OWENS WANTS CIVILIANS TO WATCH ARMY RESEARCH

Rep. Wayne Owens, D-Utah, continues to battle the Army over germ warfare research secrecy - this time calling for a civilian agency to oversee Army medical research.

Owens introduced a bill Tuesday to give the civilian National Institutes of Health responsibility for germ warfare defense research, including developing and testing new vaccines and antidotes for germ-warfare attacks.The Army currently performs such research itself, mainly at Fort Detrick and the Aberdeen Proving Ground, both in Maryland. Much of the field testing and additional research is performed at Utah's Dugway Proving Ground.

Under Owens' bill, the NIH could contract with the Army to continue performing research at Dugway, Detrick and Aberdeen, said Owens aide Paul Warenski. A similar bill introduced by Owens in the most recent Congress would not have allowed that.

The new civilian oversight would be designed to reduce secrecy to ensure the Army is not dabbling with outlawed germ-weapon research for offensive purposes, nor creating exotic new germs through genetic engineering to cause disease without cure.

While the Army has repeatedly denied any such exotic research, critics - including professors at the University of Utah and the watchdog group Downwinders - say Army secrecy and a track record of lies make that difficult to believe.

For example, while the Army says its Biological Defense Research Program is open and unclassified, it has not released to the media and watchdog groups the requested details of many of its tests.

Details of some other tests - obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the Deseret News and others - have also revealed information that concerns critics.

The Deseret News discovered last year that the Army has likely contaminated a vast stretch of Utah public land - about the size of Washington, D.C., - near, but off the Dugway base with unexploded biologic, chemical and high explosive munitions.

FOIA requests also revealed that thousands of open-air biologic tests at Dugway have likely been conducted in past decades, resulting in spraying hundreds of gallons of highly concentrated germ mixtures over the West Desert.

Critics also say early Army contentions that fallout from nuclear tests in Nevada and claims that Dugway testing was not responsible for the 1969 nerve-gas deaths of 6,000 sheep in Skull Valley turned out to be lies.

Owens has also introduced legislation this year to force the Army to list annually all the biologic agents it is using in research.

He is also scheduled to be the lead witness on Wednesday at a joint hearing before the Senate Armed Forces and Government Affairs committees on biologic warfare. Interest by those committees may help Owens' bill to progress, Warenski said.

He added that Owens became interested in the topic last year during controversy over a proposed new lab at Dugway that would make aerosols out of the deadliest germs known to man to test such things as face masks.

Warenski said Owens worries that controversy arising from secrecy in germ research may create a new germ arms race because other nations might suspect that the United States is trying to develop such new weapons.