By Bob Fitrakis
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 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 1932-35 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.
