The US Government Is the Real Bioterror Threat

Assuming the federal government has, after almost seven years, finally identified the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks in 2001 – admittedly a generous assumption given that for most of those years, it pursued, hounded, embarrassed, and ruined the career of the wrong man – larger dangers remain. As is normally the case with issues surrounding terrorism, the average citizen will probably be shocked to learn that their government is often a bigger threat than the terrorists. Remember the CIA's creation of the 9/11 threat by supporting the most radical Islamist groups fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s and then the U.S. government's provocation of terrorist attacks from those same militants by its non-Islamic military presence in Islamic Persian Gulf countries in the 1990s, which had continued unnecessarily subsequent to the first Gulf War.

Similarly, in the case of bioterrorism, the threat from the government is greater than from foreign groups such as al-Qaeda. Although U.S. intelligence has created fear among the U.S. public by saying that al-Qaeda has made efforts to obtain biological weapons, the capabilities of small terrorist groups to make, handle, weaponize, and disperse biological agents is very limited. Even Aum Shinrikyo, a well-funded Japanese terrorist group that hired Ph.D. scientists, could not successfully carry out a biological weapons attack. (Even their chemical attacks, which are technologically easier to accomplish, were ham-handed and did not result in mass deaths.) The sophisticated weaponization and dispersion of biological agents are difficult for technologically challenged and relatively poor terrorist groups to master; they usually require the resources and technology of governments.

Whether Bruce Ivins, a government bioscientist, is the real culprit in the anthrax attacks or not, it seems that the FBI has traced the perpetrator to the U.S. government's own research facility, which has plenty of people qualified to carry out such an attack. And apparently some employees would have a motive to do so.

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