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It is the price I must pay for Santayana and age:
We are repeating the past and are doomed to keep repeating it.
It is also the price I pay for having a long memory as a victim of Cointelpro and as someone who is old enough to remember this:
In 1971 there were reports that operatives within the CIA were spreading Swine flu.
I cannot even begin to tell you how reluctant I am to dive into the business of conspiracy theory – so I can only give you the reports and my opinion about them.
Because I am relatively new poster here and haven’t mastered all the bells and whistles i will just give you the basics here.
Human swine flu infecting humans began on a US military base. There is an excellent thread with the story at democratic underground right now (I wil try to come back with the link later).
Swine flu had been developed for use as a bioweapon and was reportedly dumped on Cuba in the 1970′s causing some serious harm (my own recollection when it was reported is that it was "dusted" via aircraft and that some of it blew back into the US infecting pigs and possibly humans here, but that is foggy – I just remember it that way).
Rumsfeld worked for Nixon at that time and then later went to work at Gilead Pharmaceuticals which was engaged in bioweapons research (vaccines) using skills presumably picked up working for Nixon’s executive branch.
Right now Rumsfeld is one of the primary targets in the torture investigation and on Chris Matthews today none other than Pat Buchanan said that any investigation of torture utlimately must investigate and hold the executives who authorized the war crimes (the deciders in chief) responsible (ie prosecute Cheney, Bush, Rummy, Wolfowitz et al).
For the past 8 years (and arguably the last 28 years since Bill Clinton gave them all a pass on their illegal acts in Iran-Cocaine-Contra crimes and crimes against humanity in the name of "looking ahead" and political expedience) Darth Cheney, the Bushes, Rumsfeld et al (but them in particular and especially) have been enabled to amass huge swaths of ilegal and hidden wealth and to organize, finance, and hide private global corporofascist military ops. Part of the Blackwater, Halliburton, Carlyle money gets laundered through casinos, according to some scenarios of how this works, and put in offshore banks which also handle casino ops in places like the Marianas (where Delay and Abramoff were playing and got busted) and which handle internet gaming ops (where you can launder billions with your cell phone playing slots, give ten percent to the house and put the rest in Vanuatu where disclosure of banking info gets you ten years and a $100,000 fine.
(Remember I was a Hill staffer and btw I have extensive experience in fraud and rico matters involving money laundering – but I am also a shaggy activist investigative journalist – I have been following this stuff for many many years which is how I became a victim of Cointelpro more than 30 years ago)
But I digress…
My point is that the very TARGETS of the torture investigations are the people who are not only the architects of the "Casualty Production by biological agents: (what this would be called in the army field manual) using swine flu and avian sources which first infected humans on an army research base AND they are the ones who will reap the profits from the sale of Tamiflu as well as benefit from the distraction of the pandemic which will cause the torture headlines to lose any real significance (FOR GODS SAKE NYC PREPPIES ARE DYING!!!)
Here’s a sample of articles I found searching the past history which was triggered by my deep dark CT memory of the 1970′s when swine flu was used by home grown terrorists in our government.
Deja Vu all over again. I hate to be the one to say I need a tin foil hat, but its true, only thing is tin foil doesn’t foil swine/avian/human bioweapons, it only works on electomagnetic fields, i hear.
Obama needs to take these criminals down fast before they kill us all, mefears. If they do not give a shit about the Geneva Convention on war crimes and torure, why would they hesitate to violate bioweapons treaties?
At this point they are facing prosecution. Maybe they want to burn the global village rather than be taken alive and made to pay for their crimes. Once you have committed crimes against humanity, what’s the dif?
A few notes from the google monster:
CUBA SAYS U. S. USED BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS TO KILL 156 PEOPLE
UNITED NATIONS (UPI) – Cuba publicly accused the United States Thursday before the U. N. General Assembly of using biological warfare against the island nation in a campaign that killed 156 Cubans, including 99 children.
‘In less than three years, our country has suffered the scourge of five grave plagues and epidemics, which have hit our cattle, our plantations and now our people,’ Cuban Foreign Minister Isidoro Malmierca told the assembly in his policy speech.
‘The agencies of the U. S. are using biological weapons against the people of Cuba.
‘Ninety-nine children have died in Cuba,’ he charged. ‘They were victims of the hemorrhagic dengue epidemic that took from us a toll of 156 lives.’
Cuban President Fidel Castro has in the past charged that the CIA was responsible for spreading the diseases in Cuba.
