It has been proved beyond doubt that Iraq contained no weapons of mass destruction, therefore the excuse for the occupation was a lie. The nation was traumatized by the incredible violence of September 11th. Seven days later, it was further traumatized by letters laced with lethal strains of anthrax delivered to two US senators, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, both trying to debate the Patriot Act being rammed down Congress’ throat by the Bush administration. Five people who handled the letters died and 17 were sickened. The strain of anthrax was traced to the US Army Ft. Detrick biowarfare lab. To date, the FBI has not identified the sender, it has been suggested its investigation is a cover-up, and congressional requests for hearings on the investigation has been unsuccessful so far.
In June, the Department of Homeland Security will decide on the short list for a new biowarfare lab containing the most dangerous known pathogens. University of California/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will be in the running with a proposal for a 500,000 square foot facility in the middle of its bombing range, Site 300, where it has also applied for a permit to explode depleted uranium bombs. The permit is an improvement. UC/LLNL has been doing it for years without permits. UC/LLNL already has a biosafety level-3 biowarfare lab in Livermore. The proposed Tracy lab would contain both level-3 and a level-4 biowarfare labs.
There are four level-4 labs in the country, but the Bush administration announced plans for construction of at least three more.
Biosafety Level 3 includes a wide spectrum of viruses, bacteria, and fungal agents. Bacterial agents include: tularaemia, pulmonary and nonpulmonary tuberculosis, glanders, melioidosis, typhoid fever, paratyphoid fever, plague (bubonic, pneumonic, and septicaemic), Q fever, typhus (scrub and epidemic), and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Viral agents include over 170 arboroviruses such as West Nile, yellow fever, and various forms of encephalitis (i.e. Dengue fever and Hantavirus), lymphocytic choriomeningitis (LCM) (neurotrophic strains), Hepatitis B and C, HIV, and Rift Valley fever. Fungal agents in BSL3 include: Coccidioides immitis (which causes pulmonary disease), pulmonary histoplasmosis, and North American Blastomycosis.
Biosafety Level 4 covers a smaller group of pathogens that pose a “high risk of exposure and infection to personnel, the community, and the environment.” These include a number of arenaviruses, filoviruses, and arboroviruses such as: Junin, Marburg, Russian Spring-Summer, Congo-Crimean, hemorrhagic fever, Omsk hemorrhagic fever, Lassa, Machupo, Ebola, Sabia, and Encephalmomyeltis.
There are currently four Biosafety Level 4 laboratories in the United States. These are: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta; the United States Army Research Institute on Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Frederick, Maryland; the Southwest Institute for Biomedical Research in San Antonio; and the University of Georgia in Athens, which houses a smaller, “shoebox” facility.
The Bush Administration recently announced the construction of at least three new Biosafety Level 4 laboratories—at Boston University Medical Center; the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston; and the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana—as well as the expansion of Biosafety Level 4 capacity at the CDC and USAMRIID. USAMRIID is the only Level 4 laboratory currently under military protection. – Boston University Biodefense website
While Northern California media has been up in arms about the $500-million contract between UC Berkeley and British Petroleum for biotech research, the far more dangerous UC proposal is its level-4 biowarfare facility near Tracy. Given the propaganda talent UC, LLNL, the federal government and defense contractors are capable of mustering, we are even curious about the timing. The connection between the two lies in UC’s rabid promotion of biotechnology. Its warfare application is in manipulating pathogens. This manipulation can range from creating antidotes to creating ethnic-specific toxins. On the livestock front, it can range from vaccines for foot-and-mouth or Avian flu to super-virulent strains of those diseases to destroy the food sources of targeted populations. And because biowarfare (called “biodefense” by the government and UC) labs are highly secret for reasons of national security, of course, you will never know what they are researching or what hit you, your flock or herd, or when.
In case of an accident at the Tracy facility, lethal pathogens could spread up to 60 miles endangering the lives of seven million people and much livestock besides. Given the combined forces of cover-up – UC/LLNL and the government – people and animals will probably sicken and die without explanation. One of the worst recent examples of biowarfare lab secrecy is Plum Island, NY. Lyme Disease, W. Nile Virus and Dutch duck plague, which first appeared in the US within miles of this facility, are conjectured to have leaked from Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Michael Carroll’s Lab 257, the result of seven years of exhaustive investigation, documents astounding lapses in safety, failure to enforce regulations, reckless disregard for the safety of surrounding populations in New York and Connecticut, and complete stone-walling by the USDA, managers of Plum Island after it took control of this military biowarfare lab. We doubt somehow that the California livestock, dairy and poultry organizations supporting the UC/LLNL bio-warfare lab have read Lab 257. Although the public is allowed very little information about either UC/LLNL’s nuclear weapons or biowarfare programs, we do know that safety and security has never been perfect and never will be perfect. We also know that among the densest populations of poultry and diary cows in the nation lie within 100 miles of the proposed site of this lab, and large herds of beef cattle and sheep seasonally graze closer to the site (that’s why Pombo wears a cowboy hat). We also know that the proposed lab would lie directly beneath the Pacific Flyway for migratory waterfowl, protected by international treaties since early in the 20th century.
