Bioterrorism and Armageddon
Separating Fact from Fantasy in the New World
Order
By Dr. Alan Cantwell
New Dawn No. 75 (November-December 2002)
JAPANESE
BIOTERRORISM IN MANCHURIA
ANTHRAX ISLAND
IN SCOTLAND
PLUM ISLAND
AND SECRET US MILITARY BIOWARFARE EXPERIMENTS
BIOLOGICAL
WARFARE AND GENETIC ENGINEERING
IS AIDS A
MAN-MADE EPIDEMIC?
KILLER GERMS
FOR SALE
PEACE OR
ARMAGEDDON?
In August 1945 the dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, and the quick ending of World War II, was cause for great celebration in the United States and elsewhere. A half-century later, an American postage stamp designed to commemorate the bomb was withdrawn from sale due to pressure from various groups who felt the atom bomb was nothing to celebrate. Now all the major powers have atomic bombs, the nuclear arms race continues, and even "third world" nations and terrorist groups have access to nuclear weapons.
Not content with the nuclear capability to blow up the world, the major powers continue building up their chemical and biological warfare arsenals. It seems right for "good" countries to have agents of mass destruction, but unacceptable for "bad" countries and "evil doers" to have access to these same weapons.
As a result of all this, the world community faces increasing risk of nuclear and bioweapons in case of war. The worsening conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, as well as President Bush's determination to go to war against Iraq, increase the likelihood of a global war and a fulfillment of the Armageddon prophesied by the Bible.
JAPANESE BIOTERRORISM IN MANCHURIA
Historically, all the major powers have contributed to the biological warfare mess we are now in. Finding an "innocent" world power in biowarfare is as rare as finding a virgin in a whorehouse.
In Manchuria in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Japanese performed diabolic biological experiments on prisoners. When the Japanese overran the country, they established Unit 731, a bioweapons research and production facility in Pingfan, near the city of Harbin. In Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technologies (1988), Charles Pillar and Keith Yamamoto write:
At least 3000 Chinese, Korean, Soviet, American, British and Australian prisoners of war died horrific deaths at the hands of the Pingfan technicians.
In the bioweapons experiments the Japanese deliberately infected human beings with microbes causing cholera, dysentery, typhoid, syphilis, and other infectious diseases.
The work included trials of anthrax and gas gangrene bombs. Prisoners were tied to stakes, their buttocks exposed to the shrapnel flying from a bomb detonated by remote control. The course of the disease was meticulously tracked and recorded as the victims died in agony. Other prisoners were infected with organisms causing cholera and plague, only to be dissected - sometimes while still alive - to monitor the progressive degeneration of their internal organs.1
During the post-war Japanese war crime trials, the US Army feared the Russians might benefit from learning the results of these experiments. To thwart this possibility, the US Army made a deal. The Japanese doctors would turn over their data to the Army biowarfare technicians, and in turn the US government would not prosecute the Japanese perpetrators of these war crimes.
Finally in August 2002, six decades after these atrocities, a Japanese court acknowledged for the first time that biological weapons were used before and during World War II, but the court rejected Chinese claims for compensation.
The anthrax mailings in the US in 2001 are widely known. It is now strongly suspected that scientists from within the US government's own biowarfare community were the perpetrators of this outrage, resulting in the seeding of the halls of Congress with anthrax spores and the deaths of three people. But seeding anthrax into the environment is not new.
In a secret experiment in the summer of 1942, British bacteriologists used a small island, 400 yards off the north-west coast of Scotland, to test a 25 pound chemical bomb filled with a thick mix of anthrax spores. Thirty sheep were collected from the mainland and as the date of the detonation approached, the animals were ferried over to Gruinard Island. The anthrax bomb was placed on a small mound of earth, with the sheep tethered near by. When the bomb exploded, billions of spores formed an invisible cloud over the island and dispersed over the test site and the sea. The next day, the first of all the sheep began to die from inhalation anthrax. In further tests, more sheep were brought to Gruinard, and more anthrax bombs were tested.
