SPECIAL REPORT. Ebola is just another product of 1972 treaty violations by Wayne Madsen

SPECIAL REPORT. Ebola is just another product of 1972 treaty violations

The first outbreak of the deadly Ebola hemorrhagic fever was recorded on July 27, 1976 in the southern Sudan. The first victim of the disease suffered from the Sudan strain of the virus. The man, who worked at the Nzara Cotton Manufacturing Factory in the Sudanese town of Nzara, was dead ten days later. The outbreak quickly spread to the town of Maridi, where hapless villagers struck by the virus went because it was the location of the nearest hospital. Infections were also reported in Juba and Tembura. In 1976, southern Sudan was the scene of a guerrilla-led civil war that pitted black southern Sudanese against the largely Arab central government in Khartoum. In 2011, after the long civil war, one in which the CIA and Mossad supported the South Sudanese against Khartoum, the Republic of South Sudan declared its independence.

In 1976, Zaire was being used as a base for an illegal CIA war against the Marxist-led government of Angola. The 1976 Clark Amendment to the Arms Control Act, authored by Senator Dick Clark (D-IA) and passed by the Senate, forbid the U.S. government from aiding any sides in the Angolan civil war. CIA director George Bush merely ignored the act and provided covert assistance to right-wing Angolan guerrillas in a total violation of the law.

Just as the CIA did with the House of Representatives Boland Amendment forbidding any U.S. government involvement in the Nicaraguan civil war, the CIA merely ignored the law and began supporting the anti-Marxist guerrillas, including UNITA guerrillas led by Jonas Savimbi, in Angola. Assistance to the guerrillas was provided through Zaire, then run by CIA client-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. U.S. mercenaries fighting on behalf of the minority white government of Rhodesia reportedly helped the Salisbury regime of Prime Minister Ian Smith develop bio-warfare agents, including anthrax, to use against black nationalist guerrillas. Some of these bio-warfare weapons were also transferred to CIA-backed rebels in Angola from both Rhodesia and Zaire.

After the anthrax attacks in the United States in 2001, the FBI dispatched a team of agents to South Africa and Zimbabwe to investigate then-primary "person of interest" Dr. Steven Hatfill's role in the 1970s with South Africa's Project COAST and Rhodesia's Selous Scouts own bio-war program, much of it developed with the assistance of the South Africans. There is reason to believe that the FBI was called off its investigation when a link between Hatfill and a covert CIA operation to aid the Rhodesian Selous Scouts during the 1970s was discovered. This link included the provision of bio-warfare agents, including anthrax and West Nile virus,from Fort Detrick and Project COAST.

In 2000, the FBI discovered a network of veterans of the South African bio-warfare program, code named Project COAST, living in the Los Angeles area. A UCLA gynecologist and high-level Mormon named Dr. Larry Ford was linked to the chief of Project COAST, Dr. Wouter Basson. Ford's partner in his firm Biofem Pharmaceuticals was shot and wounded on February 28, 2000 and shortly thereafter, Ford allegedly committed suicide in his Irvine, California home. The FBI discovered canisters containing cultures of cholera, salmonella, botulism, and typhus buried in Ford's backyard. FBI agent Doug Baker revealed that Ford had connections to the CIA but later quickly recanted after he received pressure from FBI headquarters. However, Ford's friend Basson was linked to Don Mayes, a retired CIA officer and one of Basson's former employee, Dan Goosen, and the CIA and FBI. Mayes acted as the CIA's and FBI's go-between to Goosen and Basson. on behalf of Basson, Goosen was trying to sell the CIA a genetically-engineered pathogen that combined intestinal bacteria with gas gangrene, a very fatal concoction. The pathogen was shipped from South Africa to the FBI office in Key West in a toothpaste tube, a favorite container for Gottlieb, where former CIA-turned-FBI agent Robert Zlockie took possession of the tube. Negotiations for the CIA to buy the pathogen reportedly broke down, however, there were reports that Goosen met with officials of Bioport, the Michigan-based firm that sold anthrax vaccines to the Pentagon. There were reports at the time that investors in Bioport included The Carlyle Group, on whose board George H. W. Bush sat. The toothpaste tube was reportedly sent to Fort Detrick.


A small arsenal, in addition to pathogen canisters, were discovered buried in Dr. Larry Ford's backyard. Some believe that Ford took over from Dr. Sidney Gottlieb as the CIA's "Dr. Death," but in a much more covert fashion with maximized "plausible deniability" of agency involvement.

During the CIA's illegal involvement in warfare in Zaire and Angola, two novel viruses appeared on the scene: Ebola and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The CIA's longtime "Dr. Strangelove" for creating exotic methods to kill people, the club-footed Hungarian-Jew Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, saw Africa as a virtual "Petri dish" for carrying out his macabre experiments. In 1960, Gottlieb developed a deadly poison that was to be put on Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba's toothbrush and cause instant death. Gottlieb also worked on various "exotic" medical means to dispatch Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Other Gottlieb exploits included blue mold against Cuba's tobacco crop; cane smut against its sugar crop; African swine fever, which is related to the coronavirus Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which is related to the deadly 1918 Spanish flu; and a hemorrhagic strain of Dengue fever against Cuba's human population. In the months after 9/11 and long after Gottlieb's retirement from the CIA, a cousin of hemorrhagic Dengue fever, the Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), made its debut among civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Russian scientists who examined SARS claimed that the virus was genetically created by fusing mumps and measles pathogens. They pointed their fingers at Fort Detrick.

Although Gottlieb retired from the CIA in 1972, after 20 years of service with Langley, there is no evidence that the CIA discontinued its involvement with biological warfare experimentation, even after the United States signed, along with the United Kingdom and the USSR, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction or "BWC." Evidence suggests that the CIA merely transferred its bio-war programs to the
U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland where bio-warfare research was being conducted under the cover of "non-proliferation" enforcement and research. Other banned research was conducted at Fort Detrick's British counterpart at the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) in Porton Down in Wiltshire, England.

 
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, aka "Joseph Schneider."
HIV first infected Cuban troops in Angola who were assisting the central government in battling CIA- and South African-supported rebels throughout Angola. Those returning Cuban troops in turn infected Cuban civilians. It was from the Cuban vector that HIV was then transmitted to the United States via Cuban refugees who received political asylum in Florida. The Soviet news agency TASS was always ridiculed for producing propaganda, however, the CIA and State Department had full-time operations to counter everything reported by the news agency, indicating that the United States was concerned to counter TASS even when their reports were correct, which they were more times than not. On March 30, 1987, TASS reported that East German scientists concluded that HIV was a manufactured virus, developed by gene splicing a visna virus, a retrovirus that causes encephalitis and pneumonia in sheep, with HTLV-1, the first retrovirus that was known to infect humans. The East German scientists traced HIV back to Fort Detrick. The U.S. State Department labled the story "Soviet propaganda," but the U.S. government has never really owned up to its "Dr. Frankstein" medical operations in Africa or elsewhere.

In fact, the U.S. government, with suspicions of CIA involvement, was subjecting African-American to injections with syphilis as late as 1972. The U.S. Public Health Service forced syphilis infection operation was coordinated with Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The Atomic Energy Commission, again, with suspected CIA involvement, subjected American civilians and military personnel, including the population of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, as well as Australian citizens, to radiation experiments as part of Projects SUNSHINE and GABRIEL.

An August 2, 1977 letter from CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner to Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) reveals the nature of the CIA's work with Fort Detrick's USAMRIID on bio-warfare projects. The letter states that as part of the CIA's MKULTRA project, various subprojects involved "funding for unspecified activities connected with the Army's Special Operations Division at Ft. Detrick, Md . . . Under CIA's Project MKNAOMI, the Army assisted CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery systems for use against humans as well as against animals and crops. The objectives of these subprojects cannot be identified from the recovered material beyond the fact that the money was to be used where normal funding channels would require more written or oral justification than appeared desirable for security reasons or where operational considerations dictated short lead time for purchases." [Emphasis added]

Turner claimed MKNAOMI bio-warfare operations ended in 1960, however, statements by CIA director William Colby released later indicated that the CIA destroyed much of the MKNAOMI records that existed up until 1972. The records were part of a trove of CIA documents that Colby referred to as the agency's "Family Jewels."


