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Purpose: Our purpose is to serve the Resistance/Patriot Movement as an occassional gazette providing news and commentary favorable to our Cause in a format accessible to the general public.

The news from e-mail listings is shown in preformatted text. This news will be attributed to its authors/editors and is entirely the opinion of that particular author/editor.
One of the reasons for this is to cut down on the spamming and foolishness inherent in raw e-mail in order to provide a forum for discussion of Resistance Movement issues.

Commentary is in regular format and is solely the opinions of the Editor and Staff of Modern Militiaman Internet Gazette.

Editor Martin Lindstedt

Fable of Contents

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The Biological War Inevitable, Part II

Back in July of 1997 in the Modern Militiaman's Internet Gazette #7-97, I predicted that biological warfare was indeed inevitable. We are now eight months closer to that inevitability. Back then, there were rumors of biological warfare plottings on the part of the U.S. regime, the Iranians, and the various anti-government groups that formed in response to the U.S. regime's criminal tyrannical activities. The same rumors still fly, concerning the same players, but the basis for these rumors have since been revealed to be horribly altogether so true. Anybody can use and successfully deploy biological warfare agents.

We forget that biological warfare has been with us for a long time. The Black Death that ravaged Europe in 1348-1351 has been traced to the Mongols catapulting corpses in a town they had besieged in the Crimea in 1348. Ships evacuating the town carried the Bubonic Plague to Italy, thence to Spain, France, Germany, England, Scandanavia, where it took at least one-third of the population, sometimes more. American whiskey traders sometimes deliberately sold smallpox blankets to the non-immune Indians, to clear the proposed settlement of their tribal lands. The Assyrians are credited with biological warfare as well, as far back as the 7th Century B.C.E.

Yet these efforts are crude compared to the age of biological weapons which lie ahead. The atomic bomb, with which we were concerned with when we were fighting communism, is but the outgrowth of physics, a science thought up in the last half of the 19th Century and perfected within the first half of the 20th Century. The limits of nuclear weaponry is that for all practical purpose they are but the outgrowth of gunpowder weapons. Yes, a nuclear weapon has a substantially larger bang than the largest cannon can deliver, but in its applications by military men have been treated substantially as blast and bombing weapons superior only in its scope to conventional explosives, as witness its delivery by aircraft, missle, or even by cannon.

Biology concerns itself with the science of life. The science of life can be harnessed to be the science of death -- human death -- as the smallest forms of life are unleashed to form agents of death against humanity. All it takes is but the will to do so, as the science of life has progressed with the invention of genetic technology to where new pathogens can be brought into being by gene-splicing, the creation of new deadly forms of life, as opposed to the 60 year-old method of breeding natural pathogens such as anthrax to serve biological warfare.

Yet both the subtle methods of biological warfare, such as gene-splicing viruses such as ebola and smallpox, and the crude methods, such as collecting natural anthrax spores and culturing them by exposure to antibiotics to create military-grade anthrax immune to all known antibiotics, are possible today. Countries such as the former U.S.S.R and the present U.S.S.A. have created super-viruses while Third-World countries such as Iraq are stuck with culturing anthrax or indigenous camel pox, and aggrieved and restive populations of these tyrannical countries consider, then implement culturing crude, but effective matural anthrax spores. The united States develops the biological equivalent of the mini-gatling gun, while the U.S.S.R and China have 50 cal. machineguns, Iraq has an AK-47, and aggrieved elements of these tyrannical regimes have acquired bolt-actions and flintlocks aimed at their home regimes' backs. All these hostile elements are locked together, hating one another, within a firing range of an acre. Given all the weaponry involved, and the measure of hatred, it is but a matter of time before the shooting starts and almost everyone is killed. The very first shot is guaranteed to kill, and the subsequent shots are no less lethal.

----- So what is lacking is a mastery of the political forms given this new reality. The current old politics of tyranny rested firmy on gunpowder weaponry wherein political power grew out of the barrel of a gun, and given enough guns absolute political power was assured. The gunpowder weaponry to enforce terror favored the terror of the masses against the individual or smaller grouping, and the better organized the masses were in using gunpowder weaponry, the better the political will of the rulers of these political masses could be enforced.

Edged weaponry, and the age of feudalism, were destroyed by the usages of gunpowder. Where feudalism still existed at the turn of the century, it ended up being destroyed by the modern nation-state at the turn of the 19th Century. The British, with their political organization of constitutional monarchy butchered from afar with Maxim and rifle fire the spear-armed squares of Fuzzy-Wuzzies, ruled by kings and prophets in the Sudan around 1895. The Italians, with their dictatorship of Mussolini machine-gunned entire regiments of spear-chucking Ethiopians of the feudalistic Haile Selassie. So we can see that weaponry -- the means of enforcing government coercion -- shapes the political shape of the nation, whose ruling classes always reserve unto themselves a monopoly of force. Edged weapons brought about feudalism. Gunpowder brought about the modern nation-state.

But what form of regime does biological weaponry bring about? What political changes are brought about by biological weaponry?

Biological weaponry can be made by very small groups of people, or even just one person acting alone. The value of the masses is negated absolutely in favor of brainpower of the individual. One individual, working alone, and in secret, can create a weapon of mass destruction. And by working alone, and in secret, that one individual can strike at any time, undetected, and carry out his will. The monopoly of violence, the balance of terror has thus shifted to the launcher of a shot which comes out of the dark. Since political power is measured by the ability to exercise force, and force is derived from the willingness and ability to use violence and create terror, the structure of the social order will/must change because it has no other choice.
No future society will be able to maintain a big government. In the prophetic words of Frank Herbert in his 1982 novel The White Plague, a biologist says:

"Of what use is a big government when a single individual can destroy it? Governments will have to be small enough where you know every one of your neighbors. . . . . But who would dare attack his neighbor when one survivor can exterminate the attackers. . . . . Who would dare maintain a military force when the possession of such a force is an invitation to disaster, keeping your populace in constant peril? Your military forces cannot practice its arts upon its neighbors. The old weapons are outmoded."

Even the Russian scientist in the book knows that his social order, a relatively efficient police state, cannot work in the new reality, because what happens if you shoot the wrong scientists? Or the plague mutates? Or another plague is created by other nationalities' scientists? Who then, will create the vaccine?

So the new biological weaponry, in addition to outmoding the old gunpowder/atomic weaponry has destroyed the political basis behind all current social orders. Biological weaponry, striking at unprepared civilian populations will rip right through them just as Hitler's machine-gun armed panzers destroyed the charging Polish cavalry. The regime that ill-leads its obsolete military machine to destruction will be overthrown, just as the Polish government was replaced after its unconditional surrender and partition in 1939. So too, will be the foolish Clinton regime, starting a foreign war against Iraq and all its Arab brethren and its Pan-Islamic fundamentalist allies who regard it as the Great Satan. Meanwhile, internal dissent will turn deadly, as aggrieved anti-regime forces create, then use, crude biological weaponry against the police state that murders and oppresses them.

So in this new reality, the necessity for wisdom and justice in both foreign and domestic policies becomes the sine qua non for survival. Yet while the necessity of civilized and lawful behavior on the part of the ruling elites becomes greater and greater, the supply is nonexistant. Clinton's toying with disaster with the Iraqis, and the moronic majority of Republican kongress-kritters ensure that foreign policy regarding the biologically-armed Iraq and its allies is equivalent to the behavior of a malicious five-year-old bully armed with a submachinegun wanting to stomp the heads in of a den of rattlesnakes. Sooner or later the little monster is going to get bit -- regardless of how many snakes get shredded by bullets. And for what? So a morally degenerate and politically bankrupt mass herd of Amerikan mattoids can get their feebleminded interest off Slick Willie's spittle-slicked willie? Never before has so much been risked by so many for so few.

In domestic policy, the lives of the amoral majority are hostage to the actions of a police state run by the Keystone Kops in favor of the criminal injustice system. Remember, it only takes a fanatic copying a page off the Larry Wayne Harris School of Microbiology to destroy Hillary's village.

But regrettably, surveying the state of the current social order and the rottenness of the decayed political elites running it towards its destruction, anyone with a clear mind's-eye to see reality knows that the situation is hopeless. The need for change is several orders of magnitude beyond the ability to change to meet the new conditions for social survival. The task would be daunting enough if the social order was in good shape -- but it is not. Our civilization cannot be saved, not in its present form, not with the load of degenerates swamping the lifeboats.

For close to two years now, I have urged the Resistance and Patriotic elements to form survival cells of close friends and family. I continue to make that rational plea of sanity. For those who do not believe it is bad as I say, I offer the below issue of easily verifiable material for them to peruse and to see for themselves. The policies which should be set by all Resistance cells are those common-sense solutions which will lead to: (1) Survival and (2) Freedom. Survival comes first because you cannot enjoy your Freedom unless you are alive to enjoy it. So when biological warfare comes, I urge you to be out of the cities and in a place of isolation from a diseased and dying mass humanity. That you have enough food, water, and shelter in an isolated location. That you have enough moral strength to protect your own from the dying clinch of the unprepared who would take from you your self-prepared means for survival. This might even mean that you might go so far in your own protection as to consider fighting fire with fire.

Every man to his tent, O Israel! We will meet, in our separate tribes before the ark of the covenant when this is all over to discuss the basis for a voluntary confederation of men of good will for the purposes of justice.

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Someone wrote:

>Does anyone have a reference defining "military-grade anthrax"?
>Nothing showed up in an Altavista Web search.
>
>Could the newspapers be referring to weaponized anthrax?
>
>

            GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

   In the sorting of electronic components, such as diodes and 
resistors, the gold band after the first three is to denote a 
militiary specification, such as within 5 percent, as opposed to the 
silver band, which is  commercial grade and thus within 10% 
tolerance.

   In the case of biological agents, I would say that military-grade 
anthrax is a strain which has a pedigree, having been cultivated and 
specifically bred for a military application, as opposed to 'natural' 
strains which can be found in the soil where domestic animals died of 
anthrax, and the bacilli had opportunity to strengthen their cell walls 
and hibernate into spore form.  Supposedly, Harris took a probe and got 
anthrax spores by such a method.  These spores can be found anywhere in 
places like South Dakota or Texas which were known as 'anthrax 
districts.'  In fact, in a Modern Militiaman's Internet Gazette of 
last year, I reprinted a story from the Souix Falls Argus-Leader about 
an anthrax outbreak around Mitchell, South Dakota, which had killed two 
cattle herds as a result of the unusually moist conditions of last year. 
[Correction: It was in an e-mail posting, which I think was posted to 
a listserver.  Last July the wires were burning over a supposed biowar 
which didn't happen.]

    See: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/1076/mmgaz7.html

   It would seem reasonable that a military grade anthrax would be bred 
and tested to ensure lethality much in the same way Herefords are bred 
for special characteristics and the way nuclear warheads have been tested 
to ensure a maximum bang for a given amount of plutonium.

   You see, biological warfare is the wave of the future because it is 
cheap, easily available to anyone who really wants to develop such 
weapons, and its defense is created as a useful byproduct adjunct to 
developing such offensive weapons.  In fact, if you wish to develop a 
vaccine to the military grade anthrax, you must culture the strain to 
which you wish to create those antibiodies (or antibiotics).

    Remember, anthrax is a naturally occurring bacillus which has been 
used as the template for almost all biological warfare experiments. 
It is the original stock, like the wolf is for everything from wolfhounds 
to little Mexican hairless dogs whose name I can't spell.
   So one gets some anthrax spores from natural sources.  From that, 
one cultures the spores, then exposes that culture to antibiotics.  The 
antibiotics will kill most of the anthrax culture, but what survives is 
now antibiotic resistant, then immune to that particular antibiotic. 
(For example, there are some strains of tuberculosis bacilli which 
prefer to eat streptomycin FIRST, before feeding upon the normal 
culture medium.) What anthrax strains die off, are not destroyed, 
are used for the development of a vaccine to be used for inoculation 
before the live antibiotic-resistant anthrax strain faces the next 
hurtle of a new test with a more potent antibiotic.

