Biological/Chemical Terrorism & Warfare

Biological/Chemical Terrorism & Warfare

"...we do have it documented that the CIA has been experimenting on people, with viruses. And now we have some deadly, killer viruses running around in society. And it has to make you wonder, and it has to make you worry." ~ John Stockwell in his 1987 lecture series, "The Secret Wars of the CIA".

A Plague of Bioweapons

December 4, 2003 -- In Iraq, a vial of harmless botulinium found in a scientist's refrigerator is cited by the United States' leaders as proof of the righteousness of the occupation of a foreign country, while in Los Angeles women throw Botox parties where participants receive injections of a related toxin to smooth wrinkles.

In Texas, a scientist respected for his decades of work studying and treating infectious diseases in some of the world's more squalid quarters is hauled in front of a court in chains on bio-terrorism-related charges because he didn't follow government regulations with his samples while his own university uses military funding to genetically engineer plants to produce even more deadly poisons.

Meanwhile, two American health workers are killed by a vaccine against a disease which should no longer exist; domestically produced anthrax spores terrorize the nation in one of history's great unsolved crimes; and the writings of respected advisors to our president tout the benefits of developing synthetic viruses that would target specific ethnic groups.

Welcome to the confounding, illogical and sometimes deadly space where public health and raw science meet national security and military secrecy.

This shadowy world, which stretches from a college campus near you to the terror training camps of Afghanistan, from the plague towns of Tanzania to the spotless labs of Ft. Detrick, is haunted by terrors real and imagined, bogeymen employed when convenient to drum up funds, intimidate critics or squelch scandals. In short, it is a conspiracy theorist's dream.

When it comes to talking about biological weapons, first employed three centuries ago when the British gave smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans, almost nothing is ever black and white.

Just ask Dr. Thomas Butler, who faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in jail after being convicted Monday on 47 out of 69 federal charges filed after the FBI said he lied to them about missing plague samples and launched an investigation into his research and financial practices. Yet only months ago, according to his peers, this Navy vet and Texas Tech researcher was considered not only a leading medical scientist but something of a hero for his years of work treating epidemics in rough-and-tumble places like Calcutta and wartime Vietnam.

"Butler is probably the nation's most eminent expert on the plague," he added. "Are students going to want to work on tropical medicine if there's a chance they might lose some samples, then be hauled off in the middle of the night?" Peter Agre, a former student of Butler's who won this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, told the Los Angeles Times. But where Agre and the leaders of the National Academies believe this is an attack on scientific initiative, the FBI has a decidedly different take. "An incident that could have sparked widespread panic of a bio-terrorism threat in west Texas was stopped clean in its tracks," said U.S. Attorney Jane J. Boyle.

Butler, however, testified that the FBI forced him to lie in a statement and that he is innocent of all charges.

Lost in Lubbock The story began in January of this year, when Butler reported 30 vials of plague bacterium missing and all hell broke loose. The FBI and local police sent in 60 investigators and soon Texas was abuzz with fears of a plague-wielding terrorist. After being interrogated and allegedly failing a lie dictator test, Butler signed a confession saying he had, in fact, destroyed the vials and lied to cover up his mistake.

After being arrested, however, Butler recanted his confession, saying he had been pressured to lie in order to calm public fears. He said FBI agent Dale Green told him "the FBI investigation pointed toward accidental destruction as the explanation for the missing vials. . . . Because they were destroyed, there was no danger to the public. [Green] wanted a written statement that would help them conclude the case."

The feds then upped the ante, charging Butler with a slew of other unrelated crimes dealing with his financial relationships. He was convicted of fraud and embezzlement based on secret relationships he had with pharmaceutical companies for whom he was doing clinical trials; apparently, he was siphoning off money that was to go to the university. Texas Tech has begun proceedings to fire him.

So is Butler the latest scientist to be framed by an over-exuberant FBI, a la Wen Ho Lee? Or was Butler so irresponsible in his treatment of potentially dangerous substances as to warrant such an aggressive prosecution? It's too early to say. One prosecution consultant, interviewed by the Times, waxed philosophical:

"It struck me how much the world had changed. When you have a change like that, you're going to have some casualties," said Victoria Sutton, director of the Texas Tech Center for Biodefense, Law and Public Policy.

What was Sutton, with such an appropriate "biodefense" specialization, doing there in remote Lubbock, pop. 200,000? As it turns out, Texas Tech is actually a large center for secretive military-funded research on bioweapons, much of it done under the broad mantle of counterterrorism and potentially unacceptable under the world Biological Weapons Convention.

