April 28, 2009

Many people react with incredulity when the assertion is made that the so-called swine flu outbreak in Mexico may be manufactured crisis. And yet history is replete with examples of government using biological and chemical agents for political purpose.

As a primary example, consider the CIA’s secret war against Cuba and Fidel Castro.
featured stories Weaponizing Deadly Viruses: Historical Precedents
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The CIA used chemical agents and toxins then stockpiled at Fort Detrick against Cuba and Fidel Castro.


In 1975, the Church Committee revealed a CIA memorandum listing deadly chemical agents and toxins then stockpiled at Fort Detrick. “These included anthrax, encephalitis, tuberculosis, lethal snake venom, shellfish toxin, and half a dozen lethal food poisons, some of which, the committee learned, had been shipped in the early 1960s to Congo and to Cuba in unsuccessful CIA attempts to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro,” write Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap (Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way, Ocean Press, 2003, p. vii).

Schaap cites the work of Dr. Marc Lappé (Chemical and Biological Warfare: The Science of Public Death, Student Research Facility for East Bay Women for Peace and Science Students for Social Responsibility, 1969), who claims that the U.S. Army had a biological warfare agent prepared for use against Cuba at the time of the Missile Crisis in 1962, mostly likely Q fever (Coxiella burnetii, a bacterium that affects both humans and animals). In 1977, a Washington Post report confirmed that during this time the CIA maintained an “anticrop warfare” program.

In regard to swine flu, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on January 10, 1977, that CIA “operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971.” The outbreak, the first time the disease hit the Western Hemisphere, was labeled the “most alarming event” of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. Cuba reacted to outbreak by slaughtering 500,000 pigs. An intelligence source told the newspaper “that early in 1971 he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at Ft. Gulick, an Army base in the Panama Canal Zone. The CIA also operates a paramilitary training center for career personnel and mercenaries at Ft. Gulick.” The source said he was given instructions to turn the container with the virus over to members of an anti-Castro group.