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The history of bioweapons research in the United States is a history of illicit--and illegal--human experiments.
From the Cold War to the War on Terror, successive American administrations have turned a blind eye on dubious research rightly characterized as having "a little of the Buchenwald touch."
While the phrase may have come from the files of the Atomic Energy Commission as Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome revealed in her 1999 book, The Plutonium Files, an investigation into secret American medical experiments at the dawn of the nuclear age, it is as relevant today as the United States pours billions of dollars into work on some of the most dangerous pathogens known to exist in nature.
That Cold War securocrats were more than a little concerned with a comparison to unethical Nazi experiments is hardly surprising. After all, with the defeat of the Axis powers came the triumphalist myth-making that America had fought a "good war" and had liberated humanity from the scourge of fascist barbarism.
Never mind that many of America's leading corporations, from General Motors to IBM and from Standard Oil to Chase National Bank, were sympathizers and active collaborators with the Third Reich prior to and even during World War II, as documented by investigative journalists Charles Higham in Trading With The Enemy, and Edwin Black in IBM and the Holocaust. Like much else in American history, these were dirty little secrets best left alone.
Soon enough however, these erstwhile democrats would come to view themselves as mandarins of a new, expanding American Empire for whom everything was permitted. In this context, the recruitment of top German and Japanese scientists who had conducted grisly "medical" experiments whilst waging biological war against China and the Soviet Union would be free of any moralizing or political wavering.
As the Cold War grew hotter and hotter, America's political leadership viewed "former" Nazis and the architects of Japan's Imperial project not as war criminals but allies in a new undertaking: the global roll-back of socialism and the destruction of the Soviet Union by any means necessary.
This tradition is alive and well in 21st century America. With the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent anthrax mailings as a pretext for an aggressive militarist posture, the national security state is ramping-up research for the production of genetically-modified organisms for deployment as new, frightening weapons of war.
According to congressional testimony by Dr. Alan M. Pearson, Director of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Control Program at the Washington D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, with very little in the way of effective oversight or accountability, tens of billions of dollars "have been appropriated for bioweapons-related research and development activities." Pearson reveals that approximately $1.7 billion "has been appropriated for the construction on new high containment facilities for bioweapons-related research."
By high containment facilities I mean facilities that are designed for work with agents that may cause serious or potentially lethal disease through exposure to aerosols (called Biosafety Level 3 or BSL-3 facilities) and facilities that are designed for work with agents that pose a "high individual risk of life-threatening disease, which may be transmitted via the aerosol route and for which there is no available vaccine or therapy" (called Biosafety Level 4 or BSL-4 facilities).
Prior to 2002, there were three significant BSL-4 facilities in the United States. Today twelve are in operation, under construction, or in the planning stage. When completed, there will be in excess of 150,000 square feet of BSL-4 laboratory space (as much space as three football fields). The number of BSL-3 labs is also clearly growing, but ascertaining the amount of growth is difficult in the absence of accurate baseline information. There are at least 600 such facilities in the US. (Alan M. Pearson, Testimony, "Germs, Viruses, and Secrets: The Silent Proliferation of Bio-Laboratories in the United States," House Energy and Commerce Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, October 2007)
Chillingly, one consequence of this metastatic growth "is that the very labs designed to protect against bioweapons may become a source for them." As the 2001 anthrax attacks amply demonstrated, the threat posed by a biological weapons' incident may be closer to home than any of us care to think. Pearson writes, "Nor should we ignore the possibility that a US biologist may become disgruntled or turn rogue while working in one of these labs."
According to Edward Hammond, the Director of the now-defunct Sunshine Project, while "biological arms control is currently in ... its worst crisis since the signing of the Bioweapons Convention (BWC) in 1972," the American Bioweapons-Industrial Complex has "embarked on the exploitation of biotechnology for weapons development." Indeed, Hammond relates that active programs utilizing genetic engineering techniques have "been employed in offensive biowarfare programs in order to make biowarfare agents more effective."
But increases in state subsidies for such work have generated new risks to the public. A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report faulted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for lax security at three of the nation's five BSL-4 labs currently in operation that "handle the world's most dangerous agents and toxins that cause incurable and deadly diseases." Agents such as Ebola, Marburg and smallpox are routinely studied at these facilities. And yet, as GAO auditors found,
Select agent regulations do not mandate that specific perimeter security controls be present at BSL-4 labs, resulting in a significant difference in perimeter security between the nation's five labs. According to the regulations, each lab must implement a security plan that is sufficient to safeguard select agents against unauthorized access, theft, loss, or release. However, there are no specific perimeter security controls that must be in place at every BSL-4 lab. While three labs had all or nearly all of the key security controls we assessed, our September 2008 report demonstrated that two labs had a significant lack of these controls. (Government Accountability Office, Biosafety Laboratories: BSL-4 Laboratories Improved Perimeter Security Despite Limited Action by CDC, GAO-09-851, July 2009)
As Global Security Newswire revealed in June, a "recently completed inventory at a major U.S. Army biodefense facility found nearly 10,000 more vials of potentially lethal pathogens than were known to be stored at the site."
The 9,220 samples--which included the 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--were found during a four-month inventory at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., according to Col. Mark Kortepeter, the center's deputy commander. (Martin Matishak, "Thousands of Uncounted Disease Samples Found at Army Biodefense Lab," Global Security Newswire, June 18, 2009)
The GSN report states that while "half of the newfound material was destroyed after being recorded," inventory control officer Sam Edwin told reporters that "the other half was deemed worthy for further scientific use, cataloged, and stored in the center's containment freezers."
