~ Is The US Making Anthrax Bombs? ~

[Zman]

:sl:/Peace To All

Is The U.S. Making Anthrax Bombs?

By Ted McDonough
Salt Lake City Weekly
February 23, 2006

In March 1988, Saddam Hussein unloaded some of his pandora's box of chemical weapons on the Kurdish village of Halabja. As many as 5,000 were killed by nerve agents believed to have included VX, a poison so deadly that a single drop the size of pinhead can cause death minutes after touching the skin.

By forcing all the body's nerves to fire continuously, causing all of a victims involuntary muscles to contract, VX leads to racing heart, drooling, vomiting, gut spasms and, finally, death by asphyxiation.

Fifteen years later, in 2003, that attack was still cited as a reason to force Iraq to get rid of its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, then believed to additionally include giant fermentors used to grow deadly bacteria such as Anthrax and Botulinum. Civilized countries, including the United States, had sworn off such weapons a generation earlier and were busy dismantling Cold War-era chemical and biological weapons factories.

Much of the Job of destroying America's WMD stockpile took place in Utah's West Desert at the Desert Chemical Depot, 12 miles south of Tooele. In March 2005, the depot, celebrated its milestone destruction of the millionth VX-filled munition. The date of the announcement coincided nicely with a worldwide celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, when more than 150 countries pledged to never again make weapons of mass destruction.

But something else was going on that March in the West Desert that has some questioning the United States' dedication to Nonproliferation. Over at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Grounds--the chemical depot's Tooele County neighbor--Procurement officer's quietly placed orders for a system of bacteria-growing fermentors that would have made Saddam salivate.

According to government solicitation, the order called for four fermentors with a total capacity of producing nearly 3,500 liters of bacteria and the possibility of another five fermentors in the future. That's enough bacteria-making equipment to cook up about three-fourth's the 8,400 liters of Anthrax Iraq admitted to having produced for Saddam's biowar program.

The order didn't detail what Dugway wanted to grow, but at the same time, the secretive Army base put out feelers for a second set of fermentors and contractors willing to make 1,500-liter batches of a benign strain of Anthrax called Sterne.

The request sent shockwaves through the community of government watchdogs and scientists dedicated to ensuring the biowar genie stays in its bottle. For, while fermentors were ostensibly ordered for production of a nonlethal strain of Anthrax, they could easily be used to produce vast quantities of the lethal strain as well.

Dugway had long been known to experiment with deadly agents. In Spring 2003, for example, the base advertised for help brewing up Paralysis-Inducing Botulinum Toxin, as well as Ricin, Plague, Rabbit Fever, Food Poisoning, The Horse Disease Glanders, and all manner of Nerve Agents including the Nazi-Invented Tabun and Soman. But as far as anyone knew, Dugway only used small amounts of the agents inside sealed laboratories.

"To anybody's knowledge, there was no fermentation capacity anywhere near that size at Dugway until this decision to build it," said Edward Hammond, who keeps an eye on bioweapons research from his texas-based Sunshine Project.

"A few years ago, if somebody did that it would be viewed as possibly a smoking gun of an offensive program. It would probably get the Iranians bombed if they did that at one of their facilities."

The requests for fermentors were the clearest sign yet that a huge build-up of U.S. biowar research, begun after 9/11, was coming to Utah. Dugway, long home to the nation's biodefense testing, reports a 60 percent increase in its workload since the attacks on the World Trade Center and late last year, readied plans for construction to double testing again.

All of the testing is done in the name of protecting the country from terrorist attack with biological or chemical weapons. But the direction in which some of the testing is headed--including all but making WMDs ourselves--is troubling an increasingly vocal group of scientists. Even if America's motives are pure, they worry, the work could spark a new WMD Arms Race.

For Utah watchdogs, the prospect of increased testing at Dugway resurrects memories of a time before 1969, when outdoor testing with biological and chemical weapons was stopped. One chilling, unexplained request from Dugway last year asked for batches of dead, frozen sheep for testing a mobile crematorium, resurrecting the specter of 6,000 sheep found dead in Utah's Skull Valley following the accidental release of VX from Dugway in 1968.

