Biological and Chemical Warfare
Source: Wall Street Journal
Another nation could be attacked surreptitiously, and
who could tell whether a new epidemic was natural or the result of
biological warfare?
The entire subject of your government's half-century old
biochemical weapons development program is so mind-boggling and
outrageous that it almost defies description. The easiest way to
address the issue, as one correspondent noted, is to assume that there
is no longer any such thing as science fiction. The following brief
excerpt from AIDS: The End of Civilization, by Dr. William Campbell
Douglass, makes the point:
If scientists can now play God with germs, then generals
can now play Satan with those same man-made organisms. AIDS is only
the opening gun, a softening up process of a war we
are losing, an arms race that is unseen and undetectible by any
current spy technology.
With the advent of genetic manipulation (i.e.,
recombinant engineering), some most incredible and deadly viruses can
now be manufactured with little difficulty. One devastating
possibility would be to combine the highly-contagious influenza virus
with the genes of either the anthrax toxin, the botulism virus, or the
toxin from plague.
If this type of designer virus were unleashed upon a
population, infection of almost all of the populace would be certain,
especially in the cities, and death would very quickly follow. There
would be no treatment and diagnosis would be difficult. This is not
science fiction. This is today's reality.
Some of the bio-weapons being designed by the Soviets
are almost beyond human comprehension. Russian scientists are
attempting to re-combine the venom-producing genes from cobras or
poisonous spiders with ordinary viruses or bacteria in such a way that
once they infect the body, these organisms will produce deadly,
paralytic cobra or spider neurotoxins. The Soviet literature describes
these weapons as being useful in 'combat or for sabotage purposes'
(Wall Street Journal, 4/23/84.)
Michael Zakharov, a former Soviet biochemist, has
commented on the Soviet use of these venoms in research. He confirmed
that the central Asian cobra is being used to produce one of the most
powerful toxins ever known to man. He said, "If
we isolate this gene -- and it's absolutely possible -- and place it,
introduce it, in the genome of a (common) virus, what will we get? An
absolute killer" (the quote was published in 1988. What has happened
since? -ed.).
Zakharov further elucidated that perhaps the best way to
deliver this paralyzing cobra venom would be to inject the
cobra-producing virus into the simple (highly contagious) flu virus.
While the body was mobilizing its immune system to fight the flu, the
recombinant genes would begin instructing the body to produce its own
snake venom, and thus the body would poison itself.
Soviet bio-warfare scientists are also investigating the
possibilities of honey bee venom, Bulgarian viper venom, and even the
toxin from the deadly puffer fish.
The Wall Street Journal, in its series, 'Beyond Yellow
Rain,' asks,
Do these papers represent bonafide basic research by
Soviet scientists, who may be looking for some new wonder drug? Or are
these the 'sanitized' results of their work on germ
warfare? Any single one of the published Soviet research articles
would not appear greatly different from basic genetic engineering
research conducted in the West. Beyond doubt, there are good
scientific reasons to study toxins...but the voluminous structure of
the Soviet literature points to another hideous intention.
Dr. Richard Lukens, a San Diego biochemist, says,
"...you see them publishing genetic engineering studies of membrane
penetration and various kinds of studies you would expect them to do
if they were in the business of improving
chemical and biological warfare weapons."
The great military powers renounced chemical and
biological warfare more than 20 years ago -- and kept right on
experimenting:
.Our own germ warfare experiments on (U.S.) Seventh Day
Adventist Soldiers ('Project Whitecoat)
.Tuskeegee syphilis experiments on prisoners (J.H.
Jones, Bad Blood, MacMillan, NY, 1982)
.San Francisco Bay attack by the U.S. Army using
Serratia marcescens bacteria (on tens of thousands of civilians
(Common Cause Magazine, Jan/Feb 1988)
.New York subway germ attack (First AIDS Report,
March/April 1988) and many other experiments on humans, largely
unknown to the victims, continue in the free world. In Novosobirsk,
the Ivanofsky Institute and other Soviet centers of
biological warfare, you can be sure that similar diabolical
experiments on humans continue....
The Soviet press, always masters of the half-truth,
accused the U.S. Army of having made the AIDS virus in the
biological warfare laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland. This was a
clever psy-war ploy which, for a while anyway, neutralized these of us
who were saying essentially the same thing, that the AIDS virus was
probably created through recombinant genetic engineering (the
rearranging of genes between two or more species of animals or
plants), and/or serial passage (the growing of a virus in a series of
generations of tissue cells or animals, thus adapting the new virus to
a new species) using human tissue culture cells in the top secret labs
at Fort Detrick. People
started accusing us of spreading the communist line, not a
comfortable position for dedicated anti-communists.
