[BIOWAR] Biological weaponry poses vicious threat (fwd)

[Zombie Cow <waste@zor.hut.fi>]

Try joking a purchase or a sell of these substances via
e-mail and get an FBI raid on your friend's home. :-)

Great way to see if you're under observation, or get yourself
under 24/7 observation for a few months. :-)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 14:18:53 -0400
From: Dan S <dan@southeast.net>
To: biowar <biowar-l@mail.sonic.net>,
     "ignition-point@admin.listbox.com" <ignition-point@admin.listbox.com>
Subject: [BIOWAR] Biological weaponry poses vicious threat

http://www.canoe.ca/EdmontonNews/es.es-06-20-0050.html
-
Sunday, June 20, 1999 

Biological weaponry poses vicious threat

By ERIC MARGOLIS, TORONTO SUN

GENEVA -- U.S. and European intelligence agencies are reporting
mounting evidence that Russia and China have massively violated the
1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention and subsequent
international and bilateral agreements to control biowarfare weapons.

The convention, signed by 169 nations, prohibits the development,
production, acquisition, stockpiling, transfer or use of chemical and
biological weapons.

   All signatories with biowarfare arsenals are pledged to eliminate
such weapons over 10 years. While Russia and China appear to have
ceased adding to their huge stockpiles of chemical weapons, both are
developing new strains of highly lethal biological toxins.

According to Ken Alibek, a former deputy director of the top secret
Soviet-era biowarfare program, who defected to the West, Moscow never
ended its offensive biological warfare research. Alibek claims Russia
has stockpiled many hundreds of tonnes of anthrax and plague, as well
as smaller quantities of smallpox, Ebola and Marburg viruses, and
toxins designed to attack plants and animals. Russia is also
developing a new strain of "invisible" biowarfare agents, known as
bioregulators, that destroy the body's immune or neurological systems.

The highest-ranking defector from Russia's biowarfare program ever to
come West also claims that in 1985 former Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev secretly authorized a five-year program to develop
weaponized germs and viruses, some of which were mounted on multiple
warheads of the large SS-18 ICBMs targeted at North America. Alibek
also says China, which claims to have abandoned biowarfare production
and eliminated stockpiles, is producing hemorrhagic viruses at Lop Nor
in Central Asia and suffered two major accidents in the late 1980s
that killed hundreds of people.

Many toxins being developed in Russia have been biologically
engineered to resist antibiotics, notably a super-strain of anthrax
that is apparently impervious to the anti-anthrax inoculations now
being given to NATO troops.

Alibek and other Russian defectors also confirmed the Soviet Union
used chemical and biological weapons in Afghanistan from 1980-89.
While covering the war there, I saw numerous cases of grave injuries
or death inflicted on the Afghan mujahedeen by mysterious Soviet
weapons. After being sprayed by a fine chemical mist, or exposed to
gas, people would turn black and die, bleed profusely from all body
orifices, choke and vomit or become disoriented and dazed. Bodies of
some victims would putrefy almost immediately.

The Soviets also employed glanders, a highly contagious horse disease,
to kill the animal transport used by the Afghan resistance and ergot
fungus to destroy wheat. None of the biowarfare agents used by the
U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan, save glanders, have ever been identified by
western scientists. The West, while scourging Iraq for using chemical
weapons against Iran and its rebellious Kurds, chose to ignore
employment by the U.S.S.R. of more sophisticated toxic agents in
Afghanistan.

Western protests over Russia's latest germ warfare projects and
demands for inspection of its four major biowarfare labs have been
rebuffed by Russia. The Bill Clinton administration, influenced by the
strongly pro-Russian Strobe Talbot, has repeatedly rejected demands by
Congress to cut off billions in U.S. aid in order to pressure Moscow
into ceasing its illegal biowarfare programs. Europe, which also
bankrolls Boris Yeltsin's regime, has been similarly negligent in
pressing Moscow on this vital issue.

Some of the 60,000 scientists and technicians formerly employed in the
Soviet biological warfare establishment have reportedly been employed
by Iraq, Israel, Iran, Syria and Serbia - all of which have extensive
biowarfare arsenals. India may also have received substantial Russian
aid to develop its growing biowarfare capabilities.

Alibek testified before the U.S. Congress that he defected after
learning that while the West had virtually eliminated its toxic
arsenals, Russia was not only continuing Soviet biowarfare programs
but accelerating them, with 2,000 scientists alone working on new,
genetically engineered strains of anthrax at a top secret island base
in the Aral Sea. He claims such toxic agents have little tactical
military value and are of use only as mass terror weapons designed to
compensate for Russia's and China's relative backwardness in
conventional military systems.

These terror agents are being produced in a large complex at Kirov,
east of Moscow, Compound 19 at Ekaterinburg in the Urals, Sergeiv
Possad outside Moscow and at a new complex at Strizhy, close to Kirov.
The laboratory at Ekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk) was the site of a
massive accidental release of anthrax in 1979 that killed or injured
over 1,000 people.

According to the 1990 U.S.-Russia Bilateral Destruction Agreement, the
two powers were to reduce their respective chemical stockpiles to
5,000 tonnes each by 2002. In 1996, Russia backed off even this
agreement, citing financial problems. The UN was supposed to take over
supervision of biowarfare agents destruction and implementation of the
1972 treaty, but it has failed dismally to enforce the agreements or
even to protest egregious violations by Russia, China and other
signatory states.

The West has destroyed or significantly reduced its stocks of chemical
agents, and ceased biological warfare research. Russia and China
continue to develop such weapons. The former balance of terror has
become unbalanced, as "friendly" regimes in Moscow and Beijing not
only violate international law but threaten all mankind with their
relentless development of hi-tech germ warfare.

--

dan@southeast.net
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