Thursday, November 17, 2005
William Cohen
Clinton's Secretary of Defense holds up a five-pound bag of sugar on ABC's "This Week" in 1997 to illustrate the quantity of chemical weapons necessary to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
"The United Nations decided that he must get rid of all of his biological and chemical weapons. Now we discovered — the United Nations discovered — that he had immense amounts on hand. We discovered, for example, that this is a facility that was producing — that was, in fact, producing — biological and chemical weapons that had evaded the initial discovery by the inspectors.
Now once that was discovered with the help of overhead capability...
Cokie Roberts: And this was just last year?
Cohen: This was back in 1996 in which this was destroyed. So, that facility that went undetected initially has been destroyed. They have destroyed enormous amounts of chemical and biological weapons.
It’s important when we talk about weapons of mass destruction that we translate into something that the American people, and hopefully, the world community can understand.
For example, when we talk about Anthrax — Anthrax, if you took a five-pound bag of sugar and accept — call this Anthrax {producing a 5-pound bag of Domino® table sugar from under the interview table}. This amount of Anthrax could be spread over a city — let’s say the size of Washington. It would destroy at least half the population of that city. If you had even more amounts...
If you had more amounts of Anthrax — let me just get to this point. One of the things we found with Anthrax is that one breath and you are likely to face death within five days. One small particle of Anthrax would produce death within five days.
VX is a nerve agent. One drop from this particular thimble as such — one single drop will kill you within a few minutes.
Cokie Roberts: Would you put that bag down please.
William Cohen: Now I want to point out — I will spill it on the table — point out that he has had enormous amounts, and I’d like to go to some of the lies that have been told about this, because originally, if we could look at this particular chart, the original declaration of Iraq, he said he had small quantities of nerve agent for research.
We found almost four tons of VX — that little vial I just showed you — four tons of it.
He said he had no...
Cokie Roberts: Could wipe out populations of whole countries.
William Cohen: Millions, millions, if it were properly dispersed and through aerosol mechanisms and so forth.
He said he had no offensive biological weapons program. We found 2,100 gallons of anthrax — that little pound of sugar here that I showed you — had 2,100 gallons of that.
He said he had only 49 combat-ready missiles. We found at least triple that number.
November 16, 1997
"This Week" on ABC
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/abc-cohen-19971116.html
"I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons...I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out."
April 2003
