Biowarfare, Terror Weapons and the US

by Francis A. Boyle

[Editors’ Note: What follows is the transcript of a faculty lecture given by Professor Boyle at the University of Illinois, followed by a few questions and answers.]


Origins of BWC

We had at least going back to World War II an extremely aggressive offensive biological warfare program. Finally, Nixon and Kissinger decided to get rid of this offensive biological warfare program. Two grounds. One, it was counterproductive, just militarily, you could not really control these things. Two, we had a massive superiority in nuclear weapons anyway. Bios were the poor man’s atom bomb and we wanted to get rid of them to deprive anyone out there in the third world of a weapon of mass extermination. Nixon unilaterally ordered the termination of our biowarfare program for offensive purposes. Nevertheless the CIA continued anyway despite the President’s order. Eventually we supported and became a party to the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 that prohibits research, development, testing of biological weapons, agents, components, etc., except for prophylactic and defensive purposes. And at least after the treaty came into effect we wound down our offensive biological warfare program. There was still a CBW unit there lurking in the Pentagon that had been starved of funds, wanting to come back to life. I am not sure exactly what the CIA was doing.



Now what had happened in the meantime to the technology after Nixon was that DNA genetic engineering had come to the forefront. The technology itself, that is gene splicing. And the Reagan administration decided to exploit it. They engaged in dual-use research and development of biological agents, that is research that could be put to both offensive uses and defensive uses at the same time. The technology is the same.

To have a biological weapon as a weapon you need three things. First you need an agent. Second you need a delivery device. And third you need a vaccine to vaccinate your own troops and your own people. Using a biological agent you are going to send an army in there, they are going to occupy the territory, they need a vaccine.


U of Illinois Contracts

We had two of these contracts here on the University of Illinois campus. I have read these contracts. They were clearly biological warfare contracts and the tip-off on any of these contracts is they call for the development in the contract of an aerosol delivery device. That is how biological warfare agents are delivered, by air. All of this type of research then was being farmed out all over the country to large numbers of life-science researchers. Meanwhile the Reagan administration was cutting back funding for the National Science Foundation, on other hand. So what we had was second and third rate scientists who were no longer able to get money in the life-sciences from NSF had to go to the Pentagon in order to get funding. Now the Council for Responsible Genetics then responded to this by putting out a Pledge saying the signers would not accept any money from the Pentagon for any reason.

You can read these biowarfare contracts. It clearly says “military justification” for this contract. Indeed the ones here on campus, they were gassing pigs and sheep and rabbits over there at VetMed. And the contract said that we picked pigs because they have a circulatory system and respiratory system most akin to human beings. You can read it there in the contract.

CRG Congressional Briefing



Bio-Weapons Anti-terrorism Act



What we did not know at that time when the Reagan people were fighting us tooth and nail is that they had also authorized at least forty shipments of weapons specific biological agents to Iraq from the American Type Culture Collection, which is a big scientific institute. It has for scientific purposes cultures of every type of exotic disease in the world. You name it, it is there. It was clear the Reagan administration was shipping all this to Iraq knowing full well Iraq was going to develop biological weapons and use them against Iran, and yet they did it anyway. Now at the time my legislation was coming through we did not know this. It came out later. So we got nowhere with the legislation.

Bush Sr.

Bush Sr. was elected and then the question was whether should we continue under Bush Sr. or just junk the legislation. I took the position: Look, the Reagan administration also developed a new generation of chemical weapons – binaries. It was hotly contested and CRG opposed that too. It came down to a tie vote in the Senate and George Bush as Vice President broke the tie vote in favor of the binary chemical weapons. However, his mother then publicly stated she was very disappointed. I said my guess is that really indicates he is trying to send a message here and that really indicates where he stands. So I argued we should go forward with Bush Sr., maybe we will see a change in policy.




Indeed, I worked over in Britain on an expose over there “The Dirty War” a documentary film. Finally the British government admitted there is such a thing as the Gulf War Syndrome. I personally believe they go back to these vaccines. They were experimental medical vaccines in violation of Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation. I argued this point in the court martial proceedings of Captain Doctor Yolanda Huett-Vaughn, who was court martialed in part for refusing to give these vaccines. And later Senator Jay Rockefeller held hearings in which he also accused Bush, Cheney and Powell of committing a Nuremberg crime on our own troops. Today approximately a minimum of 50,000 U.S. military personnel suffer from what is called the Gulf War Syndrome. The tip off here, the French Army rejected the vaccines because they knew they were experimental. They had been burned once before in IndoChina. Of course, there were multiple agents that worked there – depleted uranium, carcinogenic substances in the air, etc.




Bush Jr.

That then is why the Bush Jr. administration repudiated the verification protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention. These negotiations had been underway for quite some time. The Convention has no verification provisions. Finally, this Fall all of a sudden out of nowhere, Bush Jr. repudiated the whole thing and tried to kill it. Why? Because it is clear we are involved in this type of work. Whether the Pentagon, the CIA, or their contractors, or all of them.

Anthrax Attacks



That very day I called up a senior official in the FBI who handles terrorism and counter-terrorism, he knows who I am because of the work I have done in this field, and discussed this matter with him. I said: Look there are very few people who have this capability. I have a list of them under the Reagan administration. That is where you have to start to look. I went down the list and I said you know, this person worked with this government lab, that person worked with that government lab, etc., etc. He said, well, we are coordinating our efforts with Ft. Deitrick. I said well, Ft. Deitrick could very well be the problem here. They are one of the few labs with the capability to do something like this. And you could have a Timothy McVeigh type situation where someone who was once on the reservation is now off the reservation. So you need to start looking at this list of these people who have worked with the Pentagon, I do not have a list of the CIA people, and my guess is you are going to find your person. He told me he would pass the information along to the right people.