Malmierca said Cuba has been hit successively by ‘the swine fever, the blue mold in tobacco, the sugar cane rot, the hemorrhagic dengue and, more recently, when we were still in the process of fighting of this one, hemorrhagic conjunctivitis appears.’"
– Houston Post 9/25/81
* * * * *
Cuba’s charges could not be proved, but they were not farfetched. As noted above, the United States has frequently destroyed enemy crops. The CIA tried to overthrow the Cuban government at the Bay of Pigs and mounted numerous assassination attempts against Castro. Agency interest in sabotaging the Cuban economy with chemical or biological methods against crops and workers is also a matter of public record . . .
– Gene Wars by Charles Pillar and
Keith R. Yamamoto, Beech Tree
Books-William Morrow, New York,
1988, ISBN 0-688-07050-7, p 72
Six years after it happened, one incident came to light:
CIA LINK TO CUBAN PIG VIRUS REPORTED
New York — With at least the tacit backing of U. S. Central Intelligence Agency officials, operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971.
Six weeks later an outbreak of the disease forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic.
A U. S. intelligence source told Newsday last week he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at a U. S. Army base and CIA training ground in Panama with instructions to turn it over to the anti-Castro group.
The 1971 outbreak, the first and only time the disease has hit the Western Hemisphere, was labeled the ‘most alarming event’ of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. African swine fever is a highly contagious and usually lethal viral disease that infects only pigs and unlike swine flu, cannot be transmitted to humans.
All production of pork, a Cuban staple, halted, apparently for several months.
A CIA spokesman, Dennis Berend, in response to a Newsday request for comment, said, ‘We don’t comment on information from unnamed and, at best, obscure sources.
[snip]
. . . on the basis of numerous interviews over four months’ with U. S. intelligence sources, Cuban exiles and scientists concerning the outbreak — which occurred two years after then-President Nixon had banned the use of offensive chemical and biological warfare — was able to piece together this account of events leading up to the outbreak.
The U. S. intelligence source said 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 instruction to turn the container over to members of an anti-Castro group.
The container was given to a person in the Canal Zone, who took it by boat and turned it over to persons aboard a fishing trawler off the Panamanian coast. The source said the substance was not identified to him until months after the outbreak in Cuba. He would not elaborate further.
Another man involved in the operation, a Cuban exile who asked not to be identified, said he was on the trawler when the virus was put aboard at a rendezvous point off Bocas del Toro, Panama. He said the trawler carried the virus to Navassa Island, a tiny, deserted, U. S.-owned island between Jamaica and Haiti. From there, after the trawler made a brief stopover, the container was taken to Cuba and given to other operatives near the U. S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay.
The source on the trawler, who had been trained by the CIA and had carried out previous missions for the agency, said he saw no CIA officials aboard the boat that delivered the virus to the trawler off Panama, but added: ‘We were very well paid for this and Cuban exile groups don’t have that kind of money . . ."
He said he was revealing the information because he is a member of an exile group being investigated by the United States in connection with terrorist activity in Florida. His account was confirmed by another intelligence source in Miami. The source said he had no proof that the operation was approved by CIA officials in Washington, but added: ‘In a case like this, though, they would always give them (CIA officials in Washington) plausible deniability.’
The investigation referred to by the operative on the trawler involves a federal inquiry into terrorist acts allegedly carried out by Cuban exiles. Those include bombings and assassination attempts in the United States and Venezuela."
– Newsday, 1/10/77
Finally – I will try to find the other sources for the use of turkey feathers for dispersal and the first human cases of swine flu at, I believem Fort Detrick
Can we afford not to know this stuff? Can Santayana be wrong?
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BOMBS OF A FEATHER — OR 30 SECONDS OVER DES MOINES
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) . . . scientists from one of the leading agriculture schools worked in the 1950s to develop a way to spread hog cholera with turkey feather bombs, according to the Des Moines Sunday Register.
The copyright article said the scientists from Iowa State University helped in building and testing a bomb that exploded in air, releasing thousands of turkey feathers carrying the deadly hog cholera virus.
[snip]
No hog Cholera bombings took place in Iowa, but several preliminary field tests were conducted in the state which leads the nation in livestock production. A bomb was dropped near Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, the newspaper said.
Two feather-filled bombs were detonated 1,500 feet over the base on July 14, 1951, infecting more than 90 research hogs at the base, the article said. The feathers spread over an area 2.8 miles long and a half-mile wide, documents said.”
