20 November 2001 Source: http://usinfo.state.gov/cgi-bin/washfile/display.pl?p=/products/washfile/latest&f=01112001.plt&t=/products/washfile/newsitem.shtml See Bolton speech: http://cryptome.org/bolton111901.txt ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Washington File 20 November 2001 Transcript: Bolton Briefing on Biological Weapons Pact, November 19 (He says BWC draft protocol is dead and won't be resurrected) (6800) Geneva -- John R. Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, says the central problem with the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) is that "an unfortunate number" of countries are flatly violating it and developing offensive germ weapons programs. Bolton spoke at a press conference at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on November 19. Earlier the same day, in an address to the BWC review conference, he identified Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria as countries the U.S. believes have offensive BW programs. Bolton argued that the fundamental underlying problem of BWC non-compliance would not be solved by the proposed draft protocol that has been rejected by the United States. "Our complaint about the draft protocol is that it would not do what its supporters claimed it would do. A country, which is capable of signing the 1972 BWC and violating it, is fully capable of signing the protocol or 20 other treaties and violating those as well. "The draft protocol that was under negotiation for the past seven years is dead in our view. Dead, and it is not going to be resurrected. It has proven to be a blind alley," he said. Bolton said the protocol was "hopelessly defective in three major respects:" First, it would endanger the viability of biological warfare defense programs because its inspection provisions could enable countries with offensive BWC programs to learn about national defense programs and potentially devise sophisticated countermeasures to overcome those defenses. Second, the United States believes the protocol would have compromised the export control programs of the U.S. and other Western countries that restrict the export of dual use items that could be used in building an offensive biological weapons capability. "The inspection mechanism in the draft protocol would have compromised our export control system which we felt would have dramatically undercut our efforts to prevent biological weapons proliferation," Bolton explained. Third, the protocol would have posed a risk to proprietary commercial information. Bolton said that he hopes a set of new U.S. proposals to fight the threat of germ weapons -- including a proposal that the U.N. Secretary General be empowered to call inspections -- will be incorporated in the final declaration of the November 19 - December 7 BWC Review Conference. He said the new U.S. proposals would not require any amendment to the BWC Treaty. Following is a transcript of the briefing: (begin transcript) Transcript of Press Briefing by The Honorable John R. Bolton Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, United States Department of State at the Palais des Nations Geneva, Switzerland November 19, 2001 UNDER SECRETARY BOLTON: It's a pleasure to be again in Geneva. I don't propose to repeat what I said in the plenary to save time although I do think it is important to underline two points. The first is that the central problem in our view with biological weapons is the fact that an unfortunate number of the states party to the Biological Weapons Convention are flatly violating the terms of the Convention with the conduct of an operational biological weapons program. That is the reason that we named some of those countries in the plenary statement to make it clear that we know what they are doing, and we know that it is in violation of the Convention. Second, also as I said in the speech, to recognize that simply piling one convention on top of another is not going to solve the problem if the rogue states that we are talking about are prepared to violate the underlined prohibitions in the BWC, or indeed going back to the Geneva Convention of 1925. That's why I said that neither the United States nor anyone else, would be protected by a Maginot treaty approach to the BW threat. So, I think that those are the two central points that I wanted to underline and with that I would be pleased to answer any question you may have. QUESTION: What are you proposing then -- to disregard the protocol, to disregard the Convention and work on something else? BOLTON: As the statement makes clear, we strongly support the Biological Weapons Convention. What we have done is propose a series of measures that we think would substantially strengthen the Convention. Measures that do not have the disadvantages of the draft protocol that was rejected last summer. Let me just mention two of our proposals, the idea to enact national criminal legislation that would make it, in each of the respective jurisdictions, a criminal offense for individuals or conspiracies to engage in behavior that would violate the substantive terms of the BWC itself. The United States already has such legislation. It was amended slightly recently, and may well be subject to further amendments. So like any National legislation, it's a work in progress, but our belief is that most other governments do not have legislation at the national level that criminalizes the use of biological weapons within their own domestic jurisdiction. Now, if nations were to adopt such legislation, and if they were to accept another of our suggestions, which is strengthening of