"Public Menace-Private Profit: America’s Biowarfare Alliance"
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: "Public Menace-Private Profit: America’s Biowarfare Alliance"
Date: Jan 1, 2010 3:16 AM
ARTICLE BELOW
===================
Well, one they didn't win was
"Lyme Disease." The entire medical
world is totally hush-hush, despite
the fact that we were supposed to
hear from IDSociety.org this past
December (2009) about what "Lyme
Disease" is (again).
The best we got out of the decade
was Anthony Fauci sayin' in the summer of
2008 to duh NEJM, "Hmm, maybe we should
take a look at what he structure of
Pam3Cys/HIV/LYMErix is." And, "Hmm,
maybe we have to rethink vaccines."
Seven years after we was sayin, "It
suppresses/dysregulates the immune
system. It gives people a disease
exactly like Chronic Lyme."
What's Chronic Lyme?
It's the thing you get diagnosed
with if you didn't get an MS diagnosis
first:
http://www.actionlyme.org/MARTIN_NINDS_MS_CHRONIC_LYME.htm
I sure wish we had some smart people
in American Medicine. Wouldn't it
be great if we had some smart people?
Maybe if we had some smart people
we could do science. If we had some
smart people in America, maybe we
could do some scientifical stuff like
find out what Relapsing Fever is:
http://www.actionlyme.org/RICOCHRON.htm
Or even what was the Mysterious Merck
Crystal... "against which there would
be no immunity" ... And "we need to rethink
vaccines" ... And "we need to take a look
at what HIV gp120/gp41 (LYMErix) is" ...
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
==========================================
http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/12/public-menace-private-profit-americas-biowarfare-alliance/
Public Menace-Private Profit: America’s Biowarfare Alliance
by Tom Burghardt / December 2nd, 2009
In September, The New York Times reported that a University of Chicago
researcher, Malcolm Casadaban, died after exposure to “a weakened and
ordinarily harmless strain of the bacteria that cause plague.”
According to the Times, “Dr. Casadaban, an associate professor at the
university, was studying the bacteria to create a better vaccine for
plague … in part because of concerns about its possible use in
bioterrorism.” The Times averred that “infectious disease experts said
researchers rarely die from being infected with an ordinarily harmless
strain of the bacteria or viruses they are studying.”
Which of course, raise inevitable and troubling questions: just how
“safe” was the strain of plague studied by Casadaban, and was this
research part of a new round of illicit, highly compartmented
experiments meant to bulk-up America’s first-strike arsenals?
While there is no evidence that Casadaban ever worked on banned
weapons, indeed the molecular geneticist was a leading expert into the
origins of bubonic plague, the casual agent responsible for the Black
Death, and an opponent of biological warfare, what of his colleagues?
One expert, Dr. Kenneth Alexander, told the Times “there might have
been something unusual about the bacteria that caused it to be
dangerous, a mutation, for example.” Alexander hastened to add that
“it was more likely” that the researcher had a “pre-existing
condition,” one that “made him more susceptible to infection.”
Perhaps. But according to Edmond Hammond, director of the now-defunct
Sunshine Project, records pried from the federal government through
the Freedom of Information Act uncovered a disturbing pattern of
criminal neglect amongst university and corporate officials.
Hammond discovered, and shared with Congress back in 2007, information
that should have blown the lid off of one of America’s dirtiest–and
deadliest–little secrets. In excruciating detail, citing case after
case, Hammond told congressional investigators that amongst the deadly
pathogens that escaped containment in a series of underreported
accidents were the following substances: Plague, anthrax, Rocky
Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, brucellosis and Q fever.
Lab workers became sick, communities were threatened and yet, illicit
work with these dangerous germs continue; just another day at the
office for militarists, corporate grifters and their academic
accomplices.
While Dr. Casadaban’s death is a tragedy for family and friends, was a
“pre-existing condition” responsible for the scientist’s demise or was
something more sinister taking place behind closed doors without his
knowledge?
In the former Soviet Union, the Sunshine Project revealed that
scientists involved in illegal offensive biowarfare research developed
“plague bacteria (Yersinia pestis) … that were resistant to 16
different antibiotics. Today, the genetic introduction of antibiotic
resistance into bacterial pathogens is routine work in almost any
microbiology laboratory.”