   Eventually, given a few weeks, months, years, the last antibiotic 
left, such as vancomycin, is breached in its effectiveness as 
prophylactic against a biological warfare agent.  However, at the 
same time, the vaccine for this superior anthrax strain has been 
developed as a defense in tandem with a military offense.  Thus the 
developer of the offensive biological agent has the advantage of 
creating its defense, and thus can wage offensive biological warfare 
at will upon defenseless populations.  This is the logic behind the 
military uses of biological warfare, and would be what I would call 
'military-grade' anthrax.  It would be an anthrax with a pedigree, 
specifically bred to overcome civilian sector commercial antibiotics 
(which due to their overuse by agribusiness are increasingly worthless 
in combatting native bacilli such as streptococcus) and to which there 
is a vaccine available for injection by those chosen to survive.
   When one includes gene-splicing technology available for useage by 
the regime, all manner of exotic baccilli can be created, such as an 
artificial strep-anthrax-plague bacilli, which could be used as a 
doomsday device or for further blackmail.  Of course, I would call 
such an artificial organism 'super-military-grade anthrax derivative,'
but any way you sliced it, it still would be guaranteed death in a 
bottle.

  When one realizes that our own criminal regime has been experimenting 
with such pathogens since before WWII, and has both the criminal intent 
to make such weapons and the will to use them, one should be far more 
scared of of 'our' gubbnmint's military-grade anthrax, as it has had 
a longer headstart than anything which has been bred by the Iraqis who 
have probably only been at it for 15 years, or a Larry Wayne Harris 
special, which in terms of effectiveness is but the crude derivation 
of natural anthrax.

   In any case given the immorality and stupidity of the current 
idiotic criminal regime, it is indeed but a matter of time before 
(1) They start a war with some state or group with the willingness 
to use biological warfare or (2) They pull an OKC and poison-death 
some mid-range city and blame it on the militia or 'patriots' or 
Iraqis or whomever else is the enemy of the criminal regime that 
season.  In any case, the target will likely be some major political 
of economic center such as a big city.  Washington or New York in the 
case of aggrieved parties from #1; Baton Rouge or Houston or Tulsa 
in the case of the criminal regime wanting to spread panic and 
to protect itself from internal disruption by totalitarian imposition 
in scenario #2.

   Of course the efforts of a dying criminal regime to maintain 
power through a policy of 'limited' biological warfare will backfire.  
Biological warfare is here to stay, and it simply cannot be protected 
against given the current state of scientific knowledge, the numbers 
of aggrieved parties wishing for revenge for past injustices, and 
the vulnerabilities inherent in having masses of low-quality humanity 
crowded together in megalopolises and the fact that due to the overuse 
of antibiotics by agribusiness that there is no pool of people with 
natural immunity to the actions of biological warfare.  The era of 
artificial immunity is drawing to a close with vancomycin-resistant 
bacteria signalling an end to the past 50-year over-exploitation of 
earth-based anti-bacilli of the streptomycin family.

   The only defense against biowar is to enforce a strict isolation 
in favor of one's self and family by eliminating all sources of 
infection and having the resources to live in isolation until the 
biowar has run its course.  In other words, this entails living in a 
small town or rural area, being willing to shoot to kill anyone coming 
within an infection zone by straying off public thoroughfares, and 
having enough food and other supplies to stay put until the pandemic 
is over.  Since antibiotics will be useless and it is foolish to bet 
that you are the one person in 100 with a nautural genetic immunity to 
whatever pathogen is used, such a policy of defense from contagion 
is the only one possible.

                            -------

   The Resistance Action Force cells out there must consider 
the discreet development of biological agents for the following 
reasons:
  
    (1) Every totalitarian regime out there has developed or is 
     developing biowar agents for the overt purpose of Mutual 
     Assured Destruction and the covert purpose of having a 
     first-strike capability in order to advance their criminal 
     activities against perceived enemies, foreign and domestic. 
     Since by their criminal activities these regimes and their 
     culpable citizenry have forfeited their right to live, the 
     usage of biological weaponry for past and continuing injustices 
     against them is not an immoral act.
    (2)  Biological warfare is cheap, effective, easy, and undetectable. 
     There is no way it can be guarded against.  Placing an airtight 
     cordon around a major city 24 hours per day for years on end is 
     impossible, given the need for its resupply with food and 
     other essentials of life.  Driving a car on the interstate beltway 
     around every major city in Amerika with a fake tailpipe pumping 
     anthrax spores upwind is a piece of cake given a suicide driver or 
     someone properly vaccinated against the pathogen.
    (3) Biological warfare is such that the only defense other than 
    quarantine is to be the only one holding the vaccine to the pathogen 
    unleashed.  This vaccine can be administered to one's allies and 
    denied to the victims unless they acceed to one's will. Thus a 
    tactical and strategic necessity of biowar is to ALWAYS be the 
    one engaged in a first strike.
    (4) Biological warfare always favors the aggrieved who have far 
    less to lose.  While no person has more than one life, taking 
    down a criminal regime and its human herd animals who allowed it 
    to flourish wallowing in injustice can be said to be an effective 
    revenge, and thus a life effectively spent.  In any case, such 
    revenge being taken is but a matter of time given that the 
    current criminal regime is a never-ending fountain of injustice 
    generating masses of the aggrieved.  
    (5) Since a large portion of Resistance Action Forces are of 
    Christian Identity and/or White Nationalist persuasion and live 
    in the rural areas most defensible to biowar, and the favored 
    minorities of the criminal regime and the regime criminals 
    themselves live in the urban and suburban areas most susceptable 
    to biowar attack, it would be foolish not to use a weapon which 
    favors our side.  Logic dictates that in the absence of any true 
    faith and allegiance between opposing sides that tactical and 
    strategic advantages will be pursued relentlessly in the interests 
    of winning the coming biowar.  All things considered, it is far 
    safer to unleash biowar rather than have it unleased against your 
    side. 
        Larry Wayne Harris does indeed come off as a psychotic on the 
    TV tube such as occurred on Diane Sawyer's ABC program on Feb. 25, 
    1998; however his snigger concerning the usage of biowar tactics 
    by unknown Resistance cells reflects realities.  Unknown cells 
    using crudely bred anthrax spores are indeed invincible, and Mr. 
    Harris, be he psycho or unwilling FiBbIe stooge, has accurately 
    glimpsed the future.  Mr. Harris may not be the George Washington 
    of the biowar revolution, but he is intelligent enough to be a 
    prophet glimpsing the reality of the times to come.

   Morality has absolutely nothing to do with the deployment of 
biological weaponry.  The time for morality was back before the 
current immorality made civil warfare inevitable.  
   Anyone in the Resistance movement who cannot take the above 
realities to heart should waste his time in church praying for peace 
between men of ill will.  The Resistance needs to develop some of 
this weaponry in order to deal with the current ruling criminal 
regime and also to deal with potential invasion when civil- and 
bio-warfare has decimated the vast majority of Amerika.  I would 
urge anyone who loves his own to keep in mind the above realities 
of offensive biological warfare or at the very least the limited 
pitiful and beleagured defense against it .

--Martin Lindstedt


P.S.  I am not an expert in this field.  However, confirmation of the 
facts cited above can be discerned by reading some general information 
concerning biology in a high-skrule textbook, an adequate encyclopedia 
(I have Compton's on CD-ROM), and a few general non-fiction books on 
the subject such as 1990's "The Coming Plague."  Even fiction such as 
Stephen King's "The Stand", Frank Herbert's "The White Plague" or 
especially Michael Crichton's "The Lost World" can be informative. -M.L.

.

Date:  Wed, 18 Feb 1998 17:48:37 -0500
From: MID-EAST REALITIES http://WWW.MiddleEast.Org.

         M  I  D  -  E  A  S  T      R  E  A  L  I  T  I  E  S
                          (c) Copyright 1998
    MER may be freely distributed by email and on the Internet so 
       long as there is no editing of any kind.  For any print 
           publication, permission in writing is required.   
    MER@MiddleEast.Org / Fax: 202 362-6965 / Phone: 202 362-5266

.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS -January/February 1998
www.foreignaffairs.org

THE PRIMARY DANGER IS THAT AN ENEMY MIGHT TRIGGER A CATASTROPHE IN 
AN AMERICAN CITY  --  The New Threat of Mass Destruction

Richard K. Betts

WHAT IF MCVEIGH HAD USED ANTHRAX?

DURING THE Cold War, weapons of mass destruction were the centerpiece 
of foreign policy.  Nuclear arms hovered in the background of every 
major issue in East-West competition and alliance relations.  The 
highest priorities of U.S. policy could almost all be linked in some 
way to the danger of World War III and the fear of millions of 
casualties in the American homeland.

Since the Cold War, other matters have displaced strategic concerns 
on the foreign policy agenda, and that agenda itself is now barely 
on the public's radar screen.  Apart from defense policy professionals, 
few Americans still lose sleep over weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  
After all, what do normal people feel is the main relief provided by 
the end of the Cold War?  It is that the danger of nuclear war is off 
their backs.

Yet today WMD present more and different things to worry about than 
during the Cold War.  For one, nuclear arms are no longer the only 
concern, as chemical and biological weapons have come to the fore.  
For another, there is less danger of complete annihilation, but more 
danger of mass destruction.  Since the Cold War is over and American 
and Russian nuclear inventories are much smaller, there is less chance 
of an apocalyptic exchange of many thousands of weapons.  But the 
probability that some smaller number of WMD will be used is growing.  
Many of the standard strategies and ideas for coping with WMD threats 
are no longer as relevant as they were when Moscow was the main 
adversary.  But new thinking has not yet congealed in as clear a form 
as the Cold War concepts of nuclear deterrence theory.

The new dangers have not been ignored inside the Beltway.
"Counterproliferation" has become a cottage industry in the Pentagon 
and the intelligence community, and many worthwhile initiatives to 
cope with threats are under way.  Some of the most important 
implications of the new era, however, have not yet registered on the 
public agenda.  This in turn limits the inclination of politicians 
to push some appropriate programs.  Even the defense establishment 
has directed its attention toward countering threats WMD pose to 
U.S. military forces op, abroad rather than to the more worrisome 
danger that mass destruction will occur in the United States,
killing large numbers of civilians.

The points to keep in mind about the new world of mass destruction 
are the following.  First, the roles such weapons play in 
international conflict are changing.  They no longer represent the 
technological frontier of warfare.  Increasingly, they will be weapons 
of the weak-states or groups that militarily are at best second-class.  
The importance of the different types among them has also shifted.  
Biological weapons should now be the most serious concern, with 
nuclear weapons second and chemicals a distant third. 

Second, the mainstays of Cold War security policy-deterrence and 
arms control-are not what they used to be.  Some new threats may not 
be deferrable, and the role of arms control in dealing with WMD has 
been marginalized.  In a few instances, continuing devotion to 
deterrence and arms control may have side effects that offset the 
benefits.

Third, some of the responses most likely to cope with the threats 
in novel ways will not find a warm welcome.  The response that should 
now be the highest priority is one long ignored, opposed, or 
ridiculed: a serious civil defense program to blunt the effects of 
if they are unleashed within the United States. Some of the most 
effective measures to prevent attacks within the United States may 
also challenge Traditional civil liberties if pursued to the maximum.  
And the most troubling conclusion for foreign policy as a whole is 
that reducing the odds of attacks in the United States might require 
pulling back from involvement in some foreign conflicts.  American 
activism to guarantee international stability is, paradoxically,
the prime source of American vulnerability.

