June 1, 2006
Return of the Petri Dish Warriors
A New Biowar Arms Race Begins in Maryland

By KEVIN ZEESE

"You will do well to try to innoculate the Indians by means of blanketts, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race..."

--Approval by Lord Gen. Jeffrey Amherst, British Commander-in-Chief of America, for Col. H. Bouquet's suppression of Pontiac's Rebellion with smallpox laced-blankets, July 1763. The attack partially backfired when Bouquet infected his own troops.

The United States has come along way since our British ancestors used small pox poisoned blankets as a biological weapon against Indians. But, sadly, biological weapons are still with us--indeed they are becoming a major thrust of the U.S. military and a threat to humanity.

Ft. Detrick in Frederick, MD, just 45 miles away from the nation's capitol, is going through a massive expansion into the largest bio-weapons facility in the world. The federal government is installing a 220 acre campus that will bring together numerous federal agencies anchored by a massive U.S. Army building--22 acres in size. The National Interagency Biodefense Campus (NIBC) is likely to ignite a bio-weapons arms race.

Expansion of Bio-Weapons Activity Will Make America, and the World, Less Safe

Not only is this a multi-billion dollar misuse of federal funds, but it will encourage our adversaries to develop similar programs, lead to the invention of new, infectious agents and increase the risk of diversion of U.S. made bio-weapons to our adversaries. If the government really want to increase the safety of Americans the U.S. would invest in the public health system, strengthen international controls and work to remove pathogens from the face of the earth, rather than creating new ones.

The only modern bio-weapons attack was the use of anthrax in letters to Senators Daschle and Leahy at the time the Patriot Act was being considered. There is no question the anthrax used in this attack was produced in the United States and came through Ft. Detrick. The type of anthrax used was the "Ames strain," with a concentration and dispersability of one trillion spores per gram--a technology that is only capable of production by U.S. scientists.

It is not surprising that the only bio-weapons attack originated in U.S. laboratories. As advocates Barry Kissin and Richard Ochs point out:

"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.' Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland demonstrates in his recently published 'Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat' that billions of federal expenditures have been appropriated in the absence of virtually any threat analysis, and that the risk and imminence of the use of biological agents by non-state actors/terrorist organizations has been systematically and deliberately exaggerated. It is critical to recognize that the only bio-attack in American history, namely the anthrax letters of October 2001, almost certainly was generated by our own bio-weapons establishment."

Now, the U.S. is expanding the number of laboratories involved in bio-weapons development by the hundreds, the number of individuals involved by the thousands thereby increasing exponentially the number of people who have access to these weapons and the risk of diversion of the material. The U.S. may end up spending billions of dollars and provide those who oppose the United States with weapons they could not produce themselves.

The U.S. is also developing new methods of using bio-weapons. Attorney and Congressional candidate Barry Kissin testified recently that,

"In May of 2003, it was reported that the United States Army has developed and patented a new grenade that it says can be used to wage bio-warfare. This is in explicit violation of the BTWC, which explicitly prohibits all development of bio-weapons delivery devices. US Patent #6,523,478, granted on February 25th 2003, covers a 'rifle launched non lethal cargo dispenser' that is designed to deliver aerosols, including, according to the patent's claims, 'crowd control agents, biological agents, [and] chemical agents...'"
link
http://www.counterpunch.org/