The story of "Anthrax Island" can be found in Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman's A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare (1982). In the winter of 1943, the Allies began to manufacture a biological bomb weighing 4 pounds and filled with anthrax spores. Harris and Paxman consider "N" as "the greatest Allied secret of the war after the atomic bomb." Proving that the US is no stranger to anthrax manufacture, an initial batch of 5,000 anthrax-filled bombs came off the experimental production line in May 1944 at Fort Detrick, the US Army's biowarfare community unit located at Frederick, Maryland.
In the ensuing years, various attempts to decontaminate Gruinard were unsuccessful, and the island remained off limits for decades, a testament to the persistent viability of anthrax spores and the inability to destroy the spores once they heavily contaminate an area.
A BBC report (25 July, 2001) claims an English company was paid half a million pounds to decontaminate the 520-acre island in 1986 by soaking the ground with 280 tons of formaldehyde diluted in seawater. Finally, on 24 April, 1990, the government declared Gruinard safe and the red biohazard warning sign was finally removed. But Dr. Brain Moffat, a leading archaeologist, remains unconvinced the land is safe. Moffat has examined anthrax spores at ancient excavation sites and found the spores to be still viable, even after centuries. "I would not go walking on Gruinard. [Anthrax] is a very resilient and deadly bacterium."
Anthrax bombs are rarely mentioned in the media. People don't want to be reminded that a few anthrax bombs strategically dropped on Manhattan Island could easily turn New York City into yet another "Anthrax Island."
PLUM ISLAND AND SECRET US MILITARY BIOWARFARE EXPERIMENTS
In the 1950s the US military planned to cripple the Soviet economy by killing horses, cattle, and swine, with biowarfare weapons developed from exotic animal diseases at Plum Island, off the coast of Long Island, New York. According to Norman Covert, base historian and public information officer at Fort Detrick, only a handful of scientists were aware of this project. "In many cases there were only maybe five people who knew what was going on in weapons research. People in one lab didn't know what happened in the next lab, and they didn't ask." Details of these Plum Island experiments were classified as secret until 1993. One legacy of the Army's role in founding the Plum Island lab is its repository for viruses and viral antibodies of the most dangerous animal diseases in the world.2
During the 1950s and 60s secret military biowarfare attacks on unsuspecting civilians took place in many parts of America. The most notorious was a six-day attack on San Francisco in which clouds of potentially harmful bacteria were sprayed over the city. Twelve people developed pneumonia due to the infectious bacteria, and one elderly man died from the attack. This attack was also not revealed to the public, until years later when classified documents were finally released.3
In other classified experiments, the military sprayed bacteria in New York City subways, in a Washington D.C. airport, and on highways in Pennsylvania. Bioweapons testing also took place in military bases in Virginia, Key West (Florida), and off the coasts of Southern California and Hawaii.4
The Army also experimented on its own soldiers. Project Whitecoat, a code name for a series of biowarfare experiments that took place at Fort Detrick between 1954 and 1973, utilised about 2,300 Seventh-Day Adventist volunteers as subjects. The men were exposed to germs causing tularemia, malaria, anthrax, Queensland fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, encephalitis, and a host of exotic diseases. The experiments were aimed at preventing, diagnosing, and treating these diseases, as well as the development of vaccines. No one died in the experiments, but critics contend that the men were essentially coerced into participating in research that, despite military assurances to the contrary, could have been used to produce biowarfare weapons.5
In preparing America for nuclear attack during the Cold War years following World War II, thousands of US citizens were used as unsuspecting guinea pigs in over 4,000 secret and classified radiation experiments conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission and other agencies, such as the Department of Defense, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the Public Health Service (now the CDC), the National Institutes of Health, the Veterans Administration, the CIA and NASA.6
The full extent of these government-sponsored covert biowarfare programs will probably never be known because many incriminating documents remain Top Secret or classified. Other documents are often declared as missing, destroyed, or "unavailable", in an attempt to hide the truth from the public.
BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AND GENETIC ENGINEERING
As the 1970s began, the US Army's biowarfare program intensified, particularly in the area of genetic engineering research. This genetic manipulation of cells and infectious agents, and the mixing and transferring of viruses between various animals (including monkeys, chimps and other primates) resulted in the creation of many "man-made" agents for research, commercial and biowarfare purposes.