Turner's less-than-candid admission to Inouye about the CIA's bio-war program with Fort Detrick.

On August 26, 1976, after the Zaire strain of Ebola first appeared near the Ebola River in the Republic of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, the virus recorded a fatality rate of over 85 percent. A school headmaster, who had been visiting northern Zaire, arrived at the Yambuku Mission Hospital and was misdiagnosed as suffering from malaria. Many of those who had contact with the headmaster before and after he died contracted Ebola. During the following few months, there were 602 reported cases of Ebola in Zaire and in southern Sudan. Of these, 431 people died from the two strains of the novel virus. The international news media painted the Zaire "hot zone" as a virtual geographic death zone.

News reports at the time emphasized two major points: 1) the nearly-always fatal disease caused its victims to die a horrible death, turning their internal organs into jellified masses and 2) the virus was thankfully limited to a remote part of Zaire and did not pose a threat to any major urban centers. It was the remoteness of the virus outbreak that led the Western nations to brush off the virus as deadly but only affecting black Africans because of its remoteness.

That Western mindset largely resulted in governments in Washington, London, Paris, and other capitals brushing off the latest incarnation of the Zaire strain of Ebola which has killed well over 4000 people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone and may infect as many as 1.5 million people by early 2015, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). After all, Western leaders reasoned, the virus was only killing black Africans. Even America's overly-hyped first "African-American president," Barack Obama, failed to take the recent Ebola outbreak seriously when he invited leaders of African states, along with their staffs and cabinet ministers, African business leaders, and journalists, to a Washington, DC summit with little regard for the contagiousness of Ebola. White House staffers appeared to have forgotten that the WHO determined that when Ebola first broke out in Zaire in 1976 that it could be transmitted by airborne means.

Three other strains of Ebola, known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF), a member of the Filoviridae family of viruses, are known to exist in addition to the very deadly Zaire and the less deadly Sudan strains. They are the Côte d’Ivoire or Taï Forest, Bundibugyo (Uganda), and Reston (Virginia) strains. There was an outbreak of Ebola-Zaire in Uganda between 2000 and 2001 in the Gulu District; a Taï strain outbreak spread from chimpanzees to a human in October 1994; an outbreak of Zaire strain in November, 1994 in the gold mining camps of
Meouka, Andock, and Minkebe in Gabon followed by other outbreaks in 1996 in Mayibout and the Booué region of Gabon and 2001 in Libreville, the capital city; an Ebola-Zaire outbreak in Yambio, South Sudan in 2004; and a re-emergence of Ebola-Zaire in an outbreak in Kasaï-Occidental province, DRC, in 2007, as well as in 2008 and 2009. Ebola-Zaire also hitKagadi in the Kibaale District of Uganda in 2012 with a 66 percent fatality rate.

In 2007, a new form of Ebola, the Bundibugyo strain, less deadly than Ebola-Zaire, struck Uganda. In 2008, the least deadly form of Ebola, the U.S. lab-produced Reston strain, infected humans from a group of infected pigs in the Philippines. It was the first case of non-humans or primates being infected by Ebola.

There was another Zaire strain outbreak in Kikwit, Zaire in 1995 and an outbreak of the virus in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) in the Mbomo or Kéllé districts in 2003 and 2007.

In addition to humans, Ebola is known to infect primates such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and monkeys, in addition to forest antelopes, fruit bats, porcupines, and, as seen in the Philippines, pigs.



The original 1976 Ebola outbreak "hot zones."
The first victim of the West African Ebola-Zaire outbreak was a 2-year old boy who died from the virus on December 6, 2013 in Meliandou, Guinea. From the town, the virus spread to nearby villages. The initial area of contagion is close to the lucrative Simandou iron mine, which has long been a target of exploitation of Israeli mining magnate and Israel's richest man Benny Steinmetz and his Benny Steinmetz Group Resources (BSGR) and the hedge fund tycoon George Soros. Steinmetz has been under FBI investigation for bribery. In addition, he attempted to launch a coup against Guinean President Alpha Condé after BSGR, based in Guernsey with offices in London and Geneva, was stripped of its mining rights in Guinea after attempting to bribe Guinean officials. Steinmetz's attempt to foment an anti-Condé coup among disaffected Guinean army officers and members of the minorty Fula tribe.



Pentagon map showing current Ebola "hot zones" in West Africa.

One of Steinmetz's associates, Frederic Cilins, was arrested by the FBI in Jacksonville, Florida before he could begin destroying several BSRG documents proving that Steinmetz had paid bribes to Guinean officials in violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. There was a recent scare at Jacksonville's Baptist Hospital after someone who had contact with a recent visitor to West Africa complained of initial Ebola-like symptoms. The patient did not indicate whether his contact had been in Guinea or the nature of that person's business in Guinea, Sierra Leone, or Liberia. The Simandou mine is in close proximity to the Guinean borders with both Sierra Leone and Guinea.


Ebola outbreak in Guinea near Israeli tycoon's attempted iron mining bonanza.
By March 2014, as more Guineans were sickened with the virus, an isolation unit was established by Doctors Without Borders in Gueckedou, near Meliandou. By March 25, four southeastern districts in Guinea suffered Ebola outbreaks with the first cases also reported from across the tri-border area in Lofa and Nimba counties, Liberia and in Kailahun District, Sierra Leone. By June, the first Ebola cases were reported in Monrovia, the Liberian capital and in Kenema, Port Loko, and the Western Districts of Sierra Leone. By July, the virus had spread to Sierra Leone's Bo District and the capital city of Freetown.

With the exception of the contained outbreak of Ebola in 2001 in Libreville, Gabon, the virus's arrival in Monrovia and Freetown were the first time the disease had hit major metropolitan areas. At the end of July, a Liberian-American man died from Ebola after flying from Monrovia to the mega-metropolis of Lagos, Nigeria. Nigeria, as well as Senegal, managed to contain the virus with minimal fatalities. Meanwhile, mandatory quarantine zones were established throughout Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. President Obama dispatched U.S. troops and National Guardsmen to the West African nations to deal with the Ebola outbreak.

By October, there were reported Ebola cases in the United States from a Liberian man who later died of the virus in a Dallas hospital after traveling from Liberia. Other cases in Spain, the UK, Germany, Norway, and France were reported from medical workers who had been in West Africa and who contracted the virus from patients. Ebola-Zaire also saw an outbreak in the Boende District of the DRC, however, WHO said the outbreak was unconnected to that in West Africa.

Oddly, as the White House named Ron Klain as the "Ebola czar," it also announced late Friday afternoon, on October 16, that it was cutting off funding to risk government experimentation that studied certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The timing of the White House announcement was odd, considering that it was reported by WMR that the H1N1 swine influenza "novel" strain was the product of resurrecting the deadly 1918 Spanish flu from DNA extracted by scientists from the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland from the corpse of a female Inuit teen who died from the disease in 1918. U.S. government-funded scientists succeeded in combining the resurrected Spanish flu DNA with other viruses, including swine and avian flu. The White House also asked scientists currently conducting research on influenza, SARS and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) and other coronaviruses such as the Hong Kong and New Haven viruses, to "voluntarily" halt all current research. Did President Obama delve into the work of USAMRIID, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Centers of Disease Control (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to discover that the BWC of 1972 was being routinely violated since it was signed? In addition to H1N1 flu, scientists, including Yoshihiro Kawaoka of University of Wisconsin-Madison, were researching ways to make H5N1 avian flu able to "species jump" from ferrets to humans.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Health and Human Services did not put a time limitation on the research moratorium but Kawaoke indicated future research projects on influenza and coronaviruses would not be started and that he would consult with NIH on applying the moratorium on current research efforts. The White House policy does not affect research Ebola but only applies to influenza and coronaviruses.

