U.S. should disclose any and all previous shipments of weapons to foreign countries

The U.S. government created a potentially catastrophic problem for itself when it shipped samples of several biological agents to Iraq in the 1980s. The samples were sent to sites that U.N. weapons inspectors later determined were part of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, under the Reagan administration, approved the delivery of anthrax, botulinum toxin and germs could cause gas gangrene.

Just as the United States created a future problem by financing Osama bin Laden in the Afghan war in the 1980s, it did the same when it provided the makings for Iraq’s chemical weapons program, which President Bush now says is a major threat.

The government already has disclosed that the United States continued to provide assistance to Iraq even after president Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurdish dissidents, but the new revelation is particularly shocking. Equally as maddening is that under a program administered by the Commerce Department at the time, the transfers of toxins to Iraq were completely legal.

The Reagan administration suffered a very public embarrassment in the Iran-Contra scandal, when it was revealed the president either approved or “didn’t know” about illegal transfers of drug money and weapons. Now we are seeing that scandal was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the Reagan administration may have had many more skeletons in its closet.

This policy decision was incredibly short sighted. It robs the United States of even more diplomatic credibility, helped create a new international threat and worst of all endangers thousands of lives around the world.

The U.S. government owes it to its citizens and the rest of the world to disclose any other transfers of American weapons or deadly materials to other countries. And to forestall future international threats, the U.S. government owes it to itself not to provide deadly weapons to uncertain allies.

Washington police overstepped their bounds in D.C. protest

Washington city police crossed a dangerous threshold when they arrested protesters and bystanders ••en masse•• during anti-globalization demonstrations last Friday.

The police arrested everyone within a certain area, regardless if they committed a crime or were even involved in the protest. The willingness of police to group law-abiding protesters along with individual lawbreakers could begin descending a slippery slope in policing.

The demonstrators were protesting globalization and the International Monetary Fund, neither of which is particularly well understood by most people, so the public response to the mass arrests was lukewarm.

But if the police had rounded up members of the Million Man March, or abortion protesters outside the Supreme Court, the public outcry would be immense. Washington police were wrong to take advantage of this issue’s obtuseness to summarily round up protesters.

It goes without saying that Americans are entitled to speak out and to protest—these rights top the list of Constitutional Amendments. Police not only violated these rights with the group arrest, they detained individuals who were committing no crime

Protests are always prickly situations for law enforcement officials. People in crowds behave differently from they way they normally would. The protests in Washington, however, were mostly orderly. They were planned for months to coincide with a meeting of IMF officials, and D.C. police had weeks to prepare.

There was no reason for police to round up people they knew would be there and march them off to jail. Police could have at least ordered the protesters to disperse before closing in and arresting them.