In order to placate the fears of critics, President Richard Nixon renounced germ warfare, except for "medical defensive research." But despite the 1972 treaty forbidding nations from developing or acquiring weapons that spread disease, the bioweapons buildup continued. Scientists understood that to create a defense against bioweapons, it was also necessary to study offensive biowarfare agents. As a result, biowarfare research continued worldwide, despite the ineffectual treaty.
In 1971, Nixon transferred a major part of the Army's Biological Warfare Unit at Ft. Detrick over to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Thereafter, secret biowarfare experimentation continued under the cover of bona-fide cancer research. Utilising the latest genetic engineering techniques, virologists forced cancer-causing viruses to "jump" from one species of animal to another. In the hazardous transfer of dangerous infectious agents, scientists developed new forms of cancer in animals, as well as AIDS-like immunodeficiency diseases in cats, primates, and other lab animals.7 In 1981, a decade later, a new and mysterious immunodeficiency disease called AIDS suddenly appeared exclusively in gay men, the most hated minority in America.
In November 1973 a high-level conference entitled "Biohazards in Biological Research" convened at Asilomar, near Pacific Grove in Northern California. The cancer virologists freely admitted there was no foolproof way to prevent the escape of these highly dangerous viruses into the community. Leaving no doubt that new and dangerous viruses were being created, Robert W. Miller of the NCI warned that "laboratory workers have not only heavy exposures to known viruses, but also to the viruses that they invent."
During the 1970s the NCI's Special Virus Cancer Program also brought together scientists from the leading medical and scientific institutions in America, as well as from abroad, in a unified attempt to uncover cancer-causing viruses. Some AIDS researchers, like myself and others, believe that this Special Virus Cancer Program spawned HIV, a "designer" and immunosuppressive virus that was subsequently seeded into the US homosexual community via the government-sponsored experimental hepatitis B vaccine program (1978-1981). These experiments in Manhattan, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, utilised only highly promiscuous, but healthy white gay and bisexual men as guinea pigs. Shortly after this experiment began, the first cases of the "gay-related immune deficiency disease" (later known as AIDS) erupted in New York City.8
Not only is the public kept ignorant of bioweapons research, but bioweapons "accidents" are officially covered-up, downplayed, or blamed on animals. For example, the Russians finally revealed the truth about an epidemic of anthrax that caused at least 68 deaths in 1979 in the city of Sverdlovsk, 850 miles east of Moscow. The outbreak was officially blamed on eating meat from infected animals. Officials at the nearby top-secret bioweapons compound maintained that the anthrax spores were spread among cattle through ingestions of contaminated bone meal, and that the people who got anthrax acquired it through the illegal sale of diseased cattle from private farms. In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin finally acknowledged the real truth. The cause was not "natural", but due to the accidental escape of spores of weapons-grade anthrax produced by the nearby bioweapons installation.9
The idea of AIDS as a man-made virus that was deliberately seeded into the gay and African black population in the late 1970s is considered by most scientists to be a joke. There are all sorts of theories pertaining to the origin of HIV, but man-made AIDS is always trashed as paranoid "conspiracy theory." However, it is obvious that nuclear, chemical, and bioweapons programs are all clouded in extreme secrecy. As a result, the scientific "facts" surrounding these programs are often tainted with misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, cover-ups, outright lies, and more than a touch of conspiracy.
Scientists generally pooh-pooh the idea of a "man-made" virus, even though the laboratory manipulation and transfer of viruses from one species to another always results in a "man-made virus". When a virus is transferred by man to another species its molecular structure is altered. This occurs because the transferred virus picks up new genetic material from the cell of the new species that it infects.
Even the molecular structure of HIV viruses derived from human beings are all different, albeit slightly. The exception to this rule is the HIV virus discovered by Robert Gallo in 1984. Later, French scientists at the Pasteur Institute claimed that Gallo stole the AIDS virus (called "LAV") that was discovered there by Luc Montagnier in 1983 and then had been sent to Gallo's lab for further study. The molecular structure of Gallo's virus and the French virus were eventually determined to be identical. This was because both the American and the French virus were both isolated from a French gay man who had sex in New York City in 1979. A lawsuit was settled out-of-court in 1987, but only through the intervention of the French President and President Ronald Reagan.
