Written by Larry Romanoff; Originally appeared at Global Research
It should be apparent that the launching of bio-warfare, as with conventional warfare, is considerably eased by locating military bases, offensive weapons and delivery systems as physically close as possible to one’s potential enemies. This is one reason the US has established its nearly 1,000 foreign military bases – to ensure the capability of putting an enemy under attack within 30 minutes anywhere in the world. Clearly, the same strategy applies to biological warfare, the US military having created scores of these labs euphemistically defined as “health-security infrastructure” in foreign countries.
It is frightening to learn that many of these foreign bio-installations are classified as so “Top-Secret” they are outside the knowledge and control of even the local governments in the nations where they are built. It is also frightening to learn that the Ebola outbreaks all occurred in close proximity to several of these well-known (and top-secret) US bio-weapons labs in Africa.
There were great fears a few years ago when American scientists recreated the Spanish flu virus that killed around 50 million people in 1918. They spent nine years on this effort before succeeding, and now large quantities of this virus are stored in a high-security government laboratory in Atlanta, Georgia. More recently, scientists have created a mutated super-strain of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus that is directly transmissible among humans and would have at least a 50% kill rate, spawning fears in 2005 of a global pandemic that might kill hundreds of millions.
In late 2013, more than 50 of the world’s most eminent scientists severely criticised the research Ron Fouchier and colleagues at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, who have been developing mutant varieties of the H5N1 bird-flu virus that are far more dangerous to humans. The scientists wrote that the research was designed to make the virus fully transmissible between humans, and clearly had a dual civil-military function. This engineered flu could kill half the world’s population, and not by accident. The US military funded this research with more than $400 million.
The Korean War
During and after the Korean War, China produced considerable evidence that the US military was employing biological pathogens against both the Chinese and the North Koreans. More than 25 US POWs supported Chinese claims – and provided further, and very detailed, corroborating evidence of anthrax, various insects such as mosquitoes and fleas carrying Yellow Fever, and even propaganda leaflets infected with cholera, over the entire North-East of China and virtually all of North Korea. The US government immediately filed charges of sedition against the soldiers who told their stories of these illegal activities, applying enormous pressure to silence them, even threatening defending lawyers with unspecified retribution. As a final desperate attempt to silence these former POWs, the US military relied on the CIA to subject them to extensive treatments with a newly-discovered and dangerous drug called Metrazol, in attempts to totally erase all memories of their activities in Korea, apparently destroying the mens’ minds in the process.
Global Research published an article on September 07, 2015 by David Swanson which provided some detail on American attempts to flood North Korea with the Bubonic Plague, beginning with the statement, “This happened some 63 years ago, but as the U.S. government has never stopped lying about it, and it’s generally known only outside the United States, I’m going to treat it as news.”
Correct on all counts. Curtis LeMay not only conducted his sincere attempts to exterminate the entire civilian population of North Korea by bombing virtually every house in the country, but there is now a huge and still emerging volume of indisputable evidence the Americans dropped on both North Korea and China insects and materials carrying anthrax, cholera, encephalitis, and bubonic plague. (26)
Then on September 10, 2012, the Los Angeles Times ran an article discussing the topic of doctors “still trying to diagnose mysteries of the Hantavirus” more than 20 years after this deadly pathogen was first identified in the US in 1993. (101) In this case, the virus appeared to attack only native Indians – the infections concentrated in a four-state area – who developed sudden respiratory problems and were often dead within hours. Most victims reported “not feeling well” one day, and were dead the next, from what appeared as a very mysterious pathogen with an undeterminable source. But then, “a lucky clue” arose from a television viewer, a physician who stated this illness seemed very similar to that caused by a virus he had observed the US military using in Korea in the 1950s. And sure enough, tests proved the illness to be caused by a variation of the same Hantavirus that attacked troops in Korea. (27)
The virus attracted attention because some American troops were accidentally exposed to it in Korea, most of whom died very suddenly. Two facts that were eliminated from the public reports of the time: (1) the virus attacked North Koreans and Chinese in greater numbers, and (2) this Hantavirus was one item in the treasure trove of biological weapons the Americans inherited from Dr. Ishii and his Unit 731. The Japanese were light-years ahead of the Americans and the Western Allies in virus research and had isolated the lethal Hantavirus by the late 1930s, with much evidence it was used against China by the Japanese and later against both China and North Korea by the Americans. It seems that some of this weaponised material escaped containment and exposed American and South Korean soldiers to their own handiwork.
