Flashback: CIA Link to Cuban Pig Virus Reported

http://www.maebrussell.com/Health/CIA%20Pig%20Virus.html

With at least the tacit backing of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officials, operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971.

Six weeks later an outbreak of the disease forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic.

A U.S. intelligence source told Newsday last week he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at a U.S. Army base and CIA training ground in the Panama Canal Zone, with instructions to turn it over to the anti-Castro group.

The 1971 outbreak, the first and only time the disease has hit the Western Hemisphere, was labeled the "most alarming event" of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. African swine fever is a highly contagious and usually lethal viral disease that infects only pigs and, unlike swine flu, cannot be transmitted to humans.

A New Bio Warfare Arms Race Begins in Maryland

http://www.lewrockwell.com/zeese/zeese34.html

Fort Detrick actually began in 1943 as Camp Detrick and worked with the British in creating an anthrax bomb. It became a permanent Army installation, Fort Detrick, in 1956 and developed offensive bio-weapons. But, in 1969 during the Vietnam War, when the U.S. was criticized for using gas, napalm and herbicides in Vietnam, President Nixon unilaterally ended the nation’s offensive biological warfare program and ordered pathogens and toxins destroyed. This also led to the signing of the Biological Weapons and Toxins Convention in 1972 which became law in 1975. It was discovered in 1975 that the CIA had disobeyed the order to destroy all bio-weapons stocks, and had retained pathogens and toxins for its own use. In the 1980’s, the Reagan and Bush Administrations revived the dormant budget for "defensive" biowarfare research. It was also in the 1980’s that the U.S. supplied Saddam Hussein with the basis for Iraq’s biowarfare capability.

US-Vietnam Project Starts Agent Orange re-mediation

(Source-Raw Story)

A US-Vietnamese group said Friday 1.2 million dollars had been spent to contain rainwater run-off from a "dioxin hotspot" at a war-time US airbase that was a depot for the toxic defoliant Agent Orange.

As part of the project, scientists had tested blood and breast milk samples from residents and workers near the base and found they exceeded safe levels of the most toxic dioxin type TCDD "by a wide margin," the group said.

Under the 1961-71 "Operation Ranch Hand" US forces sprayed about 80 million litres (21 million gallons) of Agent Orange and other herbicides on southern and central Vietnam to deprive enemies of forest cover and food crops.

Washington has rejected responsibility for the millions of people Vietnam says have suffered direct or second-generation disabilities due to Agent Orange, with US officials pointing to a lack of mutually agreed data.