AMY GOODMAN: And we are going to go to our second headline now and then draw all of these issues together, with the anthrax scare expanding. You have a third person who has come down now with anthrax. This is inhalation anthrax, and he is a postal worker in Washington, D.C. The issue of how far the U.S. will go in bombing — will the U.S. go outside of Afghanistan — has been raised again.

Last week, government officials reported that the form of anthrax sent to Senator Tom Daschle was in a highly potent form. This means that whoever is responsible has access to considerable scientific expertise. But intelligence sources involved with the CIA and Defense Department are taking a step further, claiming that the technical expertise suggests a state sponsor, and naming Iraq as a prime suspect.

It’s not only right-wingers in the Bush administration who are publicizing the claim, possibly to shore up support for attacking Iraq, people like one of the top officials in the Bush administration, Paul Wolfowitz, but now Democrats are saying that Saddam Hussein must be taken out, citing his having these weapons. And yesterday, Joseph Lieberman, the former vice-presidential Democratic candidate, Democrat from Connecticut, said Saddam Hussein should be taken out.

We’re joined by John Tirman, Social Science Research Council, author of Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade. Can you talk about how the U.S. and Western companies sold germ warfare, bioweapons to Iraq?

JOHN TIRMAN: Well, most of this happened in the 1980s, of course, before Iraq occupied Kuwait. And it was a part of the, basically, commerce, more or less normal commerce, but with an asterisk to it, and that is that most of these exports of technology in the form of biological cultures and some high-tech equipment, computers and the like, that are used in labs, that can produce toxins, can produce chemical weapons, can produce — help produce nuclear weapons. This was all done as sort of normal commerce that had to get licensed, in certain cases, but often even slipped by the very loose restrictions that were in effect in that time. And yes, it came from the United States, it came from Germany, it came from the U.K., came from France, in rather large numbers. Tons of these cultures that can be used to make anthrax, for example, were exported to Iraq in the 1980s.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the U.S. corporations involved?

JOHN TIRMAN: Well, there were a number. It’s a little difficult to track down exactly what was sent and when, because the records on this actually aren’t all that good. But some of the corporations that were involved in providing the technology that can be used in production are International Computer Systems in Texas and California, PerkinElmer in Connecticut, BDM Corporation in Virginia, Vico Instruments in New York, Scientific-Atlanta in Atlanta, Georgia, which was also, I believe, involved in the BNL scandal. That is that these things were — these were various kinds of high-tech spectrograph equipment and the like that could be used in a variety of ways. And they were often sent there under the guise of the scientific equipment were going to universities or whatnot, but in fact were being diverted to military use.

AMY GOODMAN: So, when we hear, for example, Joseph Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut, yesterday saying on the Sunday talk shows that we know Saddam Hussein gassed his own people, he is a terrorist, and so he should be taken out, the fact is, the U.S. was involved with giving Iraq bioweapons, as well, after that?

JOHN TIRMAN: I don’t think that the United States — I think that the United States tightened up considerably after the attack on the Kurdish people, although there were mustard gas attacks on Iran during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, which a lot of people forget about, that there was this bloody conflict from 1980 to 1988 that took a million lives, and that we, the United States, played a significant role in tilting toward Iraq in this and provided them with an enormous number of assets, not direct military assistance, but financial credits, political respectability, intelligence, real-time intelligence that saved them from defeat, and some hard equipment, that very easily could have been used, and probably was used, in a number of different weapons programs. You were just talking about Brzezinski. It’s interesting, Brzezinski was one of the originators of the tilt toward Iraq after the fall of the shah in Iran. And again, that was another episode of American foreign policy, which began actually under the Carter administration and was intensified during the Reagan years.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, John Tirman, I want to thank you very much for joining us, author of Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade.

When we come back, we’ll be joined by an Iranian American professor talking about Iraq and bioweapons, also talking about how Iran fits into this picture, as well as the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Edward Peck. You’re listening to The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.