[FreePress] Did Bush Admin. Attack Peace Rally W/Military Grade Bio. Bacteria?

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Misty L. Trepke

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Did Bush administration attack peace movement with military grade

biological bacteria?

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2005/1221

October 4, 2005

 

What do we make of the Saturday, October 1 Washington Post

headline " Poison Found in Air During Anti-War Protest " ?

 

Washington D.C. Public Health Director Greg A. Pane posed the right

question in the Post article, " Why that day? That's what is not

explained. " Pane pointed that it was " just this 24-hour period and

none since. "

 

The Post noted that Pane found " . . . it was puzzling that the

finding was from a day when the mall was packed with people. "

 

Puzzling? Indeed. Biohazard sensors detected tularemia bacteria at

the mall on Saturday, September 24.

 

Equally puzzling was an earlier Post report: " Weekend protesters hit

travel snags. " The article reported that Amtrak trains from New York

City were turned back, cancelled or delayed from heading to the

nation's capitol for the biggest peace demonstration since the

Vietnam War era. Also, Metro subway cars coming into the capitol were

disrupted by repairs.

 

Federal officials are still pondering the death of five people on

U.S. soil and scores of others who were infected with U.S. military-

grade anthrax in the fall of 2001.

 

The wholly implausible " working hypothesis " put forward by Pane is

that the bacteria found in rodents, rabbits and other small animals

just happened to occur on the same day the trains failed to run on

time and more than quarter of a million people assembled to directly

challenge the Bush regime's illegal war in Iraq.

 

Coincidence theorists. You gotta love `em and their great faith in

believing in the statistically improbable occurrence of events,

rather than an alternative hypothesis: that friends of Bush (FOBs)

planted the tularemia bacteria, just as they most likely sent anthrax

to Democratic senators and the media.

 

Tularemia is one of six major bacterial bioterrorism agents,

according to the Sherlock Bioterrorism Library serving the U.S. Army

Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick,

Maryland.

 

The BBC notes that tularemia is " one of the most infectious germs

known to science, " and that it " takes just 10 microbes to bring on

disease in humans. "

 

Tularemia emerged as a " plague-like disease " during a 1911 outbreak

of " rabbit fever " in Tulare Lake in California. The disease

progresses rapidly in humans with patients suffering from headache,

fatigue, dizziness, muscle pains, loss of appetite and nausea. The

disease progresses to inflamed and reddened face and eyes. The

disease next attacks lymph nodes and glands, often with life-

threatening complications.

 

Fortunately, tularemia is relatively rare in nature. According to the

Illinois Department of Public Health there are generally five or

fewer cases that occur each year naturally. The Kansas City Missouri

Health Department tells us that most cases that occur naturally are

found in " south, central and western states, " not Washington D.C.

 

Unfortunately, tularemia has been long used as a military biological

weapon. We should consider the presence of tularemia a shot across

the bow to the peace movement from an administration willing to

cheat, steal, torture, lie and kill to further its political agenda.

Karl Rove, the president's brain, brags of his worship of Machiavelli

and will do anything to keep his Texas prince in power.

 

This history of tularemia suggests it is a long-standing weapon used

by fascists, militarists and authoritarians.

 

Japanese germ warfare research units operating in Manchuria between

1932-45 admit to possessing the tularemia bacteria.

 

The Sunshine Project reported in May 2003 that the German Ministry of

Defense " remains engaged in a controversial biodefense research

project involving tularemia bacteria that has been genetically

engineered to withstand antibiotic treatment. "

 

Both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed the military

strain Francisella tularensis during the Cold War. Dr. Kenneth Alibek

(formerly known as Kanatjan Alibekov) the number two man in the

former Soviet Union's biochemical operations describes in great

detail in his book " Biohazard " how the Soviets deployed Francisella

tularensis against the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad.

 

In another one of those bizarre coincidences, Ken Alibek was also

involved in the U.S. anthrax project run by the nonprofit Battelle

Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. Considered the DIA's and the

CIA's favorite nonprofit contractor, Battelle has been involved,

according to the New York Times and the Columbus Dispatch, with

manufacturing the infamous trillion spores per gram Ames (as in Iowa)

silica-impregnated anthrax. Officially, the work is done

for " defensive " purposes in order to produce a vaccine.

 

Battelle was in partnership with BioPort of Lansing, Michigan in

officially producing the anthrax vaccine for the United States.

 

The New York Times reported in 1998 that BioPort's owners included

Admiral William Crowe, Jr., a former chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs

of Staff and Ambassador to Britain during the Clinton years. One of

Crowe's partners is the mysterious Fuad El-Hibri, a German citizen of

Lebanese descent and a reported business associate of the bin Laden

family.

 

BioPort is partly owned by a top-secret British biowarfare consortium

Porton International. Laura Rozen pointed out in a salon.com article

that El-Hibri, then BioPort's CEO, " made a fortune " for Porton

International from its monopoly on the anthrax vaccine during the

first Gulf War.

 

The New York Times reported that the CIA ran a top secret anthrax

project through Battelle code-named " Clear Vision. " There was also

another anthrax project at Battelle's central Ohio West Jefferson

labs called " Project Jefferson. "

 

Alibek has been listed as both a classified consultant with the CIA

and Battelle. A 1998 New Yorker article outlines the joint work of

Alibek and William C. Patrick, III. Patrick wrote a report on the

potential of sending anthrax through the mail.

 

Unless federal officials are willing to think the unthinkable, but

obvious, and have the tularemia samples independently tested, we'll

never know whether a deliberate attack occurred against peaceful U.S.

citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, or some freakish

and bizarre coincidence occurred.

 

In another coincidence, it was the Battelle Memorial Institute

that " botched " the exit polls in the 2002 election that would have

served as protection against the unexplainable defeat of Senator Max

Cleland of Georgia who was up 9-12 points in the tracking polls just

prior to Election Day.

 

The Free Press calls for an independent investigation of the

tularemia bacteria found on the mall on September 24, not to be

conducted by any federal officials in the Bush administration or

Battelle. With Minister Louis Farrakhan calling for a Million More

March on Washington for October 14-16, it is more important now than

ever.

 

--

Bob Fitrakis is the author of The Fitrakis Files: Spooks, Nukes and

Nazis.He is editor of the Free Press and freepress.org. He has a

Ph.D. in Political Science and a J.D. The story of the 2004 stolen

election in Ohio he co-authored with Harvey Wasserman is listed as

number three in Project Censored's most censored stories of the year.

 

Washington Post link: Biohazard article