[Reader-list] Profits in Biowarfare Research

[Ananth]

June 22, 2007
The Big Profits in Biowarfare Research Corporate America's Deadliest  
Secret

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross06222007.html

By SHERWOOD ROSS

A number of major pharmaceutical corporations and biotech firms are  
concealing the nature of the biological warfare research work they  
are doing for the U.S. government.

Since their funding comes from the National Institutes of Health, the  
recipients are obligated under NIH guidelines to make their  
activities public. Not disclosing their ops raises the suspicion they  
may be engaged in forbidden kinds of germ warfare research.

According to the Sunshine Project, a nonprofit arms control watchdog  
operating out of Austin, Texas, among corporations holding back  
information about their activities are:

Abbott Laboratories, BASF Plant Science, Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont  
Central Research and Development, Eli Lilly Corp., Embrex,  
GlaxoSmithKline, Hoffman-LaRoche, Merck & Co., Monsanto, Pfizer Inc.,  
Schering-Plough Research Institute, and Syngenta Corp. of Switzerland.

In case you didn't know it, the White House since 9/11 has called for  
spending $44-billion on biological warfare research, a sum  
unprecedented in world history, and an obliging Congress has  
authorized it.

Thus, some of the deadliest pathogens known to humankind are being  
rekindled in hundreds of labs in pharmaceutical houses, university  
biology departments, and on military bases.

An international convention the U.S. signed forbids it to stockpile,  
manufacture or use biological weapons. But if the U.S. won't say  
what's going down in those laboratories other countries are going to  
assume the worst and a biowarfare arms race will be on, if it isn't  
already.

Sunshine says failure to disclose operations also puts corporate  
employees involved in this work at risk. Only 8,500, or 16%, of the  
52,000 workers employed at the top 20 U.S. biotech firms work at an  
NIH guidelines-compliant company, Sunshine says.

Francis Boyle, an international law authority at the University of  
Illinois, Champaign, says pursuant to 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."  
Boyle said the Pentagon's Chemical and Biological Defense Program was  
revised in 2003 to endorse "first-use" strike in war. Boyle said the  
program includes Red Teaming, which he described as "plotting,  
planning, and scheming how to use biowarfare."

Besides the big pharmaceutical houses, 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 says.

What's more, the Bush administration is pouring billions in  
biowarfare research while some very real killers, such as influenza,  
are not being cured.

In 2006, the NIH got $120 million to combat influenza, which kills  
about 36,000 Americans annually but it got $1.76 billion for  
biodefense, much of it spent to research anthrax. How many people has  
anthrax killed lately? Well, let's see, there were those five people  
killed in the mysterious attacks on Congress of October, 2001 ---  
attacks that suspiciously emanated from a government laboratory at  
Fort Detrick, Md.

One would think the FBI might apprehend the perpetrator whose attack  
shut down the Congress of the United States but nearly six years have  
gone by and it hasn't caught anybody. Seem a bit odd to you? Some  
folks suspect the anthrax attack was an inside job to panic the  
country into a huge biowarfare buildup to "protect" America from  
"terrorists."

Milton Leitenberg, of the University of Maryland's School of Public  
Policy, though, says the risk of terrorists and nonstate actors using  
biological agents against the U.S. "has been systematically and  
deliberately exaggerated" by administration scare-mongering.

And molecular biologist Jonathan King of Massachusetts Institute of  
Technology says, "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." King  
added President Bush's policies "do not increase the security of the  
American people" but "bring new risk to our population of the most  
appalling kind."

In the absence of any credible foreign threat, Sunshine's Hammond  
said, "Our biowarfare research is defending ourselves from ourselves.  
It's a dog chasing its tail." Sadly, it looks more and more every day  
like a mad dog.

Sherwood Ross has worked as a reporter for major dailies and wire  
services. Reach him at sherwoodr1 at yahoo.com