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I think you will enjoy this new article from Virtual Citizens titled "Bush Developing Illegal Bioterror Weapons For Offensive Use".

In violation of the U.S. Code and international law, the Bush administration is developing illegal, offensive, germ-warfare weapons.  When adjusted for inflation, the current Bush program is spending more than FDR did in WWII on the Manhattan Project to make the atomic bomb.

So says Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois professor of international law who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by Congress.  Boyle states that the Pentagon “is now gearing up to fight and ‘win’ biological warfare” pursuant to two Bush national strategy directives adopted “without public knowledge or review” in 2002.

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 (CBW) in war, says Boyle.  Terming the action “the proverbial smoking gun,” Boyle said that the mission of the controversial CBW program “has been altered to permit development of offensive capability in chemical and biological weapons!”

In his book, “Biowarfare and Terrorism” (Clarity Press), Boyle charges that these directives “usurp and nullify the right and the power of the United States Congress to declare war in gross and blatant violation of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution.”

For fiscal years 2001-2004, the Federal government funded $14.5-billion “for ostensibly civilian biowarfare-related work alone,” a “truly staggering” sum, Boyle wrote.

Boyle adds that another $5.6-billion was allotted for “the deceptively-named Project BioShield” under which Homeland Security is stockpiling vaccines and drugs to fight [sic] anthrax, smallpox and other bioterror agents. 

On December 12, 2006, the Washington Post reported that both houses of Congress passed legislation “to salvage the two-year-old Project BioShield, which has been marked by delays and operational problems.”  When President Bush signs it into law, he will allocate $1-billion more over three years for additional research “pumping more money into the private sector” aka the military-industrial complex.

Boyle argues that the enormous amounts of money purportedly dedicated to “civilian defense” is dramatically increasing.  Such is evidence that this administration wants to embark on offensive campaigns using biowarfare.  By pouring huge sums into university and private sector laboratories, Boyle charges that Federal spending has co-opted and diverted the U.S. biotech industry to biowarfare.

According to Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, over 300 scientific institutions and 12,000 individuals have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare and terrorism.  Ebright found the number of National Institute of Health grants to research infectious diseases with biowarfare potential shot up from 33 in 1995-2000 to 497.

Academic biowarfare participation involving the abuse of DNA genetic engineering since the late 1980s has become “patently obvious,” Boyle said. “American universities have a long history of willingly permitting their research agendas, researchers, institutes, and laboratories to be co-opted, corrupted, and perverted by the Pentagon and the CIA.”  “These despicable death-scientists were arming the Pentagon with the component units necessary to produce a massive array of DNA genetically engineered biological weapons,” Boyle said.

In a forward to Boyle’s book, Jonathan King, a professor of molecular biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote, “the growing bioterror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population” and “threatens international relations among nations.”  While such programs “are always called defensive,” King explained, “with biological weapons, defensive and offensive programs overlap almost completely.”

Boyle contends that the Bush administration is “in breach” of both the Biological Weapons and Chemical Weapons conventions and U.S. domestic criminal law.  In February 2003, for example, the Bush administration granted itself a patent on an illegal long-range biological weapons grenade.  Boyle said other countries grasp the military implications of U.S. germ warfare actions and will respond in kind.  “The world will soon witness a de facto biological arms race among the major biotech states under the guise of defense, and despite the requirements of the Biological Warfare Convention.”

“The massive proliferation of biowarfare technology, facilities, as well as trained scientists and technicians all over the United States, courtesy of the Neo-Con Bush Jr. administration, will render a catastrophic biowarfare or bioterrorist incident or accident a statistical certainty,” Boyle warned.

As far back as September 2001, according to a report in the New York Times titled, “U.S. Pushes Germ Warfare Limits,” critics were concerned “the research comes close to violating a global 1972 treaty that bans such weapons.”  But U.S. officials responded at the time they are more worried about understanding the threat of germ warfare and devising possible defenses.  The 1972 treaty, which the U.S. signed, forbids developing weapons that spread disease, such as anthrax, regarded as “ideal” for germ warfare.

According to an article in the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel of September 28, 2006, Milton Leitenberg, a veteran arms control advocate at the University of Maryland, said the American government was spending billions on germ warfare with almost no analysis of any foreign threat.  Leitenberg said that American claims that terrorists will use the weapons [against the U.S.] have been “deliberately exaggerated.”

In March 2005, 750 U.S. biologists signed a letter protesting what they saw as the excessive study of bioterror threats.  The Pentagon has not responded to that letter or the charges made by Boyle.

Sherwood Ross is a Virginia-based free-lance writer on political and military issues. Contact him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

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