Along with Germany and Japan, the United States of America is a pioneer in the use of chemical and biological weapons against human beings. After World War II the U.S. government granted immunity from prosecution to Japanese and German scientists in return for their knowledge of how to murder human beings horribly.
The fact that the Japanese scientists had used American prisoners of war in cruel biological experiments was no problem for the U.S. Corporate Mafia Government. It cared far more for the scientists’ deadly information than for the lives of its own soldiers.
The U.S. military used biological warfare extensively against the Korean and Chinese people during the Korean Genocide. Fifteen years later Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were covered with Agent Orange during America’s greatest campaign of terror and genocide ever. One naturally wonders what other chemical and biological weapons the U.S. military must have used against the Southeast Asian people.
And now for several years we’ve heard the fine, upstanding representatives of our genocidal plutocracy self-righteously warning that “outlaw states”, “terrorists”, “rogue nations” and “organized criminals” might possibly do to the United States what the United States has done so liberally to millions of people around the world for so many years.
The total hypocrisy of American war criminals is a wonder to behold.
Agent Orange
From
Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum:
For about a decade beginning in the early 1960s, the United States sprayed tens of thousands of tons of herbicides over three million acres of South Vietnam (as well as parts of Laos and Cambodia) to wipe out the foliage used as a cover by the enemy and to destroy crops.
The herbicides, particularly the extensively-used Agent Orange, polluted Vietnam with some five hundred pounds of dioxin, a nearly indestructible pollutant that is regarded as one of the most toxic substances in the world; at least as toxic as nerve gas, and highly carcinogenic. Amongst other health effects associated with exposure to dioxin are metabolic disorders, immunological abnormalities, reproductive abnormalities, and neuro-psychiatric disorders.1 Three ounces in the water supply is thought to be enough to wipe out the population of New York. 2
As many as two million people were affected by these poisons in Vietnam (in addition to many thousands of American soldiers). There have been reports of high levels of birth defects in areas which were saturated with Agent Orange, and the Vietnam government estimates that the various chemicals have contributed to birth defects in 500,000 children, although this has not been documented.3 No compensation has ever been paid by the United States to the Vietnamese people or government for any damage to health.
Notes:
1. The Michigan Agent Orange Commission, Physician's Information for Care of Vietnam Veterans Exposed to Agent Orange and other Chemicals, June 1991, p.4-8;
Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare (London, 1982) p192-3.2. According to Dr. Barry Commoner, director of the Center for Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University, St. Louis, The Guardian (London), February 17, 1984.
3. Robert Dreyfuss, “Apocalypse Still”, Mother Jones (San Francisco), February 2000, p.42ff
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It has been known since 1952 that the defoliant Agent Orange causes cancer, degenerative diseases and birth defects. Yet when Vietnam veterans suffered these afflictions, the Pentagon insisted there was no evidence they were caused by Agent Orange.
American Corporations Sold Chemical and Biological Weapons Material to Iraq
From
Rogue State
by William Blum:
In his January 1998 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton spoke of how we must “confront the new hazards of chemical and biological weapons, and the outlaw states, terrorists and organized criminals seeking to acquire them.” He castigated Iraq for “developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons” and called for strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention. Who among his listeners knew, who among the media reported, that the United States had been the supplier to Iraq of much of the source biological materials Saddam Hussein’s scientists required to create a biological warfare program?
According to reports of a US Senate Committee in 1994:
From 1985, if not earlier, through 1989, a veritable witch’s brew of biological materials were exported to Iraq by private American suppliers pursuant to application and licensing by the US Department of Commerce. Amongst these materials, which often produce slow, agonizing deaths, were:
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Bacillus anthracis, cause of anthrax.
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Clostridium botulinum, a source of botulinum toxin.
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Histoplasma capsulatam, cause of a disease attacking lungs, brain, spinal cord and heart.
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Brucella melitensis, a bacteria that can damage major organs.
