Cord Byrd: “amidst the wall-to-wall reporting on Iraq that has become daily grist for the Nation's news media, a headline in this…”

“amidst the wall-to-wall reporting on Iraq that has become daily grist for the Nation's news media, a headline in this morning's USA Today leaped out from the front page: ``In Iraq's arsenal, Nature's deadliest poison.'' The article describes the horrors of botulinum toxin, a potential weapon in Iraq's biological warfare arsenal. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, botulinum toxin is the most poisonous substance known. We know that Saddam Hussein produced thousands of litres of botulinum toxin in the run up to the Gulf war. We also know where some of the toxin came from. Guess. The United States, which approved shipments of botulinum toxin from a nonprofit scientific specimen repository to the government of Iraq in l986 and l988. I recently asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about these shipments during an Armed Services Committee hearing a week ago. I repeat today what I said to him then: In the event of a war with Iraq, might the United States be facing the possibility of reaping what it has sown? The threat of chemical and biological warfare is one of the most terrifying prospects of a war with Iraq, and it is one that should give us serious pause before we embark on a course of action that might lead to an all-out, no-holds-barred conflict.”