“The U.S. government was incredibly shortsighted,” says Raymond Zilinskas, a senior scientist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “This kind of research is permissible under the Biological Weapons Convention if it’s carried out in the open and reported as part of the confidence-building measures — neither of which was done. Here we are doing activities that, if we found out they were being done in Iraq or Iran or North Korea, we would probably immediately bomb the hell out of them.”

U.S. Undermining International Bioweapons Controls: “Just a week before the September 11 terrorist attacks, American news media reported that the U.S. government had conducted clandestine research on biowarfare preparedness. The Pentagon had secretly drawn up plans to reproduce a Russian genetically-engineered strain of the anthrax bacterium in order to test the U.S. military’s anthrax vaccine. It had also built a germ factory in Nevada out of commercially available materials, in which the government apparently planned to manufacture not actual bioweapons agents but germ simulants, to gauge how easily others could do the real thing. Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency had constructed a copy of a Soviet germ bomblet that the agency feared was being sold on the international market.

Many experts believe these sub rosa experiments violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).” The American Prospect