Time for a pre-emptive strike?

The cable was from 2009. Quite a long time after the invasion of Iraq.

Moreover, the cable states that the end user was the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases which is the part of the US Army that carries out research into how to counter biological weapons.

USAMRIID…..they’re the people who try and make vaccines and treatments for these diseases you fool.

You know, find a way to cure Lassa Fever, Ebola?

“By the late 1970s, in addition to the work on Coxiella burnetii and other rickettsiae, research priorities had expanded to include the development of vaccines and therapeutics against Argentine, Korean and Bolivian hemorrhagic fevers, Lassa fever and other exotic diseases that could pose potential BW threats. In 1978, the Institute assisted with humanitarian efforts in Egypt when a severe outbreak of Rift Valley fever (RVF) occurred there for the first time. The epidemic caused thousands of human cases and the deaths of large numbers of livestock. Diagnostics, along with much of the Institute’s stock of RVF vaccine, were sent to help control the outbreak. In 1979, the Institute acquired both fixed and transportable BSL-4 containment plastic human isolators for the hospital care and safe transport of patients suffering from highly contagious and potentially lethal exotic infections. At that time a formal agreement was signed with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that USAMRIID would house and treat highly contagious infections in laboratory personnel should any occur.”

From the Wikipedia entry. Did you even bother to look this up?

And re getting the stamp on the document. Umm, aren’t you glad that when someone like me requests a nuclear goods licence (yes, it happens, yes, I get given them) someone actually goes and checks, makes sure that it all is real, that I’m not just making things up?

Blimey, complaining about people trying to research vaccines and or cures for the most vicious diseases in the world. You’ll be complaining about AIDS funding next, or penecillin.

If a pathogen can be weaponised, and exists, it is presumably better to have it studied and antidotes ready than not? We have vaccines for smallpox available you know, and that is officially extinct. That is exactly the sort of thing governments are meant to do for us – prepare against things we cannot deal with otherwise.

If you really believe that the US would import dangerous pathogens to reproduce for weapons (rather than for experimentation) then you forget two things. One, it would be very stupid to do so with the knowledge of the German government. And two, surely the US would do the production in a foreign country (as with everything else…).

It’s a standard excuse to justify the study of pathogens as a means of finding ways to counter-act them. However, if anyone thinks that the USA (the only nation which has ever dropped two nuclear bombs on civilian populations, exterminating tens of thousands) would not seize the chance to develop their own biological weapons of mass destruction under cover of this excuse, they are living in cloud cuckoo land. The very fact that the research is militarised tells its own story.

It’s a standard excuse to justify the study of pathogens as a means of finding ways to counter-act them. However, if anyone thinks that the USA (the only nation which has ever dropped two nuclear bombs on civilian populations, exterminating tens of thousands) would not seize the chance to develop their own biological weapons of mass destruction under cover of this excuse, they are living in cloud cuckoo land. The very fact that the research is militarised tells its own story.

Of course, as the only nation to conquer nigh on a quarter of the globe, we must not let Britain buy ships and weapons because, regardless of the totally different situation then and now, we might do it again.

And clearly we must never sell horses to Mongolia in case they use them to devestate Asia…

There is learning the lessons of history, and there is stupidity. Although nice to see Briar would like to have privatised research into biological weapons (who else would do it – the US does not have an NHS you know, so would have to set up an entire new arm – their disease control branch (CDC?) relies heavily on military expertise already).

@5 – Well done, you’ve made Tim look reasonable. That Takes Work (TM)

What an ignorant OP. Even for a paranoiac dog whistle it failed.

They should research the viruses and then return them. This news report highlights that these trades happen – and there is no international inspection body to monitor what happens to these viruses upon its being received by the importer.

“They should research the viruses and then return them.”

Snigger.

Viruses replicate. You know, you breed them? You get a little bit of it then you make more?

“and there is no international inspection body to monitor what happens to these viruses upon its being received by the importer.”

That’s what the asking for the stamp on the request was all about, That’s what is the inspection regime. That the government receiving them promises that it really is the government receiving them and that they’re not going to do anything naughty with them.

The system is based around “end user certificates”. You have to say who is the end user and what they’re going to use it for. It’s the same with arms and nuclear materials. Lying on one of these end user certificates carries an up to 20 year jail sentence.

I certainly swallow hard each time I sign one.

I know of one American exec, ended up serving three years for having been tricked on one. He thought he was sending Zr powder to be made into car airbags. It ended up in cluster bombs. He was lied to by the end user but that didn’t matter: it was still him who went to jail.

Not a perfect system but you should at least know what the system is before you criticise it.

It seems the OP is ‘reading an MA in International Journalism’.

Presumably this doesn’t include ‘check facts before publishing’ as lesson 1?

The idea that the US are the bad guys is a really damaging lefty meme. It’s, “What have the Romans every done for us?” in a modern setting.

The US is big and diverse, so to universally decry anything they do is simply prejudice. The implication that we’d be better off without them is just preposterous.

I blame Chomsky. And Pilger. And plain bloody laziness.