To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
Dr. Malone was so damn right when he said we’re barely scratching the surface on the biolabs topic. And so was I when I insisted you should pay special attention to the research on insects that’s been going on not only in the US funded labs in Ukraine and Georgia, but all over the world, including US soil.
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA WELCOMES YOU TO YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE YOU HAVEN’T EVEN FATHOMED YET
The Chernobyl Research Initiative began formal research activities in Ukraine in 2000, Belarus in 2005, and Fukushima, Japan, in July, 2011. To date, the group has conducted more than 35 research expeditions to Chernobyl and 16 expeditions to Fukushima.
USC’s Chernobyl Research Initiative was the first and currently is the only research group to utilize a multidisciplinary approach to address the health and environmental outcomes of radiation effects in free-living natural populations. This has permitted the investigation of both acute (short term) and chronic (long term and multi-generational) exposures.
The Chernobyl Research Initiative is also currently the only research team studying plants and animals in both Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Key funding sources have included the Samuel Freeman Charitable Trust, the CNRS (France), the National Science Foundation, and the National Geographic Society. Subsequently, additional funding sources have included the Civilian Research Development Foundation (CRDF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Qiagen GmbH, the Fulbright Foundation, the University of South Carolina Office of Research and the College of Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Finland, and gifts from private citizens.
To date, more than 90 scientific publications have resulted from this initiative, most in the past 10 years (see link above for publications). This research has been highlighted in many newspaper reports and television programs including the New York Times, The Economist, Harpers, the BBC, CNN, CBS’s 60 Minutes, and Miles O’Brian of PBS News Hour (see links above for media coverage).
The team has pioneered the use of ecological, genetic and dosimetric technologies in order to unravel the health and environmental consequences of chronic low-dose exposure resulting from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. These have included massively replicated ecological censuses of natural populations of birds, mammals and insects to investigate population and demographic effects; DNA sequencing and genotoxicity testing to assess short and long term genetic damage to individuals living in the wild; and the use of miniature dosimeters attached to wild animals and field measurements of whole body burdens of radioisotopes in birds and mammals to obtain accurate estimates of realized external and internal radiation doses to animals living under natural conditions. Recently, the group has expanded to include epidemiological and genetic studies of human populations (especially children) living in Chernobyl-affected regions of Ukraine.
Key results include the discovery of tumors, cataracts and damaged sperm in birds from high radiation areas of Chernobyl, and impacts on biodiversity in Fukushima. Exciting new results include the discovery that some species of birds may have developed resistance to the effects of radiation and effects on neurological development in small mammals in both Chernobyl and Fukushima.
These two disasters differ in the time since the events, and the amount and diversity of radionuclides that were released, although the predominant source of radiation is cesium-137 in both locations.
We are seeking funding to support the following ongoing and planned future research activities of the Chernobyl + Fukushima Research Initiative:
1)Continued monitoring of Fukushima populations of birds, small mammals, and insects in order to test for changes in population sizes (abundances) and numbers of species (biodiversity) through time.
2)Continued monitoring of barn swallows and rodents (mice and voles) populations for cancers, survival, reproduction, and genetic damage in Fukushima and Chernobyl (in collaboration with the CNRS, France, Rikkyo University, Tokyo, the Wild Bird Society of Japan, the National Institute of Forestry, Japan, and the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland).
3)Initiate a new project to study effects of radiation on tree growth and soil microbial activity in Fukushima (in collaboration with Chubu University, Nagoya, Japan).
4)Initiate a new project to investigate effects of radiation growth, fertility, and genetic damage in cows living in highly radioactive regions of Fukushima (in collaboration with the Fukushima Cattle Ranchers Association).
5)Initiate a new project to examine mutation rates in humans using whole genome DNA sequencing. Initially this project will focus on families living in contaminated regions of Ukraine. The project is in collaboration with the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University, the Center of Radiological Research at Columbia University, and the Institute for Radiation Medicine in Kiev, Ukraine.
6)Continued development of new methods for measurement of dose and genetic damage in wild populations of animals.
7)Coordination of an international consortium of independent scientists to provide unbiased evidenced-based information concerning the health and environmental risks related to nuclear accidents. This group will compile, evaluate, and interpret the current scientific and medical literature and develop a literature suitable for public distribution via the print and internet media, as well as public presentations in Japan and internationally.
Highlights from research published by the Chernobyl Research Initiative include the following:
•Population sizes and numbers of species (i.e. biodiversity) of birds, mammals, insects, and spiders are significantly lower in areas of high contamination in Chernobyl.
•For many birds and small mammals, life spans are shorter and fertility is depressed, in areas of high contamination.
•In Fukushima, only birds, butterflies, and cicadas showed significant declines during the first summer following the accident. Other groups were not negatively affected. Now, five years later, effects on birds have increased.
•There is considerable variability among species in their sensitivity to radionuclides. Many species are not affected, and a few species even appear to increase in numbers in areas of high contamination in both Chernobyl and Fukushima, presumably in response to competitive release (i.e. more available food and shelter) and fewer predators.
•Many species show evidence of genetic damage stemming from acute exposures and the differences observed between Fukushima and Chernobyl suggests some species may show the consequences of mutation accumulation over multiple generations.
•Some individuals and species show no evidence of genetic damage in relation to radiation exposure and some even show evidence of evolutionary adaptation to the effects of radiation through increased antioxidant activity, which may provide protection against ionizing radiation.
•The bird species that are most likely to show declines in numbers in response to radiation are those that historically have shown increased mutation rates for other reasons possibly related to DNA repair ability or reduced defenses against oxidative stress.
•Deleterious effects of radiation exposure seen in natural populations in Chernobyl include increased rates of cataracts, tumors, growth abnormalities, deformed sperm, and albinism.
Maps of Contaminated regions of Fukushima (left), Ukraine, Belarus and Russia (right), and Europe (below). Fukushima map courtesy of Shane Welch; other maps courtesy of the European Union.
•Neurological development is impacted as evidenced by depressed brain size in both birds and rodents and consequent effects on cognitive ability and survival have been demonstrated in birds.
•Tree growth and microbial decomposition in the soil are also depressed in areas of high radiation.
•In Fukushima, the first signs of developmental abnormalities have been observed in birds in 2013, although significant genetic damage has not yet been documented for birds or rodents.
Do I need to spell it out? They are using these grounds for experiments. Did they end up being experiment grounds by accident? People in Chernobyl have been evacuated, but fauna and flora are hardly impacted by radiation. Radiation does not discriminate by species. You know who does that? Viruses and bacteria.
WASHINGTON — DARPA, the Pentagon’s high-tech office, is working with the government of Ukraine to develop capabilities to help Kiev in its hybrid warfare challenge.
DARPA director Steven Walker, who recently took over that job after five years as the agency’s deputy, told reporters that he had personally visited the country in 2016 for talks with Ukrainian military, intel and industry leaders.
“We did have a good visit to the Ukraine,” Walker said Thursday at a breakfast hosted by the Defense Writer’s Group. “Yes, we have followed up with them, and through the U.S. European Command, we have started several projects with the Ukraine, mostly in the information space.”
“Not providing them weapons or anything like that, but looking at how to help them with information,” Walker added, before declining to go into further detail.
Ukraine has become a testing ground for hybrid warfare techniques from Russia and Russian-backed militant groups ever Russia’s invasion of Ukrainian territory in 2014, including disinformation campaigns. While that has allowed Moscow to test out new capabilities and techniques, it also provides an opportunity to develop counter techniques — which may benefit the U.S. and its allies in the long term.
“I think we’ve got to get better, as a country, in information warfare and how we approach info warfare,” Walker said. “I think there are capabilities there that we need to improve upon, and DAPRA is working in some of those areas.”
This is not the first tie between DARPA and Kiev. The Ukrainian government has hired Tony Tether, who led DARPA for the entirety of the George. W. Bush administration, to help lead a reorganization of their science and technology efforts, something Tether in a LinkedIn post said was necessary in part because so much of Ukraine’s S&T facilities were in the territory seized by Russia.
The former DARPA head has also consulted for the Ukroboronprom group, Ukraine’s largest defense contractor, and just a few weeks ago was added to the group’s supervisory board in a move that Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko called a “symbol of effective cooperation between Ukrainian and American partners.”
Tether is expected to try and recreate some of what make DARPA so successful in Ukraine, but Walker notes that many countries have tried to do that — and failed, in large part due to a cultural fear of giving workers the freedom to fail they need.
“When I talk to others about DARPA and why it works, many other cultures say ‘this couldn’t happen,’” Walker noted.
More broadly, Walker said part of what he wants to see at DARPA during his tenure is looking at increasing counterinsurgency capabilities.
“I think as more populations across the world move to larger and larger cities, we need to understand the three dimensionality of cites and how to operate in those very crowded, very three-dimensional spaces,” Walker said, noting DARPA is working on ways to sense and map underground tunnels and infrastructure.
Updated 3/1/18 at 1:45 PM EST to reflect the fact that after publication, DARPA confirmed that Walker visited Ukraine in 2016.
Aaron Mehta was deputy editor and senior Pentagon correspondent for Defense News, covering policy, strategy and acquisition at the highest levels of the Defense Department and its international partners.
The U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been accused of trying to create a new class of biological weapons that would be delivered via virus-infected insects. Aphids are one of the insects being used in the DARPA program.ISTOCK
The U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been accused of trying to create a new class of biological weapons that would be delivered via virus-infected insects.
The Insect Allies program was announced by DARPA in 2016. It is a research project that aims to protect the U.S. agricultural food supply by delivering protective genes to plants via insects, which are responsible for the transmission of most plant viruses. Scientists believe loading the bugs up with viruses that would offer plants protective benefits could be one way of ensuring food security in the event of a major threat.
In an editorial published in the journal Science, a group of researchers led by Richard Guy Reeves, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, says Insect Allies isn’t exactly what it says it is. Instead, they claim DARPA is potentially developing insects as a means of delivering a “new class of biological weapon.”
How Does Insect Allies Work?
There are many threats that could impact upon food security. This includes environmental disasters, natural pathogens and intentional attacks. Crop failure, for whichever of these reasons, has the potential to have devastating consequences—wheat and maize, for example, are relied upon by hundreds of millions across the globe for their basic nutritional needs.
Scientists with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are looking at introducing genetically modified viruses that can edit chromosomes directly, like using insects to transmit genetically modified material into plants.DARPA
Genetically altering a species to make it more resilient comes with problems. Introducing alterations directly into a species’ chromosome is slow, as the alteration must be passed down through generations before it takes hold.
Instead, scientists with DARPA are looking at introducing genetically modified viruses that can edit chromosomes directly in fields—these are known as horizontal environmental genetic alteration agents (HEGAAs).
The DARPA program is using the principles of HEGAAs but, unlike traditional methods of dispersal—like spraying fields with them—it wants to spread them through insects. At the moment, maize and tomato plants are being used in experiments and the insects being used for dispersal are leafhoppers, aphids and whiteflies.
“Insect Allies aims to develop scalable, readily deployable, and generalizable countermeasures against potential natural and engineered threats to mature crops,” Blake Bextine, DARPA Program Manager for Insect Allies, told Newsweek. “The program is devising technologies to engineer and deliver these targeted therapies on relevant timescales—that is, within a single growing season. To do so, Insect Allies researchers are building on natural, efficient, and highly specific plant virus and insect vector delivery systems to transfer modified, protective genes to plants.”
Why Biological Weapons?
Reeves and his colleagues offer a number of assertions about why Insect Allies could end up being a means of bioweapon dispersal. Firstly, they question the very nature of the project—the use of insects. Why, they say, are insects so integral? What is the problem with spraying HEGAAs?
The team says Insect Allies “appears very limited in its capacity to enhance U.S. agriculture or respond to national emergencies…. As a result, the program may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery.”
Potentially, the viruses being introduced could do harm instead of good. The insects could be used to disperse agents that would prevent seeds from growing. “HEGAA weapons could be extremely transmissible to susceptible crop species, particularly where insects were used as the means of delivery,” they write. “Chromosomal editing would be targetable to particular crop varieties dependent on their genome sequence (presumably those varieties not grown by the deploying parties).”
Maize, one of the crops being tested by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is relied upon by millions of people for basic nutrition. Scientists believe loading the bugs up with viruses that would offer plants protective benefits could be one way of ensuring food security in the event of a major threat.ISTOCK
The development of an insect-based system, according to the authors, points to “an intention to develop a means of delivery of HEGAAs for offensive purposes.” The technology, they say, could quickly be simplified and used to develop a whole new class of biological weapons. “In our view, the program is primarily a bad idea because obvious simplifications of the work plan with already-existing technology can generate predictable and fast-acting weapons, along with their means of delivery, capable of threatening virtually any crop species,” they wrote.
The team calls for more transparency from DARPA as the Insect Allies progresses. However, it also says the potential to weaponize this technology is already out there. They say weapons programs are driven by the perceived activities of competitors—maybe the Insect Allies program is a response to intelligence about another nation’s capabilities.
Furthermore, “the mere announcement of the Insect Allies Program, with its presented justifications, may motivate other countries to develop their own capabilities in this arena—indeed, it may have already done so…. Reversal of funding for this DARPA project…would not in itself close the particular Pandora’s box that HEGAAs or their insect dispersal may represent.”
DARPA denies the assertions made by Reeves and his colleagues. “DARPA is producing neither biological weapons nor the means for their delivery,” a spokesman told Newsweek. “We do accept and agree with concerns about potential dual use of technology, an issue that comes up with virtually every new powerful technology.” He said these concerns are the reason Insect Allies has been structured in the way it is—supposedly as a transparent and university-led research project that encourages communication. “We also have numerous, layered safeguards in place to maintain biosecurity and ensure the systems we’re developing function only as intended,” the DARPA spokesperson added.
Bextine reiterated this point. Researchers working with DARPA are allowed to publish their results and work with different agencies. The experiments they carry out are done so in biosecure greenhouses. “At no point in the program is DARPA funding open release of Insect Allies systems,” Bextine said.
He said he disagrees with the conclusion of the editorial in Science, saying technology and research that deals with food security and gene editing “have a higher bar than most for transparency”—and Insect Allies, he says, meets these high standards.
Responding to the queries relating to delivery—why spraying technology cannot be used—Bextine said these are just not up to the challenge, especially when it comes to responding at a large scale to the most severe threats.
“Many existing methods for protecting crops are inefficient, expensive, imprecise, or destructive to plants, may require significant infrastructure, and often provide only limited efficacy,” he said. “Sprayed treatments are impractical for introducing genetic modifications on a large scale and potentially infeasible if the spraying technology does not access the necessary tissues with specificity. Meanwhile, traditional selective breeding methods for introducing protective traits into plants require years to propagate, nowhere near the speed required to prevent a fast-moving threat from developing into a crisis.”
He added that DARPA would never receive funding for the next generation of aerial spraying technology. The development of this new technology is dependent on industry and other research funders. “Instead, we reach for fundamentally new ways of delivering more precise, efficacious treatments through systems that can be readily adapted to confront a range of potential threats.
“Emerging biotechnologies—and especially the cutting-edge research being performed on Insect Allies—are pushing science into new territories. DARPA is proud to be taking a proactive role in working with stakeholders to inform a new framework for considering how the benefits of these technologies can be most safely realized.”
US military plan to spread viruses using insects could create ‘new class of biological weapon’, scientists warn
Agency says it is trying to genetically modify crops, but experts think this goal is ‘simply not plausible’
US military plan to spread viruses using insects could create ‘new class of biological weapon’, scientists warn
Insects could be turned into “a new class of biological weapon” using new US military plans, experts have warned.
The Insect Allies programme aims to use bugs to disperse genetically modified (GM) viruses to crops.
Such action will have profound consequences and could pose a major threat to global biosecurity, according to a team that includes specialist scientists and lawyers.
However, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which is responsible for developing military technologies in the US, says it is merely trying to alter crops growing in fields by using viruses to transmit genetic changes to plants.
In theory, this rapid engineering would allow farmers to adapt to changing conditions, for example by inserting drought-resistance genes into corn instead of planting pre-engineered seeds.
But this seemingly inoffensive goal has been slammed by the scientists, who say the plan is simply dangerous and that insects loaded with synthetic viruses will be difficult to control.
They also say that despite being in operation since 2016 and distributing $27m in funds to scientists, Darpa has failed to properly justify the existence of such a programme.
Research programme with potential for dual use: scientists fear that the Insect Ally programme by the US could encourage other states to increase their own research activities in the field of biological warfare (MPG/D.Duneka) (MPG/ D. Duneka)
“Given that Darpa is a military agency, we find it surprising that the obvious and concerning dual-use aspects of this research have received so little attention,” Felix Beck, a lawyer at the University of Freiburg, told The Independent.
Dr Guy Reeves, an expert in GM insects at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, said that there has been hardly any debate about the technology and the programme remains largely unknown “even in expert circles”.
He added that despite the stated aims of the programme, it would be far more straightforward using the technology as a biological weapon than for the routine agricultural use suggested by Darpa.
“It is very much easier to kill or sterilise a plant using gene editing than it is to make it herbicide or insect-resistant,” explains Reeves.
Experiments are reportedly already underway using insects such as aphids and whiteflies to treat corn and tomato plants.
Mr Beck said he and fellow experts were not suggesting that the US military wanted to create biological weapons, but that the proposed agricultural uses are “simply not plausible for a number of reasons”.
Firstly, they note that if farmers wanted to use genetically modified viruses to improve their crops, there is no reason not to use conventional spraying equipment.
They also noted that despite Darpa stating that no insects used should survive longer than two weeks, if such safeguards were not in place “the spread could in principle be unlimited”.
Mr Beck added: “The quite obvious question of whether the viruses selected for development should or should not be capable of plant-to-plant transmission – and plant-to-insect-to-plant transmission – was not addressed in the Darpa work plan at all”.
Air Force fails to acknowledge mysterious meteor that crashed to Earth near US military base
Making their case in the journal Science, the team noted that if Insect Allies’ research cannot be justified, it could be perceived as breaching the UN’s Biological Weapons Convention.
“Because of the broad ban of the Biological Weapons Convention, any biological research of concern must be plausibly justified as serving peaceful purposes,” explained Professor Silja Voeneky, a specialist in international law at Freiburg University.
“The Insect Allies Program could be seen to violate the Biological Weapons Convention, if the motivations presented by Darpa are not plausible.
“This is particularly true considering this kind of technology could easily be used for biological warfare.”
To prevent any suspicion and to avoid encouraging other nations to develop their own technologies in this area, the authors of the study have called for more transparency from Darpa if it intends to pursue such programmes.
A spokesperson from Darpa defended the programme, explaining that using insects to apply these gene altering treatments could provide advantages over sprays.
“Most importantly in this context, sprayed treatments are impractical for introducing protective traits on a large scale and potentially infeasible if the spraying technology cannot access the necessary plant tissues with specificity, which is a known problem,” they said.
“If Insect Allies succeeds, it will offer a highly specific, efficient, safe, and readily deployed means of introducing transient protective traits into only the plants intended, with minimal infrastructure required.”
LMFAO
Ukroboronprom Appoints Former DARPA Head as Supervisory Board Member
Anthony Tether, Former Head of US DARPA was appointed as member of UOP Supervisory Board (Image: Ukroboronprom)
Ukraine’s state run Ukroboronprom has appointed former head of US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Anthony Tether as member of UOP Supervisory Board.
Anthony Tether has been in charge of Ukroboronprom long-term development for over a year and a half. He assists in implementing UOP development strategy, implementation of reforms, corporatization, and international audit. The former head of DARPA contributed to strengthening Ukroboronprom’s export potential and investment development. Under his chairmanship, the State General Advanced Research and Development Agency (GARDA, the prototype of the American DARPA) was created, the company said in a statement Thursday.
“As a member of the Supervisory Board, Anthony Tether will help Ukroboronprom to implement the reform strategy and international audit,” said Roman Romanov, Ukroboronprom Director General.
Earlier, Mykhaylo Zhurovs’kyy – the rector of the National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute named after I. Sikorsky” – was elected as Chairman of the Supervisory Board. Lieutenant General Yaroslav Skal’ko, former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Air Force, was elected as Vice-Chairman.
On January 31, the Ukroboronprom Supervisory Board – after a long-term meeting -took key decisions on the activities of the Concern. During the meeting, UOP management report was heard; strategic directions for UOP development, corporatization process of UOP enterprises-participants, the international audit, the system of effective anti-corruption measures, creation of an advisory body and other issues were discussed.
Ukraine to Create DARPA-like Defence Research Agency
Ukriane will soon set up its General Advanced Research & Development Agency (GARDA), modeled along the American Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at Igor the Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI).
This was stated by UKROBORONPROM Director General Pavlo Bukin during his speech at the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, during the parliamentary hearings “National Innovation System: State and Legislative Development”.
“It was decided to create an agency of advanced technologies based on the DARPA model, to implement technologies in the defense industry. Mykhaylo Zhurovs’kyy – the rector of the National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute named after I. Sikorsky” – agreed that the agency will be based at this very university. I am sure this decision will contribute to the greatest effect”, stressed Pavlo Bukin.
At the same time, he mentioned that the issue of innovative technologies development is connected with the necessity of legislative changes that would improve the mechanisms of financing such projects.
“The legal framework for innovation in Ukraine is sufficiently developed, but some aspects need to be improved, as they hamper financing. When it comes to research institutes and design bureaus – their resources are limited. It is necessary to legislatively create a mechanism for innovation activity financing and preferential taxation, “- said UKROBORONPROM Director General Pavlo Bukin from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.
He named UGV “Phantom-2” development among UOP innovations. “This platform allows to destroy the enemy’s manpower and to transport the goods, and it has already passed the test abroad, and it can be considered to be a result of the activities of the State Concern and its design engineering bureaus,” said Pavlo Bukin.
Ukroboronprom head: Ukraine’s military industrial complex during hybrid warfare
By Roman Romanov, Dec 11, 2017 Roman Romanov is the director general of Ukrainian defense company Ukroboronprom.
Three years ago, Ukraine was facing an unexpected challenge – Russia’s military aggression. The annexation of Crimea and the first battles in Donbass were a total shock to the Ukrainian armed forces and the domestic defense industry. At that time, defense and law enforcement agencies were uncapable of performing their tasks; weapons and military equipment were not ready for operational use; and the military-industrial complex could not meet the needs of the Army.
Unfortunately, over the past 25 years, Ukrainian defense enterprises received no orders from the state – more than half of the plants were practically closed. The main types of the military equipment manufactured required Russian components.
In 2014, we completely stopped our cooperation with the Russian defense industry, and Ukroboronprom received the task to provide the Army with necessary weapons and military equipment in the shortest possible time.
First of all, we formed a new team of Ukroboronprom managers, who managed to quickly make qualitative changes and introduce the best business and management practices. We replaced about half of the directors of Ukroboronprom enterprises, mainly those who failed to adapt their way of thinking to new realities; we initiated repair and overhaul of the military equipment – Ukroboronprom enterprises organized 55 mobile maintenance crews, restoring military equipment directly in the anti-terrorist operation zone.
Furthermore, we arranged the import of critical components and organized the repair and manufacture of modernized military equipment samples. Ukroboronprom heads for strategic partnership with Western countries and NATO-Ukraine defense-technical cooperation.
In 2015, Ukroboronprom began implementing a new strategic task – the State Defense Order. Ukroboronprom enterprises launched serial production of new military equipment samples. The Army began to receive sniper rifles, mortars, modernized tanks and new armored personnel carriers manufactured in Ukraine.
The next urgent task was set: to overcome the dependence on imported components from the Russian Federation. To solve this problem, we launched a large-scale import substitution program to attract domestic reserves and set up cooperation within the country with enterprises of any form of ownership.
Ukroboronprom representatives visited all regions of Ukraine, held meetings with governors and discussed the issues of attracting the region’s industry to cooperation with Ukroboronprom.
As a result, enterprises from all regions of Ukraine began to join the import-substitution program implementation. As of today, 414 small, medium and large enterprises of Ukraine and 200,000 specialists joined the process. In fact, Ukroboronprom has attracted the whole country to working on strengthening the Ukrainian Army and the development of the country’s economy.
Furthermore, we renewed the workforce, attracted scientific and educational potential of the country: memorandums of cooperation were signed with 48 Ukrainian universities. Today, we train young specialists: 8,000-plus students had their practical training at Ukroboronprom enterprises and almost 600 of them are already working at our plants.
Memorandums of cooperation were signed with 30 institutes of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Attracting talented Ukrainian scientists and young specialists resulted in 535 promising developments upon the anvil and 80 projects that are already being implemented at Ukroboronprom enterprises.
We set ourselves to the task of expanding partnerships and implementing NATO standards for all stages of armament life cycles. The work on the introduction of the AQAP 2000 series standards at Ukroboronprom enterprises is launched. The ISO 9001 system already operates at 73 percent for Ukroboronprom enterprises.
Ukroboronprom specialists actively participate in multinational projects of the NATO concept Smart Defence, as well as in the meetings of the NATO-Ukraine Joint Working Group on Defence-Technical Cooperation.
In 2016, the development of the Ukroboronprom reform strategy was launched. The state concern Ukroboronprom held a meeting of a specially established tendering committee, involving the specialist of the Independent Defence Anti-Corruption Committee of Transparency International Ukraine, to help select the international consulting company using a “competitive dialogue” procedure. Thus, the concern started the process of conducting an international audit. We launched the next stage of Ukroboronprom’s reform. Implementation of such a large-scale process – as international audit and transformation of Ukroboronprom’s enterprises into joint stock companies – will last for about two years.
As a result of military operations in the anti-terrorist operation area, 900-plus technical solutions were introduced and implemented by Ukroboronprom engineers in the armored vehicles operated by the Army, having significantly improved tactical and operational characteristics of the military equipment and taking into account hybrid war experience.
Today, the latest developments of our specialists are being used and tested in the anti-terrorist operation zone. A good example is the unmanned complex Spectator, developed by the specialists of state concern Ukroboronprom, together with scientists of the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.” In May 2015, a contract for production was signed. And in January 2016, the first batch was transferred to Ukraine’s armed forces. This high-tech product has been successfully used in combat conditions for more than a year. The prototype of the new tactical UAV, Horlytsya, developed by the Ukrainian enterprises, successfully performed its first flight.
Hybrid war in the east of Ukraine forced us – taking into account combat experience – to develop unmanned equipment for performing various tasks on the battlefield without putting our soldiers’ lives at risk.
Ukroboronprom withstood the challenge of the war and in three years transferred about 16,000 units of weapons and military equipment to the military. Thanks to the work of the entire defense industry of Ukraine, our armed forces – from combat-ineffective units in 2014 – turned into a well-armed Army.
Mosquitos potentially carry a range of deadly diseases, from malaria to yellow fever. (Photo by James Gathany/CDC. Public Domain.)
WASHINGTON: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency may have been created to develop cutting-edge technology to help the US take on the Soviet Union in the Cold War, but now it’s taking on another deadly enemy: mosquitos.
DARPA’s latest idea, now entering its second phase, is to get down to the molecular level to make a topical cream that would actually alter the “microbiome” of human skin to make it less appetizing to the disease-carrying insects.
“The ReVector program aims to precisely, safely, and efficiently reduce mosquito attraction and biting, and, subsequently, to help maintain the health of military personnel operating in disease-endemic regions,” the agency said in a release last month.
While tiny compared to the USSR and totally lacking artillery, the mosquito is the deadliest animal on the planet, responsible for spreading malaria, which kills more than 400,000 people every year, in addition to other deadly diseases. Throughout human history militaries have struggled with mosquito-borne maladies, from the million-plus cases that waylayed soldiers during the Civil War to the over 80,000 cases among US servicemembers in Vietnam.
Even though a vast majority of those survived, the disease disrupted the forces’ ability to fight, at times in critical moments. Army researchers currently estimate malaria infections are responsible for up to 21,000 lost work hours and between $1.2 and $4.4 million per year in evacuation and medical costs.
The treatment for malaria has progressed significantly in recent decades, but the ReVector program aims to stop the disease before it can get into the human body at all. The program’s first phase involved the development of technology to “modify human skin microbes” and the “volatile molecules” it produces, and testing the effect of those modifications on mosquitos.
“In Phase 2, the team plans to advance testing in animal models and move complex microbiome communities,” ReVector program manager Linda Chrisley said in the release.
The release explained that “ultimately, ReVector seeks to develop topical formulations that could be applied shortly before a mission with minimal equipment or training, and last for at least two weeks without reapplication, offering improved, sustained protection against disease vectors.”
DARPA is working with Stanford University researchers on the project, and the agency notes the research is reviewed by the US Food and Drug Administration and “if necessary” the Environmental Protection Agency “to ensure that technologies are effective and do not pose a threat to humans or the environment.”