Some worry the liklihood of accidents will increase as more tests are performed at a supposedly secure Army base where nine illegal workers from Mexico were found working for a subcontractor in February, hard at work building a new hotel.

"There is a very blurry line between offense and defense when it comes to Germ Warfare," said Salt Lake City Dugway watchdog Steve Erickson, director of the Citizens Education Project. "When they start doing stuff like ordering up fermentors, there is Just no knowing what they are going to do," said Erickson. "It's not Just unsettling for us locally, it is an International cause for concern. A lot of these other countries that are signatories to the Biological Weapons Convention--What will they think? Perception in this arena is critical."

Dugway isn't saying why it wanted large volumes of the nonlethal Sterne Anthrax, except that it was acting on orders from the U.S. Army Developmental Test Command. The particular solicitation that alarmed watchdogs was canceled when no contractor responded, said Dugway spokeswoman Paula Nicholson. Base commanders did not respond to questions about whether the order had been filled in another way.

Dugway has been growing small amounts of its own Sterne-Strain Anthrax since 2002, according to Nicholson. It's used as a substitute for the real thing when testing battlefield detectors that sniff out biowar agents and other defense equipment.

Hammond thinks the only explanation for the Army's need for thousands of liters of non-lethal Anthrax would be outdoor testing. In such a case, faux Anthrax would be grown in fermentors, dried out and turned into an aerosol to be released as a cloud above a Dugway training range to tests detectors or to train troops.

Critics say the problem is that such experiments look a lot like what a country would do if it wanted to make biological weapons. Because Biological weapons don't keep well, a biological weapons program looks like a bunch of fermentors ready to be turned on in case of war.

When the Bush administration went to the United Nations with its case for war with Iraq, it noted reports that Saddam could produce 25,000 liters of Anthrax. The administration didn't claim Saddam had that much Anthrax, Just that it "had biological weapons sufficient to produce that much." In other words, fermentors and equipment enough to turn the resulting death soup into a powder that will float on the wind.

The best defense is a good offense, goes the old sports analogy. The question many are asking is, when it comes to military research, how do you tell the difference?

Equipment used to grow large amounts of the type of Anthrax given soldiers to vaccinate them against the disease could Just as easily grow the disease that causes black, crater-like swelling on the skin and that suffocates a victim in three days said Hammond. And the real Anthrax is also stored at Dugway, inside biological laboratories newly expanded in 2003 as part of the national biodefense build-up.

Anthrax, thought to be either the fifth or sixth plague of Egypt described in the Bible, has been a favorite of WMD research because of its ability to survive as a spore for decades before finding its way into a host. As a skin infection, Anthrax forms black, bacteria-oozing patches that can cover an entire limb, but its mostly deadly in the lungs. Infections from inhaling spores begin like a mild case of the flu that continues until the sudden onset of troubled breathing, when it's often too late to stop. The skin turns bluish and the victim's chest swells as Anthrax spores, activated in the warmth of the lungs, begin to reproduce, widening a gap behind the breastbone and causing massive bleeding inside the chest cavity. Ultimately, the bacteria spread through the blood to the rest of the body, resulting in shock and death in two to three days.

One of the farthest reaching, if little advertised, effects of the war on terror has been a dramatic increase in U.S. spending on biological and chemical warfare research. A cursory review of Bush's 2007 budget request released early February shows $7 billion in dedicated funding. That compares with $750 million spent before 9/11. Hammond calculates that if off-the-books "black budget" spending is included, the United States is already spending up to $8 billion per year on biodefense.

The same people who told us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction believe an attack on the United States with chemical or biological weapons is a dire threat. To Justify experiments that a few years ago were generally considered off-limits for defensive purposes, the Department of Homeland Security has resorted to reinterpreting the Biological Weapons Convention, said Alan Pearson, director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation's Biological and Chemical Weapons Program.

