BA'QUBAH, Iraq - (KRT) - What haunts the former Iraqi intelligence officer most about the men he helped kill in 1987 wasn't their numbed silence or their defeated gazes. It was the strange cloud that seemed to come from nowhere, the cloud that killed them.

It was misty white, he said, and it blossomed above the gulch near the Iranian border where he and his security men had deposited 10 truckloads of political prisoners. Hours later, waiting at a nearby roadblock, he watched the trucks return. They were piled with dead bodies. Civilian technicians accompanying the grim convoy angrily ordered him to keep his distance.

"That's when I realized this was no ordinary execution," said the officer, a retired colonel with the Iraqi Second Army Corps who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The government was using prisoners to test its chemical weapons."

U.S. forces have failed to find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, frustrating a Bush administration that had argued war was necessary to eliminate Saddam Hussein's alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

But there is no doubt that Saddam had used such weapons in the past, including the gassing of Kurdish villages in the 1980s.

Now reports are surfacing that Saddam used human subjects to test the weapons. Senior intelligence officers, weapons engineers and the families of alleged testing victims are stepping forward to describe one of the darkest crimes the old regime inflicted on its people.[...]