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By
Dr. Alan Cantwell
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bomb was withdrawn from sale due to pressure from various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.
ANTHRAX
ISLAND IN SCOTLAND
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
IS
AIDS A MAN-MADE EPIDEMIC?
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.
KILLER
GERMS FOR SALE
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.
PEACE
OR ARMAGEDDON?
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.
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