Bush's avian flu rap is attempt to blind America with fear

Sean Gonsalves writes: 

The major news outlets have been giving lots of coverage to yet another dreadful warning coming from the Bush administration -- the looming "bird flu pandemic." (Cue the sound track of Hitchcock's classic "The Birds").

Best case scenario, reports the Associated Press, a minimum of 200,000 people will die from an avian flu pandemic, but it could be as many as 2 million deaths in America alone. Yikes.

Ah, the power of fear. Edmund Burke, the intellectual father of conservatism, would be impressed. In Burke's "On the Sublime and Beautiful" (1757), he wrote: "No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."

President Bush didn't let Burke down. At an Oct. 4 press conference, he talked about the possibility of having a military-enforced quarantine.

"And who best to be able to effect a quarantine? One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move....I think it's an important debate for Congress to have." Lord knows, the president loves a good "debate."

Not that he's predicting an outbreak, he said, "but we better be thinking about it. And we are. And we're more than thinking about it; we're trying to put plans in place."

Included in those plans are billions of dollars to buy Tamiflu, the most sought-after flu remedy in the world.

If you dig a little deeper you'll find that a California biotech company called Gilead owns the rights to Tamiflu. And guess who was Gilead's former chairman? Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who served as Gilead chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001.

Fortune magazine's senior writer Nelson Schwartz reports that Rumsfeld still owns between $5 million and $25 million in Gilead stock.

The Bush administration is one of biggest Tamiflu buyers. In July, the Pentagon ordered $58 million worth of Tamiflu and Congress is being urged by the president to approve another multi-billion dollar purchase.

Rumsfeld recused himself from being involved in Gilead decisions. An unnamed Pentagon official told Fortune that Rummy considered selling his stock but a private securities lawyer "advised him that it was safer to hold on to the stock and be quite public about his recusal rather than sell and run the risk of being accused of trading on insider information."

Every time you turn around, up pops another "coincidence." Bush has deep ties to the oil industry and oil companies are making record profits. A "war on terror" is being waged and who gets the multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts? Companies with ties to the Bush administration.

The rebuilding of the Gulf Coast? More money for Bush cronies. And now, the president just happens to be reading a book about the 1918 influenza outbreak and decides to start preparing the public for another possible major threat from which Rumsfeld stands to handsomely profit.