by James Glaser
May 29, 2003

You read the newspaper or watch the news on television and what you read and see just doesn't make much sense. There is all of this talk of tax cuts and then a few paragraphs down they start talking about raising the National Debt Ceiling because we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars we don't have.

On the next page there is an article about companies that have moved "off shore" to avoid paying American taxes and the story goes on about our American government awarding contracts to these very companies, while those that stay here and pay taxes get nothing.

Remember how upset we got with Iraq because they kept claiming that they destroyed their chemical weapons, but didn't have the paper work to prove it? Well just today I read a story about finding Weapons of Mass Destruction. These weapons were not in Iraq, but buried in a field 50 miles from Washington, DC, at Fort Detrick Maryland.

It seems that over 2,000 tons (4,000,000 pounds) of hazardous material was found, including vials of live bacteria, the vaccine form of anthrax, and discarded biological agents like Brucella Melitensis, which causes a flu like disease and Kiebsiella which causes pneumonia.

Here is the kicker. The Pentagon has no documentation (paper work) about the various biological agents disposed of at the US bio-defense center at Fort Detrick. Fort Detrick officially ended its germ warfare program back in 1969, but it has kept a supply of these agents so we could maintain a defense against biological attack.

No, I have no idea of how keeping biological weapons protects us from attack, nor do I have any idea of why we would bury these weapons. Now we have both the weapons to deal with, plus tons of contaminated soil.

I would like to know who decided to put our bio-defense center 50 miles from our Nations Capitol or who decided that was a good place to keep storing these dangerous weapons. It might be nice to know who decided to bury 2,000 tons of this stuff in a field and it sure makes me wonder how many other fields there are like this one.

I figure we will start finding out some real military secrets, when this stuff starts percolating down to our drinking water. If the soil was contaminated in Maryland, that means the containers these agents were stored in failed in less than 35 years.

It would be prudent if the United States started looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction right here at home. Then maybe we can start telling other countries how to clean up their act.

Post Script: To read the whole bio-weapons story you have to go to the "Guardian/UK" It was written by Julian Borger and titled US Finds Evidence of WMD At Last - Buried in a Field Near Maryland