On the heels of the White House order curtailing research on "risky" viruses, the Pentagon announced that the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) would work with USAMRIID, the suspected original source of the "Ames strain" anthrax pathogen used in the 2001 postal system attacks, to send Ebola medical teams to areas of the United States reporting outbreaks. USAMRIID not only has the anthrax release on its rap sheet but also the recombination of deadly flu viruses for which the White House ordered a cut-off in funding hours before the Pentagon's announcement on military teams being used to protect the "homeland" from Ebola.

Obama's Bioweapons Program

The Obama administration's recent declaration on bioweapons would simply be another run-of-the-mill example of our "change" president's duplicity were it not such an unmitigated disaster.

Recapitulating sinister Cold War practices that informed American ruling class consensus when it came to secretly toying with nature's most deadly pathogens, (a) because they could, (b) because it was, and is, highly profitable and (c) because they got with it, the profound failure by the administration to rein-in out-of-control corporate grifters, militarists and scientists thirsting after an endless flow of taxpayer dollars, have put us all on a potential glide path towards the abyss.

Since the roll-out of the Obama product-line January 21, on issues ranging from war and peace to economic justice and from civil liberties to healthcare, the "change" team exhibit the same callous disregard for disarmament proposals that characterized their Bushist predecessors in the Oval Office.

Nowhere is this reality so transparently delineated than by the administration's continuing efforts to derail plans to revitalize the moribund Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), rejecting binding verification protocols that would finally give the 1972 treaty teeth.

"Strengthening" the BWC: Killing it with Kindness

From her perch as U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Ellen Tauscher, a former Democratic congresswoman from the San Francisco Bay Area (in other words, a feckless "liberal" who spent her career paying lip-service to the antiwar sentiments of her constituents--and then voting in favor of every blood-soaked imperialist adventure undertaken by the Bush regime) rejected international monitoring of military and pharmaceutical sites that might employ research for illicit purposes, e.g., the fabrication of banned biological weapons.

"The Obama administration will not seek to revive negotiations on a verification protocol to the convention," Tauscher told delegates December 9 at the annual meeting of the States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention in Geneva.

The position outlined last week by the administration eerily follows in the footsteps of the previous government. In 2001, there was broad support internationally for revitalizing the BWC draft Protocol; a long, circuitous process undertaken back in 1991.

But during these earlier negotiations, the U.S. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) released a position paper opposing the routine inspection of laboratories and other research facilities on the grounds of safeguarding "confidential business information," a position they have reiterated today.

This, along with U.S. Defense Department opposition killed the deal after the American delegation, under instructions from arch neocon John Bolton who then held Tauscher's brief, argued that an international inspections regime would put U.S. "national security" at "risk" by allowing spot checks of suspected U.S. weapons sites.

Revealing a warmer and fuzzier, though no less obstructionist side than blustery Bolton, the Undersecretary mounted a charm offensive in Geneva, touting the National Security Council's (NSC) "National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats" as a major transformation of the U.S. position. It wasn't. Tauscher told delegates: "The United States intends to implement this [NSC] strategy through renewed cooperation and more thorough consultations with our international counterparts in order to prevent the misuse and abuse of science while working together to strengthen health security around the world."

However, not a single word in the 23-page NSC document addresses the vital issue of verification. Indeed, while no-holds-barred inspections of nuclear weapons' facilities undergird international treaties governing the destruction of warheads and missiles, thus ensuring compliance with treaty obligations by states, when it comes to biological weapons the "National Strategy" skirts the question entirely. Why?

While the United States claims that it will "advance policies and practices that establish and reinforce norms against the misuse of the knowledge and capabilities that arise from the life sciences while encouraging their free and open availability for peaceful and beneficial use," a call to "develop and employ complementary and multi-layered systems for influencing, identifying, inhibiting, and interdicting biological threats" does nothing to constrain state or corporate actors from exploiting the life sciences for nefarious ends, to wit, work with dual use select agents that can be diverted into surreptitious weapons' programs.

This is crucial. While the document asserts that America's "relationships with the United Nations, international organizations, foreign governments, and the private sector are critical to the success of our efforts" the fact is, the "private sector" and the secret state's own Defense Department are dead-set against any initiative that give international arms' control monitors access to their facilities.

Claiming that the United States "has carefully reviewed previous efforts to develop a verification protocol," the administration has "determined that a legally binding protocol would not achieve meaningful verification or greater security."

Echoing Tauscher and the NSC's lame reasoning, Barry Kellman, president of the International Security and Biopolicy Institute told The Hill he "agreed," and told the publication "that given the rapid evolution of the biological market, technologies that once could only be made in a laboratory can now be made anywhere, so it would be impossible to verify that a country is holding true to the convention protocols."

Really? Perhaps then, Mr. Kellman would care to enlighten us as to which select agent was used in the first and to date, only, bioterrorist attack of the 21st century, and where pray tell it might have come from.

Editing Out the Secret State: The 2001 Anthrax Attacks

As has generally been accepted by scientific experts and as The Baltimore Sun revealed back in 2001, "for nearly a decade, U.S. Army scientists at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah have made small quantities of weapons-grade anthrax that is virtually identical to the powdery spores used in the [October 2001] mail attacks."

Investigative journalist Scott Shane disclosed that Dugway's Life Sciences Division "made hundreds of kilograms of anthrax for bombs designed to kill enemy troops over hundreds of square miles" during the Cold War.

Indeed, the "extraordinary concentration" of the finely-milled powdered anthrax mailed to the media and members of Congress was "in the range of 1 trillion spores per gram" which "meant that the letter could have contained 200 million times the average dose necessary to kill a person."

Researchers at Northern Arizona University determined that "the genetic fingerprint of the mailed anthrax is indistinguishable from that of the Ames 'reference strain,' which is the strain used most often at Fort Detrick and Dugway, according to a scientist familiar with the genetic work," the Sun reported.

Years later, former Ft. Detrick deputy commander Richard Spertzel told investigative journalists Bob Coen and Eric Nadler that "the material that was in the Daschle/Leahy letter was "1.5 to 3 microns in particle size" and characterized the refinement "as super sophisticated ... phenomenal." When investigators attempted to examine samples under a microscope, "it readily floated off the slides."

In other words, the "genetic fingerprint" and "extraordinary concentration" of the weaponized anthrax used in the attack would require a team of individuals, and not a proverbial "lone nut" to produce a biotoxin possessing such exquisitely lethal characteristics. The inescapable conclusion is that the anthrax used to murder five people, sicken dozens of others and terrorize the rest of us, could only have come from a state program or one operating under contract to a government agency.

Could the deadly biotoxin have been diverted from a U.S. defense facility or corporate lab by a group of "black box" scientists operating under the radar for their own nefarious ends, i.e. strengthening the state's repressive hand within the social-political context of the 9/11 attacks? It is certainly possible and cannot be ruled out.

As I previously reported, Global Security Newswire (GSN) disclosed in June that "a recently completed inventory at a major U.S. Army biodefense facility found nearly 10,000 more vials of potentially lethal pathogens than were known to be stored at the [Ft. Detrick] site."

According to reporter Martin Matishak, the 9,220 samples discovered "included the bacterial agents that cause plague, anthrax and tularemia; Venezuelan, Eastern and Western equine encephalitis viruses; Rift valley fever virus; Junin virus; Ebola virus; and botulinum neurotoxins."

While Ft. Detrick's deputy commander Col. Mark Kortepeter claimed there are "multiple layers of security" and that "a lot of buffers [would] prevent anyone who shouldn't be in the laboratory from getting in in the first place and then preventing them taking something out with them," this dodges the question of whether someone who was authorized to be inside Ft. Detrick or any of the other 400 U.S. facilities that have Biosafety Level-3 or Biosafety Level-4 laboratories, could smuggle out deadly toxic substances.

The New York Times reported December 9, that Tauscher rejects a strict regulatory regimen that would monitor state bioweapons research and development because of the "regulatory burdens that verification would place on the American pharmaceutical industry and on the military's bio-defense research activities."

