U.S. weapons of mass destruction protested
By
Kermit Leibensperger
Baltimore
Published Jul 3, 2006 2:35 PM
If President Bush
has his way, tens of billions of dollars will be taken from public health
spending in the coming years and allocated to the U.S. Army’s Ft. Detrick,
the headquarters of U.S. bio weapons research, located in Frederick, MD. The
administration’s plans for massive expansion of the number of BLS-4
containment suites and related WMD facilities were protested June 4 by a rally
and march through crowds gathered for a fair in downtown Frederick.
Activists alerted the community of upcoming Environmental Impact Study
hearings in late August or September, when the Army will try to gloss over the
danger posed by experiments—past and future—with disease-causing
viruses and bacteria for which there exist neither vaccine nor cure.
Ft.
Detrick’s efforts at gene splicing and other DNA modification techniques
to increase the virulence of existing strains of viruses and bacteria are
perhaps the most foolish and dangerous part of the Bush administration’s
WMD programs. In a recent four-article series on the lab, the Frederick
News-Post reported Ft. Detrick had “161 mishaps” from 2002 to
2005.
Speakers representing the entire progressive-revolutionary political
spectrum called on groups and individuals to work to bring out the community en
masse for the hearings, and denounced Ft. Detrick’s bioweapons research as
not only a threat to Frederick County, but to all humanity. Documentation of
illnesses and deaths related to leaks from the sprawling facilities may be found
at www.frederickpac.org.
Two speakers added very sad, personal notes to
the rally, stories which deeply touched those present. Mrs. Grace Free Koehl
spoke of the involuntary confiscation of dairy farms, upon which the bioweapons
labs were built. “One day there was a sign along the road saying we had to
vacate three of our fields,” Mrs. Koehl told me as she paged through a
scrapbook filled with newspaper articles, photographs, and land plans
documenting the Federal land takeovers and the numerous illnesses and deaths in
her family, neighboring families, and farm animals that followed the opening of
the Army labs. “They took fields my father rented from Dr. Rau for what
was called Camp Detrick back then, along with land from other
farmers.”
By taking only portions of farms, the Army effectively
made the farmers and their families human guinea pigs. Mrs. Koehl denounced the
book “50 Year History of Ft. Detrick,” recently published by the
government, because it makes no mention of the forced farmland confiscations or
of the health consequences to the Free family, their cattle, and the surrounding
area, which came to be a “cancer cluster.”
Son of Frank
Olson speaks out
Eric Olson, whose father held a key position at the
nation’s most secret biological warfare laboratory during the Cold War,
told the rally that the government covered up the killing of his father, Frank
Olson, not just once, claiming his fall of 10 stories from a Manhattan hotel was
a suicide or accident in 1953, but with a second deception in 1975, when
President Ford called the Olson family to the White House and apologized for the
LSD that was administered to Frank Olson without his knowledge.
However,
after receiving information from an old friend of his father’s, Eric Olson
has become convinced his father was killed because he was appalled at reports
that bioweapons bombs were being tested in the Korean War. Referring to stories
that captured American pilots who confessed to dropping bioweapons were
brainwashed, Norman Kanoyen confided to Olson, “It wasn’t all
brainwashing. Get it? Your dad found it was true.” How much bioweapons
testing was actually done in Korea Kanoyen didn’t know or wasn’t
willing to say, Olson reported.
Frederick lawyer and congressional
candidate Barry Kissin noted in his speech that Ft. Detrick had the creation of
anthrax bombs on their agenda since 1943. At that time the Army planned to use
anthrax bombs in Germany, but the project was not completed before the end of
WWII.
Olson also believes his father opposed the use of Ft.
Detrick-produced chemicals and biologicals in the Korean War for what was then
called “terminal interrogation.” This is what the Bush
administration’s spin-doctors now term the “extraordinary
rendition” of kidnapped suspects that the CIA conducts in secret prisons
in Europe, according to Dana Priest’s recent Pulitzer Prize winning
exposé in The Washington Post (December 4). “He would have
known,” Olson said. “He was [chief of the] Special Operations
Division, the CIA— Detrick liaison for the CIA.”
Olson
encouraged the audience to learn details of CIA crimes, including the killing
of his father, by seeing a documentary made for German public television’s
ARD network titled “Code Name: Artichoke—The CIA’s Secret
Experiments on Humans” by Egmont R. Koch and Michael Wech (Available at
Satellite Video, Walkers ville, MD; 301-845-2737). Olson said that PBS had
scheduled to show the film, then cancelled. More information, including a
transcript of the film and Olson’s continuing investigation of his
father’s murder and other CIA criminal activities, may be found at
www.frankolsonproject.org.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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