US Biowarfare on Cuba
One of the commonly-known (outside the US) biological warfare programs conducted by the US, remarkable for its longevity, is the decades-long offensive attack on Cuba. The US military and CIA conducted so many of these biological assaults that there is a museum in Havana that provides substantial evidence of the many years of biological warfare against this small country. Jeffrey St. Clair noted in an article a few of these events, as follows: (28)
“In 1971 the first documented cases of swine fever in the western hemisphere showed up in Cuba, resulting in the deaths of more than 500,000 hogs. Cuba accused the US of importing that virus into the country, and a CIA agent later admitted that he delivered the virus to Cuban exiles in Panama, who carried the virus into Cuba. The news was public, but the US media ignored it. In 1981, Fidel Castro blamed an outbreak of dengue fever in Cuba on the CIA. The fever killed 188 people, including 88 children. In 1988, a Cuban exile leader named Eduardo Arocena admitted bringing some germs into Cuba in 1980. Another occasion involved an outbreak of thrips palmi, an insect that kills potato crops, palm trees and other vegetation. Thrips first showed up in Cuba on December 12, 1996, following low-level flights over the island by US government spray planes. The US was able to quash a United Nations investigation of the incident.”
This was only a small part of America’s biological aggression against Cuba. In 1979, the Washington Post published reports on a long-standing American bio-warfare program against Cuban agriculture that had existed at least since 1962, by the CIA’s biological warfare section. And in 1980, the US believed it had discovered a biological agent that would target ethnic Russians, and sent a ship from Florida to Cuba on a mission to “carry some germs to Cuba to be used against the Soviets”. And as recently as 1996 and 1997, the Cuban government was again accusing the US of engaging in biological warfare by spraying Cuban crops with biological pathogens during illegal “reconnaissance flights”. It was also definitively reported that during the Cuban missile crisis, large numbers of chemical and biological weapons were loaded on American military aircraft in preparation for use on Cuba.
American bio-warfare efforts have also been launched on at least several other nations in Central and South America, involving a number of viral pathogens, cancers and chemicals. In his article, St. Clair referred to an epidemic of dengue fever that erupted in Managua, Nicaragua, where about 50,000 people became seriously ill and many died. The attack occurred during the CIA’s war against the Sandinista government, where the outbreak immediately followed a series of low-level so-called “reconnaissance flights” conducted by the Americans over Managua.
It has also been reliably reported by several sources that the US military has used Haiti as a kind of “open season” biological lab, exposing the local population to almost everything imaginable, with the US media keeping a very tight lid on information leakage. Even more reprehensible was the treatment awarded to those Haitians who made the serious mistake of becoming “boat people”, i.e. escaping their American pathology lab by emigrating in small boats to the US. The US government deported most to Puerto Rico to be used as guinea pigs and lab rats, where they would be out of view of Congress and the media and, according to reports, having contained them in concentration camps to inflict upon them whatever ‘scientific tests’ they avoided at home. In one case as recently as 1980, hundreds of Haitian men in these detention camps developed full-size female breasts after being injected repeatedly with unknown hormones by US military physicians. The historical record tells us the same was done to the same people in a publicly off-limits military base in Florida.
Along with Cuba, there is the strange case of the more or less simultaneous occurrence of cancers among the leaders of South American countries, coincidentally in each case, the infection of a national leader the US despised and had tried to remove by several other means. We had Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, and the former Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. A former Brazilian President, speaking of these cancers, said in an interview,
“It is very hard to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some leaders in Latin America. It’s at the very least strange, very strange.”