Our guide here is The Sunshine Project, a nongovernmental organization that is devoted to documenting and debunking secrets and myths about biological weapons. Adding context to the Butler case, the group released a statement last week that said, "If life scientists are looking for a cause to symbolize their resentment of new oversight laws, the Butler case may not be the one that wins them public sympathy. There is a 'crime' far more heinous than Butler's bumbling that underlies the prosecution: the gutting of openness in academic institutions by secretive biodefense research."

"What has gone unreported in the Butler case is that Texas Tech's work with bioweapons is far from a little program at an ordinary state school in a flat and dusty corner of Middle America. In fact, Butler worked in the midst of a large and secretive biodefense program supported by the U.S. Army, a program that even many life scientists may not be aware of."

According to Sunshine's investigators, to inject military dollars into the university in order to fund research it needs done, the Army's Soldier Biological Chemical Command funnels money through the Institute for Environmental and Human Health, a biodefense research center located off-campus at Reese Air Force Base that receives four-fifths of its grant money from the Pentagon. From here, some money goes on to the university's Health Sciences Center to fund research on such subjects as, yes, bubonic plague. Texas Tech financial documents current through August 31 list 22 active biodefense contracts totaling more than $7.5 million, according to the nonprofit.

"Supporters of intellectual and scientific freedom who are aligning themselves to Butler's cause would be more likely to earn admiration by challenging the biodefense agenda that is compromising institutions like Texas Tech and that has led to Buler's aggressive indictment," writes Sunshine. "If there can be a positive outcome of Butler's trial, it will be a thorough public exploration of [Texas Tech's] research and of how biodefense is compromising the integrity of institutions like Texas Tech."

Ricin, the Lubbock treat Another recent Sunshine Project investigative report illuminates how questionable some of this research appears to be.

During his pre-war presentation to the United Nations Security Council making the case that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an imminent threat to world security, Secretary of State Colin Powell spent several minutes describing the deadly natural poison ricin, the production of which he alleged Al Qaeda operatives might have been exploring:

"The network is teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons. Let me remind you how ricin works. Less than a pinch image a pinch of salt less than a pinch of ricin, eating just this amount in your food, would cause shock followed by circulatory failure. Death comes within 72 hours and there is no antidote, there is no cure. It is fatal."

When a few grams of ricin were discovered in Europe in 2002, the Continent was sent into a panic. Yet back in Lubbock, Texas Tech aggie scientists have quietly been working for almost a decade to breed two kinds of specialty castor beans one which would produce low levels of ricin (to improve the safety of castor oil produced for human consumption) and one which would have very high levels of ricin. Why they would want to produce this high-ricin-yield plant is not apparent.

Not only were they successful in this dual-purpose endeavor, breeding both low- and high-yield variants, but in a parallel effort the university's chemical engineering department designed and built a machine to automate the extraction of ricin from plant matter. Tech scientists have even developed a way that other plants i.e., tobacco could be genetically modified to produce ricin, and is willing to sell the technology according to Texas Tech's website.

With all these advances, Texas Tech has now made it relatively easy to produce hundreds of kilos of deadly ricin off a small plot of castor beans. But why? There is no current practical use for ricin, and if one were to appear say in a new legal drug plenty could be harvested from normal castor beans using previously existing technology. It would appear that the only rational reason for Texas Tech to spend all this time and money doing this is to make it easier to produce biological weapons.

We don't know if the military was funding TTU's ricin projects. But if it wasn't, it might want to shut them down lest it provide more ammunition to those who criticize the United States as being hypocritical when it comes to weapons of mass destruction. After all, the United States insisted one of its key rationales for invading Iraq earlier this year was because it believed the country still had hidden stores and production facilities for ricin, despite ten years of UN inspections and sanctions.

"The effort at [Texas Tech] to develop ways to produce and use ricin involved a coordinated effort across several academic departments and activities that, if conducted in many countries, the US would consider proof of a weapons program," points out The Sunshine Project report. "Because [Texas Tech's] activities relate to production of a toxin subject to severe restrictions under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions, [Texas Tech] should provide a detailed public explanation of all its ricin projects."

(On Oct. 23 of this year, a small metal container found in an envelope in a postal handling facility in Greenville, South Carolina, was determined to contain ricin. The accompanying letter complained about legislation regulating the trucking industry. No suspects have been identified.)