the provision of extradition measures, what this would do would be to add a measure of uniformity from the law enforcement perspective that would allow the respective law enforcement agencies of governments that have adopted such legislation to cooperate, share information, and work together. The prospects for both detection and hopefully for deterrence that this enhanced stability of the law enforcement community that they would derive from this legislation we think would be very powerful. What we have said is that we strongly support the Convention. It was after all the United States that unilaterally announced in 1969 that we were forswearing the use of biological weapons and that we would unilaterally destroy all of our biological weapons stocks, and that led really to the negotiations that created the 1972 Convention. The United States for 30 plus years has been in the forefront of the opposition to biological weapons and we think that the proposals that we have made today continue in that tradition. QUESTION: Two questions related to your alternatives package if I may ask. Number one is, do you plan to make your alternatives package a global one as well as a legally binding one or would you be willing to start off the program on incremental approach like with say 20 countries, 30 countries willing to go aboard with your alternative package. Second part of the question is, aren't many of the elements included in this alternative package compatible, not mutually exclusive, with the composite draft protocol that you have just rejected. BOLTON: In response to your first question we think that it's in fact more effective to rely on the adoption of national criminal legislation rather than slug through seven more years of negotiation as we just finished with the draft protocol that resulted in something that we found both ineffective and unacceptable for other reasons. I'll be happy to come back if somebody else is interested and describe again why we found the draft protocol unacceptable. But we think this is a better way to proceed. There are actually, of the elements that we suggested in our package, really very few that were in any way addressed in the protocol. And that's one of the reasons why we wanted to get away from both the protocol and the Ad Hoc group to break through that old thinking, if I may characterize it that way, and look at other ways to strengthen the BWC. QUESTION: Your statement on legislation particularly in the U.S.; I would have bought that two month ago. But now it sounds rather hollow considering that, and I may be wrong, considering that with the Anthrax threat in the U.S. there was talk that you have about 30,000 laboratories that can actually work out Anthrax and produce it. So your legislation has not had much impact on the present situation, so how do I square these two remarks. BOLTON: I think there are two aspects to that. The first is that any criminal legislation hopefully functions with a deterrent effect, but it is obvious that there are some people to whom deterrence of any sort does not really apply. We don't know, as I say in the statement, at the moment, in a way that we could make public, where the Anthrax attacks came from. But for example in the case of the September 11th terrorists, individuals who were willing, not only to kill thousand of innocent civilians, but who were willing to commit suicide themselves, neither criminal statutes nor international treaties obviously deterred them from what they did. It may well be that there is nothing satisfactory to deter some people from that kind of murderous behavior. The function of criminal law, when deterrence and abiding by the law fails, is punishment. And I have every confidence that the pertinent law enforcement authorities in the United States are actively pursuing the perpetrators of the Anthrax attacks. If they are found and brought into custody, that they would be prosecuted to the fullest extend of American law. QUESTION: You mentioned that there are other countries that you did not want to name but that you would be speaking to privately that are doing this. Is this because they are friendly countries or countries that for other reasons you wouldn't want to embarrass? BOLTON: In the kind of complex diplomacy that the United States engages in where there are many factors that affect not just preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, there are a lot of things we take into account. Having made the decision not to name certain names in the prepared statement, I am obviously not going to get them in now. But as the statement says, we will be contacting them privately because, as the statement also says, strict compliance with the BWC is something we think is important for all countries to engage in, and that standard is the one that we are really holding countries to. There are practical limits to the efficacy of what you say publicly and what you say privately. It's a complex balance that we have to make in a wide range of cases. The balance we made in this instance was demonstrated in the statement. QUESTION: The BW Convention has certain provisions to clarify the kind of allegations you have made at least vis a vis those countries that are also states parties, four out of the six are also states parties, why hasn't the U.S. yet entered this kind of procedures, like for instance Cuba did years ago when they had some allegations against the U.S.? Are you going to do that? And my second question, coming back to what you claimed to be alternative proposals. After having read the Convention text again I must say I found