The Secret WW II US-Japan Bio-Partnership
When Japanese troops invaded North-East China in 1932, Dr. Shiro Ishii began his notorious biological warfare experimentation program in a sector near Harbin disguised as a water-purification unit, then known as Unit 731. He began with various poisonous gases including mustard gas, then used aircraft to distribute cotton and rice husks contaminated with the bubonic plague, in various parts of Central China. His unit collected Chinese resisting the Japanese occupation, using them for unlimited medical atrocities including live vivisection. The New York Times reported one instance of a Japanese physician describing his experience there:
“I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.” (29)
Ishii would first have his teams infect the victims with anthrax, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, dysentery, syphilis, the bubonic plague and other pathogens, then dissect them while still alive to examine the results, followed by cremation of the evidence. The US military’s Surgeon-General’s Department estimated that 580,000 Chinese were killed in this manner, with atrocities committed by some of Japan’s most distinguished physicians. (30)
At the end of the war when it became clear Japan was losing and would have to evacuate China, Ishii ordered all the remaining Chinese in custody to be killed and their bodies burned, then destroyed with explosives the entire Unit 731 compound to hide all traces of his experiments. General Douglas MacArthur, then Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, made a secret deal with Ishii and the entire staff of Unit 731 to transfer to the US military all records of the biowarfare and vivisections for US military study, in exchange for a complete cover-up of all evidence of the existence of these activities, and a promise of immunity from war-crimes prosecution. (31)
Ishii turned over to the US military on one occasion alone more than 10,000 pages of his “research findings”, after which the Americans re-wrote Japan’s history books, which is why neither the Japanese nor the world know of the massive atrocities committed in China, and which is where the American military gained much of its expertise and know-how in chemical and biological weapons and the methods of human experimentation it would later apply so freely in Korea and Vietnam and to American citizens.
On 6 May 1947, MacArthur wrote to Washington that “additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as ‘War Crimes’ evidence.” Some Japanese were arrested by Soviet forces for their biological crimes against Russians, and tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949 but, to cover their own tracks, the Americans dismissed all surviving victim testimony and Russia’s war-crimes trials of Japanese as “communist propaganda”. (32) (33)
Not only did the US government and military provide Dr. Ishii and his staff total immunity from prosecution, they imported the entire group to the US, all secretly stationed on US military bases and on the US Army payroll. Ishii was for years a frequent guest lecturer at the US military’s bio-warfare school at Fort Detrick, and given a lucrative post as full professor and supervisor of biological research at the University of Maryland until he died decades later. It was only in 1995 that the US military finally admitted it had offered immunity, secret identities, and good jobs with high salaries, to these Japanese scientists and physicians in exchange for their work on biological warfare research and human experimentation. These people were recruited not only by the military, but by the CDC, the US State Department, military intelligence, the CIA, and the US Department of Agriculture, all for work on “secret government projects”.
Epilogue
From the very earliest days of America’s bio-warfare experiments, US political and military leaders, as well as CIA officials, made no effort to hide their interest in developing methods of infecting individuals with cancer as a method of ridding themselves of national leaders they didn’t like, a method with perfect deniability. The US record of having assassinated by various means about 150 political leaders in other nations will attest to this assertion.
“The attraction is that bio-weapons are not only very efficient mass killers but are quite cost-effective compared to shooting wars. As well, genetic weapons can be dispersed in a multitude of ways, using virus-infected insects or bacteria, or spliced into GM seeds. These weapons are difficult to detect and identify, and often a treatment or vaccine could be years in the making.”
Dr. Leonard Horowitz, the famed pharma industry whistleblower, quoted one expert as saying he would plan a bio-attack
“with subtle finesse, to make it look like a natural outbreak. That would delay the response and lock up the decision-making process. Even if you suspect biological terrorism, it’s hard to prove. It’s equally hard to disprove . . . You can trace an arms shipment, but it’s almost impossible to trace the origins of a virus that comes from a bug.”
One author noted that a properly-done release of an infectious agent would make diagnosis and treatment difficult, adding that this kind of bio-warfare cannot be traced to its source and might be considered an “act of God”.
Many recent disease outbreaks would seem to properly qualify as potential bio-warfare agents: AIDS, SARS, MERS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Hantavirus, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Polio (Syria), Foot and Mouth Disease, the Gulf War Syndrome and ZIKA.
The Western mass media have ignored all of this, censoring this entire portion of history, and even the Internet has been scrubbed with Google and Bing unable to find the truth which is out there. Once again, freedom of speech depends entirely on who controls the microphone.
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(26) https://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-drops-fleas-with-bubonic-plague-on-north-korea/5474089
(27) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2012-sep-10-la-me-hantavirus-mystery-20120911-story.html
(28) https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/03/germ-war-the-us-record-2/
(29) https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/18/opinion/the-crimes-of-unit-731.html
(30) https://www.cs.amedd.army.mil/borden/Portlet.aspx?ID=66cffe45-c1b8-4453-91e0-9275007fd157
(33) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-12-18-me-1014-story.html