Gallo proposed the theory (widely accepted as "fact") that HIV originated from African green monkeys. A decade later, other scientists theorised the "ancestor" of HIV actually originated from a chimpanzee virus.
Two leading government scientists, Beatrice Hahn and Betty Korber, have used computerised "molecular clocks" to construct elaborate viral "family trees" (which few people outside the field can understand) in an attempt to prove how HIV descended from chimps in the African rain forest.
Significantly, Beatrice Hahn worked in Gallo's lab in the early 1980s while he was popularising his green monkey theory; and Betty Korber works at her computer at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, home of America's nuclear weapons program and the birthplace of the notorious secret human radiation experiments. These two government scientists, along with the support of an adoring media, have apparently convinced the scientific world that HIV originated in chimps. The possibility that HIV originated from a bioweapons lab or from widespread species-jumping viral experiments in primates is simply never considered.
Big questions regarding the origin of AIDS remain unanswered by molecular biologists. For example, if HIV has been around for decades, centuries, millennia, as these scientists proclaim, where were the AIDS cases? Strangely, there are no proven cases from Africa in the 1960s and 70s, despite the "proof" offered by scientists of a positive HIV blood test (based on fragments of molecular structure) from an African blood donor in 1959, who was never identified and whose medical records were never found. Are we supposed to believe that HIV existed in Africa for a long time, even though there are no proven AIDS cases in Africa before the early 1980s?
AIDS experts tells us that AIDS is a sexually-transmitted disease and that HIV can often have a long incubation period (up to 10 to 20 years). And that it is possible to get HIV even through one sexual contact with an infected person. With the long-incubation period, why are there no positive HIV blood specimens (and no AIDS cases) in the US prior to 1978-1979 (the year the gay vaccine experiments began)? If only one sexual contact is needed to get HIV, how is it possible for a supposedly black, heterosexually-transmitted disease out-of-Africa to have suddenly (no incubation period) appeared exclusively in young, white, well-educated, healthy gay men in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco?
Only young white gay men? Why no blacks, women, old people, immunosuppressed people, children, heterosexuals among the first cases? This would certainly have occurred with a blood-borne virus with a long incubation period. Furthermore, if one considers the entire amount of sexual activity and multiple partners among heterosexual America and compares that to the tiny fraction of gay male-only sexual activity, it is truly unbelievable that an "out-of-Africa" blood-borne virus with a long incubation period would have suddenly affected only young white gay men in three American cities! These are just a few of the many questions that people should ask themselves about the supposed primate/African origin of AIDS in America.
It is only possible to discuss a tiny bit of evidence pointing towards AIDS as a man-made disease in this article. My two books, AIDS and the Doctors of Death, and Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot (available from New Dawn, see page 89), provide extensive documentation for the man-made origin of AIDS. Previous issues of New Dawn have also carried articles on this research, and anyone with Internet access can also go to google.com and type-in "AIDS biological warfare" or "alan cantwell", and encounter many webpages and reams of information on this subject by various researchers, all of which has been ignored by the scientific community and the major media.
Is it just a "coincidence" that new "emerging viruses" began to emerge in the 1970s when many man-made viruses were adapted for commercial and biowarfare purposes during that same decade? Could genetically-altered viruses be seeded (via vaccines or other methods) into select populations for genocidal purposes? This possibility is not "conspiracy theory but "common sense", particularly in view of the recorded history of damage to select populations already subjected to secret nuclear and biowarfare experimentation.
On 18 October, 2001, the CDC issued an unprecedented alert asking physicians to watch out for cases of smallpox, plague, botulism, tularemia, and even "emerging" hemorrhagic African viruses that cause Ebola and Marburg disease. Before the terrorist bombings, virologists were blaming animals in the wild. Now it is clear (to those who can read between the lines) that the more likely threat comes from crazy scientists who will use any deadly infectious agent as a potential biowarfare agent if it suits their national, political, or religious agenda.