This was partly true in the Cold War, when the main danger that 
nuclear weapons might detonate on U.S. soil sprang from strategic 
engagement in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East to deter attacks on 
U.S. allies.  But engagement then assumed a direct link between 
regional stability and U.S. survival.  The connection is less evident 
today, when there is no globally threatening superpower or 
transnational ideology to be contained -- only an array of serious but 
entirely local disruptions.  Today, as the only nation acting to 
police areas outside its own region, the United States makes itself 
a target for states or groups whose aspirations are frustrated by
U.S. power.

FROM MODERN TO PRIMITIVE

The primary risk is that enemies might trigger catastrophes in 
American cities.

WHEN NUCLEAR weapons were born, they represented the most advanced 
military applications of science, technology, and engineering.  None 
but the great powers could hope to obtain them.  By now, however, 
nuclear arms have been around for more than half a century, and 
chemical and biological weapons even longer.  They are not just 
getting old.  In the strategic terms most relevant to American 
security, they have become primitive.  Once the military cutting edge 
of the strong, they have become the only hope for so-called rogue 
states or terrorists who want to contest American power.  Why?  
Because the United States has developed overwhelming superiority in
conventional military force something it never thought it had against 
the Soviet Union.

The Persian Gulf War of 1991 demonstrated the American advantage in 
a manner that stunned many abroad.  Although the U.S. defense budget 
has plunged, other countries are not closing the gap.  U.S. military 
spending remains more than triple that of any potentially hostile 
power and higher than the combined defense budgets of Russia, China, 
Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Cuba.

More to the point, there is no evidence that those countries' level 
of military professionalism is rising at a rate that would make them
competitive even if they were to spend far more on their forces.  
Rolling along in what some see as a revolution in military affairs, 
American forces continue to make unmatched use of state-of-the-art 
weapons, surveillance and information systems, and the organizational 
and doctrinal flexibility for managing the integration of these 
complex innovations into "systems of systems" that is the key to 
modern military effectiveness.  More than ever in military history, 
brains are brawn.  Even if hostile countries somehow catch up in an 
arms race, their military organizations and cultures are unlikely to 
catch up in the competence race for management, technology
assimilation, and combat command skills.

If it is infeasible for hostile states to counter the United States 
in conventional combat, in American cities, it is even more daunting 
for smaller groups such as terrorists.  If the United States is lucky, 
the various violent groups with grievances against the American 
government and society will continue to think up schemes using 
conventional explosives.  Few terrorist groups have shown an interest 
in inflicting true mass destruction.  Bombings or hostage seizures 
have generally threatened no more than a few hundred lives.  Let us 
hope that this limitation has been due to a powerful underlying reason, 
rather than a simple lack of capability, and that the few exceptions 
do not become more typical.

There is no sure reason to bet on such restraint.  Indeed, some have 
tried to use WMD, only to see them fizzle.  The Japanese Aum Shinrikyo 
cult released sarin nerve gas in Tokyo in 1995 but killed only a few 
people, and some analysts believe that those who attacked the World 
Trade Center in 1993 laced their bomb with cyanide, which burned up 
in the explosion (this was not confirmed, but a large amount of 
cyanide was found in the perpetrators' possession).  Eventually such 
a group will prove less incompetent.  If terrorists decide that they 
want to stun American policymakers by inflicting enormous damage, 
WMD become more attractive at the same time that they are becoming 
more accessible.

Finally, unchallenged military superiority has shifted the attention 
of the U.S. military establishment away from WMD.  During the Cold 
War, nuclear weapons were the bedrock of American war capabilities.  
They were the linchpin of defense debate, procurement programs, and 
arms control because the United States faced another superpower --one 
that conventional wisdom feared could best it in conventional warfare.  
Today, no one cares about the MX missile or B-1 bomber, and hardly 
anyone really cares about the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.  In a 
manner that could only have seemed ludicrous during the Cold War, 
proponents now rationalize the $2 billion B-2 as a weapon for 
conventional war.  Hardly anyone in the Pentagon is still interested 
in how the United States could use WMD for its own strategic purposes.

What military planners are interested in is how to keep adversaries 
from using WMD as an "asymmetric" means to counter U.S. conventional 
power, and how to protect U.S. ground and naval forces abroad from 
WMD attacks.  This concern is all well and good, but it abets a drift 
of attention away from the main danger.  The primary risk is not that 
enemies might lob some nuclear or chemical weapons at U.S. armored 
battalions or ships, awful as that would be.  Rather, it is that they 
might attempt to punish the United States by triggering American 
cities.


CHOOSE YOUR WEAPONS WELL

UNTIL the past decade, the issue was nuclear arms, period.  Chemical
weapons received some attention from specialists, but never made the
priority list of presidents and cabinets.  Biological weapons were 
almost forgotten after they were banned by the 1972 Biological 
Weapons Convention.  Chemical and biological arms have received more 
attention in the 1990's.  The issues posed by the trio lumped under 
the umbrella of mass destruction differ, however.  Most significantly, 
biological weapons have received less attention than the others but 
probably represent the greatest danger.

Chemical weapons have been noticed more in the past decade, especially
since they were used by Iraq against Iranian troops in the 1980-88
Iran-lraq War and against Kurdish civilians in 1988.  Chemicals are 
far more widely available than nuclear weapons because the technology 
required to produce them is far simpler, and large numbers of countries 
have undertaken chemical weapons programs.  But chemical weapons are 
not really in the same class as other weapons of mass destruction, in 
the sense of ability to inflict a huge number of civilian casualties 
in a single strike.
 For the tens of thousands of fatalities as in, say, the biggest 
strategic bombing raids of World War 11, it would be very difficult 
logistically and operationally to deliver chemical weapons in 
necessary quantities over wide areas.

Nevertheless, much attention and effort have been lavished on a 
campaign to eradicate chemical weapons.  This may be a good thing, 
but the side effects are not entirely benign.  For one, banning 
chemicals means that for deterrence, nuclear weapons become even more 
important than they used to be.  That is because a treaty cannot 
assuredly prevent hostile nations from deploying chemical weapons, 
while the United States has forsworn the option to retaliate in kind.

In the past, the United States had a no-first-use policy for chemical
weapons but reserved the right to strike back with them if an enemy 
used them first.  The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which 
entered into force last April, requires the United States to destroy 
its stockpile, thus ending this option.  The United States did the 
same with biological arms long ago, during the Nixon administration.  
Eliminating its own chemical and biological weapons practically 
precludes a no-first-use policy for nuclear weapons, since they 
become the only WMD available for retaliation.  

Would the United States follow through and use nuclear weapons 
against a country or group that had killed several thousand Americans 
with deadly chemicals?  It is hard to imagine breaking the post-
Nagasaki taboo in that situation.  But schemes for conventional 
military retaliation would not suffice without detracting from the 
force of American deterrent threats.  There would be a risk for the 
United States in setting a precedent that someone could use WMD 
against Americans without suffering similar destruction in return.  
Limiting the range of deterrent alternatives available to U.S. 
strategy will not necessarily cause deterrence to fail, but it will 
certainly not strengthen it.

The ostensible benefit of the CWC is that it will make chemical 
arms harder to acquire and every bit as illegal and stigmatized as 
biological weapons have been for a quarter-century.  If it has that 
benefit, what effect will the ban have on the choices of countries or 
groups who want some kind of WMD in any case, whether for purposes of 
deterrence, aggression, or revenge?  At the margin, the ban will 
reduce the disincentives to acquiring biological weapons, since they 
will be no less illegal, no harder to obtain or conceal, and far more 
damaging than chemical weapons.  If major reductions in the chemical 
threat produce even minor increases in the biological threat, it will 
be a bad trade.

One simple fact should worry Americans more about biological than 
about nuclear or chemical arms: unlike either of the other two, 
nuclear weapons combine maximum destructiveness and easy use, have 
great killing capacity but are hard to get; chemical weapons are easy 
to get but lack such killing capacity; biological agents have both 
qualities.  A 1993 study by the Office of Technology assessment 
concluded that a single airplane delivering 100 kilograms of anthrax 
spores -- a dormant phase of a bacillus that multiplies rapidly in 
the body, producing toxins and rapid hemorrhaging -- by aerosol on a 
clear, calm night over the Washington, D.C., area could kill between 
one million and three million people, 300 times as many fatalities
as if the plane had delivered sarin gas in amounts ten times larger.

Like chemical weapons but unlike nuclear weapons, biologicals are
relatively easy to make.  Innovations in biotechnology have obviated 
many of the old problems in handling and preserving biological agents, 
and many have been freely available for scientific research.  Nuclear 
weapons are not likely to be the WMD of choice for non-state terrorist 
groups.  They require huge investments and targetable infrastructure, 
and are subject to credible threats by the United States.   An 
aggrieved group that decides it wants to kill huge numbers of 
Americans will find the mission easier to accomplish with anthrax 
than with a nuclear explosion.

Inside the Pentagon, concern about biological weapons has picked up
tremendously in the past couple of years, but there is little serious
attention to the problem elsewhere.  This could be a good thing if 
nothing much can be done, since publicity might only give enemies 
ideas.  But it is a bad thing if it impedes efforts to take steps 
-- such as civil defense -- that could blunt nuclear, chemical, or 
biological attacks.


DETERRENCE AND ARMS CONTROL IN DECLINE


Deterrence requires knowledge of who has launched an attack.

AN OLD vocabulary still dominates policy discussion Of WMD.  Rhetoric 
in the defense establishment falls back on the all-purpose strategic 
buzzword of the Cold War: deterrence.  But deterrence now covers 
fewer of the threats the United States faces than it did during the 
Cold War.

The logic of deterrence is clearest when the issue is preventing 
unprovoked and unambiguous aggression, when the aggressor recognizes 
that it is the aggressor rather than the defender.  Deterrence is 
less reliable when both sides in a conflict see each other as the 
aggressor.  When the United States intervenes in messy Third World 
conflicts, the latter is often true.  In such cases, the side that 
the United States wants to deter may see itself as trying to deter 
the United States.  Such situations are ripe for miscalculation.

For the country that used to be the object of U.S. deterrence 
Russia -- the strategic burden has been reversed.  Based on 
assumptions of Soviet conventional military superiority, U.S. 
strategy  used to rely on the threat to escalate -- to be the first 
to use nuclear weapons during a way to deter attack by Soviet 
armored divisions.  Today the tables have turned.  There is no Warsaw 
Pact, Russia has half or less of the military potential of the Soviet 
Union, and its current conventional forces are in disarray, while
NATO is expanding eastward.  It is now Moscow that has the incentive 
to compensate for conventional weakness by placing heavier reliance 
on nuclear capabilities.  The Russians adopted a nuclear no-first-use 
policy in the early 1980s, but renounced it after their precipitous 
post-Cold War decline.

Today Russia needs to be reassured, not deterred.  The main danger 
from Russian WMD is leakage from vast stockpiles to anti-American 
groups elsewhere -- the "loose nukes" problem.  So long as the United 
States has no intention of attacking the Russians, their greater 
reliance on nuclear forces is not a problem.  If the United States 
has an interest in reducing nuclear stockpiles, however, it is.

The traditional American approach-thinking in terms of its own 
deterrence strategies -- provides no guidance.  Indeed, noises some 
Americans still make about deterring the Russians compound the 
problem by reinforcing Moscow's alarm.

Similarly, U.S. conventional military superiority gives China an 
incentive to consider more reliance on an escalation strategy.  
The Chinese have a long-standing no-first-use policy but adopted it 
when their strategic doctrine was that of "People's war," which relied 
on mass mobilization and low-tech weaponry.  Faith in that doctrine 
was severely shaken by the American performance in the Persian Gulf 
War.  Again, the United States might assume that there is no problem 
as long as Beijing only wants to deter and the United States does not 
want to attack.  But how do these assumptions relate to the prospect 
of a war over Taiwan?  That is a conflict that no one wants but that 
can hardly be ruled out in light of evolving tensions.  If the United 
States decides openly to deter Beijing from attacking Taiwan, the 
old lore from the Cold War may be relevant.  But if Washington 
continues to leave policy ambiguous, who will know who is deterring 
whom?  Ambiguity is a recipe for confusion and miscalculation in a 
time of crisis.  For all the upsurge of attention in the national
security establishment to the prospect of conflict with China, there 
has been remarkably little discussion of the role of nuclear weapons 
in a Sino-American collision.

