The U.S. Government's Secret Experimentation with
Biological and Chemical
Warfare (Part One)
by Mitchel Cohen
The mass-spraying of dangerous insecticides on the
entire population and
environment of New York City for the last two years,
brought on,
supposedly, by infected mosquitoes, smacks more and
more of a military
operation than a public health program. Coordinated
by the Office of
Emergency Management from the now destroyed “bunker”
on the 28th floor of 7
World Trade Center (which also housed the CIA's office
in New York), the
spray program sought to integrate federal, state
and local emergency
management teams -- the same teams that were established
in response to
anti-New World Order protests in Seattle, Boston,
Washington, Philadelphia
and Los Angeles.
The government has been using those protests as an
opportunity to
experiment with new weapons and configurations of
command. The
demonstrations, such as the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations
in Nov. 1999,
have served as large “field tests” of purportedly
“non-lethal” weapons on
protesters, just as the hysteria around the West
Nile virus was
orchestrated to gain acceptance among large numbers
of people for the
indiscriminate spraying of Malathion and pyrethroid
pesticides over the
largest urban population center and ecosystem in
the country. Is it a
coincidence that dozens of military agencies in Seattle
-- operating
domestically under a new joint command structure
for the first time --
sprayed mixtures of malathion-like cholinesterase
inhibitor pesticides as
part of the tear-gas? The spraying in New York and
the repression of
anti-globalization demonstrators used the same materials
for completely
different purposes. They define a new phase in the
systematic development
of US biological and chemical warfare techniques
and their use on domestic
civilian populations.
The covert U.S. biological and chemical warfare program,
much of it
developed at Fort Detrick, Maryland, has historically
tested its weapons on
U.S. soldiers, American Indian reservations, ghetto
populations, colonies
(like Puerto Rico), and prisoners -- in other words,
controlled and bounded
populations. Widescale testing on OTHERS is now becoming
increasingly
frequent and aggressive -- albeit, shrouded in secrecy
and disinformation.
The military’s Psychological Operations manuals describe
ways to control
large populations and gain compliance, if not acceptance:
Create and
exaggerate a “threat,” which makes it relatively
easy to whip up panic; and
divert attention from the real culprits onto scapegoats.
In a crisis
everyone rallies around those in charge, however
illegally or
illegitimately they have attained or used their position
of authority
(George Bush and Rudy Giuliani are two current examples).
The orchestrated
but controlled hysteria can then be directed against
other countries, as
well as used in taming domestic opposition.
During the military build-up to the Gulf War in 1990-91,
then-President
George Bush condemned the threatened use of chemical
and biological weapons
by Saddam Hussein, who was depicted as “worse than
Hitler.” The U.S.
military, under the guise of fearing an Iraqi attack
with biological and
chemical weapons, inoculated hundreds of thousands
of U.S. soldiers with
experimental anthrax and nerve gas remedies that
had never before been
tested on people in field conditions. (Hundreds resisted.
Many were
court-martialed.) It’s not as though Iraq could surprise
the U.S. with
unknown biological and chemical agents. The United
States government knew
full well the extent of Iraq's biological and chemical
arsenal, for it was
George Bush himself, in his former capacity as head
of the CIA (and later
as Vice President and President), who had approved
U.S. shipments of
material needed to make biological and chemical weapons
to Iraq.
Bush approved shipping to Iraq toxic varieties of
E.coli and Salmonella
bacteria, and organisms causing anthrax, gas gangrene
and brucellosis.(1)
At the same time, various anthrax antitoxins were
sent to Israel, a
practice that continued into the Clinton/Gore administration.
The U.S. had
been experimenting with antitoxins for these diseases
and, as in the case
of the massive insecticide spraying over New York
and in using new weapons
against the anti-globalization protesters, these
new weapons and
counter-weapons had yet to be tested in the field.
And so it was the U.S., not Iraq, that used new shells
and armor made from
depleted uranium which aerosolized as it heated,
irradiating huge swaths
of land and water, and dramatically increasing the
ecological as well as
human catastrophe there. These weapons were used
again by Clinton/Gore in
Yugoslavia, and still again in Afghanistan along
with America’s full
complement of cluster bombs -- supplemented by releasing
various gasses --
whose only function is to shred living tissue with
tiny razor-sharp
fragments. Other anti-personnel weapons such as air-fuel
explosives were
deployed to burn up all oxygen as a means of killing
all life in a
particular area.
How much of this is intentional experimentation and
how much is just
stupidity and/or callous disregard for human life
-- that is, business as
usual? And does it matter whether the recent spate
of chemical and
biological weapons use is intentional or not? Either
way, the effects are
just as deadly.
