Pentagon Sold Discount Equipment That Could Produce Biological Warfare Agents

After a U.S. auditors bought biological weapon-capable laboratory equipment from the Defense Department, the department suspended the sale of such items three weeks ago, CNN reported yesterday.

The Pentagon’s Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service had been publicly selling cut-price laboratory equipment that could be used to produce biological warfare agents, according to a draft U.S. General Accounting Office report.

The service sells surplus defense equipment, but it halted the sale of the equipment in question on Sept. 19 after GAO investigators formed a front company to purchase an evaporator, an incubator, centrifuge equipment and 300 to 400 biological protection suits, CNN reported.

“Many items needed to establish a laboratory for making biological warfare agents were being sold on the Internet to the public from DoD’s excess property inventory for pennies on the dollar, making them both easy and economical to obtain,” the draft report says.

The GAO front company spent “a little over $4,000” for equipment that the Pentagon originally purchased for $46,000, according to the report.

The equipment is largely available on the open market, but without the low price, according to CNN (Chris Plante, CNN.com, Oct. 6).

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Officials Dispute Whether Iraq Had an Active Biological Weapons Program

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The interim report released last week by investigator David Kay says investigators have so far found no evidence of active Iraqi nuclear or chemical weapons programs, but a debate has ensued on whether the report indicates that Iraq was conducting a biological research and development program just before the U.S.-led invasion in March (see GSN, Oct. 3).

In a publicly released summary of his report, Kay says no biological weapons or evidence of biological weapons production has yet been found by the Iraq Survey Group, the U.S.-led team he coordinates.

Investigators did find, however, a number of biological weapons “activities,” including a vial containing a “reference strain” of botulinum, alleged research on biological weapons-“applicable” agents, and concealment efforts.

All of that, Kay said, suggested a “compartmentalized” version of Iraq’s former program that involved maintaining “smaller” capabilities that could be reactivated for quick production.

Statements by administration officials appeared to indicate a view that Kay’s evidence showed that ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had recently pursued a biological weapons program.

“In other words, he’s hiding his programs,” President George W. Bush said Friday citing the Kay report.

“David Kay is finding programs, even specific ones like the ones to develop new biological agents,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said during a press briefing last Friday.

Boucher said the Iraqi botulinum was a “weapon of mass destruction.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell also appeared to support that view, asking reporters rhetorically on Friday whether “vials of botulinum should constitute a weapon of mass destruction?”

Evidence Suggested No Program

An independent expert and a senior senator, however, have argued that Kay’s evidence does not show that Iraq had an active biological weapons program in the run-up to this year’s war.

“There’s no evidence that the weapons program was restarted in the nuclear area, that it was restarted in the biological area, [or] that the units were ready for chemical warfare,” said Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich), in a comment broadcast on Fox News Sunday.

Former U.N. weapons inspector Raymond Zilinskas, currently with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey Institute of International Studies, supported that view.

“My feeling was that they certainly had the potential in terms of human resources and dual-use equipment, and they also had the cultures in vials that could be opened any time and be propagated, but that they had no actual biological weapons at all,” he said.

“I would judge it at the level of keeping a basic capability that, should the need arise, could be activated in the future,” he said.

Kay’s statement said Iraq had been using substitute agents for biological weapons agents in research: “R&D work that paired overt work with nonpathogenic organisms serving as surrogates for prohibited investigation with pathogenic agents.”

Kay, for his part, appeared to discount the possibility that the discovered botulinum strain was part of an active biological weapons program.  He said in a conference call with reporters Friday that an Iraqi scientist had been storing the vial in his refrigerator since 1993, the Associated Press reported.

Reference strains ostensibly are retained for use in identifying unidentified agents.

A Dormant Program

Milton Leitenberg, a professor and arms control expert at the University of Maryland, on the other hand said the evidence Kay has produced did indicate a biological weapon program was underway, though a “little” one.

“I don’t think you can say those things [Kay described] aren’t part of a program.  Every one of them is a material breach.  There shouldn’t have been a pathogen in a refrigerator.  There shouldn’t have been any equipment in a mosque.  There shouldn’t have been those two dozen or 20 laboratories in the Iraqi intelligence service,” Leitenberg said.

Leitenberg said, though, Kay’s statement should have provided greater detail about the contents of those laboratories.

David Franz, vice president of the Southern Research Institute’s Chemical and Biological Defense Division, said Iraq would not necessarily have needed extensive biological facilities to have a program that could pose a threat.

“What you need for a biological terrorism program, which was what I was more concerned about during the war, as opposed to a biological warfare program is quite different,” he said.

“They could have hurt us with what [Kay] has found so far, in biology,” he said.

Prior to this year’s U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bush administration officials had cited Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and programs as justification for the use of force.  Kay’s report says no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons have been found yet, but indicates that more than 100 ammunition sites that might contain hidden unconventional weapons remained uninvestigated.

Kay’s statement, released by the Central Intelligence Agency following closed-door congressional testimony last Friday, said Iraqi capabilities could be used to quickly produce weapons.

“All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents,” Kay said.

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U.S.  Selects Sites for Biodefense Research Network

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — A U.S. federal agency this week named 11 academic facilities to receive funds for building or upgrading high-security, biological defense laboratories.  Recently established security requirements for such sites have been a source of contention this year, and one facility’s president has called for a national debate on the issue.