all these proposals in the Convention text, even though sometimes they had other labels or other titles, with the exception of the proposal on the consultation cooperation article 5, and that leads to my last question. In this proposal you are saying that going through the Secretary General of the UN rather than having a regime of mandatory challenge or routine inspections, would make investigations of such events of alleged breaches more certain and timely. My question would be on which kind of experience are your basing this assessment given the fact with the CW treaty for the last 8 years we have had all good and satisfactory experience. BOLTON: In response to your second question: because of the difference between the nature of chemical weapons and the nature of biological weapons. The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention is essentially an "intent" treaty. And it's one of the things that differentiates it from other kinds of arms control and why we think this alternative proposal is more likely to work. But make no mistake about it. We have not contended that this proposal is perfect. What we do think, to come now to answer your first question, is that states that undertake to comply with the biological weapons convention should comply with it. And absent the use of compelling force the most important thing we can do, whether through public means or private means, is to convince them to comply with it. We are not concerned with the violation of Article 1 of the BWC by countries in Western Europe because we know they are complying with it. We want the other countries to comply with it too. Because their failure to comply with it undercuts the legitimacy and utility of our all arms control arrangements and that's why we thought it important to name names today to put the spotlight internationally on those countries that are lying about their compliance. QUESTION: Excuse me if I may follow up then because my question was whether or not you will enter the procedures that are being provided for in the convention to clarify the kind of allegations you have been making here. And there are certain procedures. And... BOLTON: I don't feel the need to clarify them because our information we believe is sufficient to justify the statements that I made here publicly and many others that we've made in classified fashion to Congress and to other friends and Allies. QUESTION: OK and the other question was, I mean the proposal you make going through the Secretary General is an alternative to what has been in verification protocol draft so far which provides for regularly mandatory inspections either routine or challenge. And so my question is why do you think that going through the Secretary General might be more certain and more timely to investigate certain allegations. BOLTON: Because it's our hope based on experience based under the Chemical Weapons Conventions but also the work that we undertook in looking at various of the measures being debated in connection with the draft BW protocol, that we thought would have been ineffective, that this will provide a better alternative. Let me say again, that's not because there's an absolute proof in the world that any human mechanism we can devise will work infallibly. I don't make that contention. We simply say this is our belief. It will be tested if it is adopted. QUESTION: Do I understand you correctly, saying.... BOLTON: How many questions do you want to ask? QUESTION: Well, if you don't answer them I have to come back. Do I understand you correctly then saying that those regimes that we do have in the Chemical Weapons Treaty for both routine and challenge inspections on each others territory are not working to the satisfaction of your government? Is that what you are saying? BOLTON: I am not going to answer the question. I've answered more questions for you than for everybody else in the room put together. QUESTION: No you didn't, you didn't answer the questions. That is why I keep asking. BOLTON: That's your opinion. I'm sorry that you feel that way. Yes sir. QUESTION: The proposal in your speech using the Secretary General's office to get inspectors in countries, is this avenue preferred because it could also be easier to impose sanctions on states that would not comply? It's an easier mechanism to have sanctions for the UN structure? BOLTON: Well, it's possible, but I think it is important to have that mechanism play out. First it's important to get it adopted, which hasn't happened yet because it is still a proposal, but it is also important to see what happens when we try to implement it. Our preference, let me say it again, is that states should comply with their obligations under the biological weapons convention because they have solemnly undertaken to engage in that kind of behavior, and all of the proposals we are talking about are really second best solutions from the ideal, which is to have the governments that sign on to the Biological Weapons Convention, do what they commit to do. QUESTION: The call for national criminal legislation on this issue, would it be a call for a kind of law of the jungle? What will be the coordinating strategy for that. Don't you feel that every country that takes up your call will legislate according to its particular interests. BOLTON: We expect that every country will legislate consistent with the obligations that they have undertaken pursuant to the Biological Weapons Convention itself. The United States has legislation, I am sure that other countries will have other ideas, but it is not necessarily the case that one size fits all. Other