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>From the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed]
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Subject:  Saddam Connection -- West Nile Virus the First Bioweapon?
Dave Eberhart
Thursday, 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. This year the virus killed an Atlanta woman 
<http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/8/17/190342.shtml>, 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 Connection
And 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 U.N. 
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 
<http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/10/21/204923.shtml>,a defector and the 
former deputy chief of research for Biopreparat, the Soviet Union's main biowarfare 
program, spoke to lawmakers 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.

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