PENTAGON UNIT A1266 STUDIES INSECTS AS BIOTERRORISM AGENTS ON RUSSIA’S DOORSTEPS:
DARPA has been working for several years on genetic editing of mosquitoes. Through its “Insect Allies” program, DARPA has been working, using CRISPR gene-editing and gene drive technologies, on manipulating the Aedes Aegypti mosquito. The US Department of Defense has spent at least $100 million in the controversial technology known as “gene drives” making the US military a top funder and developer of the gene-modifying technology. “Gene drives are a powerful and dangerous new technology and potential biological weapons could have disastrous impacts on peace, food security and the environment, especially if misused,” said Jim Thomas, co-director of ETC Group, an environment safety group. “The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field.”
Entomological warfare is a type of biological warfare that uses insects to transmit diseases. The Pentagon, using DARPA research, has allegedly performed such entomological tests secretly in the Republic of Georgia and Russia. Is the DARPA development, together with Gates’ foundation and Oxitec, of the gene edited mosquitoes a covert program in entomological warfare?
The Pentagon presently has top security bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program– Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP). They are in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa. Among their projects, Phlebotomine sand fly species were collected under the heading, “Surveillance Work on Acute Febrile Illness,” in which all (female) sand flies were tested to determine their infectivity rate. A third project, also including sand flies collection, studied the characteristics of their salivary glands. This is weaponization research.
The controversial person picked by the Biden Administration to become the first Cabinet-level science advisor, Eric Lander, came from the MIT-Harvard Broad Institute. Lander is a specialist in gene drive and gene editing technologies and played a major role in the flawed US Human Genome Project. This is not the kind of science we need to be supporting. It is rather part of what is obviously a larger eugenics agenda and Bill Gates is again playing a key role. SOURCE
The highly attuned sensory abilities of plants could be employed to gather intelligence for the military (Getty Images/iStockphoto)
The US military wants to deploy plants as “the next generation of intelligence gatherers”.
Genetically modified plants could be employed as self-sustaining sensors to gather information in settings unsuitable for more traditional technologies.
The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is responsible for the development of emerging technologies in the US military, has called for scientists to submit ideas for how to harness the power of plants.
In the past, DARPA has produced information-gathering technologies such as the satellites and seismographs employed to ensure Soviet compliance with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
But in this new initiative, termed the Advanced Plant Technologies (APT) programme, the agency is looking to the natural world for help.
“Plants are highly attuned to their environments and naturally manifest physiological responses to basic stimuli such as light and temperature, but also in some cases to touch, chemicals, pests and pathogens,” said Dr Blake Bextine, the manager of the ATP programme.
“Emerging molecular and modelling techniques may make it possible to reprogramme these detection and reporting capabilities for a wide range of stimuli, which would not only open up new intelligence streams, but also reduce the personnel risks and costs associated with traditional sensors,” said Dr Bextine.
The idea is that plants’ natural capabilities can be co-opted to detect relevant chemicals, harmful microorganisms, radiation and electromagnetic signals.
Modifying the genomes of plants would enable the military to control the types of sensing they are doing, and also trigger certain responses that can be monitored remotely using existing hardware.
Technology already exists to monitor plants from the ground, air and even from space.
“Advanced Plant Technologies is a synthetic biology programme at heart,” said Dr Bextine.
“As with DARPA’s other work in that space, our goal is to develop an efficient, iterative system for designing, building, and testing models so that we end up with a readily adaptable platform capability that can be applied to a wide range of scenarios.”
Past experiments with plants that have been modified in this manner have resulted in organisms that have difficulty settling in the natural environment, where they would be deployed.
The additional strain placed on the modified plants by their new duties makes it difficult for them to survive and compete with surrounding plants. This will be a key area that the new programme seeks to address.
The “proposers day” is being held on 12 December in Arlington, Virginia. It will lay out the objectives of DARPA’s programme and take submissions for research projects that are relevant to the initiative.
A British-American gene-editing company has released millions of genetically modified mosquitoes containing a dominant lethal gene, each week for 27 months in the Bahia, Brazil region in a test to see if the gene-edited mosquitoes would mate with local mosquitoes carrying Zika, malaria or other mosquito-borne diseases. A new study documents the alarming fact that following an initial reduction of the target population of mosquitoes, after some months the “population which had been greatly suppressed rebounded to nearly pre-release levels.” Scientists to date have no idea what dangers are presented by the new mutations. This once more highlights the dangers of uncontrolled gene-editing of species.
According to a new published study in Nature Reports journal, genetically engineered mosquitoes produced by the biotech company, Oxitec, now part of the US company Intrexon, have escaped human control after trials in Brazil and are now spreading in the environment.
On paper the theory was brilliant. Strains of “yellow fever” male mosquitoes taken from Cuba and Mexico were altered using gene-editing to make it impossible for their offspring to survive. Oxitec then began a systematic release of tens of millions of the manipulated mosquitoes over more than two years in the the city of Jacobina in the region of Bahia in Brazil. The Oxitec theory was the altered mosquitoes would mate with normal females of the same type which carry infectious diseases like dengue fever, and kill them off in the process.
‘Unanticipated Outcome…’
A team of scientists from Yale University and several scientific institutes in Brazil monitored the progress of the experiment. What they found is alarming in the extreme. After an initial period in which the target mosquito population markedly declined, after about 18 months the mosquito population recovered to pre-release levels. Not only that, the paper notes that some of the mosquitos likely have “hybrid vigor,” in which a hybrid of the natural with the gene-edited has created “a more robust population than the pre-release population” which may be more resistant to insecticides, in short, resistant “super mosquitoes.”
The scientists note that, “Genetic sampling from the target population six, 12, and 27–30 months after releases commenced provides clear evidence that portions of the transgenic strain genome have been incorporated into the target population. Evidently, rare viable hybrid offspring between the release strain and the Jacobina population are sufficiently robust to be able to reproduce in nature…” They continue, “Thus, Jacobina Ae. aegypti are now a mix of three populations. It is unclear how this may affect disease transmission or affect other efforts to control these dangerous vectors.” They estimate that between 10% and 60% of the Bahia natural Ae. Aegypti mosquitoes now had some gene-edited OX513A genome. They conclude that “The three populations forming the tri-hybrid population now in Jacobina (Cuba/Mexico/Brazil) are genetically quite distinct, very likely resulting in a more robust population than the pre-release population due to hybrid vigor.”
This was not supposed to happen. Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, Jeffrey Powell, senior author of the study, remarked on the findings: “The claim was that genes from the release strain would not get into the general population because offspring would die. That obviously was not what happened.” Powell went on to note, “But it is the unanticipated outcome that is concerning.”
A Gates Foundation Project
The Brazil study deals a major alarm signal on the uncontrolled release of gene-edited species into nature. It calls to mind the horror plot of Michael Crichton’s 1969 science fiction novel, Andromeda Strain. Only it is no novel.
The Oxitec mosquitoes were developed using a highly controversial form of gene-editing known as gene drive. Gene Drive, which is also being heavily funded by the Pentagon’s DARPA, combined with CRISPR gene-editing, aims to force a genetic modification to spread through an entire population, whether of mosquitoes or potentially humans, in just a few generations.
The scientist who first suggested developing gene drives in gene-editing, Harvard biologist Kevin Esvelt, has publicly warned that development of gene editing in conjunction with gene drive technologies has alarming potential to go awry. He notes how often CRISPR messes up and the likelihood of protective mutations arising, making even benign gene drives aggressive. He stresses, “Just a few engineered organisms could irrevocably alter an ecosystem.” Esvelt’s computer gene drive simulations calculated that a resulting edited gene “can spread to 99 percent of a population in as few as 10 generations, and persist for more than 200 generations.” This is very much what has now been demonstrated in the mosquito experiment in Brazil.
Notable is the fact that the Oxitec Brazil mosquito experiment was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In June, 2018 Oxitec announced a joint venture with the Gates Foundation, “to develop a new strain of Oxitec’s self-limiting Friendly™ Mosquitoes to combat a mosquito species that spreads malaria in the Western Hemisphere.” The Brazil results show the experiment is a catastrophic failure as the new strain is anything but self-limiting.
The Gates Foundation and Bill Gates have been backing development of the radical gene-editing technology and gene drive technology for more than a decade. Gates, a long-time advocate of eugenics, population control and of GMO, is a strong gene-editing promoter. In an article in the May/June 2018 magazine of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs, Gates hails gene editing technologies, explicitly CRISPR. In the article Gates argues that CRISPR and other gene-editing techniques should be used globally to meet growing demand for food and to improve disease prevention, particularly for malaria. In his article he adds, “there is reason to be optimistic that creating gene drives in malaria-spreading mosquitoes will not do much, if any, harm to the environment.”
Every bit as alarming as the failure of the Brazil gene-editing mosquito experiment is the fact that this technology is being spread with virtually no prior health or safety testing by truly independent government institutions. To date the US Government relies only on industry safety assurances. The EU, while formally responsible to treat gene-edited species similarly to GMO plants, is reportedly trying to loosen the regulations. China, a major research center for gene-editing, has extremely lax controls. Recently a Chinese scientist announced an experiment in human gene-editing allegedly to make newborn twins resistant to HIV. Other experiments are proliferating around the world with gene-edited animals and even salmon. The precautionary principle has been thrown to the winds when it comes to the new gene-editing revolution, not a reassuring situation.
Currently Oxitec, which denies that the Brazil results show failure, is now trying to get regulatory approval from the US Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a similar experiment with the same gene-edited species in Texas and Florida. One of the people involved in the attempt, Texan Roy Bailey, is a Washington lobbyist and close friend of Randal Kirk, the billionaire CEO of Intrexon, owner of Oxitec. Bailey is also a major Trump fundraiser. Let’s hope that regulatory prudence and not politics decide the outcome.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
So yeah, nothing to worry here, just “health labs” and SPAs …
Thanks Fukushima Exposed for the great and timely contribution that decisively helped me complete this investigation!
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
For my mother, who has just buried my father, passed away from a very suspicious heart event involving some clots. She had to bury him in my absence, because the Military BioTech Complex holds us prisoners on two different continents. I had to bury myself in work to keep it together.
Work in progress, I will keep adding pieces to the Tetris until it goes away. Please return regularly for updates, this is a very long and fascinating story that should change the worldview for most people.
“This is to request that the current retention allowance [(b)(6) redaction] for Dr. Anthony S. Fauci be converted to a permanent pay adjustment in the amount [(b)(6) redaction] over his base pay of [(b)(6) redaction] in order to appropriately compensate him for the level of responsibility in his current position of Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), especially as it relates to his work on biodefense research activities.”
For past several years, DARPA has been pioneering a powerful new type of countermeasure against infectious disease called gene-encoded antibodies. They work by providing cells with genetic instructions for producing one or more highly protective antibodies against a given threat. pic.twitter.com/h2gz8fuOXJ
Via the ADEPT program, DARPA was an early investor in Moderna's mRNA therapeutics & vaccines. The company announced today their experimental coronavirus vaccine, built in part on this groundbreaking work, is nearly 95% effective at preventing illness: https://t.co/OCi5MEQiVg
First, in the US, Military and an emerging petrochemical industry with strong roots in agriculture but expanding into health, among others. The Rockefellers were the main force driving this expansion in the US and bridging over the ocean to Germany, the most advanced country in terms of chemical industrialization. But it was mostly Crown-controlled and Rothschild-controlled from the City of London, through their many henchmen.
After a few good collaborative experiences, the Military and Pharmafia decided they have a future together, and they bought up the Academia to help with the labs and the brains, as both industries already had a foot in the door there.
Two world wars demonstrated there’s hardly any limit to what they can achieve together.
The Cold War is then used as an excuse to develop more surveillance and population control tools. From these efforts spring1 out Silicon Valley and the Internet.
Before the end of 20th century, Big Pharma and Big Tech are fused by all means: capital, gear, agenda.
The Great Military BioTech Complex is born to be the main Operating System of the system.
9/11 is the launch of the new control grid.
Many of the following events were just test runs.
Covid is a forced upgrade of this operating system.
Weapons trade is disguised as “defense”, bioweapons trade as “biodefense”. And the latter is booming.
Transhumanism Airlines depart from Humanism and are set to land in lifeless soulless material existence.
After 1865, American inventiveness turned away from war and toward commerce and industry. Development of the lands of the West did promote some agencies to investigate natural resources. The Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce and Labor, and the National Park Service appeared during this period. While government research tended toward the applied end of the research spectrum, newly-created private foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute of Washington, supported much of the nation's basic scientific research.- Daniel Else, "Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex", 2017
This is the official history, not whistleblowing. It’s redacted by a system critter to make crimes palatable to the normies. Still a good starting point
Summary
Daniel Else explored the results of his year-long inquiry into the organizational underpinnings of that military technological revolution of the 1940s and 1950s. By mining the Library’s resources, Else traced the evolving relationship between science and the federal government leading to the creation of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in 1941. A temporary wartime agency, OSRD mobilized the nation’s academic and industrial technological resources in support of the war effort, and in so doing profoundly altered the linkages between science and engineering, industry, and government. Else explored those wartime changes and outline their impact, still seen and felt today more than seven decades after V-J Day.
Event Date September 21, 2017
Notes- Daniel Else was a specialist in national defense in the Congressional Research Service in the Library of Congress and the 2016 Kluge Staff Fellow at the Library’s John W. Kluge Center.
Finally in 1950, the Air Force created a larger organization, the Air Research and Development Command. The House finally passed the Senate bill that had been passed the year before, and the president signed the bill, establishing the National Science Foundation. So in that five-year gap, what we saw was the creation of a number of military, Department of Defense organizations for science and scientific research, and the final NSF bill contained no mandate for military research for the National Science Foundation.
So, what are its legacy organizations? A number of federal agencies can trace their origins back to the OSRD. National Science Foundation, of course, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Development and Engineering, or, and Evaluation Command, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, DTRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, DARPA, of course, and in the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is the custodian of atomic stockpile. - Daniel Else, "Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex", 2017
Some of Vannevar Bush’s greatest official honors
One of Vannevar Bush’s PhD students at MIT was Frederick Terman, who was later instrumental in the development of “Silicon Valley”.
DR. HEIKO SCHÖNING: THE STAGE FOR THE DARK WINTER HAS BEEN SET WITH THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS FROM 2001. There was even an Event201 for the Anthrax attacks. It was called “The Dark Winter”
The Dark Winter exercise was the collaborative effort of 4 organizations. John Hamre of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) initiated and conceived of an exercise wherein senior former officials would respond to a bioterrorist induced national security crisis. Tara O’Toole and Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services, Inc., (ANSER) were the principal designers, authors, and controllers of Dark Winter. Sue Reingold of CSIS managed administrative and logistical arrangements. General Dennis Reimer of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) provided funding for Dark Winter.
Preparing homeland security professionals through scenario-based simulations and exercises on key issues.
Steadfast Resolve
The Steadfast Resolve exercise was planned to address the concern that poorly designed government response to the next terrorist attack could disrupt America’s economy and society as much or more than the attack itself. This concern is particularly relevant in the context of an attack that may be harmful, but not catastrophic.
In the event of a next attack, government officials will be under enormous pressure to respond swiftly, more than likely with limited information about the status of the attack or what to expect next. In today’s news cycle, the public – and the situation – will demand a swift and decisive response perhaps before exactly what is happening becomes clear. Confusion, indecision, or false starts at government’s highest levels will be magnified and may have long-lasting ramifications. Getting it wrong will be easier than getting it right. As the Hurricane Katrina experience has demonstrated, a lack of situational awareness, understanding of current plans, and an absence of effective decisionmaking tools can lead to disaster.
Dark Winter: Bioterrorism Simulation Exercise
In the summer of 2001, a group of senior-level officials, including Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, David Gergen, and James Woolsey, participated in an executive level simulation. Dark Winter simulated a U.S. National Security Council meeting at which senior officials were confronted with a smallpox attack on the United States. The exercise illustrated the issues to be addressed in the event of a bioterrorism crisis, including the challenges facing state and local governments, the role and responsiveness of the federal government, and the likely friction spots between federal- and state-level responders and responses.
Coming as it did before the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent anthrax attacks, Dark Winter generated an enormous amount of interest in both the public policy community and the media. CSIS briefed Vice President Dick Cheney, then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, then FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh, over 80 members of Congress, senior government officials and leaders, including approximately 20 ambassadors to the United States, and senior government officials from Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Besides raising public awareness of the bioterrorism threat, these briefings contributed to the Bush administration’s decision to manufacture 300 million doses of the smallpox vaccine.
Silent Vector: A Critical Energy Infrastructure Simulation Exercise
The events of September 11 and additional intelligence on al Qaeda demonstrate the potential for an attack against the infrastructure of the United States. To face this challenge, CSIS developed an executive-level simulation focusing on U.S. critical energy infrastructure. The exercise took place in October 2002 and employed a simulated National Security Council of senior policymakers with former senator Sam Nunn, now chairman of CSIS’s Board of Trustees, serving as scenario president.
Silent Vector was designed to simulate possible U.S. reaction to a credible threat of terrorist attack when there is not sufficient information for effective protection. The overall purpose of the exercise was to assist the administration and Congress in their attempts to improve the effectiveness of response during the pre-attack phase of a major terrorist incident. Silent Vector challenged current and former senior government leaders to respond to increasingly credible and specific intelligence indicating the possibility of a large-scale attack against critical energy and energy-related infrastructure on the East Coast of the United States.
Black Dawn: A Scenario-Based Exercise on Catastrophic Terrorism
Organized under the auspices of the Strengthening the Global Partnership project by CSIS and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Black Dawn gathered approximately 55 current and former senior officials and experts from the European Council, the European Commission, NATO, 15 member states, and various international organizations to grapple with the challenges associated with preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by terrorists.
The exercise aimed to develop a set of actionable recommendations for the EU, NATO and individual European governments to prevent terrorists from acquiring and using WMD. The exercise was designed to energize discussion and debate as various European countries and institutions entered into their policy and budget deliberations. The central question animating the exercise was this: In hindsight, what could we have done to prevent terrorists from acquiring WMD and conducting such an attack? And what more can and should we do now?
The exercise concluded with several lessons learned: the threat of WMD terrorism is real; it could happen in Europe; prevention is the best option; we can take concrete steps to significantly reduce the risk of terrorists acquiring nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; Europe has a leadership role to play; and we need to act now.
Simon Chair BlogCommentaries on U.S. relations with countries in the Western Hemisphere – focusing on international political economy, trade, investment, energy, and other current events.
A “Dark Winter” for Public Health: Meet Homeland Security’s New Bioterror Czarina
by Tom Burghardt / August 24th, 2009
In the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks, successive U.S. administrations have pumped some $57 billion across 11 federal agencies and departments into what is euphemistically called “biodefense.” Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2005, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader William Frist, a Bushist acolyte, baldly stated that “The greatest existential threat we have in the world today is biological” and predicted that “an inevitable bioterror attack” would come “at some time in the next 10 years.”
Later that year, Frist and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) covertly inserted language into the 2006 Defense Appropriations bill (H.R. 2863) that granted legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers, even in cases of willful misconduct. It was signed into law by President Bush.
According to Public Citizen and The New York Times, Frist and Hastert benefited financially from their actions; the pair, as well as 41 other congressmen and senators owned as much as $16 million in pharmaceutical stock. revealed that “the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) is purported to be the key author of the language additions. This trade association represents virtually all major vaccine manufacturers.”
The Senate Majority Leader’s alarmist jeremiad at Davos was seconded by Dr. Tara O’Toole who added, “This [bioterrorism] is one of the most pressing problems we have on the planet today.”
Really? Not grinding poverty, global warming or the lack of access by hundreds of millions of impoverished workers and farmers to clean water, an adequate diet, health care or relief from epidemic levels of preventable diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis or diarrhea, but “bioterrorism” as narrowly defined by securocrats and their academic accomplices.
But Dr. Victor W. Sidel, a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and an outspoken critic of the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex challenged O’Toole’s hysterical paradigm.
Sidel made the point that there is a fundamental conflict between the state’s national security goals and health care providers’ professional responsibilities to patients. He wrote in 2003 that “military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies and personnel have long histories of secrecy and deception that are contrary to the fundamental health principles of transparency and truthfulness. They may therefore be unsuitable partners for public health agencies that need to justify receiving the public’s trust.”
In this context, the choice of O’Toole as the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Undersecretary of Science and Technology is troubling to say the least. As former CEO and Director of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, critics charge that O’Toole’s appointment will be nothing short of a disaster.
No ordinary policy wonk with an impressive résumé and years as a government insider, O’Toole is a key player advocating for the expansion of dual-use biological weapons programs rebranded as biodefense.
Subverting the Biological Weapons Convention
The resuscitation of American bioweapons programs are facilitated by their secretive and highly-classified nature. Under cover of academic freedom or intellectual property rights, the U.S. Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex has largely been outsourced by the state to private companies and contractors at top American corporations and universities.
Efforts to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) by the inclusion of verification language into the treaty and regular inspection of suspect facilities by international experts have been shot-down since 2001 by the Bush and now, the Obama administrations. Why?
Primarily because the United States view onsite measures as a threat to the commercial proprietary information of multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as well as to America’s reputedly “defensive” biological programs; initiatives that continue to work with nature’s most dangerous and deadly pathogens.
In fact, the problem of the dual-use nature of such research is a conundrum facing critics who challenge the break-neck expansion of concealed weapons programs. Simply put, military activities can be disguised as commercial research to develop medical countermeasures without anyone, least of all the American people, being any the wiser.
Highly-trained microbiologists deployed across a spectrum of low-key companies, trained for academic, public health, or commercial employment are part of the dual-use problem. Who’s to say whether scientists who genetically-manipulate pathogens or create Frankenstein-like chimera disease organisms (say, synthesized Marburg or Ebola virus as has already been done with poliovirus in a U.S. lab) are engaged in treaty-busting weapons research or the development of life-saving measures.
And what about the accidental, or more sinisterly, the deliberate release of some horrific new plague by a scientist who’s “gone rogue”? As researcher Edward Hammond pointed out:
British researchers pled guilty in 2001 to charges that they improperly handled a genetically engineered hybrid of the viruses causing hepatitis C and dengue fever. British authorities characterized the virus as “more lethal than HIV”. ‘Dengatitis’ was deliberately created by researchers who wanted to use fewer laboratory animals in a search for a vaccine for Hepatitis C. Under unsafe laboratory conditions, the researchers created and nearly accidentally released a new hybrid human disease whose effects, fortunately, remain unknown; but which may have displayed different symptoms than its parents and thus been difficult to diagnose, and have required a new, unknown treatment regime. (Emerging Technologies: Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons, The Sunshine Project, Background Paper No. 12, November 2003)
A new report by the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation has charged that despite restrictions under the BWC prohibiting the development, production, stockpiling and use of weaponized disease agents such as anthrax, smallpox or plague, as well as equipment and delivery systems intended for offensive use, the rapid growth of “biodefense and research programs over the last decade” has placed “new pressure” on efforts to curb the development of banned weapons listed in the treaty.
In an interview with Global Security Newswire Gerald Epstein, a senior fellow with the hawkish Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) told the publication, “When one is doing bioresearch and biodefense, one has to be careful to not overstep the treaty itself.”
He cited the U.S biodefense effort Project Bacchus–an investigation by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to determine whether it was possible to build a bioweapons production facility using readily available equipment–as an instance where questions were raised if the treaty had been violated.
The type of biodefense activity that is most likely to raise questions regarding treaty compliance is “threat assessment,” the process of determining what type of biological attacks are most likely to occur, he told Global Security Newswire. A dangerous biological agent could inadvertently be developed during such research, Epstein said. (Martin Matishak, “Biodefense Research Could Violate Weapons Convention, Report Warns,” Global Security Newswire, August 20, 2009)
But Pentagon bioweaponeers did more than build “a bioweapons productions facility using readily available equipment.” They built banned weapons. According to Jeanne Guillemin, author of Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, the Pentagon and CIA made and tested a model of a Soviet anthrax bomb and created an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax.
After consulting with scientists who strongly suggested that the CIA anthrax bomb project would violate the BWC, “CIA lawyers decided the project was within the allowed realm of defensive research,” Guillemin revealed. Project Clear Vision, a joint investigation by the CIA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, under contract to the Agency, reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test its dissemination characteristics. The Agency “decided the same” for the small, fully functional bioweapons facility built under the rubric of Project Bacchus.
The third initiative, Project Jefferson, led to the development of an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax based on a Soviet model. After the outgoing Clinton administration hesitated to give the CIA the go-ahead for the project, the Bush regime’s National Security Council gave the Pentagon permission. “They believed” Guillemin wrote, “the Pentagon had the right to investigate genetically altered pathogens in the name of biodefense, ‘to save American lives’.”
Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon authorized the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), one of the most secretive and heavily-outsourced Defense Department branches, to re-create the deadly anthrax strain.
What the scope of these programs are today is currently unknown. We do know however, that based on available evidence the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department and the oxymoronic Intelligence Community, using the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a cover, continue to investigate the feasibility of transforming nature’s most deadly pathogens into weapons.
In close coordination, the United States government and their outsourced corporate partners are spending billions of dollars on research and simulation exercises, dubbed “disaster drills” by a compliant media, to facilitate this grisly trade.
Secrecy and Deceit
That the official bioterror narrative is a preposterous fiction and swindle as even the FBI was forced to admit during its much-maligned Amerithrax investigation, is hardly worth a second glance by corporate media beholden to the pharmaceutical industry for advertising revenue; call it business as usual here in the heimat.
As we now know, the finely-milled anthrax powder which killed five people and shut down representative government didn’t come from the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al Qaeda, but rather from deep within America’s own Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex, to wit, from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Ft. Detrick in Maryland. But such troublesome and inconvenient truths are barely worth a mention by “respectable” media, e.g. the corporate stenographers who sold two imperialist military adventures to the American people.
Indeed, a credible case can be made that without the anthrax attacks, the fear levels gripping the country in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist events–and the subsequent clamp-down that followed, from the USA Patriot Act to the indefinite detention and torture of “terrorism” suspects, and from warrantless wiretapping to the demonization of dissent–may very well have been impossible.
It is difficult not to conclude that from the beginning of the affair, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax terrorist(s) to draw a straight line between 9/11 and the anthrax mailings. From there, it was but a short step to stitching-up a case for “regime change” in Iraq. The media’s role in this criminal enterprise was indispensable for what Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has called“the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade.” As Greenwald points out,
During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax–tests conducted at Ft. Detrick–revealed that the anthrax sent to [former Senator Tom] Daschle contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since–as ABC variously claimed–bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.” (Glenn Greenwald, “Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News,” Salon, August 1, 2008)
Despite ABC News’ claims that their information came from “four well-placed and separate sources,” they were fed information that was patently false; as Greenwald avers, “No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.”
And as we will shortly explore below, the dubious “Dark Winter” and “Atlantic Storm” bioterror exercises designed by Dr. Tara O’Toole freely drew from the neocon’s sinister playbook, right down to the weaponized smallpox supplied to al Qaeda by Saddam.
Whether or not one buys the current permutation of the “lone nut” theory, this one alleges that Dr. Bruce Ivins, a vaccine specialist employed by USAMRIID, was the anthrax mailer; the fact is, when all is said and done the attacks, to use a much over-hyped phrase, were an inside job.
And like other “lone nuts” who have entered the parapolitical frame at their own peril, Ivins isn’t around to refute the charges.
The Alliance for Biosecurity: Insiders with a Mission and (Very) Deep Pockets
Before being pegged by the Obama administration to head DHS’s Science and Technology division where she will oversee the department’s billion dollar budget, with some 45 percent of it going towards chemical and bioweapons defense, O’Toole, as previously mentioned, was the CEO and Director of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, a satrapy which describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to improving the country’s resilience to major biological threats.”
How “independent”? You make the call!
According to their web site The Alliance for Biosecurity is “a collaboration among the Center for Biosecurity and 13 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies whose mission is to work in the public interest to improve prevention and treatment of severe infectious diseases–particularly those diseases that present global security challenges.”
Alliance partners include the usual suspects: Bavarian Nordic; Center for Biosecurity of UPMC; Cangene Corporation; DOR BioPharma, Inc.; DynPort Vaccine Company LLC, a CSC company; Elusys Therapeutics, Inc.; Emergent BioSolutions; Hematech, Inc., a subsidiary of Kyowa Kirin; Human Genome Sciences, Inc.; NanoViricides, Inc.; Pfizer Inc.; PharmAthene; Siga Technologies, Inc.; Unither Virology LLC, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics Corporation. Rounding out this rogues gallery are associate members, the spooky Battelle Medical Research and Evaluation Facility and the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute.
Among the chief activities of the Alliance is lobbying Congress for increased funding for the development of new drugs deemed “countermeasures” under the Project BioShield Act of 2004, previously described by Antifascist Calling as a particularly grotesque piece of Bushist legislative flotsam.
