Tuesday, August 09, 2005

All Things Bright And Beautiful
All Creatures Great And Small
All Spores Vile and Botulus
Ron Reagan Sold Them All

A BRITISH cow that died in an Oxfordshire field in 1937 has emerged as the source of Saddam Hussain's "weapons of mass destruction" programme that led to the Iraq war.

An ear from the cow was sent to an English laboratory, where scientists discovered anthrax spores that were later used in secret biological warfare tests by Winston Churchill.

The culture was sent to the United States, which exported samples to Iraq during Saddam's war against Iran in the 1980s. Inspectors have found that this batch of anthrax was the dictator's choice in his attempts to create biological weapons.

...

The odyssey of the Iraqi anthrax was unravelled by Geoffrey Holland, a politics student and antiwar campaigner at the University of Sussex. The exact batch chosen by Saddam was disclosed in the CIA report by Charles Duelfer, the former UN weapons inspector, last autumn.

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A congressional investigation into Gulf War syndrome by Don Riegle had already uncovered invoices showing that this batch was shipped from the United States between 1986 and 1988.

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