Secrecy News: Bioweapons Fears; IAEA Report on Iran
Secrecy News: Bioweapons Fears;
IAEA Report on Iran
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About
Secrecy News
SECRECY NEWS is an email publication of
the Federation of American Scientists (FAS)
Project on Government Secrecy. It provides
informal coverage of new developments in secrecy,
security and intelligence policies, as well
as links to new acquisitions on the Federation
of American Scientists web site. It
is published 2 to 3 times a week, or as events
warrant. Secrecy
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As bad as the threat of biological weapons may seem-- it's actually
worse.
That is the upshot of a summary report prepared by the Central
Intelligence Agency based on a workshop with non-governmental
scientists held last January.
"Growing understanding of the complex biochemical pathways that
underlie life processes has the potential to enable a class of new,
more virulent biological agents engineered to attack distinct
biochemical pathways and elicit specific effects...," the document
stated.
A copy of the two page CIA report was obtained by Secrecy News.
See "The
Darker Bioweapons Future," Office of Transnational Issues, Directorate
of Intelligence, November 3, 2003.
No less interesting that the document itself is the tangled process
that produced it.
The CIA, in a becoming act of humility, reached out to biological
scientists early this year for insight and advice. It then
squandered much of the good will it had engendered by informing the
scientists that the conclusions of their open meeting would be
classified. But then, facing criticism, the Agency reversed itself,
belatedly yielding the present document. (Secrecy News, 4/02/03)
"CIA proactively reached out to the scientific community, but instead
of getting credit for it, it got slammed," according to one
non-governmental participant who said critics were mistaken to
believe CIA was acting in bad faith.
"I hope that the scientific and security communities have both learned
something from this experience and will continue to make the effort
to work together," he said today. "We'll have to do a lot more of it
in the future."
A November 10 report from the International Atomic Energy Agency found
that Iran has been secretly pursuing proscribed nuclear technologies
for the past 18 years, in violation of its Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty commitments.
A copy of the explosive
new report (in a large PDF file), which has not been formally
released to the public, was obtained and posted by the Natural Resources
Defense Council.
