And now on the Passionate Eye - Who was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States?
Montage: “He's dead. And they can close the case and he can't defend himself.”
“The lone gunman theory fits the needs of the FBI.”
The investigation spans the globe, uncovering the deadly world of germ warfare.
Montage: “It was about killing people and not being able to be found out. Designing assassination weapons, classic spy stuff.”
Are we on the verge of the unthinkable?
Montage: “They could launch biowarfare by means of anthrax anywhere in the world today.”
]]>October 13, 2000
JOHN GIBSON, GUEST HOST: Hi, everybody. I'm John Gibson filling in for Bill O'Reilly, who's on assignment. Thanks for watching us tonight.
We've got a packed program for you. The political Hollywood film "The Contender" is released today and the producer and one of the stars say the studio chiefs reedited it to present a pro-Gore agenda. Much ado about now much or Hollywood liberals at it again?
Plus, the presidential race is in a statistical dead heat, but the violence in the Middle East could affect who wins in November. We'll find out how the stakes have changed. And the crisis in the Mideast is our top story tonight. Here are the latest developments.
One Palestinian is dead and 12 injured in clashes today in Hebron. Ninety-eight people have been killed in 16 days of violence. President Clinton is calling for calm while many say the peace process is dead. What will it take to resolve this and have the Palestinians been treated unfairly?
Joining me now from Washington, D.C. is the former media director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Sam Husseini.
Sam, what is the case for the notion that Palestinians have been treated unfairly?
SAM HUSSEINI, INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC ACCURACY: Well, going back to the beginning of the Oslo Accords, if you take a look at it, as the group that I'm currently with, the Institute for Public Accuracy, has been doing, you find that the Oslo Accords were tremendously unfair to the Palestinians and the agreements that they have gone through since then, since the big handshake, the big photo-ops and so on.
They hide the fact that Israel continues to perpetuate its occupation over the Palestinians.
GIBSON: But Sam…
HUSSEINI: All the Israelis have done is withdrawn from some population areas.
GIBSON: Sam, I'm confused. Didn't the Palestinians agree to the Oslo Accords? So who was unfair to who?
HUSSEINI: Well, it was either agree or get nothing. Basically the Palestinians were put a gun to their head saying agree to this piece of paper or you get nothing or you get bombed or you, you know, just stay out of the picture or you get absolutely nothing at all because Israel's got all the weapons.
There's a tremendous disparity -- Israel's got one of the biggest, most powerful militaries in the world. They've got 200 nuclear weapons. And what they are at war, some people are saying against, is a civilian population…
GIBSON: But Sam…
HUSSEINI: … that's unarmed, that all they've got is rocks.
GIBSON: But Sam…
HUSSEINI: So it's an incredibly…
GIBSON: Israel is not going to bomb Gaza with nuclear weapons. That wouldn't…
HUSSEINI: No, but they can bomb other people in the region.
GIBSON: Well, sure, but -- all right, Sam, look…
HUSSEINI: They can determine their dominance of the region.
GIBSON: … how do you expect the American people at large to develop some empathy for the Palestinians when we see in the last couple of days mobs killing a couple of guys…
HUSSEINI: Well, you know, John…
GIBSON: … guys waving their bloody hands out a window in triumph?
HUSSEINI: Right, exactly. Exactly.
GIBSON: How does that build any empathy?
HUSSEINI: Yeah, what doesn't build empathy and I hear the music and I guess they'll show the clips that are getting played, I want to see the clips that haven't gotten played. There have been almost 100 Palestinian civilians, not soldiers -- I'm sorry about those soldiers, those Israeli soldiers getting killed. But what were they doing there? They're occupying soldiers.
GIBSON: They were…
HUSSEINI: They're occupying…
GIBSON: They were there by mistake.
HUSSEINI: They weren't in uniform, John.
GIBSON: They ran to the Palestinian police station for protection.
HUSSEINI: They weren't in uniform, John. You know, they're undercover units, OK? It's not a secret.
GIBSON: Well, Sam, I know that's in dispute. But I mean one picture…
HUSSEINI: So, let's see the pictures…
GIBSON: At least one picture today…
HUSSEINI: Let's see the pictures that we're not seeing…
GIBSON: … showed the guy in uniform being…
HUSSEINI: … of our -- John.
GIBSON: … shoved to the ground.
HUSSEINI: John, the other pictures of our, of American made helicopter gunships hitting civilian targets, of Palestinian children being shot. Neither one of the presidential candidates had the guts to say I condemn Israel's killing almost 100 Palestinian civilians.
]]>Independent Science News just published my piece "Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance Has Hidden Almost $40 Million In Pentagon Funding And Militarized Pandemic Science." Prior pieces on this subject are here.
]]>See piece in Salon: "Joe Biden won't tell the truth about his Iraq war record — and he hasn't for years."
See January 2007 questioning of Biden and Tony Blinken.
]]>Similarly CNN (4/6/20) mocked the notion of a lab leak when re-assessing the source of the pandemic, describing one possibility being that: "It leaked -- like a genie out of a bottle -- from a lab in an accident."
But even a cursory look at the record shows that these labs, where ever they exist, have a lot of accidents -- just from 2019, the New York Times (8/5/19) reported: "Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns" regarding Fort Detrick in Maryland: "Problems with disposal of dangerous materials led the government to suspend research at the military’s leading biodefense center." (The local paper, the Frederick News-Post has provided some coverage, including publishing letters by local activist Barry Kissin who has focused on the issue.)
