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U.S. Army To Ramp Up Anthrax Purchasing
An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist reports that the U.S. Army wants to purchase a large supply of an anthrax strain." From the article: "A series of contracts have been uncovered that relate to the US army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. They ask companies to tender for the production of bulk quantities of a non-virulent strain of anthrax, and for equipment to produce significant volumes of other biological agents ... Although the Sterne strain is not thought to be harmful to humans and is used for vaccination, the contracts have caused major concern. 'It raises a serious question over how the US is going to demonstrate its compliance with obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention if it brings these tanks online,'"
It's not going to be used for weaponry, and the US has enough nuclear firepower to not need biological weaponry, which are much more unpredictable in effect, and less reliable.
Bad journalism, coming straight from NewScientist.
We've upped our standards. Up yours.
Except Saddam signed a treaty saying he wouldn't have them...
Sorta've like how a convicted felon can't own guns legally.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
The nuclean non-proliferation treaty calls for all nuclear weapon armed states to steadily reduce their nuclear weapons stockpile, not try and develop new mini-nukes or stall weapons reduction.
They could just want all that anthrax strain, which is used for vaccinations, to do just that. Vaccinate all the armed forces people first and then the whole of the US population. It is realistically possible that for just once this is on the straight. Now, as my previous postings show, I'm not Uncle Sam's lover, but don't ascribe to malice ...
How is this "insightful" and not "flamebait?" Its like they'll let anybody moderate.
Oh well.
There are lots of countries that have WMD. The US government has no problem with WMD per se, just problems in the hands of those who might attack the US or its allies.
IIRC, Bush hasn't actually asked for the disarming of all these countries. He has asked that we take them out of the hands of nutcases who will use them as a first line of attack rather than a last resort; people who find ethnic cleansing an acceptable thing (he clouded the issue a bit by labeling them terrorists, but the reason they are terrorists seems clear enough to me).
The request itself, unlike the mechanism put in place to do it, seems reasonable enough.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
What the DoD is doing here is making some anthrax vaccine, because we're out. We used a lot of it with our second Iraq deployment, and the fear is very real that someone will use an anthrax weapon in a terrorist attack. The army wants to get some vaccine, and start making their own so they aren't reliant on outside contractors to produce it. It's always been a weak point in our policy I think to rely upon civilan companies to produce vaccines for biological agents (and checmical for that matter).
A crop duster full of anthrax would cause some serious mayhem in the US, or anywhere else for that matter, think about it.
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Stop the US bashing
Seeing some trucks that are typically used for transporting chemicals such as those used for refining oil, farming , and possibly also ingredients for chemical weapons, and then presenting it as 'smoking gun evidence' for Iraq producing chemical weapons?
Pointing out that the USA uses double standards is not USA bashing, it is pointing out the truth, wether you happen to like it or not. Stop the double standards and the issue will be gone.
IIRC, Bush hasn't actually asked for the disarming of all these countries. He has asked that we take them out of the hands of nutcases who will use them as a first line of attack rather than a last resort; people who find ethnic cleansing an acceptable thing (he clouded the issue a bit by labeling them terrorists, but the reason they are terrorists seems clear enough to me).
Ah, you mean like Israel? lets see..
Threatening to use nukes? check.
Ethnic cleansing? check.
Not to mention that them having nukes is a major reason for those 'terrorist' muslim countries trying to obtain them as well.
Yes, the request seems reasonable, but only at first glance.
The one and only reason the cold war did not turn into a hot war is because there were 2 sides that were more or less in balance and could completely destroy eachother.
Throughout history, each and every country possessing weapons with a destructive power way bigger then their neighbors have used them offensively on their neighbors.
If you are going to use a bioagent in war, you have to make sure that your own tropus are protected.
Vaccination would be a good way of doing that as various kinds of protective suits will limit the
soldiers ability to fight. This is why this kind of news gets reacted on.
Not that I really think bio warfare would be something the US would do. It would simply be too much
bad publisity. After all they have strong enough army to succesfully fight most countries without resorting
to such methods.
My guess is that they do this to make sure they are protected from all the terrorists that under the Bush administration seam to have grown just as common as communists were in the 1950s.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
The logic is the reverse: If its NOT ok for these other nations, why is it ok for the US?
There are lots of countries that have WMD. The US government has no problem with WMD per se, just problems in the hands of those who might attack the US or its allies.
