Ritter opined that "it is irresponsible for someone of Mr. Butler’s stature to be involved in unsubstantiated speculation. His behavior has, it seems, been guided by animosity towards Baghdad, rather than the facts.”

However, as Butler is quick to point out, Ritter was not present for the final hurrah of the inspections. Much of the suspicion that Iraq supplied the anthrax spores rests on the 1999 final report from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) that "the commission has no confidence that all bulk agents have been destroyed; that no BW [biological weapons] munitions or weapons remain in Iraq; and that a BW capability does not still exist in Iraq.”

Last week, Ritter said to Fox News, "What we’re seeing here in the United States isn’t a bioweapon produced by a state. This is laboratory-scale anthrax that’s available in one of 400 repositories for anthrax virus in 60 nations. Easily gotten a hold of by anybody. And so I don’t think it’s logical to point to Saddam Hussein and Iraq ...”

Also quoted in The Guardian last week, Ritter maintained that Iraq’s biological weapons programs were dismantled or rendered harmless during hundreds of no-notice inspections. "The major biological weapons production facility, al Hakum, which was responsible for producing Iraq’s anthrax, was blown up by high explosive charges and all its equipment destroyed. Other biological facilities met the same fate ...”

A Different Tune

Adding to the confusion-–and irony-–is that just a couple of years ago Ritter seemed to espouse a wholly contrary view. "Iraq is not nearly disarmed. UNSCOM lacks a full declaration from Iraq concerning its prohibited capabilities, making any absolute pronouncement about the extent of Iraq’s retained proscribed arsenal inherently tentative.”

Ritter added that UNSCOM suspects that "Iraq still has biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents.”

Ritter also noted in earlier statements and writings that Iraq probably retained tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas. "This agent is stored in artillery shells, bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. And Iraq retains significant dual-use industrial infrastructure that can be used to rapidly reconstitute large-scale chemical weapons production.”

A favored anecdote of Ritter’s revolved around the UNSCOM testing of bomb and missile fragments. "We found irrefutable evidence that the warheads had been filled with both VX nerve agent and anthrax biological agent, directly contradicting earlier Iraqi claims.”

In previous years, Ritter complained that Iraqi security forces kept key documentation, including the vital "cookbooks” that contain "the step-by-step process to make chemical agent, outline the procedures for producing weapons-grade biological agent, detail the final design of the Iraqi nuclear weapon, and provide the mechanical integration procedures for long-range ballistic missiles.”

"Beginning in 1994,” Ritter once recorded, "we sat for hours listening to high-level Iraqi defectors describe relevant Iraqi documents - who wrote them, who they were distributed to, how they were stored, how they were hidden. We confirmed much of this information through a carefully constructed international intelligence support network. But when we went into Iraq to find these documents we were stopped at gunpoint.”

Ritter also maintained in the past that Iraq was apparently engaged in active real-world testing of its weapons of mass destruction. "We had received credible intelligence that 95 political prisoners had been transferred from the Abu Ghraib Prison to a site in western Iraq, where they had been subjected to lethal testing under the supervision of a special unit from the Military Industrial Commission, under Saddam’s personal authority,” he said.

In past reports, Ritter pointed to shipping invoices showing that Iraq had received several dozen tons of growth material used for biological products that Iraq could not account for.

Beyond a bioterrorism capability, Ritter is on record saying, "Iraq has kept its entire nuclear weapons infrastructure intact through dual-use companies that allow the nuclear-design teams to conduct vital research and practical work on related technologies and materials.”

Even in the paranoid old days, Ritter did qualify the dangerousness of an unfettered Saddam, declaring that Iraq would need access to "tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to rebuild Iraq’s industrial infrastructure,” an infrastructure necessary to build sophisticated weapons. "They didn’t have it in 1998. They don’t have it today. This paranoia about what Iraq is doing now that there aren’t weapons inspectors reflects a lack of understanding of the reality in Iraq.”

Ritter’s bottom line:

"I, for one, believe that a) Iraq represents a threat to no one, and b) Iraq will not represent a threat to anyone if we can get weapons inspectors back in. Iraq will accept these inspectors if we agree to the immediate lifting of economic sanctions.

"The Security Council should re-evaluate Iraq’s disarmament obligation from a qualitative standpoint and not a quantitative standpoint.”

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Bioterrorism

Middle East

Saddam Hussein/Iraq

United Nations

War on Terrorism

A product that might interest you:
Living Terrors: Surviving the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe
Biohazard - Terrifying Account of Bio Weapons Research