By Chet Nagle ——Bio and Archives--February 11, 2024
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Biological warfare research began in the United States in 1943 by order of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service then began a large-scale research and development program at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. That research continues to this day.
President Nixon’s “Statement on Chemical and Biological Defense Policies and Programs,” was signed in late 1969. Nixon ordered “The United States shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare,” and “The United States will confine its biological research to defensive measures such as immunization and safety measures.” The Department of Defense (DoD) and the CIA simply ignored the president’s executive order.
Fort Detrick survived Nixon’s order by destroying all evidence of offensive biowar research on the base. Nevertheless, DoD and CIA continued research in other labs. In 2015 reporters for USA TODAY found more than 200 high-containment lab facilities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia operated by government agencies, universities, and public and private companies. They wrote, “They're scattered across the country from the heart of New York City to a valley in Montana; from an area near Seattle's Space Needle to just a few blocks from Kansas City's Country Club Plaza restaurant and shopping district.”
In 2009 I was seeking facts for my novel, The Woolsorter’s Plague. A friend arranged for a visit to Fort Detrick to see the emergency hospital I wanted to include in my book. I did see the hospital – it had an airlock, was nicknamed “The Slammer,” and the director said it could deal with any accidental exposures to germs by the staff. During my tour I saw labs with door labels like Ebola, Marburg and other deadly pathogens. The director assured me their research was designed to find cures and vaccines for all those diseases. It was 2009, long after Nixon’s order, so I believed him.
(If you’d like to read about how Iranian terrorists could kill Washington, my book is on Amazon The Woolsorters' Plague )
In 1972 we signed The Biological Weapons Convention and by 2023 it was ratified by 185 countries. The Convention is a disarmament treaty that bans biological weapons by prohibiting development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use. The Pentagon and CIA evaded the terms of that treaty even though it was ratified by the Senate and took effect in 1975. Once again, DoD and CIA ignored it by hiding their research programs with a screen of top-secret classifications and by stonewalling inquiries.
That helps us understand why the Pentagon could not pass its last six audits. Their huge budget for black projects is something DoD doesn’t want to reveal to auditors because if those projects were made public they would horrify taxpayers – and the rest of the world. In its last audit, the Pentagon could only account for half of its assets of $3.8 trillion (equipment, facilities, etc). That means they could not account for $1.9 trillion! That’s twice the entire Pentagon budget for 2023. What other federal agency could get away with that?
In a recent interview with Jimmy Dore, Robert F Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) showed the genesis of the Pentagon’s funding of biowar labs. He said the Pentagon “took the money that Cheney (the former Vice President) gave them (from the Patriot Act) $2.2 billion, and they funneled it through NIH, and it all went through Anthony Fauci. So beginning in 2002, Anthony Fauci got a 68% raise from the Pentagon for doing bioweapons development, and he got another raise of billions of dollars a year, and then he started doing all of this gain-of-function experimentation.”
Then, as was reported in March 2023 by ThePrint website, RFK Jr. added that when three viruses leaked out of Fauci’s U.S. labs in 2014, Congress held hearings and 300 scientists sent letters to President Obama who then told Fauci to stop his American-based gain of function labs.
“Gain of function” is research designed to make germs, like a corona virus that causes colds and the flu, become lethal to humans. That sounds insane, but we were assured by Fauci that gain of function research is vital bccause a lethal version of a relatively harmless virus might be the cause of a pandemic, and he needs to know how to create a vaccine to combat it. We now know how that worked out.
After Obama’s order, Fauci took his gain of function research to China’s lab in Wuhan and to other countries. The Pentagon admits it has bio-laboratories in 25 countries like Georgia and Ukraine as well as countries in the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa. Those labs are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $2.1 billion program called “Cooperative Biological Engagement Program.”
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Toria Nuland, Under Secretary of State, admitted in a Senate hearing on 8 March 2022 that “Ukraine has biological research facilities, which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops and Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of.” DoD spokesman John Kirby’s said it was all a “bunch of malarkey.”
Dilyana Gaytandzhieva is a Bulgarian investigative journalist. Pressure by the Bulgarian National Security Agency got her fired from the Bulgarian newspaper Trud Daily. Despite that, Dilyana continued her investigations.