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Clostridium perfringens, a highly toxic bacteria causing systemic
illness.
- Clostridium tetani, highly toxigenic.
Also, Escherichia coli (E.coli); genetic materials; human and bacterial DNA. Dozens of other pathogenic biological agents were shipped to Iraq during the 1980s. The Senate Report pointed out that “These biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction.”
“It was later learned,” the committee stated, “that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program.”
The report noted further that US exports to Iraq included:
- the precursors to chemical-warfare agents
- plans for chemical and biological warfare production facilities
- chemical-warhead filling equipment.
These exports continued to at least November 28, 1989 despite the fact that Iraq had been reported to be engaging in chemical warfare and possibly biological warfare against Iranians, Kurds and Shiites since the early 1980s as part of its war with Iran.
Presumably, Iraq’s use of these weapons against Iran is what Washington expected would happen.
The United States Military Encouraged the Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons Against Black South Africans
From
Rogue State
by William Blum:
According to testimony before the [South African] Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998, the United States encouraged South Africa’s apartheid regime to develop a CBW (Chemical and Biological Warfare) program that was aimed at the country’s black population. Dr. Wouter Basson, the South African general who headed the project from its inception in 1981, testified from notes he made of a meeting with US Maj. Gen. William Augerson:
“He [Augerson] feels that chemical warfare is an ideal strategic weapon because infrastructure is preserved together with facilities, and only living people are killed. The warm climate of Africa is ideal for this type of weapon because the diffusion of the poison is better and the absorption is increased by perspiration and increased blood flow in the persons who are targets.”
South Africa’s CBW program did in fact work on a number of projects that echoed US programs: using black soldiers as guinea pigs for experimental drugs; developing a toxin to cause a heart attack, which would appear to be the “natural” cause of death; contaminating drinking water with disease pathogens; using a variety of poisonous gases to paralyze and kill opponents in South Africa and neighboring states.
United States Army Uses the American Population as Guinea Pigs for Chemical and Biological Weapons Experiments
From
Rogue State
by William Blum:
The Army has acknowledged that between 1949 and 1969, 239 populated areas from coast to coast were blanketed with various organisms during tests designed to measure patterns of dissemination in the air, weather effects, dosages, optimum placement of the source and other factors. Testing over such areas was supposedly suspended after 1969, but there is no way to be certain of this. In any event, open air spraying continued at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
Following is a small sample of the tests carried out in the 1949-69 period:
Watertown, N.Y. area and Virgin Islands
1950:
The Army used aircraft and homing pigeons to drop turkey feathers dusted with cereal rust spores to contaminate oat crops, to prove that a “cereal rust epidemic” could be spread as a biological warfare weapon.
San Francisco Bay Area
September 20-27, 1950:
Six experimental biological warfare attacks by the US Army from a ship, using Bacillus globigii and Serratia marcescens, at one point forming a cloud about two miles long as the ship traveled slowly along the shoreline of the bay.
One of the stated objectives of the exercise was to study “the offensive possibilities of attacking a seaport city with a BW [biological warfare] aerosol” from offshore.
Beginning on September 29, patients at Stanford University’s hospital in San Francisco were found to be infected by Serratia marcescens. This type of infection had never before been reported at the hospital. Eleven patients became infected, and one died.
According to a report submitted to a Senate committee by a professor of microbiology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook: “an increase in the number of Serratia marcescens can cause disease in a healthy person and...serious disease in sick people.”
Between 1954 and 1967, other tests were carried out in the Bay Area, including some with a base of operations at Fort Cronkhite in Marin County.
Minneapolis
1953:
61 releases of zinc cadmium sulfide in four sections of the city, involving massive exposure of people at home and children in school.
The substance was later described by the EPA as “potentially hazardous because of its cadmium content”, and a former Army scientist, writing in the professional journal Atmosphere Environment, in 1972, said that cadmium compounds, including zinc cadmium sulfide, are “highly toxic and the use of them in open atmospheric experiments presents a human health hazard”. He stated that the symptoms produced by exposure to zinc cadmium sulfide include lung damage, acute kidney inflammation and fatty degeneration of the liver.
