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Germ War: The US Record
"As far as chemical and biological weapons are
concerned, Saddam Hussein is a repeat offender. He has used them against
his neighbors and on his own people."
-Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State
By Madeleine Albright's criteria Saddam has a ways to go to catch up
with the United States, which has deployed its CBW arsenal against the
Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos,
Cambodia, Cuba, Haiti, and Canada, plus exposed hundreds of thousands
of unwitting US citizens to an astonishing array of germ agents and toxic
chemicals.
The US experimentation with bio-weapons goes back to the distribution
of cholera-infected blankets to American tribes in the 1860s.
(actually I think it goes back to small pox used againsst natives in the
colonial days)
In 1900, US Army doctors in the Philippines infected five prisoners
with a variety of plague and 29 prisoners with Beriberi. At least four
of the subjects died. In 1915, a doctor working with government grants
exposed 12 prisoners in Mississippi to pellagra, an incapacitating disease
that attacks the central nervous system. After World War I, the United
States went on a chemical weapons binge, producing millions of barrels
of mustard gas and Lewisite. Thousands of US troops were exposed to these
chemical agents in order to "test the efficacy of gas masks and protective
clothing". The Veterans Administration refused to honor disability claims
from victims of such experiments. The Army also deployed mustard gas
against anti-US protesters in Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the
1920s and 1930s.
In 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, then under contract with the Rockefeller
Institute for Medical Investigations, initiated his horrific Puerto Rico
Cancer Experiments, infecting dozens of unwitting subjects with cancer
cells. At least thirteen of his victims died as a result. During the
investigation, Rhoads laid down his vision: “What the island needs is
not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate
the population.” He was exonerated by the federal authorities, and went
on to head the US Army Biological Weapons division and to serve on the
Atomic Energy Commission, where he oversaw radiation experiments on thousands
of US citizens. In memos to the Department of Defense, Rhoads expressed
his opinion that Puerto Rican dissidents could be "eradicated" with the
judicious use of germ bombs. Recently, the American Association for Cancer
Research instituted the Cornelius P. Rhoads Scientific Achievement Award,
to be given yearly to worthy researchers.
In 1945, the seismic power of atomic energy was already well known
to researchers, but the effects of radiation on human beings were not.
Manhattan Project doctors embarked on a human experiment that was as
chilling as it was closely guarded: the systematic injection of unsuspecting
Americans with radioactive plutonium. Thanks to the Freedom of Information
Act, now under attack, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome
revealed the unspeakable scientific trials that reduced thousands of
Americans men, women, and even children to nameless specimens with silvery
radioactive metal circulating in their veins. In a Massachusetts school,
seventy-three disabled children were spoon fed radioactive isotopes along
with their morning oatmeal… In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old
woman, believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected
with plutonium by Manhattan Project doctors… At a Tennessee prenatal
clinic, 829 pregnant women were served “vitamin cocktails”- in tr
In 1942, US Army and Navy doctors infected 400 prisoners in Chicago
with malaria in experiments designed to get "a profile of the disease and
develop a treatment for it." Most of the inmates were black and none was
informed of the risks of the experiment. Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg
cited the Chicago malaria experiments as part of their defense.
At the close of World War II, the US Army put on its payroll, Dr. Shiro
Ishii, the head of the Imperial Army of Japan's bio-warfare unit. Dr.
Ishii had deployed a wide range of biological and chemical agents against
Chinese and Allied troops. He also operated a large research center in
Manchuria, where he conducted bio-weapons experiments on Chinese, Russian
and American prisoners of war. Ishii infected prisoners with tetanus;
gave them typhoid-laced tomatoes; developed plague-infected fleas; infected
women with syphilis; performed dissections on live prisoners; and exploded
germ bombs over dozens of men tied to stakes. In a deal hatched by Gen.
Douglas MacArthur, Ishii turned over more than 10,000 pages of his "research
findings" to the US Army, avoided prosecution for war crimes and was invited
to lecture at Ft. Detrick, the US Army bio-weapons center in Frederick,
Maryland.
In 1950 the US Navy sprayed large quantities of serratia marcescens,
a bacteriological agent, over San Francisco, promoting an outbreak of pneumonia-like
illnesses and causing the death of at least one man, Ed Nevins. A year
later, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai charged that the US military and the
CIA had used bio-agents against North Korea and China. Chou produced statements
from 25 US prisoners of war backing him his claims that the US had dropped
anthrax contaminated feathers, mosquitoes and fleas carrying Yellow Fever
and propaganda leaflets spiked with cholera over Manchuria and North Korea.