– Associated Press, 6/19/82
60 MINUTES, Sunday Nov 4, 1979
WALLACE: Where did this so called “deadly variety of flu”, where did it first hit back in 1976? It began right here at Fort Dix in New Jersey in January of that year, when a number of recruits began to complain of respiratory ailments, something like the common cold. An Army doctor here sent samples of their throat cultures to the New Jersey Public Health Lab to find our just what kind of bug was going around here. One of those samples was from a Private David Lewis, who had left his sick bed to go on a forced march. Private Lewis had collapsed on that march, and his sergeant had revived him by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But the sergeant showed no signs of illness. A few days later, Private Lewis died.>
“SWINE FLU” (PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT)
MIKE WALLACE: The flu season is upon us. Which type will we worry about this year, and what kind of shots will we be told to take? Remember the swine flu scare of 1976? That was the year the U.S. government told us all that swine flu could turn out to be a killer that could spread across the nation, and Washington decided that every man, woman and child in the nation should get a shot to prevent a nation-wide outbreak, a pandemic.
Well 46 million of us obediently took the shot, and now 4,000 Americans are claiming damages from Uncle Sam amounting to three and a half billion dollars because of what happened when they took that shot. By far the greatest number of the claims – two thirds of them are for neurological damage, or even death, allegedly triggered by the flu shot.
We pick up the story back in 1976, when the threat posed by the swine flu virus seemed very real indeed.
PRESIDENT GERALD FORD; This virus was the cause of a pandemic in 1918 and 1919 that resulted in over half a million deaths in the United States, as well as 20 million deaths around the world.
WALLACE: Thus the U.S. government’s publicity machine was cranked into action to urge all America to protect itself against the swine flu menace. (Excerpt from TV commercial urging everyone to get a swine flu shot.) One of those who did roll up her sleeve was Judy Roberts. She was perfectly healthy, an active woman, when, in November of 1976, she took her shot. Two weeks later, she says, she began to feel a numbness starting up her legs.
JUDY ROBERTS: And I joked about it at that time. I said I’ll be numb to the knees by Friday if this keeps up. By the following week, I was totally paralyzed.
WALLACE: So completely paralyzed, in fact, that they had to operate on her to enable her to breathe. And for six months, Judy Roberts was a quadriplegic. The diagnosis: A neurological disorder called “Guillian-Barre Syndrome” – GBS for short. These neurological diseases are little understood. They affect people in different ways.
As you can see in these home movies taken by a friend, Judy Roberts’ paralysis confined her mostly to a wheelchair for over a year. But this disease can even kill. Indeed, there are 300 claims now pending from the families of GBS victims who died, alledgedly as a result of the swine flu shot. In other GBS victims, the crippling effects diminish and all but disappear. But for Judy Roberts, progress back to good health has been painful and partial.
Now, I notice that your smile, Judy, is a little bit constricted.
ROBERTS: Yes, it is.
WALLACE: Is it different from what it used to be?
ROBERTS: Very different, I have a – a greatly decreased mobility in my lips. AndI can’t drink through a straw on the right-band side. I can’t blow out birthday candles. I don’t whistle any more, for which my husband is grateful.
WALLACE: It may be a little difficult for you to answer this question, but have you recovered as much as you are going to recover?
ROBERTS: Yes. This – this is it.
WALLACE: So you will now have a legacy of braces on your legs for the rest of your life?
ROBERTS: Yes. The weakness in my hands will stay and the leg braces will stay.
WALLACE: So Judy Roberts and her husband have filed a claim against the U.S. government. They’re asking $12 million, though they don’t expect to get nearly that much. Judy, why did you take the flu shot?
ROBERTS: I’d never taken any other flu shots, but I felt like this was going to be a major epidemic, and the only way to prevent a major epidemic of a – a really deadly variety of flu was for every body to be immunized.
WALLACE: Where did this so called “deadly variety of flu”, where did it first hit back in 1976? It began right here at Fort Dix in New Jersey in January of that year, when a number of recruits began to complain of respiratory ailments, something like the common cold. An Army doctor here sent samples of their throat cultures to the New Jersey Public Health Lab to find our just what kind of bug was going around here. One of those samples was from a Private David Lewis, who had left his sick bed to go on a forced march. Private Lewis had collapsed on that march, and his sergeant had revived him by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But the sergeant showed no signs of illness. A few days later, Private Lewis died.
ROBERTS: If this disease is so potentially fatal that it’s going to kill a young, healthy man, a middle-aged schoolteacher doesn’t have a prayer.
