SOmeone should start keeping track of the ways that the Obama administration has continued pushing Bush's war-mongering. I already covered how Obama is following Bush's footsteps in legalizing torture and preventing accountability war crimes.
Now it seems that the Obama administration is also seeking to undermine the Biological Weapons Convention, just as Bush didm by refusing to abide by the treaty's inspection mechanism.
In doing so, Obama is following John Bolton's policy, Bolton who in 2001 undermined six years of negotiations on a verification system to strengthen the 1972 treaty, by unilaterally declaring that the US would not agree to the inspection mechanism and then withdrew from Bioweapons treaty conference. And yet ironically, the same John Bolton then also falsely accused Cuba (and Sudan and Iran and Syria) of having secret bioweapons programs -- claims that even the CIA and the US State Department refused to support. As the Arms Control Association noted:
Bolton’s initial call for biological weapons inspections in Cuba is particularly striking, given that only months earlier he had led the Bush administration’s effort to reject a verification and enforcement protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The administration contended that the protocol, which had been negotiated over a six-year period, was insufficient to ensure compliance and could harm U.S. commercial and national security interests.
So in short, on one had Bolton was making wide-ranging accusations that Cuba and Iran and Sudan etc. had bioweapons program, and on the other hand Bolton was trying to deliberately make it impossible for international organizations to check his claims, or to verify that the US itself was not secretly violating the same treaty.
And this wasn't the only time - in addition to the Bioweapons Convention, the US has sought to undermine the Chemical Weapons convention too, specifically by illegally pressuring the removal of Jose Bustani, the head of Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in 2002, three years prior to the end of this term. As far as I have seen, the only paper to fully & directly deal with this at the time was the Guardian, in an article by George Monbiot – though theAP reported on it much later:
This was the first time that a head of an international organization was removed from office before the conclusion of his term. Bustani had fallen out of favor with the Bush administration (and John Bolton) for a number of reasons, chiefly because he had insisted that the US be subject to the same chemical weapons inspections as other signatories, refused to play along with the accusations of an Iranian chemical weapons program, and
more significantly, because he had nearly convinced the Iraqis to sign on to the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – which would have meant that OPCW inspectors would have been able get into Iraq and presumably disprove US allegations of "vat-loads" of anthrax etc.
Incidentally, for those who may be interested: Bustani filed suit against the OPCW before the International Labour Organization – and won. The ILO Tribunal ruled that the dismissal occurred under US pressure for political reasons.
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