In an announcement Tuesday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said it would establish two National Biocontainment Laboratories by providing $120 million each to the Boston University Medical Center and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

The institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, plans also to fund nine Regional Biocontainment Laboratories at Colorado State University, Duke University, Tulane University, University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, the University of Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratory, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, University of Missouri-Columbia College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.  Each center is slated to receive grants of between $7 million and $21 million.

All facilities are required to provide matching funds.

High-Security Work

The National Biocontainment Laboratories would be biosafety level-2, -3 and -4 facilities, with BSL-4 providing the highest security required for work using potential terror agents such as the bacteria responsible for anthrax and plague and the Ebola virus.

The regional laboratories would be constructed for BSL-2 and -3 work.

“These awards to build high-level biosafety facilities are a major step towards being able to provide Americans with effective therapies, vaccines and diagnostics for diseases caused by agents of bioterror as well as for naturally occurring emerging infections such as SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] and West Nile virus,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson in a statement Tuesday.

Security and Safety Concerns

Critics who have opposed various bids for the funding have expressed concerns about the security and secrecy measures the laboratories would be required to adopt by federal law.

In particular, a federal antiterrorism law signed last year, the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, is understood by experts to bar laboratory officials from releasing certain information on select dangerous agents (see GSN, Sept. 5).  It prevents the public disclosure of the location and quantity of such agents and requires federal and state authorization before laboratory officials can notify the public and local authorities of any theft or accidental release.

The law is intended to protect the public by controlling information that might aid terrorists, but concerns that the security measures might endanger the public reportedly prompted Davis, California, Mayor Susie Boyd, to withdraw her support for the University of California at Davis’s ultimately unsuccessful bid for funding.

In another case, the University of Texas Medical Branch, citing federal and state laws, refused to release the minutes and documents of its biological safety committee meetings.

National Institutes of Health guidelines require such information to be disclosed, said Edward Hammond, whose watchdog group the Sunshine Project is seeking the information or, lacking that, the suspension of the facility’s newly announced federal funding and the security upgrade.

“We would argue it’s inappropriate for them to get this award, because it’s pretty clear they are not in compliance with the [National Institutes of Health] guidelines,” he said.

Some researchers argue, however, that the security measures are reasonable.

“There are certain things that will not be available, and we are precluded by law from making those available.  The USA PATRIOT Act [of 2001], and Homeland Security [Act of 2002], and Texas laws as well … do not allow us to say where some of these agents are stored.  They don’t allow us to give the quantity, the room number, the freezer box number,” said C.J. Peters, who heads the branch’s current BSL-4 center, in a conference call with reporters Tuesday.

“I think it makes common sense that you wouldn’t want these to be public knowledge,” he said.

Scott Weaver, a branch professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology, said every facility nationwide that conducts research on infectious agents is required to first have a biological safety committee that includes nonuniversity members of the community to review the research proposal.

“So the community has some assurance just from the way that the internal review process works that the experiments that are going on on campus here are safe, they are not designed to produce biological weapons or anything like that,” he said.

“This is a very important issue and it’s all about balancing the public’s right to know with protecting public safety,” said University of Texas Medical Branch President John Stobo.

“We hope that now that the regional centers of excellence, the Regional Biocontainment Laboratories and the National Biocontainment Laboratories have now been identified, that we can start this discussion debate at a national level using representatives from those entities,” he said.

It is “a critically important issue that goes far beyond UTMB and we need to have a national debate on it,” he said.

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Two Firms Receive Anthrax Vaccine Contracts

The United States awarded contracts this week to two firms to acquire 6 million doses of new anthrax vaccines.  VaxGen Inc. of California received $80.3 million and Avecia Group of Manchester, England, was awarded $71.3 million.

The contracts, issued by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, order each firm to continue development of its version of an improved vaccine and to manufacture 3 million doses.  The contracts keep both companies in the running for an expected $1.4 billion contract to produce and maintain 60 million anthrax vaccine doses by 2013.  That program is envisioned in the Bush administration’s Project BioShield, which has been approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and is now under consideration by the Senate (Bernadette Tansey, San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 2).

Under the VaxGen contract, the firm will test the vaccine’s efficacy by determining if it protects animals infected with anthrax.  Human studies of the vaccine’s safety began earlier this year and all the volunteers at four locations have received their immunizations (see GSN, May 28).

In a press release, VaxGen said it could manufacture 100 million doses of the bulk vaccine at its existing production facility (VaxGen release, Sept. 30).

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Researchers Hand Over Worldwide Smallpox Study Results

A team of researchers in Washington yesterday delivered the results of a global study on potential drugs to treat the smallpox virus, according to the U.S. Defense Department (see GSN, Feb. 5).

Graham Richards, head of the Oxford University Chemistry Department, presented the results to U.S. and British officials at the British Embassy in Washington.  The study — which included technology partners IBM and United Devices — used the power of 1.3 million personal computers in more than 190 countries.  The computers’ owners donated their idle computers at www.grid.org, to produce an effect more powerful than the world’s 10 largest supercomputers combined, according to the Pentagon.

The study matched 35 million potential drug molecules against eight smallpox proteins in an effort to discover which molecules would bind to the virus.  Results of the study, which have narrowed the field of possible molecules that can be used for smallpox treatment, will also be turned over to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and to other governments (U.S. Defense Department release, Sept. 30).

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