The Alliance avers that “the United States faces unprecedented risks to national security … by the clear and growing danger of bioterrorism or a destabilizing infectious disease pandemic,” and that “our nation’s vulnerability to biothreats is so severe” due to the fact that “most of the vaccines and medicines that will be needed to protect our citizens do not now exist.” Therefore, countermeasures needed to mitigate nebulous biothreats never spelled out once in the group’s literature “will likely require several years and several hundred million dollars each to successfully develop and produce.” (emphasis added)
An Alliance report, The State of Biosecurity in 2008 and Proposals for a Public/Private Pathway Forward, charts a course for “improving and accelerating” efforts to “develop medical countermeasures (MCMs) for the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile (SNS).”
Under the Project Bioshield Act of 2004, Congress authorized $5.6 billion over ten years “to purchase MCMs for the SNS.” Funds were allocated for the procurement of the anthrax vaccine as well as for “therapeutic antibodies for inhalational anthrax, a botulism heptavalent antitoxin, a smallpox vaccine, and several products for radiological and nuclear threats, obligating a total of about $1.9 billion of the $5.6 billion BioShield fund.”
In 2006 as I noted previously, Congress created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). BARDA was authorized to spend some $1.07 billion over three years for MCMs, “only $201 million has been provided by Congress through FY 2008″ noted the Alliance, “approximately one-fifth of the authorized level.”
According to an “independent economic analysis” carried out by (who else!) the Alliance’s academic partner, the Center for Biosecurity, “it would require $3.4 billion in FY 2009 to support one year of advanced development.”
“Similarly” according to the organization, “the original appropriation of $5.6 billion for Project BioShield is equally insufficient to ensure that once MCMs are developed there will be funds available to procure them and maintain the stockpile.” Indeed, “this level of funding would need to be sustained for many years.” You can bet however, that Alliance lobbyists are busy as proverbial bees in pressuring Congress to fork over the dough!
The report state’s that Alliance goals necessarily entail instilling “a sense of urgency … with Congress” by hyping the “bioterror threat.” But there’s much more here than a simple cynical exercise at preparing the “public diplomacy” ground through academic and industry “message force multipliers” that will enable Congress to shower Big Pharma with a veritable tsunami of cash. A “risk-tolerant culture” should be promoted within BARDA, one that “understands the realities, risks, timelines, and costs of drug development.”
The “risks” to whom and for what purpose are not enumerated, but one can be certain that a “risk-tolerant culture” crafted by industry insiders will come at the expense of the health and safety of the American people, one that pushes potential legal liability should things head south onto the taxpaying public.
The stealth nature of Alliance recommendations are clearly spelled out when they aver that “stakeholders” should “focus more on the potential biothreats and the corresponding countermeasures, rather than the price tag” and that BARDA, ostensibly a public agency, should be packed with insiders “who have drug development and manufacturing experience.” This will lead to the development of “a culture that is focused on partnering with industry and academia.”
But the bottom line as always, is the corporatist bottom line for Alliance shareholders! How else can one interpret their statement that emerging “biothreats” are all the more dire today now that “interest of the public and private capital markets in biodefense has declined over the last 2-3 years.” What better way then, to beef-up those sagging capital markets than to install an industry-friendly individual at DHS with a documented track record of overplaying the “bioterror threat.”
Dark Winter
O’Toole was the principal designer of two “tabletop” bioterror preparedness drills, the 2001 Dark Winter exercise and the 2005 Atlantic Storm run-through; both were criticized by scientific experts as fabrications of an alleged threat of a smallpox attack mounted by al Qaeda.
Reviewing Milton Leitenberg’s 2005 report, Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat, published the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, protein chemist Dr. Eric Smith wrote the following:
Of note is Leitenberg’s dissection of the process of assessment as practiced through bioterrorism threat scenarios conducted by the US government and private think tanks. Exercises like Dark Winter, which modeled an “aerosolized” smallpox attack, Top Off 2 and 3, both on pneumonic plague strikes, and Atlantic Storm, an exercise that purported to show an al Qaida group manufacturing a dry powder smallpox weapon, were rigged. In the cases of Dark Winter and the Top Offs, transmission rates of disease were sexed up beyond historical averages so that “a disastrous outcome was assured” no matter any steps taken to contain outbreaks. Eight pages are reserved to pointedly condemn the Atlantic Storm exercise on a host of sins which can generally be described as a bundle of frank lies and misinformation coupled with a claimed terrorist facility for making smallpox into a weapon that even state run biological warfare operations did not possess. And once again, juiced transmission rates of disease were employed to grease theoretical calamity. The reader comes to recognize the deus ex machina–a concoction or intervention added to dictate an outcome, in these cases very bad ones–as a regular feature of the exercises. However, the results of the same assessments–the alleged lessons learned–have never been reported with much, if any, skepticism in the media. (Eric Smith, “A Vaccine for the Hype: Milton Leitenberg’s new ‘Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat,” Global Security, National Security Notes, March 31, 2006)
In criticizing “the fancy that such attacks are easy and one of the most catastrophic threats faced by the American people,” Smith denounces the alarmist scenarios of Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm’s designers–people like Dr. Tara O’Toole and the coterie of industry insiders and other well-paid “experts”–as guilty of perpetrating a massive “fraud … and a substantial one” on the American people.
While one of Atlantic Storm’s architects proclaimed “this is not science fiction” and that “the age of Bioterror is now…” Leitenberg and Smith denounce O’Toole’s spurious claims as “not the least bit plausible.”
Leitenberg wrote that “well before October-November 2001, the spectre of ‘bioterrorism’ benefitted from an extremely successful sales campaign.” Indeed, hyped-up scenarios such as Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm that place “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of shadowy, intelligence-linked terror outfits like al Qaeda provided “inflated predictions that … were certainly not realistic. Much worse, in addition to being wrong, inflated predictions were counterproductive. They induced interest in BW in the wrong audiences.”
But the implausible nature of the scenarios deployed in national exercises hardly prohibited the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex from concocting scarecrow-like straw men designed to sow terror amongst the American people while extracting regular infusions of cash from Congress.
Among the eight exercises analyzed by Leitenberg between 1998-2005, he found that each and every one were fraudulently designed and the threat of bioterrorism had been framed as a rationalization for “political action, the expenditure of public funds for bioterrorism prevention and response programs,” that could “not occur without it.” This is “not benign,” Leitenberg concludes.
A second consequence of sexed-up “bioterror” drills have even more ominous implications for the immediate future. Because of national security state perceptions that mitigation of catastrophic bioterrorism is of supreme importance for national survival–perceptions reinforced by academic, corporate and militarist peddlers of crisis–”the US biodefense research program appears to be drifting into violation” of the Biological Weapons Convention. This is a menacing development and has happened, I would argue precisely because the evaluation process which justifies research into biological weapons threat capabilities and scenarios, are repackaged to conceal the offensive thrust of this research as wholly defensive in nature, which it certainly is not.
How else would one explain ongoing research funded by the National Institutes of Health to study botulism toxin, “with the added qualification” Smith points out, that because the protein toxin is “unstable, therefore there will be collaboration with other researchers to stabilize it.” The NIH grant “means preparing a much more effective botulinum toxin than had been available before.”
Smith goes on to cite “another problematical breakout” offered by two scientists to study the “aerobiological” characteristics of the lethal Marburg and Ebola viruses. How this is “defensive” in nature, in keeping with research restrictions under the Biological Weapons Convention, is another instance of a backdoor move to kick-start illicit bioweapons development.
According to Smith, the study “looks to define how the organisms can be aerosolized, an instance of research into examining vulnerability in the complete absence of a verified threat.” But I would argue that showering taxpayers dollars into such dark and troubling research tributaries deploy hyped-up threats as cover for the development of illegal weapons.
When her nomination was announced in May, Rutgers University and homeland security critic Richard Ebright told Wired,
“This is a disastrous nomination. O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush Administration. O’Toole is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney. It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position.”
“She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of government, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security,” he adds. “She makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” (Noah Shachtman, “DHS’ New Geek Chief is a Bioterror ‘Disaster,’ Critics Charge,” Wired, May 6, 2009)
And Dr. Smith told Wired that exercises designed by O’Toole and her colleagues show her to be “the top academic/salesperson for the coming of apocalyptic bioterrorism which has never quite arrived.”
As noted above, “[She’s] most prominent for always lobbying for more money for biodefense, conducting tabletop exercises on bioterrorism for easily overawed public officials, exercises tweaked to be horrifying,” Smith told Wired.
But Smith goes even further and denounces O’Toole as an industry shill who “has never obviously appeared to examine what current terrorist capabilities have been… in favor of extrapolating how easy it would be to launch bioterror attacks if one had potentially unlimited resources and scientific know-how.” It’s a “superb appointment if you’re in the biodefense industry and interested in further opportunity and growth.”
“Alternatively” Smith avers, O’Toole’s appointment is “a disaster if threat assessment and prevention” has “some basis in reality.”
Not that any of this matters in Washington. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee led by “independent Democrat” and arch neocon Sen. Joseph Lieberman, voted to send her nomination to the full Senate July 29.
Never mind that the deadly weaponized pathogen employed in the attacks didn’t originate in some desolate Afghan cave or secret underground bunker controlled by Saddam.
And never mind that the principal cheerleaders for expanding state-funded programs are Pentagon bioweaponeers, private corporations and a shadowy nexus of biosecurity apparatchiks who stand to make a bundle under current and future federal initiatives.
Leading the charge for increased funding is the Alliance for Biosecurity, a collaborative venture between the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Big Pharma.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His articles are published in many venues. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning
Bioweapon manufacturing and trading is ‘biodefense’. Guess who does the bioterrorism that sells the ‘biodefense’. Deleted article ARCHIVED HERE
Soviet scientists reportedly used newly developed genetic engineering techniques to create vaccine-subverting and antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, and smallpox for attacks against military forces and civilian populations (Bozheyeva et al. 1999, Alibek and Handelman 2000)
TRUMP: WE’RE MOBILIZING THE MILITARY TO DELIVER THE CORONAVIRUS VACCINE END OF 2020Dr Sharad S. Chauhan is a decorated Indian Police Service (IPS) officer awarded the Prime Minister’s baton and the Home Minister’s Revolver. He is also a Gold Medallist MBBS Doctor from Delhi University with a PhD in Bioterrorism. He also authored the book Biological Weapons. SOURCE
The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. Alexeter Technologies LLC, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc., Altimmune Inc., ANP Technologies Inc., Bavarian Nordic AS, Cleveland BioLabs Inc., Elusys Therapeutics Inc., Emergent BioSolutions Inc., General Dynamics Corp., and GlaxoSmithKline Plc are some of the major market participants. Although the rising prevalence of infectious disease and rapid increase in government funding in R&D will offer immense growth opportunities, to leverage the current opportunities, market vendors must strengthen their foothold in the fast-growing segments, while maintaining their positions in the slow-growing segments.
In an exclusive interview, Dr. Boyle touches upon GreatGameIndia‘s exclusive report Coronavirus Bioweapon – where we reported in detail how Chinese Biowarfare agents working at the Canadian lab in Winnipeg were involved in the smuggling of Coronavirus to Wuhan’s lab from where it is believed to have been leaked.
In this bombshell interview (full transcript below), Boyle talks about:
How the Deep State deployed anthrax on US soil to whip up publicity about biological weapons and increase funding for bioweapons labs
Why the WHO and CDC are both criminal organizations which are complicit in the covert development of biological weapons
The “death science” industry and why the US government has spent over $100 billion developing self-replicating weapons
Details about the Pirbright Institute and its ties to bioweapons, depopulation, vaccines and coronavirus patents. (It’s partially funded by Bill & Melinda Gates)
Why all BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs in the world should be banned and shut down.
Full transcript
Geopolitics and Empire: Geopolitics & Empire is joined by Dr. Francis Boyle, who is international law professor at the University of Illinois. We’ll be discussing the Wuhan coronavirus and biological warfare. He’s served as counsel to numerous governments such as Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Palestinian authority. He’s represented numerous national international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy, and biowarfare. He’s written numerous books, one of my favorites being “Destroying Libya and World Order”, which I assigned as mandatory reading material for my own students when I taught at the Monterrey Institute of Technology.
But most important for this interview, he’s written a book called “Biowarfare and Terrorism”, and drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the biological weapons convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was approved unanimously by both houses of the US Congress and signed into law by President Bush. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Boyle.
Dr. Francis Boyle: Wow. Thank you so much for having me on and thanks for that kind introduction.
Geopolitics and Empire: Now let’s get to what’s been on the news recently. This coronavirus in Wuhan. There have been some reports recently, there’s a really interesting website called GreatGameIndia that has been reporting on this. They’ve been talking about China, which they say has been complying with biological weapons convention in recent years.
But then there are some people in the US and experts that have been saying that in reality, China isn’t complying with the weapons convention. And I think neither, perhaps the US as well. I’m wondering if China is developing its own biosafety level four lab in Wuhan and elsewhere, as you know, as a type of deterrence. Is it a type of a biological arms race that we have going on?
You told me in an email that you suspect China was developing the coronavirus as a dual use of biowarfare weapons agent. Also, what do you make of reports that Chinese scientists have been stealing research and viruses, including the coronavirus from a Canadian bio lab this past December?
And as well, Chinese nationals have been charged with smuggling vials of biological research to China from the US with the aid of Charles Lieber who was the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department. And he also happens to be in 2011 a strategic scientist at Wuhan University. So, can you tell us what’s going on with this recent outbreak in Wuhan?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, that’s a lot of questions. I guess we can take them one at a time, but if you just do a very simple Google search on “Does China have a BSL-4 laboratory?”, Wuhan comes up right away. It’s at the top of the list. That’s all with the moment this type of thing happened I began to do that. So a BSL-4 is the most serious type. And basically BSL-4 labs, we have many of them here in the United States, are used to develop offensive biological warfare weapons with DNA genetic engineering.
So it does seem to me that the Wuhan BSL-4 is the source of the coronavirus. My guess is that they were researching SARS, and they weaponize it further by giving it a gain of function properties, which means it could be more lethal.
Indeed, the latest report now is it’s a 15% fatality rate, which is more than SARS at 83% infection rate. A typical gain of function travels in the air so it could reach out maybe six feet or more from someone emitting a sneeze or a cough. Likewise, this is a specially designated WHO research lab. The WHO was in on it and they knew full well what was going on there.
Yes. It’s also been reported that Chinese scientists stole coronavirus materials from the Canadian lab at Winnipeg. Winnipeg is Canada’s formal center for research, developing, testing, biological warfare weapons. It’s along the lines of Fort Detrick here in the United States of America. I have three degrees from Harvard. It would not surprise me if something was being stolen out of Harvard to turn over to China. I read that report. I don’t know what was in those vials one way or the other.
But the bottom line is I drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention that was approved unanimously by both Houses in the United States Congress signed into law by President Bush Sr. that it appears the coronavirus that we’re dealing with here is an offensive biological warfare weapon that leaped out of Wuhan BSL-4. I’m not saying it was done deliberately. But there had been previous reports of problems with that lab and things leaking out of it. I’m afraid that is what we are dealing with today.
Geopolitics and Empire: We’ll be talking about the Wuhan and the coronavirus and China, but can you give us kind of like a bigger context. I know you’ve, previously, in interviews said that since 9/11, you think that the US has spent $100 billion on biological warfare research. We know the Soviet Union, if I’m not mistaken, developed anthrax as a bioweapon. And you’ve also mentioned that UK, France, Israel and China are all involved in biological warfare weapons research.
And something interesting, I believe one or two years ago a Bulgarian journalist and the Russian government shared their concern of the discovery of a US bioweapons lab in the country of Georgia. You’ve commented how in Africa, US has set up bioweapons labs to work on Ebola, which I think is illegal under international law. But they were allowed somehow to put those in Africa. Can you give us like a bigger picture? What’s going on with these different countries and what’s the purpose of this research?
Dr. Francis Boyle:All these BSL-4 labs are by United States, Europe, Russia, China, Israel are all there to research, develop, test biological warfare agents. There’s really no legitimate scientific reason to have BSL-4 labs. That figure I gave $100 billion, that was about 2015 I believe. I had crunched the numbers and came up with that figure the United States since 9/11.
To give you an idea that’s as much in constant dollars as the US spent to develop the Manhattan Project and the atom bomb. So it’s clearly all weapons related. We have well over 13,000 alleged life science scientists involved in research developed testing biological weapons here in the United States. Actually this goes back it even precedes 9/11 2001.
I have another book, The Future of International Law and American Foreign Policy, tracing that all the way back to the Reagan administration under the influence of the neocons and they got very heavily involved in research development testing of biological weapons with DNA genetic engineers. It was because of that I issued my plea in 1985 in a Congressional briefing sponsored by the Council for Responsible Genetics, I’m a lawyer for them. They’re headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. All the MIT, Harvard people are involved in that, the principal ones. And then they asked me to draft the implementing legislation.
The implementing legislation that I drafted was originally designed to stop this type of work. “Death science work”, I call it, “by the United States government”. After 9/11, 2001, it just completely accelerated. My current figure, that last figure a 100 billion. I haven’t had a chance to re-crunch the numbers because I just started classes. But you have to add in about another 5 billion per year.
Basically, this is offensive biological weapons raised by the United States government and with its assistance in Canada and Britain. And so other States, the world have responded accordingly including Russia and China. They were going to set up a whole series of BSL-4 facilities as well. And you know Wuhan was the first. It backfired on them.
Geopolitics and Empire: Would you basically consider what happened and Wuhan and just boil it down to ineptitude or incompetence on the Chinese part?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, it’s criminality. It does appear they stole something there from Winnipeg. This activity that they engaged in clearly violates the Biological Weapons Convention. Research development of biological weapons these days is an international crime, the use of it would be. That was criminal.
I’m not saying they deliberately inflicted this on their own people, but it leaked out of there and all these BSL-4 facilities leak. Everyone knows that who studies this. So this was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Unfortunately, it happened. The Chinese government under Xi and his comrades there have been covering this up from the get-go. The first reported case was December 1, so they’d been sitting on this until they couldn’t anymore. And everything they’re telling you is a lie. It’s propaganda.
The WHO still refuses to declare a global health emergency. It said Tedros was over there shaking hands with Xi and smiling and yanking it up. The WHO was in on it. They’ve approved many of these BSL-4 labs., they know exactly what’s going on and that is a WHO research-approved laboratory. They know what’s going on too. You can’t really believe anything the WHO is telling you about this, either they’re up to their eyeballs in it, in my opinion.
Geopolitics and Empire: I’d probably agree with you that this outbreak in Wuhan was an accidental leak from the laboratory. But just your thoughts, it’s happening at quite an opportune time because namely we’re smack in the middle of a US-China new Cold War, which is currently characterized by economic warfare such as the trade war among other forms of hybrid and technological warfare. And it seems the Wuhan outbreak will likely hit the Chinese economy hard. The Chinese are flat out dismissing any idea that the US is involved in. Like I said, it’s probably they made the mistakes in the Wuhan lab. What are your thoughts of any seemingly, this would benefit the US…
Dr. Francis Boyle: When the outbreak occurred, of course I considered that alternative too. When you have an outbreak, you’re never quite sure who or what is behind it. It certainly isn’t bats, that’s ridiculous. They made the same argument on Ebola in West Africa. I demolished that online. You can check it out. So I kept competing theories about this.
But right now, when you originally contacted me, I said I wasn’t prepared to comment because I was weighing the evidence. I’m a law professor and a lawyer, I try to do the best I can to weigh the evidence. But right now, the Wuhan BSL-4 in my opinion is the most likely source, apply Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation. I’m not ruling out some type of sabotage. But right now, I believe that is the source here.
Geopolitics and Empire: And you mentioned WHO. I’d like to just get your thoughts on the WHO and the Big Pharma. There’s also some analysts who are downplaying this news media hype of the coronavirus. You’ve just said that it seems to be lethal, but if we go back a decade to the 2009 swine flu, which I believe didn’t have too many casualties, but I think profited greatly the pharmaceutical companies. If I recall that back in 2009, many countries purchased great stocks of the vaccines and they ended up not using anywhere from 50 to 80% of the vaccines that they purchased.
You’ve previously stated in an interview that the World Health Organization is a front for Big Pharma if I’m not mistaken. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also agrees and he says, you know, 50% of WHO funding comes from pharmaceutical companies. And that the CDC itself is also severely compromised. What are your thoughts on the WHO? The CDC?
Dr. Francis Boyle:Can’t trust anything the WHO says because they’re all bought and paid for by Big Pharma and when they work in cahoots with the CDC, which is the United States government, they work in cahoots with Fort Detrick, so you can’t trust any of it.
However, the swine flu and yes, I agree pharma made a lot of money, but that swine flu which I looked at it, it did seem to me to be a genetically modified biological warfare weapon. It was a chimera of three different types of genetic strains that someone put it together in a cocktail. Fortunately, it was not as lethal as all of us fear. So fine. But as I said, this figure I just gave to you was Saturday from Lancet, which is a medical publication, saying it’s a 15% fatality rate and an 83% infection rate. So it’s quite serious, I think, far more serious than the swine flu.
As for big pharma, sure they’re all trying to profit off this today as we speak. There was a big article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, all big pharma trying to peddle whatever they can over there in China even if it’s worthless and won’t help. We do know, if you read the mainstream news media they say there isn’t a vaccine.
Well, there is, it’s by the Pirbright Institute in Britain that’s tied into their biological warfare program over there. They were behind the hoof and mouth disease outbreak over there that wiped out their cattle herd and it leaked out of there. So it’s clear they’re working on a hoof and mouth biological warfare weapon, but the vaccine is there. I have the patent for it here, I haven’t had a chance to read the patent it’s about 25 pages long and my classes just resume. So eventually, I get some free time and I’ll read the patent.
You can’t patent a vaccine with the United States patent office unless the science is there. So there is a vaccine. Everyone’s lying about that, no one’s pointing this out – there’s a vaccine but instead big pharma wants to make money and the researchers say, well, it’ll take three months and we’re racing forward, you know. Everyone’s gonna make a buck off of this, that’s for sure. But there is a vaccine, I have the patent here. It’s been patented by the United States government.
So obviously, I don’t know exactly how workable it is, but it’s a vaccine. I don’t know why it isn’t out there now? Why isn’t someone saying there is a vaccine? Perhaps political leaders have already been vaccinated for all I know, I really don’t know. But there is a vaccine, Pirbright is well known there in Britain and it’s tied into Fort Detrick and CDC is tied into Fort Detrick too. So they all know there’s a patented vaccine.
Geopolitics and Empire: And just to get your comment on, I mean, something to related to this, which was my next question. So I think, I’m not sure if it’s that same Institute that you just mentioned that has the patent. I read somewhere that the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation maybe funds or has some connection to that Institute that has the patent.
Dr. Francis Boyle: I think they do. The Bill & Melinda Gates information, they fund this type of DNA genetically engineered biological warfare work. That’s correct. So you can’t trust anything they’re telling you that somehow they’re out there trying to make the world a better place. I mean, we have Bill Gates publicly admitting that the world be a better place if there were a lot less people. So the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, they are wolves in sheep’s clothing and they are funding this type of stuff. Sure.
Geopolitics and Empire: And just your comment, there was also the report that I guess it was a consortium of companies which included the Gates foundation that back in just two or three months ago in October of 2019 they held a pandemic exercise simulating an outbreak. I mean, what are the chances specifically of a coronavirus and it was called events 201. People can find this online online and they gave a list of seven recommendations for governments and international organizations to take. I also find that kind of interesting how they had this simulation.
Dr. Francis Boyle: That’s correct. It raises that question, the origins of what happened here. But right now, I’m just looking at the evidence I have and applying Occam’s razor and we know that Wuhan BSL-4 was research developing, testing, SARS as a biological warfare agent. So it could have been, they gave it this DNA genetic engineering enhanced properties gain of function which we do here in the West, in the United States all the time. We have all sorts of research that is clearly a bio warfare research that has been approved by the National Institutes of Health, it’s a joke. They know full well they are proving all kinds of biological warfare research and it gets funded by the United States government.
Geopolitics and Empire: And you’ve also mentioned in the email to me that what happened in the biosafety lab level 4 in Wuhan calls into question the safety of all of these level 3and 4four labs around the world.
Dr. Francis Boyle:They’re complete unsafe. BSL-3 and BSL-4 lab are only designed for research development testing of offense of biological warfare agents. In my opinion, they serve no legitimate purpose at all. They should all be shut down, every one of them. Even assuming, they’re simply too dangerous. If you want, there’s an excellent documentary called Anthrax Wars by Nadler and Coen and I’m in there. Repeatedly at the end, I say with respect to these labs, three and four, this is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Well, I’m afraid the catastrophe is now happened. So there it is.
Geopolitics and Empire: Yeah, I was just watching that documentary before we connected and I recommend the listeners go check that out. Do you see, in the future, any countries, if we come to a conflict between US, EU, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia, I mean you name it. Do you see any of these countries actually utilizing these biological weapons? I mean, it’s illegal under international law but we know like in the past that international law isn’t followed. Do you think that there’s a real danger of this escalating?
Dr. Francis Boyle: For sure. That’s the only reason they develop these biological weapons to eventually be used, sure. I mean, it’s like the Manhattan project, we put all that money into developing an atom bomb and even though it was not needed to end world war II they still knew Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, yes, I think that’s correct. And also these can be used covertly. Anytime you see an unexplained sudden outbreak of a disease like this anywhere in the world, both for human beings and or animals, I always suspect the bio warfare agent is at work. I monitor the situation like I did at Wuhan until I can reach a conclusion. Yes, they can be used as the eyes for the United States government, today they are fully prepared, armed, equipped, supplied to wage a biological warfare with anthrax.
These other more exotic things I don’t know, but they have the weapons, there are stockpiles. We have to understand if you read Seymour Martin Hersh’s book published about 1968, he won the Pulitzer prize, he had the whole offensive US biological warfare industry in there back before it was illegal and criminal. Basically after 9/11, 2001, that entire industry – offensive biological warfare industry has been reconstituted here in the United States with all these BSL-4 BSL-3 labs, well over 13,000, alleged scientists sort of like Dr. Mengele working on these things. Other countries have responded in kind like Russia, like China, France is involved, Britain’s involved. Sure.
Geopolitics and Empire: I just wanted to get your thoughts on, in the last few years there was the Russian double agent spy Sergei Skripal who had been allegedly poisoned with Novichok out in Britain and I thought it was funny. It just so happened where he was allegedly poisoned, he was right in Porton down the British bio weapons lab, I guess the world’s first bio weapons lab that was created in 1916. I mean, I don’t know if you have thoughts on that whole incident.
Dr. Francis Boyle: Yeah, I was right down the street from Porton Down, so applying Occam’s razor who you think might’ve been behind this and it was not a nerve agent. A nerve agent would have killed him immediately. This is Novichok. It was something else like DX or something like that. So fine. But, I would just say that I don’t think that was a coincidence, but, you know, there you go. There’s the, obviously there’s a lot of speculation on that.
Geopolitics and Empire: Something else that’s kind of interesting. You’ve written in bio warfare and terrorism in your book and there’s also Graeme Macqueen, I think your colleague who wrote the anthrax deception the case for domestic conspiracy…
Dr. Francis Boyle: Everything you said in there. That’s correct.
Geopolitics and Empire: I’m wondering also if this new war for biotechnological dominance, whatever you want to call it, if it can also be used kind of as a pretext for the centralization of political power and the initiation of wars like I guess it did in the 2003 Iraq war. I mean, is this another danger that we get these events like now this coronavirus and then governments will call for a centralization of greater power and taking away some of our civil liberties?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Sure. If you look at the October, 2001 anthrax attacks here in the United States, that was clearly by elements of the United States government that was behind that. That was a super weapons grade anthrax with a trillion spores per gram and it floated in the air solely a very sophisticated biological weapons lab like Fort Detrick could produce that. And they use that anthrax attack including on Congress to brand through the USA Patriot act which basically turned the United States to a police state which is what we have now. You have to understand the Pentagon, Fort Dietrich made the dugway proving ground still has a stockpile of that super weapons grade anthrax that we saw in October of 2001 that they can use the next time they want to do something like that to further develop the American police thing. Right.
Geopolitics and Empire: Is there anything else you feel important to mention regarding this Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak or biological warfare or any other thoughts you’d like to leave us with?
Dr. Francis Boyle:Well, you just can’t believe anything the Chinese government, the WHO, the CDC are telling. They’re all lies because they know what’s going on here and so you’re going to have to figure it out as fast as you can. But in my opinion, as of this time and I’m fully prepared to consider further evidence on this, it does seem to me that this was a DNA genetically engineered biological warfare agent leaking out of Wuhan that has gain-of-function properties which can make it more lethal. I think they are probably doing something with SARS to make it a lot more lethal and more infectious. And so for that reason, you have to take extreme precautions and they’re now finally admitted anyone within six feet can be infected, whereas with SARS that was about two feet. Well, that’s gaining a function right there and that should be a tip off.