countries may come up with legislation actually that has ideas that we could incorporate. But having the elements of the offenses laid out, and having them made applicable to individuals or groups of individuals, nationals to the countries that are adopting the legislation, moves to a level of enforcement potential that doesn't exist under the convention as written now which is applicable to states. So that is the reason that we proposed that, and that because of the possibility once the common elements of the criminalization are adopted by a wide range of nations then we have the potential for cooperation among law enforcement agencies, which if I may say so is likely to be more effective than simply cooperation among diplomats. QUESTION: Sir, have you established a connection between al Qaeda and Iraq, because your speech in a way implies it? BOLTON: Well, I am not going to get into the first subject. I think the United States has made its position, to the extent it has information on that, clear already. What I was saying in the statement is that there are countries, states parties to the Biological Weapons Convention, that we believe are implementing offensive BW programs. I won't go beyond what I said in the statement, it speaks for itself. We also mentioned the al Qaeda since it is obviously a matter of enormous concern to us at the present and it was not the intention and if you look at the statement clearly you'll see not the language in the statement either to link among them, but to say each stands on its own. QUESTION: Did I understand you correctly that you have no plans to trigger any of the provisions in the Convention against the offending countries that you have named? You are not going to go through the convention to do that? BOLTON: Well, the purpose of this statement here today was not to indicate one way or another what subsequent actions we might take which might cover a broad variety of things, but to say to the international community that these states, we believe, are currently in violation of the convention. As I said before, the ideal way to handle this is for the states that have undertaken the obligations that they do in the Biological Weapons Convention to adhere to it. That is the best way, and that is the behavior that we would like to see. QUESTION: I would like to follow up on that. You had also mentioned private government to government. Could you describe some of the kinds of actions you could foresee taking against some countries such as Iraq who have clearly in the U.S. government's experience not complied with the convention? BOLTON: No, I would rather not get into those kinds of specifics, and I would also rather not get into what we would say privately to the governments that we didn't name other than to say that those governments that were not named know who they are and one would hope that their behavior would come into conformity with the obligations under the BWC that they have undertaken. That is the purpose of this exercise. That is the preferred outcome, so that the United States or others of like mind don't have to engage in behavior other than what we engage in, which is to say we have signed on to the BWC and we comply with it. And if each nation did that, then we wouldn't have to worry about alternative means. QUESTION: Just a follow up question. If I follow you through, then that means that the list that you named today you have tried already private sort of diplomacy? BOLTON: No, no. The purpose of naming the names today was to put the international spotlight on them and to indicate that we, as I said in the statement, believe what they are doing in the area of biological weapons is in violation of the convention. Now let me come back to the lady I thought I was pointing to before. QUESTION: I'm just curious, given the events of the past two months, is there any concern why only half of the states parties are actually present at this moment. Is there a concern on the part of the United States that other countries aren't involved in the discussions right now? BOLTON: I would have to tell you I am not myself personally aware of how many states are present here whether through their missions in Geneva or through delegations from capitals, so perhaps if you or others are interested in the answer to that question let me get back to you. I just don't know myself. QUESTION: Coming back to the list of countries, you named five, and you are hinting that there could be others on this suspect list. Is your reluctance to name some of the others, is that because some of them are recipients of major U.S. foreign aid in the Middle East and Asia? BOLTON: As I said, I think I answered that question before. The issue, whether it is in the field of biological weapons or a whole range of other foreign policy questions, of when one names publicly and who one names publicly is subject to a complex set of factors. Although the subject of preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is one of the things that I spend the most time on and personally feel the strongest about, one has to recognize that this is not the only factor in foreign policy, and that there are a lot of reasons why some things we do publicly and some things we don't do publicly, precisely because of the range of interests that we have. But I think it is clear from the statement and one of the reasons that the sentence is in there about contacting other states privately is that the level of concern as President Bush has expressed on a number of occasions about the proliferation of biological weapons and other weapons of mass