More pertinently, what happens when the state itself turns "rogue" and under cover of national security and the endless "war on terror" creates the "acute risk" in the form of out-of-control laboratories "designed to protect against bioweapons" that instead, have "become a source for them"?
Bioweapons and National Security: A Chronology
Source Notes: This chronology has drawn from dozens of books, articles and declassified government documents in its preparation. Notable in this regard is Michael Christopher Carroll's Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory; Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda; Bob Coen and Eric Nadler, Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail; the National Security Archive's documentary history of U.S. Biological Warfare programs and The Sunshine Project.
* August 1945: Operation Paperclip, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program to import top Nazi scientists into the United States. Linda Hunt relates in her book, Secret Agenda, that Reich Health Leader (Reichsgesundheitsführer) Dr. Kurt Blome, was saved from the gallows due to American intervention. Blome admitted he had worked on Nazi bacteriological warfare projects and had experimented on concentration camp prisoners with bubonic plague and sarin gas at Auschwitz. After his acquittal at the 1947 Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, Blome was recruited by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and advised the Pentagon on biological warfare. Walter Paul Emil Schreiber, a Wehrmacht general who assigned doctors to experiment on concentration camp prisoners and disbursed state funds for such experiments was another Paperclip recruit; in 1951, Schreiber went to work for the U.S. Air Force School of Medicine. Hubertus Strughold, the so-called "father of space medicine" discussed--and carried out--experiments on Dachau inmates who were tortured and killed; Strughold worked for the U.S. Air Force. Erich Traub, a rabid Nazi and the former chief of Heinrich Himmler's Insel Riems, the Nazi state's secret biological warfare research facility defects to the United States. Traub was brought to the U.S. by Paperclip operatives and worked at the Naval Medical Research Institute and gave "operational advice" to the CIA and the biowarriors at Ft. Detrick.
* September 1945: General Shiro Ishii's Unit 731, a secret research group that organized Japan's chemical and biological warfare programs is granted "amnesty" by Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur in exchange for providing America with their voluminous files on biological warfare. All mention of Unit 731 is expunged from the record of The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. During the war, Unit 731 conducted grisly experiments, including the vivisection of live prisoners, and carried out germ attacks on Chinese civilians and prisoners of war. According to researcher Sheldon H. Harris in Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up, Unit 731 scientists performed tests on prisoners with plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism and other infectious diseases. Their work led to the development of what was called a defoliation bacilli bomb and a flea bomb used by the Imperial Army to spread bubonic plague across unoccupied areas of China. The deployment of these lethal munitions provided the Imperial Army with the ability to launch devastating biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells and populated areas with anthrax, plague-infected fleas, typhoid, dysentery and cholera. Rather than being prosecuted as war criminals, Unit 731 alumni became top bioweapons researchers. Ishii himself became an adviser at USAMRIID at Ft. Detrick.
1950: A U.S. Navy ship equipped with spray devices supplied by Ft. Detrick, sprayed serratia marcescens across the San Francisco Bay Area while the ship plied Bay waters. Supposedly a non-pathogenic microorganism, twelve mostly elderly victims die.
* Early 1950s: Army biological weapons research begins at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC). Vials of anthrax are transferred from Ft. Detrick to Plum Island. This information is contained in a now declassified report, "Biological Warfare Operations," Research and Development Annual Technical Progress Report, Department of the Army, 1951.
* 1951: Racist experiments are carried out. U.S. Army researchers deliberately expose African-Americans to the fungus Aspergillus fumigatus to discern whether they are more susceptible to infections caused by such organisms than white Europeans. Also in 1951, black workers at the Norfolk Supply Center in Virginia were exposed to crates contaminated with A. fumigatus spores.
* 1952: According to 1977 hearings by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research into Project MKULTRA, we discover the following: "Under an agreement reached with the Army in 1952, the Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick was to assist CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery systems. By this agreement, CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for CIA use."
* 1953: Frank Olson, a chemist with the Army's top secret Special Operations Division at Ft. Detrick was involved with biological weapons research and was tasked to the CIA for work on MKULTRA. In 1953, as Deputy Acting Head of Special Operations for the CIA, Olson is a close associate of psychiatrist William Sargant who was investigating the use of psychoactive drugs as an interrogation tool at Britain's Biological Warfare Centre at Porton Down. After being dosed with LSD without his knowledge by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the Agency's liaison to Ft. Detrick, Olson undergoes a severe psychological crisis. The scientist begins questioning the ethics of designing biological organisms as weapons of war. This does not sit well with his Agency and Army superiors. On November 24, 1953, Olson and a CIA minder, Robert Lashbrook, check into New York's Staler Hotel. He never checked out. According to Lashbrook, Olson had thrown himself through the closed shade and window, plunging 170 feet to his death. But because of his knowledge of CIA "terminal experiments" and other horrors conducted under MKULTRA, the Olson family believes the researcher was murdered. When Olson's son Eric has his father's body exhumed in 1994, the forensic scientist in charge of the examination determines that Olson had suffered blunt force trauma to the head prior to his fall through the window; the evidence is called "rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide." Norman G. Cournoyer, one of Olson's closet friends at Ft. Detrick also believes the scientist was murdered. When asked by the Baltimore Sun in 2004 why Olson was killed, Cournoyer said, "To shut him up. ... He wasn't sure we should be in germ warfare, at the end."