On its face, the treaty bans development of biological weapon agents or methods of delivery, but in writing up the plans for new biodefense centers being constructed this year, the Homeland Security Department suggested developing defensive biological weapons would be OK. That's a position taken by no other country, Pearson said.

Announced plans for the new National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center include the United States working to "acquire, grow, modify, store, stabilize, package [and] disperse," biological weapons. Other announced biodefense plans include development of genetically-modified versions of deadly bacteria. The Justification in both cases is threat assessment. That is determining what terrorists might be capable of in terms of producing vaccine-resistant strains of deadly biological agents or new methods of agent delivery.

Scientific groups coming out against portions of the biodefense effort include Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Council for Responsible Genetics. The former chief American negotiator of the Biological Weapons Convention, James Leonard, has warned the administration's initiative could be interpreted as "development" of biological weapons in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.

"The rapidity of elaboration of American biodefense programs, their ambition and administrative aggressiveness, and the degree to which they push against the prohibitions of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), are startling," Leonard wrote in a critique authored with a former deputy director of the main U.S. Biological-Pathogens Research Center at Fort Deitrick, Md. The new defensive efforts "may constitute development in the guise of threat assessment, and they certainly will be interpreted that way," they wrote.

Even the National Assembly of Sciences has chimed in, calling U.S. efforts to make more deadly germs "concerning"--If only because they might give terrorists ideas.

Making his first appearance before Congress as National Intelligence Director in February, John Negroponte said a terrorist strike with conventional explosives remains the "most probable scenario," but Al Qaeda, along with nearly 40 other terrorist organizations, remains interested in acquiring chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

But since its now evident that Iraq dismantled its facilities producing weapons of mass destruction long before the American Invasion of 2003, some scientists wonder if the current U.S. defensive biowar build-up is similarly based on faulty Intelligence.

University of Michigan science historian Susan Wright calls the extent of fear of terrorism with biological weapons "completely unrealistic."

"Heaven only knows how they think a terrorist is going to put up a lab and do this stuff without being caught," she said. "Labs with ventilation and good scientists leave huge footprints."

Others criticize the amount of money spent on biodefense. "We have ongoing problems in coping with infectous disease that are killing tens of thousands of Americans every year and yet we're soaking billions of dollars into the bioterrorist threat that is at the present time entirely hypothetical," said University of California, Davis, Microbiologist Mark Wheelis, one of many scientists arguing that if a bioterror attack occurs, spending on basic health infrastructure and emergency services will be far more important than exotic anti-biowar measures.

According to post-9/11 studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, an American's odds of dying from heart disease are one in 332, while the odds of dying in an act of bioterrorism are one in 56 million.

Bush would fund next year's proposed increase in bioterror research at the National Institutes of Health by trimming most other NIH disease programs.

It's a spending pattern consistent with past years' post-9/11 budgets. Since 2001, federal grants to study biowarfare agents have grown more than 2,000 percent while research dollars for some diseases that infect large numbers of Americans--including Turberculosis and Hepatitis--declined.

The U.S. biodefense build-up began on month after the 9/11 attacks, when envelopes containing Anthrax were mailed to Congress and Bush requested $1.5 billion in counter-bioterrorism funding.

Erickson points out one of the great ironies: the Anthrax in the letters almost certainly came not from International terrorists, but from a U.S. biodefense laboratory. While the perpetrator was never found, investigators determined the powder was a militarized Anthrax strain developed at Fort Deitrick, in Maryland.

Another irony is that Hussein got part of his Anthrax starter kit from U.S. storehouses, which shipped to Iraq cultures on seven occasions between 1986 and 1988.

Despite increasing voices of caution, the biodefense boom shows no signs of slowing down. Construction is set to begin on new multimillion-dollar biodefense centers at Fort Deitrick.