The main problem for deterrence, however, is that it still relies on 
the corpus of theory that undergirded Cold War policy, dominated by 
reliance on the threat of second-strike retaliation.  But retaliation 
requires knowledge of who has launched an attack and the address at 
which they reside.  These requirements are not a problem when the 
threat comes from a government, but they are if the enemy is anonymous.  
Today some groups may wish to punish the United States without taking 
credit for the action -- a mass killing equivalent to the 1988 bombing 
of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.  Moreover, the options 
the defense establishment favors have shifted over entirely from 
deterrence to preemption.  The majority of those who dealt with 
nuclear weapons policy during the Cold War adamantly opposed 
developing first-strike options.  Today, scarcely anyone looks to that 
old logic when thinking about rogues or terrorists, and most hope to 
be able to mount a disarming action against any group with WMD.

Finally, eliminating chemical weapons trims some options for 
deterrence.  Arms control restrictions on the instruments that can be 
used for deterrent threats are not necessarily the wrong policy, but 
they do work against maximizing deterrence.  Overall, however, the 
problem with arms control is not that it does too much but that it 
now does relatively little.

From the Limited Test Ban negotiations in the 1960s through the 
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces negotiations in the 1970s and 1980s, 
arms control treaties were central to managing WMD threats.  Debates 
about whether particular agreements with Moscow were in the United 
States' interest were bitter because everyone believed that the 
results mattered.  Today there is no consensus that treaties 
regulating armaments matter much.  Among national security experts, 
the corps that pays close attention to START and Conventional Forces 
in Europe negotiations has shrunk.  With the exception of the 
Chemical Weapons Convention, efforts to control WMD by treaty have 
become small potatoes.  The biggest recent news in arms control
has not been any negotiation to regulate WMD, but a campaign to ban 
land mines.

The United States' Cold War partner in arms control, Russia, has 
disarmed a great deal voluntarily.  But despite standard rhetoric, 
the United States has not placed a high priority on convincing 
Moscow to divest itself of more of its nuclear weapons; the Clinton 
administration has chosen to promote NATO expansion, which pushes 
the Russians in the opposite direction.

The 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty remains a hallowed 
institution, but it has nowhere new to go.  It will not convert the 
problem countries that want to obtain WMD -- unless, like Iraq and 
North Korea in the 1980s, they sign and accept the legal obligation 
and then simply cheat.  The NPT regime will continue to impede access 
to fissile materials on the open market, but it will not do so in 
novel or more effective ways.  And it does not address the problem 
of Russian "loose nukes" any better than the Russian and American 
governments do on their own.


CIVIL DEFENSE


Stockpiling gas masks and antibiotics could reduce the death toll.


DESPITE ALL the new limitations, deterrence remains an important 
aspect of strategy.  There is not much the United States needs to do 
to keep up its deterrence capability, however, given the thousands 
of nuclear weapons and the conventional military superiority it has.  
Where capabilities are grossly underdeveloped, however, is the area 
of responses for coping should deterrence fail.

Enthusiasts for defensive capability, mostly proponents of the 
Strategic Defense Initiative from the Reagan years, remain fixated on 
the least relevant form of it: high-tech active defenses to intercept 
ballistic missiles.  There is still scant interest in what should now 
be the first priority: civil defense preparations to cope with uses 
of WMD within the United States.  Active defenses" against missiles 
would be expensive investments that might or might not work against 
a threat the United States probably will not face for years, but 
would do nothing against the threat it already faces.  Civil defense 
measures are extremely cheap and could prove far more effective than 
they would have against a large-scale Soviet attack.

During the Cold War, debate about antimissile defense concerned 
whether it was technologically feasible or cost-effective and whether 
it would threaten the Soviets and ignite a spiraling arms race 
between offensive and defensive weapons.  One need not refight the 
battles over SDI to see that the relevance to current WMD threats 
is tenuous.  Iraq, Iran, or North Korea will not be able to deploy 
intercontinental missiles for years.  Nor, if they are strategically 
cunning, should they want to.  For the limited number of nuclear 
warheads these countries are likely to have, and especially for 
biological weapons, other means of delivery are more easily available.  
Alternatives to ballistic missiles include aircraft, ship-launched 
cruise missiles, and unconventional means, such as smuggling,
at which the intelligence agencies of these countries have excelled.
Non-state perpetrators like those who bombed the World Trade Center 
will choose clandestine means of necessity.

A ballistic missile defense system, whether it costs more or less 
than the $60 billion the Congressional Budget Office recently 
estimated would be required for one limited option, will not counter 
these modes of attack.  Indeed, if a larger part of the worry about 
WMD these days is about their use by terrorist states or groups, the 
odds are higher that sometime, somewhere in the country, some of 
these weapons will go off, despite the best efforts to stop them.  
If that happens, the United States should have in place whatever 
measures can mitigate the consequences.

By the later phases of the Cold War it was hard to get people 
interested in civil defense against an all-out Soviet attack that 
could detonate thousands of high-yield nuclear weapons in U.S. 
population centers.  To many, the lives that would have been saved 
seemed less salient than the many millions that would still have 
been lost.  It should be easier to see the value of civil defense, 
however, in the context of more limited attacks, perhaps with only 
a few low-yield weapons.  A host of minor measures can increase 
protection or recovery from biological, nuclear, or chemical effects.  
Examples are stockpiling or distribution of protective masks; 
equipment and training for decontamination; standby Programs for 
mass vaccinations and emergency treatment with antibiotics; wider 
and deeper planning of emergency response procedures; and public 
education about hasty sheltering and emergency actions to reduce 
individual vulnerability.

Such programs would not make absorbing a WMD attack tolerable.  
But inadequacy is no excuse for neglecting actions that could reduce 
death and suffering, even if the difference in casualties is small.  
Civil defenses are especially worthwhile considering that they are 
extraordinarily cheap compared with regular military programs or 
active defense systems.  Yet until recently, only half a billion 
dollars -- less than two tenths of one percent of the defense budget 
and less than $2 a head for every American -- went to chemical and 
biological defense, while nearly $4 billion was spent annually on 
ballistic missile defense.  Why haven't policymakers attended to 
first things first-cheap programs that can cushion the effects
of a disaster-before undertaking expensive programs that, provide 
no assurance they will be able to prevent it?

One problem is conceptual inertia.  The Cold War accustomed 
strategists to worrying about an enemy with thousands Of WMD, rather 
than foes with a handful. For decades the question of strategic 
defense was also posed as a debate between those who saw no 
alternative to relying on deterrence and those who hoped that an 
astrodome over the United States could replace deterrence with 
invulnerability.  None of these hoary fixations address the most 
probable WMD threats in the post-Cold War world.

Opposition to Cold War civil defense programs underlies 
psychological aversion to them now.  Opponents used to argue that 
civil defense was a dangerous illusion because it could do nothing 
significant to reduce the horror of an attack that would obliterate 
hundreds of cities, because it would promote a false sense of 
security, and because it could even be destabilizing and provoke 
attack in a crisis.  Whether or not such arguments were valid then, 
they are not now.  But both then and now, there has been a powerful 
reason that civil defense efforts have been unpopular: they alarm 
people.  They remind them that their vulnerability to mass destruction 
is not a bad dream, not something that strategic schemes for
deterrence, preemption, or interception are sure to solve.

Civil defense can limit damage but not minimize it.  For example, 
some opponents may be able to develop biological agents that 
circumvent available vaccines and antibiotics. (Those with marginal 
technical capabilities, however, might be stopped by blocking the 
easier options).  Which is worse-the limitations of defenses, or 
having to answer for failure to try. The moment that WMD are used 
somewhere in a manner that produces tens of thousands of fatalities, 
there will be hysterical outbursts of all sorts.  One of them will 
surely be, Why didn't the government prepare us for this?" It is not 
in the long-term interest of political leaders to indulge popular 
aversion.  If public resistance under current circumstances prevents 
widespread distribution, stockpiling, and instruction in the use of 
defensive equipment or medical services, the least that should be done
is to optimize plans and preparations to rapidly implement such 
activities when the first crisis ignites demand.

As threats of terrorism using WMD are taken more seriously, interest 
will grow in preemptive defense measures -- the most obvious of which 
is intensified intelligence collection.  Where this involves 
targeting groups within the United States that might seem to be 
potential breeding grounds for terrorist acts, (for example, supporters 
of Palestinian militants, home-grown militias or cults, or radicals 
with ties to Iran, Iraq, or Libya), controversies will arise over 
constitutional limits on invasion of privacy or search and seizure.  
So long as the WMD danger remains hypothetical, such controversies 
will not be easily resolved.  They have not come to the fore so far 
because U.S. law enforcement has been unbelievably lucky in 
apprehending terrorists.  The group arrested in 1993 for planning to 
bomb the Lincoln Tunnel happened to be infiltrated by an informer, and 
Timothy McVeigh happened to be picked up in 1995 for driving without 
a license plate.  Those who fear compromising civil liberties with
permissive standards for government snooping should consider what is 
likely to happen once such luck runs out and it proves impossible to 
identify perpetrators.  Suppose a secretive radical Islamic group 
launches a biological attack, kills 100,000 people, and announces that 
it will do the same thing again if its terms are not met. (The 
probability of such a scenario may not be high, but it can no longer 
be consigned to science fiction.) In that case, it is hardly 
unthinkable that a panicked legal system would roll over and treat 
Arab-Americans as it did the Japanese-Americans who were herded into 
concentration camps after Pearl Harbor.  Stretching limits domestic 
surveillance to reduce the chances of facing such choices could be the 
lesser evil.


IS RETREAT THE BEST DEFENSE?

No PR0GRAM s aimed at controlling adversaries' capabilities can 
eliminate the dangers.  One risk is that in the more fluid politics 
of the post-Cold War world, the United States could stumble into an 
unanticipated crisis with Russia or China.  There are no 
well-established rules of the game to brake a spiraling conflict over 
the Baltic states or Taiwan, as there were in the superpower 
competition after the Cuban missile crisis.  The second danger is 
that some angry group that blames the United States for its problems 
may decide to coerce Americans, or simply exact vengeance by infecting 
devastation on them where they live.  

If steps to deal with the problem in terms of capabilities are limited, 
can anything be done to address intentions -- the incentives of any 
foreign power or group to lash out at the United States?  There are 
few answers to this question that do not compromise the fundamental 
strategic activism and internationalist thrust of U.S. foreign policy 
over the past half-century.  That is because the best way to keep 
people from believing that the United States is responsible for their 
problems is to avoid involvement in their conflicts.

Ever since the Munich agreement and Pearl Harbor, with only a brief
interruption during the decade after the Tet offensive, there has 
been a consensus that if Americans did not draw their defense 
perimeter far forward and confront foreign troubles in their early 
stages, those troubles would come to them at home.  But because the 
United States is now the only superpower and weapons of mass 
destruction have become more accessible, American intervention in 
troubled areas is not so much a way to fend off such threats as it 
is what stirs them up.

Will U.S. involvement in unstable situations around the former 
U.S.S.R. head off conflict with Moscow or generate it?  Will making 
NATO bigger and moving it to Russia's doorstep deter Russian pressure 
on Ukraine and the Baltics or provoke it?  With Russia and China, 
there is less chance that either will set out to conquer Europe or 
Asia than that they will try to restore old sovereignties and security 
zones by reincorporating new states of the former Soviet Union or the 
province of Taiwan.  None of this means that NATO expansion or support 
for Taiwan's autonomy will cause nuclear war.  It does mean that to 
whatever extent American activism increases those countries' 
incentives to rely on WMD while intensifying political friction 
between them and Washington, it is counterproductive.

