A criminal biological weapons programme that is a threat to the entire planet!

Review: ‘Biowarfare and Terrorism’ by Francis A Boyle

Before I even begin to review this ‘weapon of critical information’, I urge you not only to buy it but when you’ve finished reading it (it’s real short, so it shouldn’t overly tax our attention-deficit culture), post it to your MP, Congressman, Senator, the UN, your vicar/priest/imam/holy man/rabbi; give it to your neighbour, teacher, workmate, brother, sister, mum and dad. In short, shout it out from the rooftops; that the US government is an international criminal of staggering proportions and the entire Bush administration should be indicted as war criminals and every last one locked up and the key thrown away.

Okay, what are we dealing with here? Boyle’s short and impassioned book deals with the US government’s illegal multi-billion dollar biological weapons programme. A programme, that as Boyle makes abundantly clear presents itself as “defensive” but of course, in order to produce a ‘defense’, requires the development of offensive bioweapons.

In fact, the penalties involved for engaging in even the research into biological weapons under US domestic law are life imprisonment and under certain circumstances, even the death penalty as well as impeachment for the president (followed rapidly one hopes by life imprisonment).

But not only does it deal with the illegal bioweapons programme initiated under the Reagan government, continued under Clinton and vastly expanded under the current regime, it reveals the linkage between the anthrax attack on Congress and 911;

Boyle goes on

No wonder the corporate media have ignored this small but devastating indictment of US war-making (I searched long and hard for a review of it in the MSM but to no avail). It is also in passing a savage indictment of the media which has ignored the issue entirely, from the true causes of Gulf War Syndrome through to the wholesale development of biological weapons by the US government including their supply to Saddam Hussein (straight from Fort Detrick).

Much of the book is given over to the specifics of the relevant treaties and laws on bioweapons and how the US has either ignored or attempted to circumvent them and Boyle dots the ‘i’s’ and crosses the ‘t’s’ as he is responsible for much of the content of these treaties, so who better to understand how the US has played fast and loose with them!

In exploring the nature of the US bioweapons programme Boyle also reveals the complicity of the universities and of the scientists employed in bioweapons development with billions of dollars of funding being channelled into campuses not only across the US but also overseas. He even warns them that they too are liable to life imprisonment for their work on bioweapons.

What makes Boyle’s book so important is that the man, almost single-handedly was responsible for all the major legislation, both domestic and international covering the outlawing of biological weapons, in particular the Biological Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.

One, because it considered bioweapons “counter-productive due to “blowback”” two, because “[a] Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) prohibiting “bios” would enable the nuclear weapons states of the world to maintain, consolidate and further extend their near monopoly on WMD that had just been codified by the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”

Furthermore, the US considered bioweapons the ‘poor man’s nuclear weapons’ and was anxious that Third World countries didn’t acquire them.

Finally, in 1972 the US ratified the BWC but this didn’t stop the CIA from continuing its research and development of bioweapons. Moreover, the BWC had a massive loophole that did not prevent “research” for “prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.”

Neither did the BWC prohibit their “use” in warfare.

And as Boyle states

And when Reagan got elected in 1981, they got their wish and the Reagan administration began to pour massive amounts of money into researching and developing biological agents for what they alleged to be “defensive” purposes.

In fact, in constant dollars, under Reagan the US

But worse was to come.

The BWC does NOT cover genetic engineering research, the science didn’t exist when the BWC was enacted, and the same genetic engineering research can be put to both defensive and offensive uses.

The line between ‘research’ and development is extremely blurred but according to Article 1 of the BWC, the development of bioweapons is prohibited. One way of determining whether the line has been crossed is whether the bio-agents have been aerosolized for delivery as most bioweapons are designed to be ‘delivered’ through the air.

And it was here that the role of universities and research institutes across the US came into their own, with billions of dollars of genetic engineering contracts handed out, all under the guise of dual-use, defensive-offensive “research”. The programme was called the “Biological Defense Research Programme or BDRP.”

Under Bush Jnr, the programme became the Chemical and Biological Defense Program.

Boyle points out that by the late 1980s many “life-scientists” were turning into “death-scientists” using genetic engineering to develop offensive biological agents followed by the production of the allegedly “defensive” vaccine; testing the damnable things on animals; and then handing over their “research and development” to the Pentagon.

In 1988, the Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) asked Boyle to produce an analysis of Reagan’s BDRP as a Detailed Memorandum of Law (which is included in the book).

It became clear to Boyle that the university where he worked, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus “were engaged in the development of offensive biowarfare weapons, despite their public protestations to the contrary,” and Boyle points out that “American universities have a long history of willingly permitting their research agendas, researchers, institutes, and laboratories to be co-opted, corrupted, and perverted by the Pentagon and the CIA. (p.26)

The scale of the US bioweapons programme is staggering with $5.6 billion being spent on “Project Bioshield”, over the next ten years, and this just one facet of US bioweapons development. Overall, the amount being spent on bioweapons development is at least $22 billion!

Boyle reveals one particularly and very relevant aspect of its bioweapons development programme; the use of countries such as Iraq to “weaponize” these novel biological agents; in other words, get Iraq to test the damn things out on Iranian troops! This is precisely what happened when the Reagan government supplied them to Iraq, via the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

These shipments violated Article III of the BWC

And, not surprisingly, it’s the same gang of ultra-right, anti-communists that accompanied the Reagan years who, like the bioweapons programme, had been biding their time, and were resuscitated under Bush Sr, just in time for ‘Operation Desert Storm’ and the forced innoculation of US (and UK) troops with both anthrax and botulin toxin vaccines

And no wonder, as nobody knew that the

Boyle makes the criminality of the US actions abundantly clear

The scale of this crime against humanity surpasses that of the Nazi medical experiments conducted on the unfortunate occupants of the concentration camps. We are talking here about almost 600,000 human beings experimented on by the US government, without their knowledge or consent. And we are not even considering the crime of the effects of depleted uranium on both ‘coalition’ forces and the Iraqi population.

Boyle sums it up as follows

And if you think the criminal acts committed under Reagan, Bush Sr, and Bush Jr excludes Clinton, think again.

Boyle deals at length with the anthrax attack on Congress following 9/11 that I referred to above, buy the book to get the details.

The crimes committed by the US as laid out in Boyle’s small book are staggering and made all the more so by the fact that the MSM has ignored them almost without exception and no wonder, were the mainstream media to go for the jugular over the monstrous crimes committed by US capitalism, almost the entire government of the United States not to mention the tens of thousands of “life-scientists” who are involved in the development of these Weapons of Mass Annihilation, would have to face the reality that at the very least, they would have to serve life sentences for their crimes.

Biowarfare and Terrorism by Francis A. Boyle, Clarity Press Inc, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 2005. $12.95

Buy it through amazon.co.uk or amazon.com