Anthrax

A one-star general and 11 other people associated with an Army biodefense laboratory face potential punishment for leadership, management and technical failures that an Army report says contributed to the mistaken shipment of live anthrax to other labs over a period of years.

The Pentagon disclosed Wednesday that it inadvertently shipped possibly live anthrax to at least 51 laboratories across the U.S. and in three foreign countries over the past decade, but it has yet to determine how it happened, who is to blame, why it was not discovered earlier and how much worse the embarrassment will get.

The U.S. Army's mistaken shipment of live anthrax samples to government and commercial laboratories occurred at a military post in a desolate stretch of the Utah desert that has been testing chemical weapons since it opened in 1942.