The other main danger is the ire of smaller states or religious and
cultural groups that see the United States as an evil force blocking 
their legitimate aspirations.  It is hardly likely that Middle 
Eastern radicals would be hatching schemes like the destruction of 
the World Trade Center if the United States had not been identified 
for so long as the mainstay of Israel, the shah of Iran, and 
conservative Arab regimes and the source of a cultural assault on 
Islam.  Cold War triumph magnified the problem.  U.S. military and 
cultural hegemony -- the basic threats to radicals seeking to
challenge the status quo-are directly linked to the imputation of 
American responsibility for maintaining world order. Playing Globocop 
feeds the urge of aggrieved groups to strike back.

Is this a brief for isolationism?  No. It is too late to turn off 
foreign resentments by retreating, even if that were an acceptable 
course.  Alienated groups and governments would not stop blaming 
Washington for their problems.  In addition, there is more to 
foreign policy than dampening incentives to hurt the United States.  
It is not automatically sensible to stop pursuing other interests for 
the sake of uncertain reductions in a threat of uncertain probability.  
Security is not an of a piece, and survival is only part of security.

But it is no longer prudent to assume that important security 
interests complement each other as they did during the Cold War.  The 
interest at the very core -- protecting the American homeland from 
attack -- may now often be in conflict with security more broadly 
conceived and with the interests that mandate promoting American 
political values, economic interdependence, social Westernization, 
and stability in regions beyond Western Europe and the Americas. The 
United States should not give up all its broader political interests, 
but it should tread cautiously in areas -- especially the Middle East 
where broader interests grate against the core imperative of 
preventing mass destruction within America's borders.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

RICHARD K. BETTS is Director of National Security Studies at the Council 
on Foreign Relations and Professor of Political Science and Director of 
the Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.

.

Delivered-To: biowar-l@afterburner.sonic.net
To: "BIOWAR-List" 
Subject: [BIOWAR] Denial keeps us from being paralyzed by fear
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 16:35:44 -0500

From http://www.jacksonvilledailynews.com/stories/022898/55l22.shtml

Denial keeps us from being paralyzed by fear

It was, as I recall, on the last Friday of the month that the air raid
sirens would sound. It was a high-pitched wail, rising and falling and
seeming to come from everywhere at once. That was our signal to stop 
our schoolwork and kneel beneath our desks, heads down, hands clasped 
behind our necks.

This was called a drop drill. Evidently someone in authority was of the
opinion that cowering beneath an inch of wood and shielding your head 
was enough to save you from the effects of a thermonuclear exchange. 
Your tax dollars at work.

I didn't think about it much when I was a child. It was just another 
piece of the school-day routine, like fire drills and pop quizzes. 
Wasn't until I got older that I began to reflect on the horror my 
elders had feared and the laughable inadequacy of their response.

Of course, what response would be equal to the threat of millions of 
people dead by nuclear fire?

When I reached an age to understand these things, there was born in me 
a fear so large I had to consign it to the furthest fringes of my mind, 
shrink it till it was just a ghost troubling the occasional sleepless 
dawn.  Nuclear exchange was a thought too awful for thinking, filled 
me with too palpable a sense of my own soft vulnerability.

Not unlike a threat of anthrax.

Does it reassure you that authorities have dropped federal charges 
against microbiologist and alleged white supremacist Larry Harris, that 
they've determined it wasn't anthrax he was caught with last week, but 
a harmless anthrax-based vaccine? Me, I'm not reassured at all. The 
threat alone was too chilling a reminder of how dangerous is the world, 
how easily we can die.

Anthrax is a deadly agent that kills in microscopic doses. Persons it
afflicts initially suffer flu-like symptoms. A few days later, they die.
I've heard little expert consensus on the probable death toll if, say, 
a vial of the stuff were released in a crowded subway or sprayed from a
low-flying plane. Suffice it to say that their most conservative 
estimate says the dead would number in the tens of thousands.

So I find myself doing something I haven't done since the Cold War days 
when every week seemed to bring a new reminder of nuclear Armageddon. 
Namely, living in denial. Whispering my mantra of sweet reassurance. 
Telling myself that the unthinkable can't happen because, after all, 
there are safeguards in place and crackerjack people on the lookout.

Don't tell me I'm fooling myself. I already know this. Heck, that's the
whole point. That's the only thing that gets me through the day.

I suspect I'm not alone in this, not the only one who shudders at the 
threat and then changes the subject -- as if ignoring it might make it 
go away.  Amazing that this impulse still survives. Even after the 
World Trade Center.  Even after Oklahoma City. Even now.

Some would-be terrorist gets caught before carrying out some scheme of 
mass destruction and we go on just as before, returning to normal 
concerns as if it were somehow divinely preordained that everything will 
turn out OK.  We are emotionally malleable, spiritually adaptable, 
believe what we must to keep moving forward. We never face the niggling 
little what-ifs that could stop us cold.

And yet ...

What if, one day, it doesn't work out OK? What if one day, it's never 
OK again?  What then?

I suppose the bureaucrats who had us kneeling under desks in 
anticipation of a nuclear exchange were only doing what comes naturally 
in the face of the unthinkable.  Exercising the illusion of control. 
Pretending to have it covered. Trying to contain a fear that seeps 
under consciousness like a slow-moving spill.

What else are you going to do? We only have the two choices.

We live in denial.

Or else, we live in fear. KNIGHT RIDDER

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.




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.


.
  

We Educated Our Enemies to Destroy Us
.




                     FRONT PAGE STORY
                         From the
         HERALD SUN SUNDAY - Melbourne, Australia
                     February 15, 1998
___________________________________________________________
***********************************************************
***********************************************************
***********************************************************

                 SADDAM'S SINISTER SCIENTIST:
              THE DEADLIEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD!

                 ***** DR. RIHAB TAHA  *****
                 ***** DR. RIHAB TAHA  *****
                 ***** DR. RIHAB TAHA  *****


            --- Special Report by Ron Laytner ---


SHE is the mother of a baby daughter, but makes unspeakable potions to 
kill people by the tens of thousands.  She is the mousy British-trained
scientist who is now Saddam Hussein's heroine in the chemical weapons
laboratories of Iraq.

Meet the woman they call Dr. Germ --- mastermind of the Doomsday 
arsenal that contains enough chemicals and viruses to kill everyone 
on Earth twice over.

Dr. Rihab Taha, 42, has overseen the creation of 10 billion doses 
of the bugs responsible for anthrax, botulism, ebola, and bubonic 
plague.

If her deadly weapons were released on battlefields or against the 
world's major cities, she could go down in history as the world's 
deadliest woman.

Meanwhile, Pentagon chief General Henry Shelton revealed a plan to 
blast Iraq with cruise missiles and bombs.

____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________

SHE has been dubbed Dr. Germ --- the most dangerous woman to walk the
Earth, and already this British-trained scientist has created enough
biological weapons to kill everyone on EARTH twice over.

Yet, in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, she is a heroine, who, only two weeks 
ago, was publicly applauded by the dictator at Baghdad's Military 
Industrial Commission as he handed her a glittering prize for her 
deadly work.

In a neat, blue suit and sober jewellery, Dr. Rihab Taha, 42 and at 
the centre of the growing Iraqi crisis, smiled her thanks before 
driving home to look after her baby daughter in a smart and very 
secure Baghdad townhouse.

For this mother, with mousy hair now flecked with grey, is the person 
who persuaded Saddam Hussein to launch his controversial germ warfare 
program back in the 1980s.

And it is her lethal handiwork, started on her return from the 
University of East Anglia, in the cathedral town of Norwich, England, 
in 1984, and kept secret by Saddam Hussein, that has sparked the latest 
crisis.

In an extraordinary decade, Dr. Germ has overseen the creation of 10
billion killer doses of toxins, including botulinum, a vicious food
poisoning bug that provokes a swollen tongue, frothing mouth and 
dizziness before a victim's rapid death.  She is suspected of producing 
a host of lethal viruses and bacteria that are stockpiled secretly in 
Iraq in bunkers and factories known only to Saddam's henchmen.

Most incredibly, she has masterminded the testing of anthrax, which
dissolves the kidneys, liver, and lungs leading to death within two 
days, on rats, mice, dogs, sheep, and donkeys.  Almost certainly, 
humans too, say United Nations inspectors.

Videos seized by them two years ago showed the animals, often placed 
in sealed plastic boxes, writhing in agony as the biological agents 
took their toll.

Today it seems certain that under Dr. Germ's direction, research also 
was done into haemorrhagic conjunctivitis, which temporarily blinds 
and makes eyes bleed, plus another ghastly virus leading to lethal 
diarrhoea in children.  Dr. Germ became an expert on camel pox, which 
provokes bleeding skin lesions, and a rare African fever.

As the scale of Dr. Germ's foul deeds come to light, those who knew 
her in Norwich --- where for five years she studied plant toxins and 
would return from holidays in Iraq with gift-wrapped boxes of dates 
for fellow students --- have expressed surprise at the notorious rise 
of a "very ordinary" scientist and nondescript girl, who loved 
watching the BBC in her spare time.

"She talked about Saddam Hussein as though he was someone she admired,
almost on fatherly terms," admitted a student who befriended Dr. Germ 
at the time.

"But she was difficult to get to know.  She and two other Iraqi girls 
would keep up to date on the Iran-Iraqi conflict by staying glued to 
the TV."

Today her professors speculate that Dr. Rihab Taha may have been sent 
to the West specifically to gain expert knowledge on biological 
weaponry for the regime back home.  Or, they wonder, did her skills 
just fit neatly into an emerging master plan when she returned to her 
native Iraq?

"It's like your daughter has gone and done something dreadful.  
Finding out what Taha does now has been a great shock to me," says 
Dr. John Turner, the head of the East Anglia University's biology 
department and her teacher for four years.

"Of all the students I have had, Taha is the last person I would 
suspect of doing something like this.  She kept quiet and was in the 
background.  Although she was well liked, she was not a gifted 
student, but very hard-working.  I am flabbergasted."

Even the first UN inspector to meet Dr. Germ, though aware that she 
played a key role, was unprepared for the woman he faced; a woman 
so nervous that she even shyly sought his opinion of her work as a 
scientist.

"She was an unassuming individual to look at her.  No one would 
suspect that she was the head fo the country's germ warfare program," 
admits Dr. David Huxsoll, who headed the initial UN weapon inspection 
team in 1991. (He was the former commander of the U.S. Army's Medical 
Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Dietrick Maryland.  After 
heading the UN inspection team in 1991, he returned in 1994.  He is 
now dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine at Louisiana State 
University.)

UN inspectors have, at last, discovered the truth about the sinister 
work of Dr. Germ --- and other Iraqi scientists, many of whom were 
educated at British universities --- despite her own desperate 
attempts at a cover up.

After seven years of sleuthing, the believe Dr. Germ's Doomsday 
arsenal of biological weaponry may have been used on human guinea 
pigs.

Recent Israeli intelligence reports point to such atrocities at 
Salman Park, a military complex 80km south of Baghdad.

According to Israeli military sources, it was here --- from safely 
behind a glass screen --- that Iraqi scientists watched as Iranian 
prisoners of war were strapped to beds in an underground room.  On 
the ceiling was a powerful spraygun aimed at the terrified men 
beneath.

On occasions, the spraygun poured out anthrax bacteria which 
penetrates the skin and lungs, leaving the prisoners dying in agony 
from internal haemorrhaging.  At other times, it contained toxins 
for use in chemical weapons. Again, the victims faced a horrible 
death.

In another test, at an open-air site near Iraq's border with Saudi 
Arabi, 12 Iranian prisoners were tied to posts while shells loaded 
with anthrax were blown up by remote control a few metres away.  
The heads of the doomed dozen were shielded to protect them from 
shrapnel so the power of the bacteria could be properly monitored.  
Each died from the disease a couple of days later.

