Saddam Connection: West Nile Virus the First Bioweapon?

Josey1

Saddam Connection: West Nile Virus the First Bioweapon? Dave EberhartThursday, Oct. 25, 2001 Lost amidst the news about the bioterror use of anthrax is the growing menace of West Nile virus - and evidence it may have been the first bioweapon used by Iraq against the U.S.This week the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that a Louisiana man had been infected, indicating the disease has spread far from its point of origin, New York.West Nile virus, the mosquito-borne disease once totally foreign to the Western Hemisphere, has now spread from New York to Florida, Louisiana and Wisconsin. The pathogen was first discovered in the United States in 1999 when it erupted in New York's Long Island City, the Queens community just across New York's East River from the United Nations. It killed seven people and caused serious illness in 62 others in New York and New Jersey. The virus this year killed an Atlanta woman, the 10th person to die from the illness in the U.S.Though the disease has all but disappeared from media scopes since the anthrax scare, it has not gone away, and its possible terrorist origins have never been definitively ruled out.At a news conference last week, New York Gov. George Pataki said his state's health labs were running 24 hours a day to accommodate anthrax testing. He noted in passing that New York state health authorities were moving workers dedicated to the West Nile virus to help test the flood of incoming samples. Meanwhile, floating as invisible as a spore, was a recent notice that two elderly residents of New York's Nassau County became the ninth and 10th New Yorkers to receive diagnoses of West Nile virus in 2001.Equally obscure: a recent article citing that Florida Department of Health extended warnings about West Nile virus to 12 more counties, placing 48 of the state's 67 counties on alert. The state confirmed seven human cases of encephalitis from West Nile virus in 2001.Commenting on a recent outbreak of West Nile and the related death of one woman in Maryland, J.B. Hanson, spokesman for the Maryland state health department, said authorities have noted that the migration of the virus has roughly followed the Interstate 95 corridor."We haven't reached a consensus to explain that route," he said, adding yet another element to the mystery of the origin and processes of the disease. For if the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is right and the virus's spread is owing only to the vagaries of Mother Nature, why does it seem to follow an interstate highway?Iraqi ConnectionAnd why has the disease broken out in the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia - all primary targets for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein since the end of the Gulf War? (The disease has also broken out in Algeria in 1994, Romania in 1996-1997, the Czech Republic in 1997, the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1998, and Russia in 1999.)Experts agree that Saddam's bioweapons people might be brewing up God-knows-what in a French-built virology facility near Baghdad that has been closed to inspectors from the United Nations since Saddam threw them out years ago. The facility, called the Foot and Mouth Vaccine Plant, was used for making botulinum toxin, or BTX - one of the most lethal biotoxins known. In 1992, the United Nations tore down the buildings in which the BTX was made and destroyed equipment, but left standing the bulk of the facility, part of which was for virus research. (In 1985 the CDC sent samples of West Nile virus to a researcher in Iraq, stirring controversy in the media five years later, on the eve of the Gulf War, when reports came out that Iraq had a significant biowarfare program.)All but missing in action on the front lines of the anthrax attacks, controversial U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher told the Jerusalem Post last year that the genetic strain of the West Nile virus found in Israel was the same as the one found in New York. And, of course, there remains the sinister shadow of "In the Shadow of Saddam," the infamous book by Saddam's reputed former bodyguard and look-alike, Mikhael Ramadan. Published by a small press in the United Kingdom in 1999, the author's sensational allegations about Saddam's plans to wreak bioterror on the U.S. were featured that same year in the New Yorker Magazine: "West Nile Mystery" by Richard Preston.Preston quoted from the Ramadan account:"In 1997, on almost the last occasion we met, Saddam summoned me to his study. Seldom had I seen him so elated. Unlocking the top right-hand drawer of his desk, he produced a bulky, leather-bound dossier and read extracts from it.... The dossier holds details of his ultimate weapon, developed in secret laboratories outside Iraq.... Free of UN inspection, the laboratories would develop the SV1417 strain of the West Nile virus-capable of destroying 97 pc [percent] of all life in an urban environment.... He said SV1417 was to be "operationally tested" on a Third World population centre.... The target had been selected, Saddam said, "but that is not for your innocent ears." Author Preston questioned, "Why would a man presenting himself as an Iraqi defector predict that Saddam would unleash a virus just months before the same one broke out unexpectedly in New York? And, of all the thousands of viruses in the world, why West Nile?" Adding another twist to the bizarre story, it turns out that, said Preston, "the fatality rate for West Nile is not remotely near ninety-seven per cent, and "SV1417" is not a standard designation for any known strain of West Nile virus." At the same time that Ramadan was being discussed in the CIA, Dr. Ken Alibek, the defected former deputy chief of research for Biopreparat, the Soviet Union's main biowarfare program, spoke to lawmakers people on Capitol Hill, voicing his concern that the West Nile outbreak was "suspicious." In his article Preston reported a conversation with an anonymous FBI agent, who told him that West Nile might be a good choice for a terrorist. He said, "If I was planning a bioterror event, I'd do things with subtle finesse, to make it look like a natural outbreak. That would delay the response and lock up the decision-making process." An Army expert interviewed by Preston in the article told him that the military knew that Soviet biologists working for the Soviet Union's biowarfare program had evaluated the West Nile virus for use as a biological weapon. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/10/24/180937.shtml