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CNN Live At Daybreak

Iraq Still Suspect in Biological Terrorism

Aired October 25, 2001 - 06:20   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Former CIA director James Woolsey says that he believes that Iraq should not be excluded as a suspect in the anthrax attacks hitting the U.S. Iraq is dismissing those claims.

But as CNN's Jane Arraf reports this morning, Iraq has experimented with biological weapons in the past.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JANE ARRAF, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Sinister, that's how Iraq describes new claims that it could be connected with anthrax attacks in the U.S.

TARIQ AZIZ, IRAQI DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: Connecting Iraq with those events is sinister and it's baseless. Iraq has nothing to do with all what happened in America since the 11th of September until now.

ARRAF: Long before the current scare, Iraq was one of the countries following the U.S. and Soviet lead in experimenting with biological weapons. Then came the 1991 Gulf War. The world ordered Iraq to destroy its major weapons programs, it says, before it got very far with anthrax.

AZIZ: We worked on anthrax in the '80s, and in the '90s, we destroyed all of our anthrax (INAUDIBLE). They were not high grade and that's very well known because there were inspections in Iraq for seven and a half years in the '90s.

ARRAF: Those inspections were conducted by U.N. weapons inspectors who blew up suspected factories and monitored Iraq's weapons sites until they left in 1998. They pulled out just hours before the U.S. bombed in retaliation for what Washington called Iraq's lack of cooperation. Baghdad hasn't let the inspectors back.

Although Iraq loaded missiles with biological agents, it appears never to have used them. While the chief weapons inspector at the time says he believes Iraq still has anthrax, one of his former lead inspectors says Iraq was never able to produce the more effective type of the bacteria, the finely milled kind apparently used in the U.S.

SCOTT RITTER, FORMER U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: What they found were shards of destroyed warheads buried in the ground, warheads that were no longer a weapon, warheads that had been destroyed and declared by Iraq as being destroyed. And when these were exhumed, when we did the swabs on the warheads, we found evidence that these warheads had in fact, as Iraq declared, been filled with anthrax and other chemical weapons. This is not a discovery of anthrax per se.

ARRAF: Diplomats say it's that lack of evidence that's stopping the U.S. from making Iraq its next target, a move that would win far less support among U.S. allies than its attacks in Afghanistan.

(on camera): No one is claiming evidence that Iraq is involved in the anthrax attacks, but without international monitoring, the U.N. can't verify that Iraq's biological weapons programs are dead, anthrax or no anthrax.

(voice-over): All the talk is likely to provide a push to get weapons inspectors back into Iraq.

Jane Arraf, CNN, Baghdad.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: The anthrax cases have some Americans worried about the threat of a large scale bioterrorism attack on the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson telling CNN it's important for people to be alert but not overwhelmed by fear.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TOMMY THOMPSON, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY: We still want to make sure that Americans continue to lead their normal lives. And we think that we'll be able to respond, of course, to a bioterrorism attack, which we've proven that we can, and we have enough supplies and enough medical personnel to handle it and we want Americans to feel comfortable with that. But at the same time, as the president has indicated, we want people to be vigilant.

These are individuals or individual that don't care much about American lives and they are doing a criminal act. It's a terrorist attack by sending anthrax through the mail that's going to do bodily harm to an individual and hopefully, on their part, is going to murder somebody. And so you've got to be very vigilant in regards to this whole thing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KAGAN: Thompson says that several drug companies were asked to bid on a job to produce millions of doses of smallpox vaccine. Thompson wants production of that vaccine to begin before the end of the year.

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