Her report, published on South Front in 2018, details Pentagon biowar labs around the world. She shows copies of DTRA’s contracts with Georgia for DTRA-funded labs and extensive evidence of DoD and CIA germ and insect vectors being tested in several foreign nations. Read her report here:
An example she reports is that 364 Ukrainians died from Swine Flu. One of the Pentagon laboratories is located in Kharkiv, where in January 2016 at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers died from a flu-like virus, with 200 hospitalized. Ukraine did not report the dead and sick soldiers in Kharkiv but by March 2016, 364 deaths were reported across Ukraine from Swine Flu A, the strain that caused the world pandemic in 2009. The Donetsk People's Republic intelligence service said the US bio-lab in Kharkiv leaked the deadly virus.
She cites a CIA project named Project Clear Vision (1997 and 2000). Under a CIA contract Battelle Memorial Institute tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomb for its dissemination capabilities. That secret CIA-Battelle test was omitted from Biological Weapons Convention declarations submitted to the UN.
Dilyana also reports bio-engineering lethal viruses is happening again in the United States, using the example of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus. She says the MERS-CoV virus was bio-engineered by DoD, as was enhanced influenza and SARS. Leaks of those viruses caused Obama’s 2014 ban on gain of function research in the U.S. until 2017 when those experiments were resumed as “Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens.” Gain of function research is again legal in the US.
The Pentagon and the CIA have long record of testing chemicals and bioweapons on Americans. As early as WWII the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service conducted mustard gas tests on sixty thousand American servicemen including four thousand who received severe full exposures.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s best-selling book, The Wuhan Cover-Up and The Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race is a must-read account of DoD and CIA bioweapons activities. Most of the following data were taken from it.
In the 1950s the Army ran Operation Whitecoat that exposed some 2,000 Seventh Day Adventist conscientious objectors to Q fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Rift Valley fever, tularemia, sand fly fever, and typhoid fever. Senator J.D. Rockefeller IV reported in 1994 that for fifty years DoD and CIA used hundreds of thousands of military personnel for tests of psycho-active drugs, bacteria, viruses, and experimental vaccines, often without their knowledge or consent. Perhaps worse, DoD and the CIA conducted large-scale experiments on American civilians without their knowledge.
In Senate hearings in 1977 military and intelligence sources revealed they conducted field experiments on 239 populated areas including New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Key West, Panama City, Alaska, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. DoD and CIA doused Midwest cities and Alaska with pathogens sprayed by crop dusters and other aircraft.
In September 1950 a U.S. Navy ship two miles off the coast sprayed San Francisco with the bacteria Serratia Marcescens to test how susceptible a city would be to a biological attack. Bay Area residents reported respiratory, urinary tract, and gastrointestinal infections, and at least one died.
In the 1950s and 1960s DoD and CIA conducted many other tests, like ejecting neurotoxic plumes of zinc cadmium sulfide over cities including Winnipeg, Manitoba; St. Louis; Minneapolis; Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Corpus Christi, Texas. The CIA also released bacteria over Tampa Bay, Florida to test its ability to infect humans. The Washington Post reported it was likely Bordetella Pertussis, the germ that causes whooping cough. And in order to test its ability to poison an enemy’s drinking water, the CIA put chemicals into the drinking water supply of Washington, DC.
The list of experiments on Americans seems endless, but it’s not complete. The Director of the CIA, Richard Helms, ordered the destruction of all CIA files pertaining to biowar programs when he left the CIA in 1973. He was administrator of ARTICHOKE and Bluebird, and he surely didn’t want to be associated with those horrific mind control and interrogation programs. Nevertheless, records from other agencies were pieced together to form a partial picture of CIA biowar activities prior to 1973.
This raises the question, does gain of function research and testing by the Pentagon and CIA continue? The answer is yes, and it continues in the open under the new title of Pandemic Preparedness and Response. As RFK Jr. notes in his book, “This overt enterprise relies on a coalition that brings together the military, academic, medical journals, mainstream media and public health regulators in a corrupt and secretive collaboration… Its linchpin is a sinister alliance between US spy and public health agencies and the Chinese military. It has become the fulcrum for neoconservatism’s globalist ambitions to empower billionaire elites and to disempower, disenfranchise, and commoditize the poor. It is the ultimate tool of imperial expansion abroad and for creating a security state at home.”
He adds, “Only by understanding its roots can we appreciate the danger it poses to all our cherished values and institutions.”
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Chet Nagle is an experienced analyst and commentator on international commerce, geopolitics, national security matters, the Middle East, and strategic communications. He has been on radio, has appeared in documentary films and has been a guest on television news programs. His columns have appeared in the Daily Caller, The Hill, Roll Call, and many other publications. He is a contributing editor for ANDmagazine.com and the European Security & Defense magazine.