USA Today had a reporter on this beat, Alison Young, but she left the paper. A sampling of her work:
While much of the media and political establishment have minimized the threat from such lab work, some hawks on the American right like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., have singled out Chinese biodefense researchers as uniquely dangerous.
But there is every indication that U.S. lab work is every bit as threatening as that in Chinese labs. American labs also operate in secret, and are also known to be accident-prone.
The current dynamics of the biological arms race have been driven by U.S. government decisions that extend back decades. In December 2009, Reuters reported that the Obama administration was refusing even to negotiate the possible monitoring of biological weapons.
Much of the left in the U.S. now appears unwilling to scrutinize the origin of the pandemic — or the wider issue of biowarfare — perhaps because portions of the anti-Chinese right have been so vocal in making unfounded allegations.
Governments that participate in such biological weapon research generally distinguish between "biowarfare" and "biodefense," as if to paint such "defense" programs as necessary. But this is rhetorical sleight-of-hand; the two concepts are largely indistinguishable.
"Biodefense" implies tacit biowarfare, breeding more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding a way to fight them. While this work appears to have succeeded in creating deadly and infectious agents, including deadlier flu strains, such "defense" research is impotent in its ability to defend us from this pandemic.
The legal scholar who drafted the main U.S. law on the subject, Francis Boyle, warned in his 2005 book "Biowarfare and Terrorism" that an "illegal biological arms race with potentially catastrophic consequences" was underway, largely driven by the U.S. government.
For years, many scientists have raised concerns regarding bioweapons/biodefense lab work, and specifically about the fact that huge increases in funding have taken place since 9/11. This was especially true after the anthrax-by-mail attacks that killed five people in the weeks after 9/11, which the FBI ultimately blamed on a U.S. government biodefense scientist. A 2013 study found that biodefense funding since 2001 had totaled at least $78 billion, and more has surely been spent since then. This has led to a proliferation of laboratories, scientists and new organisms, effectively setting off a biological arms race.
Following the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 2014, the U.S. government paused funding for what are known as "gain-of-function" research on certain organisms. This work actually seeks to make deadly pathogens deadlier, in some cases making pathogens airborne that previously were not. With little notice outside the field, the pause on such research was lifted in late 2017.
During this pause, exceptions for funding were made for dangerous gain-of-function lab work. This included work jointly done by U.S. scientists from the University of North Carolina, Harvard and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This work — which had funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance not originally acknowledged — was published in 2015 in Nature Medicine.
A different Nature Medicine article about the origin of the current pandemic, authored by five scientists and published on March 17, has been touted by major media outlet and some officials — including current National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins — as definitively disproving a lab origin for the novel coronavirus. That journal article, titled "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2," stated unequivocally: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus." This is a subtly misleading sentence. While the scientists state that there is no known laboratory "signature" in the SARS-Cov-2 RNA, their argument fails to take account of other lab methods that could have created coronavirus mutations without leaving such a signature.
But there's no rumor. It’s a fact: Labs work with dangerous pathogens. U.S. and China have such dual use biowarfare/biodefense programs. China has major facilities at Wuhan. There are leaks from labs. (See Preventing a Biological Arms Race, MIT Press, 1990, edited by Susan Wright -- see (partial) review in Journal of International Law (10/92).)
There are two obvious responses:Burn it Down: The impulsive thing to do would be to want to burn down the Democratic Party. It’s possible that the establishment of the Democratic Party would be OK with this — they seem to fear a President Sanders more than the fear another term of Trump. So, people would stay home or vote for a third party or independent candidate who openly states that they have virtually no chance of winning.Cave In: Others might insist that no matter how badly the Democratic Party establishment treats its voters, they need to get in line come November and vote for whoever the nominee is. This is euphemistically referred to as “hold your nose and voting.” People have done this for decades and it’s typically resulted in the corporate wing of the Democratic Party becoming more and more powerful.The first of these will be disastrous because it will help Trump.The second will be disastrous because it effectively surrenders control of the Democratic Party to the corporate wing, probably for the foreseeable future.But there is a third choice: The VotePact strategy.With the VotePact strategy, in the general election, disenchanted Democratics team up with a disenchanted Republicans. They pair up: spouses and friends and coworkers and neighbors and debating partners and ex-facebook friends. Instead of the two of them voting for candidates they don’t want, they pair up and vote for the third party or independent candidate of their choice.
(Talk by Art Laffin given on Oct. 22, 2019 at evening support gathering during the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 Trial at St. Athanasius Episcopal Church, Brunswick, Georgia. This version Includes some slight revisions. Audio is here. Laffin is member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community in Washington, D.C. He is also editor of the two-volume work Swords into Plowshares, which has a forward by the late Father Daniel Berrigan.)
RUSSIA AND “RUSSIAGATE”
Postol: US Policies Driving Putin Nuclear Statements
Is “Russiagate” the New Benghazi?
U.S.
Nuclear Stance Toward Russia Increasing
Existential Threats
Dark Money, Not Russia, Best Explains Trump's Win
Documents Show U.S. Violated Assurances to Moscow About Limiting NATO
Facebook or Russia: Who's the Real Threat?
“McCarthyism Inc: Hyping Russian Threats”
“Why the Papadopoulos Plea Isn't a Smoking Gun”
Effects of Russia Demonization
Is “Fake News” Scare Being Used to Stifle Dissent?
“Russiagate Is More Fiction Than Fact”