Bush Wants to Trash Germ Warfare Treaty and Risk Global Safety to Protect Drug Companies' 'Trade Secrets'

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Bush Wants to Trash Germ Warfare Treaty and Risk Global Safety to Protect Drug Companies' 'Trade Secrets'

Bush has refused to accept a plan to enforce a 1972 treaty banning biological weapons - weapons that could inflict anthrax, bubonic plague, encephalitis, and other epidemics on innocent civilians - and they are all horrible ways to go. Although the Administration has not admitted it, our resident science journal abstractor tells us that enforcement means routine inspections of pharmaceutical plants by an international task force.

US drug cos have lobbied against because of the extremely remote chance that an inspector might snoop on new products (that's the excuse, anyway - we say, what are they hiding?).

So once again, Shrub is compromising the safety of YOU and YOUR CHILDREN to protect corporate interests. Is this the world we want?

By Reuters

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration will not accept a proposed plan to enforce a 1972 treaty banning biological weapons, the Washington Post reported in its Saturday editions.

The decision was to be announced on Monday by the U.S. envoy to long-running negotiations in Geneva. He would say the United States supports the treaty but has serious objections to a proposed agreement on how to enforce it, the newspaper said, citing arms control experts and an unnamed U.S. official.

Diplomats have worked on the enforcement protocol, which would establish measures to monitor the ban, for six years and hoped to complete it by this fall.

Neither the White House or State Department was not immediately available for comment on the report.

It was the second report in two months indicating U.S. dissatisfaction with the protocol. According to the New York Times on May 19, an administration review concluded the protocol would be inefficient in stopping cheating and its deficiencies could not be overcome before the negotiations deadline.

More than 140 nations, including the United States, have ratified the 1972 Biological Warfare Convention which bans development, production and possession of biological weapons. But it has lacked an effective means of enforcement.

Copyright 2001, Reuters
All Rights Reserved

This man is not going to stop until he has ruined this country and made us a pariah among the peoples of this planet! WHY are we continually allowing Bush to "wait until we have more studies" or "find a compromise" or "develop a new plan" when the rest of the world is ready to go AND this stuff has already been studied to death and granted the "GO" by world experts in the various fields? This idiot who wants "more studies" failed miserably at running 5 oil companies and doesn't remember major portions of his close to failing years at Yale for God's sake! How much more evidence do we need that Bush and Cheney are corporate cronies and will oppose anything that will inconvenience, or not maximize the profits of, their greedy corporate backers?

This is just ONE MORE time BushCheney is being obstructionist and they're becoming more and more dangerous every day! We cannot go through this for 3 and a 1/2 more years!

-- Cherri (jessam6@home.com), July 25, 2001

Answers

I sure hope you're right. I have big money invested in Anthrax.com

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), July 25, 2001.

Cherri, do you have a plan for not going through this for another 3.5 years? Do you have a choice? Plenty of folks didn't think they could stand 4 and then 4 more years of Clinton. Points of view differ. Do you remember the nuclear bomb safety exercises in school? Who'd have thunk we still haven't had a nuclear exchange by now? (And who thought fetal position on the floor would have made a shred of difference? The kid in front of me didn't have good hygiene. bleh)

-- helen (w@has.a.cute.smile), July 25, 2001.

"(that's the excuse, anyway - we say, what are they hiding?)"

Short term profit mentality is a plague on American business but drug companies covering their bets in case they want to sell genocide seems a bit more than maladaptive.

I love ya Cherri but you're starting to worry me.

BTW, who's the "we"?

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), July 26, 2001.


No matter your political persuasion, why do people purport to speak for the majority of anyone. Cherri, the vote was split 50/50, and 3.5 years ain't going to get you the next President Washington. The best that can be hoped for is that taxes don't rise.

-- libs are idiots (moreinterpretation@ugly.com), July 26, 2001.

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