The fundamental problem with level-3 and level-4 biowarfare facilities is that, while the government and their university and private partners say they are working on strictly defensive means of countering bioterror attacks, they must research the offensive weapons to find the defenses. The history of these labs in the US has been offensive rather than defensive and there is no evidence to date that the US faces a bioterror attack except perhaps another from whoever sent the senators that US Army-made anthrax.
Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, which has been monitoring UC/LLNL handling of radioactive material and lately biological warfare material, stated recently that “bio-defense building boom” is leading to “these very dangerous facilities being built willy-nilly across the country without any consideration of whether additional bio-lab capability is needed.”
Homeland Security states at times, changing its story at other times, that support from nearby communities is important to its decisions about where to locate new biowarfare labs. Four years ago, UC Davis proposed itself as a site for a level-4 lab, the Davis City Council voted to oppose it, and the lab was not built in Davis. This year, the Tracy City Council voted to oppose the siting of this lab nearby. About 7,000 local citizens have signed petitions protesting it. The land is owned by the federal Department of Energy and managed by UC/LLNL, but technically the land-use authority is San Joaquin County, whose board of supervisors voted to support the project.
Tracy has been in political tumult for months. Hometown of former Rep. Richard Pombo, once chairman of the House Resources Committee (restored to its older title, Natural Resources Committee by the incoming Democratic leadership), a ferocious, successful campaign to unseat him took place involving state and national environmental groups and former Rep. Pete McCloskey. At the same time, a new mayor was elected, Brent Ives, a 20-year executive manager from UC/LLNL. Ives defeated Celeste Garamendi (sister of the state lieutenant governor), an opponent of the kind of growth and anti-environmental policies practiced by Pombo Real Estate Farms (the congressman’s clan enterprise) and among other developers, Angelo Tsakopoulos, whose AKT Development Corp. owns Tracy Hills, a proposed 5,500-unit housing and business project, next to the UC/LLNL Site 300. Pombo and Tsakopoulos donated thousands for attack ads against Garamendi created by the staff of Rep. John Doolittle, R-Roseville, whose Virginia home was raided last week by the FBI looking for documents linking him and his wife to Jack Abramoff, who continues to sing.
Meanwhile, in a comic sidebar, the Federal Register reports an application to designate 3,900 nearby acres called Tracy Hills as a new viticultural zone. Wine grown in that area could have something a little extra in it.
The concentration of pro-growth, pro-war pork, and anti-environmental forces in Tracy is staggering. It suggests a new title for the former, provincial Pomboza, in honor of Pombo and Rep. Dennis Cardoza, Shrimp Slayer-Merced, who, backed by regional developers, led the last unsuccessful, “bipartisan” charge against the Endangered Species Act. Now, we are dealing with the “UC/LLNL Tsakopomboza” ?
Whenever you think it can’t get worse, it is well to recall the long planning horizon of developers and universities.
Inquiring locally, Badlands learned that AKT Development was not thinking seriously of siting a residential/business community on land adjoining Site 300. The rumor is that it seeking some sort of open-space, wildlife habitat easement for it so that it can be used as “recreational" open space.
To add a particularly sick note to the deal, local opponents of both the increased depleted uranium bombing and the biowarfare lab, found as the result of a public records’ act request, that Mayor Ives and UC/LLNL are proposing a college campus to sweeten the deal for Tracy residents. UC Merced, whose most tangible academic asset remains its memorandum of understanding with UC/LLNL, is part of the discussion to help persuade the citizens of Tracy that with the biowarfare lab, the depleted uranium bombs blasting in air, and possibly yet another UC campus, Tracy will be able to attract the kind of residents that will forever bury the stigma of being a cowtown.