So, I guess you’re gonna have to protect yourself. Laurie Garrett had a pretty good essay in a foreign policy yesterday and she was over there covering the SARS and she has very good advice in there except that she took the SARS figure out two to three feet and said well, you gotta stay to two to three. I think you’ve got to stay at least six feet away because this is gained function. It can flow through the air and infect and it can get you in the eyes. Any orifice, the mouth, maybe the ears, we’re not sure at this point.
Geopolitics and Empire: I’m here on the border of China in Kazakhstan and I was just reading yesterday – today that they’re no longer allowing Chinese citizens into Kazakhstan without a medical paper, a medical check to get their visas to enter Kazakhstan
Dr. Francis Boyle: Those medical checks are worthless because this is just public relations by all the governments involved because there is a 14 day incubation period where people can still be infected. So someone could walk right through a medical inspection and passing a gate into your country and then they come down with the coronavirus. So that’s all public relations in my opinion by governments and they know it and they’re just sending people out there with temperatures and things like that. It’s not like SARS, this is more dangerous than SARS. As I said, I think that Wuhan lab, we know they had SARS in there that they were dealing with and I think they enhanced it at and I’m afraid that’s what we’re dealing with. But you know, I’m keeping an open mind as to what other sources that might have and I wasn’t prepared to say anything until that Wuhan lab is right there and it’s dealing with coronavirus. So again, apply Occam’s razor. It seems to me that’s the simplest explanation here.
Geopolitics and Empire: I guess my, one of my final question would be in the months ahead, apart of what you say staying six feet away from people. I’ve read taking high doses of vitamin C and other things like this can help you. But, if they come out as the situation develops and if it gets worse and they come out with a coronavirus vaccine, should people take it or not? What are your thoughts?
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, what I would say is this. Right now, if you look at the article at the Wall Street Journal, big pharma is trying to sell all sorts of – they’re taking all their drugs off the shelf and say well let’s see if it works. Which is preposterous. Okay. The scientists are saying, well, we can get you a vaccine maybe two to three months but they’re not tested. So what we do know, however, is that Pirbright vaccine has been patented. So all I can assume is that that might work. But I don’t think I’d be taking any of these other vaccines. No, you have no idea what’s in there. You’ll be the Guinea pig for big pharma and everyone figures they’re gonna make a lot of money here. So I’ll keep my eye open on this and how it develop but I wouldn’t trust anything they’re trying to sell right now. They’re just pulling these things off the shelf.
If they do come up with something in two to three months, even that’s not going to be tested in accordance with normal scientific protocol. So it’s going to be a crap shoot. If it’s going to help you, indeed it might not help you because they’ll be using for this vaccines (these DNA genetic engineered vaccines) they’ll be using live coronavirus probably and sticking it in there and giving you some live coronavirus on the theory you’ll develop an immunity. That’s the way a lot of these vaccines worked out, that’s what happened with the Ebola vaccine that created the Ebola pandemic there in West Africa. They were testing out a vaccine on poor black Africans, as usual, and this vaccine had live Ebola in it so it gave them Ebola. So again, I’d be very careful even if they do come up with these vaccines two to three months from now, very careful. Why would you want to inject the live coronavirus in you?
Geopolitics and Empire: All right. I don’t believe you have a strong online presence. How can people best follow your work? I suppose to search for interviews as well as get your books.
Dr. Francis Boyle:Well, basically I’m blackballed and blacklisted off all the mainstream news media here on purpose. As far as I can figure out, the US government gave an order that I should not be interviewed by anyone, so I’m not. I guess you could just put my name in there under Google, Google alert, and some interviews might come up. What happened was, right after the anthrax attacks of 9/11 2001, I was giving a lecture out at Harvard m Alma Mater. I was running a panel on biological warfare for the council for responsible genetics and it was at Harvard Divinity School and as I was going in, there was a Fox camera crew there from Boston and I said it looks to me like this has come out of the US government lab. We know they do research and testing on anthrax. Then I said the same thing there at Harvard then I gave an interview to a radio station in Washington, D C then I gave an interview on that to the BBC. So the whole world saw it and at that point I was completely cut off and I’ve been cut off ever since. So you probably not going to hear too many interviews from me here. As for my book. Biowarfare & Terrorism, you can just get it at amazon.com. That picks up the story pretty much from 9/11 2001 and until it went to press and then there are interviews I’d given to an investigative reporter, Sherwood Ross and a big one I just sent you and you might want to put that on your web page. That was pretty comprehensive.
Geopolitics and Empire: Yeah, I read that as well and I’ll include the link in the description of this interview so people can go check that out. You’re not the only academic I know and have heard of others that similar things have happened and that’s just I guess the price we pay for telling the truth. Again, for listeners, if people wanted to have a broader context and deeper understanding of what’s happening today especially with biological warfare as well as us foreign policy and international affairs, I urge you to get Dr. Francis Boyle’s books and listen to his interviews as well as his colleagues book. Graeme Macqueen, The Anthrax Deception, The Case For Domestic Conspiracy. Thank you for being with us, Dr. Boyle.
Dr. Francis Boyle: Well, thank you and again, please understand these are my current opinions. I could change my opinion here based on more evidence. So I’m just looking at the evidence out there as I see it and you have to understand there is so much disinformation, lies and propaganda that it’s kind of very difficult to distinguish truth from fact. I’m doing the best job I can here.
VINCE JAMES DOES A GREAT JOB EXPLORING THE COMPLEX FROM THE CIA ANGLE AND ARRIVING TO THE SAME BIG PICTRE AND ALL THE GOOD CONCLUSIONS, MUST WATCH ENTIRELY!
The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules.
Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last weekinstructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month after the White House and somefederal agencies expressed mounting concerns over the Defense Department’s attempted manipulation of audiences overseas, according to several defense and administration officials familiar with the matter.
The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations.
The researchers did not specify when the takedowns occurred, but those familiar with the matter said they were within the pasttwo or three years. Some were recent, they said, and involved posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin’s “imperialist” war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict’s direct impact on Central Asian countries. Significantly, they found that the pretend personas — employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China — did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.
Centcom, headquartered in Tampa, has purview over military operations across 21 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Central and South Asia. A spokesman declined to comment.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement that the military’s information operations “support our national security priorities” and must be conducted in compliance with relevant laws and policies. “We are committed to enforcing those safeguards,” he said.
Spokespersons for Facebook and Twitter declined to comment.
According to the researchers’ report, the accounts taken down included a made-up Persian-language media site that shared content reposted from the U.S.-funded Voice of America Farsi and Radio Free Europe. Another, it said, was linked to a Twitter handle that in the past had claimed to operate on behalf of Centcom.
One fake account posted an inflammatory tweet claiming that relatives of deceased Afghan refugees had reported bodies being returned from Iran with missing organs, according to the report. The tweet linked to a video that was part of an article posted on a U.S.-military affiliated website.
Centcom has not commented on whether these accounts were created by its personnel or contractors. If the organ-harvesting tweet is shown to be Centcom’s, one defense official said, it would “absolutely be a violation of doctrine and training practices.”
Independent of the report, The Washington Post has learned that in 2020 Facebook disabled fictitious personas created by Centcom to counter disinformation spread by China suggesting the coronavirus responsible for covid-19 was created at a U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick, Md., according to officials familiar with the matter. The pseudo profiles — active in Facebook groups that conversed in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, the officials said — were used to amplify truthful information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the virus’s origination in China.
The U.S. government’suse of ersatz social mediaaccounts, though authorized by law and policy, has stirred controversy inside the Biden administration, with the White House pressing the Pentagon to clarify and justify its policies. The White House, agencies such as the State Department and even some officials within the Defense Department have been concerned that the policies are too broad, allowing leeway for tactics that even if used to spread truthful information, risk eroding U.S. credibility, several U.S. officials said.
“Our adversaries are absolutely operating in the information domain,” said a second senior defense official. “There are some who think we shouldn’t do anything clandestine in that space. Ceding an entire domain to an adversary would be unwise. But we need stronger policy guardrails.”
A spokeswoman for the National Security Council, which is part of the White House, declined to comment.
Kahl disclosed his review at a virtual meeting convened by the National Security Council on Tuesday, saying he wants to know what types of operations have been carried out, who they’re targeting, what tools are being used and why military commanders have chosen those tactics, and how effective they have been, several officials said.
The message was essentially, “You have to justify to me why you’re doing these types of things,” the first defense official said.
Pentagon policy and doctrine discourage the military from peddling falsehoods, but there are no specific rules mandating the use of truthful information for psychological operations. For instance, the military sometimes employs fiction and satire for persuasion purposes, but generally the messages are supposed to stick to facts, officials said.
In 2020, officers at Facebook and Twitter contacted the Pentagon to raise concerns about the phony accounts they were having to remove, suspicious they were associated with the military. That summer, David Agranovich, Facebook’s director for global threat disruption, spoke to Christopher C. Miller, then assistant director for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict, which oversees influence operations policy, warning him that if Facebook could sniff them out, so could U.S. adversaries, several people familiar with the conversation said.
“His point‚” one person said, “was ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem.’ ”
Before Miller could take action, he was tapped to head a different agency — the National Counterterrorism Center. Then the November election happened and time ran out for the Trump administration to address the matter, although Miller did spend the last few weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency serving as acting defense secretary.
With the rise of Russia and China as strategic competitors, military commanders have wanted to fight back, including online. And Congress supported that. Frustrated with perceived legal obstacles to the Defense Department’s ability to conduct clandestine activities in cyberspace, Congress in late 2019 passed a law affirming that the military could conduct operations in the “information environment” to defend the United States and to push back against foreign disinformation aimed at undermining its interests. The measure, known as Section 1631, allows the military to carry out clandestine psychologic operations without crossing what the CIA has claimed as its covert authority, alleviating some of the friction that had hindered such operations previously.
“Combatant commanders got really excited,” recalled the first defense official. “They were very eager to utilize these new authorities. The defense contractors were equally eager to land lucrative classified contracts to enable clandestine influence operations.”
At the same time, the official said, military leaders were not trained to oversee “technically complex operations conducted by contractors” or coordinate such activities with other stakeholders elsewhere in the U.S. government.
President Biden, right, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, left, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley attend a Pentagon ceremony to remember the victims of 9/11. (Leigh Vogel/Bloomberg)
Last year, with a new administration in place, Facebook’s Agranovich tried again. This time he took his complaint to President Biden’s deputy national security adviser for cyber, Anne Neuberger. Agranovich, who had worked at the NSC under Trump, told Neuberger that Facebook was taking down fake accounts because they violated the company’s terms of service, according to people familiar with the exchange.
The accounts were easily detected by Facebook, which since Russia’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election has enhanced its ability to identify mock personas and sites. In some cases, the company had removed profiles, which appeared to be associated with the military, that promoted information deemed by fact-checkers to be false, said a person familiar with the matter.
Agranovich alsospoke to officials at the Pentagon. His messagewas: “We know what DOD is doing. It violates our policies. We will enforce our policies” and so “DOD should knock it off,” said aU.S. official briefed on the matter.
In response to White House concerns, Kahl ordered a review of Military Information Support Operations, or MISO, the Pentagon’s moniker for psychological operations. A draft concluded that policies, training and oversight all needed tightening, and that coordination with other agencies, such as the State Department and the CIA, needed strengthening, according to officials.
The review also found that while there were cases in which fictitious information was pushed by the military, they were the result of inadequate oversight of contractors and personnel training — not systemic problems, officials said.
Pentagon leadership did little with the review, two officials said, before Graphika and Stanford published their report on Aug. 24, which elicited a flurry of news coverage and questions for the military.
Army psyop graduates receive pins at the end of a field exercise reading “Persuade, Change, Influence.” (Cynthia McIntyre/Fort Hunter Liggett Public Affairs)
The State Department and CIA have been perturbed by the military’s use of clandestine tactics. Officers at State have admonished the Defense Department, “Hey don’t amplify our policies using fake personas, because we don’t want to be seen as creating false grass roots efforts,” the first defense official said.
One diplomat put it this way: “Generally speaking, we shouldn’t be employing the same kind of tactics that our adversaries are using because the bottom line is we have the moral high ground. We are a society that is built on a certain set of values. We promote those values around the world and when we use tactics like those, it just undermines our argument about who we are.”
Psychological operations to promote U.S. narratives overseas is nothing new in the military, but the popularity of western social media across the globehas led to an expansion of tactics, including the use of artificial personas and images — sometimes called “deep fakes.” The logic is that views expressed by what appears to be, say, an Afghan woman or an Iranian student might be more persuasive than if they were openly pushed by the U.S. government.
The majority of the military’s influence operations are overt, promoting U.S. policies in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere under its own name, officials said. And there are valid reasons to use clandestine tactics, such as trying to infiltrate a closed terrorist chat group, they said.
A key issue for senior policymakers now is determining whether the military’s execution of clandestine influence operations is delivering results. “Is the juice worth the squeeze? Does our approach really have the potential for the return on investment we hoped or is it just causing more challenges?” one person familiar with the debate said.
The report by Graphika and Stanford suggests that the clandestine activity did not have much impact. It noted that the “vast majority of posts and tweets” reviewed received “no more than a handful of likes or retweets,” and only 19 percent of the concocted accounts had more than 1,000 followers. “Tellingly,” the report stated, “the two most-followed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a connection to the U.S. military.”
Clandestine influence operations have a role in support of military operations, but it should be a narrow one with “intrusive oversight” by military and civilian leadership, said Michael Lumpkin, a former senior Pentagon official handling information operations policy and a former head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. “Otherwise, we risk making more enemies than friends.”
45 years ago, legendary journalist Carl Bernstein released an investigation documenting how the CIA had managed to infiltrate U.S. and global media. The CIA had placed hundreds of agents into newsrooms and had convinced hundreds more reporters to collaborate with them. These included individuals at some of the most influential outlets, including The New York Times. The CIA needed to do this clandestinely because any attempt to do so openly would harm the effectiveness of the operation and provoke stiff public resistance. But by 2015, there was barely a murmur of disapproval when Reuters announced that it was hiring 33-year veteran CIA manager and director Dawn Scalici as a global director, even when the company announced that her primary responsibility was to “advanc[e] Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. government.”
Facebook, however, is vastly more influential than the New York Times or Reuters, reaching billions of people daily. In that sense, it stands to reason that it would be a prime target of any intelligence organization. It has become so big and ubiquitous that many consider it a de facto public commons and believe it should no longer be treated as a private company. Considering who is making many of the decisions on the platform, that distinction between public and private entities is even more blurry than many presume.
I’ve just brought to light insider information that confirms a very similar model has been pursued in USSR / Russia. I wonder if the two are eventually merging at the top, like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, seeing that Putin is a former Klaus Schwab disciple and a Davos regular.
I asked the AI Chat Bot “What was the role of the DoD in covid-countermeasures?” Here is what it wrote:
“The Department of Defense (DoD) played a significant role in the development of countermeasures against COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The DoD worked closely with other federal agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to respond to the pandemic.
One of the main roles of the DoD in the COVID-19 response was to provide logistical support and medical resources to help healthcare workers and first responders on the front lines of the pandemic. The DoD also worked to develop and distribute personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies to support the response efforts.
In addition, the DoD provided funding and resources to support the development of vaccines and treatments for COVID-19. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research arm of the DoD, played a key role in this effort by funding and supporting the development of treatments and vaccines through its “Rapid Response Research” program.
Overall, the DoD played a vital role in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by providing logistical support, medical resources, and funding for research and development efforts to combat the disease.”
AI Chat Bot gets a “F” – for a highly controlled narrative answer, which was fed to all MSM sources, while the “alternative” media did not examine it very much, with some exceptions. It wasn’t just logistics or even just lots of funding, and certainly nobody was “combatting disease”.
The frantic analysis pieces pointing harder and harder at Pfizer are being circulated to draw public anger away from the DOD-HHS complex, and steer it to expendables, Pfizer are just one of the patsy's.https://t.co/kCz7ipO8uM
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
You thought Magnetogenetics are scary? Optogenetics are a similar thing, but using light instead of electromagnetism, non-invasive and non-detectable. Both stem from DARPA’s BRAIN Initiative. And you may be able to avoid EMF radiation, but you can’t avoid light.
(BIOHACKING P.6)
This actually touches on a wide array of concerns, from LEDs to vaccines, The Great Reset and the smart grid. I am very confident that if you pay attention to this video presentation from start to end, you will spend one hour, but you will save incommensurably more hours of guessing, wondering and researching. Not just the many hours I spent doing this, but the many more hours I learned where to look for and how to connect things. You’re still supposed to not take my word and do your own research, but this will give you some of the best tips on the topic.
Oh, so much wow! just hours after putting this out I find out they will be spraying us with viruses. Shocker!
By rendering individual neurons photosensitive, Deisseroth’s technique brings a once unthinkable level of precision and control to experiments designed to determine how the brain processes information and drives behavior.
DARPA Awards $21.6M to Develop Optogenetic ‘Read-Write’ Neural Interface
Ehud Isacoff of the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division is the project lead on a $21.6 million grant awarded to UC Berkeley as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) Neural Engineering System Design program. The team led by Isacoff, director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley, aims to develop a novel brain-machine interface that uses light to monitor and modulate the activity of thousands to millions of individual neurons in the cerebral cortex.
To communicate with the brain, the team will first introduce a gene encoding a fluorescent protein into neurons, making the cells flash when they fire an action potential. This will be accompanied by a second gene encoding a light-activated protein that stimulates neurons in response to pulses of light. The reading device Isacoff’s group is developing is a miniaturized light field microscope, which captures light through an array of lenses and reconstructs images computationally in any depth of focus. For the writing component, they are developing a means to stimulate groups of neurons by projecting three-dimensional light patterns onto them.
The researchers’ goal during the initial four-year funding period is to create a prototype device using model organisms—such as zebrafish larvae and mice—in which neural activity and behavior can be simultaneously detected and controlled. But DARPA’s ultimate goal is to accelerate the development of biocompatible neural implants for use in humans to compensate for sensory deficits or to control prosthetic devices. Read more from the UC Berkeley News Center.
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
For years, the Pentagon tried to convince the public that they work on your dream secretary. Can you believe that? Funny how much those plans looked just like today’s Google and Facebook. But it’s not just the looks, it’s also the money, the timeline and the personal connections. Funnier how the funding scheme was often similar to the one used for Wuhan, with proxy organizations used as middlemen.
IT’S A MEMORY aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program!
The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person’s life, index all the information and make it searchable.
What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?
The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.
All of this — and more — would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual’s health.
This gigantic amalgamation of personal information could then be used to “trace the ‘threads’ of an individual’s life,” to see exactly how a relationship or events developed, according to a briefing from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, LifeLog’s sponsor.
Someone with access to the database could “retrieve a specific thread of past transactions, or recall an experience from a few seconds ago or from many years earlier … by using a search-engine interface.”
On the surface, the project seems like the latest in a long line of DARPA’s “blue sky” research efforts, most of which never make it out of the lab. But DARPA is currently asking businesses and universities for research proposals to begin moving LifeLog forward. And some people, such as Steven Aftergood, a defense analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, are worried.News of the future, now.
With its controversial Total Information Awareness database project, DARPA already is planning to track all of an individual’s “transactional data” — like what we buy and who gets our e-mail.
While the parameters of the project have not yet been determined, Aftergood said he believes LifeLog could go far beyond TIA’s scope, adding physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.
“LifeLog has the potential to become something like ‘TIA cubed,'” he said.
In the private sector, a number of LifeLog-like efforts already are underway to digitally archive one’s life — to create a “surrogate memory,” as minicomputer pioneer Gordon Bell calls it.
Bell, now with Microsoft, scans all his letters and memos, records his conversations, saves all the Web pages he’s visited and e-mails he’s received and puts them into an electronic storehouse dubbed MyLifeBits.
DARPA’s LifeLog would take this concept several steps further by tracking where people go and what they see.
That makes the project similar to the work of University of Toronto professor Steve Mann. Since his teen years in the 1970s, Mann, a self-styled “cyborg,” has worn a camera and an array of sensors to record his existence. He claims he’s convinced 20 to 30 of his current and former students to do the same. It’s all part of an experiment into “existential technology” and “the metaphysics of free will.”
DARPA isn’t quite so philosophical about LifeLog. But the agency does see some potential battlefield uses for the program.
“The technology could allow the military to develop computerized assistants for war fighters and commanders that can be more effective because they can easily access the user’s past experiences,” DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker speculated in an e-mail.
It also could allow the military to develop more efficient computerized training systems, she said: Computers could remember how each student learns and interacts with the training system, then tailor the lessons accordingly.
John Pike, director of defense think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said he finds the explanations “hard to believe.”
“It looks like an outgrowth of Total Information Awareness and other DARPA homeland security surveillance programs,” he added in an e-mail.
Sure, LifeLog could be used to train robotic assistants. But it also could become a way to profile suspected terrorists, said Cory Doctorow, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In other words, Osama bin Laden’s agent takes a walk around the block at 10 each morning, buys a bagel and a newspaper at the corner store and then calls his mother. You do the same things — so maybe you’re an al Qaeda member, too!
“The more that an individual’s characteristic behavior patterns — ‘routines, relationships and habits’ — can be represented in digital form, the easier it would become to distinguish among different individuals, or to monitor one,” Aftergood, the Federation of American Scientists analyst, wrote in an e-mail.
In its LifeLog report, DARPA makes some nods to privacy protection, like when it suggests that “properly anonymized access to LifeLog data might support medical research and the early detection of an emerging epidemic.”
But before these grand plans get underway, LifeLog will start small. Right now, DARPA is asking industry and academics to submit proposals for 18-month research efforts, with a possible 24-month extension. (DARPA is not sure yet how much money it will sink into the program.)
The researchers will be the centerpiece of their own study.
Like a game show, winning this DARPA prize eventually will earn the lucky scientists a trip for three to Washington, D.C. Except on this excursion, every participating scientist’s e-mail to the travel agent, every padded bar bill and every mad lunge for a cab will be monitored, categorized and later dissected.
Bending a bit to privacy concerns, the Pentagon changes some of the experiments to be conducted for LifeLog, its effort to record every tidbit of information and encounter in daily life. No video recording of unsuspecting people, for example.
MONDAY IS THE deadline for researchers to submit bids to build the Pentagon’s so-called LifeLog project, an experiment to create an all-encompassing über-diary.
But while teams of academics and entrepreneurs are jostling for the 18- to 24-month grants to work on the program, the Defense Department has changed the parameters of the project to respond to a tide of privacy concerns.
Lifelog is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s effort to gather every conceivable element of a person’s life, dump it all into a database, and spin the information into narrative threads that trace relationships, events and experiences.
It’s an attempt, some say, to make a kind of surrogate, digitized memory.
“My father was a stroke victim, and he lost the ability to record short-term memories,” said Howard Shrobe, an MIT computer scientist who’s leading a team of professors and researchers in a LifeLog bid. “If you ever saw the movie Memento, he had that. So I’m interested in seeing how memory works after seeing a broken one. LifeLog is a chance to do that.”
Researchers who receive LifeLog grants will be required to test the system on themselves. Cameras will record everything they do during a trip to Washington, D.C., and global-positioning satellite locators will track where they go. Biomedical sensors will monitor their health. All the e-mail they send, all the magazines they read, all the credit card payments they make will be indexed and made searchable.
By capturing experiences, Darpa claims that LifeLog could help develop more realistic computerized training programs and robotic assistants for battlefield commanders.
Defense analysts and civil libertarians, on the other hand, worry that the program is another piece in an ongoing Pentagon effort to keep tabs on American citizens. LifeLog could become the ultimate profiling tool, they fear.
A firestorm of criticism ignited after LifeLog first became public in May. Some potential bidders for the LifeLog contract dropped out as a result.
“I’m interested in LifeLog, but I’m going to shy away from it,” said Les Vogel, a computer science researcher in Maui, Hawaii. “Who wants to get in the middle of something that gets that much bad press?”
New York Times columnist William Safire noted that while LifeLog researchers might be comfortable recording their lives, the people that the LifeLoggers are “looking at, listening to, sniffing or conspiring with to blow up the world” might not be so thrilled about turning over some of their private interchanges to the Pentagon.
In response, Darpa changed the LifeLog proposal request. Now: “LifeLog researchers shall not capture imagery or audio of any person without that person’s a priori express permission. In fact, it is desired that capture of imagery or audio of any person other than the user be avoided even if a priori permission is granted.”
Steven Aftergood, with the Federation of American Scientists, sees the alterations as evidence that Darpa proposals must receive a thorough public vetting.
“Darpa doesn’t spontaneously modify their programs in this way,” he said. “It requires public criticism. Give them credit, however, for acknowledging public concerns.”
While the Pentagon’s project to record and catalog a person’s life scares privacy advocates, researchers see it as a step in the process of getting computers to think like humans.
TO PENTAGON RESEARCHERS, capturing and categorizing every aspect of a person’s life is only the beginning.
LifeLog — the controversial Defense Department initiative to track everything about an individual — is just one step in a larger effort, according to a top Pentagon research director. Personalized digital assistants that can guess our desires should come first. And then, just maybe, we’ll see computers that can think for themselves.
Computer scientists have dreamed for decades of building machines with minds of their own. But these hopes have been overwhelmed again and again by the messy, dizzying complexities of the real world.
In recent months, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a series of seemingly disparate programs — all designed, the agency says, to help computers deal with the complexities of life, so they finally can begin to think.
“Our ultimate goal is to build a new generation of computer systems that are substantially more robust, secure, helpful, long-lasting and adaptive to their users and tasks. These systems will need to reason, learn and respond intelligently to things they’ve never encountered before,” said Ron Brachman, the recently installed chief of Darpa’s Information Processing Technology Office, or IPTO. A former senior executive at AT&T Labs, Brachman was elected president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence last year.
LifeLog is the best-known of these projects. The controversial program intends to record everything about a person — what he sees, where he goes, how he feels — and dump it into a database. Once captured, the information is supposed to be spun into narrative threads that trace relationships, events and experiences.
For years, researchers have been able to get programs to make sense of limited, tightly proscribed situations. Navigating outside of the lab has been much more difficult. Until recently, even getting a robot to walk across the room on its own was a tricky task.
“LifeLog is about forcing computers into the real world,” said leading artificial intelligence researcher Doug Lenat, who’s bidding on the project.
What LifeLog is not, Brachman asserts, is a program to track terrorists. By capturing so much information about an individual, and by combing relationships and traits out of that data, LifeLog appears to some civil libertarians to be an almost limitless tool for profiling potential enemies of the state. Concerns over the Terrorism Information Awareness database effort have only heightened sensitivities.
“These technologies developed by the military have obvious, easy paths to Homeland Security deployments,” said Lee Tien, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Brachman said it is “up to military leaders to decide how to use our technology in support of their mission,” but he repeatedly insisted that IPTO has “absolutely no interest or intention of using any of our technology for profiling.”
What Brachman does want to do is create a computerized assistant that can learn about the habits and wishes of its human boss. And the first step toward this goal is for machines to start seeing, and remembering, life like people do.
Human beings don’t dump their experiences into some formless database or tag them with a couple of keywords. They divide their lives into discreet installments — “college,” “my first date,” “last Thursday.” Researchers call this “episodic memory.”
LifeLog is about trying to install episodic memory into computers, Brachman said. It’s about getting machines to start “remembering experiences in the commonsensical way we do — a vacation in Bermuda, a taxi ride to the airport.”
IPTO recently handed out $29 million in research grants to create a Perceptive Assistant that Learns, or PAL, that can draw on these episodes and improve itself in the process. If people keep missing conferences during rush hour, PAL should learn to schedule meetings when traffic isn’t as thick. If PAL’s boss keeps sending angry notes to spammers, the software secretary eventually should just start flaming on its own.
In the 1980s, artificial intelligence researchers promised to create programs that could do just that. Darpa even promoted a thinking “pilot’s associate — a kind of R2D2,” said Alex Roland, author of The Race for Machine Intelligence: Darpa, DoD, and the Strategic Computing Initiative.
But the field “fell on its face,” according to University of Washington computer scientist Henry Kautz. Instead of trying to teach computers how to reason on their own, “we said, ‘Well, if we just keep adding more rules, we could cover every case imaginable.'”
It’s an impossible task, of course. Every circumstance is different, and there will never be enough to stipulations to cover them all.
A few computer programs, with enough training from their human masters, can make some assumptions about new situations on their own, however. Amazon.com’s system for recommending books and music is one of these.
But these efforts are limited, too. Everyone’s received downright kooky suggestions from that Amazon program.
Overcoming these limitations requires a combination of logical approaches. That’s a goal behind IPTO’s new call for research into computers that can handle real-world reasoning.