Homegrown Toxin, Homegrown Terror Whether or not Texas Tech is doing ricin research for the military or just in the name of raw science, the creation of this technology is worthy of public debate, if not censure. After all, this stuff can boomerang back on us; consider, for example, that the deadly anthrax spores delivered through the mail in late 2001 were, according to investigators who have done genetic comparisons, were spawned from an anthrax strain originally produced domestically in a U.S. military lab and "weaponized" using a very advanced technique invented by the United States' Bill Patrick.

Biodefense experts and former employees of the Army medical research institute at Ft. Detrick have charged that sloppy security procedures, disgruntled researchers and secret research into weaponization and delivery techniques could have provided the deadly combination that wrought such terror and paranoia across the country. News reports also claimed that one alleged suspect, scientist Steven Hatfill, had commissioned a report for Science Applications International Corporation a couple years before the attacks on how to deal with an anthrax attack by mail.

"Some very expert field person would have been given this job [of studying the mailing of anthrax] and it would have been left to him to decide exactly how to carry it out," Dr. Barbara Rosenberg, of the Federation of American Scientists told the BBC last year. "The result might have been a project gone badly awry if he decided to use it for his own purposes and target the media and the Senate for his own motives as not intended by the government project." The likely motive? Generating attention and budget funds for the biodefense industry which they certainly accomplished.

The details of the mailing of anthrax report are sketchy. Patrick wrote the report, according to ABCNews, describing "a hypothetical anthrax attack, specifying an amount and quality of anthrax that is remarkably similar to what was sent to the offices of Sens. Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle" in 2001. But Patrick denied writing the report. As for Hatfill, who had received the anthrax vaccine, had ready access to the substance and lost his security clearance for unknown reasons just before 9/11, he called ABC's report "completely inaccurate, scandalous and libelous."

While nobody has been charged with perpetrating the anthrax attacks, a clear profile of who could have done it has emerged. Col. David Franz, who was in charge of Ft. Detrick for 11 years, through 1998, believes the anthrax attacks were carried out by a person or persons who knew their stuff. "It's not someone who just got on the Internet or went to the library and got a book and led the book in one hand and a big wooden spoon in the other and stirred up batches," Franz told the BBC in the same report, adding that they would have needed a lot of experience to understand how to grow, purify and dry anthrax spores.

So why are we making this awful stuff? Less than one-millionth of a gram is a deadly dose, and it is proscribed by international conventions. Furthermore, the United States was supposed to have ended its production of biological weapons three decades ago. In fact, though, the line between "biodefense" and "bioweapons" is so blurry as to be nearly useless. Just days before 9/11, the New York Times published an investigative article that reported a military contractor called Battelle had actually been commissioned to create genetically altered anthrax.

Another secret project, according to Rosenberg, writing in the Los Angeles Times "involved the construction of bomblets designed for dispersion of biological agents, although the Biological Weapons Convention explicitly prohibits developing, producing or possessing 'means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes.'"

Rosenberg, a biodefense expert who believes the bioterror threat is increasing and that the American public is the most likely target, is frustrated that under the Bush administration, "the U.S. has opposed every international effort to monitor the ban on the development and possession of biological weapons by states or to strengthen the toothless Biological Weapons Convention in any way."

This is odd, since we were supposed to have the moral high ground when it came to Iraq, which had produced, according to President Bush, "more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions."

To be fair, President Clinton's Republican Defense Secretary William Cohen had been similarly apocalyptic when it came to describing Iraq's anthrax potential, noting in 1998 "a five-pound bag, properly dispersed, could kill half the population of Columbus, Ohio." And a month after 9/11, it was Clinton's ex-CIA director James Woolsey who announced on TV that "If we see the use of biological agents such as smallpox or anthrax, that would strongly suggest to me that a state is involved with the terrorists because the state would be the likely producer of such weapons. I personally believe the most likely state to be involved in something like this would be Iraq."

This would make sense in more ways than Woolsey acknowledged: The Commerce Department under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had long permitted U.S. companies to sell anthrax and other biological and chemical supplies to Iraq, the Senate Banking Committee has documented. If Iraq had used anthrax, these U.S. companies and leaders should surely bear some of the moral responsibility for whatever tragedies might have ensued.

Within days of Woolsey's statements, five people would be dead from anthrax poisoning in the United States in one of the most amazing unsolved crimes of the past century. Meanwhile, hundreds of U.S. inspectors have found no signs of anthrax in Iraq despite more than a half a year of looking.