Given the available facts surrounding the 2001 anthrax terrorist incident and the FBI's subsequent cover-up, Tauscher's fear of "regulatory burdens" on the "pharmaceutical industry" and the state's own "bio-defense research activities" are certainly misplaced and should be viewed with suspicion.

Big Pharma and Congress: Best Friends Forever!

While journalists and researchers have explored ethically-challenged relationships amongst former Defense Department officials and the weapons' industry, most recently by USA Today, and have described the oft-cited revolving door as entrée to an exclusive and highly lucrative good 'ol boys club; call it a Beltway version of a retirement village for Pentagon clock-punchers.

Inquiring minds can't help but wonder: does the same clubby atmosphere pervade, and inform, the policy decisions made by denizens of the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex? Let's take a look!

Take the Alliance for Biosecurity, a Big Pharma lobby shop aligned with the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), as a starting point. Self-described as "a collaboration among the Center for Biosecurity and 13 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies," one "whose mission is to work in the public interest to improve prevention and treatment of severe infectious diseases--particularly those diseases that present global security challenges," one discovers that similar relationships between academia, industry and government abound.

Since Antifascist Calling first reported on Alliance efforts to increase state funding of biotechnology and "biodefense" research in August, all references to the Alliance for Biosecurity have been scrubbed from UPMC's web site. Indeed, all traces of the lobby shop's activities, including group policy statements and testimony before relevant congressional committees have simply vanished.

But why, pray tell, would they take evasive action in the first place? And more importantly, what do they have to hide? As it turns out, quite a lot.

According to The Washington Times, when the Center for Biosecurity's director, Dr. Tara O'Toole, was nominated for her current post as Undersecretary of Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security, she had "served as a key adviser for a lobbying group funded by the pharmaceutical industry that has asked the government to spend more money for anthrax vaccines and biodefense research."

Reporter Tim McElhatton disclosed that O'Toole "never reported her involvement with the lobbying group called the Alliance for Biosecurity in a recent government ethics filing." The Washington Times further reported that the Alliance "has spent more than $500,000 lobbying Congress and federal agencies--including Homeland Security--since 2005, congressional records show."

"In written testimony to Congress" according to McElhatton, "Dr. O'Toole said the alliance was 'created to protect the Center for Biosecurity's status as an honest broker between the biopharma companies and the U.S. government'." As is well known, $500,000 buys much in the way of "honesty" in the halls of Congress!

In an October 31 letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) "signed by Dr. O'Toole and two other alliance officials, the group called on Congress to include more than $900 million for the 'advanced development of medical countermeasures' to be administered by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority."

The Washington Times revealed that the letter was also "signed by the chief executive officer of member company PharmAthene, David Wright, who was one of the two first co-chairmen for the alliance after its creation in 2005."

McElhatton reported that according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing "Mr. Wright's company has a big financial interest in securing work from the authority," and that "PharmAthene has been trying to win a contract administered by the authority to supply 25 million doses of an anthrax vaccine to the national stockpile."

According to a press release, the firm announced that PharmAthene "will participate in and present data at the HHS Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE) workshop and BARDA Industry Day taking place in Washington, DC Dec. 2-4, 2009."

Indeed, the PHEMCE work shop "will bring together public and private sector stakeholders for a dynamic dialogue on the current state of medical countermeasure preparedness, PHEMCE initiatives in the past year, and plans for moving forward to enhance national capabilities to respond to a public health emergency."

When "moving forward" entails the expenditure of nearly one billion dollars for "countermeasure preparedness," one can be sure that companies on the make will be all ears!

Former Bushist Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, averred that the PHEMCE workshop "is very timely given the WMD Commission's conclusion that terrorists are much more likely to attack America with a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon."

Despite the fact that weapons' experts have not reached a consensus on the Commission's alarmist report, given the extreme difficulty faced by "terrorists" to fabricate biotoxins into an effective weapon, Thompson claims, "now that our national experts have made this warning clear, we need to take the immediate steps necessary to protect against potential biological attacks against the U.S. homeland. In particular, we need to move forward efforts to build and stockpile appropriate biological countermeasures, such as next-generation anthrax vaccines, recombinant influenza vaccines, and novel antivirals."

Among the "experts" consulted by the WMD Commission were none other than Dr. O'Toole's Center for Biosecurity who have called for the expenditure of some $3.4 billion annually on "countermeasure development to reach 90 percent chance of success defending the country against bioterrorism threats."

Nowhere however, in the PharmAthene press release is it disclosed that the former HHS Secretary has a proprietary interest in securing federal dollars allegedly to "enhance national capabilities" to better respond "to a public health emergency." Currently, Thompson is the President of Logistics Health, Inc., a firm that does extensive business with the U.S. Department of Defense for what it euphemistically calls "military readiness."

Craig Holman, the legislative director of the watchdog group Public Citizen, said that O'Toole's lack of transparency "definitely and clearly runs counter to the intent of the law."

What was the response by Senate Democrats, quick to denounce the "culture of corruption" of their coconspirators across the aisle? According to The New York Times, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid "slammed Republicans for slowing down, and in some cases, blocking the confirmation of nominees for various posts in the Obama administration."

Neither Reid, nor for that matter the Times, breathed a word about O'Toole's obvious conflict of interest and cosy relationships with biodefense firms she would presumably oversee from her perch at DHS.

Instead, we are lavished with empty rhetoric from Reid who told the Times: "'For that position, [DHS Undersecretary] President Obama nominated an expert in combating both pandemics and bioterror attacks,' Mr. Reid said, adding: 'Imagine that: Americans are bracing against a flu epidemic here at home and threats of terrorism from abroad, the President nominated someone highly experienced in both of those areas, and Republicans are saying no'."

Despite revelations of serious ethical breaches, O'Toole was confirmed by the Senate November 4.

The Ties that Bind (And Pay Handsomely!)

The close proximity of O'Toole, the Center for Biosecurity and now, the Department of Homeland Security to Alliance members such as Bavarian Nordic; Cangene Corporation; DOR BioPharma, Inc.; DynPort Vaccine Company LLC; Elusys Therapeutics, Inc.; Emergent BioSolutions; Hematech, Inc.; Human Genome Sciences, Inc.; NanoViricides, Inc.; Pfizer Inc.; PharmAthene; Siga Technologies, Inc.; Unither Virology LLC, , as well as associate Alliance member, the spooky, CIA-connected Battelle Memorial Institute, might just help explain the Obama administration's opposition to strengthening the BWC.

According to the Center for Responsive Politic's OpenSecrets.org database, the Alliance for Biosecurity have contributed some $600,000 to congressional grifters since 2005 through the Philadelphia law firm Drinker, Biddle & Reath.

While chump change when it comes to assuring that the best congresspeople money can buy stay "on-message," OpenSecrets reports that since 1990, Big Pharma and their allies in the health products industry have spent a whopping $177,030,005 on "influence and lobbying." Breaking down the numbers, the watchdog group avers that the bulk of contributions have benefited Republicans ($111,405,078 or 63%) vs. Democrats ($65,056,643 or 37%).

In The Washington Times piece cited above, ethics groups have said that the Alliance's set-up "is an example of what critics call "stealth lobbying," in which like-minded companies form a loosely knit compact and spend lots of money lobbying the government. The arrangement is legal, but it exposes loopholes that prevent the public from finding out how much money each company pays and whether one business exerts more control over the others."

Alliance legal counsel Anita Cicero told the paper, "the group is complying with all applicable federal laws" and that the group "does not generate income, does not have a bank account and does not owe taxes." She told the paper the organization "was formed so companies, academic institutions and the government" could work together to "accelerate the development of therapeutic and vaccine countermeasures."

"Countermeasures" that markedly add to the corporatist bottom line.

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, the National Biodefense Science Board (NBSB), chock-a-block with industry insiders and academic shills, posted an August 11 notice buried in the Federal Register.

Rescued from oblivion by the whistleblowing intelligence and security web site Cryptome, we were informed that NBSB's "Market & Sustainability Work Group" seek to hand over even more cash to industry partners.