* 1955: Following a CIA biowarfare test in Tampa Bay, Florida, the area experiences a sharp rise in cases of Whooping Cough, including 12 deaths. The Agency had released bacteria it had obtained from the U.S. Army's Chemical and Biological Warfare Center at the Dugway Proving Grounds.
* 1956-1958: More racist experiments. The U.S. Army conducted live field tests on poor African-American communities in Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida. Mosquitoes were released into neighborhoods at ground level by "researchers" or by helicopter; residents were swarmed by the pest; many developed unknown illnesses and some even died. After the tests, Army personnel posing as health workers photographed and tested the victims, then disappeared. While specific details of the experiments remain classified, it has been theorized that a strain of Yellow Fever was used to test its efficacy as a bioweapon.
* 1962: A declassified CIA document obtained by the National Security Archive relates the following: "In November 1962 Mr. [redacted] advised Mr. Lyman Kirkpatrick that he had, at one time, been directed by Mr. Richard Bissell to assume responsibility for a project involving the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, then Premier, Republic of Congo. According to Mr. [redacted] poison was to have been the vehicle as he made reference to having been instructed to see Dr. Sidney Gottlieb in order to procure the appropriate vehicle." Gottlieb was the chief scientific adviser for the CIA's MKULTRA program.
* June 1966: The U.S. Army's Special Operations Division dispenses Bacillus subtilis var niger throughout the New York City subway system. More than a million people were exposed when Army operatives dropped light bulbs filled with the bacteria onto ventilation grates.
* December, 1967: The New York Times reports, "Fatal Virus Found in Wild Ducks on L.I." A virus never seen before in the Western hemisphere, began with ducks in Long Island at a site opposite Plum Island; the virus devastates the area's duck industry and by 1975 has spread across the entire continent.
* 1971: The U.S. Department of Agriculture proclaims that "Plum Island is considered the safest in the world on virus diseases." USDA's proof? "There has never been a disease outbreak among the susceptible animals maintained outside the laboratory since it was established."
* 1975: PIADC begins feeding live viruses to "hard ticks," including the Lone Star tick (never seen outside Texas prior to 1975). The Lone Star tick is a carrier of the Borelia burgdorferi (Bb) bacteria, the causal agent of Lyme Disease. The first cases of the illness are reported in Connecticut, directly across from the facility. Current epidemiological data conclusively demonstrate that the epicenter of all U.S. Lyme Disease cases is Plum Island. It is theorized that deer bitten by infected ticks swam across the narrow waterway separating the island from the mainland.
* September 1978: A PIADC news release relays the following: "Foot and Mouth Disease has been diagnosed in cattle in a pre-experimental animal holding facility at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center." A documented outbreak has occurred.
* 1979: An internal investigation of the FMD incident reveals massive, widespread failures in the containment systems at PIADC. A USDA Committee report recommends that "Lab 101 not be considered as a safe facility in which to do work on exotic disease agents until corrective action is accomplished."
* 1979: Despite containment failures and poor practices, USAMRIID undertakes the investigation of the deadly Zagazig 501 strain of Rift Valley Fever at PIADC. Producing symptoms similar to aerosolized hemorrhagic fevers such as Marburg and Ebola virus, the Army inoculates sheep that should have been destroyed as a result of the FMD outbreak with an experimental Rift Valley Fever vaccine. The experiments are conducted outdoors, in violation of the lab's primary directive prohibiting such work. During a 1977 Rift Valley outbreak in Egypt, some 200,000 people are infected and 700 others die excruciating deaths. A survey of blood serum taken before 1977 proved that the virus was not present in Egypt prior to the epidemic. By 2000, rampant outbreaks of the disease have occurred in Saudi Arabia and Yemen with the virus poised to unfurl its tentacles into Europe.
* 1982: A Federal review begun after the FMD outbreak concludes: "We believe there is a potentially dangerous situation and that without an immediate massive effort to correct deficiencies, a severe accident could result... [L]ack of preventive maintenance, [and] pressures by management to expedite programs have resulted in compromising safety."
* 1983: Six PIADC workers test positive for African Swine Fever virus. The workers are not notified of the test results which are conducted clandestinely during routine annual physical exams.
* 1991: USDA privatizes PIADC. A New Jersey firm, Burns & Roe Services Corporation low bids other competitors and is awarded the contract. In cost-cutting moves, the contractor scales back on safety and security measures in place for decades.
* June 1991: An underground cable supplying Lab 257 shorts out but is not replaced since there is no money left in the budget.
* August 1991: Hurricane Bob, a category 3 storm similar to Hurricane Katrina, slams into Plum Island, knocking down overhead power lines that connect Lab 257. The underground cable which was Lab 257's primary power source has not been repaired. Freezers containing virus samples defrost, air seals on lab doors are breached and animal holding room vents fail. PIADC's "fail safe" mechanism of "air dampers" to seal off the facility also fail. Melted virus samples mix with infected animal waste on lab floors as swarms of mosquitoes fill the facility.
* September 1991: The USDA denies that any system failures occurred during the hurricane. Whistleblowing workers in Lab 257 at the time of the blackout are fired in further cost-cutting moves and several subsequently develop mysterious undiagnosed diseases.