A Big Threat From a Smallpox When, in the wake of 9/11, our president and noted "counterterrorism experts" (who make a living off fear, it should be remembered) decided to add a new bogeyman to the list of terrors we should worry about, the exterminated disease smallpox, it raised disturbing questions. Since the only known living smallpox virus was supposedly held by Russia and the United States, it would seem that somebody would have to really have goofed up for smallpox to have found its way into the hands of terrorists who had, as yet, never successfully (or unsuccessfully, as far as we know) employed biological or chemical weapons in an attack even those much easier to produce. Did the president know more than he was telling?

Chaotic, corrupt Russia was trotted out whenever smallpox came up in the media: Those poor Russian scientists might have sold some to Al Qaeda for some hard currency, reporters and experts said. While this was simply speculation, it was loosely based on the fact that in 1989 a Soviet defector claimed his country had weaponized and produced up to 20 tons of smallpox.

But if it wasn't understood before, the anthrax attacks should have been a wake-up call that our own security surrounding these dangerous substances was rather lacking. The stricter controls that have tangled up Dr. Butler are an attempt to batten down the hatches. It would seem there's more to be done: An Associated Press report on Nov. 21 told the scary story of a vial of one of the most deadly plagues ever discovered sitting in an unlocked freezer controlled by an undergraduate lecturer.

The question few asked, even as close to 40,000 Americans health and emergency workers, mostly were subsequently vaccinated for smallpox at the government's instruction, was whether the whole scare was nothing more than an irresponsible, panicky reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Or, far worse, a cynical attempt to increase our already soaring national fear levels. After all, the smallpox vaccine itself was known to be somewhat dangerous.

In fact, two women died after receiving the shots, killed by "adverse cardiac events" of a kind associated with the vaccine. Since then, the civilian program has basically ceased functioning, although the military continues to vaccinate soldiers; one died of a mysterious "lupus-like" disease last week after receiving the smallpox, anthrax and other vaccines on the same day.

Putting these tragedies aside, the questions remain: Did the threat demand this? Was there even a realistic threat at all? Colin Powell, speaking at the UN, seemed to think so. "Saddam Hussein has investigated dozens of biological agents causing diseases such as gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camelpox and hemorrhagic fever, and he also has the wherewithal to develop smallpox," Powell claimed.

Powell didn't explain this last sentence. There are two likely ways smallpox, a truly devastating disease which is estimated to have killed 30 million people in the last century, could be reintroduced to humanity: From a strain kept in a lab somewhere, or through a synthetic version of the virus made by gene wizards. However, the latter is very unlikely, especially in the case of a rogue state like Iraq, since the complex variola virus that causes smallpox is quite large and complex, and would be a major challenge to recreate in a lab.

What is not clear is who might have kept a smallpox strain and why. The World Health Organization had recommended that all virus stocks be destroyed by 1999, but this almost certainly did not happen. And while the virus was supposedly only held in two locations in the United States and Russia, it is possible that other nations kept secret stashes of it taken in the years before it was eradicated in the populace. Donald Henderson, a science advisor to the U.S. government, noted last month in the Independent that the countries of Iraq, Syria and Iran could theoretically have retained smallpox samples from a natural outbreak there in 1972.

The government's official position on smallpox, which has no cure, is simply that "the deliberate release of smallpox as an epidemic disease is now regarded as a possibility." No smallpox samples have been discovered in Iraq.

It Gets Uglier Even as we fear the resurrection of one of the few plagues mankind has completely defeated, some of those who advise and work for President Bush have talked warmly of possibilities even more horrifying.

A decade ago, neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby who now occupy powerful positions in the White House wrote a draft policy paper that, among other calls for aggressively increasing U.S. power in the world, argued that the government consider the development of biological weapons that "can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."

Nobody who has living through the astonishing medical and scientific advances of recent decades can doubt that such a horror might be possible. But to suggest we develop such diseases to add to our arsenal in defiance of international covenants and human decency is abominable.

This month, the CIA convened a gathering of life sciences experts who warned that genetically engineered diseases "could be worse than any disease known to man." The report generated by the scientists, "The Darker Bioweapons Future," argues, "The same science that may cure some of our worst diseases could be used to create the world's most frightening weapons." They also noted the possibility that these monstrous creations could potentially be released secretly, and thus avoid any international "blowback."