It is the horrific possibility of experimentation on humans that is 
now being explored by the UN inspectors, who were turned away from 
the Abu Gharib jail, near Baghdad, when they tried to uncover evidence 
that prisoners had been removed for the obscene testing two years ago.

Raymond Zilimskas, a former germ warfare analyst at the Arms Control 
and Disarmament Agency in the US, met Dr. Germ and her sidekicks on 
two trips to Iraq.  He says her scientific and management prowess 
was obvious to him.  But, today, he wonders if Saddam Hussein is 
trying to hide the extent of this monster woman's work exactly 
because it involved experiments on humans.

"That's what everybody's asking," Zilimskas said recently.  "The
speculation is that in Iraq there probably has to be unsavory 
activities, including unethical experimentation.  The real mystery has 
to do with testing.  It is the records of this work that Iraq will 
go to any lengths to hide."

So, despite their undoubted skills, the inspectors -- men and women 
from 21 countries -- have a hard job.  As they search in river beds 
and tunnels for warheads fitted with deadly germs, in ministries for 
an odd file that might give them a clue, they concede that they are 
up against a determined madman in Saddam Hussein.

But they are secretly helped by Israel, which has a national interest 
in preventing Iraq keeping or acquiring weapons of mass destruction.  
In 1981, Israeli war planes bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear rectors to 
prevent the country building a nuclear bomb.  During the Gulf War, 
Iraq, in response, aimed Scud missiles at Israel and its 
extraordinary 50 metre-long "supergun," a one-shot weapon designed 
to fire chemical or biological payloads, was aimed directly at Tel 
Aviv.

Today, Israeli agents pass information under cover to the UN, which 
is wary of publicity about the arrangement because of the Arab world's 
animosity to the Jewish state.  Israeli agents never enter the UN, 
but meeting are set up in safe houses and hotel rooms so vital 
intelligence can be passed over the help jam Saddam Hussein's war 
machine.

And, in Israel, thousands of citizens line up for biological gas 
masks, knowing that an attack on Iraq will bring Iraqi bio-missiles 
to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Since the inspection regime was set up by the UN only weeks after 
Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War in 1991, a fantastic array of Saddam 
Hussein's instruments of mass destruction has been destroyed or 
removed, including an assembled supergun, 150 Scud missiles, 30 
chemical warheads and 690 tons of chemical weapons.  In fact, more 
Iraqi weaponry has been disarmed in this way that the US and its 
Allies managed to eliminate by bombing in the 1991 conflict.

Yet, despite successes, the UN believes many of the most dangerous 
weapons of all --- the biological ones --- are hidden by the Iraqis. 
At one stage, inspectors feared that sizeable quantities of anthrax 
were being driven around the country in refrigerated trucks by 
Saddam Hussein's Special Republican Guard so it could not be found.

Certainly, when Dr. Germ was first relentlessly questioned about her
research she denied everything, bursting into tears, throwing tantrums, 
and even storming out of the interview room.

A deliberate liar, she pretended that all biological agents and 
munitions had been destroyed in the months after the Gulf War.  Dr. 
Taha also kept secret the existence of a germ warfare factory at 
al_hakim, 130km west of Baghdad, where lethal research was carried 
out under her instructions.

At the heart of Iraq's biological warfare effort, code-named Project 
324 because work started at al_hakam on March 24, 1988, the factory 
produced gas gangrene, which makes the skin of a human melt and fall 
off.  It was from there, during the Gulf War, that Dr. Germ carried 
out Saddam Hussein's personal instructions to experiment on loading 
bombs and missile warheads with deadly toxins.

At the secret factory -- which escaped US and British aerial 
bombardment during Gulf War action, but has been since destroyed by 
the UN -- the tiny, but determined female scientist discovered that 
a single missile warhead filled with anthrax could annihilate 30,000 
or 40,000 people in 12 hours of hell.  A teacup of the toxin is 
enough to wipe out the inhabitants of a small town.

Yet, when Dr. Germ was grilled about the al-Hakam factory, she 
insisted it was making only chicken feed to help end the hunger of 
Iraq's people.  "Our country now needs fat chickens and lots of eggs, 
so we are trying to do just that," she claimed.  "This project is 
purely for civilian use."

That was, of course, a lie.  But her devious work, including a plan 
to wreak havoc in the West by developing an antibiotic-resistant 
chemical, earned Dr. Taha friends in high places.  On one notable 
occasion, as a UN inspector began to list the biological agents she 
had developed, he reported she started to cry hysterically.

Suddenly, General Amer Kashid, Iraqi official in charge of liaising 
with the UN inspections team --- and a mastermind of the attacks on 
Kuwait, Israel, and Saudi Arabia during the Gulf conflict --- stepped 
in.  He called the inspector a bad scientist for accusing Dr. Germ of 
misdeeds.

Soon after, the inspectors discovered the general was in love with Dr. 
Taha and had sired her daughter.  He had quietly married her in 1994, 
despite still being married to another woman, the mother of his 
six-year-old child.

However, the real breakthrough came when Saddam Hussein's son-in-law,
General Hussein Kamal -- himself a super weapons expert -- defected 
from Iraq to Jordan in 1995 and told the world about Dr. Germ.  He 
said her charming ways and pleasant manner were nothing but a sham.

General Kamal's testimony about Taha and Iraq's bio-weapons 
preparations came to an end when he was personally convinced by 
Saddam Hussein to return to Iraq, where he was immediately killed.

But he gave the first open knowledge of Saddam's monstrous woman 
scientist who had worked on killer viruses and forms of germ 
warfare --- a woman who was completely unknown before.  This was the 
woman who had a child at home, but was preparing potions to kill other 
mothers' babies.

Faced with the damning new evidence, Dr. Taha confessed.  "She 
suddenly had no hesitation about presenting herself as the brains 
behind the biological weapon-building in Iraq," one UN weapons 
inspector commented.

"She is proud of her country and proud of her work.  I don't think 
she had a qualm in the world about her misdeeds."

Today, Dr. Rihab Taha must be high on the target list of the West's 
secret services.  Perhaps higher, even, than Saddam Hussein.  She 
also may be a war criminal for violating the international laws on 
germ warfare.

But in Iraq she is upheld as a shining example of womanhood by Saddam
Hussein, who gave her the prize for scientific achievement so very
recently.

"It was obviously for her work in biological weaponry," a UN scientist
observed the other day.  "Dr. Germ has never achieved anything else 
during the whole of her career to date.  But she may go down in history 
as the most deadly woman of all time."


.


See also:
 
The World's Deadliest Woman?  Dr. Germ Heads Saddam's Biological Warfare Program -- MSNBC News
American Colleges Are Weapons U For Iraq -- U.S. News & World Report -- 030998


.


.
  


Origins of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction
.



Subject: [BIOWAR] US helped Iraq develop bio, chemical arms-report
Sender: owner-biowar-l@afterburner.sonic.net


Fowarded as received..
=

06:22 PM ET 02/12/98

US helped Iraq develop bio, chemical arms-report

LONDON (Reuters) - The United States helped Iraq develop its chemical 
and biological weapons programs in the 1980s while Britain sold 
Baghdad the antidote to nerve gas as late as March 1992, Britain's 
Channel Four television news said Thursday.

The program said it had found U.S. intelligence documents which 
showed 14 consignments of biological materials were exported from 
the United States to Iraq between 1985 and 1989.

These included 19 batches of anthrax bacteria and 15 batches of 
botulinum, the organism that causes botulism. The exports, backed by 
the State Department, were licensed by the Department of Commerce, 
it said.

The program said Iraq had bought other toxins from the United States 
while the atomic energy commission in Baghdad acquired human genetic 
material and E. coli bacteria for use as a culture medium.

No less than 29 batches of material were sent after Iraq had used 
gas in an attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, killing 
5,000 people, it said.

Stephen Bryen, a former senior Pentagon official in the 1980s, said 
he and a few colleagues had tried hard to stop the exports of 
sensitive materials.

`They just were stupid, utterly stupid, and the people who did it I 
don't think had even a slight grasp of what they were doing,'' he 
told Channel Four.

He said he had managed to stop a 1988 order from Iraq for 1.5 million 
doses of atropine, which is used to protect troops from nerve gas.

Channel Four news quoted from a classified U.S. Department of Defense
document which it said showed Iraq had bought pralidoxine -- an 
antidote to nerve gas -- from Britain in March 1992, after the Gulf 
War.

``This (sale) took place, as I understand it, long before we came into
government,'' British Defense Secretary George Robertson told the 
program.

"`We'll investigate it, but I understand it probably was exported on 
the grounds that it was medication and medications are allowable 
exports to Iraq today."

Channel Four also said it had uncovered U.S. intelligence documents 
which showed London and Washington knew as long ago as August 1990 of 
the existence of Agent 15, a deadly nerve gas.  Robertson, releasing 
what he said was new information about Iraq's 1991 weapon stocks, on 
Monday said Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein may have possessed large 
quantities of Agent 15.

`There may well have been some knowledge of the range of things Saddam 
might have had at that time but the concrete information has only 
gradually come forward (in) recent times,'' Robertson told Channel 
Four.

REUTERS


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.


.
  

Fight One Dog, You Gotta Fight 'Em All
.



From U.S. News of Feb. 23, 1998, 

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/iraqwfa.htm


WEB EXCLUSIVE - Moving Target

Iraq has secretly built chemical weapons plants in Sudan, transferred
nuclear materials to Algeria, and sent a dozen of its top scientists 
to develop a biological warfare complex in Libya.

BY ALAN COOPERMAN

U.S. airstrikes cannot eliminate Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction for the simple reason that Iraq has smuggled many of them 
to other Arab countries for safekeeping.

That is the conclusion of a draft report by the U.S. House of
Representatives Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare 
which was obtained by U.S. News & World Report magazine.

The report -- based on American, German, and Israeli intelligence 
-- says that Iraq has secretly built chemical weapons plants in Sudan, 
transferred nuclear materials to Algeria, and sent a dozen of its top 
scientists to develop a biological warfare complex in Libya.

The Clinton administration has dispatched three aircraft carriers to 
the Persian Gulf and is now building international support for a 
military strike to punish Saddam Hussein for defying United Nations 
weapons inspectors.

But "no bombing campaign against Iraq, and even an occupation of that
country for that matter, is capable of destroying the hard core of 
Saddam Hussein's primary WMD [weapons of mass destruction] development 
and production programs,'' the congressional report states. "The reason 
is that under current conditions these programs are run outside of 
Iraq -- mainly in Sudan and Libya, as well as Algeria (storage of some 
hot nuclear stuff).''

The transfer of Iraq's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons 
technology began even before the Gulf War. As Saddam Hussein realized 
that the coalition led by the United States was going to bomb his 
country in 1991, he hastily smuggled know-how, equipment, and key 
materials to his close allies. And the smuggling has continued right 
up to the present.

In March/April 1991, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz got 
permission from Sudan's president, Umar al-Bashir, to move about 400 
Scud missiles and chemical weapons to Sudan for "safekeeping.'' At 
the same time, Iraq smuggled nuclear materials, documents, and weapons 
parts -- including 27.5 pounds of highly-enriched uranium-235 -- to 
Sudan via Jordan using diplomatic mail privileges.  For example, 
barrels of uranium were hidden in a truck marked "furniture'' that 
went from the Sudanese Embassy in Iraq to Khartoum, the capital of 
Sudan, in January 1992.

Since Sudan has no nuclear facilities, most of the nuclear materials 
were later shipped to a Chinese-built research reactor in the Algerian 
town of Ain Oussera, where they are still being stored, according to 
the report.