Seeking public comment on the group's working document, "Inventory of Issues Constraining or Enabling Industry Involvement in Medical Countermeasure Efforts," NBSB is seeking to further "streamline" the Food and Drug Administration's already lax review process in a move meant to further "incentivize" industry by "increased federal funding for advanced development, in the form of cost-reimbursement contracts and rewarding private-capital investments with milestone payments at procurement."

Under NBSB's proposal, the drug industry stands to grab "reimbursement of development costs + 15%, with return-on-working-capital at 22%, and cost-of-money-for-capital at 15%."

If said corporate patriots swing into action during a national emergency, then "compensation if commercial product(s) during emergencies (e.g., lost sales, market share, delayed licensing" are fully paid by the federal government. Talk about a robust "public-private partnership" in action!

But wait, there's more!

GSN reported in October that Alliance member Human Genome Sciences Inc. had earned $160 million from the federal government for sales of its ABthrax vaccine, despite a Food and Drug Administration report that stated although the product performed better than a placebo (!) "it is still unknown how well these models and results predict efficacy in humans." Despite these equivocal findings, "Washington has placed an order for 65,000 doses of ABthrax for the country's emergency medicines reserve."

Now that's what I call a streamlined review process!

Earlier in October, GSN disclosed that Alliance member Emergent BioSolutions won $4.9 million in funding from the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, "for the development of a new anthrax vaccine that could require only two doses to provide protection."

As investigative journalists and filmmakers Bob Coen and Eric Nadler revealed in Anthrax War and a companion book, Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail, Emergent BioSolutions has a very interesting pedigree indeed.

When the State of Michigan auctioned off the Michigan Biological Products Institute (MBPI) in 1998, standing in the wings with a check for $24 million were Lebanese financiers Ibrahim El-Hibri and son Fuad, "an international telecom magnate" according to Coen and Nadler. During this period, the firm the El-Hibri's had founded after scooping-up MBPI for a song, BioPort, "held the exclusive contract to provide the U.S. government with the anthrax vaccine, and that in addition to the physical plant, the Michigan sale included $130 million in contracts with the Department of Defense."

During their investigation, Coen and Nadler learned "that the El-Hibris had participated in the privatization of portions of the United Kingdom's leading biodefense facility, Porton Down, a decade earlier" and that "with the acquisition of the Michigan plant, the family had planted stakes in the only two leading anthrax vaccine producers in the West." What makes this particularly troubling according to Coen and Nadler, is the fact that the "El-Hibri's did not have science backgrounds or biotech business experience before the Porton takeover--but were clearly canny investors."

Alarmingly, "the troubling fact [was] that the sale of MBPI to BioPort had transferred control of a sensitive government program to a network of companies, one of which was headquartered in the Dutch Caribbean."

Indeed, "Fuad El-Hibri himself informed Congress in 1999 that the controlling shareholder in BioPort--Intervac LLC--was partly owned by I and F Holdings NV, a Netherlands Antilles investment company owned by his father."

None of this troubled Congress in the least since, as Coen and Nadler relate "no one on the House Committee on Government Reform asked him if El-Hibri senior had any partners in I and F Holdings." These disturbing facts led the investigative journalists to wonder: "Who actually owned the largest anthrax vaccine manufacturing plant in the West, if not the world? Who really knew."

Fast forward a decade and according to GSN BioPort, now Emergent BioSolutions, "is the producer of BioThrax, the only vaccine licensed by the Food and Drug Administration for the prevention of anthrax disease. The company is also developing other anthrax treatments and countermeasures against diseases such as botulism and hepatitis B." Funds for developing the vaccine were provided "through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009."

Last month, GSN revealed that Alliance member, Danish firm Bavarian Nordic will receive some $40 million for a freeze-dried version of the firm's Imvamune vaccine for smallpox. GSN reported that "Bavarian Nordic has received $680 million in contracts for Imvamune from the U.S. government. Washington has ordered 20 million doses of the vaccine in its liquid-frozen form and has the option of buying another 60 million," according to a company press release.

This, despite the fact that smallpox has disappeared as an international public health threat. However as the Sunshine Project's Edward Hammond revealed in Emerging Technologies: Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons, when a U.S. research team at the State University of New York in Stony Brook synthesized poliovirus "from scratch," the responsible bioresearch community were alarmed.

Hammond commented that "the experiment exemplifies possibilities that generate real problems if similar techniques become applicable to agents such as smallpox. Today it is unlikely (though not completely impossible) that countries apart from Russia and the USA have access to smallpox virus. This is the basis of the current threat assessments with regard to smallpox, which rate the likelihood of a smallpox attack very low. Should it become possible in a few years to build smallpox virus in the laboratory, the situation would be turned upside down. The relative security that can be assumed today (at least for most countries in the world) will evaporate."

Since Hammond's piece first appeared in 2003, is it plausible that synthetic smallpox could have been ginned-up in a top secret U.S. research facility, hence contingency planning by secret state officials to have a freeze-dried, hence longer-lived vaccine on hand? We don't know.

Examining only the three above-named firms, OpenSecrets reports that since 2000, Human Genome Sciences has expended some $24 million since 2002 for lobbying; Emergent BioSolutions has spent some $10.9 on lobbying efforts since 2003, and Bavarian Nordic has spent some $21.7 lobbying Congress since 2002.

Given the enormous outlay of taxpayer largesse to firms that have profited handily under the Project BioShield Act of 2004, a grotesque piece of Bushist legislative flotsam, and the nearly $60 billion dollars reported by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation spent on so-called biodefense by the federal government, one can only conclude that lobbying activities by Big Pharma is an investment well-spent!

Keep in mind too, that the expenditure of federal dollars for Project BioShield and related programs do not include black budget allocations concealed by the CIA and Pentagon under a welter of above top secret Special Access Programs, a subject that Antifascist Calling will explore in future reports.

Conclusion

As the Sunshine Project's Edward Hammond has warned: "Rapid developments in biotechnology, genetics and genomics pose a variety of environmental, ethical, political, and social questions. And because they open up tremendous new possibilities for biological warfare, these technological developments have grave implications for peace and security."

We must view the Obama administration's cynical opposition to strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention because of the "regulatory burdens that verification would place on the American pharmaceutical industry and on the military's bio-defense research activities" as a dire international public health emergency, one which University of Illinois constitutional law professor Francis Boyle, the author of the 1989 Bioweapons Anti-Terrorism Act, has called "a catastrophe waiting to happen."

We proceed blindly along this path at our own peril.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, Information Clearing House and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.

Aporkalypse Now: Finding the Real Swine in the Pandemic Pandemonium

Finding the Real Swine in the Pandemic Pandemonium

by Lucinda Marshall / May 2nd, 2009

For the last eight years, there has been no shortage of things to worry about: Bin Laden, Al Queda, Saddam Hussein, Anthrax, Bird Flu, Katrina, sub-prime mortgages, health care costs, gas pump prices, unemployment, stock price plunges and now we have H1N1, the non-Kosher virus formerly known as Swine Flu.

The news media is pigging out (sorry, I’ll try to contain myself) with 24/7 coverage of the potential pandemic and breathless reports that this is the new Black Death and millions could die. According to MSNBC, “H1N1 swine flu is seen as the biggest risk since H5N1 avian flu re-emerged in 2003, killing 257 people of 421 infected in 15 countries. In 1968 a “Hong Kong” flu pandemic killed about 1 million people globally, and a 1957 pandemic killed about 2 million. Seasonal flu kills 250,000 to 500,000 people in a normal year, including healthy children in rich countries.” However, as I write this, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that, only 12 people have died so far of this outbreak of H1N1.

To put all of this in further perspective, it is useful to compare these numbers to the annual number of deaths from other causes. According to WHO:

• 1 million people die from malaria each year
• 2 million from AIDS
• 2 million from air pollution
• 7.4 million from cancer
• 17.5 million from cardiovascular disease
• 1.6 million from tuberculosis

In other words, we KNOW that 31.5 million people will die each year from causes that in large part could be prevented, but 7 deaths a pandemic makes? Have we, as Simon Jenkins suggests in the Guardian all gone demented? Perhaps. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that WHO knows what it is talking about and that a lot of people could get sick from this virus, the question then becomes whether it is the virus we should fear or our ability to react to it.