While it is quite possible that Casadaban’s death was a freak
accident, nothing however can, or should, be ruled out.
Fanciful speculation? Better think again!
In June, Global Security Newswire reported that during a routine
inventory at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious
Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., safety officers “found
nearly 10,000 more vials of potentially lethal pathogens than were
known to be stored at the site.”
Claiming that there are “multiple layers of security,” Ft. Detrick’s
deputy commander Col. Mark Kortepeter said it was “extremely unlikely”
that any of the center’s samples had been smuggled out. “Unlikely,”
but not impossible.
Amongst the 9,200 extra samples uncovered during the inventory were
“bacterial agents that cause plague, anthrax and tularemia;
Venezuelan, Eastern and Western equine encephalitis viruses; Rift
valley fever virus; Junin virus; Ebola virus; and botulinum
neurotoxins.” In other words substances which can, and probably have,
been weaponized by the Pentagon.
As Antifascist Calling previously reported, with “biodefense” as a
cover, the U.S. National Security State has spent tens of billions of
dollars ($56.9 billion since 2001, according to the Center for Arms
Control and Non-Proliferation) on secretive programs investigating the
deadliest pathogens known to nature, or ginning up new chimeric
monsters in any number of privately-run labs.
The antinuclear watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs (TVC) obtained
documents under the Freedom of Information Act that revealed how
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a “limited liability
corporation” overseen by the University of California, Bechtel, BWX
Technologies, Washington Group International and Battelle, routinely
violated federal regulations and had carried out “restricted
experiments” that resulted in the inadvertent release of anthrax in
2005.
Noting that “the relevant details of the 2005 anthrax accident were
kept from the public at the time, just as happened with the illegal
experiments that are coming to light today,” TVC learned that this
work is expanding, with little in the way of effective oversight by
Congress or indeed, by any regulatory agency.
LLNL has now opened a Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) facility and is
planning to experiment with pathogens exquisitely suited for use as
offensive weapons. Activities contemplated include, “aerosolizing
(spraying) pathogens such as plague, tularemia and Q fever, in
addition to anthrax. Moreover, government documents disclose that
planned experiments in the BSL-3 include genetic modification and
potentially novel manipulation of viruses, prions and other agents.”
In October, TVC filed a motion for summary judgement in Federal Court
in the Northern District of California “aiming to stop the operation
of a bio-warfare agent research facility at the Lawrence Livermore
National Lab (LLNL) main site in Livermore, California.”
According to TVC, “the large inventory of multiple bio-weapon agents,
the presence of genetically modified variants, and the fact that some
of the pathogens have been put into just the right form to be
effectively spread via an airborne release, all serve to make the
Livermore BSL-3 a potential magnet for terrorism from either an
internal or external source.”
Currently, some 400 research facilities and more than 15,000
individuals are cleared “to have access to select agents, which
include anthrax, smallpox and the Ebola virus,” according to a
September report by the National Research Council.
The NRC averred that lax security at laboratories that work with
select agents “pose a severe risk to human or animal health,” risks
that “have grown as the amount of research has increased in recent
years.”
And if one or more of these researchers should “go rogue,” for money
or as a plausibly deniable component of a Pentagon or CIA operation,
doesn’t the public have the right to expect the civilian side of
government would weed out such miscreants from work with these deadly
toxins?
A History of Illicit Research
The close proximity of U.S. biological warfare programs and the
pharmaceutical industry is hardly an historical accident. From its
inception, American research drew from a rich pool of biomedical
researchers backed by the formidable technological resources of Big
Pharma.
As Leonard Cole revealed in his 1988 exposé, Clouds of Secrecy: The
Army’s Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas, biowarfare research
during World War II and the Cold War period was a public/private
affair in which the government provided funds to state agencies and
private corporations alike in the hope that such solicitous
relationships would lead to breakthroughs in the area of offensive
weapons or what is now euphemistically called “biodefense.”
