America's Bioterror

Dear President Bush,

In commemorating the victims of the attacks on New York and Washington lastweek, you called for disputes to be "settled within the bounds ofreason." You insisted that "every nation in our coalition must takeseriously the growing threat" of biological and chemical weapons. Youassured us that on this issue "there is no margin for error, and no chanceto learn from mistakes ... inaction is not an option." These are sentimentswith which most of the world's people would agree. While many of us believe thatattacking Iraq would enhance rather than reduce the possibility that weapons ofmass destruction will be used, few would dispute that chemical and biologicalagents present a grave danger to the world.

So those of us in other nations who have followed this issue are puzzled. Whyshould you, who claim to want to build "a peaceful world beyond the war onterror", have done all you can to undermine efforts to control these deadlyweapons? Why should the congressmen in your party have repeatedly sabotagedattempts to ensure that biological and chemical agents are eliminated?

In December, your negotiators tore the Biological Weapons Convention toshreds. The 1972 convention, as you know, was impossible to implement. While thetreaty banned the development and production of bio-weapons, it contained nomechanism for ensuring that its rules were enforced. So for six years, the 144signatories had been developing a "verification protocol", which wouldpermit the United Nations to examine suspected bio-weapons facilities. In July,your government refused to sign the protocol. In December, you deliberatelyscuttled the negotiations by insisting, at the last minute, that the resolutionbe re-written. One European delegate, referring to the commitments yourdelegation had made before the meeting, observed, "They are liars. Indecades of multilateral negotiations, we've never experienced this kind ofinsulting behavior." Your actions have rendered the convention useless,leaving the world unprotected from the very weapons you say you want toeliminate.

Four years ago, Republican members of Congress, working alongside the Clintongovernment, voted to inflict similar damage to the Chemical Weapons Convention.This treaty already possessed the means to force nations to open theirlaboratories to inspection, which is the key determinant of effective weaponscontrol. But in 1998, your party decided that the United States should not besubject to these provisions. By passing legislation banning the removal ofchemical samples from the US by international weapons inspectors; limiting thenumber of laboratories which the US needs to declare and permitting the UnitedStates president to refuse "challenge inspections" of its chemicalplants, Republican congressmen effectively hobbled the convention worldwide.Under your presidency, even routine verification has been vitiated, asgovernment officials have told the inspectors which parts of a site they can andcannot visit, just as Saddam Hussein has done in Iraq. Other countries have usedyour intransigence as an excuse for undermining the convention themselves.

The United States has also withheld both the money required by the chemicalsweapons inspectorate, and the funds needed to remove and disable the vastarsenal of warheads loaded with nerve agents in western Siberia, some of whichare lying in warehouses secured only by bicycle padlocks on the doors. It wasyour own senator Pat Roberts who argued that the promised funding should not beissued, on the grounds that these weapons "pose more of an environmentalthreat to Russia than a security threat to the United States." Yet securityat the dumps is so lax that no one even knows how many warheads they contain.

You should not be surprised to learn that many of us have been wondering whyyour professed intentions and your policies diverge so widely. Nor should you besurprised to discover that some of us suspect that the US might have some deadlysecrets of its own, which your government hopes to shield from public view.

In September last year, the New York Times reported that "the Pentagonhas built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe outentire cities." The factory's purpose was defensive: your employees wantedto see how easy it would be for terrorists to do the same thing. But it wasconstructed without either Congressional oversight or a declaration to theBiological Weapons Convention, in direct contravention of international law. Wecould, perhaps, agree that if the US had discovered a similar undisclosed plantin a poor nation, then that country's government, if it survived your initialresponse, would have a good deal of explaining to do.

But of still more concern is the recent discovery that your government hasbeen planning to test warheads containing live microbes in large aerosolchambers at the US Army's Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland.Experts in this field say that the scale of the experiments suggests that theyare not defensive, but designed to help develop new biological weapons.

It is also clear that some elements of your existing defence programmecontravene both of the treaties your government and your party have sabotaged.The genetically engineered fungus you have developed for aerial spraying inColombia plainly qualifies as a non-lethal biological weapon. And, because yourstrategic aims in that country extend beyond the simple eradication of drugs tothe elimination of the leftwing rebel forces, the chemical sprays you have beenusing in the regions they control have also clearly been deployed as weapons,much as Agent Orange was in Vietnam. Your military laboratories have beendeveloping a new range of genetically engineered "materials-eatingbacteria", designed to destroy runways, engines and the radar-blockingcoatings of warplanes. Though they do not directly affect humans, you would behard-put to deny that these are biological weapons.

Your government has also refused to destroy its stocks of smallpox, and hasinsisted on developing new and more lethal varieties of anthrax. You say thatthis is purely for defensive purposes: to study how they might be used by enemyforces, or to develop new kinds of vaccine. But the Federation of AmericanScientists warns that some of the new research you are funding could becategorised as "dual use": it could lead just as easily to attack asto defence. Even if we were to accept your government's assurances that theseprogrammes are solely defensive in nature, it is surely plain that they aregenerating the very hazards they claim to be confronting. The anthrax attacks inOctober appear to have been launched by a scientist from within your ownbiological warfare laboratories, making use of a strain developed by the USArmy's Medical Research Institute.

Mr President, you say you want to save the world from biological and chemicalweapons. With or without the help of our own leaders, you seem prepared to go towar in pursuit of that aim. But surely the first step towards dealing withweapons of mass destruction is the mass destruction of weapons? And surely yourcampaign for world peace would be more convincing if you respected theconventions designed to destroy them?

Yours Sincerely,
George Monbiot

(George Monbiot is HonoraryProfessor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at theDepartment of Environmental Science at the University of East London and theauthor of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travelbooks Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. Hewrites a weekly column for the Guardian, UK)