Like any other disease, the first question should always be what is causing it and how can we prevent it, not the pharmaceutical industry driven approach of how can we (profitably) treat it with drugs such as Tamiflu, which as I noted during the bird flu scare is made by a company in which former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield has a significant financial stake.

Another critical point is that unlike birds that can fly pretty much anywhere, human and pig interaction is for the most part limited to farms, especially factory farms and circumstantial evidence indicates that this outbreak may have originated at a Smithfield Foods facility in Perote, Mexico. Grist reports that, “Smithfield operates massive hog-raising operations Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. The operations, grouped under a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carroll, raise 950,000 hogs per year.” According to Grist, 30% of the population living near the plant have become ill with flu-like symptoms which they believe is due contamination from the hog factory.

But as Narco News points out, the real culprit in swine flu may be NAFTA which went into effect the same year that Smithfield opened its Mexican facility in the aftermath of being hit with huge fines for environmental pollution in the U.S., “The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.”

The issue of whether agri-business run factory farms are the source of the problem has been all but ignored by the U.S. media. Instead we are being told to stay home if sick and seek medical care if really sick. Nice advice presuming you have paid sick leave benefits and health insurance. And even for those able to seek medical care, there are real questions about the adequacy of whether our problem-plagued healthcare infrastructure to handle a massive additional medical incident. As John Nichols points out, we need to reinstate funding for pandemic response; disaster preparedness and infrastructure maintenance aren’t luxuries, they are a necessity, something we surely should have learned from Hurricane Katrina.

So while we need to take this threat seriously, we need to do so in the context of the many existing health pandemics that already exist, we need to take steps to insure that our healthcare system itself is healthy and we need to address the root causes of what allowed the conditions in which the H1N1 virus manifested and take the necessary steps to correct policies that endanger public health.

Lucinda Marshall is a feminist artist, writer and activist. She is the Founder of the Feminist Peace Network. Her work has been published in numerous publications in the US and abroad. She also blogs at WIMN Online and writes a monthly column for the Louisville Eccentric Observer. Read other articles by Lucinda, or visit Lucinda's website.

This article was posted on Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at 10:00am and is filed under Food/Nutrition, Health/Medical. ShareThis

New swine flu feared to be weaponized strain

New swine flu feared to be weaponized strain

publication date: Apr 25, 2009

Remember that Rumsfeld is THE major shareholder in Tamiflu

April 25-26, 2009 -- SPECIAL BULLETIN. New swine flu feared to be weaponized strain

According to two mainstream media journalists, one in Mexico City and the other in Jakarta, who spoke to WMR on background, they are convinced that the current outbreak of a new strain of swine flu in Mexico and some parts of the United States is the result of the introduction of a human-engineered pathogen that could result in a widespread global pandemic, with potentially catastrophic consequences for domestic and international travel and commerce.

The journalists have been told by top officials of the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) about the grave dangers posed by the new and deadly swine flu strain, known as A-H1N1. The flu, never before seen by scientists, has already killed up to 68 people in Mexico and has forced the cancellation of public events, including sports matches and concerts, and the closure of schools, libraries, and museums. Eight cases have been reported in Texas and California and one Texas family is already under a quarantine. Doctors are examining several students at a Queens high school in New York who displayed symptoms similar to those experienced by swine flu patients in Mexico.

Our Mexico City source said 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, concluded that H1N1 possesses certain transmission "vectors" that suggest that 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.

Past swine flu outbreaks have been spread from pigs to humans, who then passed the flu on to other humans. However, with A-H1N1, there have been no reported infections of pigs. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), A-H1N1 has gene segments from North American swine, bird and human flu strains and a segment from Eurasian swine flu. Costa Rica, Brazil, and Peru have issued alerts to check all incoming passengers from Mexico at border crossings, airports, and seaports for symptoms of the swine flu.

WHO is convening an emergency session of its top medical experts in Geneva and is set to declare H1N1 a "public health event of international concern." It is reported that WHO will recommend travel restrictions to and from areas where the flu has been reported, including Mexico City and the states of Mexico, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí and Oaxaca.

Our Jakarta source said WHO officials are afraid that the presence of gene segments from dreaded H5N1 bird flu in the A-H1N1 swine flu strain could mean that the new swine flu strain was engineered to "jump species." WMR has been informed that the CDC and U.S. Army dug up the body of an Inuit woman who died in 1918 in Brevig Mission, Alaska from an outbreak of Spanish flu. The influenza pandemic that year killed up to 100 million people worldwide in an 18-month period. Brevig Mission saw 72 of its 80 residents die within five days, the worst case recorded anywhere in the world. WMR has been told the genetic material recovered by the U.S. government from the corpse of the Inuit woman provided the basis for the development of the H5N1, or bird (avian), flu strain at the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the point of origin for the Ames strain of anthrax used in the 2001 bio-war attacks against the U.S. Congress and the media.

The fear in Asia is that if the A-H1N1 pandemic spreads to the United States, travel to and from the country will be all but shut down.

The following are the symptoms associated with A-H1N1:

• cough
• fever
• sore throat
• shortness of breath
• muscle and joint pain

The drugs Tamiflu and Relenza are seen as the most effective against A-H1N1.

Remember that Rumsfeld is THE major shareholder in Tamiflu

Anthrax attack on Congress and media had roots in planned US biowar attack on USSR and Albania

SPECIAL REPORT. Anthrax attack on Congress and media had roots in planned US biowar attack on USSR and Albania

According to documents obtained by WMR, the anthrax attacks on the U.S. Congress and the media in October and November 2001 were directly linked to CIA and Pentagon contractors that were developing biological warfare agents in 1983 that were to be used against the Soviet Union and Albania.

On August 4, 2008, WMR reported on the anthrax investigation: "U.S. intelligence sources have revealed that the FBI has gone slow on the anthrax investigation because of the myriad links to covert programs involving Fort Detrick, the CIA, the Army Dugway Proving Ground in Utah (the home to the only aerosolized dry anthrax laboratory), and contractors SAIC, Battelle, and Hadron Advanced Biosystems (now known as Analex Corporation). Such weapons development would be in contravention of the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty signed by President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev but may have been subsequently ignored by the CIA following Nixon's resignation in 1974. Former President George Bush headed the CIA from November 1975 to January 1977."

As it turns out, in 1983, the Reagan administration was not only violating the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty but was planning to target the Soviet Union with newly-developed biological agents.

The FBI concentrated its anthrax investigation on Fort Detrick and the late badgered scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins. The FBI's motives were to avoid the genesis of the illegal US bio-warfare program, located just across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia's Rosslyn and Court House neighborhoods.

A January 20, 1983, letter from Cabazon Arms,a "CSC-WSI Joint Venture" established by Cabazon Security Corporation (83-180 Requa Avenue, Suite 9, Indio, California) and Wackenhut Services Inc. (3280 Ponce de Leon Blvd., Coral Gables, Florida), as a joint CIA and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) weapons research and development firm on the Cabazon Indian reservation in California, from Cabazon Arms President John P. Nichols to Dr. Harry Fair of Tactical Technologies, located at 1400 Wilson Boulevard, Room 1014, Arlington (Rosslyn), Virginia, states: "On February 15, 1983, I will be forwarding to you a unique lost of agents and production techniques related to biological warfare. The Stormont Laboratories, Inc., business plan I mailed you was to prepare you for what we are sending you in this area. Their products could be utilized in small countries bordering Albania or large countries bordering the Soviet Union. You will be amazed at the scope." Just down the street from Tactical Technolgies was 1911 North Fort Myer Drive, the location of the offices of CIA covert operatives Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines, Ted Shackley, Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero and the center for the shipment of arms to Iran on the ill-fated SS Poet and other illegal arms shipments. Just up Wilson Boulevard from Tactical Technologies was Battelle Memorial Institute, implicated in the anthrax weaponry development.

