From the "Love your country but don't trust its government" files:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34707-2001Dec12.html An Army biological and chemical warfare facility in Utah has been quietly developing a virulent, weapons-grade formulation of anthrax spores since at least 1992, and samples of the bacteria were shipped back and forth between that facility and Fort Detrick, Md., on several occasions in the past several years, according to government officials and shipping records. The Utah spores, grown and processed at the 800,000-acre Dugway Proving Ground about 80 miles from Salt Lake City, belong to the Ames strain -- the same strain used in the deadly letters sent to media outlets and two senators in September and October. No other nation is known to have made weapons-grade Ames. And although it is legal to make small quantities of such agents under the provisions of an international treaty the United States has signed, experts said yesterday they were surprised by the revelation that a U.S. lab was producing such lethal material. "It comes as a bit of a shock," said Jonathan Tucker, a former member of the U.N. team that inspected Iraq's bioweapons stocks after the Persian Gulf War and now director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies' Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program in Washington. ... The most recent shipment of the deadly spores to Fort Detrick left Dugway Proving Ground June 27. The spores were to be irradiated at the Maryland lab to render them harmless, according to shipping records and interviews with officials. Those spores apparently sat at Fort Detrick for more than two months before being shipped back to Dugway on Sept. 4, less than a month before this fall's spate of bioterrorist attacks began with a Florida photo editor's fatal case of anthrax.