anthrax still in Iraq, the then-U.S. secretary of
state said of the discrepancy, "This is evidence,
not conjecture. This is true."
But the truth appears to lie elsewhere, according to
the account disclosed in a little-noted section of
the Iraq Survey Group report, a 350,000-word
document issued last Oct. 6.
The British-educated Taha, who ran the Hakam complex
in the 1980s, told interrogators her staff carted
off anthrax from Hakam in April 1991 and stored it
in a bungalow near the presidential palace at
Radwaniyah, 20 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. teams
report.
Later that year the crew dumped the chemically
deactivated anthrax on grounds surrounded by a
Special Republican Guard barracks near the palace,
the report says. Barton, who took part in Iraq
Survey Group interrogations, said in a recent
Australian Broadcasting Corp. interview that the
disposal was carried out in July 1991 when Iraqi
orders came down to destroy all bioweapons agents
immediately.
Then, through the years, Taha and other Iraqi
officials denied the "missing" anthrax ever existed.
"The members of the program were too scared to tell
the Regime that they had dumped deactivated anthrax
within sight of one of the principal presidential
palaces," the Iraq Survey Group says.
The arms hunters' report also concludes, "ISG's
investigation found no evidence that Iraq continued
to hide BW (biological) weapons after the unilateral
destruction of 1991 was complete."
"We knew there was a lie," Barton said, "but we
jumped to the wrong conclusions."
The U.N. inspection agency says in an assessment of
the U.S. report that the Taha disclosure is "perhaps
the most significant new information" in the
biological area. It suggested sampling and analysis
at the Radwaniyah site to corroborate her account.
AP
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