WALLACE: The New Jersey lab identified most of those solders’ throat cultures as the normal kind of flu virus going around that year, but they could not make out what kind of virus was in the culture from the dead soldier, and from four others who were sick. So they sent those cultures to the Federal Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, for further study. A few days later they got the verdict: swine flu. But that much-publicized outbreak of swine flu at Fort Dix involved only Private Lewis, who died, and those four other soldiers, who recovered completely without the swine flu shot.
ROBERTS: If I had known at that time that the boy had been in a sick bed, got up, went out on a forced march and then collapsed and died, I would never have taken the shot.
DR DAVID SENCER: The rationale for our recommendation was not on the basis of the death of a – a single individual, but it was on the basis that when we do see a change in the characteristics of the influenza virus, it is a massive public-health problem in the country.
WALLACE: Dr David Sencer, then head of the CDS – the Center of Disease Control in Atlanta – is now in private industry. He devised the swine flu program and he pushed it.
You began to give flu shots to the American people in October of ‘76?
DR SENCER: October 1st.
WALLACE: By that time, how many cases of swine flu around the world had been reported?
DR SENCER: There had been several reported, but none confirmed. There had been cases in Australia that were reported by the press, by the news media. There were cases in -
WALLACE: None confirmed? Did you ever uncover any other outbreaks of swine flu anywhere in the world?
DR SENCER: No
WALLACE: Now, nearly everyone was to receive a shot in a public health facility where a doctor might not be present, therefore it was up to the CDC to come up with some kind of official consent form giving the public all the information it needed about the swine flu shot. This form stated that the swine flu vaccine had been tested. What it didn’t say was that after those tests were completed, the scientists developed another vaccine and that it was the one given to most of the 46 million who took the shot. That vaccine was called “X-53a”. Was X-53a ever field tested?
DR SENCER: I-I can’t say. I would have to -
WALLACE: It wasn’t
DR SENCER: I don’t know
WALLACE: Well, I would think that you’re in charge of the program
DR SENCER: 1 would have to check the records. I haven’t looked at this in some time.
WALLACE: The information form the consent form was also supposed to warn people about any risk of serious complications following the shot. But did it?
ROBERTS: No
One of the 10 longest pending Freedom of Information requests.
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” a copy of the FBI headquarters file maintained under the name “Central Intelligence Agency” (file number 62-80750), records concerning a deceased Cuban national Jorge Mas Canosa, the Cuban American National Foundation, investigations into individuals and organizations in the United States
I tried to use cancel..didn’t work..obviously…’g’.
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” a copy of the FBI headquarters file maintained under the name “Central Intelligence Agency” (file number 62-80750), records concerning a deceased Cuban national Jorge Mas Canosa, the Cuban American National Foundation, investigations into individuals and organizations in the United States concerning actions to harm Cuba, complaints by Cuba concerning U.S. flyovers, and concerning an outbreak of African swine fever in Cuba in 1971 “
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/N…..02/fbi.htm
this is one excellant post, thanx for making it seventhson
we can trace the entire bush/cheney/iran contra/iraq episodes back to the failure of prosecuting nixon.
those in his administration moved forward to work on ford’s administration, moved forward to work on bush’s administration
WE WILL REVISIT THESE CRIMES IF WE FINALLY HOLD THOSE RESPONSIBLE TO ACCOUNT
I posted about this three times in the past month. Nobody commented. A big shiny man made object.
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Baxter: Product contained live bird flu virus
http://www.edmontonsun.com/New…..61061.html
Ultimately I trace this all back to the failure to prosecute the Bushes et al for the coup attempt against FDR in the 1930’s (google smedly butler) and the failure to prosecute Prescott Bush, the Dulleses, Rockefellers et al for their treasonous financing and support of Hitler and the nazis during WWII and after.
Of course corporate fascism goes back farther than that, but a lot of this could have been stopped cold if there had been prosecutions after (or during) WWII of those corporate and financial powers in the US who backed the Third Reich. That failure resulted in the emergence of what Hunter Thompson called the Fourth Reich consisting of the power elites who still wield the dangerous powers that endanger democracy and all of us (globally).
That is why the potential failure of Obama to prosecute the perps of torture and war crimes now becomes so dangerous to us all still.
It is also why it is critical to get such documents (as the FOIA info on Cuba and swine flu) out.
BTW Butterfly, it was the crickets on this subject that made me post.
But the means, motive and opportunity of the torturers in chief to be behind this outbreak makes me completely certain that it is a subject that needs to be raised and discussed where it might get some attention.
FDL and Oxdown provide a valuable service in this respect. MAYBE some investigative reporters with national prominence somewhere will pick it up and dig deeper (as Mike Wallace did in his 60 minutes piece).
