[Here's a speech of Byrd's from last year -- this one's even scarier. I'll try to get some more of his writings on the site. Here's his follow up speech -- I don't remember how much of this was reported in the media.]

Senator Byrd - Sept. 20, 2002, Remarks on Iraq Bioweapons

September 20, 2002Mr. President, yesterday at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I asked a question of the Secretary of Defense.ï¿S I referred to a Newsweek article that appeared in the September 23, 2002, edition.ï¿S That article asserted that the Reagan administration allowing the Iraqis to buy a wide variety of materials that could be used as the foundation for chemical and biological weapons.

Specifically during yesterday's hearing, I asked Secretary Rumsfeld:

"Mr. Secretary, to your knowledge, did the United States help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq War? Are we, in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown?"

The Secretary quickly and flatly denied any knowledge, but said he would review Pentagon records.  I suggest that the Administration speed up that review for today my concerns have grown. 

A letter from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which I submit for the Record, and other documents show that the United States may, in fact, be preparing to reap what it has sown. 

The CDC letter, written in 1995 by former Director David Satcher to Senator Donald W. Riegle, Jr., points out that the United States Government provided nearly two dozen viral and bacterial samples to Iraqi scientists in the 1985.

According to the letter from Doctor Satcher to Senator Donald Riegle, many of the materials were hand-carried by an Iraqi scientist to Iraq after he had spent three months training in a C-D-C laboratory.

The Armed Services Committee is requesting information from the Departments of Commerce, State, and Defense on the history of the United States providing the building blocks for weapons of mass destruction to Iraq.  I recommend that the Department of Health and Human Services be included in that request as well.

We do not need obfuscation and denial.  The American people need the truth.  The American people need to know whether the United States is, in large part, responsible for the very Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which the Administration now seeks to destroy.  We may very well have created the monster that we seek to eliminate.

The Senate deserves to know the whole story.  The American people deserve answers.