Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 3. September 2013 / Timeline September 3, 2013
Version 3.52. September 2013, 4. September 2013
09/03/2013
Første verdenskrig starter, 1914.
09/03/2013
Chemical and Biological Warfare: The US Record
CounterPunch
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http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/03/germ-war-the-us-record-2/
by Jeffrey St. Clair
Who will intervene?
The United States, which has deployed its chemical-biological
warfare arsenal against the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam,
China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Haitian boat
people and Canada, plus exposure of hundreds of thousands of
unwitting US citizens to an astonishing array of germ agents and
toxic chemicals, killing dozens of people.
The US experimentation with bio-weapons goes back to the
distribution of cholera-infected blankets to American Indian tribes
in the 1860s. 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. Rhoads went on to headof 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.
In 1942, US Army and Navy doctors infected 400 prisoners in Chicago
withmalaria 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
Centerin Virginia with infectious bacteria. One type was chosen
because blackswere 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 linked to food
and blood poisoning and respiratory problems.
Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida were the targets of
repeatedArmy 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
gallonsof Agent Orange (a dioxin-powered herbicide) over about 4.5
million acresof South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The government of
Vietnam estimate 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.
In a still classified experiment, the US Army sprayed an unknown
bacterial agent in the New York Subway system in 1966. It is not
known if the test caused any illnesses.
A year later, the CIA placed a chemical substance in the drinking
water supply of the Food and Drug Administration headquarters in
Washington, DC. The test was designed to see if it was possible to
poison drinking water with LSD or other incapacitating agents.
In 1969, Dr. D.M. McArtor, the deputy director for Research and
Technologyfor the Department of Defense, asked Congress to
appropriate $10 millionfor 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. A CIA agent later admitted that he
had been instructed to deliver the virus to Cuban exiles in Panama,
who carried the virus into Cuba in March of 1991. 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 developfull-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 Cuban 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 was able to quash a United
Nations investigation of the incident.
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 agentsas a result of the US operation
at Kamashiya. This may be one cause of Gulf War Illness, another
cause is certainly the experimental vaccines unwittingly given to
more than 100,000 US troops.
[Jeffrey St. Clair is the editor of CounterPunch and the author of
Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of
Nature, Grand Theft Pentagon and Born Under a Bad Sky. His latest
book is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. He can
be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. This essay is excerpted from
Jeffrey St. Clair’s book Grand Theft Pentagon.]
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