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The US government and its many agencies and educational and health institutions, have for many decades conducted intensive research into biological warfare, in many cases strongly focused on race-specific pathogens.
In a report to the US Congress, the Department of Defense revealed that its program of creating artificial biological agents included modifying non-fatal viruses to make them lethal, and genetic engineering to alter the immunology of biological agents to make treatment and vaccinations impossible. The military report admitted that at the time it operated about 130 bio-weapons research facilities, dozens at US universities and others at many international sites outside the purview of the US Congress and the jurisdiction of the courts.
This knowledge hasn't been a secret for a long time. In a classified 1948 report by the Pentagon's Committee on Biological Warfare, the main selling point was that:
"A gun or a bomb leaves no doubt that a deliberate attack has occurred. But if " an epidemic slashes across a crowded city, there is no way of knowing whether anyone attacked, much less who", adding hopefully that "A significant portion of the human population within selected target areas may be killed or incapacitated" with only very small amounts of a pathogen. (1) (2)
A US Army operating manual from 1956 stated explicitly that biological and chemical warfare were an integral operating portion of US military strategy, were not restricted in any way, and that Congress had given the military "First Strike" authority on their use. In 1959, an attempt by Congress to remove this first-strike authority was defeated by the White House and bio-chemical weapons expenditures increased from $75 million to almost $350 million. That was an enormous amount of money in the early 1960s. (3)
US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (image on the right) executed 150 top-secret bio-weapons programs in the 1960s, performing bio-weapons experiments and field tests on an unwitting public, sometimes in foreign countries but most often against American citizens. McNamara ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff "to consider all possible applications" of these agents against enemy nations in a coherent plan for a total "biological and chemical deterrent capability", the plan to include cost estimates and an "appraisal of international political consequences". (4) (5)
In the year 2000, The Project for the New American Century (6) (7) produced a report titled, "Rebuilding America's Defenses", which contained a radical and belligerent Right-Wing policy ambition for America. Their report called itself a "blueprint for maintaining global US preeminence " and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests." The authors, their genocidal mentality obvious, stated:
"Advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare " to a politically useful tool."
Bio-Weapons Research Institutions
The US Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland is the military's main facility for research on biological warfare. It comprises 80,000 m ². By the mid-1980s, this bio-weapons section of Fort Detrick was receiving nearly $100 million per year, and this was only one of many sections.
When Japan invaded China, one of Dr. Ishii's (unit 731) grand successes was to develop methods of mass-producing fleas and ticks infected with the plague and other lethal pathogens for distribution among civilian populations - which is how the Americans learned to weaponise insects - to breed and disseminate ticks infested with Lyme Disease from their secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory in New York State. This was also the source of the US programs of breeding and disseminating mosquitoes and fleas infected with cholera and Yellow Fever in China and North Korea, to say nothing of the domestic mosquito programs the US inflicted on its own people.
Founded on Ishii's human research, the US military developed an entomological (insect) warfare facility, and initially prepared plans to attack Russia and the Soviet States with entomological bio-weapons. The facility was designed to produce 100 million yellow fever-infected mosquitoes per month, its output tested on unwitting American civilians by dropping infected mosquitoes and other insects over large portions of the US. As is so typical for the US military, these projects beginning in the 1950s and 1960s were given juvenile appellations like "Project Big Buzz" and "Project Big Itch" and "Operation Mayday" (8) (9) (10), but were tests of the feasibility of producing billions of insects, infecting them with lethal pathogens, then loading them into munitions and dispersing them over Russia from aircraft or even missiles.
From a US Army report from March of 1981, one writer noted that "you can marvel at how much (or how little) it would have cost to launch a yellow fever-infected mosquito attack on a city - with a handy "Cost per Death" chart included!." The Dugway Sheep incident is worth attention as well. (11)
Then we had "Operation Drop Kick" (12), designed to test various ways of dispersing infected insects over large geographical areas, the tests carried out over various parts of the continental US, including most of the East Coast. We had "Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense). Then, as late as 2000, we had "Project Bacchus" designed to determine the feasibility of constructing an anthrax production facility in a foreign country while remaining undetected. There were other of these programs of course, all with foolish names and all designed to assess the dissemination of infected insects and other lethal pathogens into civilian populations. They were kept very secret since they were illegal in domestic law and contravened international law and many weapons treaties that other nations signed with the US in good faith.
Selected Articles: War against Iran or North Korea?
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