|
Iraq buys nerve antidote { November 12 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/12/international/middleeast/12NERV.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/12/international/middleeast/12NERV.html
November 12, 2002
Iraq Said to Try to Buy Antidote Against Nerve Gas
By JUDITH MILLER
Iraq has ordered large quantities of a drug that can be used to counter the effects of nerve gas, mainly from suppliers in Turkey, which is being pressed to stop the sales, according to senior Bush administration officials.
The officials said the orders far outstripped the amount Iraq could conceivably need for normal hospital use, and they said Turkey had indicated in talks with the State Department that it was willing to review the matter.
"If the Iraqis were going to use nerve agents," an official said, "they would want to take steps to protect their own soldiers, if not their population. This is something that U.S. intelligence is mindful of and very concerned about."
Iraq has ordered, mainly from a Turkish company, a million doses of the drug, atropine, and the 7-inch autoinjectors that inject it into a person's leg, the officials said.
It is not clear how much, if any, of the drug has actually been delivered.
Atropine is highly effective at blocking such nerve agents as sarin and VX, both of which Iraq has acknowledged having made and stockpiled. Iraq claims to have destroyed those stockpiles, but American intelligence agencies doubt it has done so.
One official said Iraq had also placed orders for another antidote for chemical weapons, obidoxime chloride.
Officials said hospitals and clinics around the world commonly stocked atropine to resuscitate patients who have had heart attacks. As a result, atropine was not included on a list of thousands of "dual use" items that the United Nations Security Council members drafted in May that inspectors must review more carefully before they can be sold to Iraq.
The bulk purchases of autoinjectors and atropine, however, have raised concerns among chemical weapons experts, intelligence analysts and senior White House officials, who argue that atropine to counter heart attacks is normally given intravenously and in much smaller doses. Obidoxime chloride is not used at all for that purpose, one expert said.
All this, the officials and experts say, illustrates how hard it is to control dual-use products — those that have civilian purposes, yet also can strengthen a country's military. That is true even when the seller is an ally, they said.
The United States renounced the use of nerve agents and other chemical weapons in the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, pledging not to use such weapons in war, and saying it no longer has them in its arsenal. But the American armed forces do carry atropine and autoinjectors in first-aid kits in case of attack.
Iraq has not ratified the treaty that bans the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. It used chemical weapons during its war against Iran in the 1980's and to suppress dissent among its own Kurdish citizens in the north.
White House officials have recently considered the Iraqi orders at meetings, and the State Department has tried to stop the sales through discussions with Turkey in the last two months. One official said Turkey, a NATO member and staunch American ally, had agreed to review the orders and consider the request.
In a telephone interview, Turkey's ambassador to Washington, O. Faruk Logoglu, said he was unaware of such discussions. But he added that they might well have been conducted by American Embassy and Turkish officials in Ankara, the Turkish capital, bypassing his embassy.
Administration officials declined to identify the Turkish supplier, but one official characterized the company as an important regional producer of bio-defense products and equipment with international customers.
"Atropine and autoinjectors are common products," an official said.
Administration officials said the contracts demonstrated deficiencies in the system put in place last summer to simplify the shipment of aid to Iraqi civilians under the United Nations "oil for food" program. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell extolled the new system as "smart sanctions."
Under the previous system, shipments of food, medicine and other goods that Iraq said were for civilians were routinely delayed for months while Security Council members and United Nations weapons inspectors pored over contracts to determine whether the sales could strengthen Iraq's military.
The new system adopted in May allows for the sale and shipment of most goods without extensive review unless they are on the list put together by the United States, Russia, France, and other Security Council members. It took almost a year for negotiators to develop the list, because the United States wanted it to be as comprehensive as possible, while Russia and France, both large exporters to Iraq, lobbied for a shorter list.
The United States has yet to conduct a formal assessment of the new system, now just a few months' old. But officials said in interviews that they feared that Iraq was already exploiting omissions from the list.
American officials said it was becoming obvious that some items that should have been included, like the atropine and autoinjectors, had been omitted.
Iraq's military capabilities, "though far less impressive than they were before the 1991 gulf war, are becoming better through such purchases every day," a senior administration official said. "And we're seeing that the traditional mechanisms for controlling the transfer of such items — export controls, border patrols, and other sanctions — are still porous."
Technically, the list can be reopened for changes every six months, but administration officials said the State Department was reluctant to do so. "If we try to add items to that list," an official said, "Russia and France will demand that other items be subtracted from it, and we'll be back again to square one."
But the Pentagon is more willing to seek a change, officials said. If any Security Council member does want to change the list, the deadline to do so is late this month.
Dave Franz, a former director of the Army's bio-defense lab at Fort Detrick, Md., and Frederick R. Sidell, a chemical agents expert who worked at the Army Medical Institute of Chemical Defense, agreed that Iraq's orders raised concern because there were virtually no peaceful uses for that much atropine. "The Iraqis must know that we are not going to use such agents against them, because we don't have chemical weapons," Dr. Franz said.
Dr. Sidell said obidoxime chloride was not used for anything in the United States. Furthermore, autoinjectors contain five times the amount of atropine normally administered intravenously to treat malfunctioning hearts.
Copyright The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
|
|
