Day: August 12, 2005

Rep. Katherine Harris is looking like a born entertainer, able to charm crowds with her malapropisms and general battiness.

On his blog, St. Petersburg Times political reporter Adam Smith quotes Harris on the campaign trail in Sarasota, Florida:

“Bob Novak, my good friend and defender, I sure do wish he were here. But I think he’s still locked in a blue room somewhere,” she quipped, apparently referring to the green rooms where TV guests cool their heels before going on the air.

I got one word for you, Katherine, and it’s straight from Bob Novak: “Bullshit.”

Back when Saddam Hussein was our friend and the Ayatola Khomeni the only bad guy, the United States looked upon weapons of mass destruction more fondly. In fact, the Times of London reports, the United States actually supplied Iraq with biological weapons of mass destruction back in those halcyon days.

A British cow that died in an Oxfordshire field in 1937 has emerged as the source of Saddam Hussain’s “weapons of mass destruction” programme that led to the Iraq war.

An ear from the cow was sent to an English laboratory, where scientists discovered anthrax spores that were later used in secret biological warfare tests by Winston Churchill.

The culture was sent to the United States, which exported samples to Iraq during Saddam’s war against Iran in the 1980s. Inspectors have found that this batch of anthrax was the dictator’s choice in his attempts to create biological weapons.

Well, what do you know? We were certain Saddam had WMDs because we gave them to him. It all starts to come together.

The odyssey of the Iraqi anthrax was unravelled by Geoffrey Holland, a politics student and antiwar campaigner at the University of Sussex. The exact batch chosen by Saddam was disclosed in the CIA report by Charles Duelfer, the former UN weapons inspector, last autumn.

“Iraq declared researching different strains of B. anthracis, but settled on the American Type Culture Collection strain 14578 as the exclusive strain for use as a BW,” Mr Duelfer said.

A congressional investigation into Gulf War syndrome by Don Riegle had already uncovered invoices showing that this batch was shipped from the United States between 1986 and 1988.

The English, our only real ally in the current Iraq mess, are a little hot under the collar about all this.

The discovery has angered some British politicians. Austin Mitchell, the Labour MP for Great Grimsby, has renewed his call, supported by 126 MPs in the last Parliament, for a UN investigation into whether Washington broke a weapons control agreement. “It just makes them look more hypocritical than ever,” he said.

According to the GovExec newsletter, the government’s General Accounting Office has issued a report critical of how the U.S. Postal Service handles suspiciouos and potentially dangerous packages. Following the GAO’s recommendations, the USPS is implementing a beefed-up training plan that includes Web-based, video and written instructions for its employees.

The training changes were precipitated by a specific incident:

GAO based its recommendations on an analysis of how employees at a Greenville, S.C., airmail facility reacted to the midnight discovery of an envelope marked: “Caution: Ricin Poison.” Ricin is a biotoxin derived from castor beans and can kill people within 36 to 72 hours of exposure.

In that case, Greenville employees initially treated the package like a routine shipment of a hazardous substance because it contained a warning label. Employees took some precautions, including moving the envelope to a secluded room and double-bagging it. But it took half a day for the facility manager to notify postal inspectors of the package, which ended up containing a metal vial that did test positive for ricin.

The incident ended without any confirmed cases of ricin exposure to workers. But it illustrated that employees did not follow all the procedures in place for handling suspicious packages, GAO reported. In addition, they failed to immediately identify it as a danger, the auditors said.

The emphasis of the new training program is on rapid response once a suspicious or dangerous parcel has been identified.

“Once we identify a potentially dangerous package, USPS employees will be instructed to expedite delivery to the intended victim in order to protect postal workers and facilities,” said Francis X. Carlton, a training consultant. “Once we complete this program, you won’t find a vial of deadly ricin sitting around in a post office for two or three days, potentially threatening the lives of innocent mailmen and -women.”

In related news, the USPS has issued new guidelines in Arabic and Farsi on how to properly label a package carrying hazardous substances, or a suspicious package containing a bomb, radiological substance, or biological or chemical agent meant to do harm, in order to expedite handling and ensure the parcel reaches its intended target.