BY KELLIA RAMARES
Even as US President George Bush threatens to invade Iraq, claiming that Saddam Hussein is hiding biological weapons, Washington is hypocritically expanding its own biowarfare research programs.
The US government plans to increase the number of biohazard safety level 3 and BSL4 laboratories around the country. BSL3 labs handle live anthrax, botulism and bubonic plague, among many other things; BSL4 labs conduct research on an array of even deadlier organisms, including smallpox and the Ebola virus.
Steve Erickson, director of the Citizens' Education Project in Salt Lake City, Utah, explained: "This expansion of laboratory capacity within the defence department and other departments has been in the works for a number of years, probably dating to about 1995. Certainly, the intensity and speed of these developments has picked up since [the 9/11 terrorist attacks]. The last count we had was about 14 [labs] that were being proposed in various locations by any one of four cabinet-level departments within the US government. There are some indications now that the National Institutes of Health will be backing off in terms of the numbers of BSL4 laboratories, but intends instead to renovate and perhaps build additional BSL3 labs."
The US Department of Energy wants to build a BSL3 facility at its Los Alamos lab in New Mexico. On December 16, the DOE released the final environmental assessment of plans to build a BSL3 lab at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the suburbs of San Francisco. The DOE issued a "finding of no significant impact" for construction of this new facility.
Additionally, LLNL plans to be a partner in developing the Western National Center for Biodefense and Emerging Diseases, a BSL4 facility slated for the University of California's Davis campus.
Why put high containment microbiology labs at nuclear facilities, such as Los Alamos and LLNL?
One might think the ready answer is that security measures already in place at the nuclear weapons labs would safeguard the community against accidents or terrorist attacks. But when I posed the question to John Bellardo, director of the Office of Public Affairs of the US DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, he did not even attempt to use that justification.
The real reason for putting a high containment microbiology lab in a nuclear research facility may be to duck oversight protocols. Professor Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, chair of the working group on biological weapons of the Federation of American Scientists, pointed out that "when various types of weapons are being researched at the same place, it means that if there is any kind of oversight or investigation or inspection of one type, it puts at risk classified information about the others. And this is a reason why this government frequently objects to any kind of oversight."
What might government microbiologists be researching that they wouldn't want to have subject to inspection?
Dr Robert Gould, the incoming president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, is concerned that the US may be breaching the Biological Weapons Convention, which limits research to "defensive purposes", by genetically modifying anthrax. "This is a threat of developing offensive capabilities because you're modifying an organism to be resistant to antibiotics and therefore increasing its capability to be a weapon", Gould explained.
Gould's concerns are borne out by several documents. LLNL, which already has a BSL2 lab, has acknowledged in a "frequently asked questions" document that it would be working with anthrax in the BSL3 lab and that it has been "working with 25 different strains of anthrax since spring 2000 as part of our regular program work for the National Nuclear Security Administration's Chemical and Biological National Security Program".
The draft environmental assessment for the proposed lab says that current plans call for the facility to handle the DNA and RNA of a wide array of organisms. The lab could also engage in the chemical separation of DNA, RNA and proteins, and in "sample amplification" — which the assessment defines as "the process to rapidly and significantly increase the number of microorganisms in a sample". The environmental assessment also states that "the proposed facility would have the unique capability within DOE/NNSA to perform aerosol studies to include challenges of rodents using infectious agents or biologically derived toxins (biotoxins)".
While the Bush gang threatens war to compel the Iraqi regime to bare all in connection with its alleged weapons programs, what biological horrors are the US government cooking up in the secrecy of its own labs?
[Kellia Ramares hosts Radio Internet Story Exchange. Visit <http://www.rise4news.net/>.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 5, 2003.
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