Reichstag 2001: Mil making Daschle-quality anthrax

[Dirk Boxcuttah]

>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.