Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Weaponizing Deadly Viruses: Historical Precedents

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
April 28, 2009

Many people react with incredulity when the assertion is made that the so-called swine flu outbreak in Mexico may be manufactured crisis. And yet history is replete with examples of government using biological and chemical agents for political purpose.

As a primary example, consider the CIA’s secret war against Cuba and Fidel Castro.

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The CIA used chemical agents and toxins then stockpiled at Fort Detrick against Cuba and Fidel Castro.

In 1975, the Church Committee revealed a CIA memorandum listing deadly chemical agents and toxins then stockpiled at Fort Detrick. “These included anthrax, encephalitis, tuberculosis, lethal snake venom, shellfish toxin, and half a dozen lethal food poisons, some of which, the committee learned, had been shipped in the early 1960s to Congo and to Cuba in unsuccessful CIA attempts to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro,” write Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap (Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way, Ocean Press, 2003, p. vii).

Schaap cites the work of Dr. Marc LappĂ© (Chemical and Biological Warfare: The Science of Public Death, Student Research Facility for East Bay Women for Peace and Science Students for Social Responsibility, 1969), who claims that the U.S. Army had a biological warfare agent prepared for use against Cuba at the time of the Missile Crisis in 1962, mostly likely Q fever (Coxiella burnetii, a bacterium that affects both humans and animals). In 1977, a Washington Post report confirmed that during this time the CIA maintained an “anticrop warfare” program.

In regard to swine flu, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on January 10, 1977, that CIA “operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971.” The outbreak, the first time the disease hit the Western Hemisphere, was labeled the “most alarming event” of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. Cuba reacted to outbreak by slaughtering 500,000 pigs. An intelligence source told the newspaper “that early in 1971 he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at Ft. Gulick, an Army base in the Panama Canal Zone. The CIA also operates a paramilitary training center for career personnel and mercenaries at Ft. Gulick.” The source said he was given instructions to turn the container with the virus over to members of an anti-Castro group.

In 1980, described as “the year of the plagues” by Schaap, “Cuba was beset with disasters. Another African swine fever epidemic hit; the tobacco crop was decimated by blue mold; and the sugarcane crops were hit with a particularly damaging rust disease.”

By 1981, the Cuban population was targeted with hemorrhagic dengue fever, a devastating disease transmitted by mosquitoes. “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 [mosquito], the epidemic was over,” writes Schaap. “The history of the secret war against Cuba and the virulence of this dengue epidemic were enough to generate serious suspicions that the United States had a hand in the dengue epidemic of 1981. But there is much more support for those suspicions than a healthy distrust of U.S. intentions regarding Cuba.”

After interviewing officials from the Pan American Health Organization and of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, Schaap states that he believes the “epidemic was artificially induced.”

The epidemic began with the simultaneous discovery in May 1981 of three cases of hemorrhagic dengue caused by a type 2 virus. The cases arose in three widely separated parts of Cuba: Cienfuegos, Camagiiey, and Havana. It is extremely unusual that such an epidemic would commence in three different localities at once. None of the initial victims had ever traveled out of the country; for that matter, none of them had recently been away from home. None had had recent contact with international travelers. Moreover, a study of persons arriving in Cuba in the month of May from known dengue areas found only a dozen such passengers (from Vietnam and Laos), all of whom were checked by the Institute of Tropical Medicine and found free of the disease. Somehow, infected mosquitoes had appeared in three provinces of Cuba at the same time. Somehow, the fever spread at an astonishing rate. There appears to be no other explanation but the artificial introduction of infected mosquitoes.

Researchers believe the Mexican swine flu outbreak may also be “artificially induced.” First, the Mexican outbreak occurred outside of the normal flu season (influenza usually obeys a regularly re-occurring time period – in temperate climate zones, the flu season will typically begin in the late fall and peak in mid- to late winter, while in tropical zones flu seasons appear to be less pronounced, with year-round isolation of the virus). Second, the genetic makeup of the fast-spreading H1N1 strain of influenza — including genetic elements from bird flu, swine flu and human flu covering three continents — appears to be man-made.

“What seems suspicious to me is the hybrid origin of the viral fragments found in H1N1 influenza,” writes Mike Adams. These viral fragments include human influenza, bird flu from North America, and swine flu from Europe and Asia.

This is rather astonishing to realize, because for this to have been a natural combination of viral fragments, it means an infected bird from North America would have had to infect pigs in Europe, then be re-infected by those some pigs with an unlikely cross-species mutation that allowed the bird to carry it again, then that bird would have had to fly to Asia and infected pigs there, and those Asian pigs then mutated the virus once again (while preserving the European swine and bird flu elements) to become human transmittable, and then a human would have had to catch that virus from the Asian pigs — in Mexico! — and spread it to others.

At present, there is little evidence the virus was created in a U.S. lab and deliberately unleashed on an unsuspecting Mexican public. However, there is plenty of evidence the U.S. military and the CIA have used biological agents in the past, including “tests” on the American people.

“More than 200 experiments were carried out in U.S. rural areas to test the spread of non-lethal germs,” writes Joe Allen. “These tests were also carried out in San Francisco in 1950 and in New York in 1966. While the cover for these tests was to study a ‘defense’ against biochemical warfare, U.S. war planners wanted this knowledge for offensive use against an enemy population,” for instance livestock and people in Cuba, as mentioned above.

At the height of Cold War insanity, the U.S. government gave a free hand for its scientists to experiment on anything that could possibly further its military prowess. The CIA experimented with LSD for “mind control.” At Fort Detrick, scientists studied the possibility of spreading yellow fever and plague with insects. Anti-crop bombs were built for the United States Air Force to be used in the Third World.

It appears this insanity did not stop with the Cold War. Last week, the Frederick News Post reported Army criminal investigators are looking into the possibility that disease samples are missing from biolabs at Fort Detrick.

Finally, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen has reported that “a top scientist for the United Nations, who has examined the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa, as well as HIV/AIDS victims, [and] concluded that H1N1 possesses certain transmission ‘vectors’ that suggest that the new flu strain has been genetically-manufactured as a military biological warfare weapon. The UN expert believes that Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and the current A-H1N1 swine flu virus are biological warfare agents.”

Again, at this time, there is no definitive evidence indicating the Mexican virus is a bioweapon. However, there is plenty of factual evidence pointing to the fact the U.S. government (and other governments) have developed biological weapons and have used them against target populations.