Douglas Tamilio, commander of Dugway's West Desert Test Center, said in a prepared statement that planned construction in Utah isn't yet underway. While Dugway has added laboratories since 9/11, it has shut older labs so less room is available for testing than was available 10 years ago. While numbers of Dugway's customers and related tests have "significantly increased" since 2001, the amount of biological agents or simulant used at Dugway hasn't grown significantly, Tamilio wrote.

Still, last September, Dugway completed an environmental plan describing potential construction to support a doubling of the testing activities over the next seven years. That includes an annex for Dugway's bio-laboratory and buildings for communications and protective-gear testing. A mock city was proposed for a dramatic expansion of Dugway's soldier training. last October, Dugway requested permission to take over an undisclosed amount of nearby federal land for training and test ranges.

Dugway's requests for this year include lodging, a year of bus service to transport workers from Tooele, a crew of paramedics, a natural gas transport pipeline for heating and a real-time continuous air-monitoring system. The base has received $25 million for a rebuilt runway.

It's all a for defense and perfectly safe. So says the government. But it makes the watchdogs nervous.

"It's not so much that I'm afraid that the U.S. is going to start weaponizing Anthrax. We've got enough ways to kill people. The problem is, what if everyone in the world starts doing this? Hammond asks.

"We're creating the threat we are supposed to be defending against, and there isn't a technical solution. There is always going to be one more step, one more vaccine to be defeated. It's like a dog chasing it's own tail."

Source:
http://slweekly.com/editorial/2006/feat_2006-02-23.cfm

[Zman]

:sl:/Peace To All

America The Beautiful's Germ Warfare Rash

By Sherwood Ross
TheHumanist

In his bellicose Cincinnati, Ohio, speech of October 7, 2002, President George W. Bush warned that Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten America with "horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons."

While Iraq's possession of these weapons later proved to be unfounded, the president's charges did point to a certain germ of truth: they neatly described his own operations.

Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has spent at least $44 billion on biological "defense" without ever making made a true needs assessment.

In the early 1990s the Kremlin shut down their huge, Soviet-era germ warfare operation and, while Israel, Iran, and North Korea are known to have biological weapons research facilities and India, China, and Cuba are said to be building high-security labs to study lethal bacteria and viruses, these initial or potential programs are disproportionately behind the massive efforts underway in the United States.

In the words of Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, an Austin, Texas-based group that tracks research involving biological agents:

"Our biowarfare research is defending ourselves from ourselves. It's a dog chasing its tail."

Milton Leitenberg is an arms control authority and a member of the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy and UM's Center for International and Security Studies.

In his 2005 book, Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat, Leitenberg writes that the risk of terrorists and nonstate actors using biological agents "has been systematically and deliberately exaggerated," particularly after the 2001 anthrax attacks on Congress and media outlets.

He contends that U.S. officials undertook a concerted effort to promote their view on the international stage and that an "edifice of institutes, programs, conferences, and publicists" continues to spread what he calls exaggeration and scare-mongering.

What's more, while floating extravagant tales of terrorists planning to launch deadly germ attacks on the United States,

the Bush administration has been diverting dollars from urgent medical research against real threats, such as avian influenza, to the creation of new strains of extinct killer diseases like Spanish flu. Upon his retirement in December 2004, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson cited pandemic flu as the greatest threat to the nation.

Yet according to Leitenberg, Washington policymakers instead have focused on bioterrorism and biodefense.

Leitenberg posits it might take just such a pandemic to demonstrate to the public that Washington "has been using the overwhelming proportion of its relevant resources to prepare for the wrong contingency."

From 1977 to 1999, he notes, flu killed 788,000 people in the United States, about 36,000 a year. Even if there is no outbreak of pandemic flu, one could project 360,000 American deaths from flu over the next decade.

When these figures are contrasted with the five deaths from the 2001 anthrax attacks, it is little short of amazing that in fiscal year 2006 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) received $1.76 billion for biodefense but only $120 million to fight influenza.