Anti-terrorism and the Effective Death Penalty Act

As for my statute: when it came out that the Reagan administration had authorized the 40 or so shipments of weapons specific agents to Iraq, we never intended to impede legitimate scientific research let alone the biotech industry. So I never in the drafting of this assumed that American Type Culture Collection would be complicit in shipping weapons specific biological agents to Iraq at the behest of the Reagan administration. So when this all came out my statute was amended by the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act to deal with this problem, that is to deal with legitimate scientific institutes like American Type Culture somehow getting involved in biological warfare. So it was amended and it is currently being amended again to deal with the problem that you have so many people out there who are capable of doing this type of work, or at least work not as sophisticated as the Daschle and Leahy letters, but certainly capable of producing a weapon and killing people.

Well, why don’t I take any questions that people might have.

Hijacker and Anthrax in Florida?


Gulf War Syndrome v. Agent Orange?

Well, the Pentagon still lies about Agent Orange and you know it took them years to finally admit that Agent Orange produced cancer and to provide proper medical treatment to those Veterans. They are doing the exact same thing here. One, it is the question of financial liability for these service people in making sure they have proper medical treatment. And two it gets back to the point that if you start getting into this how did Iraq get weapons specific agents and why and who was shipping it over there and clearly it was illegal, it violated the treaty and although not yet the statute. I do not think the Pentagon wants to get into any of that so the cover-up goes on. But as I said the big expose in the UK: UK troops did take the shots, like Americans, the French rejected it, no real Gulf War Syndrome there. And for years the UK also denied it. But the documentary called “The Dirty War” came out and I was a consultant on it, independent station TV 4, came out all over Britain and I was also in it. Finally as a result of that documentary getting front page headlines in Britain, a spokesperson for the British Ministry of Defense admitted that there was such a thing as the Gulf War Syndrome.

Now let me make one more point. The danger of the syndrome is in addition here in the United States it is microbial. In other words it is being conveyed to next of kin, and also to health care workers who treat it. So it can and is slowly spreading through the population. Now the upside is however, there was a private doctor who was denied government funds, it is a government coverup here, nevertheless, with his own resources investigated this stuff and concluded that there was a DNA genetically engineered mycoplasm at work and it could be treated by antibiotics. And so he has been successfully treating some of these people. But as I said the last figure is about 50,000 Gulf War Vets suffer from the Gulf War Syndrome which the government still denies exists.

There are multiple symptoms because there was also the use of depleted uranium as well. And DU is radiological, toxic, and carcinogenic, the government still denies that too. And so you have everyone getting these shots, and all these vaccines were experimental, none had been approved by the FDA for this purpose. It clearly violated the Nuremberg code on medical experimentation. When Dr. Huett-Vaughn refused to give them, she was court-martialed. And there were also bromide tablets for nerve gas attacks that were given out. They had never been tested either for nerve gas. What they did these tablets was interfere with the firing of nerve synapses. So the theory here was that if you got hit with a nerve gas agent take one of these tablets and it would interfere with shutting you down and you would be able to resume what you were doing. None of this had been tested or approved or anything by anyone. Of course in addition you saw the fire and all the oil in the air and you put all this together you have a lot of very sick people out there.

The last time I showed “The Dirty War” here I had Major Doug Rokke in who teaches here on this campus and he handled the DU investigation for the Pentagon. He came in to talk about it, he can verify everything I am telling you. He himself suffers from the Gulf War Syndrome. So you have tens of thousands of Vets out there not getting proper medical treatment because of the government cover-up. Indeed, it used to be you could go to a Veteran’s hospital with the symptoms and they were instructed to say that this was just stress, it’s all in your mind.

Iraq Today?




Dr. Huett-Vaughn?



Loophole in BWC?


Bios v. Gas in WWI?






Third World v. Pentagon and CIA?

Well sure, but the real problem, it has always been the problem, what about the Pentagon and the CIA? And so far Congress has not been prepared to reign them in and to stop this very dangerous, lethal research. It is still going on as we speak today. That in my opinion, is still the real problem and I believe that type of work is what is behind this recent anthrax attack on our government. It is not some crazy people in the third world, it was far too sophisticated for that. This was not the type of stuff you could put together in a university lab. That is why I do not believe the guys who hijacked the airplanes, had anything at all to do with it. The only people who had that capability, they all worked for the government or have worked for the government in these biowarfare programs.

Federal Regulations?

They are dealing with the problem that the movement of these agents had been unregulated for the most part. As you know there is federal legislation on hazardous materials but this is super-hazardous and it needs very stringent regulation on all these agents for scientific purposes. Now scientists say you cannot interfere with what we are doing. Well I never intended to interfere with legitimate science but it turns out legitimate science can be perverted and so there will have to be more regulation not to stop the science but to regulate where is this agent and what is being done with this agent, and even if we hear from a legitimate lab and we send an agent out to the lab, where is the guarantee that someone out there at that scientific research institute is not going to turn this for weapons purposes? This is the problem they have to deal with now. It is a very big problem.


Francis Boyle is human rights lawyer and a professor of law at the University of Illinois. He is the author of The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, recently published by Clarity Press. He can be reached at: FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU

Copyright Francis A. Boyle.



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