“BIONOIA”

Did U.S. Use Germ Warfare Against DC Peace March?
Or Are We Just Being Bionoid…?

by Mark Sanborne

“Bionoia… Catch It!”

There’s something uniquely scary about germs. Along with making us sick, they’re the things that put the “B” in ABC (Atomic, Biological, and Chemical) warfare. Sure, there’s been some stiff competition on the fear-o-meter: Cheney warning that a WMD attack on a U.S. city was inevitable, ongoing chatter about dirty bombs, a government report that an attack on chemical plants in New Jersey could send a “lung-melting” cloud over New York, killing over a million. Still, the prospect of lab-bred bacteria and viruses causing mass indiscriminate sickness and death holds a special horrid fascination for many people.

This is not surprising. Fortunately, exposure to atomic blast, radiation, and poison gas are hypotheticals for most of us, but we all have personal experience fighting infections and disease, and our species has a long genetic and cultural memory of such ills. And unlike the relatively site-specific nature of nuke and chemical attacks, biological pandemics—be they man-made or “natural”—have the potential to spread their devastation across the country and globe in a matter of weeks or months.

With the latest “regular” flu season and its attendant vaccine shortages upon us, and the specter of deadly bird flu suddenly being trumpeted by the media-medical establishment, it’s no wonder that public paranoia has been whipped up. These fears follow a well-worn groove dating back decades: AIDS, of course, and the emergence of other frightening “hot zone” diseases like the Ebola and Marburg viruses from the jungles of Africa, and their potential dissemination via globalization and worldwide air travel: the “revenge of nature” scenario. Domestically, there have also been “outbreaks” like Lyme’s and Legionnaire’s disease, West Nile virus, and more recently SARS, which supposedly was spawned in the unsanitary condition of China’s exotic cuisine market. Then there’s the talk of flesh-eating bacteria in our hospitals and other scary diseases-of-the-week.

Fear of “bioterrorism” has been a parallel track running in the public consciousness. For decades there have been warnings from “experts” about the looming threat of biowarfare attacks by terrorists, a menace that became the staple of countless mass-market books, TV shows, and Hollywood thrillers. But who, exactly, are the “bioterrorists?”

A common motif—and still a current favorite—involves terrorists buying black-market plague weapons from disaffected and/or mercenary ex-Soviet or Third World scientists. (Of course, the main real-life example of this trade was the transfer of U.S. bio-agents to Iraq in the 1980s.) This cliched script point found a real-life echo in reports from Afghanistan, after the U.S. invasion in 2001, of documents in a supposed al-Qaeda safe house indicating elaborate if not fantastical plans for aerial anthrax attacks against unnamed targets.

That presumably is the kind of bioterrorism that we’re supposed to fear, and for which billions of new homeland-security dollars are currently being spent. But it also raises what should be an obvious question: if the Russians and certain Third World dictators have dangerous biowar programs—what about the U.S.?

TREATY DODGING

Many Americans, sadly, would probably be surprised to discover that the U.S. does indeed have a very robust biological warfare capability, despite the fact that President Nixon ordered a halt to the U.S. biowar program in 1969 and signed the 1972 International Biological Weapons Convention banning their production and use. The BWC was ratified by the Senate in 1974 and to date has been ratified by 143 other nations. Unfortunately the landmark treaty had no enforcement protocol whereby suspicious sites could be inspected, and the U.S. has endeavored mightily ever since to keep it that way.

Most recently, the task fell to that most belligerent of necons, John R. Bolton, who was shoehorned into his U.N. ambassadorship in an Aug. 1 recess appointment by Bush. (The appointment technically lasts until a new Congress convenes in January 2007.) Back in December 2001, when he was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security (!), Bolton single-handedly scuttled an international conference in Geneva aimed at finally implementing a BWC enforcement protocol, saying it was “dead is not going to be resurrected.”

The U.S. was the only signatory to object to the protocol, claiming countries like Iraq and Iran were cheaters, and that inspections could reveal biowar trade secrets of the U.S. military and its partners in the private sector—research with potentially huge commercial value in the pharmaceutical and vaccine industries. Presumably, the fear is that international inspection teams could be infiltrated by foreign intelligence agents—as the U.S. and Britain did in the case of Iraq from the 1990s up until the recent war.

But the larger reason for Washington’s adamant if lonely opposition may have more to do with the treaty’s other fatal loophole: the “defensive” research exception. The convention’s signatories pledge not to develop, produce, stockpile, or acquire biological agents or toxins “of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective, and other peaceful purposes.” Unfortunately, that has been interpreted as allowing countries to continue developing ever-more-deadly pathogens, as long as it’s done in small amounts and only for the purpose of developing countermeasures, like drugs and vaccines.