Indeed, none other than George W. Merck, the president of the Merck
Pharmaceutical Company, was a top-flight consultant to the Secretary
of War. In that capacity, Merck and his company provided expertise and
technological know-how for work on America’s nascent biowar programs.
In a 1946 report to the Secretary of War penned by Merck, Cole
revealed that the program “included research, testing, development,
and production of biological agents,” all carried out as Merck wrote,
in the “strictest secrecy.”
While wartime fears of biological attacks by the Axis powers
represented a clear and present danger to the United States and their
allies as revelations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan’s active
programs attest, this information was scrupulously covered-up and
suppressed for decades. Indeed after the war, the United States
actively recruited these sociopaths into their biological, chemical
and nuclear weapons programs.
As is now known, America’s military establishment struck a devil’s
bargain with the same war criminals who, in the name of science,
visited death upon millions. While the doctors and biologists who
filled the ranks of Japan’s Unit 731 hadn’t achieved a “breakthrough”
in terms of delivery systems’ development, as researcher Sheldon H.
Harris revealed in Factories of Death, they possessed an invaluable
resource sought by U.S. bioweaponeers: detailed records of the
Japanese Army’s obscene human experiments.
After the war with a new official enemy looming on the horizon–the
Soviet Union–Merck admonished the state to maintain a strong
biological warfare program, writing: “Work in this field, born of the
necessity of war, cannot be ignored in time of peace; it must be
continued on a sufficient scale to provide an adequate defense.”
By 1948, the newly-emerging national security state stood-up a
Committee on Biological Warfare within the Department of Defense to do
just that. Shortly thereafter, the Central Intelligence Agency,
particularly the Company’s Technical Services Division (TSD), so-
called “wizards of Langley,” ran a series of illicit programs that
sought to “secure the realm” through the application of the latest
advances in the biological and psychological sciences.
Over decades, projects such as Bluebird, Artichoke, MKDELTA, MKNAOMI
and MKULTRA, variously identified by researchers as “mind control”
projects–which they were–garnered outrage when it was revealed during
the 1970s that the Agency conspired with leading psychiatrists,
psychologists, medical doctors, biologists and academic institutions
in funding obscene human experiments employing psychoactive drugs such
as LSD, mescaline and BZ on unwitting test subjects.
As the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, popularly
known as the Church Committee, revealed during hearings to examine the
Watergate scandals of the 1970s, the Pentagon’s own programs ran
simultaneously with those of the CIA. The Committee discovered:
In many respects, the Army’s testing programs duplicated research
which had already been conducted by the CIA. They certainly involved
the risks inherent in the early phases of drug testing. In the Army’s
tests, as with those of the CIA, individual rights were also
subordinated to national security considerations; informed consent and
followup examinations of subjects were neglected in efforts to
maintain the secrecy of the tests. Finally, the command and control
problems which were apparent in the CIA’s programs are paralleled by a
lack of clear authorization and supervision in the Army’s programs.
(Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, Project MKULTRA,
The CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, United
States Senate, August 3, 1977, Appendix A, p. 92)
While these projects may only have achieved modest success in standing
up programmable assassins, as evidence on Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan
Sirhan may suggest, MKULTRA and its spin-offs were primarily
behavioral modification programs subsequently useful for what are now
euphemistically termed “enhanced interrogation techniques,” e.g.,
torture and as a formidable bioweapons project.
Indeed, Ft. Detrick’s Special Operations Division (SOD), chock-a-block
with CIA officers and assets, was, by the early 1950s experimenting
with, and assembling biologically-based assassination weapons that
were easily concealed and could be deployed by “wet work” specialists
to murder foreign leaders such as the multiple failed plots against
Fidel Castro, or Patrice Lumumba attest. As researcher Ed Regis
documented, Congolese Prime Minister Lumumba was a thorn in the secret
state’s side.
Refusing to play ball with Washington so as to facilitate the
extraction of that nation’s vast mineral wealth by American
multinational corporations, Lumumba sealed his fate when he sought
military assistance from the Soviet Union. At that point, the national
liberation leader became an object for Agency “executive action.”