If taxpayers are slow to recognize that billions of their tax dollars are being poured into hundreds of biological cesspools, some scientific bodies are not.

According to the nonprofit Center For Arms Control and Non-Proliferation (CAC) in Washington, DC, in 2001 the U.S. government spent $1.6 billion to address the threat of biological weapons.

By 2006 total spending had reached $36 billion, with a record $8 billion more earmarked for FY 2007. As noted, one of the leading agencies allocating such funds is the NIH, billed as "the steward of medical and behavioral research for the Nation."

Two years ago, the growing slice of the NIH budget being shifted to biodefense research--money that has traditionally gone to fighting diseases such as cancer--prompted 750 of the 1,143 NIH-funded scientists studying bacterial diseases to write an open letter to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni charging that the research center's emphasis on biodefense had diminished their efforts to achieve basic research breakthroughs.

The public has good reason for concern.

In the introduction to Francis Boyle's 2005 book, Biowarfare and Terrorism, MIT molecular biology professor Jonathan King writes:

"the Bush administration launched a major program which threatens to put the health of our people at far greater risk than the hazard to which they claimed to have been responding."

Bush's policies, he continues, "do not increase the security of the American people" but "bring new risk to our population of the most appalling kind."

From Washington State to Florida and from Massachusetts to California, the United States has broken out in a rash of federally funded biological warfare operations with as many as four hundred labs involved in research related to pathogens that could be used as bioweapons agents.

According to the Sunshine Project, most states have a facility of some sort, ranging from an open-air testing location to aerosol test chambers to Biosafety Level 3 or Level 4 operations, the latter being one in which the pathogens being tampered with are deadly, easily transmissible, and have no known cure.

Additionally, there are laboratories in a number of states whose activity is classified as secret.

Beyond the NIH, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the military are heavily engaged in such work, some of it conducted abroad, such as the Navy's labs in Egypt, Peru, Indonesia, and Germany.
Biological warfare involves the use of living organisms for military purposes.

Such weapons can be viral, bacterial, and fungal, among other forms, and can be spread over a large geographic terrain by wind, water, insect, animal, or human transmission.

Among the most dangerous pathogens under study are anthrax, tularemia, plague, and ebola virus, as well as toxins (living organisms such as fungi).

Using genetic engineering, U.S. government scientists are purportedly concocting new strains of lethal microbes for which there are no cures.

Bacteria, for example, can be made resistant to vaccines. Indeed, they can be made more virulent, easier to disseminate, and harder to eradicate.

Some pathogens are even being injected with genes to make them resistant to antibiotic drugs.

Words fail to describe this "achievement," coming from the same country that gave the world the Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin polio vaccines.
As part of its buildup, in January 2005 the Army authorized construction of a new facility at the already sprawling U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

According to a July 31, 2006, report in London's Guardian, Fort Detrick's National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC), due to be completed in 2008, "will house heavily guarded and hermetically sealed chambers in which scientists simulate potential terrorist attacks."

The scientists will dress in full-body spacesuits and use aerosol-test chambers to expose animals to deadly pathogens.

To do so, the Guardian reported, the world's most lethal bacteria and viruses would have to be produced and stockpiled.

Questions of international law violations and the hastening of a biological arms race persist.

In December 2006 Battelle National Biodefense Institute hooked the $250-million, five-year DHS contract to run the NBACC.

According to the Washington Post, much of what transpires at that center may never be known as the government intends to operate the facility largely in secret.

In its July 30, 2006, article, the Post reported:

The heart of the lab is a cluster of sealed chambers built to contain the world's deadliest bacteria and viruses.

There, scientists will spend their days simulating the unthinkable:

bioterrorism attacks in the form of lethal anthrax spores rendered as wispy powders that can drift for miles on a summer breeze, or common viruses turned into deadly superbugs that ordinary drugs and vaccines cannot stop.
University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle charges that the Bush administration is spending more money in inflation-adjusted dollars to develop illegal, offensive germ warfare than the $2 billion the United States spent on the Manhattan Project to make the atomic bomb.