In 1995, Iraq and Sudan jointly built a plant to produce choking 
mustard gas near Wau in southwestern Sudan. The chemical weapons plant 
is located in a former fruit factory staffed by Iraqi technicians. 
The gas has been used at least twice by the Sudanese government against 
the rebel Sudanese People's Liberation Army in southern Sudan.

In May 1996, the Iraqis and Sudanese tested chemical agents in the 
desert, and residents got sick when winds shifted suddenly and 
carried residues into the city of Omdurman.

Last year, Sudan and Iraq completed a far more sophisticated chemical
weapons plant along the Blue Nile in the Kafuri region north of 
Khartoum.  The plant is believed to have begun test runs of nerve 
agents and is producing 122mm and 152mm artillery shells as well as 
rocket and tactical missile warheads. Iraqi intelligence agents 
recruited experts from Egypt, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Russia to help 
with the plant according to the report.

The Iraqis also built a chemical weapons plant at the Yarmook 
Industrial Complex in the Mayu area south of Khartoum using 
German-made machines acquired by Iraqi intelligence and smuggled 
via Bulgaria.  Computers were purchased in France.  The site includes 
a mosque, medical clinic, and guest houses for foreign experts from 
Iraq and Iran. It even has a special farm to keep the "guests" well 
fed on fresh milk, vegetables, and dates.

In 1995, the congressional report says, Iraq signed a secret 
agreement to provide Libyan leader Muammer Qadhafi with experts on 
ballistic missiles.  Iraq also sent nuclear fuel and specialists to 
work on nuclear weapons development at a secret site in Sidi Abu 
Zurayq, in the desert about 240 miles southwest of Tripoli.

Since the mid-1990s, Iraqi agents have been buying sensitive 
technology in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, then diverting it 
to Libya.  Late last year, Iraq sent some of its top experts in 
chemical weapons to the Libyan chemical weapons facility inside a 
mountain at Tarhunah, 40 milies southeast of Tripoli.

About a dozen Iraqi scientists involved in biological weapons 
research arrived in Libya at the beginning of this year.  They are 
helping the Libyans develop a new biological warfare complex under 
the guise of a medical facility called General Health Laboratories. 
This secret program, codenamed Ibn Hayan, is aimed at producing bombs 
and missile warheads filled with deadly anthrax and botulism agents, 
according to the report.



.


.
  

Of Course, Patriots are Higly Suspicious
.



Subject: More Proof of U.S. gov False Arrests & Propaganda in 
Anthrax "Plot"

"Michael Johnson" (USCMike1@aol.com) wrote:

Dear Patriots:
     Here is additional proof that our benevolent federal government is
full of liars, plotters, schemers, and conspirators and they are trying 
to scare the public into giving up more U.S. Constitutionally guaranteed
freedoms and rights.  In fact, they are planning on preparing the public 
to accept the FALSE fact that there are U.S. citizen terrorists trying to 
kill innocent people.
    But, the fact is that it is our own U.S. Government that is going 
to perpetrate biological warfare against us citizens (the ones who voted 
our federal leaders into office) and then try to blame good, honest, 
moral citizens for the crimes that our gov commits against us, just like 
they did in the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building blast.  Documented 
evidence shows that the federal government planted hard wired bombs 
around numerous pilings inside the building and set off the explosion 
from the inside and tried to blame it on agricultural fertilizer in a 
Ryder truck parked outside on the street.  They set up Timothy McVeigh 
really good as a patsy just the way they did Oswald in the federal 
government perpetrated Kennedy assassination.

   Please read in the following Associated Press newsrelease that even 
with all the hype about domestic terrorists that the government has 
refused to inform the public or even train them against such an 
attack ..... that is because the federal government does not want the 
public protected against any attack that the federal government wants 
to perpetrate against us.  If you are interested in how to protect 
yourself from a possible biological warfare attack upon yourself and 
your family, please feel free to contact me as that is one of the areas 
in my medical and health fields.  

   I currently operate the USC Disaster and Emergency Rescue Team 
training program and biological warfare is definitely a possibility 
whether perpetrated by foreign terrorists or by our own government.

"Michael Johnson" (USCMike1@aol.com)


.


.
 

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (Feb. 21) - U.S. Army tests have concluded that the substance
seized by agents in Las Vegas was a nonlethal form of anthrax used in
vaccines, a federal official said today.

FBI agents discovered the materials Wednesday in Las Vegas when they
descended on a beige Mercedes and its two occupants. The men were 
arrested and jailed in Las Vegas, and the substance was sent for 
testing to an Army laboratory at Fort Dietrick, Md.

The Army found that the material "is not capable of producing the toxins
that normal anthrax would produce," said this federal official, who
requested anonymity.

However, the FBI seized other material in Ohio from houses owned by 
Larry Wayne Harris, a bearded former Aryan Nation member arrested in 
Las Vegas.  That material is still being tested at Fort Dietrick, and 
those tests will not be completed before Monday.

Although the initial incident sent a shudder of fear through America, 
the first government tests have confirmed claims made Friday by lawyers 
for two men arrested in Las Vegas that they were dealing with vaccine 
material instead of weapons as the FBI alleged.

"The Army has concluded testing of the stuff from the initial arrests, 
and it is a nonlethal form of anthrax used in vaccines," the federal 
official said.

The FBI and other federal officials were planning to disclose the 
results of the first tests at a news conference in Las Vegas later 
today.

In Las Vegas, Lamond Mills, defense attorney for William Leavitt, the
second suspect, said he had not been informed by the FBI or the U.S.
attorney's office about the test results. He called the news reports
"really good news."

"Legally, this means their case goes down the toilet," said Mills. "I
would expect the U.S. attorney to drop the charges."

Mills said he would try to get his client out of jail as early as 
Saturday.

An attorney for Harris and the U.S. attorney's office weren't 
immediately available for comment.

Harris and Leavitt were turned in by Ronald Rockwell in Las Vegas, 
whom the FBI portrayed as a "citizen performing his civic duty."

For his part, Rockwell said he was just plain scared when Leavitt and
Harris, who were interested in what he called a "germ-killing" machine,
said they had the deadly bacteria.

It's unclear exactly what Leavitt and Harris, both microbiologists, 
were carrying as they headed to test Rockwell's machine, but Rockwell's 
claims that the men were carrying deadly anthrax sent federal agents 
to the Las Vegas area.

Leavitt and Harris were arrested Wednesday night in the suburb of 
Henderson and charged with conspiracy to possess and possession of a 
biological agent.  They are being held without bond.

The FBI was awaiting tests to determine whether the men had anthrax 
vaccine or military-grade anthrax, which is potent enough to kill 
thousands of people.

Rockwell told the Las Vegas Sun, http://www.lasvegassun.com/ in a 
story made available on the newspaper's Web site, that he became 
suspicious after Harris, 46, and Leavitt, 47, changed their stories 
about plans for his purported germ-killing machine.  Rockwell felt that 
more common bacteria should be used for testing the machine and became 
nervous when they told him they had anthrax, he said.

"They just said they had military-grade anthrax," Rockwell told the Sun.

Rockwell told a similar story of his conversations with Leavitt and 
Harris on the "NBC Nightly News" on Friday.

"They lied on what they were going to do," Rockwell said. "It scared 
me so bad."

Leavitt's lawyer, Lamond Mills - a former U.S. Attorney - said his 
client didn't think the material was military-grade anthrax but rather 
anthrax vaccine, which is legal to possess.  Leavitt was initially 
shocked that he was caught up in the investigation, Mills said.

"Today he's not in shock, he's mad. He's just plain mad. We're in a
fighting mode now," Mills said.

Leavitt was only interested in Rockwell's machine, which Rockwell 
tried to sell to the men for $2 million, Mills said.  "When he couldn't 
scam them, he went the other way," Mills said of Rockwell. "He became 
a good guy for the FBI."

Harris' attorney, Michael Kennedy, said Rockwell's credibility "is
something we're going to look into."

Rockwell, who the FBI said was a cancer research scientist, was 
convicted of felony extortion in 1981 and 1982. But the FBI has 
vouched for his credibility, saying the "citizen performing his civic 
duty" came forward on his own.

In an interview with KVBC-TV, Rockwell said he didn't think the men 
wanted to infect the Las Vegas area.  "Bill Leavitt doesn't want to 
spread nothing around," he said.

The machine Rockwell was peddling was called the AZ-58 Ray Tube 
Frequency Instrument Prototype. In glossy brochures, Rockwell says 
the AZ-58 is able to flush the body clean of bacteria and viruses.

Leavitt wanted to test it before making a $100,000 down payment and
arranged to fly Harris to Las Vegas about a week ago, said Kirby Wells, 
a lawyer for Leavitt.

It was unclear how Leavitt, a Mormon bishop with strong political 
ties, got hooked up with Harris, an alleged white supremacist who has 
been plugging his self-published book about germ warfare.

The FBI has said Harris met Rockwell last summer at a Denver science
conference, while Leavitt's attorneys said they believed Rockwell got 
the men together.

Leavitt is married with three children and has a fire-protection 
business. The FBI says he also owns microbiology labs in his hometown 
of Logandale, Nev., and Frankfurt, Germany.

Harris, who is married, claimed to be a lieutenant colonel in the
Idaho-based white supremacist group Aryan Nations, the FBI affidavit 
said.

AP-NY-02-21-98 1448EST



.


.


Just Suppose
Bradford Metcalf


Just suppose our fearless Kommander in Chief decides to attack Iraq. 
Do you think Saddam will not follow through on his threat to unleash 
biologicals in the U.S.? We've all heard the rumor that he has planted 
his (50) teams of 10 men and 1 woman throughout the U.S. just waiting 
for some moron like Teflon Willie to do something stupid. Saddam may 
be crazy but it is obvious that he isn't stupid. He would be a fool 
NOT to have an insurance policy.

Just suppose the government had figured out that this is a perfect 
time to take control of our country by martial law.  How could this 
happen? Hegelian Dialectic (sp?).  Get the population to see a 
problem (or manufacture one), offer a solution and get them to ask 
for a cure that they would normally balk at. Thesis, anti-thesis, 
synthesis. 

Thesis -- We attack Iraq and Saddam (or maybe some special ops teams 
that just happen to look like they are from the middle-east) sends 
out a terror team to spread Anthrax throughout Los Angeles, Chicago, 
and New York City. Within a week, 25,000,000 of our population are 
dead and more are dying.

Anti-thesis-- Instead of asking why FEMA hadn't prepared for what 
our government knew would happen, our population screams that 
something has to be done to stop this from happening again.  As the 
National Guard haul off the bodies for mass cremation, our 
illustrious president says that we will have a dusk-to-dawn curfew 
nationwide until further notice.  After all, the anthrax is spread at 
night because it is most potent when sunlight hasn't hit it. At least 
that is what we will be told.  We cannot have anymore of those 
terrorists spreading that nasty bug around.  But people continue to 
drop like flies because the bug does persist. Food won't be arriving 
at the supermarket, the pharmacies have all been raided, food riots 
become widespread-there is a total breakdown coming if something 
isn't done quickly.

Synthesis--Martial Law.  The population is screaming for it. The 
government must help us.  We tell our leaders that we will do anything 
-- just stop the death.  What was unthinkable and totally unacceptable 
two weeks prior is now being begged for.

All citizens are ordered to report to their local Post Office for 
registration.  They are told they will be given food, antibiotics, 
and immunizations.  As they are marched through, they are segregated
into work groups. (Has anyone seen, "Schindler's List"?) The hard 
core patriots, militia, vocal anti-big-government types, veterans, 
gunowners and other potential troublemakers are separated out from 
the rest.  They are told they will be sent to a re-education camp 
but many of them already know that they have a one way ticket.  Some 
have heard of death camps with guillotines but thought it was just 
rumor.  Most don't object -- they have spent their life in servitude 
and obedience to a dictatorial government and they won't muster the 
courage to fight back now.