It was around this time that the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans,
Richard Bissell, had a couple of informal talks with his scientific
adviser, Sid Gottlieb, concerning the subject of the covert
assassination of foreign leaders. Gottlieb suggested that biological
agents were perfect for the task: they were invisible, untraceable,
and, if intelligently selected and delivered, not even liable to
create a suspicion of foul play. The target would get sick and die
exactly as if he’d been attacked by a natural outbreak of an endemic
disease. Plenty of lethal or incapacitating germs were out there and
available, Gottlieb told Bissell, and they were easily accessible to
the CIA. (Ed Regis, The Biology of Doom, New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1999, pp. 182-183)
While proponents of continued research with nature’s deadliest
pathogens argue that the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) allows
for purely “defensive” work to protect the public against potential
bioattacks, this mendacious logic studiously avoids the issue of the
dual-use nature of this work.
Cole unearthed documents, including a 1968 official history of Ft.
Detrick penned by a Pentagon bioweaponeer who asserted forthrightly
that “research and development in the offensive aspects of BW
proceeded hand in hand with defensive developments for, in truth, the
two are almost inseparable.”
But MKULTRA and its grisly spin-offs are a thing of the past, right?
Not by a long shot!
Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist and critic of the torture-enabling
American Psychological Association (APA), revealed November 23, that
the group had organized a workshop in 2007 at the Arlington, Virginia
headquarters of the dodgy RAND Corporation.
That conference, entitled “Science of Deception: Integration of
Practice and Theory,” discussed new and novel ways “to utilize drugs
and sensory bombardment techniques to break down interrogatees. Those
are signal techniques of psychological torture long utilized by the
CIA and other intelligence agencies and military around the world.”
Citing APA documents, Kaye discovered that APA and their friends at
CIA were actively looking for “pharmacological agents … known to
affect apparent truth-telling behavior.” Kaye learned that amongst the
probative questions driving the spooks and contractors was this
revealing sentence: “What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of
deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the
senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?”
According to numerous researchers, the CIA, and the psychologists
and psychiatrists they contracted to work with them, including many of
the top behavioral scientists of their day, experimented with many
drugs in their quest to find a “truth” drug that would open up the
recalcitrant and expose the liar and the dissembler. The CIA has
declassified a paper from its in-house intelligence journal from the
early 1960s, “‘Truth’ Drugs in Interrogation,” where they discuss
research on drugs for interrogation ranging from scopolamine,
amphetamines, and barbiturates to cannabis, LSD, and mescaline. The
CIA authors discuss the limitations of using drugs, based on research,
and conclude that a special use for drugs may be found in detection of
deception. (Jeffrey Kaye, “Who Will Investigate CIA/RAND/APA Torture
‘Workshop’?,” The Public Record, November 21, 2009)
What was true throughout the Cold War period is just as true today and
remains a pressing public health issue. As Global Security Newswire
reported in August, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) began construction on a new facility at
Ft. Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. The brief report states that “new
site will allow for more study of lethal diseases and should have
space for 952 staffers, compared to the 800 now using facilities that
date back four to five decades.”
While the National Academy of Sciences “plans to assess health and
safety issues raised by observers who believe there has been
insufficient consideration regarding the potential release of an
infectious agent from the facility,” the same can also be said for the
BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities in private hands, under contract to the
U.S. government.
As I reported in “Bringing the (Bio) War Home,” the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists revealed that “massive U.S. biodefense spending and
a buildup of high-containment laboratories throughout the country
might have created an internal security risk that no outside terrorist
group could ever duplicate. Nearly two dozen new federal and many more
new private biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories have been built in
recent years, meaning a large cadre of scientists has access to
extraordinarily lethal material.”
And if today’s bioweaponeers have their way, such risks will increase
exponentially with untold consequences for us all.
Building Banned Weapons
Leading experts, as I reported in August, have derided the possibility
that terrorist groups have the know-how to fabricate smallpox or other
pathogens into biological weapons as a massive “fraud … and a
substantial one” perpetrated on the American people.
Hysterical claims by securocrats that “bioterrorism is one of the most
pressing problems we have on the planet today,” an assertion made by
Dr. Tara O’Toole, the Undersecretary of Science and Technology at the
Department of Homeland Security, is not borne out by the facts.