It’s one of several problems Brachman said are “absolutely imperative” to solve as quickly as possible.
Although computer systems are getting more complicated every day, this complexity “may be actually reversing the information revolution,” he noted in a recent presentation (PDF). “Systems have grown more rigid, more fragile and increasingly open to attack.”
What’s needed, he asserts, is a computer network that can teach itself new capabilities, without having to be reprogrammed every time. Computers should be able to adapt to how its users like to work, spot when they’re being attacked and develop responses to these assaults. Think of it like the body’s immune system — or like a battlefield general.
But to act more like a person, a computer has to soak up its own experiences, like a human being does. It has to create a catalog of its existence. A LifeLog, if you will.
THE PENTAGON CANCELED its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.
Run by Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and experiences.
LifeLog’s backers said the all-encompassing diary could have turned into a near-perfect digital memory, giving its users computerized assistants with an almost flawless recall of what they had done in the past. But civil libertarians immediately pounced on the project when it debuted last spring, arguing that LifeLog could become the ultimate tool for profiling potential enemies of the state.
Researchers close to the project say they’re not sure why it was dropped late last month. Darpa hasn’t provided an explanation for LifeLog’s quiet cancellation. “A change in priorities” is the only rationale agency spokeswoman Jan Walker gave to Wired News.
However, related Darpa efforts concerning software secretaries and mechanical brains are still moving ahead as planned.
LifeLog is the latest in a series of controversial programs that have been canceled by Darpa in recent months. The Terrorism Information Awareness, or TIA, data-mining initiative was eliminated by Congress — although many analysts believe its research continues on the classified side of the Pentagon’s ledger. The Policy Analysis Market (or FutureMap), which provided a stock market of sorts for people to bet on terror strikes, was almost immediately withdrawn after its details came to light in July.
“I’ve always thought (LifeLog) would be the third program (after TIA and FutureMap) that could raise eyebrows if they didn’t make it clear how privacy concerns would be met,” said Peter Harsha, director of government affairs for the Computing Research Association.
“Darpa’s pretty gun-shy now,” added Lee Tien, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been critical of many agency efforts. “After TIA, they discovered they weren’t ready to deal with the firestorm of criticism.”
That’s too bad, artificial-intelligence researchers say. LifeLog would have addressed one of the key issues in developing computers that can think: how to take the unstructured mess of life, and recall it as discreet episodes — a trip to Washington, a sushi dinner, construction of a house.
“Obviously we’re quite disappointed,” said Howard Shrobe, who led a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory which spent weeks preparing a bid for a LifeLog contract. “We were very interested in the research focus of the program … how to help a person capture and organize his or her experience. This is a theme with great importance to both AI and cognitive science.”
To Tien, the project’s cancellation means “it’s just not tenable for Darpa to say anymore, ‘We’re just doing the technology, we have no responsibility for how it’s used.'”
Private-sector research in this area is proceeding. At Microsoft, for example, minicomputer pioneer Gordon Bell’s program, MyLifeBits, continues to develop ways to sort and store memories.
David Karger, Shrobe’s colleague at MIT, thinks such efforts will still go on at Darpa, too.
“I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title,” wrote Karger in an e-mail. “I can’t imagine Darpa ‘dropping out’ of such a key research area.”
MEANWHILE…
Google: seeded by the Pentagon
By dr. Nafeez Ahmed
In 1994 — the same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA — two young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.
Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin reported regularly and directly to two people who were not Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining.
Thuraisingham is currently the Louis A. Beecherl distinguished professor and executive director of the Cyber Security Research Institute at the University of Texas, Dallas, and a sought-after expert on data-mining, data management and information security issues. But in the 1990s, she worked for the MITRE Corp., a leading US defense contractor, where she managed the Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, to foster innovative research in information technology.
“We funded Stanford University through the computer scientist Jeffrey Ullman, who had several promising graduate students working on many exciting areas,” Prof. Thuraisingham told me. “One of them was Sergey Brin, the founder of Google. The intelligence community’s MDDS program essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources, including the private sector.”
This sort of funding is certainly not unusual, and Sergey Brin’s being able to receive it by being a graduate student at Stanford appears to have been incidental. The Pentagon was all over computer science research at this time. But it illustrates how deeply entrenched the culture of Silicon Valley is in the values of the US intelligence community.
In an extraordinary document hosted by the website of the University of Texas, Thuraisingham recounts that from 1993 to 1999, “the Intelligence Community [IC] started a program called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) that I was managing for the Intelligence Community when I was at the MITRE Corporation.” The program funded 15 research efforts at various universities, including Stanford. Its goal was developing “data management technologies to manage several terabytes to petabytes of data,” including for “query processing, transaction management, metadata management, storage management, and data integration.”
At the time, Thuraisingham was chief scientist for data and information management at MITRE, where she led team research and development efforts for the NSA, CIA, US Air Force Research Laboratory, as well as the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) and Communications and Electronic Command (CECOM). She went on to teach courses for US government officials and defense contractors on data-mining in counter-terrorism.
In her University of Texas article, she attaches the copy of an abstract of the US intelligence community’s MDDS program that had been presented to the “Annual Intelligence Community Symposium” in 1995. The abstract reveals that the primary sponsors of the MDDS programme were three agencies: the NSA, the CIA’s Office of Research & Development, and the intelligence community’s Community Management Staff (CMS) which operates under the Director of Central Intelligence. Administrators of the program, which provided funding of around 3–4 million dollars per year for 3–4 years, were identified as Hal Curran (NSA), Robert Kluttz (CMS), Dr. Claudia Pierce (NSA), Dr. Rick Steinheiser (ORD — standing for the CIA’s Office of Research and Devepment), and Dr. Thuraisingham herself.
Thuraisingham goes on in her article to reiterate that this joint CIA-NSA program partly funded Sergey Brin to develop the core of Google, through a grant to Stanford managed by Brin’s supervisor Prof. Jeffrey D. Ullman:
“In fact, the Google founder Mr. Sergey Brin was partly funded by this program while he was a PhD student at Stanford. He together with his advisor Prof. Jeffrey Ullman and my colleague at MITRE, Dr. Chris Clifton [Mitre’s chief scientist in IT], developed the Query Flocks System which produced solutions for mining large amounts of data stored in databases. I remember visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick Steinheiser from the Intelligence Community and Mr. Brin would rush in on roller blades, give his presentation and rush out. In fact the last time we met in September 1998, Mr. Brin demonstrated to us his search engine which became Google soon after.”
Brin and Page officially incorporated Google as a company in September 1998, the very month they last reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser. ‘Query Flocks’ was also part of Google’s patented ‘PageRank’ search system, which Brin developed at Stanford under the CIA-NSA-MDDS programme, as well as with funding from the NSF, IBM and Hitachi. That year, MITRE’s Dr. Chris Clifton, who worked under Thuraisingham to develop the ‘Query Flocks’ system, co-authored a paper with Brin’s superviser, Prof. Ullman, and the CIA’s Rick Steinheiser. Titled ‘Knowledge Discovery in Text,’ the paper was presented at an academic conference.
“The MDDS funding that supported Brin was significant as far as seed-funding goes, but it was probably outweighed by the other funding streams,” said Thuraisingham. “The duration of Brin’s funding was around two years or so. In that period, I and my colleagues from the MDDS would visit Stanford to see Brin and monitor his progress every three months or so. We didn’t supervise exactly, but we did want to check progress, point out potential problems and suggest ideas. In those briefings, Brin did present to us on the query flocks research, and also demonstrated to us versions of the Google search engine.”
Brin thus reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser regularly about his work developing Google.
==
UPDATE 2.05PM GMT [2nd Feb 2015]:
Since publication of this article, Prof. Thuraisingham has amended her article referenced above. The amended version includes a new modified statement, followed by a copy of the original version of her account of the MDDS. In this amended version, Thuraisingham rejects the idea that CIA funded Google, and says instead:
“In fact Prof. Jeffrey Ullman (at Stanford) and my colleague at MITRE Dr. Chris Clifton together with some others developed the Query Flocks System, as part of MDDS, which produced solutions for mining large amounts of data stored in databases. Also, Mr. Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google, was part of Prof. Ullman’s research group at that time. I remember visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick Steinheiser from the Intelligence Community periodically and Mr. Brin would rush in on roller blades, give his presentation and rush out. During our last visit to Stanford in September 1998, Mr. Brin demonstrated to us his search engine which I believe became Google soon after…
There are also several inaccuracies in Dr. Ahmed’s article (dated January 22, 2015). For example, the MDDS program was not a ‘sensitive’ program as stated by Dr. Ahmed; it was an Unclassified program that funded universities in the US. Furthermore, Sergey Brin never reported to me or to Dr. Rick Steinheiser; he only gave presentations to us during our visits to the Department of Computer Science at Stanford during the 1990s. Also, MDDS never funded Google; it funded Stanford University.”
Here, there is no substantive factual difference in Thuraisingham’s accounts, other than to assert that her statement associating Sergey Brin with the development of ‘query flocks’ is mistaken. Notably, this acknowledgement is derived not from her own knowledge, but from this very article quoting a comment from a Google spokesperson.
However, the bizarre attempt to disassociate Google from the MDDS program misses the mark. Firstly, the MDDS never funded Google, because during the development of the core components of the Google search engine, there was no company incorporated with that name. The grant was instead provided to Stanford University through Prof. Ullman, through whom some MDDS funding was used to support Brin who was co-developing Google at the time. Secondly, Thuraisingham then adds that Brin never “reported” to her or the CIA’s Steinheiser, but admits he “gave presentations to us during our visits to the Department of Computer Science at Stanford during the 1990s.” It is unclear, though, what the distinction is here between reporting, and delivering a detailed presentation — either way, Thuraisingham confirms that she and the CIA had taken a keen interest in Brin’s development of Google. Thirdly, Thuraisingham describes the MDDS program as “unclassified,” but this does not contradict its “sensitive” nature. As someone who has worked for decades as an intelligence contractor and advisor, Thuraisingham is surely aware that there are many ways of categorizing intelligence, including ‘sensitive but unclassified.’ A number of former US intelligence officials I spoke to said that the almost total lack of public information on the CIA and NSA’s MDDS initiative suggests that although the progam was not classified, it is likely instead that its contents was considered sensitive, which would explain efforts to minimise transparency about the program and the way it fed back into developing tools for the US intelligence community. Fourthly, and finally, it is important to point out that the MDDS abstract which Thuraisingham includes in her University of Texas document states clearly not only that the Director of Central Intelligence’s CMS, CIA and NSA were the overseers of the MDDS initiative, but that the intended customers of the project were “DoD, IC, and other government organizations”: the Pentagon, the US intelligence community, and other relevant US government agencies.
In other words, the provision of MDDS funding to Brin through Ullman, under the oversight of Thuraisingham and Steinheiser, was fundamentally because they recognized the potential utility of Brin’s work developing Google to the Pentagon, intelligence community, and the federal government at large.
==
The MDDS programme is actually referenced in several papers co-authored by Brin and Page while at Stanford, specifically highlighting its role in financially sponsoring Brin in the development of Google. In their 1998 paper published in the Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committeee on Data Engineering, they describe the automation of methods to extract information from the web via “Dual Iterative Pattern Relation Extraction,” the development of “a global ranking of Web pages called PageRank,” and the use of PageRank “to develop a novel search engine called Google.” Through an opening footnote, Sergey Brin confirms he was “Partially supported by the Community Management Staff’s Massive Digital Data Systems Program, NSF grant IRI-96–31952” — confirming that Brin’s work developing Google was indeed partly-funded by the CIA-NSA-MDDS program.
This NSF grant identified alongside the MDDS, whose project report lists Brin among the students supported (without mentioning the MDDS), was different to the NSF grant to Larry Page that included funding from DARPA and NASA. The project report, authored by Brin’s supervisor Prof. Ullman, goes on to say under the section ‘Indications of Success’ that “there are some new stories of startups based on NSF-supported research.” Under ‘Project Impact,’ the report remarks: “Finally, the google project has also gone commercial as Google.com.”
Thuraisingham’s account, including her new amended version, therefore demonstrates that the CIA-NSA-MDDS program was not only partly funding Brin throughout his work with Larry Page developing Google, but that senior US intelligence representatives including a CIA official oversaw the evolution of Google in this pre-launch phase, all the way until the company was ready to be officially founded. Google, then, had been enabled with a “significant” amount of seed-funding and oversight from the Pentagon: namely, the CIA, NSA, and DARPA.
The DoD could not be reached for comment.
When I asked Prof. Ullman to confirm whether or not Brin was partly funded under the intelligence community’s MDDS program, and whether Ullman was aware that Brin was regularly briefing the CIA’s Rick Steinheiser on his progress in developing the Google search engine, Ullman’s responses were evasive: “May I know whom you represent and why you are interested in these issues? Who are your ‘sources’?” He also denied that Brin played a significant role in developing the ‘query flocks’ system, although it is clear from Brin’s papers that he did draw on that work in co-developing the PageRank system with Page.
When I asked Ullman whether he was denying the US intelligence community’s role in supporting Brin during the development of Google, he said: “I am not going to dignify this nonsense with a denial. If you won’t explain what your theory is, and what point you are trying to make, I am not going to help you in the slightest.”
The MDDS abstract published online at the University of Texas confirms that the rationale for the CIA-NSA project was to “provide seed money to develop data management technologies which are of high-risk and high-pay-off,” including techniques for “querying, browsing, and filtering; transaction processing; accesses methods and indexing; metadata management and data modelling; and integrating heterogeneous databases; as well as developing appropriate architectures.” The ultimate vision of the program was to “provide for the seamless access and fusion of massive amounts of data, information and knowledge in a heterogeneous, real-time environment” for use by the Pentagon, intelligence community and potentially across government.
These revelations corroborate the claims of Robert Steele, former senior CIA officer and a founding civilian deputy director of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, whom I interviewed for The Guardian last year on open source intelligence. Citing sources at the CIA, Steele had said in 2006 that Steinheiser, an old colleague of his, was the CIA’s main liaison at Google and had arranged early funding for the pioneering IT firm. At the time, Wired founder John Batelle managed to get this official denial from a Google spokesperson in response to Steele’s assertions:
“The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”
This time round, despite multiple requests and conversations, a Google spokesperson declined to comment.
UPDATE: As of 5.41PM GMT [22nd Jan 2015], Google’s director of corporate communication got in touch and asked me to include the following statement:
“Sergey Brin was not part of the Query Flocks Program at Stanford, nor were any of his projects funded by US Intelligence bodies.”
This is what I wrote back:
My response to that statement would be as follows: Brin himself in his own paper acknowledges funding from the Community Management Staff of the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) initiative, which was supplied through the NSF. The MDDS was an intelligence community program set up by the CIA and NSA. I also have it on record, as noted in the piece, from Prof. Thuraisingham of University of Texas that she managed the MDDS program on behalf of the US intelligence community, and that her and the CIA’s Rick Steinheiser met Brin every three months or so for two years to be briefed on his progress developing Google and PageRank. Whether Brin worked on query flocks or not is neither here nor there.
In that context, you might want to consider the following questions:
1) Does Google deny that Brin’s work was part-funded by the MDDS via an NSF grant?
2) Does Google deny that Brin reported regularly to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser from around 1996 to 1998 until September that year when he presented the Google search engine to them?
LESS KNOWN FACT: AROUND THE SAME YEAR 2004, SERGEY BRIN JOINED WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM’S YOUTH ORGANIZATION, THE “YOUNG GLOBAL LEADERS”
Total Information Awareness
A call for papers for the MDDS was sent out via email list on November 3rd 1993 from senior US intelligence official David Charvonia, director of the research and development coordination office of the intelligence community’s CMS. The reaction from Tatu Ylonen (celebrated inventor of the widely used secure shell [SSH] data protection protocol) to his colleagues on the email list is telling: “Crypto relevance? Makes you think whether you should protect your data.” The email also confirms that defense contractor and Highlands Forum partner, SAIC, was managing the MDDS submission process, with abstracts to be sent to Jackie Booth of the CIA’s Office of Research and Development via a SAIC email address.
By 1997, Thuraisingham reveals, shortly before Google became incorporated and while she was still overseeing the development of its search engine software at Stanford, her thoughts turned to the national security applications of the MDDS program. In the acknowledgements to her book, Web Data Mining and Applications in Business Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism (2003), Thuraisingham writes that she and “Dr. Rick Steinheiser of the CIA, began discussions with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on applying data-mining for counter-terrorism,” an idea that resulted directly from the MDDS program which partly funded Google. “These discussions eventually developed into the current EELD (Evidence Extraction and Link Detection) program at DARPA.”
So the very same senior CIA official and CIA-NSA contractor involved in providing the seed-funding for Google were simultaneously contemplating the role of data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes, and were developing ideas for tools actually advanced by DARPA.
Today, as illustrated by her recent oped in the New York Times, Thuraisingham remains a staunch advocate of data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes, but also insists that these methods must be developed by government in cooperation with civil liberties lawyers and privacy advocates to ensure that robust procedures are in place to prevent potential abuse. She points out, damningly, that with the quantity of information being collected, there is a high risk of false positives.
In 1993, when the MDDS program was launched and managed by MITRE Corp. on behalf of the US intelligence community, University of Virginia computer scientist Dr. Anita K. Jones — a MITRE trustee — landed the job of DARPA director and head of research and engineering across the Pentagon. She had been on the board of MITRE since 1988. From 1987 to 1993, Jones simultaneously served on SAIC’s board of directors. As the new head of DARPA from 1993 to 1997, she also co-chaired the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum during the period of Google’s pre-launch development at Stanford under the MDSS.
Thus, when Thuraisingham and Steinheiser were talking to DARPA about the counter-terrorism applications of MDDS research, Jones was DARPA director and Highlands Forum co-chair. That year, Jones left DARPA to return to her post at the University of Virgina. The following year, she joined the board of the National Science Foundation, which of course had also just funded Brin and Page, and also returned to the board of SAIC. When she left DoD, Senator Chuck Robb paid Jones the following tribute : “She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century.”
Dr. Anita Jones, head of DARPA from 1993–1997, and co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands Forum from 1995–1997, during which officials in charge of the CIA-NSA-MDSS program were funding Google, and in communication with DARPA about data-mining for counterterrorism
On the board of the National Science Foundation from 1992 to 1998 (including a stint as chairman from 1996) was Richard N. Zare. This was the period in which the NSF sponsored Sergey Brin and Larry Page in association with DARPA. In June 1994, Prof. Zare, a chemist at Stanford, participated with Prof. Jeffrey Ullman (who supervised Sergey Brin’s research), on a panel sponsored by Stanford and the National Research Council discussing the need for scientists to show how their work “ties to national needs.” The panel brought together scientists and policymakers, including “Washington insiders.”
DARPA’s EELD program, inspired by the work of Thuraisingham and Steinheiser under Jones’ watch, was rapidly adapted and integrated with a suite of tools to conduct comprehensive surveillance under the Bush administration.
According to DARPA official Ted Senator, who led the EELD program for the agency’s short-lived Information Awareness Office, EELD was among a range of “promising techniques” being prepared for integration “into the prototype TIA system.” TIA stood for Total Information Awareness, and was the main global electronic eavesdropping and data-mining program deployed by the Bush administration after 9/11. TIA had been set up by Iran-Contra conspirator Admiral John Poindexter, who was appointed in 2002 by Bush to lead DARPA’s new Information Awareness Office.
The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was another contractor among 26 companies (also including SAIC) that received million dollar contracts from DARPA (the specific quantities remained classified) under Poindexter, to push forward the TIA surveillance program in 2002 onwards. The research included “behaviour-based profiling,” “automated detection, identification and tracking” of terrorist activity, among other data-analyzing projects. At this time, PARC’s director and chief scientist was John Seely Brown. Both Brown and Poindexter were Pentagon Highlands Forum participants — Brown on a regular basis until recently.
TIA was purportedly shut down in 2003 due to public opposition after the program was exposed in the media, but the following year Poindexter participated in a Pentagon Highlands Group session in Singapore, alongside defense and security officials from around the world. Meanwhile, Ted Senator continued to manage the EELD program among other data-mining and analysis projects at DARPA until 2006, when he left to become a vice president at SAIC. He is now a SAIC/Leidos technical fellow.
Google, DARPA and the money trail
Long before the appearance of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Stanford University’s computer science department had a close working relationship with US military intelligence. A letter dated November 5th 1984 from the office of renowned artificial intelligence (AI) expert, Prof Edward Feigenbaum, addressed to Rick Steinheiser, gives the latter directions to Stanford’s Heuristic Programming Project, addressing Steinheiser as a member of the “AI Steering Committee.” A list of attendees at a contractor conference around that time, sponsored by the Pentagon’s Office of Naval Research (ONR), includes Steinheiser as a delegate under the designation “OPNAV Op-115” — which refers to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations’ program on operational readiness, which played a major role in advancing digital systems for the military.
From the 1970s, Prof. Feigenbaum and his colleagues had been running Stanford’s Heuristic Programming Project under contract with DARPA, continuing through to the 1990s. Feigenbaum alone had received around over $7 million in this period for his work from DARPA, along with other funding from the NSF, NASA, and ONR.
Brin’s supervisor at Stanford, Prof. Jeffrey Ullman, was in 1996 part of a joint funding project of DARPA’s Intelligent Integration of Information program. That year, Ullman co-chaired DARPA-sponsored meetings on data exchange between multiple systems.
In September 1998, the same month that Sergey Brin briefed US intelligence representatives Steinheiser and Thuraisingham, tech entrepreneurs Andreas Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton invested $100,000 each in Google. Both investors were connected to DARPA.
As a Stanford PhD student in electrical engineering in the 1980s, Bechtolsheim’s pioneering SUN workstation project had been funded by DARPA and the Stanford computer science department — this research was the foundation of Bechtolsheim’s establishment of Sun Microsystems, which he co-founded with William Joy.
As for Bechtolsheim’s co-investor in Google, David Cheriton, the latter is a long-time Stanford computer science professor who has an even more entrenched relationship with DARPA. His bio at the University of Alberta, which in November 2014 awarded him an honorary science doctorate, says that Cheriton’s “research has received the support of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for over 20 years.”
In the meantime, Bechtolsheim left Sun Microsystems in 1995, co-founding Granite Systems with his fellow Google investor Cheriton as a partner. They sold Granite to Cisco Systems in 1996, retaining significant ownership of Granite, and becoming senior Cisco executives.
An email obtained from the Enron Corpus (a database of 600,000 emails acquired by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and later released to the public) from Richard O’Neill, inviting Enron executives to participate in the Highlands Forum, shows that Cisco and Granite executives are intimately connected to the Pentagon. The email reveals that in May 2000, Bechtolsheim’s partner and Sun Microsystems co-founder, William Joy — who was then chief scientist and corporate executive officer there — had attended the Forum to discuss nanotechnology and molecular computing.
In 1999, Joy had also co-chaired the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, overseeing a report acknowledging that DARPA had:
“… revised its priorities in the 90’s so that all information technology funding was judged in terms of its benefit to the warfighter.”
Throughout the 1990s, then, DARPA’s funding to Stanford, including Google, was explicitly about developing technologies that could augment the Pentagon’s military intelligence operations in war theatres.
The Joy report recommended more federal government funding from the Pentagon, NASA, and other agencies to the IT sector. Greg Papadopoulos, another of Bechtolsheim’s colleagues as then Sun Microsystems chief technology officer, also attended a Pentagon Highlands’ Forum meeting in September 2000.
In November, the Pentagon Highlands Forum hosted Sue Bostrom, who was vice president for the internet at Cisco, sitting on the company’s board alongside Google co-investors Bechtolsheim and Cheriton. The Forum also hosted Lawrence Zuriff, then a managing partner of Granite, which Bechtolsheim and Cheriton had sold to Cisco. Zuriff had previously been an SAIC contractor from 1993 to 1994, working with the Pentagon on national security issues, specifically for Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment. In 1994, both the SAIC and the ONA were, of course, involved in co-establishing the Pentagon Highlands Forum. Among Zuriff’s output during his SAIC tenure was a paper titled ‘Understanding Information War’, delivered at a SAIC-sponsored US Army Roundtable on the Revolution in Military Affairs.
After Google’s incorporation, the company received $25 million in equity funding in 1999 led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. According to Homeland Security Today, “A number of Sequoia-bankrolled start-ups have contracted with the Department of Defense, especially after 9/11 when Sequoia’s Mark Kvamme met with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to discuss the application of emerging technologies to warfighting and intelligence collection.” Similarly, Kleiner Perkins had developed “a close relationship” with In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture capitalist firm that funds start-ups “to advance ‘priority’ technologies of value” to the intelligence community.
John Doerr, who led the Kleiner Perkins investment in Google obtaining a board position, was a major early investor in Becholshtein’s Sun Microsystems at its launch. He and his wife Anne are the main funders behind Rice University’s Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL), which in 2009 received $16 million from DARPA for its platform-aware-compilation-environment (PACE) ubiquitous computing R&D program. Doerr also has a close relationship with the Obama administration, which he advised shortly after it took power to ramp up Pentagon funding to the tech industry. In 2013, at the Fortune Brainstorm TECH conference, Doerr applauded “how the DoD’s DARPA funded GPS, CAD, most of the major computer science departments, and of course, the Internet.”
From inception, in other words, Google was incubated, nurtured and financed by interests that were directly affiliated or closely aligned with the US military intelligence community: many of whom were embedded in the Pentagon Highlands Forum.
Google captures the Pentagon
In 2003, Google began customizing its search engine under special contract with the CIA for its Intelink Management Office, “overseeing top-secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified intranets for CIA and other IC agencies,” according to Homeland Security Today. That year, CIA funding was also being “quietly” funneled through the National Science Foundation to projects that might help create “new capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology.”
The following year, Google bought the firm Keyhole, which had originally been funded by In-Q-Tel. Using Keyhole, Google began developing the advanced satellite mapping software behind Google Earth. Former DARPA director and Highlands Forum co-chair Anita Jones had been on the board of In-Q-Tel at this time, and remains so today.
Then in November 2005, In-Q-Tel issued notices to sell $2.2 million of Google stocks. Google’s relationship with US intelligence was further brought to light when an IT contractor told a closed Washington DC conference of intelligence professionals on a not-for-attribution basis that at least one US intelligence agency was working to “leverage Google’s [user] data monitoring” capability as part of an effort to acquire data of “national security intelligence interest.”
A photo on Flickr dated March 2007 reveals that Google research director and AI expert Peter Norvig attended a Pentagon Highlands Forum meeting that year in Carmel, California. Norvig’s intimate connection to the Forum as of that year is also corroborated by his role in guest editing the 2007 Forum reading list.
The photo below shows Norvig in conversation with Lewis Shepherd, who at that time was senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, responsible for investigating, approving, and architecting “all new hardware/software systems and acquisitions for the Global Defense Intelligence IT Enterprise,” including “big data technologies.” Shepherd now works at Microsoft. Norvig was a computer research scientist at Stanford University in 1991 before joining Bechtolsheim’s Sun Microsystems as senior scientist until 1994, and going on to head up NASA’s computer science division.
Lewis Shepherd (left), then a senior technology officer at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, talking to Peter Norvig (right), renowned expert in artificial intelligence expert and director of research at Google. This photo is from a Highlands Forum meeting in 2007.
Norvig shows up on O’Neill’s Google Plus profile as one of his close connections. Scoping the rest of O’Neill’s Google Plus connections illustrates that he is directly connected not just to a wide range of Google executives, but also to some of the biggest names in the US tech community.
Those connections include Michele Weslander Quaid, an ex-CIA contractor and former senior Pentagon intelligence official who is now Google’s chief technology officer where she is developing programs to “best fit government agencies’ needs”; Elizabeth Churchill, Google director of user experience; James Kuffner, a humanoid robotics expert who now heads up Google’s robotics division and who introduced the term ‘cloud robotics’; Mark Drapeau, director of innovation engagement for Microsoft’s public sector business; Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs; Jon Udell, Microsoft ‘evangelist’; Cory Ondrejka, vice president of engineering at Facebook; to name just a few.
In 2010, Google signed a multi-billion dollar no-bid contract with the NSA’s sister agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The contract was to use Google Earth for visualization services for the NGA. Google had developed the software behind Google Earth by purchasing Keyhole from the CIA venture firm In-Q-Tel.
Then a year after, in 2011, another of O’Neill’s Google Plus connections, Michele Quaid — who had served in executive positions at the NGA, National Reconnaissance Office and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — left her government role to become Google ‘innovation evangelist’ and the point-person for seeking government contracts. Quaid’s last role before her move to Google was as a senior representative of the Director of National Intelligence to the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force, and a senior advisor to the undersecretary of defense for intelligence’s director of Joint and Coalition Warfighter Support (J&CWS). Both roles involved information operations at their core. Before her Google move, in other words, Quaid worked closely with the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, to which the Pentagon’s Highlands Forum is subordinate. Quaid has herself attended the Forum, though precisely when and how often I could not confirm.
