Gas Used in Russian Tragedy to be Used on US Crowds

Stephen James Kerr reports,

When Vladimir Putin's generals pumped anaesthetic gas through the vents of that Moscow theatre last week, the inadvertent killing of 117 hostages by their rescuers became the calling card of a new era in chemical warfare. Russian health minister Yuri Shevchenko confirmed yesterday that the substance used was a sedative called fentanyl, in the same family as morphine and heroine.

Ironically, according to the Sunshine Project, an international NGO dedicated to the eradication of bio/chemical weapons, this is the very drug that has caught the eye of American researchers at Penn State who are exploring potential military uses of pharmaceuticals.

The Sunshine Project, which has obtained a deluge of documents through the Freedom of Information Act, believes the U.S. military is in fact deeply interested in weaponized "calmatives," particularly Valium, Prozac and Zoloft. Arms monitors are sounding the alarm that, while George W. Bush prepares to invade Iraq over its alleged chemical weapons, U.S. efforts to turn pharmaceuticals into "non-lethal" armaments are themselves in direct violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

One of the released documents is a Department of Defense presentation entitled Into The Future: Non-Lethal Capabilities Into The 21st Century. The weapons at the top of the non-lethal list are calmatives that will "attack a target's senses or cognitive/motor abilities."

..."What the Pentagon planners are anticipating is that U.S. forces will repeatedly be put in a situation where they feel they need to drug large quantities of civilians," says Edward Hammond, a biotech expert with the Sunshine Project.

"But they are also looking at these weapons in what they call "the full spectrum of war,' meaning anti-terrorism and anti-drug operations up through major-theatre-scale conflict like invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq."