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Report: Government surplus sales include bioterror gear

Emergency Management Alert, October 16, 2003

Undercover congressional investigators used the Internet to buy thousands of dollars of surplus laboratory equipment and protective gear that could be used to make biological and chemical weapons, Reuters reports.

The General Accounting Office (GAO) told Congress on October 7 that its investigators spent $4,100 to buy Defense Department equipment including a biological safety cabinet, a bacteriological incubator, an evaporator, and protective clothing with an original cost of $46,900. In addition, thousands of defective protective suits the Pentagon was trying to pull from circulation may have found their way to state and local law enforcement agencies and other first responder units.

The GAO also found that between October 1, 1999, and March 31, 2003, the Pentagon sold more than 600 pieces of lab equipment and more than 250,000 protective suits to buyers in the Middle East, the Philippines, and Canada.

After earlier hearings on biological and chemical weapons tools, the Pentagon had said defective and surplus protective suits would no longer be sold to the public. But GAO officials said it was able to buy hundreds of older "battle dress overgarments," some from defective lots the department had been trying to remove from circulation for several years. Almost 5,000 defective suits may have been issued to state and local law enforcement agencies.

Lab equipment is also available from other sources such as medical and laboratory suppliers.

An official from the Defense Logistics Agency, which handles the Pentagon's surplus property, told the House Government Reform subcommittee on national security and emerging threats that steps were underway to tighten controls and notify agencies of potentially defective gear.

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