In March 2012, then DARPA director Regina Dugan — who in that capacity was also co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands Forum — followed her colleague Quaid into Google to lead the company’s new Advanced Technology and Projects Group. During her Pentagon tenure, Dugan led on strategic cyber security and social media, among other initiatives. She was responsible for focusing “an increasing portion” of DARPA’s work “on the investigation of offensive capabilities to address military-specific needs,” securing $500 million of government funding for DARPA cyber research from 2012 to 2017.
Regina Dugan, former head of DARPA and Highlands Forum co-chair, now a senior Google executive — trying her best to look the part
By November 2014, Google’s chief AI and robotics expert James Kuffner was a delegate alongside O’Neill at the Highlands Island Forum 2014 in Singapore, to explore ‘Advancement in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Society, Security and Conflict.’ The event included 26 delegates from Austria, Israel, Japan, Singapore, Sweden, Britain and the US, from both industry and government. Kuffner’s association with the Pentagon, however, began much earlier. In 1997, Kuffner was a researcher during his Stanford PhD for a Pentagon-funded project on networked autonomous mobile robots, sponsored by DARPA and the US Navy.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work.
Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
A rich history of the government’s science funding
There was already a long history of collaboration between America’s best scientists and the intelligence community, from the creation of the atomic bomb and satellite technology to efforts to put a man on the moon.The internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort.
In fact, the internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort: In the 1970s, the agency responsible for developing emerging technologies for military, intelligence, and national security purposes—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—linked four supercomputers to handle massive data transfers. It handed the operations off to the National Science Foundation (NSF) a decade or so later, which proliferated the network across thousands of universities and, eventually, the public, thus creating the architecture and scaffolding of the World Wide Web.
Silicon Valley was no different. By the mid 1990s, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community.
They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.
The Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project
MDDS was introduced to several dozen leading computer scientists at Stanford, CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and others in a white paper that described what the CIA, NSA, DARPA, and other agencies hoped to achieve. The research would largely be funded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF, which would allow the architecture to be scaled up in the private sector if it managed to achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.
“Not only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data,” the intelligence community said in its 1993 MDDS white paper. “Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions.”
Over the next few years, the program’s stated aim was to provide more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to advance this research concept. The grants were to be directed largely through the NSF so that the most promising, successful efforts could be captured as intellectual property and form the basis of companies attracting investments from Silicon Valley. This type of public-to-private innovation system helped launch powerful science and technology companies like Qualcomm, Symantec, Netscape, and others, and funded the pivotal research in areas like Doppler radar and fiber optics, which are central to large companies like AccuWeather, Verizon, and AT&T today. Today, the NSF provides nearly 90% of all federal funding for university-based computer-science research.
MIT is but a Pentagon lab
The CIA and NSA’s end goal
The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing, and the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems” took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose in the spring of 1995.The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing.
Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could “birds of a feather” be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?
By working with emerging commercial-data companies, their intent was to track like-minded groups of people across the internet and identify them from the digital fingerprints they left behind, much like forensic scientists use fingerprint smudges to identify criminals. Just as “birds of a feather flock together,” they predicted that potential terrorists would communicate with each other in this new global, connected world—and they could find them by identifying patterns in this massive amount of new information. Once these groups were identified, they could then follow their digital trails everywhere.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, computer-science boy wonders
In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?
This process is perfectly suited for the purposes of counter-terrorism and homeland security efforts: Human beings and like-minded groups who might pose a threat to national security can be uniquely identified online before they do harm. This explains why the intelligence community found Brin’s and Page’s research efforts so appealing; prior to this time, the CIA largely used human intelligence efforts in the field to identify people and groups that might pose threats. The ability to track them virtually (in conjunction with efforts in the field) would change everything.
It was the beginning of what in just a few years’ time would become Google. The two intelligence-community managers charged with leading the program met regularly with Brin as his research progressed, and he was an author on several other research papers that resulted from this MDDS grant before he and Page left to form Google.
The grants allowed Brin and Page to do their work and contributed to their breakthroughs in web-page ranking and tracking user queries. Brin didn’t work for the intelligence community—or for anyone else. Google had not yet been incorporated. He was just a Stanford researcher taking advantage of the grant provided by the NSA and CIA through the unclassified MDDS program.
Left out of Google’s story
The MDDS research effort has never been part of Google’s origin story, even though the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” he wrote. In a published research paper that includes some of Brin’s pivotal work, the authors also reference the NSF grant that was created by the MDDS program.
Instead, every Google creation story only mentions just one federal grant: the NSF/DARPA “digital libraries” grant, which was designed to allow Stanford researchers to search the entire World Wide Web stored on the university’s servers at the time. “The development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford,” Stanford’s Infolab says of its origin, for example. NSF likewise only references the digital libraries grant, not the MDDS grant as well, in its own history of Google’s origin. In the famous research paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which describes the creation of Google, Brin and Page thanked the NSF and DARPA for its digital library grant to Stanford. But the grant from the intelligence community’s MDDS program—specifically designed for the breakthrough that Google was built upon—has faded into obscurity.
Google has said in the past that it was not funded or created by the CIA. For instance, when stories circulated in 2006 that Google had received funding from the intelligence community for years to assist in counter-terrorism efforts, the company told Wired magazine founder John Battelle, “The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”
Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur something that looks almost exactly like Google.
To understand this significance, you have to consider what the intelligence community was trying to achieve as it seeded grants to the best computer-science minds in academia: The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur the development of something that looks almost exactly like Google. Brin’s breakthrough research on page ranking by tracking user queries and linking them to the many searches conducted—essentially identifying “birds of a feather”—was largely the aim of the intelligence community’s MDDS program. And Google succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
The intelligence community’s enduring legacy within Silicon Valley
Digital privacy concerns over the intersection between the intelligence community and commercial technology giants have grown in recent years. But most people still don’t understand the degree to which the intelligence community relies on the world’s biggest science and tech companies for its counter-terrorism and national-security work.
Civil-liberty advocacy groups have aired their privacy concerns for years, especially as they now relate to the Patriot Act. “Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet,” says the ACLU. “While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.”
When asked, the biggest technology and communications companies—from Verizon and AT&T to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft—say that they never deliberately and proactively offer up their vast databases on their customers to federal security and law enforcement agencies: They say that they only respond to subpoenas or requests that are filed properly under the terms of the Patriot Act.
But even a cursory glance through recent public records shows that there is a treadmill of constant requests that could undermine the intent behind this privacy promise. According to the data-request records that the companies make available to the public, in the most recent reporting period between 2016 and 2017, local, state and federal government authorities seeking information related to national security, counter-terrorism or criminal concerns issued more than 260,000 subpoenas, court orders, warrants, and other legal requests to Verizon, more than 250,000 such requests to AT&T, and nearly 24,000 subpoenas, search warrants, or court orders to Google. Direct national security or counter-terrorism requests are a small fraction of this overall group of requests, but the Patriot Act legal process has now become so routinized that the companies each have a group of employees who simply take care of the stream of requests.
In this way, the collaboration between the intelligence community and big, commercial science and tech companies has been wildly successful. When national security agencies need to identify and track people and groups, they know where to turn – and do so frequently. That was the goal in the beginning. It has succeeded perhaps more than anyone could have imagined at the time.
Sebastian Thrun was entertaining the idea of self-driving cars for many years. Born and raised in Germany, he was fascinated with the power and performance of German cars. Things changed in 1986, when he was 18, when his best friend died in a car crash because the driver, another friend, was going too fast on his new Audi Quattro.
As a student at the University of Bonn, Thrun developed several autonomous robotic systems that earned him international recognition. At the time, Thrun was convinced that self-driving cars would soon make transportation safer, avoiding crashes like the one that took his friend’s life.
In 1998, he became an assistant professor and co-director of the Robot Learning Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. In July 2003, Thrun left Carnegie Mellon for Stanford University, soon after the first DARPA Grand Challenge was announced. Before accepting the new position, he asked Red Whittaker, the leader of the CMU robotics department, to join the team developing the vehicle for the DARPA race. Whittaker declined. After moving to California, Thrun joined the Stanford Racing Team.
On Oct. 8, 2005, the Stanford Racing Team won $2 million for being the first team to complete the 132-mile DARPA Grand Challenge course in California’s Mojave Desert. Their robot car, “Stanley,” finished in just under 6 hours and 54 minutes and averaged over 19 mph on the course.
Google’s Page wanted to develop self-driving cars
Two years after the third Grand Challenge, Google co-founder Larry Page called Thrun, wanting to turn the experience of the DARPA races into a product for the masses.
When Page first approached Thrun about building a self-driving car that people could use on the real roads, Thrun told him it couldn’t be done.
But Page had a vision, and he would not abandon his quest for an autonomous vehicle.
Thrun recalled that a short time later, Page came back to him and said, “OK, you say it can’t be done. You’re the expert. I trust you. So I can explain to Sergey [Brin] why it can’t be done, can you give me a technical reason why it can’t be done?”
Finally, Thrun accepted Page’s offer and, in 2009, started Project Chauffeur, which began as the Google self-driving car project.
The Google 101,000-Mile Challenge
To develop the technology for Google’s self-driving car, Thrun called Urmson and offered him the position of chief technical officer of the project.
To encourage the team to build a vehicle, and its systems, to drive on any public road, Page created two challenges, with big cash rewards for the entire team: a 1,000-mile challenge to show that Project Chauffeur’s car could drive in several situations, including highways and the streets of San Francisco, and another 100,000-mile challenge to show that driverless cars could be a reality in a few years.
By the middle of 2011, Project Chauffeur engineers completed the two challenges.
In 2016, the Google self-driving car project became Waymo, a “spinoff under Alphabet as a self-driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around.”
Urmson led Google’s self-driving car project for nearly eight years. Under his leadership, Google vehicles accumulated 1.8 million miles of test driving.
In 2018, Waymo One, the first fully self-driving vehicle taxi service, began in Phoenix, Arizona.
From Waymo to Aurora
In 2016, after finishing development of the production-ready version of Waymo’s self-driving technology, Urmson left Google to start Aurora Innovation, a startup backed by Amazon, aiming to provide the full-stack solution for self-driving vehicles.
Urmson believes that in 20 years, we’ll see much of the transportation infrastructure move over to automation. – Arrow.com
TO BE CONTINUED
Here’s a peek into the next episode:
Facebook Hired a Former DARPA Head To Lead An Ambitious New Research Lab
If you need another sign that Facebook’s world-dominating ambitions are just getting started, here’s one: the Menlo Park, Calif. company has hired a former DARPA chief to lead its new research lab.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced April 14 that Regina Dugan will guide Building 8, a new research group developing hardware projects that advance the company’s efforts in virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and global connectivity.
Dugan served as the head of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency from 2009 and 2012. Most recently, she led Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects Lab, a highly experimental arm of the company responsible for developing new hardware and software products on a strict two-year timetable.
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
Article 8 of The Rome Statute of The International Criminal Court (ICC) defines biological experiments as war crimes. The US, however, is not a state party to the international treaty, and cannot be held accountable for its war crimes.
“The Russian Defence Ministry continues to study materials on the implementation of military biological programs of the United States and its NATO allies on the territory of Ukraine.
We have already mentioned Robert Pope, director of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Programme and author of the idea of the Central Depository of Highly Dangerous Microorganisms in Kiev.
In his statement of April 10, 2022, Pope said that “…there is no reason to claim that research related to the development of biological weapons is taking place in Ukraine…”. He previously claimed that “…the Americans did not find biological weapons when they first started working with Ukraine, and they still haven’t. In addition, Ukraine lacks the infrastructure to develop and produce biological weapons…”.
I would like to recall that the term “biological weapons” includes biological formulations that contain pathogenic micro-organisms and toxins, as well as the means of delivery and use of said formulations.
While the priority for Ukrainian healthcare is socially significant diseases such as HIV, poliomyelitis, measles and hepatitis, US customers are interested in a completely different nomenclature: cholera, tularemia, plague and hantaviruses.
As a result of the special military operation on the territory of Ukraine, facts of work with the specified pathogens, which are potential agents of biological weapons, have been revealed. At the same time, it was noted that Ukraine had sent a request to the manufacturing company regarding the possibility of equipping the Bayraktar drones with aerosol equipment.
In addition on March 9, three unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with 30-litre containers and equipment for spraying formulations were detected by Russian reconnaissance units in Kherson region. At the end of April, 10 more were found near Kakhovka.
All this information calls into question the statements of American experts.
We have previously provided a scheme for US coordination of biological laboratories and research institutes in Ukraine. Its preliminary analysis suggests that Ukraine is essentially a testing ground for the development of biological weapons components and the testing of new samples of pharmaceuticals.
The Russian Ministry of Defence was able to clarify the said scheme.
It should be noted that the ideologues of US military-biological activities in Ukraine are the leaders of the Democratic Party.
Thus, through the US executive branch, a legislative framework for funding military biomedical research directly from the federal budget was formed. Funds were raised under state guarantees from NGOs controlled by the Democratic Party leadership, including the investment funds of the Clintons, Rockefellers, Soros and Biden.
The scheme involves major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and the US military-affiliated company Gilead. U.S. experts are working to test new medicines that circumvent international safety standards. As a result, Western companies are seriously reducing the cost of research programmes and gaining a significant competitive advantage.
The involvement of controlled nongovernmental and biotechnological organisations, and the increase in their revenues, allows the leaders of the Democratic Party to generate additional campaign finance and hide its distribution.
In addition to US pharmaceutical companies and Pentagon contractors, Ukrainian state agencies are involved in military bioweapons activities, whose main tasks are to conceal illegal activities, conduct field and clinical trials and provide the necessary biomaterial.
Thus, the US Department of Defence, using a virtually internationally uncontrolled test site and the high-tech facilities of multinational companies, has greatly expanded its research capabilities, not only in the field of biological weapons, but also in gaining knowledge about antibiotic resistance and the antibodies to specific diseases in populations in specific regions.
It should be noted that not only the US, but also a number of its NATO allies are implementing their military-biological projects in Ukraine.
The German government has decided to launch a national biosafety programme independent of Washington, D.C., starting in 2013. Twelve countries, including Ukraine, are involved in the Programme.
On the German side, the programme involves the Institute for Armed Forces Microbiology (Munich), the Robert Koch Institute (Berlin), the Loeffler Institute (Greifswald) and the Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (Hamburg).
New documents reveal that between 2016 and 2019 alone, three and a half thousand blood serum samples of citizens living in 25 regions of Ukraine were taken by military epidemiologists from the Bundeswehr Microbiology Institute.
The involvement of institutions subordinate to the Bundeswehr confirms the military orientation of biological research carried out in Ukrainian laboratories and raises questions about the goals pursued by the German armed forces in collecting biomaterials of Ukrainian citizens.
The documents obtained also show the involvement of Poland in Ukrainian biolaboratories. The participation of the Polish Institute of Veterinary Medicine in research aimed at assessing the epidemiological threats and spread of the rabies virus in Ukraine has been confirmed. Characteristically, the research in question was carried out jointly with the US-based Battelle Institute, a key contractor for the Pentagon.
In addition, Polish funding for the Lvov Medical University, which includes a member of US military biology projects, the Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene, has been documented. The organisation has been running a retraining programme for specialists with experience of working with dual-use materials and technologies since 2002.
The special military operation by Russian troops succeeded in obtaining additional information about bio-incidents in Ukraine.
For example, materials indicating the intentional use of a multidrug-resistant tuberculosis pathogen in 2020 to infect the population of the Slavyanoserbsky district of the LPR were examined.
The flyers, made in the form of counterfeit currency notes, were infected with the tuberculosis agent and distributed to minors in Stepovoe village. The organisers of this crime took into account the behaviour of children, who have a habit of “putting everything in their mouths” and taking food with unwashed hands.
The results of bacteriological studies have confirmed the resistance of the isolated bacteria to first- and second-line anti-TB drugs, meaning that the disease caused by them is much more difficult to treat and the cost of treatment is much higher.
According to the conclusion of the Lugansk Republican Sanitary and Epidemiological Station, “…the contamination of the notes was most likely carried out artificially, as the material contains extremely dangerous strains of the pathogen in concentrations capable of ensuring infection and development of the tuberculosis process…”.
In his conclusion, the chief doctor of the Lugansk Republican TB Dispensary also notes that “…there are all signs of deliberate, man-made contamination of the flyers with highly pathogenic biomaterial…”.
We previously reported on trials of potentially dangerous biological drugs on one of the least protected categories of people – patients of the Kharkov Regional Clinical Psychiatric Hospital No 3.
We have received new information revealing details of the Pentagon’s inhuman experiments on Ukrainian citizens in Psychiatric Hospital No 1 (Streleche village, Kharkov region). The main category of subjects was a group of male patients aged 40-60 years with a high stage of physical exhaustion.
In order to conceal their US affiliation, the biological research experts travelled via third countries. Here is a photograph of Florida native Linda Oporto, who was directly involved in these works.
In January 2022, the foreign nationals conducting the experiments were evacuated in an emergency and the equipment and drugs they were using were taken to western Ukraine.
Russian Defence Ministry specialists have carried out work directly in two biolaboratories in Mariupol.
Evidence of emergency destruction of documents confirming work with the US military establishment was obtained. A preliminary analysis of extant documentation indicates the use of Mariupol as a regional centre for cholera pathogen collection and certification. The selected strains were sent to the Public Health Centre in Kiev, which is responsible for the onward shipment of biomaterials to the United States. These activities have been carried out since 2014, as evidenced by the transfer of strains.
An act of destruction of the pathogen collection dated February 25, 2022, according to which cholera, tularemia and anthrax pathogens were handled there, was found in the sanitary and epidemiological laboratory.
Part of the collection of the veterinary laboratory was not destroyed in a hurry. In order to ensure safety and secure storage, 124 strains were exported by Russian specialists and their study was organised.
The presence in the collection of pathogens that are uncharacteristic of veterinary medicine, such as typhoid, paratyphoid fever and gas gangrene, is a cause for concern. This could indicate the laboratory’s misuse and involvement in a military biological programme.
We will continue to examine the full volume of material received from the Mariupol biolaboratories and will inform you about the results.
The Russian Ministry of Defence has information that provocations are being prepared to accuse the Russian Armed Forces of using weapons of mass destruction, followed by a “Syrian scenario” investigation to fabricate the necessary evidence and assign blame.
The high likelihood of such provocations is confirmed by requests from the Kiev administration for personal skin and respiratory protection equipment that provides protection against toxic chemicals and biological contaminating agents. The supply to Ukraine of organophosphorus poisoning antidotes raises concerns. In 2022 alone, more than 220,000 ampoules of atropine, as well as preparations for special treatment and disinfection, were delivered from the USA at the request of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health.
Thus, the information obtained confirms that the United States is implementing an offensive military-biological programme in Ukraine to study the possibility of forming controlled epidemics in specific territories.
The special military operation of the Russian Armed Forces has crossed the US military-biological expansion in Ukraine and stopped criminal experiments on civilians.” – RUSSIA MOD
Yeah, everything from any government has to be taken with a pinch of salt and all that, but when things easily corroborate with what we previously discovered, we need to pay attention. I can’t argue anything against the new data yet, but we can cross-reference a lot of it, so, rather than a bombshell, this is more like cementing the foundation and filling in some gaps.
She originated all our revelations and public debate and this is her first lengthy interview lately! Thank her and be a part of the solution by spreading this!
US fired back at Russia with very symmetrical accusations. Many are correct. That doesn’t let either of the parts off the hook, both are dirty and guilty, both are a reflection of each other, like commies and nazis, libtards and trumptards, Pepsi and Coke, all eventually owned by some Blackrock.
Dilyana Gaytandzhieva is a Bulgarian investigative journalist, Middle East correspondent and founder of Arms Watch. Over the last two years she has published a series of revealing reports on weapons supplies to terrorists in Syria and Iraq. Her current work is focused on documenting war crimes and illicit arms exports to war zones around the world.
Attention: for expired/deleted links, learn to use the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive, their apps and plugins are great.
The US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of Biological Weapons. Hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable diseases. Bio warfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world. These US bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program– Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and are located in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.
Georgia as a testing ground
The Lugar Center is the Pentagon bio laboratory in Georgia. It is located just 17 km from the US Vaziani military airbase in the capital Tbilisi. Tasked with the military program are biologists from the US Army Medical Research Unit-Georgia (USAMRU-G) along with private contractors. The Bio-safety Level 3 Laboratory is accessible only to US citizens with security clearance. They are accorded diplomatic immunity under the 2002 US-Georgia Agreement on defense cooperation.
The Lugar Center, Republic of GeorgiaThe US Army has been deployed to Vaziani Military Air Base, 17 km from the Pentagon bio-laboratory at The Lugar Center.The USA-Georgia agreement accords diplomatic status to the US military and civilian personnel (including diplomatic vehicles), working on the Pentagon program in Georgia.
Information obtained from the US federal contracts registry clarifies some of the military activities at The Lugar Center – among them research on bio-agents (anthrax, tularemia) and viral diseases (e.g. Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever), and the collection of biological samples for future experiments.
Pentagon contractors produce bio agents under diplomatic cover
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has outsourced much of the work under the military program to private companies, which are not held accountable to Congress, and which can operate more freely and move around the rule of law. US civilian personnel performing work at The Lugar Center have also been given diplomatic immunity, although they are not diplomats. Hence, private companies can perform work, under diplomatic cover, for the US government without being under the direct control of the host state – in this case the Republic of Georgia. This practice is often used by the CIA to provide cover for its agents. Three private American companies work at the US bio-laboratory in Tbilisi – CH2M Hill, Battelle and Metabiota. In addition to the Pentagon, these private contractors perform research for the CIA and various other government agencies.
CH2M Hill has been awarded $341.5 million DTRA contracts under the Pentagon’s program for bio-laboratories in Georgia, Uganda, Tanzania, Iraq, Afghanistan, South East Asia. Half of this sum ($161.1 million), being allocated to The Lugar Center, under the Georgian contract. According to CH2M Hill, the US Company has secured biological agents and employed former bio warfare scientists at The Lugar Center. These are scientists who are working for another American company involved in the military program in Georgia – Battelle Memorial Institute.
Battelle as a $59 million subcontractor at Lugar Center has extensive experience in research on bio-agents, as the company has already worked on the US Bio-weapons Program under 11 previous contracts with the US Army (1952-1966).Source: US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, vol. II, 1977, p. 82
As opposed to this Al Jazeera dude, we’re not working for corporations or governments and there’s no government that can put up with our research. Dilyana is anti-Russian, I am against any large group of people that’s not a music festival audience or a tree-planting brigade, they’re all dumb and only harmonic vibrations can redeem them.
The CIA-Battelle Project Clear Vision
Project Clear Vision (1997 and 2000), a joint investigation by the CIA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, under a contract awarded by the Agency, reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test its dissemination characteristics. The project’s stated goal was to assess bio-agents dissemination characteristics of bomblets. The clandestine CIA-Battelle operation was omitted from the US Biological Weapons Convention declarations submitted to the UN.
Top Secret Experiments
Battelle has operated a Top Secret Bio laboratory (National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center – NBACC) at Fort Detrick, Maryland under a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contract for the last decade. The company has been awarded a $344.4 million federal contract (2006 – 2016) and another $17.3 million contract (2015 -2026) by DHS.
Besides the military experiments at the Lugar Center in Georgia, Battelle has already produced bioterrorism agents at the Biosafety Level 4 NBACC Top Secret Laboratory at Fort Detrick in the US. A NBACC presentation lists 16 research priorities for the lab. Amongst them to characterize classical, emerging and genetically engineered pathogens for their BTA (biological threat agent) potential; assess the nature of nontraditional, novel and non-endemic induction of disease from potential BTA and to expand aerosol-challenge testing capacity for non-human primates.
Scientists engineer pathogens at the NBACC lab. Photo credit: NBACC
The US Company Metabiota Inc. has been awarded $18.4 million federal contracts under the Pentagon’s DTRA program in Georgia and Ukraine for scientific and technical consulting services. Metabiota services include global field-based biological threat research, pathogen discovery, outbreak response and clinical trials. Metabiota Inc. had been contracted by the Pentagon to perform work for DTRA before and during the Ebola crisis in West Africa and was awarded $3.1 million (2012-2015) for work in Sierra Leone – one of the countries at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak.
Metabiota worked on a Pentagon’s project at the epicenter of the Ebola crisis, where three US biolabs are situated.
A July 17, 2014 report drafted by the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium, accused Metabiota Inc. of failing to abide by an existing agreement on how to report test results and for bypassing the Sierra Leonean scientists working there. The report also raised the possibility that Metabiota was culturing blood cells at the lab, something the report said was dangerous, as well as misdiagnosing healthy patients. All of those allegations were denied by Metabiota.
2011,The Lugar Center, Andrew C. Weber (on the right) – US Assistant Secretary of Defense (2009-2014), US DoD Deputy Coordinator for Ebola Response (2014-2015), is currently a Metabiota ( the US contractor) employee.
[Keep these guys in mind for later! – S.m.]
Military Experiments on biting insects
Entomological warfare is a type of biological warfare that uses insects to transmit diseases. The Pentagon has allegedly performed such entomological tests in Georgia and Russia. In 2014 The Lugar Center was equipped with an insect facility and launched a project “Raising Awareness about Barcoding of Sand Flies in Georgia and Caucasus”. The project covered a larger geographic area outside of Georgia – Caucasus. In 2014-2015 Phlebotomine sand fly species were collected under another project “Surveillance Work on Acute Febrile Illness” and all (female) sand flies were tested to determine their infectivity rate. A third project, also including sand flies collection, studied the characteristics their salivary glands.
A biting fly in a bathroom in Tbilisi (photo 1), flies in Georgia (photo 2, 3)
As a result Tbilisi has been infested with biting flies since 2015. These biting insects live indoors, in bathrooms, all year long, which was not the typical behaviour of these species in Georgia previously (normally the Phlebotomine fly season in Georgia is exceptionally short – from June to September). Local people complain of being bitten by these newly appeared flies while naked in their bathrooms. They also have a strong resistance to cold and can survive even in the sub-zero temperatures in the mountains.
Biting Flies in Dagestan, Russia
Since the start of the Pentagon project in 2014 flies similar to those in Georgia have appeared in neighboring Dagestan (Russia). According to local people, they bite and cause rashes. Their breeding habitats are house drains.
Flies in Georgia (on the left). The same species in Dagestan (on the right)
Flies from the Phlebotomine family carry dangerous parasites in their saliva which they transmit through a bite to humans. The disease, which these flies carry, is of high interest to the Pentagon. In 2003 during the US invasion of Iraq American soldiers were severely bitten by sand flies and contracted Leishmoniasis. The disease is native to Iraq and Afghanistan and if left untreated the acute form of Leishmoniasis can be fatal.
A 1967 US Army report “Arthropods of medical importance in Asia and the European USSR” lists all local insects, their distribution and the diseases that they carry. Biting flies, which live in drains, are also listed in the document. Their natural habitats, though, are the Philippines, not Georgia or Russia.
Source: “Arthropods of medical importance in Asia and the European USSR”, US Army report, 1967
Operation Whitecoat: Infected flies tested to bite humans
Sand fly
In 1970 and 1972, Sand Fly Fever tests were performed on humans according to a declassified US Army report – US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, 1977, vol. II, p. 203. During operation Whitecoat volunteers were exposed to bites by infected sand flies. Operation Whitecoat was a bio-defense medical research program carried out by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland between 1954 and 1973.
Despite the official termination of the US bio-weapons program, in 1982 USAMRIID performed an experiment if sand flies and mosquitoes could be vectors of Rift Valley Virus, Dengue, Chikungunya and Eastern Equine Encephalitis – viruses, which the US Army researched for their potential as bio-weapons.
Killer Insects
A. Aegupti
The Pentagon has a long history in using insects as vectors for diseases. According to a partially declassified 1981 US Army report, American bio warfare scientists carried out a number of experiments on insects. These operations were part of the US Entomological Warfare under the Program for Biological Weapons of the US.
The Pentagon: How to kill 625,000 people for just $0.29 cost per death
A US Army report in 1981 compared two scenarios – 16 simultaneous attacks on a city by A. Aegupti mosquitoes, infected with Yellow Fever, and Tularemia aerosol attack, and assesses their effectiveness in cost and casualties.
Operation Big Itch: Field tests were performed to determine coverage patterns and survivability of the tropical rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis for use as a disease vector in biological warfare.
Operation Big Buzz: 1 million A. Aeugupti mosquitoes were produced, 1/3 were placed in munitions and dropped from aircraft, or dispersed on the ground. The mosquitoes survived the airdrop and actively sought out human blood.
