Gern Warfare Research & Experiments

"Francis Boyle, an international legal expert at the University of Illinois, Champaign , puts it more bluntly. He called the in-house university committees “a joke and a fraud” that provide “no protection to anyone.” Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by Congress, states the Pentagon “is now gearing up to fight and ‘win’ biological warfare” pursuant to two Bush national strategy directives adopted “without public knowledge and review” in 2002...

Since 9/11, biotech houses, military laboratories, and State and private universities across America, and others sited in Canada, Australia, and South Africa, have collectively lapped up record sums in Federal R&D dollars.

Those who tend to dismiss NIH's laxity about enforcing its own regulations have only to recall the October, 2001, anthrax attacks on Congress and the media. The deadly strain released is believed to have come from a U.S. germ warfare lab at Fort Detrick although there is no certainty as the FBI has never solved the murders. Since then, the vast proliferation of such labs by the Bush administration has educated many new employees --- in some cases undergraduate students --- in germ warfare ops. Four employees at Fort Detrick are known to have died after performing lab work...

Lack of transparencey is cause for concern if only because of the history of secret CIA and Pentagon experiments in germ warfare that used the American people as guinea pigs. In “ Rogue State,” (Common Courage Press) reporter William Blum noted those agencies over two decades “conducted tests in the open air in the United States, exposing millions of Americans to large clouds of possibly dangerous bacteria and chemical particles.” Between 1949 and 1969, the Army tested the spread of dangerous chemical and bacterial organisms over 239 U.S. populated areas including San Francisco , New York and Chicago with no warnings to the public or regard for the health consequences, Blum wrote. The Pentagon even sprayed navy warships to test the impact of germ warfare on U.S. sailors...

The secret operations of the labs' would be less ominous if the Bush administration hadn't led the fight to demolish the international inspection system. Jackie Cabasso, executive director of Western States Legal Foundation, Oakland, Calif., warned, “Last year (2001), the U.S. single-handedly blew apart an international system for inspections of these kinds of (biological) laboratories, a system that would have made great strides toward ensuring that biodefense labs aren’t abused for offensive purposes. Having thumbed our nose at the world, the US is now massively expanding its biodefense program, mostly in secretive facilities.”...

In sum, the costliest, most grandiose research scheme ever attempted having germ warfare capability is going forward today under President Bush and in apparent defiance of international treaties such as the Geneva Convention of 1925 that bans biological agents. What's more, where once the use of germ warfare was an isolated happenstance -- such as when an English general in 1767 gave smallpox-laced blankets to the Indians that decimated their tribes -- research in this grim area today suggests it has been elevated to an instrument of national policy. And this program, involving some of the world's deadliest and most loathsome pathogens, many of which could trigger plagues and epidemics, is being conducted largely in secret without adequate oversight and in flagrant contempt of NIH's own rules. Why?"

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