Tactical Technologies, involved with Hadron and Cabazon, and a CIA front was headquartered at 1400 Wilson Boulevard in Rosslyn.

A stone's throw from Tactical Technologies was 1911 North Fort Myer Drive, the brown building in the center and the headquarters of CIA fronts involving Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines, Edwin Wilson, and the shipping agent for the ill-fated SS Poet.

In a May 25, 1981, Wackenhut Inter-Office memo, Fair is named as "Dr. Harry D. Fair, Chief, Propulsion Technology, Applied Science Division" of the U.S. Army's Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, New Jersey. The same memo states that the Santa Rosa Indians pledged to the Cabazons that their land could be used for the testing of a "rail gun."

It is unclear what Nichols meant by using biological warfare agents in small countries bordering Albania, then a Chinese ally, and large countries bordering the Soviet Union, which included China. However, the possibility that the CIA and its contractors were contemplating a "false flag" biological attack on Albania from non-aligned Yugoslavia that may have been blamed on Moscow and a "false flag" retaliatory biological attack from China on the Soviet Union cannot be ruled out. A Soviet-Chinese war in the early 1980s would have advanced the proto-neoconservative political agenda of extreme anti-Communists in the Reagan administration like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, individuals who would later play a key part in the bogus intelligence that saw the George W. Bush administration invade and occupy Iraq.

On September 10, 1981, the Riverside, California Police Department noted a major meeting at the Cabazon Indian Reservation that was attended by Earl Brian, identified as a "Wisconsin businessman and CIA employee."

Brian, who was reportedly involved in working for William Casey and George H. W. Bush to pay off Iranian mullahs to arrange for the Iranians to hold the U.S. hostages until after the 1980 presidential election, a criminal conspiracy known as the "October Surprise," was the CIA's point man on developing biological weapons. Brian headed up two companies involved with bio-war research and development for Langley, Biotech Capital Corporation and Hadron. Brian was also involved in selling pirated copies of Inslaw, Inc.'s Prosecutors Management Information System (PROMIS) to foreign clients to fund bio-war weapons research and development on the Cabazon Indian reservation.

Brian was also the president of Xonics, Inc., a CIA and Pentagon contractor based in Los Angeles that was involved in radar and telecommunications systems. Hadron was originally incorporated in 1964 as Bio-Rad. The assets of the failed Xonics and Bio-Rad were combined to form Hadron, which ultimately became Analex Corporation. Analex North America was sold in 2007 to QinetiQ in a deal that involved The Carlyle Group, in which George H. W. Bush had a financial stake.

The correspondence between Nichols and Fair also mentioned Stormont Laboratories, founded by Dr. Clyde Stormont in Woodland, California. Stormont, a native of Wisconsin, was a noted professor of professor of genetics and serology. Stormont, a speciaist on equine blood typing, died on September 10, 2002.

Cabazon and associated firm principal directors also discussed in 1988 the development of biological warfare weapons, including those involving cancer and immuno-deficiency and specifically a patent involving cytotoxic T-Lymphocytes, with the Japanese. The primary Japanese entity involved in signing the agreement with the Cabazon interlocking entities on September 14, 1988,was Ajinomoto Co., Inc. of 1-5-8 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo and an "internationally-recognied Medical School in Japan" that received a CIA grant laundered through the Cabazon entity and the American side of the agreement included Meridian International Logistics, Inc. (MIL), a reputed CIA front and CIA and Pentagon liaison to Cabazon Arms, with offices at 15270 Sutton Street, Suite 101, Sherman Oaks, California and 1666 San Onofre Drive, Pacific Palisades, California, and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. MIL had an arms subsidiary, Meridian Arms Corporation (MAC), which dealt directly with Cabazon Arms and Wackenhut.

An undated U.S. government document, classified as "National Security Information: Unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions," attached to the January 20, 1983 letter from Cabazon Arms' Nichols to Fair, states in a paragraph titled "Possible Military Applications Utilizing Hybridoma Technology" and a sub-paragraph titled "Biological warfare," that states "the gene-splicing technology provides the ability to produce pathogenic (harmful) agents (i.e., viruses). In fact, biological warfare weaponry of this nature (both production and supply) is limited only by the imagination of the scientist."

In addition, the letter states that the Cabazon reservation was being used to develop a small machine gun that could be fitted with silencers. The letter states that Peter Zokosky, who was the owner of an arms manufacturer called Armtec Manufacturing and whose wife was mayor of Indio, had the British interested in the machine gun project. In addition, South Korean ammunition makers were involved, along with Swedish arms manufacturers. Chile and Guatemala were mentioned as possible locations for the manufacture of the weapon, called the Cabazon Arms CA 9 SMG. Other markets for Cabazon Arms mentioned in a September 1, 1981, Cabazon letter, were Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and El Salvador. Guatemala and El Salvador are described as the "most sensitive." A March 23, 1982, Cabazon Arms letter also stats that potential markets for the firm's ammunition included Argentina, Taiwan, and Turkey. Cabazon Arms also exported night vision goggles to Guatemala and Jordan.

The mention of Chile and Guatemala is significant. On February 4, 2008, WMR reported: "A stringer for the Financial Times, Anson Ng, who was following a CIA-connected money trail connecting the weapons smugglers to Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) money tranches, including one that led through the Cabazon Indian Reservation in California, was shot and killed in Guatemala City.

On November 27, 1992, a number of dramatic revelations were made in a debate in the British House of Commons, chief among them that a British journalist [Jonathan Moyle] investigating [Chilean arms manufacturer Carlos] Cardoen, Matrix Churchill, and the weapons smuggling ring was murdered in Chile:

The following comments were made by then-MP Ken Livingstone, [later] Mayor of London: 'I must emphasise that we are still talking about allegations that Mark Thatcher [son of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher] was trading arms to Iraq and that he was trying to sell South African arms to Saudi Arabia. However, if there is any shred of truth in the charges, are we to believe that MI5 and MI6 did not warn the Prime Minister of the day about the activities in which her son was involved? Surely the director of MI5 or MI6 must have thought that it was important, if any information of that kind came to light, to warn the Prime Minister immediately that her son was engaged in activities that were illegal in British law and contravened United Nations resolutions. Of course, the director of MI5 or MI6 would have done that.

I shall examine the position of Dr. Carlos Cardoen a little more. He is a major and powerful figure in Chile. According to Mr. Ari Ben-Menashe, Dr. Cardoen is a business associate of Mark Thatcher. A British journalist who went to investigate Dr. Cardoen has been murdered. That is a particularly unpleasant twist to the story . . .'"

The Cabazon Arms letter to Fair also stated that Kuwait was interested in "financing the production of the CA 9 SMG."

Hadron eventually morphed into Analex. On April 8, 2002, this editor wrote an article for CounterPunch on the Analex connection to the anthrax attacks in 2001: "On April 4, ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross broadcast on ABC World News Tonight that after six months the FBI still had hardly any clues and no suspects in its anthrax investigation. A Soviet defector, the former First Deputy Director of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992 and anthrax expert, Ken Alibek (formerly Kanatjan Alibekov), now a U.S. government consultant, made the astounding claim that the person who is behind the anthrax attacks may, in fact, been advising the U.S. government. After having passed a lie detector test, Alibek was cleared of any suspicion.

Interestingly, Alibek is President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems. On October 2, 2001, just two days before the first anthrax case was reported in Boca Raton, Florida and a week and a half before the first anthrax was sent through the mail to NBC News in New York, Advanced Biosystems received an $800,000 grant from NIH [National Institutes of Health] to focus on very specific defenses against anthrax. Hadron has long been linked with the CIA. The links resulted in charges by many former government officials, including the late former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, that the company's former President, Earl Brian, illegally procured a database system called PROMIS (Prosecutors' Management Information System) from Inslaw, Inc. and used his connections to the CIA and Israeli intelligence to illegally distribute the software to various foreign governments."