Source: Evaluation of Entomological Warfare as a potential Danger to the US and European NATO nations, US Army, March 1981 Report
Operation May Day: Aedes Aegupti mosquitoes were dispersed through ground based methods in Georgia, USA, during a US Army operation codenamed May Day.
Parts of the 1981 US Army report such as the “Mass production of Aedes Aegypti” have not been declassified, potentially meaning that the project is still ongoing.
Aedes Aegypti, also known as yellow fever mosquito, have been widely used in US military operations. The same species of mosquitoes are alleged to be the vectors of dengue, chikungunya and the Zika virus, which causes genetic malformations in newborns.
The US Army Chemical Research and Development Command, Biological Weapons Branch, studied outdoor mosquito biting activity in a number of field tests at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, in 1960. Virgin female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which had been starved, were tested upon troops out in the open air.
Military Experiments with Tropical Mosquitoes and Ticks in Georgia
Such species of mosquitoes and fleas (studied in the past under the US Entomological Warfare Program) have also been collected in Georgia and tested at The Lugar Center.
Under the DTRA project “Virus and Other Arboviruses in Georgia” in 2014 the never-before-seen tropical mosquito Aedes albopictus was detected for the first time and after decades (60 years) the existence of Aedes Aegypti mosquito was confirmed in West Georgia.
Aedes Albopictus is a vector of many viral pathogens, Yellow fever virus, Dengue, Chikungunya and Zika.
These tropical mosquitoes Aedes Albopictus having never been seen before in Georgia, have also been detected in neighboring Russia (Krasnodar) and Turkey, according to data provided by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Their spread is unusual for this part of the world.
Aedes Aegupti Mosquitoes have been distributed only in Georgia, Southern Russia and Northern Turkey. They were detected for the first time in 2014 after the start of the Pentagon program at The Lugar Center.
Under another DTRA project “Epidemiology and Ecology of Tularemia in Georgia” (2013-2016) 6,148 ground ticks were collected ; 5,871 were collected off the cattle and 1,310 fleas and 731 ticks were caught. In 2016 a further 21 590 ticks were collected and studied at The Lugar Center.
In 2007 despite the anthrax outbreak the Georgian government terminated the compulsory vaccination for 7 years, 2013 saw NATO start human trials on a new anthrax vaccine in Georgia.
Pentagon Research on Russian Anthrax
Anthrax is one of the bio agents weaponized by the US Army in the past. Despite the Pentagon’s claims that its program is only defensive, there are facts to the contrary. In 2016 at The Lugar Center American scientists carried out research on the “Genome Sequence of the Soviet/Russian Bacillus anthracis Vaccine Strain 55-VNIIVViM”, which was funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s (DTRA) Cooperative Biological Engagement Program in Tbilisi, and administered by Metabiota (the US contractor under the Pentagon program in Georgia).
34 people infected with Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) in Georgia
Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is caused by infection through a tick-borne virus (Nairovirus). The disease was first characterized in Crimea in 1944 and given the name Crimean hemorrhagic fever. It was then later recognized in 1969 as the cause of illness in Congo, thus resulting in the current name of the disease. In 2014 34 people became infected (among which a 4-year old child) with CCHF. 3 of which died. The same year Pentagon biologists studied the virus in Georgia under the DTRA project “Epidemiology of febrile illnesses caused by Dengue viruses and other Arboviruses in Georgia”. The project included tests on patients with fever symptoms and the collection of ticks, as possible vectors of CCHV for laboratory analysis.
34 people became infected with CCHF, 3 of them died in Georgia. Source: NCDC-Georgia
The cause of the CCHF outbreak in Georgia is still unknown. According to the local Veterinary Department report, only one tick from all of the collected species from the infected villages tested positive for the disease. Despite the claims of the local authorities that the virus was transmitted to humans from animals, all animal blood samples were negative too. The lack of infected ticks and animals is inexplicable given the sharp increase of CCHF human cases in 2014, meaning that the outbreak was not natural and the virus was spread intentionally.
In 2016 another 21 590 ticks were collected for DNA database for future studies at The Lugar Center under the Pentagon project “Assessing the Seroprevalence and Genetic Diversity of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Virus (CCHFV) and Hantaviruses in Georgia”.
Symptoms of CCHF
Military bio-lab blamed for deadly CCHF outbreak in Afghanistan
237 cases of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) have also been reported across Afghanistan, 41 of which were fatal as of December 2017. According to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Health most of the cases have been registered in the capital Kabul where 71 cases have been reported with 13 fatalities, and in the province of Herat near the border with Iran (67 cases).
Afghanistan is one of 25 countries across the world with Pentagon bio-laboratories on their territory. The project in Afghanistan is part of the US bio-defense program – Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), which is funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The DTRA contractors, working at The Lugar Center in Georgia, CH2M Hill and Battelle have also been contracted for the program in Afghanistan. CH2M Hill has been awarded a $10.4 million contract (2013-2017). The Pentagon contractors in Afghanistan and Georgia are the same and so are the diseases which are spreading among the local population in both countries.
Why the Pentagon collects and studies bats
Bats are allegedly the reservoir hosts to the Ebola Virus , Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and other deadly diseases. However, the precise ways these viruses are transmitted to humans are currently unknown. Numerous studies have been performed under the DTRA Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) in a search for deadly pathogens of military importance in bats.
Bats have been blamed for the deadly Ebola outbreak in Africa (2014-2016). However, no conclusive evidence of exactly how the virus “jumped” to humans has ever been provided, which raises suspicions of intentional and not natural infection.
This comes from the set of evidences Russia made public prior to convoking a UN meeting on March 11 2022
Engineering deadly viruses is legal in the US
MERS-CoV is thought to originate from bats and spread directly to humans and/or camels. However, like Ebola, the precise ways the virus spreads are unknown. 1,980 cases with 699 deaths were reported in 15 countries across the world (as of June 2017) caused by MERS-CoV.
3 to 4 out of every 10 patients reported with MERS have died (Source: WHO)
MERS-CoV is one of the viruses that have been engineered by the US and studied by the Pentagon, as well as Influenza and SARS. Confirmation of this practice is Obama’s 2014 temporary ban on government funding for such “dual-use” research. The moratorium was lifted in 2017 and experiments have continued. Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens (PPPs) experiments are legal in the US. Such experiments aim to increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens.
Tularemia as Bioweapon
F. Tularensis is a highly infectious bacterium and has the potential to be weaponized for use through aerosol attacks.
Tularemia, also known as Rabbit Fever, is classified as a bioterrorism agent and was developed in the past as such by the US. However, the Pentagon’s research on tularemia continues, as well as on possible vectors of the bacteria such as ticks and rodents which cause the disease. The DTRA has launched a number of projects on Tularemia along with other especially dangerous pathogens in Georgia. Especially Dangerous Pathogens (EDPs), or select agents, represent a major concern for the public health globally. These highly pathogenic agents have the potential to be weaponized with proof of their military importance seen through the following Pentagon projects: Epidemiology and Ecology of Tularemia inGeorgia (2013-2016) (60 000 vectors were collected for strain isolates and genome research); Epidemiology of Human Tularemia in Georgia and Human Disease Epidemiology and Surveillance of Especially Dangerous Pathogens in Georgia (study of select agents among patients with undifferentiated fever and hemorrhagic fever/septic shock).
Tularemia is one of the bio-weapons that the US Army developed in the past. Source: 1981 US Army Report
Pentagon bio-laboratories spread diseases in Ukraine
The DoD Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has funded 11 bio-laboratories in the former Soviet Union Country Ukraine, bordering on Russia.
The US military program is sensitive information
Ukraine has no control over the military bio-laboratories on its own territory. According to the 2005 Agreement between the US DoD and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine the Ukrainian government is prohibited from public disclosure of sensitive information about the US program and Ukraine is obliged to transfer to the US Department of Defense (DoD) dangerous pathogens for biological research. The Pentagon has been granted access to certain state secrets of Ukraine in connection with the projects under their agreement.
Biowarfare scientists under diplomatic cover
Among the set of bilateral agreements between the US and Ukraine is the establishment of the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU) – an International organization funded mainly by the US government which has been accorded diplomatic status. The STCU officially supports projects of scientists previously involved in the Soviet biological weapons program. Over the past 20 years the STCU has invested over $285 million in funding and managing some 1,850 projects of scientists who previously worked on the development of weapons of mass destruction.
The US personnel in Ukraine work under diplomatic cover.
364 Ukrainians died from Swine Flu
One of the Pentagon laboratories is located in Kharkiv, where in January 2016 at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers died from Flu-like virus in just two days with 200 more being hospitalized. The Ukrainian government did not report on the dead Ukrainian soldiers in Kharkiv. As of March 2016 364 deaths have been reported across Ukraine (81.3 % caused by Swine Flu A (H1N1) pdm09 – the same strain which caused the world pandemic in 2009).
According to DPR intelligence information the US bio lab in Kharkiv leaked the deadly virus.
Police investigate infection with incurable disease
A highly suspicious Hepatitis A infection spread rapidly in just few months across South East Ukraine where most of the Pentagon biolabs are located.
29 cases of Hepatitis A were reported in Kharkiv in November 2017. The virus was isolated in contaminated drinking water. One of the Pentagon bio-labs is located in Kharkiv which was blamed for the deadly Flu outbreak a year ago which claimed the lives of 364 Ukrainians.
Ukraine and Russia hit by new highly virulent cholera infection
A new highly virulent variant of the cholera agent Vibrio cholera, with a high genetic similarity to the strains reported in Ukraine, hit Moscow in 2014. According to a 2014 Russian Research Anti-Plaque Institute genetic study the cholera strain isolated in Moscow was similar to the bacteria which caused the epidemic in neighboring Ukraine.
Southern Research Institute, one of the US contractors working at the bio-laboratories in Ukraine, has projects on Cholera, as well as on Influenza and Zika – all pathogens of military importance to the Pentagon.
Along with Southern Research Institute, two other private American companies operate military bio-labs in Ukraine – Black&Veatch and Metabiota.
Black & Veatch Special Project Corp. was awarded $198.7 million DTRA contracts to build and operate bio-laboratories in Ukraine (under two 5-year contracts in 2008 and 2012 totaling $128.5 million), as well as in Germany, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Thailand, Ethiopia, Vietnam and Armenia.
Metabiota has been awarded a $18.4 million federal contract under the program in Georgia and Ukraine. This US company was also contracted to perform work for the DTRA before and during the Ebola crisis in West Africa, the company was awarded $3.1 million (2012-2015) for work in Sierra Leone .
Southern Research Institute has been a prime subcontractor under the DTRA program in Ukraine since 2008. The company was also a prime Pentagon contractor in the past under the US Biological Weapons Program for research and development of bio-agents with 16 contracts between 1951 and 1962.
Southern Research Institute was also a subcontractor on a Pentagon program for anthrax research in 2001. The prime contractor being Advanced Biosystems, whose president at that time was Ken Alibek (a former Soviet microbiologist and biological warfare expert from Kazakhstan who defected to the US in 1992).
Ken Alibek was the First Deputy Director of Biopreparat, where he oversaw a program for biological weapon facilities and was the Soviet Union’s main expert on anthrax. After his defection to the US, he was engaged on Pentagon research projects.
$250 000 for lobbying Jeff Sessions for “research for US intelligence”
Southern Research Institute lobbied the US Congress and US Department of State hard for “issues related to research and development for US intelligence” and “defense related research and development”. The lobbying activities coincided with the start of the Pentagon projects on bio-labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet states.
The company paid $ 250 000 for lobbying the then Senator Jeff Sessions in 2008-2009 (currently the US Attorney General appointed by Donald Trump), when the institute was awarded a number of federal contracts.
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, US Senator from Alabama (1997-2017)
Police investigate Botulism toxin poisoning in Ukraine
115 Botulism cases, with 12 deaths, were reported in Ukraine in 2016. In 2017 the Ukrainian Ministry of Health confirmed a further 90 new cases, with 8 deaths, of botulinum toxin poisoning (one of the most poisonous biological substances known). According to the local health authorities, the cause of the outbreak was food poisoning into which police launched an investigation. The Pentagon biolaboratories in Ukraine were among the prime suspects, as botulinum toxin is one of the bioterrorism agents which have already been produced at a Pentagon bioweapons facility in the US. (see below)
The Ukrainian government stopped supplying antitoxin in 2014 and no botulism vaccines in stock were available during the 2016-2017 outbreak.
Botulism is a rare and extremely dangerous illness caused by a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum.
1 gm of the toxin can kill as many as 1 million people
Botulinum neurotoxin poses a major bio-weapon threat because of its extreme potency, ease of production and transport. It causes muscles paralyses, respiratory failure and ultimately death if not treated immediately. A single gram of crystalline toxin, evenly dispersed and inhaled can kill more than one million people. It could be disseminated via aerosol, or by contamination of water and/ or food supplies.
The Pentagon produces live Viruses, Bacteria & Toxins
Botulinum Toxin was tested as a bio-weapon by the US Army in the past, as well as Anthrax, Brucella and Tularemia. Although the US bio-weapons program was officially terminated in 1969 documents show that the military experiments have never ended. Presently the Pentagon produces and tests live bio- agents at the same military facility as it did in the past – Dugway Proving Ground.
The US Army produces and tests bio-agents at a special military facility located at Dugway Proving Ground (West Desert Test Center, Utah), as proven in a 2012 US Army Report. The facility is overseen by the Army Test and Evaluation Command.
The Life Sciences Division (LSD) at Dugway Proving Ground is tasked with the production of bio-agents. According to the Army report, scientists from this division produce and test aerosolized bio-agents at Lothar Saloman Life Sciences Test Facility (LSTF).
Lothar Saloman Life Sciences Test Facility (LSTF) where bio-terrorism agents are produced and aerosolized. Photo Credit: Dugway Proving GroundBiological Agents produced by the US Army at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, USA Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center
The Life Sciences Division consists of an Aerosol Technology branch and a Microbiology Branch. The Aerosol Technology Branch aerosolizes biological agents and simulants. The Microbiology branch produces toxins, bacteria, viruses and agent-like organisms which are used in chamber and field testing.
The fermentation laboratories at the Life Sciences Test Facility grow bacteria in fermentors ranging from a small 2 L to a large 1500 L system. The fermentors are tailored specifically to the requirements of the microorganism that is being engineered – pH, temperature, light, pressure, and nutrient concentrations that give the microorganism optimal growth rates.
A large 1500 L fermentatorA post-production laboratory dries and mills test materials. Photos credit: Dugway Proving Ground
After the bio-agents are produced, the scientists challenge them at containment aerosol chambers.
Technicians disseminate live biological agents for identification sensitivity tests (photos: Dugway Proving Ground)
Aerosol experiments with Botulinum Neurotoxin and Anthrax
Documents prove that the US Army produces, possesses and tests aerosols of the most lethal toxin in the world – Botulinum Neurotoxin. In 2014 the Department of the Army purchased 100 mg of Botulinum Toxin from Metabiologics for tests at Dugway Proving Ground.
The experiments date back to 2007 when an unspecified quantity of the toxin was procured to the Department of the Army by the same company – Metabiologics. According to the 2012 West Desert Test Center Report, the military facility performs tests with Botulinum Neurotoxin Aerosol, as well as with aerosolized Anthrax, Yersinia pestis, and Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus (VEE).
Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test Center
Outdoor field test programs at Dugway Proving Ground
US Army documents and photos show that the Pentagon has developed various dissemination methods for bioterrorism attacks including by explosives.
Source: Capabilities Report 2012, West Desert Test CenterDissemination of contaminants for biological/chemical tests. Photo credit: Dugway Proving GroundDissemination of simulants by explosives. Photo Credit: Dugway Proving GroundLiquid DisseminationPowder DisseminationDissemination on the test grid. Photos Credit: Dugway Proving GroundAerosol Sprayer
The US Army report lists numerous dissemination techniques including by bio-aerosol sprayers. Such sprayers called Micronair disseminators have already been developed by the US Army and tested at Dugway Proving Ground. According to the documents, they can be vehicle-mounted, or worn as a backpack, with a pump system which can be fitted to the unit to increase the accuracy of the release. Micronair sprayers can release 50 to 500 mL of bio-liquid simulant per minute from 12 L tanks.
The US stole bacteria from Saddam Hussein’s bio weapons factory
Bacillus thuringiensis
Bacillus thuringiensis is an insect pathogen that is widely used as a bio-pesticide. B. thuringiensis (BT) Al Hakam was collected in Iraq by the UN Special Commission led by the US in 2003. It is named after Al Hakam – Iraq’s bio-weapons production facility. Apart from Pentagon field tests, this bacterium is also used in the US for the production of GM corn, resistant to pests. Photos posted by the CIA prove that the bacteria was collected by the US in Iraq. According to the CIA, the vials containing bio-pesticide, were recovered from an Al Hakam scientist’s home.
CIA: A total of 97 vials-including those with labels consistent with the al Hakam cover stories of single-cell protein and bio-pesticides, as well as strains that could be used to produce BW agents were recovered from a scientist’s residence in Iraq in 2003. Photo credit: CIA
Information from the US federal contracts registry shows that the Pentagon performs tests using the bacteria stolen from Saddam Hussein’s bio-weapons factory in Iraq.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) federal project for laboratory analysis and field tests with bacteria. Source: govtribe.com
The tests are performed at Kirtland Air Force Base (Kirtland is the home of the Air Force Materiel Command’s Nuclear Weapons Center). Here weapons are being tested, meaning that the field tests with biological simulants (bacteria) also fall into this group.
The DTRA contractor on this project – Lovelace Biomedical and Environmental Research Institute (LBERI), operates an Animal Bio-safety 3 Level (ABSL-3) laboratory which has Select Agent status. The facility is designed to conduct bioaerosol studies. The company has been awarded a 5-year contract for field tests with biological simulants at Kirtland Air Force Base.
Photo Credit: Kirtland Air Force Base
Field tests with Biological Simulants (bacteria)
What the Pentagon is now doing is exactly what it did in the past, meaning that its bio-weapons program was never terminated. The US Army performed 27 field tests with such biological simulants, involving the public domain from 1949 to 1968, when President Nixon officially announced the end of the program.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which runs the US military program at the Lugar Center in Georgia, is alleged to have already performed field tests with an unknown substance in Chechnya, Russia. In the spring of 2017 local citizens reported on a drone disseminating white powder close to the Russian border with Georgia. Neither the Georgian border police, nor the US personnel operating on the Georgia-Russia border, commented on this information.
$9.2 million US military project on Russia-Georgia border
DTRA has full access to the Russia-Georgia border, granted under a military program called “Georgia Land Border Security Project”. The activities, related to the project have been outsourced to a private American company – Parsons Government Services International. DTRA has previously contracted Parsons for similar border security projects in Lebanon, Jordan, Libya and Syria. Parsons have been awarded a $9.2 million contract under the Pentagon border security project on the Russia-Georgia border.
Local citizens in Chechnya noticed a UAV sprayer near the Russian border with Georgia in 2017.
US Defense Agency tests GM Insects to transmit GM Viruses
The Pentagon has invested at least $65 million in gene editing. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded 7 research teams to develop tools for genome engineering in insects, rodents and bacteria under DARPA’s Safe Gene program, using a novel CRISPR-Cas9 technology.
Under another military program –Insect Allies, GM insects are engineered to transfer modified genes to plants. The $10.3 million DARPA project includes both gene editing in insects and in the viruses that they transmit. Ecological Niche-preference Engineering is a third ongoing military program for genome engineering in insects. The Pentagon’s stated objective is to engineer GM organisms so that they can resist certain temperatures, change their habitat and food sources.
Besides gene editing in insects and in the viruses they transmit, the Pentagon wants to engineer humans as well. DARPA Advanced Tools for Mammalian Genome Engineering Project seeks to create a biological platform inside the human body, using it to deliver new genetic information, and thus altering humans at the DNA level.
DARPA wants to insert an additional 47th artificial chromosome into human cells. This chromosome will deliver new genes that will be used for engineering the human body. SynPloid Biotek LLC has been awarded two contracts under the program totaling $1.1 million (2015-2016 – $ 100,600 for the first phase of the research; 2015-2017 – $ 999,300 for work which is not specified in the federal contracts registry. The company has only two employees and no previous record on bio-research.
Top Secret Research on Synthetic Viruses
Between 2008 and 2014, the United States invested approximately $820 million in synthetic biology research, Defense being a major contributor. Most of the military projects on synthetic biology are classified, among them are a number of classified studies by the secretive JASON group of US military advisors – e.g. Emerging Viruses and Genome Editing for the Pentagon, and Synthetic Viruses for the National Counterterrorism Center.
JASON is an independent scientific advisory group that provides consulting services to the U.S. government on matters of defense science and technology. It was established in 1960 and most of their resulting JASON reports are classified. For administrative purposes, the JASON’s projects are run by the MITRE Corporation, which has contracts with the Defense Department, CIA and the FBI. Since 2014 MITRE has been awarded some $27.4 million in contracts with the DoD.
Although the JASON Reports are classified, another US Air Force study titled Biotechnology: Genetically Engineered Pathogens, sheds some light on what the secretive JASON group has researched – 5 groups of genetically engineered pathogens that can be used as bio-weapons. These are binary biological weapons (a lethal combination of two viruses), host swapping diseases (animal viruses that “jump” to humans, like the Ebola virus), stealth viruses, and designer diseases. Designer diseases can be engineered to target a certain ethnic group, meaning that they can be used as ethnic bio-weapons.
Ethnic Bioweapons
Ethnic biological weapon (biogenetic weapon) is a theoretical weapon that aims to primarily harm people of specific ethnicities, or genotypes. Although officially the research and development of ethnic bio-weapons have never been publicly confirmed, documents show that the US collects biological material from certain ethnic groups – Russians and Chinese.
The US Air Force has been specifically collecting Russian RNA and synovial tissue samples, raising fears in Moscow of a covert US ethnic bio-weapons program.
Source: fbo.gov
Apart from Russians, the US has been collecting biological material from both healthy and cancer patients in China. The National Cancer Institute has collected biological samples from 300 subjects from Linxian, Zhengzhou, and Chengdu in China. While another federal project, titled Serum Metabolic biomarkers discovery study of Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma in China, includes analysis of 349 serum samples which have been collected from Chinese patients.
The US National Cancer Institute has been collecting biological material from patients of the Chinese Cancer Hospital in Beijing.
Chinese biological material has been collected under a series of federal projects including saliva and cancer tissue. Among them, Genotyping DNA Samples from Lymphoma cases and from controls (healthy patients), Breast cancer tissue blocks from breast cancer patients, Saliva samples of 50 families who have 3 or more cases of UGI cancer, Genotype 50 SNP’S for DNA samples from the Cancer Hospital, Beijing, Genotypes from 3000 cases of gastric cancer and 3000 controls (healthy patients) in Beijing.
Tobacco Vaccines: How the Pentagon helped tobacco companies to profit from Ebola
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested $100 million in vaccines production from tobacco plants. The companies, involved in the project, are owned by the biggest American tobacco companies – Mediacago Inc. is co-owned by Philip Morris, and Kentucky BioProcessing is a subsidiary of Reynolds American which is owned by British American Tobacco. Currently they are producing Flu and Ebola vaccines from tobacco plants.
The $100 million program Blue Angel was launched as a response to the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. Medicago being awarded $21 million to produce 10, 000 million doses of an influenza vaccine within one month.
Blue Angel program manager Dr. John Julias explains: “Although there are multiple plant species and other organisms being explored as alternative protein production platforms, the US Government has continued to make an investment in tobacco-based manufacturing.”
The plant-based vaccine production method works by isolating a specific antigen protein that triggers a human immune response from the targeted virus. A gene from the protein is transferred to bacteria, which is used to infect plants. The plants then start producing the protein that will be used for vaccinations (photos: DARPA)
It is not clear why the Pentagon chose to invest in vaccines produced from tobacco plants amongst all other plant species, which they explored. Medicago, co-owned by Philip Morris, paid $495,000 for lobbying the Department of Defense, the Congress and The Department of Health and Human Services for “funding to advance technology to support public health preparedness applications”. The Pentagon funded tobacco companies to develop new technology and to profit from vaccines. – http://dilyana.bg/
Bulgarian journalist confronts US official over secret biolabs
On 16 January 2018, a Bulgarian investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva wrote a detailed article about the US bio-weapons research that spans across the world in 25 different countries. Gaytandzhieva wrote in her article that the US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria and toxins in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of biological weapons, and that hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable diseases. She added that bio-warfare scientists are using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at Pentagon bio-laboratories in 25 countries across the world. These bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under a $2.1 billion military program called Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP), and are located in countries such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, etc. Luckily, the Balkans seems to be clear.
Gaytandzhieva recently traveled to Brussels and attended the European Parliament in order to confront Robert Kadlec, Assistant Secretary at the US Department of Health, regarding the number of classified bio-weapons research labs scattered through Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Kadlec categorically denied the existence of an American bio-weapon program as well as that information surrounding the labs in question were classified. Gaytandzhieva attempted to continue her follow up but was silenced by Hilde Vautmans, the EU official sitting next to Kadlec, who stated “This is not an investigation” to applause from the audience and an embrace between herself and Kadlec. Gaytandzhieva didn’t stop there, however, following Kadlec to the elevator and continuing to ask him questions regarding the bio-weapons program which Kadlec refused to answer. Security staff then refused to let Gaytandzhieva on the elevator.
Here’s the full transcript of the exchange between Gaytandzhieva and Kadlec:
Gaytandzhieva: Why has the Pentagon been operating military bio-laboratories in 25 countries, bordering on the US rivals Russia, China and Iran, and why has the number of deadly outbreaks, in all those countries, increased dramatically since the start of the military program of the United States in these countries? Kadlec: I will say unequivocally and undeniably, the US does not have a military biological weapons program. Period. End of statement. Number two [interrupts Gaytandzhieva], we have been working, and I do know from the Department of Defense, they have been working with partners in parts the World, to ensure that those laboratories, and we trained them to do the diagnostic tests on these diseases, to ensure that they can manage them and also safely secure those facilities, so they’re not accessible by terrorists, or by criminals, who would do ill with them. Gaytandzhieva: Why are all these projects classified information? All these bio-laboratories of the Pentagon in 25 countries across the world? Why are they classified information? Kadlec: They’re not classified, they’re openly avaliable to anyone who wants to look at them. Gaytandzhieva: No, I tried it. No, this is not true. They are classified information. Vautmans: Ok, ok, I think I will not give you more time. We will try to answer your questions, but that’s not the place here. Case closed, thank you very much [kisses with Kadlec].
Gaytandzhieva then followed Kadlec to the elevator and continued to ask him questions regarding the bio-weapons program.
Gaytandzhieva: Just one more question? Kadlec: No more questions. Gaytandzhieva: What is the need of military biolaboratories of the United States in 25 countries across the world?
She attempted to enter the elevator, but was forcibly stopped.
Gaytandzhieva: This is public area, sorry, I can use the elevator. Security man: Sorry not this one, it’s full. Gaytandzhieva: I can use the elevator. Security man: No more questions then [trying to prevent cameraman]. Gaytandzhieva: Why not? Why is the Pentagon investing 65 million dolars in gene editing? The gene editing is the part of this program.
Elevator gates closed.
Later, Gaytandzhieva posted the video on her social media pages, simply commenting: “How a journalist gets expelled from the European Parliament when asking the Assistant Secretary at the US Department of Health questions about the Pentagon bio-laboratories around Russia, China and Iran.
Although unable to retrieve any answers from Kadlec, her article is already an impressive collection of information revealing a network of bio-weapons research facilities as well as mysterious outbreaks in their vicinities.
This is not the first time that Gaytandzhieva is exposing the US secret military programs. Last summer, she published a bombshell report which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company was regularly transporting tons of cheap Bulgarian and East European weaponry to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Turkey, under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program. These weapons were found inside underground terrorist warehouses belonging to Al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN. The US modus operandi was the same: using bases in the satellite countries, abuse of diplomatic channels, and dirty politics directed against Russia, Iran and Syria.
Leaked e-mails between the Lugar Center, the Pentagon biolaboratory in Tbilisi, the US Embassy to Georgia and the Georgian Ministry of Health reveal new information about the $161 million secretive US Government biological research program in this former Soviet country.
The data allegedly originating from the Ministry of Health of Georgia has been published anonymously on Twitter and on a forum for database leaks – Raidforums. Among the documents there are internal memos, official letters and detailed information about US government projects at the Lugar Center, funding and foreign business trips.
Arms Watch volunteers have analyzed these documents and discovered very interesting facts about the Center’s recent activities.
The Pentagon has planned to turn Georgia into its largest biological research center overseas, combining its military resources with the resources of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Georgia.