My own recollections of that period when swine flu was threatening to be a pandemic is what had me so incredulous that these bastards would actually INFECT civilian populations for “political” reasons and it would then spin out of control as it is now threatening us all.
I hope someone in homeland security is listening.
But after I posted this it occurred to me that of course those who intentionally use bioweapons have their own protection from it AND that perhaps this is payback for the election of Obama as well as an effort to derail his presidency, distract it, and keep it from actually be able to accomplish anything with the intent of restoring the perpetrators power in the future.
Medical and drug dictatorship..yup, still that way in 2009. When they try to convince people to take a new vaccine, remember that Bush gave drug companies immunity until 2015.
*************
” When doctors had tried to suppress the symptoms of the typhoid with a stronger vaccine, it caused a worse form of typhoid which they named paratyphoid. But when they concocted a stronger and more dangerous vaccine to suppress that one, they created an even worse disease which they didn’t have a name for. What should they call it? They didn’t want to tell the people what it really was — their own Frankenstein monster which they had created with their vaccines and suppressive medicines. They wanted to direct the blame away from themselves, so they called it Spanish Influenza. It was certainly not of Spanish origin, and the Spanish people resented the implication that the world-wide scourge of that day should be blamed on them. But the name stuck and American medical doctors and vaccine makers were not suspected of the crime of this widespread devastation — the 1918 Flu Epidemic. It is only in recent years that researchers have been digging up the facts and laying the blame where it belongs.
Now (1976) we are being worked on again by the vaccine -epidemic makers in their effort to force another multi million dollar vaccine sale caper. Their con men have already talked President Ford into handing over $135 million dollars to start their vaccine racket. Even the insurance companies refused to become involved with such an obviously dangerous and crooked scheme. So, again the medical and drug con men induced the appropriate government officials to guarantee insurance against the, possible billions of dollars in law suits which could be brought against the vaccine promoters if the vaccine campaign is carried out as planned. It’s a good thing Ford was voted out of office. It’s too bad he wasn’t “dumped” before he paid the poison squad the MONEY’ to poison the whole population. However, we don’t yet know if President Carter will be any better. Will he be held in the grip of the medical and drug dictatorship? Or will he investigate — learn the truth — reverse the decisions and make the vaccine makers return the money taken from the taxpayers under false pretenses? “
http://www.whale.to/vaccine/sf1.html
That is the scary part of all this too. Who knows what wil get spread with the vaccines and treatments and what new strains will arise?
I think I had forgotten about the immunity thing for vaccines, but that makes sense.
I still cannot get over the deja vu, though, of this being blowback from our own bioweapons programs and just in time to shift our attention away from torture.
Same as it ever was, I guess
Thanks Blue
” Friday, 06 March 2009
The World Health Organization has released another report concerning the bird flu virus which states that the capacity for production of bird flu vaccines has increased three times since 2007 but nevertheless it could still take as many as four years to meet the global demand for these vaccines if a full on H5N1 bird flu pandemic were to occur. In the “best case scenario” they said at least one and a half years would be needed for enough medication to be produced to vaccinate the whole world.
The head of the World Health Organisation campaign for more vaccine research said that she was concerned that the supply of the medications to treat the bird flu virus would not be able to cope when a pandemic broke out. She said that the production capability for seasonal influenza vaccines was more than sufficient but this did not mean that they would be able to cope if the H5N1 bird flu virus started to mutate into a form which would be easily transferable between humans.
Stephen Gardner for speaking on behalf of GlaxoSmithKline who make the influenza medication Relenza explained that they were not able to get themselves in a position to meet a demand that did not yet exist. He said that GlaxoSmithKline could not get to “vaccine capacity” and then “mothball this capacity” until a time when a full on bird flu pandemic broke out.
The present World Health Organisation guidelines state that nations should have enough of the influenza medication Tamiflu to be able to treat 25 percent of their populations. Tamiflu which is made by the drug company Roche is not actually a bird flu vaccine but merely a treatment which has shown to work effectively in men and women who have contracted the H5N1 virus. It is often given to people who have potentially been exposed to the H5N1 virus as a precaution because the earlier Tamiflu is administered the more effective it is. “
http://www.ukmedix.com/tamiflu…..nt4505.cfm
I’m not really much of a conspiracy fan, but a couple of random thoughts occurred to me as a read your post: early ’80s is when that famous photo of the handshake between Rummy and Saddam took place (field test?) and it hasn’t made even a ripple in the news up here, but there is a dengue epidemic ongoing in Argentina (field test?).