One cannot help but wonder if the new spread into the US of the sometimes deadly mosquito-borne West Nile virus (originally found in Africa in the 1930s) is also a result of decades of animal experimentation transferring the WNV virus into various lab animals. This possibility, of course, is never mentioned in the major media. As this is being written, there is fear that the virus might now be in the US blood supply. Four organ transplant patients were recently infected from organs received from a WNV-infected Georgia accident victim. Currently, blood is not tested for WNV. And homosexuals are still barred from donating blood.
Further complicating bioterrorism is the sale of deadly microbes to anyone with the cash to buy them. In the mid-1980s, when the US was still on friendly terms with Saddam Hussein, his Education Ministry purchased 70 shipments of anthrax and other disease-causing organisms from the American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit company in Rockville, Maryland. At that time, such shipments were entirely legal and received quick approval by the US Commerce Department.10
In Time magazine (1 December, 1997), writer Bruce Nelan claims, "Iraq now admits to brewing more than 2,000 gallons of anthrax, but American experts think the true amount was three times that. A fatal dose, says a US Defense official, is smaller than a speck of dust, something you wouldn't even see. One truth about bioweapons is that they can be produced by using a recipe found on the Internet, a beer fermenter, a culture and a gas mask, with a total investment of $10,000." A Pentagon official claims, "If you buy commercial equipment and put it in a small room, you can be producing kilogram quantities of anthrax within a month. And each kilo has millions and millions of potential deaths in it." A study by the US Office of Technology Assessment estimated that 100 kilos of anthrax spread by a crop duster over Washington could cause 2 million deaths.
A bioterrorism attack against America was predicted years ago by Joseph Douglas and Neil Livingston. In their 1987 book, America the Vulnerable: The Threat of Chemical and Biological Warfare, they outlined many practical reasons why chemical/biological (C/B) weapons are attractive to terrorist groups. First, C/B weapons are cheap and "the poor man's atomic bomb." Second, C/B weapons can be produced without much difficulty and in a relatively short time. Third, a very small amount of a C/B agent (like a nerve gas agent) can represent a real threat. And fourth, virtually any target is vulnerable to a C/B attack.
Appearing before a UN panel in 1969, a group of C/B experts estimated that "for a large scale operation against a civilian population, casualties might cost about $2,000 per square kilometre with conventional weapons, $800 with nuclear weapons, $600 with nerve-gas weapons, and $1 with biological weapons." Douglas and Livingston concluded back in 1987 that the US is completely unprepared to respond either to terrorists attacks on population centres or to covert operations.
What can be done to counter more than a half century of nuclear and bioweapons buildup? Are we headed for a biological Armageddon?
No one knows,
but people should ask themselves if they want to live in a world
deliberately seeded with bioweapons agents, emerging viruses, and
new diseases. Do we really need more crazy germ warfare experiments
for our "security"? And does anyone out there have an "antidote" for
all this.
Unless we want to constantly live in fear, we had better start
pushing harder for world peace rather than risk war with the kind of
biowarfare agents our doctors of death have so painstakingly
designed to kill us.
FOOTNOTES:
1. The full details of all this are also recorded in Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-up (1994), by Sheldon H Harris.
2. "Plum Island's shadowy past: Once-secret documents reveal lab's mission was germ warfare," Newsday, 21 November, 1993.
3. "Army germ fog blanketed S.F. for 6 days in '50 test," Los Angeles Times, 17 September, 1979.
4. "Army used live bacteria in tests on US civilians," Los Angeles Times, 9 March, 1977.
5. "Adventists' faith put to test; 2,300 soldiers were used in germ-warfare experiments," The Washington Times, 17 October, 1998.
6. "The Human Radiation Experiments," New Dawn, September, 2001.
7. See also AIDS: An Explosion of the Biological Time Bomb? Biological Warfare in the Modern Era [2000], by Robert E Lee.
8. See "AIDS: Who is to Blame?", New Dawn, May 2001.
9. "Soviet germ lab caused epidemic in '79", Los Angeles Times, 16 June, 1992.
10. "Germ library's inventory is making detractors queasy," Los Angeles Times, 16 March, 1998.
______________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Cantwell is a retired physician who is a frequent contributor to
New Dawn. He is the author of two books on the man-made epidemic of
AIDS. Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot is available
through the New Dawn Book Service. His books are available in the
USA from Book Clearing House @ 1-800-431-1579.