destruction is very intense in Washington. QUESTION: You've presented alternative proposals, but a lot of countries are concerned that we don't have what they consider to be an international legally binding protocol. Is there any way that you could accept for countries to go along with your proposals on the understanding that negotiations would continue on a wider protocol? BOLTON: The draft protocol that was under negotiation for the past seven years is dead in our view. Dead, and is not going to be resurrected. It has proven to be a blind alley. We have lost a lot of time in the course of the negotiations and we think that the proposals we have made, and there may well be other thoughts and proposals out there that would be productive as well, ought to be pursued and ought to be pursued in the immediate short term so that they can be implemented. I think that that is why the statement says in a couple of occasions, we think the traditional arms control approaches in this area have not been successful, and we are trying to think -- I don't like to use this phrase, but I can t think of another one of the top of the head -- why we are trying to think outside the box and why we encourage other governments to do the same. QUESTION: Why the emphasis on bilateral extradition agreements? If you have national legislation, doesn't that imply then that you don't trust the other nations to enforce this legislation and you would like to be able to collect these people and bring them to the United States for trial? BOLTON: Well, I think the proposal on extradition is not dissimilar from other bilateral extradition ideas that countries have on a whole variety of offenses that where there is the possibility of extraditing in some cases you want the person brought back to the United States, or another country may want it brought back to its national jurisdiction, and you want that possibility to be there, absolutely. QUESTION: You said in your statement that the United States has crafted alternative proposals, I quote, in the light of the September 11th terrorist attacks, etc. Now as you know the U.S. was much criticized earlier this year apparently for walking away from the seven year's work of the ad hoc committee without having anything to put in place of the ad hoc committee's work. To what extent, sir, is your speech today triggered by September 11th, and to what extent is it the outcome of long-term analysis of the defects of the ad hoc committee's proposals. Thank you. BOLTON: Well, I think it is a combination of both. I think the terrorist attacks of September the 11th demonstrate that the risks to the American homeland are real, that we are dealing with something that is not hypothetical. And certainly the release of anthrax, whatever its source turns out to be, underlines that. But our effort has been to see if there aren't ways of truly strengthening the biological weapons convention and the prohibition against the use of BW. Our complaint about the draft protocol was that it would not do what its supporters claimed it would do. A country which is capable of signing the 1972 BWC and violating it, was fully capable of signing the protocol or 20 other treaties and violating those as well. The defects in the protocol that we saw were such that on an interagency basis there was no disagreement during the course of the U.S. government's internal review. There was no disagreement that the protocol should be rejected. Why did we reject it now? Because the negotiators in the course of their discussions had set this conference in effect as the deadline. The United States even during the prior administration had argued against setting this conference as the deadline, but we were, dare I say it, alone. And so the overwhelming weight of the seven-year-long ad hoc process came together and we had to make a decision. It was not a case where the Bush administration came in and said let's make a decision on this. It was presented to us that we were going to be here in November and the subject of the ad hoc group's protocol was going to come up, where did we stand on it? So we evaluated it and told the truth. QUESTION: A follow up on that. Technically speaking what are you aiming at? Are you aiming at amending the Convention, which of course would be a time consuming process, and why could you not strengthen the Protocol, which then would be probably shorter at the risk of the Americans loosing their face? BOLTON: The proposals that we made, that are elaborated in the speech, do not require amending the Biological Weapons Convention. We think that's one of the advantages of it. In terms of why we are not proposing to change the protocol as an alternative, the protocol we found to be hopelessly defective in three major respects. First, we felt that the protocol as drafted would endanger the viability of Biological Warfare defense programs because the inspection provisions would open up to countries that had a desire to have an offensive BW program the possibility of finding out what our defenses were. And once they learned more about our defenses, they could develop more sophisticated offensive programs or countermeasures to overcome the defenses. The second major defect of the protocol was that it would have endangered and we believe hopelessly compromised the export control programs that the United States and many other Western countries have restricting and limiting very severely the export of dual use items that could be used to help develop an offensive biological weapons capability. And these are export controls I should say that apply to dual use