VHeadline.com commentarist Chris Herz writes: Long ago the American poet, John Greenleaf Whittier described my homeland of Frederick, Maryland as “fair as the garden of the Lord.” And it is. We are “green-walled by the hills of Maryland”; everywhere we look are gently rolling fields of corn, soya and meadows rich with butter-fat cattle. The foot-hills of the Appalachian Mountains unfold across our view like a panorama. And just to the north is the president’s own summer retreat, once aptly called Shangri-la (although this memoir of Franklin D. Roosevelt, like all others is now purged from our national conciousness).
Yet here, literally across the street and around the corner from my family home, and just 40 miles (65 kilometers) from Washington itself is found Fort Detrick. This is the home of the US Army’s bio-war programs. Here is and has been done all of the theoretical and much of the practical development of bacteriological and viral military agents. This is also the home of the anthrax which was used by rogue elements from within the “security organs” themselves to attack the Democratic Party and the Postal Service immediately after the 9/11 attacks.
- Nothing more exposes the fantastic delusions of the nutters who run the United States and her defense than the massive expansion on-going here in the size and activities of this biological weapons facility.
Since 9/11 more than US$10 billion has been spent on these efforts, and the physical plant at the Fort has been expanded to the tune of $400 million.
Given the notorious weaknesses of US public health, and the denial of even basic care to such large swaths of our own population, any encouragement of bio-war as a standard military tactic seems on par with the decision of the German High Command in 1916 to use poison gas — in full knowledge that the winds in Europe blow from West to East!
Yet this is exactly what has been done.
Whole new generations of organisms, with enhanced genetically-induced virulence are in train. New methods of propagation and dispersion are in research. As are new methods for mass production. The national defense white-papers of the Project for a New American Century, whose members are now in high office, call for the development of enhanced organisms targeted to specific ethnicities.
Worse, new, Strangelovian technicians are being trained and indoctrinated in the development and use of such weapons. Truly, were this being done in any other nation, even one whose military were under perfect control, as ours demonstrably are not, the alarm bells would be ringing in every capital in the world. Yet somehow we are not to be concerned with the growth of this technology in the most aggressive power on Earth.
Recently, writing in the Baltimore Sun, Scott Shane has reported the “accidental” shipment of live anthrax in the US Mails (!) to a lab in California; all the way across the continent. Another writer, Ian Hoffman, of the Oakland Tribune, reported that some programs of at least some offensive potential were launched at the Fort without the sanction of, and hidden from the Clinton administration.
Senior retired government personnel are described in the last article as questioning the plans of the Army and the Department of Homeland “Security” to continue and expand such programs. One of these was Dr Richard Spertzel, a former bio-war developer himself and Chief Bio-war Inspector for the United Nations following Gulf War I. This individual told me to my face that Iraq indeed had these terrible weapons during the propaganda build-up to the current war. I suggest that if the scale of these researches can alarm a person hardly to be considered some sort of peace campaigner, we may all share his alarm.
For many months now, speculation has been rife around here that the reason no one was ever arrested for the anthrax mailings was that the person or persons involved knew too much about US violations and evasions of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. This UN document having been initiated and signed by that notorious peacenik, Richard M. Nixon. The US regime could never afford to have anything discussed in any possible judicial venue, disclosing its ill-faith and its interest in such perverted prohibited technologies.
Older, local citizens and reporters are aware also of the large amount of work done here in past days on HIV and other extremely nasty bugs. Some buildings at the Fort had to be closed and sealed. A few even speculate that the raging global pandemic was caused by contamination of experimental vaccines for hepatitis and polio by HIV virus from lab animals shared with military programs. But I repeat, this is speculative, and no one will speak on record. However, such work was actually done in the mid and late sixties and can be verified by Congressional budgetary information.
That the United States can actually have the gall to accuse Cuba of running a bio-war program in the face of all of this manure on its own hands is astounding. Soon, I suppose we shall hear how President Hugo Chavez Frias is installing secret labs in the basement of the Miraflores Palace!
Chris Herz
cdherz44@yahoo.com