That weapon's development was, at least, driven by the realistic fears that Nazi Germany might develop it first. Today, no comparable enemy exists.

Peculiarly, the only significant deadly germ warfare attack on the United States appeared to have come from the government's own Fort Detrick site.

A month after 9/11, the mysterious anthrax attacks killed five, sickened seventeen, and alarmed the nation.

The perpetrator was never found (a poor showing for a country that spends $40 billion a year on intelligence), but the anthrax-laced letters to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) prodded Congress to rubberstamp an expansion of spending for biological defense through the Patriot and Project BioShield acts.
Project BioShield is a $5.6-billion plan under which the Department of Homeland Security is stockpiling vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax, smallpox, and other germ warfare agents.

There is considerable dispute as to whether the plan's activities open the door to aggressive use of such agents.

According to Boyle, pursuant to two national strategy directives adopted by Bush in 2002, the Pentagon "is now gearing up to fight and 'win' biological warfare without prior public knowledge and review."

The Pentagon's Chemical and Biological Defense Program was revised in 2003 to implement those directives, endorsing "first-use" strike of chemical and biological weapons in war.

Boyle calls the directives the proverbial smoking gun and further points to President Bush's Homeland Security Presidential Directive, HSPD-10, of April 28, 2004, which states:

We are continuing to develop more forward-looking analyses, to include Red Teaming efforts, to understand new scientific trends that may be exploited by our adversaries to develop biological weapons and to help position intelligence collectors ahead of the problem.

"'Red Teaming' means that we actually have people out there on a Red Team plotting, planning, and scheming how to use biowarfare," says Boyle.
The Army has stated its work is, and will continue to be, solely defensive in nature. But when it comes to biowarfare and the agents involved, how do you prepare to defend against such threats without developing them?

According to Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Biotech Century, "it is widely acknowledged that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between defensive and offensive research in the field."

Still, as a signatory to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (entered into force in 1975), the United States is officially bound to the treaty, the scope of which is defined in Article 1:

Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain:

(1) Microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes;

(2) Weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.
University of Maryland's Leitenberg, a long-time authority in the arms control field, contends the government is not developing germ warfare weapons.

However, in a monograph published by his organization, he does question whether ongoing research crosses the line:

There is no such thing as 'defensive' biological weapons. Whatever military doctrine may say regarding distinctions between offensive and defensive conventional weapons, this does not apply to biological weapons.

Article 1.1 of the BWC allows the growth of laboratory quantities of pathogens (agents) for defensive purposes, that is, in order to develop vaccines and pharmaceuticals, test rapid detection systems, masks, decontamination systems and so on.

However, even the 'development' of the pathogen is explicitly forbidden--"never in any circumstances"--as is production and stockpiling.
Boyle, who drafted the 1989 federal law enacted by Congress that criminalized BWC violations, sees it more definitively; he contends the government is creating a killing machine.

Fort Detrick's activities betray aggressive intent, he says, and should be shut down and those responsible jailed.
Others also apparently believe the line has been crossed.

Commenting on Fort Detrick, Mark Wheelis, a microbiology professor at the University of California at Davis, told the Global Security Newswire in June 2004 there was no question that the activities underway there mirrored how offensive biological weapons capability would be developed.

"We're going to develop new pathogens for various purposes. We're going to develop new ways of packaging them, new ways of disseminating them," Wheelis outlined.

"We're going to harden them to environmental degradation. We'll be prepared to go offensive at the drop of a hat if we so desire."

And on July 30, 2006, Leitenberg told the Washington Post,

"If we saw others doing this kind of research, we would view it as an infringement of the bioweapons treaty.

You can't go around the world yelling about Iranian and Korean programs, about which we know very little, when we've got all this going on."

As for whether there truly is an aggressive intent behind the government's biological warfare research, one clue is that in February 2003 the United States granted itself a patent on an illegal, long-range bioweapons grenade in clear violation of the BWC mandate that prohibits such delivery devices.

