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http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-5027-0-22-22--.html
The house that Bush built or at least added on to!
The sixth anniversary of the murder of British bioweapons expert Dr. David Kelly on July 17, 2003, lifted the lid on more than government lies that smoothed the way for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq; it exposed the shadowy world of germ warfare research in Britain and the United States.
Along with the 2001 anthrax attacks in America that murdered five people and exposed some 10,000 others to a weaponized form of the bacteria, Kelly's death under highly questionable circumstances focused attention on the West's bioweapons establishment. For a fleeting instant, all eyes were trained on an international network of medical researchers, corporate grifters and Pentagon weaponeers busy as proverbial bees experimenting with deadly microorganisms.
And then as they say, things went dark; as more bodies piled up, cases were "closed" and the money kept on flowing...
An Expansive Bioweapons-Industrial Complex
The production of biological weapons were ostensibly banned when the United States signed the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1975. However, the absence of any formal verification regime limited, some would argue purposely so, the effectiveness of the treaty from the get-go.
Indeed, a giant loop hole in the BWC allows for the production of "small quantities" of pestilential agents "for medical and defensive purposes." Note however, it is is not the production of said agents that are prohibited as such but rather, their transformation into "weapons, equipment or means of delivery ... for hostile purposes or in armed conflict."
And with the September 11 and anthrax attacks as a pretext, the United States embarked on a systematic and reckless program to expand research into the creation of prohibited weapons systems. Along with renewed interest in these dodgy projects, now euphemistically dubbed "biodefense" to avoid breaching the BWC, came a huge increase in funding as new facilities are built and older ones "upgraded." A May 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimates that overall government spending has "increased from $690 million in FY2001 to $5.4 billion in FY2008."
According to the Washington D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation since the 2001 terrorist attacks "the U.S. government has spent or allocated nearly $50 billion among 11 federal departments and agencies to address the threat of biological weapons. For Fiscal Year 2009 (FY2009), the Bush Administration proposes an additional $8.97 billion in bioweapons-related spending, approximately $2.5 billion (39%) more than the amount that Congress appropriated for FY2008."
The bulk of these funds according to the Center have gone to the Department of Health and Human Services' Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA ($31.5 billion), the Defense Department ($11.8 billion), Department of Homeland Security ($3.3 billion) and Project BioShield ($5.5 billion).
Yet according to numerous studies, deadly pathogens are far more likely to spread like wildfire as the result of a laboratory accident than an attack by germ-wielding terrorists. As I write, labs with Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) and Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facilities are sprouting up like poisonous mushrooms across the United States.