That exception allowed the U.S. and others—principally Britain and the Soviets—to continue business as usual by labeling their biowar programs as now being defensive in nature. The U.S. junked its germ stockpiles from the early Cold War period and launched a new generation of biowar research, using cutting-edge advances in recombinant DNA to devise new versions of already virulent diseases. Over the years more and more of that work has been farmed out to spooky “defense” contractors like Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) and the Battelle Memorial Institute. Never mind international inspectors, it’s not clear that anyone—and certainly not Congress—is overseeing this sprawling bio-industrial complex to ensure it’s in compliance with international treaty and domestic law.

Here is a vast underground empire, hiding in various government and private labs around the country, sucking up billions of dollars in secret funding, dedicated to creating the very things we fear most, and marred with a long, well-documented history of covert biowar experiments on U.S. citizens and attacks on foreign enemies. Yet those facts and that history are verboten in polite media discourse; instead the talking heads work overtime to keep our post-9-11 fears focused on “terrorists” and “rogue states.”

Thus various commentators have had no difficulty speculating that North Korea may be “weaponizing” avian flu for sale to al-Qaeda, that SARS might have been a bioengineered virus that escaped from a Chinese weapons lab, or that the introduction of West Nile virus into the U.S. in 1999 was a dirty trick from Saddam. But it’s apparently impossible for our intelligentsia to conceive the possibility that “rogue elements” (whatever that means in today’s context) in the U.S. biowarfare community could be responsible for those or other such horrors, whether by clumsy accident or nefarious design. Except, of course, for the 2001 anthrax attacks, which is perhaps why that highly suspicious case has dropped down the memory hole.

But maybe I’m just being…bionoid.

RABBIT FEVER GOES TO WASHINGTON

Or am I? On Sept. 24, 2005, I joined at least 100,000 other people from across the country on the National Mall in Washington D.C. to protest the Iraq war. It didn’t get much press, but here’s something that got even less: on Sept. 30, the federal Centers for Disease Control warned public health authorities that a low concentration of the Francisella tularensis bacteria that causes Tularemia—commonly known as rabbit fever—had been detected by six different bioweapons sensors around Washington that day.

The sensors, run by the Department of Homeland Security’s Bio Watch program, are designed to detect six bio-agents deemed by the government most likely to be used as biological weapons. The little-known rabbit fever is one of them; it takes only 10 of the microscopic bacteria to cause Tularemia, which if left untreated can kill 50% of those infected. (The other favorites include anthrax, smallpox, and plague.) DHS waited three days before informing the CDC, which took another three days to do its own tests before sending out a low-profile alert.

“It is alarming that health officials…were only notified six days after the bacteria was first detected,” House Government Reform chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) wrote in an Oct. 3 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “Have DHS and CDC analysts been able to determine if the pathogen detected was naturally occurring or the result of a terrorist attack?”

“There is no known nexus to terror or criminal behavior,” a DHS spokesman told the Washington Post. “We believe this to be environmental.” A CDC spokesman concurred, saying: “It is not unreasonable that this is a natural occurrence. There are still no cases of Tularemia.”

There are two problems with this bizarrely placid official reaction. One, there are indeed people who say they came down with unknown infections shortly after returning from the protest, though there is as yet no proof that rabbit fever was the culprit. A number of personal accounts of sickness by named individuals were cited on the ProgressiveSociety.com blog for Oct. 8 and on Salon.com Oct. 18.

One person wrote on Progressive Society: “Hi, I wanted to let people know that many people got sick after the march, including myself. Initially, it seemed like the flu, but wasn’t responding to flu treatment. Then I thought to switch to a treatment for bacteria infection, and then started to feel a little better… The incubation time for this bacteria is 3 to 24 days. There are people who came with me from Southern states who are just getting sick now.”

Salon cited four people who said they got sick after attending the anti-war rally. One was Mike Phelps, 45, who traveled there from Raleigh, NC, and said he began getting sick three days after returning home. “It was gross,” he said. “I literally vomited out cup loads of phlegm. Most of it was dark-colored. I’ve never had anything like this before.” His doctor diagnosed pneumonia and prescribed antibiotics. When Phelps informed him about the Tularemia scare a few days later, the doctor said he would’ve have prescribed the same antibiotics for rabbit fever.

Salon also interviewed independent experts who scoffed at the idea that a “natural” source of the rabbit fever bacteria somehow ended up in the soil on the Mall and was kicked up into the air by all the protesters. They noted that the six sensors that detected the germs were located miles apart, indicating that a more likely explanation was dispersal from the air. (As at most such protests, there were various helicopters flying overhead all day.)

