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October 16, 2001
Patrick
Cockburn
The
Battle of Mazar-i-Sharif
John
Troyer
Return
to Normal?
Moji Agha
A
Jihad Against Ignorance
October
15, 2001
Tariq
Ali
Alternatives
to War
John
Pilger
War
American Style
Umberto
Eco
The
Roots of Conflict
Marwan
Bishara
Clash
of Civilizations? Hardly
Patrick
Cockburn
Modern
War in
A Medieval Village
October
13, 2001
Carl
Estabrook
Letters
to Editors
Molly
Secours
War:
The Procter and Gamble Perspective
Alexander
Cockburn
War
Can't Save the Economy
October
12, 2001
Imran
Khan
Try
Them in Court
Vijay
Prashad
War
in a Passive Voice
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombing
the Taliban
October
11, 2001
David
Vest
Bob
Dylan and 9/11
Amb.
Edward Peck
Bush
War Plan "Dumb"
Hani
Shukrallah
West
Is As West Does
Patrick
Cockburn
Looming
Humanitarian Crisis
October
10, 2001
Cockburn/St.
Clair
The
Empire Strikes Back
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Five
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Published Oct. 3, 2001
8-Page Special
Issue
Aftermath
Diary
Ashcroft's Onslaught
on
Civil Liberties
Ridge Long Groomed
for
Cheney's Job
Those CIA Killing
Bids
Never Stopped
The Not-So-Great
Mayor Giuliani
Crop Duster
Ban
Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
Laden Women
Fled Bel Air
Tom Ridge's
Vietnam
Same as Kerrey's?
A CounterPunch
Journey
to Ramallah
A Word About
God
Nostrodamus
Jam-maker
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James
Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas
Valentine
Al
Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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October
17, 2001
The Anthrax Chronicles
The Check's
In The Mail
By Steve Perry
The U.S. Congress headed for the hills on Wednesday
after it was reported that the anthrax sample received at Senator
Tom Daschle's office on Monday may have gotten into the ventilation
system of the Senate's Hart Office Building. By mid-morning Wednesday
some 29 Daschle staffers had already tested positive for exposure
to anthrax, and hundreds of others Capitol Hill staffers were
standing in line to get nasal swabs. House Speaker Dennis Hastert
announced that House offices would close until at least next
Tuesday, and the Senate was expected to follow suit. Congress
is effectively closed until the middle of next week. Around mid-day
came word that spores had also been found in offices of New York
Governor George Pataki.
Despite the innumerable official-sounding
speculations, no one knows where the anthrax originated or what
it may bode for the future. The Daschle mailing, like the letter
sent to NBC's Tom Brokaw, was postmarked in Trenton, New Jersey.
But if official accounts are to be believed, the spores contained
in the Daschle letter were enormously more potent than any of
the other anthrax samples seen to date. Televised CNN reports
made ambiguous reference to the possibility that the Florida
and D.C. anthrax mailings came from "different groupings,"
but it wasn't clear whether that meant they represented different
strains of the bacteria, or just that they had been processed
at separate facilities by different means. In either case it
underlined the relative ease of acquiring and transporting anthrax
bacteria. Processing the spores into "weapons-grade"
packages containing spores of 1 to 10 microns in size may be
a sophisticated procedure, but acquiring the raw materials was
simple as could be until very recently-and there's no telling
how long the perpetrators have possessed it or how they got it.
These matters aside, there's no denying
that the use of the U.S. Postal Service was a stroke of brilliance
on the part of the perpetrators. It's a virtually untraceable
delivery system (investigators pursuing the Trenton connection
admitted on Tuesday that the mailing to Daschle's office might
have come from any of 46 different postal branches, and probably
did not come from a resident of Trenton) that maximizes
the element of fear and paralysis and makes the most of what
may-or may not-be limited supplies of the bacilli. It likewise
circumvents the problem of coordination and possible detection
associated with a more public release of anthrax spores. The
perpetrators have succeeded in creating the impression they can
go anywhere: The sites infiltrated in the past few days include
two major media networks, a titan of American capitalism-the
Microsoft offices in Reno, Nevada-and two prominent state and
federal government facilities.
Cipro: Public
health vs. corporate patents
Meanwhile the patent lawyers fiddle as
Rome smolders. Bayer AG, the German pharmaceutical company that
holds the patent on Cipro, the antibiotic of choice in treating
anthrax exposure, is working round the clock to stave off international
calls for the violation of its copyright in the interest of public
health. On Tuesday New York Senator Charles "Boomer"
Schumer joined the chorus calling for the broad-scale licensing
of generic manufacturing of Cipro clones to combat the prospective
rise in anthrax exposure. Bayer responded by promising to ramp
up its production of Cipro from 15 to 60 million tablets per
month. Even at that level, the stores of Cipro would be sufficient
to treat only half a million exposures-and scares-around the
world, since the preventative course of Cipro involves two tablets
daily for 60 days. This is not to mention the cost factor: Under
patent protections, Cipro presently costs $350 a month in the
United States, but according to the New York Times, the same
formula from "reputable suppliers" costs only $10 a
month in India.
But set aside the cost and consider the
broader ramifications. Capacity for treating half a million may
seem a lot, but it's a paltry sum from a public health standpoint
given the rapidly escalating number of anthrax threats in the
U.S. alone. The Schumer proposal is entirely sensible and prudent,
and his office notes that at least three other drug manufacturers
could be flooding the market with generic Cipro substitutes within
two to three months if given the go-ahead. But the Bush administration's
Department of Health and Human Services is so far on the side
of corporate patents. Said HHS flak Kevin Keane on Tuesday: "We'll
certainly take a look at the senator's proposal, but we don't
see the need right now. Right now we have enough Cipro and other
antibiotics for the contingencies before the American public.
If we have an emergency, the manufacturers can turn this around
quickly. We have to be careful about patent protections-there's
a balance there."
As the Wednesday
New York Times feature makes clear, there are provisions
in U.S. law that allow the government to ignore any drug patent
with impunity and allow competitors to make a generic equivalent.
But so far the Bush administration is loath to do so. For one
they are worried that any invocation of a national emergency
to violate the Bayer patent on Cipro would set a dangerous precedent
for the release of patented AIDS drugs in Africa. Many of the
drugs in question are of course patented by American drug companies.
National crises come and go, but business is business. CP
Steve Perry
writes frequently for CounterPunch and is a contributor to the
excellent cursor.org
website, which offers incisive coverage of the current crisis.
He lives in Minneapolis, MN.
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