Remember that anti-war protest last weekend in Washington, D.C.?  You know, the one on the weekend of September 24-25 where hundreds of thousands marched on the Mall?

Well, that wasn’t the only thing appearing in D.C. that weekend:

Biohazard sensors showed the presence of small amounts of potentially dangerous tularemia bacteria in the Mall area last weekend as huge crowds assembled there, but health officials said they believed the levels were too low to be a threat.

Health authorities in the Washington area were notified yesterday that the bacteria were found in and near the area between the U.S. Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, where crowds gathered Saturday for an antiwar rally and a book festival.

Yikes.

Tularemia is a biological weapon.  Double yikes:

Francisella tularensis has long been considered a potential biological weapon. It was one of a number of agents studied at Japanese germ warfare research units operating in Manchuria between 1932 and 1945; it was also examined for military purposes in the West. A former Soviet Union biological weapons scientist, Ken Alibeck, has suggested that tularemia outbreaks affecting tens of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers on the eastern European front during World War II may have been the result of intentional use.  Following the war, there were continuing military studies of tularemia. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US military developed weapons that would disseminate F tularensis aerosols; …[b]y the late 1960s, F tularensis was one of several biological weapons stockpiled by the US military.

In 1969, a World Health Organization expert committee estimated that an aerosol dispersal of 50 kg of virulent F tularensis over a metropolitan area with 5 million inhabitants would result in 250 000 incapacitating casualties, including 19 000 deaths.  Illness would be expected to persist for several weeks and disease relapses to occur during the ensuing weeks or months.

Want more conspiracy theory?  Guess where Bush was that weekend?  In a military base in Colorado.

Still not sold?  Okay, how about this.  Guess what was going on in Washington D.C. only three days before the anti-war protests in which tularemia was floating around?

Today, somewhere in the DC metropolitan area, the military is conducting a highly classified Granite Shadow "demonstration."

Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military’s extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control.

A spokesman at the Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region (JFHQ-NCR) confirmed the existence of Granite Shadow to me yesterday, but all he would say is that Granite Shadow is the unclassified name for a classified plan.

Have fun, conspiracy theorists!