William Stanhope of the St. Louis University School of Public Health’s Institute for Biosecurity told Salon he was convinced it was a botched terrorist attack. “I think we were lucky and the terrorists were not good,” he said. “I am stunned that this has not been more of a story.”

As for the CDC’s “nature did it” explanation, Stanhope says: “One sensor, I’d say maybe. Two sensors is a stretch. Six sensors? I’m sorry, you don’t have enough money to buy enough martinis to make me believe that it is naturally occurring at six different sites.”

Dr. Steven Hinrichs of the University of Nebraska Center for Biosecurity agreed, telling Salon: “The fact that it happened in six locations would have supported an attack scenario… It could be a failed attack.”

An attack, yes. But perhaps also a devious test that, far from failing, did exactly what it was supposed to do. Which again brings us back to the question: precisely who are the “bioterrorists”?

NEXT MONTH: Anthrax, bird flu, SARS and U.S. biological terrorism

SOURCES:

US Mission to the EU, press release on Bolton’s position on the BWC
http://www.use.be/Categories/Defense/Nov1901BoltonBiologicalWeapons.html

“Biological alarm in Washington,” by Mark Benjamin, Salon, Oct. 18, 2005
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/18/tularemia/index_np.html

“Tularemia at DC March,” Progressive Society Blog, Nov. 5, 2005
http://www.progressivesociety.com/blog/?postid=284

The Sunshine Project
Research and facts about biological weapons and biotechnology
http://www.sunshine-project.org

WW4 REPORT #15 on Bolton scuttling the Biological Weapons Convention
/15.html#shadows10

WW4 REPORT #15 on the supposed al-Qaeda anthrax threat
/15.html#shadows6

WW4 REPORT #45 on infiltration of UN Iraq inspections by U.S. spies
/45.html#iraq17

WW4 REPORT #4 on U.S. sale of biological agents to Saddam Hussein
/4.html#shadows2

WW4 REPORT #15 on U.S. Army origins of anthrax in the 2001 attacks
/15.html#shadows1

WW4 REPORT #24 on FBI probe of U.S. Army facilities in anthrax attacks
/24.html#1anthrax

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

AVIAN FASCISM

The Ecology of Pandemic and the Impending Bio-Police State

by Michael I. Niman

If there’s any good to come out of the Gulf Coast tragedy, it’s that Katrina is a harbinger warning of what the Bush junta has in store for us should an avian flu pandemic hit America. Katrina, like the tsunami that hit Asia nine months earlier, also demonstrates how greed, political priorities and development priorities compounded the killing power of otherwise “natural” disasters.

A Perfect Biological Storm

In the case of the Avian flu, it’s Third World urban poverty combined with the corporate model for factory-farming chickens that has created the perfect environment to incubate a superflu. It goes like this: anti viral drugs are expensive and their production is limited due to patents held by large multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Tamiflu, the most effective anti-flu medication on the market today, for example, sells for at least $40 per treatment, making it cost-prohibitive in a world where over one billion people subsist on under one dollar per day. The French-owned Roche corporation owns the patent for the US-developed drug, manufacturing a limited supply in one plant in Switzerland. When South Africa and Thailand asked the World Health Organization to secure permission for the two countries to manufacture the drug generically at their own plants, France and the United States halted discussion on the question, effectively blocking the large scale production of affordable Tamiflu and guaranteeing an acute worldwide shortage. Prevailing market conditions guarantee that the world’s poorest countries will be the least likely to afford whatever limited amount of Tamiflu is on the global market.

Compound this drug shortage with the reality that structural adjustment regimes imposed on “debtor nations” over the last generation by the World Bank and IMF have decimated public health systems around the world. Most countries don’t have adequate supplies of anti-viral drugs or vaccines, nor do they have an adequate health care infrastructure to monitor the spread of diseases. Urban poverty has exacerbated this situation by concentrating billions of people in crowded unsanitary conditions without safe drinking water or sewage facilities—effectively creating super-incubators for all communicable diseases. When a disease like influenza spreads quickly in a dense population, it maintains its virulence. Once a flu epidemic sweeps through any ill-prepared country, it will almost inevitably spread across the globe.

University of California professor Michael Davis, author of The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, also points out that the global chicken industry has created, over the past fifteen years, an environment in which new strains of influenza can quickly germinate. Davis singles out Tyson Foods (on whose board of directors Hillary Clinton formerly served) as creating the model in which unprecedented concentrations of chickens are raised in enormous warehouses, speeding up the “evolution of influenza” as the virus quickly passes through huge chicken populations. Abhorrent working conditions can put chicken industry workers in dangerous contact with infected chickens. Davis argues that we’ve “changed the nature of the disease by changing its ecology,” creating the conditions for stronger strains of flu to emerge and new vectors for it to jump from birds to other populations.