Furthermore, the number of US projects and grants have increased as well as the number of US scientists deployed to the Lugar Center. The Pentagon-funded facility is planned to temporarily accommodate 16 CDC specialists from Atlanta, for whom Georgia will build a separate BSL-2 laboratory, administrative building and a campus near the Lugar Center. In addition, Georgia will become a regional CDC hub for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, internal documents reveal.
The Lugar Center is a $161 million Pentagon-funded biolaboratory in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi (photo: Dilyana Gaytandzhieva)
The Lugar Center already sparked controversy about possible dual-use research in 2018 when leaked documents revealed that US diplomats in Georgia were involved in the trafficking of frozen human blood and pathogens for a secret military program.
Pentagon research on bioterrorism agents at the Lugar Center
US military scientists have been deployed to Georgia for research on bioterrorism agents at the Lugar Center, according to the new data-leak. These bio-agents have the potential to be aerosolized and used as bioweapons. Among them anthrax, tularemia, Brucella, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, Hantavirus, Y. pestis (causing the disease plague).
The US military biological research projects in Georgia have been funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). According to internal data, American and Georgian scientists are currently working on the following DTRA projects in the Lugar Center:
Project 1059:Zoonotic Infections with Fever and Skin Injuries in Georgia
The project includes isolation of new orthopoxviruses in humans, rodents, domestic and wild animals in Georgia, and collection of rodents (as a natural reservoir for this virus) for their further study.
Duration: 01/11/2015-31/10/2018 (extended to 2020)
Funding: $702,343
Project 1060:Characterization of the Georgian National Center for Disease Control (NCDC) Strain Repository by New Generation Sequencing
Description: characterization and genome research on 100 strains from four endemic species: Y. pestis (causing the disease plague), B. anthracis (anthrax), Brucella, and F. tularensis (causing the disease tularemia).
Duration: 01/11/2015-31/10/2018
Funding: $ 518,409
Project 1439:Molecular Virological Research in Georgia
Description and objectives:
Identify and characterize Hantavirus and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) strains by molecular methods;
Characterize and study genetic diversity of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus and hantavirus strains isolated from rodents and ectoparasites;
Serological examination of febrile patients with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever and hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome;
Collection of rodents and ectoparasites (ticks, fleas);
Duration: 16/08/2017-15/08/2021
Funding: $612,614
Project 1497:Molecular Epidemiology and Ecology of Yersinia Species in Georgia and Azerbaijan
Description: 1) Ecological research on rodents in Kerb on the Georgian-Azerbaijani border 2) Isolation of different strains of Yersinia; 3) Molecular screening of collected rodent and flea samples. 4) A comparative analysis of the genomes of Yersinia strains obtained during the fieldwork; 5) Spatial analysis of the distribution of Yersinia strains.
Duration: 01/09/2017-31/08/2018 (extended to 2022)
Funding: $134,090.00DTRA Projects in Georgia1 of 8
Project 1742:Risks of bat-borne zoonotic diseases in Western Asia
Duration: 24/10/2018-23 /10/2019
Funding: $71,500
In 2017 the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) launched a $6.5 million project on bats and coronaviruses in Western Asia (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Jordan) with the Lugar Center being the local laboratory for this genetic research. The duration of the program is 5 years and has been implemented by the non-profit US organisation Eco Health Alliance.
The project’s objectives are: 1. Capture and non-lethally sample 5,000 bats in 5-year period (2017-2022) 2. Collect 20,000 samples (i.e. oral, rectal swabs and/or feces, and blood) and screen for coronaviruses using consensus PCR at regional labs in Georgia and Jordan. According to the project presentation, Eco Health Alliance already sampled 270 bats of 9 species in three Western Asian countries: 90 individual bats in Turkey (Aug 2018), Georgia (Sept 2018), and Jordan (Oct 2018).Video Player00:0003:02
EcoHealth Alliance and Georgian scientists sampling a bat for coronavirus research in 2018 (Facebook, Keti Sidamonidze)
Coincidentally, the same Pentagon contractor tasked with the US DoD bat-research program – Eco Health Alliance, USA, also collected bats and isolated coronaviruses along with Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth Alliance received a $3.7 million grant from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to collect and study coronaviruses in bats in China from 2014 to 2019.
Project 1911:Ricketsia and Coxelia infection surveillance in Georgia and Azerbaijan (US federal grant HDTRA1-19-1-0042 awarded to NCDC-Georgia)
Duration: 23/09/2019 – 22/09/2022
Funding: $945,000
Despite the official claims of Georgia and USA that the Lugar Center is under the full control of the government of this Caucasus country internal documents show otherwise. Not only has the Pentagon funded biological research projects but it has also paid all the expenses for security and maintenance including utility bills – water, gas, electricity, and cleaning. Tasked with the operational and scientific support to the Lugar Center is USAMRU-Georgia, a special unit deployed to Georgia by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR). WRAIR has paid: $524,625 (2016-2018), $650,000 (2017-2019) and $1,062,400 (2017-2021) for utility bills, and a further $158,050 (2016-2017) and $322,000 (2018-2021) for security guards.
The Pentagon has also awarded a private US contractor, Technology Management Company (TMC) an $8 million contract for science services to support USAMRU-Georgia in the Lugar Center (2016-2021).WRAIR Projects at the Lugar Center1 of 5
Tularemia research on soldiers
The Pentagon unit USAMRU-Georgia has conducted extensive research on tularemia involving Georgian soldiers, scientific papers reveal.
Tularemia is a rare infectious disease that typically attacks the skin, eyes, lymph nodes and lungs. Tularemia, also called rabbit fever or deer fly fever, is caused by the bacterium Francisella tularensis. It is categorized as a category A bioterrorism agent. Tularemia was weaponized for mass aerosol dissemination by the US Army in the past, according to a recently declassified military report.
Tularemia is one of the bio-weapons that the US Army developed in the past. Source: 1981 US Army Report
900 volunteers (soldiers and civilians) were recruited for the DTRA project GG-19 “Epidemiology and Ecology of Tularemia in Georgia” from 2014 to 2017. Blood samples were collected from those volunteers and tested for tularemia.
According to the study, 10 soldiers (2%) of the 500 solders tested had antibodies for F. tularensis. The seropositive soldiers were men, the majority of whom were between 30 and 39 years of age. Seven cases had current residences in known endemic areas (i.e. Kakheti, Samtskhe-Javakheti, Kvemo Kartli, Shida Kartli, and Tbilisi). Three were from areas without previously known F. tularensis transmission (i.e. Imereti).
Of the 783 residents approached to participate in this study, 35 (5.0%) volunteers had antibodies to F. tularensis.
While the civilian volunteers were all residents of two areas with naturally occurring foci of tularemia in Georgia, the military personnel were soldiers visiting Georgia’s military hospital. The study does not provide any explanation as to why soldiers were enrolled in this project nor how exactly they contracted the disease in the army.Project GG-19: Tularemia in Georgia1 of 8
Furthermore, Georgia has asked the US Embassy for assistance for the construction of a second military hospital in the country, according to leaked correspondence between local health officials and the US Embassy to Tbilisi.
Below is Google translation in English of this correspondence:
CDC regional hub
The US Government has launched a parallel civil program in Georgia implemented by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Leaked e-mails between the US Embassy to Tbilisi and Georgian health officials reveal that CDC has planned to set up a regional office for Eastern Europe and Central Asia in Georgia. The US Embassy and CDC have requested additional office space for 16 employees. Currently the CDC staff are working inside the Lugar Center.CDC regional hub for Eastern Europe and Central Asia in Georgia1 of 4
Interestingly, the Georgian health officials do not ask about any further information or clarification as to what this new foreign hub is going to do in their own country. Instead, Georgia’s Ministry of Health has planned the construction of a new BSL-2 laboratory, conference hall and campus near the Lugar Center with a loan from the European Investment Bank, according to a letter to the finance minister of Georgia leaked on Raidforums.
Arms Watch could not independently verify the authenticity of this letter as we did not find it in the leaked files. We have further analyzed the ministry’s internal data and discovered the following CDC projects in Georgia:
Project 1320: Antimicrobial Resistance Project
Duration: 01/09/2016 -29/09/2020
Funding: $153,492.40
Project 1440:Introducing or Expanding the Use of Influenza Vaccine Outside the United States
Duration: 30/09/2016 – 29/09/2019
Funding: $750,000
Project 1441:Influenza Surveillance Outside the United States
Duration: 30/09 / 16-29 / 09/21
Funding: $250,000
Project 1446: Strengthening New Generation Sequencing Capacities for Hepatitis C Surveillance in Georgia
Duration: 01/07/2017-30 /06/2018
Funding: $22,000
Project 1447:Samples collection under the Hepatitis C Elimination Program in Georgia – Bio-Bank
Objective: The aim of the project is to store samples collected under the Hepatitis C program for future scientific work
20,000 plasma/serum samples
6,000 serum samples from the 2015 National Seroprevalence Survey of Hepatitis C and B
1,000 blood samples from blood banks
500 blood samples from patients with terminal liver disease
Duration: 01/07/2017-30/06/2018
Project 1456:Strengthening the micronutrient deficit monitoring system in Georgia
Duration: 01/09/2017 – 31/08/2018
Funding: $92,875
Project 1457:Genetic peculiarities of hepatitis C virus in Georgia and its role in the Georgian Hepatitis C elimination program
Objective: Evaluate morbidity and mortality associated with Hepatitis C virus
Duration: 01/09/2017-31/08/2018
Funding: $127,125
Project 1532:Strengthening, detection, response and prevention of diarrhea outbreaks in Georgia
Duration: 30/09/2017 -29/09/2020
Funding: $40,000
Project 1533:Strengthening Immunization and Vaccination Control System
Duration: 30/09/2017 – 29/09/2020
Funding: $67,220.00
Project 1534: Respiratory Disease Surveillance
Duration: 30/09/2017 – 29/09/2020
Funding: $80,000.00
Project 1535:Enterovirus surveillance Georgia
Duration: 30/09/2017 -29/ 09/2020
Funding: $45,000
Project 1536:National Laboratory Quality Control Program in Georgia
Duration: 30/09/2017 -29 /09/2020
Funding: $56,140
Project 1537:South Caucasus Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Program
Duration: 30/09/2017 -29 /09/2020
Funding: $150,000
Project 1538: Fever of unknown etiology caused by arboviruses in the Black Sea region – clinical specimens will be shipped to the CDC Laboratory for analyses
Duration: 30/09/2017 – 29/09/2020
Funding: $100,360CDC Projects in Georgia1 of 15
In conclusion, the United States has been consistently developing its laboratory facilities in the Caucasus. Why has the US Government spent billions of dollars on such biolaboratories and projects abroad instead on the health of its own citizens?Scientists with diplomatic immunity1 of 6
Furthermore, why have US scientists working at the Lugar Center been given diplomatic status and immunity to research deadly pathogens and insects in Georgia? Diplomatic immunity is a principle of international law by which foreign government officials are not subject to the jurisdiction of local courts and other authorities for their activities. Hence, US scientists could even perform illegal experiments in Georgia without being prosecuted as they have diplomatic immunity.
The Internet has generated this and sent it my way, I don’t know who to credit, but it’s a good job, no lies detected as of now.
UPDATE MARCH 10, 2022: Klaus Schwab & Hunter Biden Connected To Ukraine Bio-Labs
I was working on exposing these connections myself, but Infowars moved faster and they did great job. So I can vouch for almost every sentence there based on my own research and I will take it even further. Until then, enjoy their video:
The Gateway Pundit identified through the Wayback Machine that Rosemont Seneca provided capital (invested in) Metabiota as noted on the firm’s website back in 2014.
It is listed as “Our Team’s Investments” on the Rosemont Senaca webpage.
We also located a number of documents from the Wayback Machine (meaning they have been since deleted off the Internet) that show the Department of Defense investing in the creation of Biolabs in Ukraine with the help of firm Black & Veatch.
Here is a sample of one of the documents located. (We’ve located nearly a dozen of these documents.)
Today, Metabiota, the pioneer in epidemic risk modeling, announced it has been awarded a subcontract from Black & Veatch (B&V) to support the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s (DTRA) Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) in Iraq under the Biological Threat Reduction Integrating Contract (BTRIC). Metabiota has also partnered with B&V on DTRA’s recently awarded Cooperative Threat Reduction Integrating Contract (CTRIC) III with an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ) contract ceiling of $970M.
Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm that has collaborated with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was a primary financial backer of Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, an investment group led by Hunter Biden.
Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP) was a spinoff of Rosemont Capital, a venture capital firm created by Biden and John Kerry’s stepson in 2009. Biden served as a Managing Director.
<<Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings are becoming harder for the major media to suppress amid revelations coming out of an ongoing grand jury investigation and his business partner’s prison sentence in a scheme to defraud a Native American tribe of some $60 million in bonds.
Which brings us back to a topic many have forgotten if they even knew: The proximity between Hunter Biden and the origins of COVID-19.
Hunter Biden
Independent media outlet The National Pulse reported in June of last year that an investment firm led by Hunter Biden was a key financial collaborator with Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), the firm led by Joe Biden’s son, was a lead financial backer of Metabiota, a pandemic tracking and response firm that partnered with EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan lab, the report said.
EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Daszak, and financed by several U.S. government agencies, partnered with Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina and Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses in communist China prior to the initial outbreak of Covid.
The National Pulse cited financial reports which show that RSTP led Metabiota’s first round of funding, which amounted to $30 million.
“Former Managing Director and co-founder of RSTP Neil Callahan – a name that appears many times on Hunter Biden’s hard drive – also sits on Metabiota’s Board of Advisors,” the report noted.
In April 2021, Joe Biden’s USAID announced a new initiative spearheaded by EcoHealth Alliance to track emerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential. Also collaborating on the taxpayer-funded venture was Metabiota.
Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) “PREDICT” project, which seeks to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.” As part of this effort, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study relating to bat infectious diseases in China.
Daszak is also central figure in the potential origins of Covid. His EcoHealth Alliance funneled taxpayer dollars from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to collaborate on bat coronavirus research in Wuhan.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer on Monday was sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison by Manhattan Judge Ronnie Abrams.
“There’s no dispute about the harm caused to real people,” Abrams said, noting that the defrauded tribe, the Oglala Sioux, is one of the poorest in the nation. Archer will also have to pay more than $15 million in forfeiture by himself and more than $43 million in restitution with his co-defendants in the case.
Rosemont Seneca was one of a handful of companies listed in a May 2019 grand jury subpoena that ordered JP Morgan Chase to provide records of transactions between Hunter Biden’s various ventures and the Bank of China for the previous five years.
The subpoena also asked for similar “records, documents and accounts” related to James Biden, Joe Biden’s brother, and Hunter’s former business partners Eric Schwerin and Archer, both founding partners at Rosemont Seneca.
Archer’s attorney, Matthew Schwartz, confirmed that his client had “cooperated completely” with the Department of Justice after the subpoena was leaked online last month by Marco Polo which is preparing a comprehensive report on the Biden family.
“The document offered the first real clues as to the specifics of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s probe, which was launched in late 2018 but controversially kept under wraps until weeks after the 2020 Presidential election, supposedly to avoid becoming a campaign issue,” the Daily Mail noted.>>
Update March 30, 2020: Once we pull it out you better pick up on it quickly, I told you we’re in the business of dictating future MSM headlines. But without the sugar glazing. 🙂
Knight Spirit makes a nice summary of the Metabiota – Covid connection:
Metabiota & COVID-19 origin
<<Since 2014, Metabiota has been a partner of EcoHealth Alliance as part of the “PREDICT” initiative of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID), which aims to “predict and prevent global emerging disease threats.”
As part of this endeavor, researchers from Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborated on a study into bat infectious diseases in China. According to the research, “sensitive and broadly reactive RT-PCR assays were performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.”
Shi Zhengli, the Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Lab, is one of the researchers included in the aforementioned 2014 publication. Peter Daszak, who was recently removed from the Lancet COVID-19 panel due to many conflicts of interest as a “longtime collaborator” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is named as a contributor.
Daszak is also a key figure in COVID-19’s possible origins. His EcoHealth Alliance used public funds to collaborate on bat coronavirus research in Wuhan with Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota researchers have also worked together on presentations on how to “live safely with bats” and studies tying new infectious disease epidemics to wildlife trade facilities, such as “wet markets.”
“Wildlife trade can facilitate zoonotic disease transmission and represents a threat to human health and economies in Asia, highlighted by the 2003 SARS coronavirus outbreak, where a Chinese wildlife market facilitated pathogen transmission,” the 2016 paper notes.
On a 2014 study on henipavirus spillover, a 2014 study on Ebola monitoring, a 2015 study on herpes, and a 2015 study on viral diversity, Metabiota researchers were named with EcoHealth Alliance staff.
Aside from its ties to EcoHealth Alliance, Metabiota has also been criticized for “bungling” America’s Ebola response.>>
BUT METABIOTA IS INVOLVED IN MANY PLACES AND MANY BITHREATS, SUCH AS:
ABOUT PREDICT
PREDICT is enabling global surveillance for viruses that may spillover from animal hosts to people by building capacities to detect and discover viruses of pandemic potential. The project is part of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats program and is led by the UC Davis One Health Institute. The core partners are USAID, EcoHealth Alliance, Metabiota, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Smithsonian Institution. Scientists work in 30 countries in Africa and Asia testing for five viral families—coronaviruses (e.g. SARS/MERS), filoviruses (e.g. Ebola), paramyxoviruses (e.g. Nipah / Hendra), influenza viruses (e.g. H1N1, H5N1, H7N9) and flaviviruses (e.g. Zika)—in wildlife, livestock, and humans, to understand the risk of spillover. As part of this effort, lab scientists around the world are trained to perform viral testing—a vital skill in case an outbreak should emerge. Field researchers are trained to safely handle and sample animals by capture and release. – SOURCE
Researchers from Metabiota have also been listed alongside EcoHealth Alliance personnel on a 2014 study on henipavirus [aka Nipah – keep this in mind – S.m.] spillover, 2014 study on Ebola monitoring, 2015 study focusing on herpes, and 2015 study on viral diversity.
“An American company that bills itself as a pioneer in tracking emerging epidemics made a series of costly mistakes during the 2014 Ebola outbreak that swept across West Africa — with employees feuding with fellow responders, contributing to misdiagnosed Ebola cases and repeatedly misreading the trajectory of the virus,” an Associated Press (AP) investigation into the company found.
The company reportedly made the “already chaotic situation worse,” prompting World Health Organization officials to criticize the company.
Emails obtained by AP and interviews with aid workers on the ground show that some of the company’s actions made an already chaotic situation worse.
WHO outbreak expert Dr. Eric Bertherat wrote to colleagues in a July 17, 2014, email about misdiagnoses and “total confusion” at the Sierra Leone government lab Metabiota shared with Tulane University in the city of Kenema. He said there was “no tracking of the samples” and “absolutely no control on what is being done.”
“This is a situation that WHO can no longer endorse,” he wrote.
<<A separate document detailing Ukraine’s biolab network from the BioWeapons Prevention Project outlines in greater detail the scope of pathogens the facility has conducted research with.
Among the viruses the lab studied were Ebola and “viruses of pathogencity group II by using of virology, molecular, serologica and express methods.”
Additionally, the lab provided “special training for specialists on biosafety and biosecurity issues during handling of dangerous biological pathogenic agents.”>> – National Pulse
BIOLAB’S PATHOGENS.
Look again and tell me if that virus list reminds you of anything. Hint:
This above quotes a National Defense Magazine article, which reveals the Covid narrative was already being set up in 2011, as we’ve shown in other reports too:
<<Teams are learning that local health clinics in South Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia possess deadly pathogens, not as potential weapons, but because they need samples of naturally-occurring diseases on hand to diagnose outbreaks in their human and animal populations. These samples are often kept in public repositories where the microbes could easily be stolen and released.
“We’re looking for partners in new areas around the world who have legitimate need for maintaining samples of these horrible diseases and pathogens,” Myers said, according to National Defense Magazine. “We are looking for ways to partner with them to increase their ability to keep them secure and safe, to be able to account for them so they know exactly how many strains of pathogen X or pathogen Y or pathogen Z they might have.”
The cooperative biological engagement teams are also seeking to assist the partner nations with epidemiological training to ensure scientists are effective and efficient at identifying outbreaks and alerting the proper authorities.
“Many of the countries we’re dealing with now never had any intention of being a threat to the United States,” Myers said, according to National Defense Magazine. “One of their interests in engaging with us is to become real partners with us, and we look forward to developing those relationships.”>> –
All research at a Fort Detrick laboratory that handles high-level disease-causing material, such as Ebola, is on hold indefinitely after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the organization failed to meet biosafety standards.
No infectious pathogens, or disease-causing material, have been found outside authorized areas at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
The CDC inspected the military research institute in June and inspectors found several areas of concern in standard operating procedures, which are in place to protect workers in biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories, spokeswoman Caree Vander Linden confirmed in an email Friday.
The CDC sent a cease and desist order in July.
After USAMRIID received the order from the CDC, its registration with the Federal Select Agent Program, which oversees disease-causing material use and possession, was suspended. That suspension effectively halted all biological select agents and toxin research at USAMRIID, Vander Linden said in her email.
The Federal Select Agent Program does not comment on whether a program such as USAMRIID is registered and cannot comment on action taken to enforce regulations, Kathryn Harben, a spokeswoman for the CDC, wrote in an email.
“As situations warrant, [Federal Select Agent Program] will take whatever appropriate action is necessary to resolve any departures from regulatory compliance in order to help ensure the safety and security of work with select agents and toxins,” Harben said in the email.
The suspension was due to multiple causes, including failure to follow local procedures and a lack of periodic recertification training for workers in the biocontainment laboratories, according to Vander Linden. The wastewater decontamination system also failed to meet standards set by the Federal Select Agent Program, Vander Linden said in a follow-up email.
“To maximize the safety of our employees, there are multiple layers of protective equipment and validated processes,” she said.
Vander Linden could not say when the laboratory would be able to continue research.
“USAMRIID will return to fully operational status upon meeting benchmark requirements for biosafety,” she said in an email. “We will resume operations when the Army and the CDC are satisfied that USAMRIID can safely and consistently meet all standards.”
USAMRIID has been working on modified biosafety level 3 procedures and a new decontamination system since flooding in May 2018. This “increased the operational complexity of bio-containment laboratory research activities within the Institute,” she said.
At the time of the cease and desist order, USAMRIID scientists were working with agents known to cause tularemia, also called deer fly or rabbit fever, the plague and Venezuelan equine encephalitis, all of which were worked on in a biosafety level 3 laboratory. Researchers were also working with the Ebola virus in a biosafety level 4 lab, Vander Linden said.
Of the pathogens, Ebola, bacteria Yersinia pestis (plague), and bacterium Francisella tularensis (tularemia) are on the list of the Health and Human Services select agents and toxins. The three are considered Tier 1 agents, which pose a severe public health and safety threat.
Venezuelan equine encephalitis also falls under the Federal Select Agent Program, according to the Code of Federal Regulations.
The military research institute is looking at each of its contracts to see what will be affected by the shutdown. USARMIID work outside the lab is not expected to be affected, including on Ebola, Vander Linden said.
“We are coordinating closely with the CDC to ensure that critical, ongoing studies within bio-containment laboratories are completed under appropriate oversight and that research animals will continue to be cared for in accordance with all regulations,” she said in an email. “Although much of USAMRIID’s research is currently on hold, the Institute will continue its critical clinical diagnostic mission and will still be able to provide medical and subject matter expertise as needed to support the response to an infectious disease threat or other contingency.”
According to the Code of Federal Regulations, which also lists required training, records and biosafety plans, Federal Select Agents Program registration can be suspended to protect public health and safety. It is not clear if this is why the USAMRIID registration was suspended.
The code also gives the Department of Health and Human Services, under which the CDC falls, the right to inspect any site and records, without prior notifications. Vander Linden said in the email that the CDC inspected USAMRIID several times over the past year, both unannounced and on a regularly scheduled basis.
USAMRIID will work to meet requirements set by the Army and the CDC and have its suspension lifted, Vander Linden said.
“While the Institute’s research mission is critical, the safety of the workforce and community is paramount,” she said. “USAMRIID is taking the opportunity to correct deficiencies, build upon strengths, and create a stronger and safer foundation for the future.”
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
Sometimes my memes are 3D. And you can own them. Or send them to someone. You can even eat some of them. CLICK HERE
It has happened three days ago already and I’m ashamed such huge news, so relevant to everything I wrote here, have passed by me while I was actually connected to the news flux. But then, imagine what that says about ALL media and social media!
To contextualize better, you need to read most of our latest posts, as far back as you can
Pentagon Purges Leading Advisors From Defense Policy Board
It’s unclear why the Trump administration waited until its final months to shake up the influential group of outside experts advising top Pentagon leaders.
Several members of the top federal advisory committee to the U.S. Department of Defense have been suddenly pushed out, multiple U.S. officials told Foreign Policy, in what appears to be the outgoing Trump administration’s parting shot at scions of the foreign-policy establishment.
The directive, which the Pentagon’s White House liaison Joshua Whitehouse sent on Wednesday afternoon, removes 11 high-profile advisors from the Defense Policy Board, including former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright; retired Adm. Gary Roughead, who served as chief of naval operations; and a onetime ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman. Rudy De Leon, a former chief operating officer at the Pentagon once considered by then-Defense Secretary James Mattis for a high-level policy role, will also be ousted.
2017
Also booted in today’s sweep of the board, which is effective immediately, were former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and David McCormick, a former Treasury Department undersecretary during the George W. Bush administration. Both had been added to the board by Mattis in 2017. Jamie Gorelick, a Clinton administration deputy attorney general; Robert Joseph, a chief U.S. nuclear negotiator who convinced Libya to give up weapons of mass destruction; former Bush Deputy National Security Advisor J.D. Crouch II; and Franklin Miller, a former top defense official, have also been removed. This story is based on interviews with three current and former officials. In a statement late Wednesday, the Department of Defense confirmed the decision. “As part of long-considered changes, we can confirm that several members of the Department’s Defense Policy Board have been removed,” a defense official said. “We are extremely grateful for their dedicated service, commitment, and contributions to our national security. Future announcements for new members of the board will be made soon.”
The board, overseen by the Pentagon’s top policy official, the undersecretary of defense for policy, serves as a kind of in-house think tank on retainer for top military leaders, providing independent counsel and advice on defense policy. The Defense Policy Board includes former top military brass, secretaries of state, members of Congress, and other senior diplomats and foreign-policy experts. The status of two other members of the panel—or who would replace the ousted members—was not immediately clear.
2017
Officials said that the Trump administration had long tried to remake the board with figures seen as loyal to the president—and outside of the Washington establishment—but had received pushback from recently ousted Defense Secretary Mark Esper and acting Undersecretary of Defense for Policy James Anderson, who sought to keep the board in place to allow for policy continuity. Both Esper and Anderson were removed earlier this month in a purge of Pentagon officials.
2018: South China Post says Trump is not Kissinger’s homeboy. Henry Kissinger met Chinese President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing on November 2018 ahead of a Trump = Xi meeting. “The 95-year-old veteran US diplomat’s visit is seen as an attempt to reduce tensions amid the US-China trade war and disputes over the South China Sea and Taiwan. Xi will meet US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina in late November.”- South China Morning Post reported
The White House had sought to add Scott O’Grady, a former Air Force fighter pilot shot down over Bosnia, to the board to prepare him to be nominated for a top Pentagon position, as well as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a close ally of President Donald Trump. The administration had also vetoed adding retired Adm. Eric Olson, a former U.S. Special Operations Command chief, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, as well as Gordon England, a former deputy secretary of defense during the Bush administration, over perceived anti-Trump ties.
“If they get treated like that, then who is going to want to volunteer?” a former senior Trump administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Foreign Policy.
While the board has no tangible role inside the Pentagon in the policymaking process, it routinely advises senior military leadership on some of the top strategic national security threats facing the United States. The board convened in October for classified discussions on formulating a long-term strategy toward China and deterrence in space, according to a notice from the Federal Register. The meeting included briefings from the CIA, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, and other senior Pentagon policy officials.
CNN reported it too, not that it matters too much. Fox News has just confirmed this, only mentioning Kissinger, whiteout any comments and implications. How much more amateurish and autistic can they go?
Reuters repents when it commits acts of actual journalism and factual information, good luck with the video
This, to me, definitively proves where Trump sits on the power map right now. This isn’t an image move from either sides, they both kept shush about it, so it’s Trump sending messages. And it couldn’t be louder, but our cages seem soundproof.
To be continued? Our work and existence, as media and people, is funded solely by our most generous supporters. But we’re not really covering our costs so far, and we’re in dire needs to upgrade our equipment, especially for video production. Help SILVIEW.media survive and grow, please donate here, anything helps. Thank you!
! Articles can always be subject of later editing as a way of perfecting them
:quality(70)/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/HJYX65WULBF3PO5R3TTI2SAGMY.jpg)
SILVIEW.media 