Also from the CounterPunch article was the following: "William Capers Patrick III was part of the original Fort Detrick anthrax development program, which "officially" ended in 1972 when President Nixon signed, along with the Soviet Union and United Kingdom, the Biological Weapons Convention. Nixon had actually ordered the Pentagon to stop producing biological weapons in 1969. It now seems likely that the U.S. military and intelligence community failed to follow Nixon's orders and, in fact, have consistently violated a lawful treaty signed by the United States . . .Last December, the New York Timesclaimed Patrick authored a secret paper on the effects of sending anthrax through the mail, a report he denies. However, Patrick told the BBC that he was surprised that as an expert on anthrax (he was a member of the UN biological warfare inspection team in the 1990s), the FBI did not interview him right after the first anthrax attacks. The BBC reported that Battelle Memorial Institute (a favorite Pentagon and CIA contractor and for whom Alibek served as biological warfare program manager in 1998) conducted a secret biological warfare test in the Nevada desert using genetically-modified anthrax early last September, right before the terrorist attacks. The BBC reported that Patrick's paper on sending anthrax through the mail was also part of the classified contractor work on the deadly bacterial agent."

On July 30, 2002, this editor filed the following story with Intelligence Online of Paris: The report shows that there was in the months before the anthrax attacks a significant southern California link to biological warfare:

"On March 8, 2001, police in Irvine, California discovered automatic weapons, explosives, and six plastic cylinders containing chemicals beneath the home of Dr. Larry Ford, who had committed suicide on March 2, three days after his Biofem Pharmaceutical, Inc. business partner, James Patrick Riley, was shot by a masked gunman outside the company's headquarters. An associate of Ford was later convicted of the murder. Ford, a devout Mormon who was rumored to have worked at Fort Detrick and the CIA, established a close relationship with South Africa's top secret bio-warfare program, Project COAST. In 1987, Ford, while a professor of gynecology and obstetrics at UCLA, became friendly with Dr. Niels Knobel, a major player in COAST. Ford became a consultant to the South African biowar program and became acquainted with Dr. Wouter Basson, known as "Dr. Death," the head of South Africa's bio-warfare program.

U.S. government investigators are now looking into a link between Basson, Ford, and possibly others involved with anthrax at Fort Detrick, Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center in Long Island, New York; and at South Africa's former biowar center at Fort Klapperkop in Pretoria [now Tshwane]."

Other documentation obtained by WMR shows that Cabazon Indian Security, the joint venture with Wackehut, discussed the purchase of Valleyfield Chemical Products Corporation of Valleyfield, Canada, after its owner, Canadian engineer Gerald Bull, was jailed in the United States for the illegal export of weapons to South Africa. Bull had not only worked for the South Africans but also the CIA, Israel, and was later involved in the building of a "super gun" for Saddam Hussein in Iraq. There is a belief that the 1981 testing that was to take place on the Santa Rosa Indian reservation involved Bull's rail gun or "super gun." Bull was assassinated by the Mossad on March 22, 1990 in Brussels. One of the Mossad assassins was reported recently to have been involved in the "hit" on CIA Patriot missile technology transfer expert U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel William Bennett, who was bludgeoned to death on March 22, 2009, while walking with his wife on an early Sunday morning in Landsdowne, Virginia. Bennett was specifically investigating the illegal theft of Patriot technology by Israel and its sale to Russia and China.

The May 31, 1981, Wackenhut memo states that "Barry Zuckerman and Charles F. Agar, both Canadian citizens, who are involved with a Canadian firm called Mineral Resources International Ltd., as well as both being involved with Canadian financial institutions . . . are interested in the possibility of acquiring this plant [Valleyfield Chemical]. The memo noted that the Wackenhut-Cabazon joint venture would be the foreign marketing representative for the chemical plant after its purchase and that Mineral Resources International already had a joint venture with the Cabazons to explore for oil and gas on the California reservation. The offices of California's U.S. Senators Alan Cranston and S. I. Hayakawa were involved in the agreement between the Cabazons and Canadians.

Cabazon Arms was also linked to First Intercontinental Development Corporation (FIDCO) of 908 15th Street, Suite 6, Santa Monica, California. FIDCO was reportedly a CIA front headed by George K. Pender, that was in charge of a $3 billion fund to reconstruct Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion of the country. FIDCO had direct connections to Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, the influential Chamoun Christian Maronite political family, the Arab Bank in Amman, and the Reagan White House's Michael McManus, Jr., an Assistant to the President. Another CIA front involved with Cabazon was Intersect Corporation, headed by John Vanderwerker, with offices at 18952 MacArthur Boulevard, Irvine, California. FIDCO and Intersect Corporation, as CIA fronts, regularly transferred millions of dollars to finance the CIA's arms and plane sales businesses. Two banks identified in these transactions are Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) and Credit Suisse in Zurich and Geneva. One of the Credit Suisse-Geneva account numbers used by the CIA entities between 1981 and 1983 for these transactions was 027465905482-1.

Intersect Corporation also had a Washington presence. The Washington Post Style section ran a story on January 27, 1980, about an "old hen" social party at the Smithsonian. Among those quoted in the article was an attendee at the social event, John Elliott of Fairfax, and who was cited as working for the "Intersect Corporation" which "does security work for the government."

Intersect and a Glenn Shockley, a principal of both FIDCO and Meridian International Logistics, were involved with a Spring 1981 aircraft transaction worth $7,800,000, with Parvis Lavi of Omega Industries of Plainview, Long Island. The date is significant because of the Reagan campaign's 1980 October Surprise involving the supply pre-election and post-election of military supplies to Iran in return for Iran holding U.S. embassy hostages in Iran until after the November presidential election to ensure President Jimmy Carter's defeat by Reagan. In 1998, Lavi was charged with illegally selling F-14 spare engine parts to Iran. Lavi also had offices in Los Angeles and Rotterdam. Lavi's brother, Houshang Lavi, was involved in a Carter administration deal in October 1980 to sell up to $10 million in F-14 spare parts to Iran in exchange for the hostage's release. However, key parts of the CIA were working with the Reagan campaign to ensure that there was no pre-election hostage release that could benefit Carter's re-election campaign. In 1983, a Swiss company, Alcari SA, sued Omega Industries for failure to pay Alcari $1.2 million in a deal to sell Iran military supplied in 1981, the same time that the Cabazon-connected CIA entities were involved in money transfers worth over $7 million that involved Omega Industries.

FIDCO, a Delaware corporation organized in 1974, brought a complaint on October 28, 1981, in the U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, DC against Ship's Overseas Services, Inc. (SOS), a firm organized in 1972. The complaint dealt with the 1975 shipment of steel pipe from Spain for an oil company in Libya. SOS contracted pipe from Gulf Consolidated International, Inc. in Houston and turned a profit with the Libyans, from which FIDCO demanded a share. The case appeared to be a normal business dispute, except for the fact that appearing as a pro se intervenor before the court was none other than Michael A. McManus, Jr., the Special Assistant to President Reagan. However, the court ultimately found in favor of SOS.

In 1988, the chairman of the Hosue Judiciary Committee's Criminal Justice Subcommittee conducted an investigation of the Reagan campaign's October Surprise conspiracy with Iran. However, as WMR has previusly reported, Conyers has been staffed with individuals over the years who are connected not only to the CIA and CIA front operations in Washington, DC, but American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) operatives. The Conyers investigation of the October Surprise went nowhere.

In addition to journalists Moyle and Ng, there would be one more journalist who would be murdered because of his investigation of the arms smuggling and other illegal activities partly based on the Cabazon Indian reservation. Freelance Washington journalist Danny Casolaro was found with his wrists slashed a dozen times in a bathtub at the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on August 10, 1991. One of the last sources Casolaro spoke to was an official of the Cabazon Arms operation. As with journalist Gary Webb, who uncovered the CIA's links to the same Nicaraguan contra elements who were also involved with Cabazon, Casolaro's death was ruled a suicide. Before and after their deaths, Casolaro and Webb were subjected to a concerted disinformation and character assassination campaign conducted by certain sectors of the corporate media, which, in turn, took their orders from their CIA masters.