"One panelist cited the possibility of a stealth virus attack that could cripple a large portion of people in their forties with severe arthritis, concealing its hostile origin and leaving a country with massive health and economic problems," the report says.

Is this just more fear mongering, or the sci-fi fantasies of a researcher who is dependent on federal funds for his research? We won't know for a while, of course, but just this week, scientist L. Craig Venter, one of the key players in the mapping of the human genome, posted on the Internet instructions for how to build a synthetic virus (he is working on the artificial creation of living organisms that could clean up pollution).

In any event, if such nightmares should come true, it is likely to be in the United States, the birthplace of bio-terrorism, which will have had the scientific ability, bureaucratic organization and research money needed to create them. -- By Christopher Scheer, as posted by AlterNet

CIA Looks at the Future of Bioweapons

November 14, 2003 -- As bad as the threat of biological weapons may seem-- it's actually worse.

That is the upshot of a summary report prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency based on a workshop with non-governmental scientists held last January.

"Growing understanding of the complex biochemical pathways that underlie life processes has the potential to enable a class of new, more virulent biological agents engineered to attack distinct biochemical pathways and elicit specific effects...," the document stated.

A copy of the two page CIA report was obtained by Secrecy News.

See "The Darker Bioweapons Future," Office of Transnational Issues, Directorate of Intelligence, November 3, 2003:
http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/bw1103.pdf

No less interesting that the document itself is the tangled process that produced it.

The CIA, in a becoming act of humility, reached out to biological scientists early this year for insight and advice. It then squandered much of the good will it had engendered by informing the scientists that the conclusions of their open meeting would be classified. But then, facing criticism, the Agency reversed itself, belatedly yielding the present document. (Secrecy News, 4/02/03)

"CIA proactively reached out to the scientific community, but instead of getting credit for it, it got slammed," according to one non-governmental participant who said critics were mistaken to believe CIA was acting in bad faith.

"I hope that the scientific and security communities have both learned something from this experience and will continue to make the effort to work together," he said today. "We'll have to do a lot more of it in the future."

For background on the earlier dispute see "CIA openness report to be classified?" by Peg Brickley, The Scientist, April 7, 2003.

-- Excerpted from Secrecy News by Steven Aftergood for from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, Volume 2003, Issue No. 101

Devastating acts, such as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, have left many concerned about the possibility of future incidents in the United States and their potential impact. They have raised uncertainty about what might happen next, increasing stress levels. Nevertheless, there are things you can do to prepare for the unexpected and reduce the stress that you may feel now and later should another emergency arise. Taking preparatory action can reassure you and your children that you can exert a measure of control even in the face of such events.

FDA - Rules for Food Security Against Bioterrorism: Registration of food facilities under the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002.

Center for Non-Proliferation Studies - Study Details Steps To Reduce Dirty Bomb Threat: The interest of terrorist groups in radiological dispersal devices (RDDs) has caused policymakers to seek new measures to ensure these materials do not fall into the wrong hands.

CDC - Emergency Preparedness and Response: Access daily updates to the official federal government health agency in charge of protecting the public from bio and chemical terrorism. With news, reports and alerts.

Biotech Threat Scenarios Get Scary

December 14, 2003 WASHINGTON -- A newly declassified Central Intelligence Agency report warns that rogue scientists could highjack biotechnology and create super-microbes far worse than the virus starring in "24 Hours," Fox televisions popular drama.

The CIA portrays them as viruses and bacteria from hell.

"The effects of some of these engineered biological agents could be worse than any disease known to man," the report stated. "The same science that may cure some of our worst diseases could be used to create the worlds most frightening weapons."

Entitled "The Darker Bioweapons Future," it was prepared for the CIAs Strategic Assessments Group by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The academy is an organization of top scientists, based in Washington, that advises the federal government on science.

Almost a dozen experts on bio weapons declined to comment on whether the CIA report exaggerated the threat.

Dr. Stanley Falkow, of Stanford University, for instance, noted that he chaired another NAS panel that is writing its own report on the bio weapon threat. Scheduled for completion in 2004, it addresses some of the points raised in the CIA report.

"I will be uncharacteristically silent about this for the moment," said Dr. Falkow, a noted professor of microbiology.

"I do think there is always a bit of arrogance involved when humans proclaim that they can design infectious agents better than those seen in Nature. The bar is pretty high when one considers HIV/AIDS, or just plain old-fashioned plague. Surely SARS scares the pants off a lot of people."