Firearms are outlawed and weapon sweeps are made. Anyone that turns 
in a gunowner will receive extra rations.  The penalty for possession 
of a firearm is summary execution.

Eventually the government "finds out" that a "fundamentalist 
Christian" group had released the anthrax.  All Christians are told 
to report for re-indoctrination.  The population is outraged and
calls for wholesale slaughter of anyone who does not accept the 
new "World Religion".  The mob screams for retribution and the 
government obliges.  The death camps are doing their work 24 hours a 
day, 7 days a week.  Nobody protests because the Bill of Rights 
does not exist anymore.  Any comment about the government could get 
you sent to a death camp.

Just suppose -- no, this is America -- it couldn't happen here.



.


.


Concerning Larry Wayne Harris



THE HOFFMAN WIRE. Feb. 20, 1998. Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor
----------------------------------------------------------------------
                         Of Anthrax and "Aryans"

By now most of you will have heard of the story about "white
supremacists" supposedly plotting an anthrax attack on the subways 
of New York City. If one reads the "fine print" in these stories one
discovers no evidence of intent or even possession, yet the report 
has gone around the world and is headlined in newspapers as far as 
Britain.

In 1993 a similarly hyped story appeared in the Los Angeles area 
about skinheads supposedly seeking to assassinate Rodney King and 
exterminate black people. The story was a hoax but it is still being 
repeated today.  A revelation of a media hoax seldom gets the 
publicity that the original hoax itself did.

However, before we absolve the "Aryans" in question of all 
culpability in this Anthrax charade, we might wish to consider a bit 
of military and espionage history.

"Black ops" is a term for counter-intelligence operations from within
enemy territority carried about by the enemy themselves and people
posing as you. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a man with an I.Q. of probably
180 or more, quickly grasped the Black Ops game in his territory and
disbanded the Ku Klux Klan as a result (because masked men who were 
not Klansmen were pepetrating atrocities in klan garb).

In the 1920s Soviet intelligence created an "anti-communist"
organization which fed "intelligence" to the West vastly inflating the
power of the White Army opposition and forecasting the fall of the
Bolsheviks. This false flag set-up helped to deter Western
anti-communists from assisting the White Army; they believed the war
against Bolshevism was nearly won, so why bother.

Later, Stalin set-up another fake anti-communist underground and 
enticed anti-communists into it. After they were pumped for secrets 
and other information, they were executed.

The Oklahoma City bombing is a case of a conspiracy mounted by people
who one would be hardpressed to describe as other than neo-Nazis, yet
their role in the bombing has been protected by the US government
itself. 

Lenin coined the term "useful idiots" and that is what I believe some 
in the white separatist/Aryan Nations/neo-Nazi movement are vis a vis 
the establishment. They can always be counted on to serve as shills 
for the government.

Clinton needed state power expanded and the Murrah building went up in
smoke in Oklahoma.

The American people shouted down three top government officials of
Jewish extraction at Columbus, Ohio, and are generally demonstrating 
a weariness toward constant alarms about terrorism and what happens?
Voila -- as if on cue-- "Aryan terrorists" appear out of the 
woodwork, supposedly implicated in an Anthrax attack.

The two men apprehended are probably not guilty of the crime they are
accused of, but the leader is probably guilty of shooting his mouth 
off in a reckless and irresponsible manner, with statements that 
could easily be used to manufacture a media monster.

Folks, if you choose to represent our people in public you'd better 
damn sure know what you are doing and saying. If you need an exemplar, 
study the life of Ernst Zündel as revealed in my book, "The Great 
Holocaust Trial."

No one can accuse Ernst of being "soft" or compromising, but at the 
same time, his Canadian foes have never tried to implicate him in a 
terrorist act because the charge would be laughable.  Like the vast 
majority of native Germans, Ernst is orderly and law-abiding. He is 
the bane of terrorism, not its advocate. Journalists, cops and 
activists have all come to know, Mr. Zündel has never advocated or 
counseled violence.

Hence the "Black Ops" can't use him or his trained cadre the way 
they use these Aryan Nations patsies.

I believe with Ernst Zündel that the worst possible development now is
for separatists and other dissidents to be used as foils for the
expansion of state power and the magnification of the media's atrocity
propaganda.

At a news conference yesterday in Hayden, Idaho, Aryan Nations leader
Mr. Richard Butler allegedly told reporters it was okay for people to
possess anthrax.

Well, maybe it is. But to state that baldly, without elaboration or
context is to play directly into the hands of the police state and 
the media by seeming to endorse "Aryan" terrorism.

Richard Butler is old, his I.Q. has never been too high.  FBI and ATF
agents swarm throughout the staff of his organization.  Money always
seems to materialize to keep the "Aryan Nations" organization going.

The government and the establishment media continue to use the Aryan
Nations and similar groups in order to give a black eye to all of us 
who are simply normal, healthy people advocating the same sane, 
common-sense as our great-grandparents did on issues of race, religion 
and history.

Richard Butler recently called for a parade of costumed Nazis in Idaho
on Hitler's birthday. One day after he did so his call was front page
news in all local newspapers.

If this writer were to call for a revisionist history conference in
Idaho, to discuss the history of one of America's first concentration
camps -- a shameful facility which was built to imprison Coeur 
d'Alene's white miners and was policed exclusively by black troops -- 
I wouldn't get the time of day from the local newspapers.

Why? Because real revisionism and sane separatism do not press media
buttons; they do not correpond with the Hollywood stereotype and 
script.  They shatter the mind-control consensus and therefore such 
activists and campaigns are starved of publicity.

Terrorism is cowardice. It is the fighting method of aliens. I despise
terrorism and I repudiate it. I will not knowingly give any tenor of
approval to it in any form by any group.

We are to be a cut above the herd or we are nothing.

There is of course no true immunity from media lies.  We have a public 
so drunk on illusion they wouldn't know the truth if it jumped up and 
bit them on the nose.  They are immersed in "virtual reality, video 
reality, TV reality," all of which are lacking in reality.

The media shoot first and ask questions later. If you're pro-white or
anti-Zionist you're at least a mental terrorist in their eyes from 
jump street.

But that's no reason for us to indulge their fantasies or to fail to
discipline ourselves and our use of language or to tolerate or 
cooperate with groups that do not fully and completely condemn and 
repudiate terrorism.

Groups like Aryan Nations have done little more than build state 
power in America. 

They have made feelings of white pride synonymous with ugliness, with
Halloween, with publicity-hungry, obese, bearded cranks emerging out 
of masturbatory fantasy worlds and pressing the media's buttons in 
order to be famous for 15 minutes.

What a grostesque, disgusting disaster such people are for our movement.

I don't know how such people were raised. I know Germans traditionally
are raised to put a premium on hard word and guarding one's mouth.

How wonderful if there was a tight-knit white separatist group in Idaho
that operated a farm and fixed elderly white people's cars and houses
for free; who raised barns and ran farm markets; who had lots of
children and steered clear of gun-toting and the media.

>From such a group would come a true base for the future. Such a group
would be a true alternative to this System.

Aryan Nations and their followers are mostly the lost children of the
age, deeply wounded by rage but without sufficient internal resources 
to channel that rage into constructive outlets. They typically live a 
TV and media-saturated daily existence in which they are happy to 
serve the starring role in some Jewish script. They react blindly and 
without intelligence.

I have heard ghetto black youths speak with a greater sense of decorum
and media-smarts than Aryan Nations members who seem to think it is
"daring" and "courageous" to expound racial expletives to the absolute
gratification of the media.

I'll tell you what takes courage--peaceable hard work, industry,
application to a trade, sinking roots and building friendships based 
on that work that last longer than the flick of a CNN camera.

I see very little in America of white community, of the concept of a
peaceable underground with its own codes, signals and members who are
building a sustainable network for their children and for the future 
as they boycott the System (I do know of isolated pockets of individual
families thus engaged).

Instead what is present is mostly media freaks drunk on false,
millennial prophecies of Apocalypse living like bums-in the
moment--without a thought beyond the next year.

When Catherine the Great invited the Germans into hostile Russian
territory as relative aliens among the Russian masses; the Germans came
and got to work: they ploughed, they planted and they ended up running
the joint.

Don't let the devils of Madison Avenue sell you on the idea that in this
electronic freak-out age, long-range planning and building are useless.

I predict this old planet might just have another 500 years on it.  I
predict that if America is submerged in an alien tide there will be 
no national Armageddon, simply a Bombay process. 

Go to India someday, see Bombay.  By American standards the city
shouldn't be running.  But it is. A basket case? Definitely. Race and
sectarian riots?  Now and then.  Corruption, murder?  You bet!

But the System keeps chugging along. India's civilization may one day 
be America's. The notion of a predictive Apocalypse is of Jerry Falwell 
by way of the Learned Elders of Rapturism. It is an enemy doctrine 
intended to keep you from every putting down deep roots and working 
for the long haul.

And terrorism?  Even if those two guys had been thinking of using 
Anthrax on New Yorkers, could their violence ever equal the violence 
of one morning in Hiroshima, one afternoon in Beirut in August of 1982 
or one night in Dresden in February, 1945? 

Is not President Billy Goat Clinton plotting the murder of several
thousand Iraqi women and children -- if not by Anthrax -- then by 
depleted uranium and massive bombing, just to please his masters in 
Tel Aviv who feel the camel-riders need a seasonal dose of genocide 
to keep them sufficiently awed.  Let's face it, Arab blood is cheap.

The idea of Anthrax on New York City or Scud missiles on Jerusalem
evokes paroxysms of outrage.  Carpet bomb Iraq?  Heh, why not, 
they're only towel-heads.

I am a Christian. One reason I am a Christian is because I believe
Christ was the smartest man who ever lived. He said we should be wise 
as serpents.

Christ gave his folowers a formula for building his movement that 
was invincible.  It was this: to suffer for the sake of the truth. 
From the early Christians to the Quakers, when men saw other men 
suffering for conscience's sake, they sympathized and they even 
converted and joined.

Whether you are Christian or not, you might at least grasp that the
"terrorist/killer" image is the nemesis of any small movement. It is 
the System's objective to forever tar us with that stigma even as 
they blithely pimp for the incineration of Baghdad.

Yes, we face incredible odds and a terrible foe but we can master 
both if we act like what we claim to represent--decency, civilization 
and law.

And if we truly intend to be separate, let's start by separating
ourselves from the retarded "Aryan" robots whose idea of resistance 
is to act on a Zionist stage, speaking lines from an FBI script, 
saving Clinton from a public relations disaster in Ohio while making 
Federal agents appear as noble guardians of public safety.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Just published-Michael A. Hoffman II's Revisionist History #5

                                  HAMMERED!

The Inside Story of the Top Communist Operative
Who Groomed Al Gore to Rule a Soviet America

This is the most comprehensive investigative report on Armand Hammer and
Al Gore Jr. in print. Section headings include: I. KGB Asset Al Gore Sr.
II. Gore, Hammer and Gadhafi. III. Learning Lenin's Iron Law of
Conspiracy. IV. Operation Elders of Zion. V. Zion's Stealth Candidate.

As the Clinton administration sinks under a load of scandal, all eyes
are focused on his possible successor. But the skeletons in Gore's own
closet may prove to be the far greater liability.

Not available online. Hardcopy only. Revisionist History newsletter
Issue #5. "Hammered!" $6.50 postpaid. Independent History, Box 849,
Coeur d'Alene, ID 83816. (Overseas send U.S.$10).
======================================================================
The preceding information is courtesy of THE HOFFMAN WIRE.
Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor. Copyright©1998. The Hoffman Wire is
distributed by THE CAMPAIGN FOR RADICAL TRUTH IN HISTORY 
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.


The Conspiracy Against Larry Harris
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From: TWStough@aol.com
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 19:36:58 EST
To: TWStough@aol.com
Subject: THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST LARRY HARRIS 
-- Dr. Len Horowitz Co-Author