As a society we have become so steeped in the chemicalization
of all
aspects of our lives -- and the cancers and immune
compromising ailments
that it brings -- that when we learn, for instance,
that the military
repeatedly sprayed U.S. soldiers in the Gulf with
extremely high levels of
pesticides, and that the use of these pesticides
may be one of the
precipitating factors in a person developing Gulf
War Syndrome, we don’t
even ask: Who gave such an order? We sort of accept
it as “collateral
damage” regardless of whether or not the sprays were
administered
experimentally, having never been properly tested
for use on human beings.
And, when it turns out that U.S. military Gulf War
uniforms had been
pre-soaked in permethrin, one of the family of pyrethroid
compounds sprayed
over New York City in 1999-2001, we may find this
shocking but
“understandable,” as is each piece isolated from
the overall pattern.
The fact is that pesticides and nerve gas are intimately
related:
Pesticides (like Malathion) were developed from organophosphate
nerve gas
used in World War 2. Gulf War Syndrome, suffered
by tens of thousands of US
soldiers, is likely the result of pesticide, anthrax
vaccine, nerve gas
“antidote” and depleted uranium exposure interactions.
Contrary to prior
government claims that Gulf War Syndrome does not
exist, new studies are
finding that, in fact, brain scans of veterans who
became ill after serving
in the Gulf War “show evidence of significant brain
cell loss.”(2)
Using new MR spectroscopy scanning techniques, which
detect changes to the
brain at the chemical and molecular levels, some
researchers have now
succeeded in linking Gulf War soldiers’ exposure
to pesticides and nerve
gas to debilitating brain damage.(3) Sick Gulf War
veterans, when compared
with healthy veterans, had 20 percent fewer brain
cells in the brain stem,
a structure that links the brain with the rest of
the body, allowing normal
motor and organ functions. The sick veterans also
showed a 12 percent loss
in the right basal ganglia and five percent loss
in the left basal ganglia.
The basal ganglia are associated with the control
of motor functions.(4)
I argue in this essay that we should look at recent
events as part of a
pattern of intentional experimentation on human populations
and
environments in furthering the development of biological
and chemical
weapons, and the psychological control mechanisms
needed to obtain mass
compliance with increasingly dangerous and repressive
measures. The
mass-spraying in New York City for West Nile Virus,
like the current
anthrax panic, needs to be seen in that context.
NOTES
1. Conn Hallinan, “Using CBW at Home and Abroad,”
People's Daily World,
April 6, 1989.
2. Cat Lazaroff, “Brain Damage Found in U.S. Gulf
War Syndrome Victims,”
Environmental News Service, May 25, 2000,
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/may2000/2000L 05 25 07.html.
When we combine these
vectors with the administration of experimental,
genetically engineered
vaccines and a field of radiation from Uranium 238
weapons, the assault on
the immune system is heightened far beyond even the
sum of each of those
causes taken separately. (This is known as a “synergistic”
effect.)
3. Ibid. The study outlined three interrelated but
separate causes for
brain deterioration found in many Gulf War veterans.
Some soldiers in the
Gulf War wore flea collars meant for pets, exposing
them to toxic levels of
pesticides. In 1997, Dr. Robert Haley, UT Southwestern
chief of
epidemiology and lead author of the study, and his
colleagues defined three
Gulf War syndromes. Syndrome 1, commonly found in
veterans who wore
pesticide containing flea collars, is characterized
by impaired cognition.
Syndrome 2, called confusion ataxia, the most severe
and debilitating of
the syndromes, is found among veterans who said they
were exposed to low
level nerve gas and experienced side effects from
anti nerve gas, or
pyridostigmine (PB), tablets. Syndrome 3, characterized
by central pain, is
found in veterans who wore insect repellent with
high concentrations of
DEET, a common ingredient in many mosquito and tick
repellents. Veterans
with Syndrome 3 also experienced severe side effects
from PB tablets. (cf.
paper by Dr. James Fleckenstein at the Radiological
Society of North
America's annual meeting, November 1999. The findings
were to be published
in the June, 2000 issue of the journal “Radiology.”)
4. Ibid. These brain cell losses are similar to those
found in patients
with brain diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
(ALS, or Lou
Gehrig's disease) and multiple sclerosis, as well
as dementia and other
degenerative neurological disorders, although the
brain areas affected are
different.
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Mitchel Cohen is an organizer with the NoSpray Coalition,
and a member of
the Brooklyn Greens/Green Party of New York.
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Financial contributions to help Mitchel continue
this (and other) work is
needed, and greatly appreciated.
Mitchel Cohen
2652 Cropsey Avenue, #7H
Brooklyn, NY 11214
(718) 449-0037
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