The CIA report is among dozens that have expressed concern about possible intentional misuse of biotechnology, or accidents in legitimate research labs, that create deadly new "designer" viruses and bacteria. The microbes, difficult to detect and stop, could kill or disable people or cause famines by decimating crops and livestock.

Concern predates the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which led President Bush to declare biological warfare one of the top two 21st century security threats. The other was "information warfare" involving terrorist attacks on the Internet and other information channels.

In 1999, for instance, the U.S. Department of Defense decided to find out whether scientists really could make a disease-causing virus from scratch. DOD gave the job to Dr. Eckard Wimmer, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. It took his team 3 years to cook up the worlds first homemade virus - a synthetic polio virus - with off-the-shelf ingredients.

By November, 2003, the time scale for cobbling together a synthetic virus shrunk to 2 weeks. Thats how long it took genome pioneer J. Craig Venter, Nobel laureate Hamilton O. Smith, and an associate to make an artificial "Phi X" virus, thanks to advanced genetic engineering technology.

The CIA report said such technology could be used to paste new genes into naturally occurring microbes, creating viruses or bacteria that are greater health menaces.

Thats the scenario thrilling millions of "24-Hour" fans. The series, staring Keifer Sutherland, is about a crime gang that uses a designer virus against the government.

"The virus has been engineered to kill more rapidly," according to Fox's plot summary. "With one initial location of this weaponized strain, thousands of people could be infected within two days. Over a million people will die in the first week."

In scientific terms, Fox's fictional virus has "enhanced virulence," and would result from 1 of 7 specific biotechnology experiments that top real-world sciences worry list.

NAS detailed them as "experiments of concern" in an October, 2003, report that called for limitations on experiments that attempt to:

Enhance the virulence of disease-causing microbes, or change harmless microbes into disease-causing microbes.
Render human or animal vaccines ineffective by making microbes that sicken people despite immunization against polio, measles, tetanus, anthrax, or other diseases.
Engineer viruses and bacteria with built-in resistance to antibiotics or anti-viral drugs that are used to treat people, animals, or crops.
Enhance the transmissibility of disease-causing microbes so that influenza viruses or food poisoning bacteria, for instance, spread easier.
Give animal or plant microbes genes that enable them to cause diseases in humans, or alter human microbes so they can decimate livestock or crops.
Create microbes that evade diagnostic tests.
Could lead to the weaponization of microbes or other biological agents, so they can be dispersed easily.

Some of those possibilities are fact.

Researchers at St. Louis University in November announced creation of a retooled mousepox virus that defeats a vaccine for the disease, which is a cousin of smallpox.

"There are a number of perfectly valid reasons for researchers to perform experiments of concern," Dr. James B. Petro noted. He is an expert on bio weapons at the Joint Military Intelligence College in Washington.

The St. Louis research, for instance, was part of legitimate research to find treatments for biological weapon agents. Scientists may want to know how specific threat agents behave in different environments so they can prepare countermeasures against an attack.

Dr. Petro noted that seemingly harmless research can have unexpected results.

In 2001, for instance, Australian researchers accidentally created a more potent form of the monkey poxvirus by pasting in an easily available immune-regulating gene. Other scientists have reproduced a key protein from the smallpox virus that blocks part of the human immune response.

That technique "could be applied to other naturally occurring pathogens, such as anthrax and smallpox, greatly increasing their lethality," the CIA report said.

Looming on the horizon are new "binary" and "stealth" bio weapons that would be very difficult to detect, the report warned.

Binary weapons are 2-part concoctions, both of which are harmless until combined. Terrorists, the report suggested, could release a custom-designed virus that causes mild headaches or indigestion. But it would become lethal and spread when victims take a treatment like aspirin or antacid.

A stealth bio weapon might be a virus that infects people and lies dormant inside the body for months until being triggered by something else.

The report mentions a possible "stealth virus attack that could cripple a large portion of people in their 40s with severe arthritis, concealing its hostile origin and leaving a country with widespread health and economic problems."

"The resulting diversity of new biological weapons agents could enable such a broad range of attack scenarios that it virtually would be impossible to anticipate or defend against," said the report.

Other experts, however, question that fatalism.

"Fortunately, the same advances in genomics that could be used to produce bio weapons can also be used to set up countermeasures against them," Drs. Claire M. Fraser and Malcolm R. Dando concluded in one study.

Dr. Fraser, of The Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md., and Dr. Dando, of the University of Branford in England, are experts who reviewed bio weapons threats in the journal Nature Genetics.