U.S. officials equivocated they never intended to use the biogrenade as described in their patent.
Ironically, as Hammond pointed out in a news statement of November 30, 2004, "The United States invaded Iraq in pursuit of phantom bioweapons yet, here at home, it brazenly develops them."

The Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) has warned that the United States has progressively undermined international efforts to abolish biological weapons, noting that at the November 2001 Fifth Review Conference in Geneva, the United States rejected a "verification protocol for legally binding international investigations and inspections of all parties."

CRG pointed out that to create vaccines or antiviral agents against many of the most dangerous pathogens and toxins, researchers must first produce such agents in sizable quantities, and that, in the name of vaccine development, as many as twenty laboratories in the United States handle, manipulate, and in some cases weaponize, one of the most lethal strains of anthrax.

Prominent among these facilities, CRG identified Dugway Proving Ground in Salt Lake City, Utah; the U.S. Army Medical Research Unit in Fort Detrick, Maryland; the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC; the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio; the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico; the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia; and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland.

Critics of the biodefense building boom contend that increasing the number of high-containment labs around the country that will handle potential germ warfare agents only increases the likelihood of accidental (or intentional releases) that ultimately could threaten public safety.

Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University chemist who tracks arms control issues, told the Baltimore Sun that the government's tenfold expansion of Biosafety Level-4 laboratories raises the risk of spreading dangerous organisms.

"If a worker in one of these facilities removes a single viral particle or a single cell, which cannot be detected or prevented," he cautioned, "that single particle or cell can form the basis of an outbreak."
Just recently, the Sunshine Project learned that for fourteen months, Texas A&M University concealed an incident in which a student researcher fell seriously ill from undulant fever.

In March 2007 hundreds of people were evacuated from Boston University's ten-story biomedical research building after white smoke wafted through a laboratory containing tularemia bacteria.

Exposure to the bacteria can produce sudden chills, fever, pneumonia, and can even prove to be fatal.

Meanwhile, the metal frame of another large BU biolab is rising nearby at a cost of $178 million where, the Boston Globe reported in March, "researchers would work with the world's deadliest germs, including Ebola, plague, and anthrax."

Anthrax, the nation learned in 2001, subjects its victims to breathing difficulties and wracking coughs as it starves the body of oxygen, often leading to death.

Despite the hues and cries of individuals interviewed or otherwise quoted here, the biowarfare buildup is getting an enthusiastic response from academia, which sees new funds flowing from Washington's horn of plenty.

"American universities have a long history of willingly permitting their research agenda, researchers, institutes, and laboratories to be co-opted, corrupted, and perverted by the Pentagon and the CIA," Boyle writes.
More than a dozen universities and private consortia are currently vying to win the DHS contract for its own new biodefense research center tagged at roughly $450 million.

The proposed 520,000 square-foot main building of the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) will be the nucleus of a complex liable to exceed one hundred acres.

Although advertised to replace an aging facility at Plum Island, New York, the DHS recently announced plans to spend $30 million to expand that lab.

NBAF bidders include state universities of Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.

According to DHS literature, the NBAF complex will fill a critical void in responding to "high consequence biological threats involving human, zoonotic and foreign animal diseases."

While DHS advertises it as a response to "threats," the Council for Responsible Genetics notes that because efforts to diagnose and treat exposure to biological weapons necessarily involve their production and dispersal, transparency measures must be enforced to verify the defensive intent of such efforts.

CRG laments that the U.S. rejection of the BWC inspection and verification protocol undermines that obligation.
On the contrary, many university NBAF project bidders have a history of operating in secret, and this has in no way barred them from applying for new operations.

Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) disclosure is vital, Sunshine's Hammond says, for protecting against the human health and environmental risks of biotechnology research.

Instead of making its IBC records public as required by NIH guidelines, the University of Maryland, for example, has refused to provide any significant information to the Sunshine Project.