* 1992: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cite PIADC with hundreds of safety violations. When OSHA returned five years later, none of the violations have been corrected and discover 124 new violations.
* July 1992: Although USDA officially denies that PIADC conducts biological warfare research, fourteen officials from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Pentagon visit Plum Island. Internal documents reveal that that the visit was "to meet with [Plum Island] staff regarding biological warfare." According to Carroll, "the visitors were part of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency reviewing the dual-use capabilities of the facility."
* Spring 1995: Lab 257 is closed. Although scheduled to be fully decontaminated and demolished in 1996 Carroll reports: "Lab 257 still stands today, rotting from weathered decay, harboring who knows what deep within."
* August 1999: The first four human cases of West Vile virus, a mosquito-borne pathogen never diagnosed in North America are diagnosed on Long Island. Horse farms within a five-mile radius of one another, directly opposite Plum Island, report horses dying following violent seizures. An investigation reveals that 25% of the horses in this small, localized area test positive for West Nile. The outbreak begins in August 1999 when birds, including half the exotic bird species in the Bronx Zoo begin dying mysteriously. The virus has an affinity for birds and the vector is soon identified as the mosquito. In 1999, the disease was confined to the New York City area, however by 2002, the Centers for Disease Control reports all but 6 of the lower 48 states reported West Nile virus in birds, mosquitos, animals or human populations. CDC estimates that some 200,000 people are infected nationally. During the initial outbreak in 1999, veterinary pathologist Tracey McNamara suspected a casual relationship between the bird die-offs and the human cases; CDC rebuffs her concerns. Through her persistent efforts, it is determined that the virus was indeed West Nile, a pathogen that had never been seen in North America. The CDC announces that West Nile virus was in the nation's blood supply when transplant patients who had no prior exposure to the pathogen develop the disease. The USDA's response? Deny, deny, deny? However, Jim House, a former PIADC scientist, believes that West Nile samples existed prior to 1999 on Plum Island. He told Carroll, "There were samples there, and it wasn't answered clearly to the public. They didn't honestly tell how many samples they had and that's when people started to get upset. When Carroll filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a catalog of germs held in the Plum Island virus library, he was turned down on grounds of "national security."
* September 1999: The New York Times reports that due to "the growing threat of biological terrorism" against America's food supply, USDA "is seeking money to turn the Plum Island Animal Disease Center ... into a top security laboratory where some of the most dangerous diseases known to man or beast can be studied."
* 1999: A Cold War-era document is declassified proving that in the early 1950s USAMRIID shipped twelve vials of weaponized anthrax (enough to kill one million people) to PIADC. In 1993 Newsday revealed that previously unclassified documents demonstrated Pentagon plans to disrupt the Soviet economy by spreading diseases to kill pigs, cattle and horses.
* 1999: Plans to "upgrade" PIADC by building a BSL-4 lab are killed when Congress pulls funding after a public outcry.
* September 2001: After the anthrax attacks, despite USDA denials that anthrax was ever present on the island, FBI investigators include the following questions in their polygraph examination of scientists under investigation: "Have you ever been to Plum Island?" "Do you know anyone who works at Plum Island?" "What do they do there?"
* December 2002: The New York Times reports "a three-hour power failure at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center last weekend renewed concerns about the safety of the high-security government laboratory." According to the Times, "the loss of power and failure of all three backup generators raised fears for the first time that the containment of infectious pathogens could have been seriously compromised at the laboratory."
* June 2003: President George W. Bush transfers control of PIADC to the Department of Homeland Security. The airspace over the island is unrestricted and the gates leading to Lab 101 remain open and unguarded.
* May 2004: In a sign that work on Plum Island is being shifted to "other sites," including those run by private contractors, DHS announces an $18 million grant to study Rift Valley fever, avian influenza and brucellosis.
* August 2004: DHS confirmed that an FMD outbreak "had spread briefly" in "two previously undisclosed incidents earlier this summer," The New York Times reports. A DHS spokesperson said the virus remained "within the laboratory's sealed biocontainment area" and that there "had be no risk" to human or animals. An investigation into the cause "was continuing."
* 2004: At the Medical University of Ohio, a researcher is infected with Valley Fever at the center's BSL-3 facility; Valley Fever is a biological weapons agent.
* February 2005: University of Iowa researchers conduct unauthorized genetic engineering experiments with the select agent Tularemia (rabbit fever). The Sunshine Project reports that researchers mixed genes from Tularemia species and introduced antibiotic resistant characteristics into the samples.
* March 2005: When a containment facility fails, workers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are exposed to tuberculosis when the BSL-3 "fail-safe" systems malfunction; a blower pushes contaminated air out of the work cabinet, infecting the workroom. The facility had been inspected one month prior to the accident by U.S. Army.
* Summer 2005: At the same Ohio facility a serious accident occurs when workers are infected with an aerosol of Valley Fever.
* October-November 2005: Dozens of samples thought to be harmless are received by the University of California at Berkeley. In fact, they are samples of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, a BSL-3 bioweapons agent due to its transmission as an aerosol. The samples are handled without adequate safety precautions; however, the community is never notified of the incident.
* August 2005: The whistleblowing watchdog group Tri-Valley Cares obtains documents in May 2009 proving that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had conducted "restricted experiments" with "select biological agents" at the facility. In 2005, LLNL "inadvertently" released anthrax at the lab in another incident that lab officials attempted to cover-up; five individuals were infected with the deadly pathogen.
* April 2006: Three Texas A&M "biodefense" researchers are infected with Q Fever, a biological weapons agent. Rather than reporting the incident to the CDC as required by law, Texas A&M officials cover-up the accident.
* August 2006: DHS announces that PIADC is "not on the rebuilding list" and a new site to study infectious diseases is being considered.
* January 2009: DHS announces that the new National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility will be built in Manhattan, Kansas.
* July 2009: Government Accountability Office investigators charge that DHS relied on "a rushed, flawed study" to locate the $700 million research facility for highly infectious pathogens "in a tornado-prone section of Kansas." Among other concerns, the GAO cites DHS's "flawed and outdated methodology" in its criticism. Those concerns are: "the ability of DHS and the federal government in general to safely operate a biosafety facility such as the proposed NBAF; the potential for a pathogenic release through accidents, natural phenomena, and terrorist actions; our May 2008 testimony that concluded that DHS had not conducted or commissioned a study to determine whether FMD research could be conducted safely on the U.S. mainland; natural phenomena such as tornadoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes that could cause catastrophic damage to the NBAF and result in the release of a pathogen; the possibility that an infected mosquito vector could escape, allowing a pathogen such as Rift Valley Fever virus to become permanently established in the United States; the economic effects of a release or a perceived release on the local, state, and national livestock industry."
Posted by Antifascist at 11:45 AM 0 comments
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Bringing the (Bio) War Home
The 2001 anthrax attacks underscore the dangers posed to our health and safety by the Bioweapons-Industrial Complex.
The killer(s) employed a military-grade version of the deadly pathogen, a four-mutation blend of anthrax prepared at the government's test site at the remote Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Based on available evidence it's a near certainty that the weapon came from stockpiles at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Ft. Detrick, Maryland.
Before the dust cleared prominent opposition politicians had been attacked, five people were murdered, 10,000 more were exposed and representative government ground to a halt as panic set in.
According to multiple media reports, federal investigators concluded that the anthrax spores in the letters addressed to former Senate leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) could only have been produced in a state-run lab. The weaponized version of the pathogen contained as many as one trillion spores per gram, a concentration sufficient enough to kill half the American population if widely distributed.
But rather than giving pause to Pentagon weaponeers, Big Pharma who profit handsomely from vaccine production, the $100 billion agribusiness empire that drives research and the politicians who do their bidding, decades-long U.S. biowar programs have miraculously morphed overnight into a new growth industry: "biodefense."
What had once been Washington's dirty little secret has now blossomed into a $50 billion cash-cow for academic and corporate grifters, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pointed out last year, "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."
Indeed, under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the new National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) opened in 2008 at USAMRIID. The center conducts inherently dual-use classified research and is currently managed by the spooky Battelle National Biodefense Institute.
Under the rubric of preventing bioterrorism, one question that DHS has not answered is whether or not government scientists and private contractors will conduct illicit experiments that violate the Biological Weapons Convention?
We may never know. Claiming that research will not breach the BWC, DHS avers that a "Compliance Review Group" overseen by senior Homeland Security officials will monitor NBACC operations. However information, including the Review Group's reports on Center operations or accidents at the facility may not be available under the Freedom of Information Act under cover of national security.
While it is reasonable to protect the nation's food supply from mischief, including sabotage by terrorists or deranged individuals armed with dangerous pathogens, work on animal diseases should be done transparently and safely. This however, is not the approach favored by the Department of Homeland Security.
A culture of secrecy and cover-up permeates the agency; after all DHS answers to the militarized Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the so-called security "czar" who oversees the 16-agency U.S. intelligence complex.
"Food security" under such conditions is hardly amenable to public accountabilty; it is however, a formula that can be highly detrimental to our health, safety and well-being.
National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility
When the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to phase out the Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) by 2015, the agency cited the need to "enhance our nation's capacity to assess potential threats to humans and animals alike."
Averring that the Plum Island facility "is near the end of its lifecycle" and "is too small to meet the nation's research needs," DHS now plans to open the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) on the campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. Estimated to cost taxpayers some $700 million to construct, the department plans to have the site up-and-running by 2014.
The authority for building the new facility comes from Homeland Security Presidential Directive 9 (HSPD-9): Defense of Agriculture and Food. HSPD-9 mandates that the secretaries of Homeland Security, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services; the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the heads of other "appropriate" federal departments and agencies "in consultation" with the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, "accelerate and expand the development of countermeasures against the intentional introduction or natural occurrence of catastrophic animal, plant, and zoonotic diseases."
According to a 2007 report by the Congressional Research Service:
The DHS foresees multiple uses and goals for the new facility: serving as a unique BSL-3 and BSL-4 livestock laboratory capable of developing countermeasures for foreign animal diseases; providing advanced test and evaluation capability for threat detection, vulnerability assessment, and countermeasure assessment for animal and zoonotic diseases; and supporting countermeasure licensure.
The research agenda for NBAF is to be at least partially based on current risk assessments and subject to change as the risk assessments change. The DHS predicts that the facility will focus on foot and mouth disease (FMD), classical swine fever, African swine fever, Rift Valley fever, Nipah virus, Hendra virus, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, and Japanese encephalitis. (Dana A. Shea, Jim Monke and Frank Gottron, The National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility: Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service, RL42160, November 15, 2007)
A zoonotic disease is one that can easily be transmitted from animals to humans; examples include Rift Valley fever, Lyme Disease, West Nile virus, H1N1 and H5N1 influenza. These pathogens however, can also be deployed as plausibly deniable bioweapons, a point not addressed by government investigators.
"Countermeasure licensure" of course, is a formula for handing over the fruit of publicly funded research to unaccountable private corporations who stand to make hefty profits from the manufacture of vaccines.
More pertinently, will America's expanding "biodefense" industry serve as a cover for the manufacture of new weapons of war?
As Watergate-era congressional investigations and multiple media reports have conclusively demonstrated, for decades the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon employed far-right Cuban mercenaries to attack the economic and agricultural infrastructure of socialist Cuba.
Indeed, Newsday reported as far back as 1977, that "operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971. Six weeks later, an outbreak of the disease forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide epidemic."
The African swine fever virus deployed in the attack according to participants, was believed to have originated from stockpiles stored at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and handed over to CIA-trained terrorists at Ft. Gulick, an Army base in the former Panama Canal Zone.
And in 1981 according to researcher William H. Schaap, Cuba was struck by a devastating epidemic of Dengue fever, "one of some 250 arthropod-borne viruses, or 'arboviruses,' diseases transmitted from one vertebrate to another by hematophagous arthropods--blood eating insects, usually mosquitoes."
"Dengue and other arboviruses" Schaap wrote, "are ideal as biological weapons for a number of reasons. Dengue, especially hemorrhagic dengue, is highly incapacitating; it can be transmitted easily through the introduction of infected mosquitoes; it will spread rapidly, especially in highly populated and damp areas."
Citing the simultaneous outbreak of the disease in three widely separated parts of Cuba and that it is "extremely unusual that such an epidemic would commence in three localities at once," and the absence of the disease on adjacent islands such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Schaap concludes that the pathogen was purposely introduced into Cuba as a bioweapon.
Indeed, Army researchers at Ft. Detrick had conducted dispersal studies of the Aedes aegypti mosquito--and Dengue fever--used in the 1981 attack against the island nation.
The epidemic which hit Cuba in May 1981 was of type 2 dengue with hemorrhagic shock. Except for the type 1 epidemic reported in 1977, this was the first major dengue outbreak in Cuba since 1944, and, most importantly, the first in the Caribbean since the turn of the century to involve hemorrhagic shock on a massive scale.
From May to October 1981 there were well over 300,000 reported cases, with 158 fatalities, 101 involving children under 15. At the peak of the epidemic, in early July, more than 10,000 cases per day were being reported. More than a third of the reported victims required hospitalization. By mid-October, after a massive campaign to eradicate Aedes aegypti, the epidemic was over. (William H. Schaap, "The 1981 Cuba Dengue Epidemic," Washington, D.C.: Covert Action Information Bulletin, Number 17, Summer 1982)
And if the past is any guide to future actions by the Pentagon and the so-called Intelligence Community, what can we infer from DHS's stated goal of standing-up NBAF as a center for assessing "potential threats to humans and animals alike"? As it turns out, quite a lot.
Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigators charge that DHS relied on "a rushed, flawed study" to justify its decision to locate the $700 million research facility for highly infectious pathogens "in a tornado-prone section of Kansas, according to a government report," The Washington Post reported July 26.
The dubious report in question, United States Department of Agriculture Biocontainment Feasibility Studies, Study Report: Plum Island Animal Disease Center, was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and prepared by the giant defense and security firm Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).
Talk about feathering one's own nest! SAIC's Frederick, Maryland advanced technology division (near Ft. Detrick) has partnered-up with with a host of federal agencies including the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, the Pentagon's primary biowarfare research center.
Needless to say, the spooky firm has considerable clout in Washington. According to Washington Technology's "2009 Top 100 Federal Prime Contractors" list, SAIC clocks-in at number 7 (just behind KBR Inc.) with some $4,811,194,800 in revenue, the bulk of earnings coming from defense and security contracts with the federal government.
Last year however, a preliminary GAO report was unveiled during hearings before Congress' Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Energy and Commerce. It was highly critical of the flawed reasoning behind DHS's NBAF decision and SAIC's report. Relying on USDA's 2002 study, GAO auditors found that the agency,
has neither conducted nor commissioned any study to determine whether work on foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) can be done safely on the U.S. mainland. Instead, in deciding that work with FMD can be done safely on the mainland, DHS relied on a 2002 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) study that addressed a different question. The study did not assess the past history of releases of FMD virus or other dangerous pathogens in the United States or elsewhere. It did not address in detail the issues of containment related to large animal work in BSL-3 Ag facilities. It was inaccurate in comparing other countries' FMD work experience with that of the United States. Therefore, GAO believes DHS does not have evidence to conclude that FMD work can be done safely on the U.S. mainland. (Nancy Kingsbury, Managing Director Applied Research and Measurements, Government Accountability Office, High-Containment Laboratories: DHS Lacks Evidence to Conclude That Foot-and-Mouth-Disease Research Can Be Done Safely on the U.S. Mainland, Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, May 22, 2008, GAO-08-821T)
The SAIC review addressed a different issue: whether or not it is "technically feasible" to conduct such research on the U.S. mainland. GAO averred, "This approach fails to recognize the distinction between what is technically feasible and what is possible, given the potential for human error."
Citing "methodological problems" in SAIC's study, GAO auditors found that the report: "(1) did not assess the history of releases of FMD virus or other dangerous pathogens, (2) did not address in detail the issues related to large animal work in BSL-3 Ag facilities, and (3) was inaccurate in comparing other countries' FMD work experience with that of the United States."
GAO concluded that among the report's more glaring and obvious problems, "(1) the study used an ad hoc method to select its expert panel that was not necessarily free from bias; (2) the study report was written by a single third-party person under contract for that purpose who was not present during the panel discussions; and (3) no concern was taken to ensure that the expert panel members reviewed either the draft or the final version of the report. At least one expert panel member expressed disappointment with the slant of the report."
Indeed, the SAIC review failed to address the issue of past releases of FMD or other pathogens, nor did it assess "the general history of accidents within biocontainment facilities." No small matter when it comes to potential mischief or lax safety standards known to exist at such facilities.
According to GAO, "the study panel members we interviewed said that no data on past accidents with or releases of either FMD or other pathogens was systematically presented or discussed. Rather, the panel members recalled that they relied on their own knowledge of and experience with the history of releases in a general discussion."
In a follow-up report published in July 2009, GAO discovered that DHS's Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was wholly inadequate and in fact, relied on flawed and outdated methodology to arrive at their conclusions. According to GAO auditors "Comments on the NBAF draft EIS included the following concerns:"
* the ability of DHS and the federal government in general to safely operate a biosafety facility such as the proposed NBAF;
* the potential for a pathogenic release through accidents, natural phenomena, and terrorist actions;
* our May 2008 testimony that concluded that DHS had not conducted or commissioned a study to determine whether FMD research could be conducted safely on the U.S. mainland;
* natural phenomena such as tornadoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes that could cause catastrophic damage to the NBAF and result in the release of a pathogen;
* the possibility that an infected mosquito vector could escape, allowing a pathogen such as Rift Valley Fever virus to become permanently established in the United States;
* the economic effects of a release or a perceived release on the local, state, and national livestock industry. (United States Government Accountability Office, Report to Congressional Committees, Biological Research: Observations on DHS's Analyses Concerning Whether FMD Research Can Be Done as Safely on the Mainland as on Plum Island, July 2009, GAO-09-747)
Indeed similar to the earlier USDA study, DHS's EIS failed to include even a cursory analysis of multiple releases of the FMD virus at Plum Island itself. No matter, full speed ahead!
Leading the charge to site NBAF at Kansas State University is the Kansas Bioscience Authority (KBA), a business and academic consortium chaired by former Democratic governor John Carlin. Plush with industry heavy-hitters such as the Midwest Research Institute (MRI), the lobby shop KansasBio, Symark LLC, a technology commercialization firm specializing in the biosciences industry, KBA is hell-bent on bringing NBAF to Kansas despite serious health and safety concerns.
According to a Kansas City Star report, Tom Thornton, the President and CEO of the Kansas Bioscience Authority told the newspaper "This nation needs to have one modern biocontainment lab that conducts research into these diseases to protect agriculture and protect public health."
Claiming that the GAO report was "biased," KBA's John Carlin asserted that "aside from using Dorothy as their science, they don't have much going for them." Thornton said the project would be built as a "vault inside a vault inside a submarine" to protect against the accidental release of germs and diseases.
In other words, move along...
DHS and USDA assert, despite historical evidence, that Foot-and Mouth-Disease (FMD) as well as research with other dangerous pathogens can be safely conducted on the U.S. mainland at its new agro-defense center. But if evidence from Britain is any guide on what to expect, the explosive growth of Biosafety Level 3 and 4 laboratories in the United States will only compound the problem.
In 2001 and 2007, FMD releases at Britain's Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright were traced to a leaking drain which allowed the disease to escape containment. Crumbling infrastructure is only one of a constellation of issues that led to the outbreaks, investigators discovered. Lax oversight and a culture of secrecy nearly devastated Europe's livestock.
According to Britain's National Audit Office, the direct cost of the 2001 outbreak to the public sector was estimated at over $5.71 billion and the cost to the private sector clocked-in at over $9.51 billion. Indeed, when tourism and supporting industries were factored into the equation, total losses ballooned from $8.56 billion to $10.27 billion when movement into the countryside was restricted by the state, UK auditors estimated.
By the time FMD was eradicated in September 2001, more than six million animals had been slaughtered and the disease had spread to France, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands and Northern Ireland. A similar outbreak in 2007 fueled calls to close the facility.
This is not a problem confined to Britain, but is endemic to the entire bioweapons and "biodefense" complex globally, particularly here in the heimat.
Tip of a Sinister Iceberg
Bioweapons research, secrecy and contamination go hand in hand.
Despite soothing bromides from defense corporations, the military, the scientific community and the politicians who do their bidding, the accidental or planned release of selected pathogens into the environment for "research purposes" is an enduring legacy of America's Cold War biowar programs.