Indeed, such claims not only distort available evidence that terrorist
groups have such capabilities but conceal the more salient fact that
Pentagon weaponeers continue to build banned weapons.
According to Jeanne Guillemin, author of Biological Weapons: From the
Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism,
the Pentagon and CIA made and tested a model of a Soviet anthrax bomb
and created an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax.
After consulting with scientists who strongly suggested that the CIA
anthrax bomb project would violate the BWC, “CIA lawyers decided the
project was within the allowed realm of defensive research,” Guillemin
revealed.
Project Clear Vision, a joint investigation by the CIA and the
Battelle Memorial Institute, under contract to the Agency,
reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test
its dissemination characteristics. The Agency “decided the same” for
the small, fully functional bioweapons facility built under the rubric
of Project Bacchus.
The third initiative, Project Jefferson, led to the development of an
antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax based on a Soviet model. After
the outgoing Clinton administration hesitated to give the CIA the go-
ahead for the project, the Bush regime’s National Security Council
gave the Pentagon permission. “They believed” Guillemin wrote, “the
Pentagon had the right to investigate genetically altered pathogens in
the name of biodefense, ‘to save American lives’.”
Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon authorized the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA), one of the most secretive and heavily-outsourced Defense
Department branches, to re-create the deadly anthrax strain.
Commenting on the close proximity of the 2001 anthrax provocation and
the rush towards the invasion and occupation of Iraq, constitutional
law expert Glenn Greenwald writes that the anthrax attack “played at
least as large of a role as the 9/11 attack itself, if not larger, in
creating the general climate of fear that prevailed for years in the
U.S. and specifically how the anthrax episode was exploited by leading
media and political figures to gin up intense hostility towards Iraq.”
Which is why, according to Greenwald, “it’s so striking how we’ve
collectively flushed this terrorist attack down the memory hole as
though it doesn’t exist.” Indeed, “what makes this particularly
significant is that the anthrax attack is unresolved and
uninvestigated.”
Here we have one of the most consequential political events of the
last decade at least–a lethal biological terrorist attack aimed at key
U.S. Senators and media figures, which even the FBI claims originated
from a U.S. military lab. The then-British Ambassador to the U.S. is
now testifying what has long been clear: that this episode played a
huge role in enabling the attack on Iraq. Even our leading mainstream,
establishment-serving media outlets–and countless bio-weapons experts–
believe that we do not have real answers about who perpetrated this
attack and how. And there is little apparent interest in investigating
in order to find out. Evidently, this is just another one of those
things that we’ll relegate to “the irrelevant past,” and therefore
deem it unworthy of attention from our future-gazing, always-
distracted minds. (Glenn Greenwald, “A key British official reminds us
of the forgotten anthrax attack,” Salon, November 27, 2009)
On and on it goes, America’s headlong rush into the abyss.
While the American people believed the election of Barack Obama
signaled a change in direction from decades’ long policies that have
brought the planet to the brink of disaster, those hopes are little
more than cynical illusions manufactured by media specialists and spin-
doctors, the ubiquitous army of “message force multipliers” who do the
bidding of their corporatist masters.
After all, $57 billion buys much in the way of silence.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco
Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and
Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers,
scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles
can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily and Pacific
Free Press. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military
"Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press. Read other
articles by Tom, or visit Tom's website.
This article was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 8:59am and
is filed under Health/Medical, Military/Militarism, Psychology/
Psychiatry, Science/Tech. ShareThis
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1.
Annie Ladysmith said on December 2nd, 2009 at 11:43pm #
There are all kinds of ‘biological’ weapons that can kill us.
The US government has them all. There is only one drawback, once out
of the vial, how to contain it when you’ve reached the death quotient?
What they are working on with this type of bacteria-plague, is a
virus engineered to kill the bacteria and make it safe for the Chosen
Ones (no reference to the Jews) to come out of their tunnels and
underground cities. What the ‘Bomb’ dosn’t get the plague will.
This ‘researcher’ who died may have commited suicide by lethal
bug, it is interesting that he obviouly took precautions not to infect
anyone else.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci