Should the U.S. "bargain with the devil" with biological weapons?
The use of chemical weapons in Syria is beyond troubling, but it really irks me to hear U.S. officials beat the drums of war when our own country is so heavily invested in developing biological weapons capable of inflicting horrific suffering on our citizens in the case of accidental or malicious leaks.
The following is an excerpt from a Truth-out article entitled Biological Weapons: Bargaining With the Devil. You can read the whole article at the link.
The bullish climate of the "war on terrorism" set off a massive flow of federal funding for research on live, virulent bioweapons' organisms (also referred to as biodefense, bioterrorism and biosafety organisms) to federal, university and private laboratories in rural, suburban and urban areas. Among the federal agencies building or expanding biodefense laboratories are the Departments of Defense (DoD), Homeland Security, State and Agriculture; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A new network, comprised of two large national biowarfare laboratories at BU and University of Texas, Galveston medical centers, more than a dozen small regional laboratories and ten Regional Centers of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Research, was designed for funding by the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of NIH. The validation offered by the federal health research agency for ramped-up biological warfare research is the dual use of the research results: "better vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics against bioterrorist agents but also for coping with naturally occurring disease."
Today, in dozens of newly sprung laboratories, research on the most lethal bacteria and viruses with no known cure is being conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy, with hand-picked internal review boards and little, if any, public oversight or accountability. Fort Detrick, Maryland, a longstanding military base and major government research facility, is the site of the largest biodefense lab being built in the United States. Here, biowarfare pathogens will be created, including new genetically engineered viruses and bacteria, in order to simulate potential bioweapons attacks by terrorist groups. Novel, lethal organisms and methods of delivery in biowarfare will be tested, all rationalized by the national security need to study them and develop a figurative bioshield against them. In fact, Fort Detrick's research agenda - modifying and dispersing lethal and genetically modified organisms - has "unmistakable hallmarks of an offensive weapons program" ... "in essence creating new threats that we're going to have to defend ourselves against" - threats from accidents, theft of organisms and stimulus of a bioarms race.(3)
Between 2002 and 2009, approximately 400 facilities and 15,000 people were handling biological weapons agents in sites throughout the country, in many cases unbeknownst to the local community. The marathon to spend nearly $60 billion since 2002 on biological weapons research has raised serious concerns for numerous scientists and informed public critics.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2693:biological-weapons-bargaining-with-the-devil
I have to ask why we're going in this direction and why taxpayers should fund it. Feel free to post other articles and info about biological and/or chemical weapons here at home.
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