A New Way Bushco Can Sicken Us

It would seem that a next step in our ongoing effort to instill a spine into the Democratic congressional leadership could be a march on Washington, and given the options discussed by Meteor Blades of The Daily Kos in this post, my guess is that this would take place sometime in September.

If and when we do, all I ask is that we remain mindful that the possibility exists that our government may use that as an excuse to dose us somehow with some as-yet-unidentified chemical agent.

I qualified that statement as much as I could because I readily admit that I don’t have any kind of a “smoking gun” on this – just a bunch of worrisome circumstantial stuff that I’m going to try and string together here.

To begin, I give you this excerpt from Dubya’s speech at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT on Wednesday…

To help stop new attacks on our country, we launched the BioWatch program, placing state-of-the-art equipment in major U.S. cities to detect biological agents.

Believe it or not, that’s actually true, at least to the extent that these sensors were placed in Washington. D.C.

And the reason we know this is because of the posts noted here, here and here at the Gorilla Radio Blog referencing stories from the Washington Post from October 2005. The bio sensors Dubya mentioned detected low levels of the Francisella tularensis bacteria that causes tularemia, otherwise known as rabbit fever (also noted here).

As the Gorilla Blog continues…

Rabbit fever cannot be passed from person to person and can be effectively treated with readily available medicines, the CDC said. Symptoms usually appear 3 to 5 days after exposure, but in rare cases can take up to 2 weeks.

Symptoms of the disease, which an infected person would have begun experiencing no earlier than on Monday, include: sudden fever, chills, headaches, conjunctivitis, diarrhea, muscle aches, joint pain, dry cough and progressive weakness.

For a person in reasonably good health to begin with, this probably would not be a big deal in the long run. However, suppose you were suffering from a debilitating illness and/or you were an elderly person, to say nothing of AIDS? You could die from something like this.

Now, of course, there is no proof (none to my knowledge, anyway) that the virus was intentionally spread within the Mall knowing that the protestors would arrive. However, as this Counter Punch story notes, a chemical agent that caused these symptoms could have been manufactured at the Ft. Detrick facility in nearby Frederick, Maryland.

As the story continues…

"In May of 2003, it was reported that the United States Army has developed and patented a new grenade that it says can be used to wage bio-warfare. This is in explicit violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), which explicitly prohibits all development of bio-weapons delivery devices. US Patent #6,523,478, granted on February 25th 2003, covers a 'rifle launched non lethal cargo dispenser' that is designed to deliver aerosols, including, according to the patent's claims, 'crowd control agents, biological agents, [and] chemical agents...'"

The Counter Punch article by Kevin Zeese discusses the long and controversial history of Ft. Detrick, including the attempt by President Nixon in 1969 to clean a seven-story tower used to house anthrax bacteria (remember the anthrax scare, which the FBI believed “would never be solved” in February 2004 – see Item 18 on this list), as well as the discovery in 1991 of high levels of the cancer causing agents TCE and PCE in the water near Ft. Detrick by the Maryland Department of the Environment and the Frederick County Health Department.

And one more thing – as noted in the Gorilla Blog posts…

The CDC waited a week to notify city officials of the detected bacteria because it took that long to test the samples at labs and confirm its presence, the radio station reported.

According to the CDC's Web site, people can get rabbit fever by being bitten by an infected tick, deerfly or other insect; handling infected animal carcasses; eating or drinking contaminated food or water; or, breathing in the bacteria.

The CDC also said the bacteria can be used as a weapon if made into an aerosol that could be inhaled.

…

The bacterium, francisella tularensis, also called 'rabbit fever' is naturally occurring, but has a long history of manipulation for the purpose of weaponization. Imperial Japan is noted for its groundbreaking experiments on tularemia's effects on human physiology. They are estimated to have sacrificed more than 10,000 prisoners to science during their occupation of China.

The results of Japanese efforts were not lost on the American government, and by the late 1960's Biological Weapon (BW) tularemia was a component of both the vast U.S. arsenal of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, and that of their arch Cold War nemesis.

Did Bushco, as part of some “ops” campaign, distribute an aerosol version of rabbit fever into a crowd of antiwar protestors in October 2005 by means of a rifle-launched grenade of some type? I don’t know that – all I’m doing here is presenting a bunch of pieces to this puzzle that may or may not fit, and of course Bushco would deny and ridicule as always in response.

Though it’s not as if this administration has never played fast and loose with the facts on chemical and biological weapons before, right?