Russia Says U.S. Expanding Bioweapons Labs in Europe

• Russia Says U.S. Expanding Bioweapons Labs in Europe 
  by Bill Gertz, http://freebeacon.com/  
  Russia recently charged the Pentagon with expanding a network of biological weapons laboratories in Europe, a charge the State Department denies.
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  A new Russian national security strategy document describes the United States and NATO as threats and warns of the “uncertainty about instances of foreign states’ possession of biological weapons and their potential for developing and producing them.”
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  “The network of U.S. military-biological laboratories on the territory of states adjacent to Russia is being expanded,” says the strategy, made public Dec. 31. U.S. officials and arms analysts said the Russian charge is false.
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  Blake Narendra, a spokesman for the State Department’s arms control, verification and compliance bureau, said the United States is in full compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention, which bans production and stockpiling of germ weapons.
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  “The United States government supports public and animal health laboratories around the world whose mission it is to safely and securely detect and report the outbreaks of diseases,” Narendra told the Washington Free Beacon. “There is no research or storage at these facilities involving biological or any other kind of weapon,” he said.
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  “Activities for peaceful purposes, to include the prevention of disease, are explicitly permitted under the BWC,” he continued, using an acronym for the Biological Weapons Convention. 
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  Russian Embassy press spokesman Yury Melnik said the strategy does not accuse the United States of developing bioweapons. “Paragraph 19 of the document mentions our concern related to the Pentagon’s bioactivities in neighboring countries,” Melnik said, noting a laboratory in the Republic of Georgia near Tbilisi. “U.S. military professionals conduct research there,” he said. Melnik said “press reports” did not specify identified Pentagon laboratories in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, West Africa and other states.
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  “That is obviously concerning,” Melnik said. “There is absolutely no transparency in U.S. biological activity abroad. Mere involvement of the military personnel raises questions whether [the] U.S. government’s actions are consistent with the BWC.” 
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  Moscow’s charge appears based on Foreign Ministry accusations in June that the Pentagon is covertly researching the weaponization of diseases. That claim, in a ministry statement, followed the disclosure in May that a Defense Department laboratory in Utah mistakenly sent live samples of anthrax, a contagious bacteria found in sheep and cattle that is deadly in humans, to numerous laboratories in the United States and several abroad.
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  The ministry stated that the Richard G. Lugar Center for Public and Animal Health Research, set up under the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction Program near Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi, is a secret U.S. research facility.
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  “American and Georgian authorities are trying to cover up the real nature of this U.S. military unit, which studies highly dangerous infectious diseases,” the ministry said, according to state-run Russian press reports.
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  “The Pentagon is trying to establish similar covert medico-biological facilities in other countries [in Russia’s neighborhood],” the ministry said.
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