Right. Yes. And that doesn't strike you in any way as hypocritical? "It's OK for ME to do, but not for YOU? So I'll sign this treaty and keep you to it, but not myself?".
Mental exersize; replace "The US government" with "The Kremlin", and see how you feel about it. Then, with "Osama Bin Laden". See how that works?
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Stop the US bashing
Stop bombing people. Stop toppling democratically elected governments. Stop preaching about democracy when your own government is controlled by corporate lobbyists. Stop torturing people. Stop imprisonment without trial. Clean up your pollution.
I have good friends who are citizens of the USA. Lots of you are nice people, but as a nation you face justifiable critisism.
If people criticising the USA makes you unhappy then do something about the bad things your country is doing. Don't try and stop the free speech that your great nation was founded on.
The fact that Anthrax got loose in Washington, and the way the investigation was stonewalled seems to indicate that the US has not been adhering very stringently to the spirit of any convention.
"got loose"? You mean: "was mailed there" by some loon. You're making it sound like the Downtown Washington DC Anthrax Depot, badly handled by some sort of yukapuk guarding it with a whistle and a nightstick, somehow sprung a leak. Rather, someone who knew what they were doing with the organism and had the specific will to cause some chaos with it acted to do just so. How is that any example of the U.S. not adhering the "spirit of any convention" (my emphasis)? That sentence (and concept) just doesn't make any contextual sense whatsoever.
That's like saying that because some maniac in Japan slit the throats of some school children, that Japan is "once again going to war." Or that the Spanish guy who raped and murdered a French schoolgirl shows that there the spirit of the Geneva convention is being ignored by Spain in their conflict with France. What? That's crazy? Right.
On the other hand testing your weapons on your own population does not infringe on any treaty AFAIK.
Wow! You sure know something that no one else does! Unless of course you're just BSing because it's fun to pretend that a secret US method of testing a bio-weapon on its own citizens would be to mail it to people. What complete, tinfoil-lined crap, and you know it. I can't believe this was modded insightful. Wait... where am I? Slashdot? I suppose I can, actually.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This is very inconsistent with the claim, "we went in it for the oil."
It's entirely consistent. The people behind the war didn't start it to reduce fuel costs for ordinary Americans. They started it to control the production of oil in order to increase their own wealth.
It's about oil producers. They don't give a rats arse about oil consumers. Look at the price gouging that's happening right now.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Sorta've like how a convicted felon can't own guns legally.
Except that he didn't have them.
I'd like to quote you Article 4 of the Geneva convention:
Nationals of a State which is not bound by the Convention are not protected by it. Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are.
Not sure how it applies in the case of armed fighters not fighting on behalf of a government or fighting on behalf of a government not signatory to the geneva convention.
I'd also disagree on the "terrorism against captives" bit, terrorism is against civilians. Pearl Harbor wasn't a terrorist attack for example. A captured enemy fighter is not a civilian by definition.
Yeah, you sure done showed us good!
Seems he has if you can't even log in to post.
Fearmongering?! Are you for real? Only morons trust their government. I'd go so far as to say that people who trust the government are traitors to their nation.
Gas prices have more than doubled since the US declared an end to major conflict in Iraq, mirroring trends in the world economy. This is very inconsistent with the claim, "we went in it for the oil."
You're right to note that I wasn't arguing that the US went in for oil, but that the world percieves it that way. I've already picked up one Troll mod, but I'm glad someone read my post correctly.
However, I don't think what I've quoted above is evidence that the US didn't go in for the sake of oil. Firstly, lets agree that the US has seized control of the oil. The first things the US army did when ground troops went in was to secure the oil facilities. Likewise, major US oil companies are setting up in Iraq and there is a system of reparations in place under which Iraq must pay for damages caused ("you made us invade, now compensate us!"). Naturally Iraq will be paying this in oil. The figures are in the hundreds of billions of dollars worth.
It's also worth considering for whose benefit the US seized the oil. Not primarily for the US public, but for the corporations. It's hard to deny that US oil companies have made a killing out of this. It's also worth trying to isolate the factors that affect the oil price. You picked a date just after hurricane Katarina that disrupted major oil production facilities off your East coast and jacked up prices by upto $0.70 - quite a lot of the rise you quote.
Secondly, there is a strategic aim in capturing Iraq's oil, which is that it denies the same oil to others (China). It also provides a land route for an oil pipeline to the Eastern European oil-fields, allowing the US to get access to that oil supply and deny it to others (China) as well.