items that might have applicability in chemical or nuclear programs as well, but in other words the inspection mechanism in the draft protocol would have compromised our export control system which we felt would have dramatically undercut our efforts to prevent biological weapons proliferation. And the third fatal defect in the protocol was the risk to proprietary information that would have been occasioned by the inspection provisions from entirely legitimate pharmaceutical concerns in the United States and elsewhere. So the draft protocol as it stood in the summer of this year we felt was hopelessly inadequate already and that is why we rejected it, and the timing of the rejection as I said a moment ago was occasioned by the impending arrival of November the 19th and this review conference. There is no doubt however that had the protocol remained open for amendment whether by us or others there are many states that would have wanted to make the protocol even worse from our point of view. And our judgment was that after seven years of negotiation, the process was in a ditch, and we couldn't see how to get it out, and that is why, because of the press of circumstances, we came to the decision that we did and presented it at the last meeting of the ad hoc group during the summer. QUESTION: So you want your proposals to be part of the final declaration? BOLTON: Of this review conference, that is correct. QUESTION: Can you indicate what measure of support you think you are going to get from other participants in the conference, given that many of them, including the Western Group, or many in the Western Group, are still angry about the U.S. pullout in the summer on the protocol negotiations and given that you appear to be accusing them of diplomatic inertia over the past few years, when in fact, if you recall, the accusation in the summer was that it was the U.S. itself which had not been active in the negotiations until the last moment? BOLTON: Well I can certainly say in response to the last part of your question that speaking on behalf of my colleagues who did participate during the past seven years, and I am a Bush appointee as you may have suspected, as I was in the last Bush administration, that during that long interregnum in Washington my current colleagues in the State Department and other agencies were deeply involved in the negotiations over a sustained period of time. One of the things that I find most interesting when I came into the administration was that the concerns, the analysis of the defects in the draft protocol that I heard from the people who had devoted seven years to this negotiation were things they had been saying in the negotiations during that entire period of time. So it was not as though the new appointees of the Bush administration suddenly found a new range of defects. All of these things had been discussed during the earlier negotiations and it is precisely because one can reasonably conclude that after seven years of effort that produces an unacceptable text, that maybe we ought to try something different. Your first question, if I recall, is what the prognosis is for acceptance of our proposals, and I can say that we have consulted extensively around the world on these proposals and that I think there is a fair amount of support for them. Whether that will be enough to ensure that they are adopted in the final declaration, or whether the conference is unable to reach agreement on the declaration because of other issues, I can't really say at this point. I will tell you what I told a meeting of the Western Group just a few moments ago, was that I am certainly prepared to come back here in the third week of this conference if my counterparts, at least in the Western Group, are also prepared to come back here. I think this is one of the points that they are stressing, is that we have looked at this issue on the cabinet level in the United States, at a very political level of decision making, and it is because of the seriousness with which we view the threat of biological weapons and our determination to strengthen our protection against the use of these weapons that I have been sent here and that I would hope that my counterparts from other governments -- if it is that serious for them as well -- would show up too. So we are prepared to engage across the full length and breadth of Geneva for the next three weeks in hope of having a successful outcome here. QUESTION: Could you elaborate more on your information on North Korea's biological weapons program? And one more question, will your naming in public of the North Korean program would have some effect on the ongoing U.S. North Korean dialogue or are you going to put the prerequisite of this problem for the improvement of bilateral relations between the two countries? BOLTON: The wording of the statement on North Korea, and indeed all the states and al Qaeda that I named, I can assure you was the subject of careful consideration by the U.S. government in terms of what we thought we could say publicly. So I hope you will understand if I say I can't elaborate on the statement beyond what appears in the text that I delivered this morning, but we have the highest degree of confidence, we have the highest degree of confidence in the accuracy of that statement. Now with respect to the potential impact on President Bush's offer to have further conversations with the DPRK, I did say in the statement we are hopeful that Pyongyang will come into compliance with the BWC, and that's our policy, just as we are hopeful that they will cease their proliferation of other