 Doesn't
it seem strange to you that we're seeing all this gnashing of teeth
over whether Iran -- an oil-rich state -- is or is not developing, or
hiding, nuclear weapons capability, while at the same time:
- Osama bin Laden is still making sophisticated videotapes, now with fancy subtitles;
- There have been no announcements from anyone about progress or even sightings of bin Laden or Mullah Omar (remember him? He was the head of the Taliban, the guy who most of us thought was worse than Saddam);
- No credible suspect has been caught, or even investigated,
for the anthrax mailings of 2001 to prominent political liberals Tom
Daschle and Patrick Leahy;
- Plans to create millions of doses of smallpox and anthrax
vaccine appear to have been back-burnered (the courts have blocked the
military from giving existing anthrax vaccine to the military, ruling
it unsafe, and a contract for a new vaccine has been given to a
bankrupt California company, but the FDA won't even review its safety
before 2007).
I'm no conspiracy theorist, and I don't believe the US government was
behind, or knew in advance about, 9/11, but it is becoming clear to me
that the US government only really cares about 'terrorism' when the
possible perpetrator is an oil-rich state. They are not interested in
investing time or taxpayers' money to address terrorist threats from
poor states (like North Korea), or from stateless groups (like the
myriad Arab fundamentalist sects that the government likes to lump
together under the name Al Qaeda is if it were one global coordinated
group), or from individuals, nor is it interested in addressing
bioterror threats at all. When it comes to non-oil-state players or
bioweaponry, it's all talk and no action.
If I'm wrong about this, please point out the evidence to the contrary.
If I'm right, what does this mean? Here's some more information to
digest, some of which I reported earlier in my discussion of Richard
Preston's investigative book The Demon in the Freezer:
- There have been frequent incidents of contamination of anthrax and other bioweapons at several of the fifty government research labs in major US cities
(forty more such labs are planned in cities like Atlanta and Boston --
coming soon to a community near you!) that are, for unspecified
purposes, developing weaponized anthrax and other bioweapons and
testing them on animals. Their entire operations are now cloaked in a
veil of total Patriot Act secrecy, though the name on the buildings
says 'defensive'.
- When the anthrax scare occurred in 2001, top scientists, epidemiologists
and security forces immediately wanted to know one thing above all else:
was the weaponized (separated into extremely fine, airborne particles, a
highly sophisticated process) anthrax used as a carrier for smallpox
? Whereas as we now know weaponized anthrax spreads very rapidly, it can
be a very effective carrier for smallpox, which is much, much more contagious
and lethal than anthrax. The two in combination would, according to Preston,
be almost impossible to stop.
- The U.S. destroyed almost all its smallpox vaccine in the
1970s
after the disease was officially eradicated worldwide, and after the
USSR
(which was largely responsible for eradication of the disease in the
third world) and U.S. jointly agreed to minimize and contain all
remaining samples
in a few locations, subject to mutual inspection and verification. They
then
discovered that after the collapse of the USSR large amounts of
weaponized smallpox, anthrax, plague and Marburg virus went, and
remain, missing. Reliable intelligence suggests many
countries remain in possession of smallpox, much of it collected before
the 1970s by local medical authorities for research into its eradication.
Smallpox is easy to amplify (replicate), so not much is needed to create
a lot. Anthrax is endemic in nature, so easy to obtain but requires industrial equipment to weaponize. One leading scientist says
of Marburg virus: "Marburg virus is lethal. It only takes one to two
virus particles to cause an infection of the respiratory tract. There
is no vaccine. And once you contract the disease, there is only one way
to go, and that's death. So it is very scary."
- Immunization for smallpox is a dangerous process, since a significant
proportion of the population cannot take the vaccine (e.g. those with immune
deficiency or some common skin ailments), and some people immunized actually
get the disease anyway.
- Smallpox is just one of thousands of related pox diseases that
affect almost every form of life on Earth. Were it not for the existence
of insect poxes, for example, some insects would multiply so quickly that
they would extinguish many other forms of life and unbalance the web of life
in a matter of weeks before starvation could bring their numbers under control.
Many forms of life on Earth are affected by more than one kind of pox, but
each pox efficiently and effectively targets only one species. Since they
only spread rapidly in large, homogeneous populations in close proximity, poxes
are, in a real sense, the ecosystem's natural 'population control' mechanism.
- With the mapping of human DNA, it is now possible to devise poxes and other bioweapons that target only certain ethnic groups. South Africa's apartheid regime did research to develop bioweapons that would affect only blacks, and the London Times reported in 1998 that Israel was researching a bomb that would affect only Arabs, to defend against Saddam Hussein's alleged WMD.
- There is a raging debate in the scientific community on
whether poxes from one species can evolve over time, or be
'repurposed', to target
another species. So even if all the smallpox remaining in the world
(all
of it, except the U.S. and Russian supplies, officially illegal) were
somehow
tracked down and eradicated, the risk could well remain. Why the U.S.
and
Russia have insisted on keeping samples of the disease when it is not
needed
to create the vaccine (the vaccine actually comes from cowpox, which is
harmless,
at least for now in its current state, to humans) has not been
satisfactorily
answered.