Finally, we shouldn't ascribe competence where it isn't due. A failure does not indicate that no attempt was made. The US is currently up to its neck in shit in Iraq right now and I'd swear this isn't what they intended to happen. Nevertheless, the clearest motivation for the US invasion was oil, with sending a warning to the muslim world and distracting people at home from domestic problems tied for second place.
IMHO, naturally.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
We're not children. If you have a significant amount of something as deadly as anthrax (remember Colin Powell in the UN?), there MUST be some trace. No matter what you do with it, truck it to Syria, sell it to the Martians, burn it, put in a rocket and shoot in space -- there must be some trace, some papers, some empty cans, some people. If after 2 years of free inspections in Iraq, the Americans did not discover a SINGLE TRACE -- the answer is obvious. There were no such weapons in the first place.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
We had complete, unfettered access to Iraq way before we invaded. Hans Blix kept saying, (approximately) "We don't see anything here, we need you to be clearer about the intelligence you're trumpeting. We see nothing here on the ground" And, of course, we couldn't be any more clear, because the little intelligence we DID have was deliberately misinterpreted and used as an excuse to whip the country into a war frenzy. The White House KNEW this. They were claiming that Iraq was trying to build nuclear weapons when that was clearly and demonstrably false, well before we invaded.
In other words, they knowingly and purposely lied to get us to go to war. The reason we didn't find any WMDs is because they were never there. UN Inspectors had full access to anything they wanted, without delay.
1) Yes, he had them in the past. Which was before he agreed not to have them anymore.
This would be like convicting someone of cracking, and setting the terms of their release from jail as being "you shall not touch a computer for 4 years". Then as soon as they step outside, you pick them up and say "Well, you did touch a computer years back, so we're picking you up on that".
Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense.
2)Yes, he used them on civilians. The US used nukes on civilians. And napalm on civilians. Your point in this is what? He's a bad man? This, again, has nothing to do with having WMD when the invasion force struck. As there were no weapons there.
3) He didn't refuse to allow a vigorous inspection. In fact, he'd agreed to open everything up. The inspectors were a little miffed about having to follow a beaurocratic trail, but explicitly stated that they did not believe (after spending years in situ) that anything was being hidden from them.
I just find it a little bit nuts that someone who has obviously not even read the public reports on the matter makes such blatant "The evidence says something, but I'll still bullheadedly believe something completely different" statements.The report at the time was basically that everyone inspecting on the ground didn't believe that there were any WMD. They just required a couple more months to check the last parts out, then they could, with a great degree of certainty, declare that there were no WMD hidden.
Odds on, you didn't bother reading the further progression of things, when the 'evidence' that Tony Blair presented to GW, on which they decided to start the invasion, was proved to be a forgery. Due diligence inside the intelligence agencies was not performed until after the invasion. Basically everyone BUT G.W. admitted there were no WMD.
Maybe, as I'm kicking one of your illusions over, I should tell you that there was no cheese on the moon until the little green men shipped it all away and replaced it with rock, just before the original moon landings.
Well.. not anthrax... but anyway, it was no secret that Saddam had WMDs during 1980's -- the amounts and types the US supplied to him are well documented.
The question was were they destroyed between 1991 and 2003? Today, there's still no significant amount of WMD found in Iraq that would disprove the UN weapons inspectors who were confident that Iraq did not have nuclear capability nor credible chemical weapons systems to threaten neighbouring countries.
What about the list of WMDs he GAVE THE UN INSPECTORS?
Not sure what your point is here. Yes he was doing as asked, so the inspectors could go on destroying the WMDs. Again, it was no secret these weapons existed before the 1991 war.
Now maybe ... And maybe
Do you think maybes are good enough an excuse to cause the death of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians?
Personally, I think that Saddam Hussein wanted to have his cake and eat it too. That is, I think he disposed of his weapons in a highly dubious and possibly illegal fashion to satiate the sanctions, but acted as if he still had them "hidden somewhere" so he could act intimidating to his more local enemies who weren't quite as powerful as the United States.
Your theory isn't too bad, but it just doesn't make sense that Saddam Hussein wouldn't have used his WMDs while being invaded. I mean, if you're not going to use WMDs when your dictatorship is being overthrown, when the fuck do you use it?
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor