SIGHTINGS

Chemical - Biological Warfare

Another nation could be attacked surreptitiously, and who could tell whether a new epidemic was natural or the result of biological warfare?

--Wall Street Journal

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.

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