- Bioweapons can be easily modified to render vaccines
useless. A small group of Australian scientists introduced
interleukin-3 into a poxvirus and the result was a much more virulent
virus immune to all known anti-virals.
- Dr William Patrick (pictured above, simulating the spraying
of 7.5 grams (7.5 trillion spores) of anthrax, enough to quickly kill
everyone in a 14-story building and travel more than a mile downwind),
a retired 30-year veteran of USAMRIID, which runs bacteriological and bioweapons research in the US, appeared on PBS's NOVA
program to say that assurances from government that bioweapons would be
hard for non-state-supported groups to develop were dangerous, and "to
demonstrate, without a shadow of a doubt, the feasibility of biological
warfare". He's taken the fully-functional, demonstration equipment
pictured above through over 50 airports worldwide without ever being
challenged. He still believes Nixon was wrong in 1969 to cease
offensive bioweaponry research aimed at incapacitating an enemy and to
refocus USAMRIID on defensive research. He makes this argument on
humanitarian grounds -- that a controlled release of bioweapons on a
battlefield, with friendly troops immunized, would cause less civilian
death and less property damage than any other type of warfare (makes
you wonder what they're doing in those secret labs now).
- Bioweapons aren't limited to toxins that kill people.
At least 30 nations are currently able to produce bioweapons that could
selectively kill an enemy's livestock, poultry, other farmed animals,
grains or other staple crops like potatoes. These could easily be
designed, according to a Swedish study, to appear to be 'acts of god'
-- so there'd be no threat of retaliation. Knowledge of animal and
plant genetics is well advanced and in the public domain. And because
of genetic engineering, global biodiversity of these essential food
sources has been drastically reduced over the last century, rendering
them much more vulnerable to biological attack. A microbiologist at UC
Davis says
that agricultural biowarfare would be an extremely effective and simple
way to destabilize an enemy nation, or, if covertly launched by a corporation
(we all know which one he's talking about) to destroy competing
biological products, increase demand for the corporation's product, and
increase profits. And since the people of most countries view animals
as mere property incapable of emotion or feeling, their slaughter is a
much lower 'moral barrier' to cross than bioterrorist actions aimed
directly at humans.
Back to what all this means. I
think the consequences are staggering, and have been played down by
politicians, governments, the media, the biotech and genetic
manufacturing industries because it is not in their interests
to raise the level of public fear when there is no simple answer, no
ready attackable scapegoat, and when the actions of many of these
players contribute enormously to increasing the risk of bioterrorism
(or of an horrendous bioweapons accident). What goes on at USAMRIID is
not a top-level state secret for nothing. And while I don't believe the
US government and its researchers are preparing anything Machiavellian,
I do believe they are doing most of the work that potential
bioterrorists need done, and are certainly ready to respond in kind
when other bioweapons-researching states attack. Problem is,
just like the Daschle antrax and the 9/11 attacks, they won't really
know who launched the attack, it probably wouldn't be an attackable
state anyway, and, if the victims are food animals or plants, they
won't even know for sure if it was an attack.
This is a genie-out-of-the-bottle problem with no easy answer.
Bioweapons research, like any other military research, is as leaky as a
sieve, and if you've studied history you'd have to be delusional to
believe that anything discovered by USAMRIID will stay a secret for
more than a few weeks. So a complete cessation of all bioweapons
research, as well as a cessation of the HGDP (the human genome
diversity project out of California, which is attempting to genetically
map cultural and ethnic diversity, ostensibly to help rid the world of
diseases to which certain ethnic groups seem genetically predisposed),
would certainly slow down the risk of bioterrorism. But ultimately the
knowledge needed to create devastating human and agricultural
bioweapons with global reach, for a small amount of money with a small
amount of work by a small number of people with relatively modest
education and resources, will be upon us. It's inevitable. So the
answer to the implied question in the title of this article is simple: Just stick around and pay attention.
If you're so inclined, you'll soon be able to make a name for yourself
for sheer devastation that will push Osama bin Ladin, Timothy McVeigh,
the Unabomber, and the Daschle anthrax mailer, into the footnotes of
history. Or, if you prefer, stay incognito. All due to the double-edged
swords of technology, human ingenuity and the impossibility of keeping
knowledge bottled up.
You probably know I usually conclude my articles with some personal
thoughts on 'what we should do about it'. This time around I don't know
what to say. It would certainly help if only a few lunatics, rather
than billions of oppressed people (and rising by leaps and bounds every
day), were motivated to want to kill billions of others, even at the
risk of ending the world. It would help, as well, if the most popular
religions all over the planet didn't promise an eternal afterlife,
forgiveness for everything, divine intervention to save us from all
calamities, and rewards for defending the faith against all others. But
I might as well wish for the moon and the stars -- we're too far gone
and going too fast to fix those things now. So, as unsatisfactory as it
may be, I can only conclude by saying there's really nothing that can
be done. Unless something worse comes along first, it's going to happen.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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