technologies involved with weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile delivery systems. BOLTON: We'll take three more questions. QUESTION: I just want to understand. You've proposed the Secretary General invoke inspections which as I understand it give would presumably give the Security Council a chance to veto such inspections, so that would presumably protect the Perm 5 inspections, the other major omission from the protocol in your proposals is, as I understand it, the lack of the sharing of technology, or am I wrong or could you set me straight? BOLTON: Can you elaborate on the second point. I'm not sure QUESTION: The sharing of technology and so forth, the thing that you pointed out that you were concerned about that developing countries, potential enemies, could of U,S, proprietary information. BOLTON: What we are concerned about there is that the acquisition of information of technology or intellectual property or even actual physical means of production that have a utility in biological weapons programs, even if they have legitimate uses, would be something we are concerned about and that's one of the reasons why we have the kind of export control program that we do. It's one of the reasons, as I said a moment ago, we were concerned about the provisions of the draft protocol. The question of what technology, to speak for the U.S. here, what technology we would share with other countries depends on the implementation of our export control laws. The reason those export controls exist is because of our fear of the proliferation of technologies and equipment that could facilitate an offensive BW program. In terms of the Security Council, you know, look, it is in the nature of the veto power, and it's why the veto power exists at all, that those countries have the ability to exercise it. I think that's a fact of life and that's not going to change. QUESTION: It was said today that none of the measures that you're proposing today are new, that they were proposed before. Any idea of why they were rejected and what makes you think that they are going to be accepted? BOLTON: I don't think I said none of them were new. I think the notion of articulating, for example, the national criminalization of the provisions of the BWC is something that has not been proposed in this forum before to my knowledge by the U.S. The notion has been around obviously as a possibility but we see this as important not simply for the legislative exercise of passing new statutes but because of the enhanced possibly for cooperation among law enforcement agencies. And that's something that we see as worth exploring. In terms of overall efficacy of the project, I just say again, the only way we can be sure that the BWC is being adhered to is if all states parties comply with it scrupulously on their own. That is in the nature of international agreements. We have a high degree of confidence that the overwhelming majority of parties are complying with it and it's the reason we wanted to turn the spotlight on some of the parties that aren't. They have it in their power to comply with the convention and we very much hope they do so. QUESTION: In your statements you said that after al Qaeda your most serious concern is Iraq and their biological weapons program. If I remember correctly, though, when the UN was going after Iraq after the war, the United States was accused of having sold Iraq the elements that it used in making its biological weapons and that the U.S. Department of Commerce was issuing export licenses for the elements right up until the 15th of January 1991, and that the U.S. impounded the UNSCOM documents and has kept them impounded ever since because they prove this. At least this is what people in the UN have told me who have worked on it. Doesn't this put you in a very awkward position then in pointing the finger at Iraq considering you've equipped Iraq and this was after Iraq had already gassed its own people and shown what it was capable of doing? BOLTON: Well fortunately my colleague Ken Jester, under secretary of commerce for export control, is here and I will flip that question to him, but I can tell you that as a matter of historical record, having been in the State Department at the time of the Persian Gulf Crisis and having helped write the resolution that created UNSCOM, that there were lots of participants, lots of sales to Iraq, lots of equipment, by lots of other countries before hand. I would be the last person to say the United States has been perfect in the implementation of its export control system. It has been and that system has undergone very substantial revision in the years since the Persian Gulf crisis, and to the extent which Iraq was able to develop an offensive BW capability before the program the Persian Gulf War, and the extent it's been able to develop one since the Persian Gulf War and particularly since the end of UN inspections should be a lesson to us all as to how easy it is for governments to practice denial and deception techniques to conceal BW programs even from the most intrusive arms control inspection regime in the history of Arms Control -- UNSCOM. And that's why the idea that the draft protocol that was rejected would have resolved the problem of Iraq was inaccurate. I think all of us in the government are ready to accept recommendations for strengthening the export controls system and it doesn't bother me at all to say that while ours [is] imperfect, others are a lot more porous. Thank you very much. I appreciate you coming. (end transcript) (Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)