The experimentation on witting and unwitting subjects in a score of top secret Army and CIA programs underscore the sinister nature of the Bioweapons-Industrial Complex. Indeed, a 1994 GAO report, documented:
During World War II and the Cold War era, DOD and other national security agencies conducted or sponsored extensive radiological, chemical, and biological research programs. Precise information on the number of tests, experiments, and participants is not available, and the exact numbers may never be known. However, we have identified hundreds of radiological, chemical, and biological tests and experiments in which hundreds of thousands of people were used as test subjects. These tests and experiments often involved hazardous substances such as radiation, blister and nerve agents, biological agents, and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). In some cases, basic safeguards to protect people were either not in place or not followed. For example, some tests and experiments were conducted in secret; others involved the use of people without their knowledge or consent or their full knowledge of the risks involved. (Frank C. Conahan, Assistant Comptroller General, National Security and International Affairs Division, Human Experimentation, An Overview on Cold War Era Programs, General Accounting Office, September 28, 1994, GAO/T-NSIAD-94-266)
Despite efforts since the Watergate-era to uncover the extent of these programs, many remain classified to this day. The GAO found that the Central Intelligence Agency, more concerned with shielding their corporate partners' participation in illicit experiments with LSD and other psychoactive compounds "have made little effort to assist test participants by identifying test locations and participants in experiments conducted by contractors." The Agency "in fact, has not released the names of 15 of the approximately 80 organizations that conducted experiments under the ... MKULTRA program because the organizations do not want to be identified."
One sinister Pentagon project, Operation WHITECOAT, was a secret U.S. Army weapons' testing program carried out between 1954-1973 on Seventh-day Adventist Church conscientious objectors who consented to the experiments, and over 2,300 Army soldiers who almost certainly were not provided anything approaching informed consent. Similar to cattle, sheep or pigs on Plum Island, test subjects were infected with agents such as Q Fever, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever, Hepatitis A, bubonic plague, Tularemia (rabbit fever) and Venezuelan Equine encephalitis.
Indeed, the range of experimentation on human subjects carried out by the U.S. biological weapons program makes for a very grim read. As Boston College sociologist Jeanne Guillemin wrote in her disturbing exposé,
The entire experimental legacy is dismaying, from the hundreds of dead monkeys at Fort Detrick to the spectacle of Seventh Day Adventist soldiers, the vaccinated volunteers in Project Whitecoat, strapped to chairs amid cages of animals in the Utah sunlight as Q fever aerosols are blown over them. Most chilling are the mock scenarios played out in urban areas: light bulbs filled with simulated BW agents being dropped in New York subways, men in Washington National Airport spraying pseudo-BW from briefcases, and similar tests in California and Texas and over the Florida Keys. (Jeanne Guillemin, Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 176-177.)
As Michael Christopher Carroll's stunning investigation of Plum Island, Lab 257 revealed, multiple releases of highly-contagious pathogens including Foot-and-Mouth-Disease and Rift Valley Fever, were systematically covered-up by the USDA and DHS.
Will it be any different at the new National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility? If one were to believe DHS, it would represent the triumph of hope over experience. This is not a rational starting point when it comes to experiments with highly-contagious pathogens.
America's corporate media however, seemingly impermeable to anything other than celebrity scandals and the crimes of official enemies, refuse to conduct in-depth investigations into the expansion of America's Bioweapons-Industrial Complex.
Despite government pronouncements, faithfully regurgitated by media stenographers to the public, available evidence suggests that the United States, as in the past, is pursuing the development of biological agents for use in a score of clandestine weapons programs.
Under cover of conducting research on the highly-contagious Foot-and-Mouth-Disease pathogen, a new and improved national laboratory equipped with BSL-3 and BSL-4 containment facilities, like their cohorts at the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, Maryland in all probability will continue to investigate the efficacy of waging aggressive biological warfare on an adversary's food supply.
Sound far-fetched? If the evidence from Cold War-era CIA and Pentagon programs, well-documented accidents, illicit human experimentation as well as numerous examples of biological attacks against socialist Cuba are a guide to Washington's future behavior, better think again!
Posted by Antifascist at 12:10 PM 0 comments
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Biowarfare Research: Lifting the Lid on America's "28 Days Later"
The dystopian British sci-fi film 28 Days Later opens with animal rights activists breaking into the Cambridge Primate Research facility to free chimpanzees used in a secret weapons program.
Terrified by the intrusion, a scientist warns the raiders that the chimps are infected with a genetically-modified pathogen. Ignoring his admonition, the chimps are let loose from their cages and immediately attack everyone in sight, unleashing a plague of unimaginable proportions.
Despite the film's fanciful scenario (with animal rights' campaigners clearly focused in the cross-hairs) this grim, cautionary tale does contain a kernel of truth. While marauding gangs of flesh-eating zombies haven't invaded our cities, a subtler threat looms on the horizon.
The sixth anniversary of the murder of British bioweapons expert Dr. David Kelly on July 17, 2003, lifted the lid on more than government lies that smoothed the way for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq; it exposed the shadowy world of germ warfare research in Britain and the United States.
Along with the 2001 anthrax attacks in America that murdered five people and exposed some 10,000 others to a weaponized form of the bacteria, Kelly's death under highly questionable circumstances focused attention on the West's bioweapons establishment. For a fleeting instant, all eyes were trained on an international network of medical researchers, corporate grifters and Pentagon weaponeers busy as proverbial bees experimenting with deadly microorganisms.
And then as they say, things went dark; as more bodies piled up, cases were "closed" and the money kept on flowing...
The rest of the story is here:
http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/