The combination of industrialized chicken production, urban poverty, high population density, poor sanitary infrastructure and decimated public health care systems has created the conditions for a deadly flu pandemic—with the current H5N1 strain posing a serious threat to quickly mutate into a super-toxic virus with the ability to easily spread among human populations.

The U.S. Response

Epidemiologists, to no avail, have been sounding the alarm about H5N1 since 1997 to both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Rather than respond to the alarm, both administrations continued to support the very policies that were setting the conditions for a pandemic—using the WTO to open markets to chicken industrialization, and pushing further “structural adjustment” regimes defunding public health and sanitation infrastructure in the Third World. In the U.S., we only have enough Tamiflu to treat two percent of the population. If the New Orleans evacuation has taught us anything—it’s who that two percent won’t be.

The situation at home is compounded further by the fact that the U.S. healthcare system, in a quest to be “cost effective,” has decimated its “surge capacity.” This means that we don’t have a ready supply of empty hospital beds, emergency rooms and intensive care units to deal with a large-scale emergency. Our healthcare stratagem seems to be based on the airline model, which seeks to keep all planes operating as close to capacity as possible. This thinking is now being applied to hospitals. While this model works for the airlines—where empty seats flying in the sky equal lost revenue—it bodes disaster for our healthcare system, where we’d rather the rooms stay empty but ready. If a flu pandemic hits, or any other pandemic for that matter, our bare-bones healthcare system will be overwhelmed. Once that happens, people will not only die from the flu—they’ll die from a plethora of accidents and other diseases because there won’t be medical facilities to accommodate them.

Avian Fascism

Only now, at the eleventh hour, with the devil knocking (or perhaps kicking) at the door, has the Bush administration responded with a strategy—developing a plan for a militarized response that’s more frightening than the pandemic itself. Bush is currently requesting authority to mobilize the military against civilian populations in an attempt to quarantine cities where an infection occurs. If the flu pandemic hits and we get sick, there won’t be medicine or hospital beds for us, but there’ll be plenty of soldiers ready to shoot us, it seems.

Militarism is the Bush administration’s one-thought solution to all problems. Of course, with trillions of dollars going to the military while our life-saving infrastructure is decimated with budget cuts, the Bushistas really left themselves no other choices but to use the only tool they have, horrifically inappropriate for most situations as it may be.

It’s also horrifically ineffective in this case. If avian flu hits a human population in the U.S., it clearly won’t be the first or the only population to be affected—and cordoning off cities and trying to shoot people as they leave won’t stop the disease’s spread. Immediately nullifying Roche’s exclusive patent rights to Tamiflu and marshalling global resources for mass-scale production of the drug, as well as other anti-viral medications, would be a much more rational and effective move.

Now let’s put all of this into the context of recent events. Bush’s top lieutenants seem to be either under criminal investigation or under indictment. Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay was arrested. Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill First is being investigated by the SEC for insider trading on a family-connected firm previously busted for ripping off Medicaid. Bush consigliere Karl Rove, along with Vice President
Dick Cheney and his Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, are all under investigation in the Valerie Plame affair. Bush opponents are calling for his impeachment and prosecution on seventeen different counts. All it will take is one alleged case of communicable human avian influenza, and all of this will be a moot point as we slip into martial law.
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Michael I. Niman’s previous columns are archived at:
http://www.mediastudy.com

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

ARGENTINA: CAMPESINOS ATTACKED, OIL WORKERS WIN

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

PATAGONIA, EL CHACO: CAMPESINOS UNDER ATTACK

On Sept. 15, police agents in the southern Argentine province of Chubut nearly beat to death campesino Simforoso Jaramillo, according to the Front of Mapuche and Campesino Struggle. The agents left Jaramillo with a fractured skull, broken rib, broken left arm, facial disfigurement and bruised back. He was taken to the Comodoro Rivadavia hospital where he underwent surgery and remains in a coma. (Adital, Sept. 20)

On Sept. 21, nine police agents arrived with a court official to evict the Guacuru indigenous community from their homes in the Juan F. Ibarra department of Santiago del Estero province in northern Argentina. The court official showed an eviction order referring to 595 hectares, but residents say police were unclear about which lands were supposed to be included and were just trying to evict everyone. The agents, from the 29th precinct in Quimili, were accompanied by Ruben Oscar Gauna, who claimed to have won the land in an auction. Gauna had been involved in a previous eviction attempt against the same community. The Campesino Movement of Santiago del Estero (MOCASE) reports that when local residents arrived to express solidarity with the families facing eviction, police left but threatened to come back with “reinforcements.” (Resumen Latinoamericano/Diario de Urgencia #635, Sept. 23, from Pulsar/Prensa de Frente, Argentina), Sept. 22)

