Report: Iraq Sells Gas To Terrorists
The United States has credible intelligence pointing to a chemical weapons deal between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network, a newspaper reports.
According to the Washington Post, the sale apparently took place in the past month and involved smuggling the chemical weapon — possibly deadly VX nerve gas — out of Iraq through Turkey.
Word of the sale came from a source deemed credible and sensitive, and the leak to The Post came from people with no direct responsibility for U.S. policy on Iraq and no strong position on whether to go to war there.
The suspected deal would mark the first time an al Qaeda linked group was known to have obtained a chemical weapon other than cyanide. It would also be the first direct evidence of a link between Iraq and terrorism, which the Bush administration has long said existed.
However, administration officials said the source of the material was still unknown, and that it was uncertain the deal involved nerve gas. One official told the newspaper the report could be a mere hypothesis.
Even if the sale did occur, it's not certain that the Islamic group was buying the weapons for Al Qaeda. Nor is it clear that the chemical agent was in weaponized form.
On the question of whether Iraqi President Saddam Hussein knew of the sale, there is no solid evidence, although sources consider it unlikely that such a deal could transpire without Saddam's knowledge, the paper said.
But one official told The Post the report of the weapons sale stood out from the hundreds of leads screened by U.S. intelligence every day.
"The way we gleaned the information makes us feel confident it is accurate," said the official. "I throw about 99 percent of the spot reports away when I look at them. I didn't throw this one away."
The suspected weapons sale could be linked to two threat warnings in the past week. One, called a Turkey Defense Terrorism Threat Awareness Message, warned U.S. troops of a possible chemical attack on the air base at Incirlik, Turkey, which is a major hub for American military operations in the region. Another alert came from European governments warning, the event of war, of a possible gas attack on the mass transit system of a major U.S. city.
VX nerve gas is among the deadliest chemical agents. It is about ten times as dangerous as Sarin gas, the agent used in the Tokyo subway attacks. British scientists developed it in 1952 and apparently traded it to the United States for information on nuclear weapons.
According to government health information, VX gas usually kills within fifteen minutes. The only antidotes are atropine, pralidoxime chlorida and diazepam.
Iraq has admitted to stockpiling VX. It would be difficult for an terrorist group to develop the gas on its own because of the "difficulty of manufacture and control of precursor chemical," according to a 2001 GAO report.