"It has lost requests for records, refused them, delayed its response, and when it has replied, provided useless paperwork from which it has redacted all meaningful information," Hammond contends. Scores of other universities are no more forthcoming.
Many big pharmaceutical houses and biotech firms that have received NIH dollars also conceal their operations from the public.

Among those, Sunshine identified: Abbott Laboratories, BASF Plant Science, Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont Central Research and Development, Eli Lilly Corp., Embrex, GlaxoSmithKline, Hoffman-La Roche, Merck & Co., Monsanto, Pfizer Inc., Schering-Plough Research Institute, and Syngenta Corp. of Switzerland. Of the top twenty biotech firms, only Genzyme and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, both headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, complied with NIH guidelines--likely because reporting is mandated by local law.

This illustrates the massive failure of voluntary compliance.

Only 8,500, or 16 percent, of the 52,000 workers employed at the top twenty U.S. biotech firms work at an NIH guidelines-compliant company, Sunshine estimated.

Here and there, concerned citizens are speaking out.

Private and government groups around the nation are protesting the bid for the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility:

In Dunn, Wisconsin, the Dane County Board is opposing the University of Wisconsin's idea of building the NBAF complex on their turf; in Tracy, California, the city council voted against allowing an NBAF facility at Lawrence Livermore, while more than 3,000 people paid to wire DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff opposing the bid and 2,000 more sent e-mail messages in opposition; in Seattle the city council forced the University of Washington to withdraw its bid; at the proposed NBAF site in Leavenworth, Kansas, residents voiced concern over lab safety, the impact on property values, and the potential to make the area a terrorism risk; in Mississippi, opponents posted "No Bio-Lab" signs; and Kentucky residents greeted federal officials making a visit to a proposed site with posters reading "Hal! No! We won't go!" in a reference to Representative Hal Rogers (R-KY).

In Boston, neighbors of the new BU lab under construction have convinced the Massachusetts Supreme Court to hear their objections.

In Maryland, area residents are objecting to the enlargement of Fort Detrick.

And when the Army announced plans this past March to reopen the Baker Laboratory on its Dugway Proving Grounds (eighty miles southwest of Salt Lake City) for the purpose of testing anthrax, the Salt Lake Tribune recalled years ago when 6,000 sheep grazing near Dugway were killed, likely by nerve gas.

"The Army is working on the deadly pathogens for classified defense purposes. That's scary," the Tribune editorialized. "It's no wonder we're concerned."

An editorial of this sort is a rarity.

Apart from coverage in the Washington Post and New York Times, major media has done little investigation into the underlying reasons for Bush's biodefense buildup.

For that matter, Leitenberg says, "not a single member of the House or Senate has questioned that expenditure or called for its reduction or basic redirection."

More questions must be asked.

In its news release of August 16, 2001, the Department of Health and Human Services--laying out its plan to combat a possible bioterrorism threat--said it was increasing its support for research related to "likely" agents.

If so, what is the point of regenerating an extinct 1918 killer flu virus?

The same release warned that "large numbers of people might be directly exposed to an agent released in a dense urban environment."

If so, why entertain bids for new facilities in such areas?

Deadly pathogens are the last thing the world needs.

And yet what we have taking shape in the United States today is the costliest, most grandiose germ warfare research program ever attempted.

It involves developmental work with the deadliest and most loathsome pathogens capable of triggering plagues and epidemics.

It is being conducted in good part in secret without adequate oversight and in violation of the NIH's own rules and treaty requirements for transparency.

It is being lavishly funded while urgent biological research to combat imminent health threats is delayed or denied.

It's not only a staggering waste of taxpayer treasure and a perversion of scientific ingenuity but it needlessly puts Americans, and all humanity, at risk.

Sherwood Ross has worked in an executive capacity in the civil rights movement, as a host of a Washington talk radio show, and as a reporter for major dailies and wire services.

He can be reached at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com.

© 2007, the American Humanist Association

Source:
http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/SherwoodRoss.html