ENTRE RIOS: PULP MILLS PROTESTED

Between 15,000 and 20,000 people marched on Sept. 28 in the Argentine city of Gualeguaychu, in the eastern Argentine province of Entre Rios, to protest the planned construction of two cellulose pulp plants in Fray Bentos, across the Uruguay river in the Uruguayan department of Rio Negro. The protesters fear the pulp plants will cause irreparable ecological damage to the surrounding region and threaten tourism and agriculture. The march–which ended with a rally on the banks of the Gualeguaychu river, a major tributary of the Uruguay–was organized by the Citizen Assembly of Gualeguaychu and supported by the municipal government. Participants included thousands of primary and secondary school students, as well as public employees organized in the Association of State Workers (ATE). (Resumen Latinoamericano/Diario de Urgencia #637, Sept. 28, from Pulsar; Agencia Periodistica Federal-APF, Sept. 29; Periodismo.com, Sept. 28)

It was the latest of a series of protests and highway blockades against the pulp mills over recent months. Last April 30, some 40,000 Argentines and Uruguayans converged to block traffic across the General San Martin international bridge linking Gualeguaychu to Fray Bentos over the Uruguay river. (Uruguay Indymedia, May 1, 2005)

On Sept. 19, Entre Rios governor Jorge Busti filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, charging the Uruguayan government with allowing construction of the paper mills to proceed without first conducting an environmental impact study. The governments of Argentina and Uruguay, which jointly administer the river, have set up a bilateral commission to do such an impact study within six months. But according to Busti, “People are getting very nervous because they see the companies keep on building at a very fast rate.” On Sept. 16, Busti filed a complaint against the projects with World Bank ombudsperson Meg Taylor, who promptly ordered an investigation to be carried out Oct. 10-14, freezing financing for the paper mills in the meantime.

The Metsa-Botnia company of Finland–Europe’s second-largest pulp producer–and the Spanish company Ence are investing a combined $1.7 billion in the plants; Metsa-Botnia is hoping to begin producing one million tons of wood pulp annually for export starting in 2007, while Ence plans to start production in 2008 and export 500,000 tons a year. Center-left Argentine president Nestor Kirchner has been vocal in supporting efforts to block the mills, while leftist Uruguayan president Tabare Vazquez, who took office in March, has pledged to push forward with the pulp projects. (Reuters, Sept. 1; Inter Press Service, Sept. 29; Infobae, Sept. 20; EFE, Sept. 26)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 2

OIL WORKERS WIN STRIKE

On Oct. 7, more than 800 striking oil workers seized control of the Termap oil plant in the southern Argentine province of Chubut. Chubut’s 2,000 oil workers were in the 11th day of a strike, demanding wages on a par with oil workers in northern Argentina. In an Oct. 5 assembly in Comodoro Rivadavia, the workers decided to maintain a blockade of Routes 3 and 26 and an occupation of area oil wells, rejecting a plea from the government and their union’s leadership for a pause in the protests. The strikers had the support of activists from other local labor and social organizations, including the Federation of Combative Workers, the television workers union, the Anibal Veron Unemployed Workers Committee, the Communist Party and university student associations. (Prensa de Frente, Argentina, Oct. 5; Ambito Financiero, Oct. 14; La Opinion Austral, Rio Gallegos, Argentina, Oct. 13 from Telam)

On Oct. 8, some 1,000 residents of Comodoro Rivadavia held a spontaneous cacerolazo (a noisy protest where people bang on pots and pans) in support of the strikers. Another cacerolazo followed on Oct. 9, and on the morning of Oct. 11 the city’s businesses shuttered their doors and thousands of people poured into the streets to support the oil workers’ demands. The march was joined by teachers, who were beginning an open-ended strike that same day to demand their own wage increase. (Argenpress, Oct. 14)

Later on Oct. 11, the oil and gas companies signed an agreement with the union, Private Gas and Oil Workers of Chubut, to increase pay by an additional 260 pesos a month retroactive to last January, putting the southern workers on a par with those in the north. The Chubut workers will be paid for the 15 days they spent on strike and will not be penalized for participating in the protests. The governor of Chubut served as guarantor of the accord. (LOA, Oct. 13 from Telam; Argenpress, Oct. 14)

Weekly News Update on the Americas, Oct. 16

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Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

See also WW4 REPORT #113
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1030

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Nov. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution