open sources.

* simon has a snippet from Charles Duelfer at the CFR in May 2002.:

"And some serious areas of concern. And that is Iraq’s consideration for using mobile production facilities. Now we first heard about that in biology from General Amril Al-Saudi(?), which I think, in a moment of weakness, he said he instructed the bio personnel to evaluate using mobile facilities for production purposes. And then he quickly backed off about five minutes later in saying that, no, that was just a whim of his at the time and it wasn’t taken seriously. Well, reports that I’ve heard recently, not from any intelligence sources but from other open sources, indicate that maybe there’s a lot more to that than just that whim of Dr. Saudi."

This from Leitenberg's White Paper (pdf):

Where did the notion of the possibility of an Iraqi mobile BW production capability come from? In 1995, Lt. General Amir al-Sa’adi told UNSCOM officials that in 1988 he had suggested that perhaps Iraq should develop its BW production on mobile platforms. The suggestion was rejected as not being feasible, and some fixed facilities were converted from other uses, while others were constructed.

During the war against Iran, General Sa’adi had been the head of the Iraq government’s Special Office for Technical Industry (SOTI) and he later became the deputy to General Hussein Kammel, the head of all of Iraq’s WMD programs, in the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization (MIMI). General Sa’adi proposed only “a concept.” He produced no specific drawings or plans. Curveball could therefore not have seen any prior set of drawings.

However, Curveball’s drawings were reported to be very crude. They bore no relation to General Sa’adi’s “concept,” and they probably also bore little relation to the illustrations which eventually appeared in Secretary Powell’s UN presentation on February 4, 2003,13