Did U.S. intelligence analysts actually “replicate” the mobile biological weapons laboratories that were supposedly deployed by Saddam Hussein, as stated in the Silberman-Robb Commission report?
Arms control expert Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland posed this question earlier this year.
Based on his own investigations, he has now concluded that there was no such replication of the supposed mobile BW labs.
“No mock-up containing the pieces of equipment shown in the drawings appears to have been produced, and no biological agent or simulant was produced.”
“Apparently the drawings [used in Secretary Powell’s 2003 UN presentation] were all that was ever prepared.”
“These self-conceived and self-imagined illustrations were all the ‘evidence’ that the United States government had to give to Secretary of State Powell to place before the United Nations and the world to support the claim that Iraq had mobile biological weapon production platforms…,” Dr. Leitenberg wrote.
See “Further Information Regarding US Government Attribution of a Mobile Biological Production Capacity by Iraq” by Milton Leitenberg, August 2006.
The human cost is measured in deaths. The financial cost is measured in the $52 billion taxpayers pay annually end stage renal disease – double NASA’s budget.
Gilman Louie, Longest Serving Board Chair of the Federation of American Scientists, Named Chair Emeritus
The proposed Office will resurrect the long-closed Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), the archive of which has been maintained by FAS for decades at https://ota.fas.org/.
If Congress needs help understanding the risks and rewards of a piece of technology, they shouldn’t have to rely solely on the sparknotes from a salesman. The rub is much simpler: Congress needs nerds.