If it wasn’t so absurd, one would suspect a certain amount of conspiracy going on instead of mere rational calculations of profit. But, a theory of conspiracy is unnecessary because there is a perfectly good explanation: the Pentagon is the Mother of All Pork Barrels. That is the only explanation that fits the facts. The US outspends the entire world in its annual defense budget. Its nearest competitor is China, which spends a tenth of what the US spends annually. The Bush administration has broken treaties on nuclear and bioweapons development previous administrations during the Cold War spent years developing, and UC/LLNL is the largest beneficiary of these broken treaties. It has the contract to build a new generation of nuclear weapons (aka “reliable replacement warhead) and now it proposes a super level-4 biowarfare lab of some 500,000 square feet – when there is no demonstrable need for either except Pork – the means by which the public’s taxes are siphoned upward in a series of win-win, public-private partnerships between the government, UC and private defense contractors, landowners and developers.
Merced has been aware for a decade of the paradox of what happens when UC comes to a cowtown. The glorious public research university has a proven capacity to stop all thought. Wherever it places its beautiful blue-and-gold footprint, insane financial speculation, political corruption and the wholesale breaking of laws follow. UC is probably the nation’s premier anti-intellectual public institution of higher education. But that would assume that intellect and ethics have any relationship and that UC is a public institution just because state and federal taxpayers spend billions a year to support it.
To paraphrase Heraclitus, War is father of all, but Pork is king. Some it makes free, others it makes slaves.
Bill Hatch
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Notes:
Income Redistribution in Disguise
Escalating Military Spending
By ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH
http://www.counterpunch.com/
Critics of the recent U.S. wars of choice have long argued that they are all about oil. "No Blood for Oil" has been a rallying cry for most of the opponents of the war.
It can be demonstrated, however, that there is another (less obvious but perhaps more critical) factor behind the recent rise of U.S. military aggressions abroad: war profiteering by the Pentagon contractors. Frequently invoking dubious "threats to our national security and/or interests," these beneficiaries of war dividends, the military-industrial complex and related businesses whose interests are vested in the Pentagon's appropriation of public money, have successfully used war and military spending to justify their lion's share of tax dollars and to disguise their strategy of redistributing national income in their favor.
4-21-07
Tracy Press
Dust up...John Upton
http://tracypress.com/content/view/8873/2/
Analysis of an air pollution permit application filed two weeks ago shows that tons of radioactive depleted uranium and other toxic heavy metals could be blown up in outdoor military test blasts near Tracy. Yearly, 20 explosions could each vaporize 220 pounds of depleted uranium at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Site 300 testing ground... Lawrence Livermore has applied to detonate more than 4 tons a year of depleted uranium on outdoor gravel-lined Site 300 blast tables...lab already conducts 60 to 100 smaller test blasts annually in which an unstated amount of depleted uranium is used “routinely,” according to a February letter sent to Tracy homes by Site 300’s manager. Lab officials this week said they have no immediate plans to detonate much of the material listed in the permit application... Quantities of materials listed in the permit application were based on “back-calculations” of doses allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency outside Site 300’s border... The lab applied for the highest limits possible to save time and money on later permit amendments and additions, Dunning said. ...Marylia Kelley, described as “unrealistic” the lab’s assumption that just 9 percent - or up to 720 pounds per year - of the uranium that could be blown up outdoors at Site 300 would be light enough for the wind to carry it away from the 7,000-acre weapons testing site. Lab spokeswoman Lynda Seaver said the rest - as much as 7,300 pounds annually - would settle on the ground at the 50-year-old site, which is already listed by the EPA as one of the nation’s most-polluted pieces of land. Depleted uranium has advantages in military use, but its health effects are disputed. Some blame it for causing debilitating wartime illnesses, while others argue its radioactivity is so weak that it’s harmless. Depleted uranium is used in American armor as well as grenades, bombs and armor-piercing bullets. U.S. forces have used it in both Iraq wars. A 2002 report commissioned by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which summarized other studies, blamed the hundreds of tons of depleted uranium used in Iraq for the debilitating and widespread Gulf War syndrome, for a four- to six-fold increase in Iraqi birth defects after the first Gulf War and for a seven- to 10-fold increase in Iraqi cancer rates. Specific individual deaths and serious illnesses were linked in the report to inhaled depleted uranium, which is toxic and emits low-level radioactivity for the average three to four years that it takes to leave the lungs, according to the report. “The users of depleted uranium have tried to keep the effects of depleted uranium secret,” wrote report author Y.K.J. Yeung Sik Yuen. According to a December letter to the Tracy Press editor signed by Lawrence Livermore health physicist Gary Mansfield, the health effects of depleted uranium are negligible.