* Ames anthrax and the 1943-1969 U.S. biowarfare program

Ike Solem posted a comment earlier today on one of the posts having to do with Marcia Chambers’ story of what she saw at Iowa State University in 1990. Here are some extracts from Ike’s comment …

• The claim since the (2001 anthrax) attacks is that the Ames strain was isolated from a cow in Texas in the early 1980s, and then it was sent to Fort Detrick, where it was found to be quite virulent and was thus chosen as the “anthrax vaccine challenge strain” – i.e., guinea pigs, rabbits and rhesus macaque monkeys would be vaccinated and then exposed to the Ames strain.  Ames is still the anthrax challenge strain, by the way.
• In 1969, Nixon shut down the entire program after anthrax spores killed 3000 sheep on the edge of the Dugway Utah biowarfare test center.  Everything was to be flushed, and supposedly it was.
• You can see the problem, however… if the Ames strain was really isolated in the 1950s, perhaps that means that the biowarfare program was not really shut down – just put on ice, transferred to a friendly country like Britain, or something similar.
• This then leads into other troubling questions – like who was it, precisely, that set Saddam Hussein up with a biological weapons program in the early 1980s when he was fighting our sworn enemies, the Iranians?
• If the Ames strain came from the 1943-1969 U.S. biological warfare program, which had been ‘entirely dismantled’, then we have a whole new set of difficult questions to ask – for example, did Britain keep their biowarfare operation running?  Is that how Saddam got his hands on anthrax?
• They do have that official secrets act, which they use to muzzle their press on such issues, so it is hard to say.
• the trail of odd suicides,
• from Frank Olson (a Detrick microbiologist who joined the program in the 1940s and later decided it had been a terrible mistake)
• to David Kelly (UK WMD scientist who died in 2003 after being accused of complicity in the alleged “sexing up” of Iraqi WMD intelligence.)
• to Bruce Ivins (accused by the FBI of being the sole perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attacks after he committed suicide in 200committed suicide in 2008).  
• Recall Colin Powell waving the little tube of anthrax around at the UN, as well, as he was drumming up support for an invasion of Iraq.
• This mess is going to be exposed to strong sunlight – which is one of the more effective methods of destroying germs – and all the surveillance and harassment in the world won’t stop that from happening.