From 1950 through 1953, the US Army released chemical clouds over six
US and Canadian cities. The tests were designed to test dispersal patterns
of chemical weapons. Army records noted that the compounds used over
Winnipeg, Canada, where there were numerous reports of respiratory illnesses,
involved cadmium, a highly toxic chemical.
In 1951 the US Army secretly contaminated the Norfolk Naval Supply
Center in Virginia with infectious bacteria. One type was chosen because
blacks were believed to be more susceptible than whites. A similar experiment
was undertaken later that year at Washington DC's National Airport. The
bacteria was later inked to food and blood poisoning and respiratory
problems.
Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida were the targets of repeated
Army bio-weapons experiments in 1956 and 1957. Army CBW researchers released
millions of mosquitoes on the two towns in order to test the ability
of insects to carry and deliver yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds
of residents fell ill, suffering from fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths,
encephalitis and typhoid. Army researchers disguised themselves as public
health workers in order photograph and test the victims. Several deaths
were reported.
In 1965 the US Army and the Dow Chemical Company injected dioxin into
70 prisoners (most of them black) at the Holmesburg State Prison in Pennsylvania.
The prisoners developed severe lesions which went untreated for seven
months. A year later, the US Army set about the most ambitious chemical
warfare operation in history. From 1966 to 1972, the United States dumped
more than 12 million gallons of Agent Orange (a dioxin-powered herbicide)
over about 4.5 million acres of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The
government of Vietnam estimates the civilian casualties from Agent Orange
at more than 500,000. The legacy continues with high levels of birth defects
in areas that were saturated with the chemical. Tens of thousands of US
soldiers were also the victims of Agent Orange. The Pentagon had experimented
with the feared Agent Orange before the war in Toro Negro, El Yunque,
and Guajataca, Puerto Rico. Thousands of people in these sections of the
Puerto Rican rainforest were affected.
In 1969, Dr. D.M. McArtor, the deputy director for Research and Technology
for the Department of Defense, asked Congress to appropriate $10 million
for the development of a synthetic biological agent that would be resistant
"to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend
to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease".
In 1971 the first documented cases of swine fever in the western hemisphere
showed up in Cuba. In 1977, a CIA agent admitted that he had been instructed
to deliver the virus to Cuban exiles in Panama, who carried the virus
into Cuba in March of 1971. This astounding admission received scant attention
in the US press.
In 1980, hundreds of Haitian men, who had been locked up in detention
camps in Miami and Puerto Rico, developed gynecomasia after receiving
"hormone" shots from US doctors. Gynecomasia is a condition causing males
to develop full-sized female breasts.
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.Four years later an epidemic of dengue fever struck Managua,
Nicaragua. Nearly 50,000 people came down with the fever and dozens died.
This was the first outbreak of the disease in Nicaragua. It occurred at
the height of the CIA's war against the Sandinista government and followed
a series of low-level "reconnaissance" flights over the capital city.
In 1996, the Cuba government again accused the US of engaging in "biological
aggression". This time it 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 has been unable to quash
a United Nations investigation of the incident that is now underway.
At the close of the Gulf War, the US Army exploded an Iraqi chemical
weapons depot at Kamashiya. In 1996, the Department of Defense finally
admitted that more than 20,000 US troops were exposed to VX and sarin
nerve agents as a result of the US operation at Kamashiya. This may be
one cause of the Gulf War Syndrome. Another cause might be the experimental
vaccines unwittingly given to more than 100,000 US troops, or the depleted
uranium shells used during the bombings.
These are the same weapons used for live military exercises on the island
of Vieques, Puerto Rico. Just during 1999, the Navy admits to having
fired 263 radioactive depleted uranium shells in the island. 20,000 pounds
of live explosives, including napalm, fell on Vieques in November 1994,
when troops were preparing for war in Yugoslavia. Radioactive materials
litter the waters around the island. The US Navy has admitted to discharging
more than the legal levels of arsenic, cadmium, and lead. On October 9,
2002, the Pentagon revealed that it carried out chemical warfare exercises
on Vieques in 1969 that exposed civilians and soldiers to Trioctyl phosphate,
a simulant of nerve agent that causes cancer in animals. The exercises
were part of a series called SHAD and Project 112, carried out from 1962
to 1971 that involved chemical and biological agents in Hawaii, Alaska,
Maryland and Florida, as well as Vieques. The population of 10,000 has
a 27% higher chance of developing cancer, compared to other Pue
After broad engagement in civil disobedience, both in Puerto Rico and
the US, the navy agreed to leave the island by May 2003. Citing the impending
war with Iraq, the Navy started new bombings of Vieques in January, and
admits there are more planned for later this year.
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