This essay is excerpted from Jeffrey St. Clair’s book Grand Theft Pentagon.
As Washington deliberates about a 'principled' response to an alleged
use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, the history of the
US's own use of chemical and biological weapons should be read widely.
The
United States, which has deployed its CBW arsenal against the
Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos,
Cambodia, Cuba, Haitian boat people and Canada, plus exposure of
hundreds of thousands of unwitting US citizens to an astonishing array
of germ agents and toxic chemicals, killing dozens of people.
The
US experimentation with bio-weapons goes back to the distribution of
cholera-infect blankets to American Indian tribes in the 1860s. In 1900,
US Army doctors in the Philippines infected five prisoners with a
variety of plague and 29 prisoners with Beriberi. At least four of the
subjects died. In 1915, a doctor working with government grants exposed
12 prisoners in Mississippi to pellagra, an incapacitating disease that
attacks the central nervous system.
After World War I, the United
States went on a chemical weapons binge, producing millions of barrels
of mustard gas and Lewisite. Thousands of US troops were exposed to
these chemical agents in order to “test the efficacy of gas masks and
protective clothing”. The Veterans Administration refused to honor
disability claims from victims of such experiments. The Army also
deployed mustard gas against anti-US protesters in Puerto Rico and the
Philippines in the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads,
then under contract with the Rockefeller Institute for Medical
Investigations, initiated his horrific Puerto Rico Cancer Experiments,
infecting dozens of unwitting subjects with cancer cells.At least
thirteen of his victims died as a result. Rhoads went on to headof the
US Army Biological Weapons division and to serve on the Atomic Energy
Commission, where he oversaw radiation experiments on thousands of US
citizens. In memos to the Department of Defense, Rhoads expressed his
opinion that Puerto Rican dissidents could be “eradicated” with the
judicious use of germ bombs.
In 1942, US Army and Navy doctors
infected 400 prisoners in Chicago withmalaria in experiments designed to
get “a profile of the disease and develop a treatment for it.” Most of
the inmates were black and none was informed of the risks of the
experiment. Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg cited the Chicago malaria
experiments as part of their defense.
At the close of World War
II, the US Army put on its payroll, Dr. Shiro Ishii, the head of the
Imperial Army of Japan’s bio-warfare unit. Dr. Ishii had deployed a wide
range of biological and chemical agents against Chinese and Allied
troops. He also operated a large research center in Manchuria,where he
conducted bio-weapons experiments on Chinese, Russian and American
prisoners of war. Ishii infected prisoners with tetanus; gave them
typhoid-laced tomatoes; developed plague-infected fleas; infected women
with syphilis; performed dissections on live prisoners; and exploded
germ bombs over dozens of men tied to stakes. In a deal hatched by Gen.
Douglas MacArthur, Ishii turned over more than 10,000 pages of his
“research findings”to the US Army, avoided prosecution for war crimes
and was invited to lecture at Ft. Detrick, the US Army bio-weapons
center in Frederick, Maryland.
In 1950 the US Navy sprayed large
quantities of serratia marcescens, a bacteriological agent, over San
Francisco, promoting an outbreak of pneumonia-like illnesses and causing
the death of at least one man, Ed Nevins.
A year later, Chinese
Premier Chou En-lai charged that the US military and the CIA had used
bio-agents against North Korea and China. Chou produced statements from
25 US prisoners of war backing him his claims that the US had dropped
anthrax contaminated feathers, mosquitoes and fleas carrying Yellow
Fever and propaganda leaflets spiked with cholera over Manchuria and
North Korea.
From 1950 through 1953, the US Army released chemical
clouds over six US and Canadian cities. The tests were designed to test
dispersal patterns of chemical weapons. Army records noted that the
compounds used over Winnipeg, Canada, where there were numerous reports
of respiratory illnesses, involved cadmium, a highly toxic chemical.
In
1951 the US Army secretly contaminated the Norfolk Naval Supply
Centerin Virginia with infectious bacteria. One type was chosen because
blackswere believed to be more susceptible than whites. A similar
experiment was undertaken later that year at Washington, DC’s National
Airport. The bacteria was later linked to food and blood poisoning and
respiratory problems.
Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida
were the targets of repeatedArmy bio-weapons experiments in 1956 and
1957. Army CBW researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the two
towns in order to test the ability of insects to carry and deliver
yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents fell ill, suffering
from fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and
typhoid. Army researchers disguised themselves as public health workers
in order photograph and test the victims. Several deaths were reported.
In
1965 the US Army and the Dow Chemical Company injected dioxin into 70
prisoners (most of them black) at the Holmesburg State Prison in
Pennsylvania. The prisoners developed severe lesions which went
untreated for seven months. A year later, the US Army set about the most
ambitious chemical warfare operation in history.
From 1966 to
1972, the United States dumped more than 12 million gallonsof Agent
Orange (a dioxin-powered herbicide) over about 4.5 million acresof South
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The government of Vietnam estimate the
civilian casualties from Agent Orange at more than 500,000. The legacy
continues with high levels of birth defects in areas that were saturated
with the chemical. Tens of thousands of US soldiers were also the
victims of Agent Orange.
In a still classified experiment, the US
Army sprayed an unknown bacterial agent in the New York Subway system in
1966. It is not known if the test caused any illnesses.
A year
later, the CIA placed a chemical substance in the drinking water supply
of the Food and Drug Administration headquarters in Washington, DC. The
test was designed to see if it was possible to poison drinking water
with LSD or other incapacitating agents.
In 1969, Dr. D.M.
McArtor, the deputy director for Research and Technologyfor the
Department of Defense, asked Congress to appropriate $10 millionfor the
development of a synthetic biological agent that would be resistant” to
the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to
maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease”.
In 1971
the first documented cases of swine fever in the western hemisphere
showed up in Cuba. A CIA agent later admitted that he had been
instructed to deliver the virus to Cuban exiles in Panama, who carried
the virus into Cuba in March of 1991. This astounding admission received
scant attention in the US press.
In 1980, hundreds of Haitian
men, who had been locked up in detention camps in Miami and Puerto Rico,
developed gynecomasia after receiving “hormone” shots from US doctors.
Gynecomasia is a condition causing males to developfull-sized female
breasts.
In 1981, Fidel Castro blamed an outbreak of dengue fever
in Cuba on the CIA. The fever killed 188 people, including 88 children.
In 1988, a Cuban exile leader named Eduardo Arocena admitted “bringing
some germs” into Cuba in 1980.
Four years later an epidemic of
dengue fever struck Managua, Nicaragua.Nearly 50,000 people came down
with the fever and dozens died. This was the first outbreak of the
disease in Nicaragua. It occurred at the height of the CIA’s war against
the Sandinista government and followed a series of low-level
“reconnaissance” flights over the capital city.
In 1996, the Cuba
government again accused the US of engaging in “biological aggression”.
This time it involved an outbreak of thrips palmi, an insect that kills
potato crops, palm trees and other vegetation. Thrips first showed up in
Cuba on December 12, 1996, following low-level flights over the island
by US government spray planes. The US was able to quash a United Nations
investigation of the incident.
At the close of the Gulf War, the
US Army exploded an Iraqi chemical weapons depot at Kamashiya. In 1996,
the Department of Defense finally admitted that more than 20,000 US
troops were exposed to VX and sarin nerve agentsas a result of the US
operation at Kamashiya. This may be one cause of Gulf War Illness,
another cause is certainly the experimental vaccines unwittingly given
to more than 100,000 US troops.
This article appeared at Alternet and is used with permission.