What the Soviet propagandists didn't say was that their
agents had been working in our top security biological
warfare laboratories for over 20 years. In a burst of brotherly love,
they were invited in by President Richard Nixon. The astounded
Communist scientists from Russia, the (former) Eastern Bloc, and
Communist China, who had been trying to penetrate this vital security
area for 40 years, quickly accepted. They have been snickering in
their beakers ever since.
It's not secret that they are there. Dr. Carlton
Gajdusek, a top official at the Fort Detrick laboratory, said in Omni
magazine, 3/86,
"In the facility I have a building where more good and
loyal communist scientists from the USSR and mainland China
work, with full passkeys to all the laboratories, than there are
Americans. Even the Army's infectious disease unit is loaded with
foreign workers not always friendly (to the U.S.)..."
You can't put in any more plainly than that. Even the
Greeks weren't that stupid: they didn't know the Trojan
horse was full of soldiers.
When it became obvious to the Communist press that we
were getting the truth out - in our statements about AIDS and
about who was running things at Fort Detrick - they completely
reversed themselves and said it was all a mistake....that everything
was just fine at Fort Detrick and that their earlier statements had
been 'incorrect.' (end of excerpt)
The reports of chemical and biological warfare
experiments that have allegedly been carried out against innocent
American civilians by the scientists working in the defense' industry
and our own military are numerous. And staggering in their
implication. More and more of these stories are surfacing through
declassified documents, leaks, and the testimonials of some of the
victims involved. A recent small story at the bottom of page 9 in the
New York Times, June 10, 1994 is a perfect example. The headline:
'Minneapolis Called Toxic Spraying Site,' and the story was straight
to the point:
In a 1953 cold war experiment, the Army sprayed clouds
of toxic material over Minneapolis dozens of times and may
have caused miscarriages and still-births, a public television station
reported. The sprayings in Minneapolis and other cities (italics
added) were described then as part of an effort to develop an aerosol
screen to protect Americans from fallout in case of an atomic attack.
The material sprayed in Minneapolis was zinc cadmium sulfide, a
suspected carcinogen, and the Army was actually testing how chemicals
would disperse during biological warfare, the station reported.
"One of the sites sprayed in Minneapolis was a public
elementary school (italics added) where former students
have reported an unusual number of stillbirths and miscarriages."
In its report, the station quoted experts as saying zinc
cadmium sulfide was toxic and might cause cancer. It said
it was sprayed 61 times in four parts of Minneapolis, from
generators in the rear of trucks or from rooftops.
One former student of the sprayed school told the
station that of her three children, one had Down's syndrome,
another was profoundly retarded and a third had a learning
disability.
Yet another instance of our government spending our
money to experiment on us with chemical and bacteriological weapons.
And this one occurred 42 years ago. Care to wonder about what has gone
on in the interim? Consider the following:
One of the more interesting questions about the spread
of HIV and AIDS among the drug-using community is how it could spread
so rapidly in that seedy stratum of society if only
a small portion of the drug abusers actually use hypodermic
syringes to administer their good times? The talk of 'dirty
needles' spreading the AIDS virus according to some is a
smokescreen to hide the real mechanism by which HIV has
been sown so successfully in this 'undesirable' element.
According to sources allegedly 'on the inside' and able
to know what is really going on, the government researchers at Ft.
Detrick, Maryland, and Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico
have succeeded in essentially freeze-drying' the AIDS virus. Remember,
that even without freeze-drying, HIV will survive quite nicely at room
temperature for somewhere between 10-21 days depending upon which
source you feel most comfortable quoting. So, freeze-drying it would
potentially give it a much longer 'shelf-life.'
At any rate, the scenario has it that the AIDS virus was
freeze-dried in some fashion, microencapsulated, and then mixed in
together with high grade heroin for 'shooting' and
cocaine which is usually 'snorted.' In either case, the user would be
introducing HIV directly into the blood stream and could be reasonably
assured to have contracted a death sentence in doing so.
Ultimately, ironically, we have funded, through our
taxes, the weapons of our own mass destruction. No one knows how
many billions have been spent on these tiniest weapons of darkness of
which the AIDS virus is just one.
Recommended Reading:
America the Vulnerable Douglas, J., and Livingstone;
Lexington, Mass, 1987
A Higher Form of Killing Harris; Hill and Wang, N.Y.,
1987 The Killing Winds McDermott; Arbor House, N.Y., 1987 'AIDS
As a Weapon of War' Douglass, W. Gung-Ho magazine, 2/89