NewsMax Wires
Wednesday, April 30, 2003

On June 1, the new Department of Homeland Security takes over Plum Island, an 840-acre wooded landmass, one-and-a-half miles off the coast of Long Island, but has made no public announcement of its plans.

The island, only about 100 miles from both New York and Boston, has for 45 years been the site of a top security department of agriculture laboratory for studying animal diseases.

According to congressional sources, who asked not be identified, the department is considering upgrading the facility -- which would allow it to conduct research on some of the world's most dangerous biological terror weapons including smallpox, anthrax, tularemia and ricin.

Asked why homeland security officials wanted the island, one Capitol Hill staffer said, "There are very few places in the United States where you can handle very dangerous substances. Plum Island because it is not part of the contiguous United States is one of those very few places."

The sources said the homeland security department and the White House had discussed upgrading the facility on Plum Island from biosafety level 3 to level 4.

"The reason you would want to move to biosafety level 4 is if you are potentially looking at zoonotic diseases that might be able to infect and affect humans," one source told United Press International, "you'd be talking about animal diseases that affect people." He gave the example of West Nile virus, the mosquito born fever that has killed hundreds in the United States.

Under law, another congressional aid said, homeland security department must notify Congress 180 days before it upgrades the safety level of the laboratory. "The existing researchers do not transfer (from Agriculture), but if the (department) wishes to add its own researchers it may," he said.

Testing Defenses

The United States has not developed biological weapons since 1969 under an international treaty, but the Department of Defense has maintained facilities that produce biological weapons in small amounts to test defenses against them.

Even before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, or the creation of the new department, there were proposals dating back to 1998 to use the island to test bioweapons.

These proposals caused a furor in communities along Connecticut and Long Island coastlines and now present the Bush administration with a major political fight with senators and representatives from both states.

"For years they studied animal diseases," said Gwen Schroeder, an official of the North Fork Environmental Council "now we learn that they want to switch to anthrax, tularemia and plague. Plum Island is between the Millstone Nuclear Reactor Complex in Waterford, Connecticut, and the Brookhaven National Laboratories. This is a major security danger."

Schroeder said citizens for years have been suspicious about experiments on the island and whether deadly animal diseases were leaking out.

A former scientist at the island told UPI that in 1978 a large hole in a laboratory wall allowed dreaded hoof and mouth to infect a herd of animals on the island. It did not spread to the mainland, he said, but deer and other animals swim back and forth all the time. He said the government hushed the incident up.

The two New York Senators, Hillary Clinton and Robert Schumer, both of whom are Democrats, oppose the placing of a bioweapons research facility on the island. An amendment was proposed to the Homeland Security Act to prevent that, but it was overridden and the notification requirement substituted.

Last December, Clinton told a forum on Long Island she feared moving the island to the new department's control "could be a precursor to raising the bio safety level at the facility. This could allow research on life threatening exotic animal diseases and these harmful materials could be transmitted through the air," she said.

"This is too great a risk and I will strongly oppose any efforts to raise the bio safety level at Plum Island."

The concerns over safety have been intensified by an eight-month strike between a private contractor that provides maintenance on the island and some 76 members of the International Operating Engineers Union. On Plum Island the vital systems needed to contain deadly animal maladies are run by the maintenance workers.

Though the strike continued in April, the union has been largely defeated.

Copyright, United Press International

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Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bioterrorism
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Editor's note:
World’s leading bio-weapons experts warns of smallpox catastrophe – Click here now