St. Louis
1953:
35 releases of zinc cadmium sulfide over residential, commercial and downtown areas, including the Medical Arts Building, which presumably contained a number of sick people whose illnesses could be aggravated by inhaling toxic particles.
Washington, DC area
1953:
Aerial spraying from a height of 75 feet of zinc cadmium sulfate combined with lycopodium spores. The areas sprayed included the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland and Leesburg, Virginia, 30 miles from the capital.
In 1969, the Army conducted 115 open-air tests of zinc cadmium sulfate near Cambridge, Maryland.
Earlier in the 1960s, the Army covertly disseminated a large number of bacteria in Washington’s National Airport to evaluate how easy it would be for an enemy agent to scatter smallpox through the entire country by infecting air travelers.
The bacterium used, Bacillus subtilis, is potentially harmful to the infirm and the elderly, whose immune system is impaired, and to those with cancer, heart disease or a host of other ailments, according to a professor of microbiology at the Georgetown University Medical Center. A similar experiment was carried out at the Washington Greyhound bus terminal.
Sometime during Richard Nixon’s time in office (apparently 1969), the Army “assassinated” him with germs via the White House air conditioning system.
And at a building used by the Food and Drug Administration, the Army surreptitiously placed a (supposedly harmless) colored dye into the water system. Whether anyone suffered harm from drinking a certain quantity of that water is not known.
Florida
1955:
The CIA conducted at least one open-air test with whooping-cough bacteria around the Tampa Bay area. The number of whooping cough cases recorded in Florida jumped from 339 and one death in 1954 to 1,080 and 12 deaths in 1955. The Tampa Bay area was one of three places that showed a sharp increase in 1955.
Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida
1956-58:
The Army, wishing to test “the practicality of employing Aedes aegypti mosquitos to carry a BW agent”, released over wide areas hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of this mosquito, which can be a carrier of yellow fever and dengue fever, both highly dangerous diseases. The Army stated that the mosquitos were uninfected, but prominent scientists said that, for several reasons, the experiment was not without risk, and was a “terrible idea”. The actual effects upon the targeted population will probably never be known.
New York City
Feb. 11-15, 1956:
A CIA-Army team sprayed New York streets and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, using trick suitcases and a car with a dual muffler.
June 6-10, 1966:
The army report of this test was called “A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents”. Trillions of Bacillus subtilis variant niger were released into the subway system during rush hours.
One method was to use light bulbs filled with the bacteria; these were unobtrusively shattered at sidewalk level on subway ventilating grills or tossed onto the roadbeds inside the stations. Aerosol clouds were momentarily visible after a release of bacteria from the light bulbs. The report noted that “When the cloud engulfed people, they brushed their clothing, looked up at the grating apron and walked on.”
The wind of passing trains spread the bacteria along the tracks; in the time it took for two trains to pass, the bacteria were spread from 15th Street to 58th Street. It will never be known how many people later became ill from being unsuspecting guinea pigs, for the United States Army exhibited not the slightest interest in this question.
Chicago
1960s:
The Chicago subway system was the scene of a similar Army experiment.
Stockyards
November 1964 to January 1965:
The Army conducted aerosol tests over stockyards in Texas, Missouri, Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska, using “anti-animal non-biological simulants”. It’s not clear why stockyards were chosen, or what effect this might have had upon the meat consumed by the public.
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Added note from this site: If the U.S. military-government would use the American people as guinea pigs during the 1950s and 1960s, you can bet they did it in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s — and are doing it right now.
Related page
American State Terrorism and Biological Warfare Against the Korean People
During the Korean War the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force terrorized the civilian people of both North and South Korea with indiscriminate bombing, massacres, torture and biological warfare.
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Chemical & Biological Weapons