They identified many of the same threats described in the CIA report, but detailed how new genetics technology could thwart them.

For instance, a new generation of bio sensors, based on DNA chip technology, could quickly detect "any biological warfare agent," they said. That includes synthetic viruses and natural microbes engineered with antibiotic resistance or other unusual traits.

Data on the genes that make up disease-causing microbes, also will make it easier to develop vaccines and antibiotics that work against bio weapons, they said.

The CIA report called for a partnership between biologists and the national security community to reduce the risk of biotechnologys misuse. It envisions the bio science community acting as "a living sensor web - at international conferences, in university labs, and through informal networks - to identify and alert it to new technical advances with weaponizing potential."

NAS laid out another roadmap in its October report.

It proposed, for instance, a formal system for reviewing "experiments of concern" before they are done and deciding whether results should be published openly.

"The life science community should take the lead in partnering with national security professionals to draft guidelines for identifying research of concern."

The report proposes a tiered system of review to identify experiments that raise concern because of their high potential for misuse.

-- By Mike Woods, Blade Science Editor, for The Toledo Blade supplemented by links from 2nd Sight Research Group

A Darker Bioweapon Future

Declassified on November 23, 2003 -- This unclassified CIA report was published Early November, and then posted on the Federation of American Scientist's website a couple of weeks later. The national news media aired the story of a Friday, the least watched new cycle of week. Briefly, this report by the CIA is probably the biggest story of the 21st century. The implications for the future (unless we dramatically change course) are staggering.

I've taken the liberty of creating a synopsis of the below report:

Life science is now are where information technology was in the 1960s; more than any other science, it will revolutionize the 21st century. The genomic revolution (due to understanding of genes and how they work) is in an explosive growth phase, accelerating dramatically and unpredictably in its breadth and volume. This evolving bioscience knowledge base is widely available to the public!

Advances in biotechnology plus nefarious biological activity equal a much more dangerous biological warfare (BW) threat. In other words, advances in biotechnology can inadvertently teach techniques that are applicable to bioweapon activity. The same science that may cure some of our worst diseases could be used to create the worlds most frightening weapons.

New BW agents could enable such a broad range of attack scenarios that it would be virtually impossible to anticipate and defend against. As a result, there could be a considerable lag time in developing effective biodefense measures. Although, effective countermeasures (once developed) could be leveraged against a range of BW agents, augmenting common elements of the bodys response to disease rather than treating individual diseases.

Detecting bioweapon activity is much more difficult than detecting nuclear weapon activity because biotechnology is dual use, and thus is extremely difficult to distinguish from legitimate research. It is suggested as a solution that we develop standards and norms intended to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate research (taking into consideration the legal or regulatory implications of any such changes).

A qualitatively different working relationship between the government and life sciences communities maybe necessary, using specific human intelligence within the life science community as collaborators to identify and alert the government to any new technical advance with weaponization potential.

Future bioweapon activity can lead to engineered biological agents like:

The Threat from Advanced BW In the last several decades, the world has witnessed a knowledge explosion in the life sciences based on an understanding of genes and how they work. According to panel members, practical applications of this new and burgeoning knowledge base will accelerate dramatically and unpredictably:

Growing understanding of the complex biochemical pathways that underlie life processes has the potential to enable a class of new, more virulent biological agents engineered to attack distinct biochemical pathways and elicit specific effects, claimed panel members. The same science that may cure some of our worst diseases could be used to create the worlds most frightening weapons.

The know-how to develop some of these weapons already exists. For example:

According to experts, the biotechnology underlying the development of advanced biological agents is likely to advance very rapidly, causing a diverse and elusive threat spectrum. The resulting diversity of new BW agents could enable such a broad range of attack scenarios that it would be virtually impossible to anticipate and defend against, they say. As a result, there could be a considerable lag time in developing effective biodefense measures.

However, effective countermeasures, once developed, could be leveraged against a range of BW agents, asserted attendees, citing current research aimed at developing protocols for augmenting common elements of the bodys response to disease, rather than treating individual diseases. Such treatments could strengthen our defense against attacks by ABW agents.

Implications for Warning The experts emphasized that, because the processes, techniques, equipment and know-how needed for advanced bio agent development are dual use, it will be extremely difficult to distinguish between legitimate biological research activities and production of advanced BW agents.

The panel contrasted the difficulty of detecting advanced bioweapons with that of detecting nuclear weapons, which has always had clear surveillance and detection observables, such as highly enriched uranium or telltale production equipment.

Consequently, most panelists argued that a qualitatively different relationship between the government and life sciences communities might be needed to most effectively grapple with the future BW threat.

They cited the pace, breadth, and volume of the evolving bioscience knowledge base, coupled with its dual-use nature and the fact that most is publicly available via electronic means and very hard to track, as the driving forces for enhanced cooperation. Most panelists agreed that the US life sciences research community was more or less over its Vietnam-era distrust of the national security establishment and would be open to more collaboration.

Court Upholds Life Sentence for Aum Cultist

September 25, 2003 TOKYO -- The Tokyo High Court upheld a lower court ruling and sentenced Noboru Nakamura, a senior Aum Shinrikyo cultist, to life in prison for his involvement in the 1994 deadly sarin gas attack in Matsumoto. The prosecutors had demanded the death penalty on Nakamura, 36. Both the prosecutors and Nakamura had appealed the life sentence issued May 2001. (Kyodo News/Japan Today)

The Aum Shinrikyo cult had begun experimenting with biochemical attacks against the public as early as April 1990, when they tried to release botulin toxin from a vehicle driving around government buildings in central Tokyo. In June 1993, another attempt was made to release botulin toxin in conjunction with the wedding of the crown prince. Later that month, the cult released anthrax spores from its Tokyo office building laboratory.

On June 27, 1994 in Matsumoto, a group of cult members drove a converted refrigerator truck into a residential neighborhood. Parking in a secluded parking lot behind a stand of trees, they activated a computer-controlled system to release a cloud of sarin. The nerve agent floated toward a small dormitory which housed all three judges sitting on a panel hearing a lawsuit over a real-estate dispute in which Aum Shinrikyo was the defendant. Seven people died in this attack, and 500 others had to be transported to local hospitals, where approximately 200 required at least one night's hospitalization.

In March 1995, just before the sarin subway attack, an attempt to spray botulin toxin in the subway at Kasumagaseki Station was preempted by a cult member who opted not to load the improvised briefcase sprayers with actual agent.

On March 20, 1995, in the midst of morning rush hour, ten highly placed Aum Shinrikyo members boarded five trains at different stations in Tokyo with packages filled with sarin wrapped in newspaper. At a predetermined time, the ten members punctured the bags with the tips of their umbrellas and left the trains. Kasumigaseki Station, which suffered the worst in the attack, is located under many government offices and the National Police Agency's headquarters. By the end of the day, 15 subway stations in the world's busiest subway system had been affected. Twelve people died and 3,800 required medical attention, with approximately 1,000 requiring hospitalization as a result of this coordinated attack.

The time and places had been selected with calculation to cause the most death, sickness, and disruption to society despite, or perhaps as retaliation against, a police raid on a Aum Shinrikyo building dedicated to the god Shiva, but actually housing a chemical weapons production facility, on March 17. After the subway attacks, police raided Aum Shrinrikyo buildings all over Japan.

March 11, 2003 -- In this time of the chronic threat of terrorism and the possibility of war with an adversary who may be armed with biological weapons, high on the wish list of security agencies and battlefield commanders is a quick and easy way to detect the presence of dangerous biological agents.

A dirty bomb, also known as a radiological weapon, is a conventional explosive such as dynamite packaged with radioactive material that scatters when the bomb goes off. A dirty bomb kills or injures through the initial blast of the conventional explosive and by airborne radiation and contamination -- hence the term "dirty". Such bombs could be miniature devices or as big as a truck bomb.

Bio-Chem Defense Briefing

March 03, 2003 -- Read the transcript from a roundtable meeting of leading experts on U.S. biological and chemical defenses, hosted by Maj. Gen. John Doesburg, from Soldier Biological and Chemical Defense Command. -- More articles on this topic from Global Security.org.

Drills Don't Calm Fear Of A Chemical Attack
9 Seconds to Don Face Mask: Troops Drill in Kuwait

February 12, 2003 -- Scud alert drills, simulating a chemical weapons attack, were held at the main headquarters for US forces assembling for a possible invasion of Iraq in Kuwait.

Biological Agents - The Unseen Enemy: This article from Military.com educates military personnel on what they should do in case they come in contact with a biological agent.

Chemical and Biological Weapons: University of Louisville has compiled an extensive list of links to government information resources.

Biological and Chemical Weapons: CNN explains how many biological and chemical weapons work, including anthrax, smallpox, botulism, and sarin. Also find a map of countries involved with such weapons.

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