http://www.whale.to/vaccine/cantwell2.html
What is the common thread which weaves
through the occurrence of the highly contagious disease known as the Gulf War
Syndrome, which has struck as many as 60,000 veterans? Dr. Cantwell has found a
biowarfare connection.
Since the Nuremberg trials, it has been against
international law to use people as guinea pigs in experiments without their
informed consent. In an unprecedented legal decision, the FDA allowed the
Pentagon to give un-approved drugs and vaccines to soldiers without their
consent. The Pentagon also refused to identify the types of drugs and
injections the troops were given forcibly, rendering them powerless against
genetically altered “supergerms.”
As many as
60,000 of the 700,000 Gulf War vets who served in Desert Storm in 1991 are ill
with a variety of symptoms lumped together as Persian Gulf War Syndrome (GWS).
Symptoms include chronic fatigue, severe neurological disorders, muscle and
joint pain, shortness of breath, gastrointestinal problems, memory loss,
insomnia, rashes, depression, headaches, and other complaints. GWS is a
sexually transmitted disease, and is contagious via the airborne route.
Soldiers are passing the illness on to wives and family members; and their
children appear to have an increased incidence of birth defects.
The government
and the Pentagon stand accused of ignoring the vets by denying they were
exposed to chemical or biological agents in the Gulf. Originally many vets were
told by military doctors that their symptoms were caused by stress. The large
number of sick vets led to an official inquiry.
In August 1995,
a massive government study of GWS indicated no evidence of so-called Gulf War
disease. Dr. Stephen Joseph, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs,
claimed the soldiers were suffering from “multiple” diseases not stemming from
any one cause, and that their collective health was no worse than their
counterparts in civilian life. The report denied that vets were exposed to
chemical agents in the Gulf.
Reynaldo
Negrete, in a letter of protest to the Los
Angeles Times (8/20/95), wrote:
When my son Ruben, a career Navy
Seebee of 14 years, was sent to the Gulf he was a healthy young man weighing
185 pounds. When he came back four months later he had lost 20 pounds and his
health. He continued to lose weight for more than a year, but the doctors at
Port Hueneme and his command did nothing. Not until I had my congressman,
Matthew G. Martinez, intervene on his behalf was our son admitted to the Naval
Hospital in San Diego a year after arriving from the Gulf War a very sick young
man. He then spent a year in the hospital, until he was medically discharged
from the Navy no better off than the day he was admitted. Yet, my son continues
to suffer, as does his family. My son has served his country very well, for
more than 14 years. He has been deployed all over the world, and in just four
short months in the Persian Gulf he comes home an invalid.”
A year later,
in 1996, the Department of Defense finally admitted that 400 soldiers (later
changed to 5,000; still later to 20,000) may have been exposed to toxic agents
when, after the war had officially ended, the military blew up an ammunition
storage depot in Kamisiyah in southern Iraq on March 4 and again on March 10,
1991. After the bombings, a U.N. inspection team informed Pentagon officials
that the buildings contained chemical weapons. However, the Pentagon
immediately classified the U.N. report and the troops were never alerted about
possible exposure to toxic chemicals.
Despite the
cover-up, exposure to chemicals cannot account for so many sick soldiers. Not
all sick vets were stationed in the Kamisiyah area. Many left the Iraqi war
zone before the war actually started, or arrived after the fighting stopped. In
addition, exposure to chemicals cannot explain why some cases of GWS are
contagious.
The first media
reports of a Gulf illness surfaced in the spring of 1992, a year after the war
ended. As time passed, the transmissibility of the disease was downplayed, as
well as the fact that wives complained about miscarriages and “burning semen”
after sex with their husbands. Veteran’s groups now claim that a third of Gulf
War babies are born with birth abnormalities. LIFE magazine (November 1996) featured a story on these Gulf babies
entitled “The tiny victims of Desert Storm: Has our country abandoned them?”
Pictured on the cover was U.S. Army Sgt. Paul Hansen holding his three-year-old
son, born with hands and feet attached to twisted stumps.
In the search
for a cause of GWS, epidemiologists have been looking for a common factor that
could have exposed so many Gulf War vets. Some sick vets were in the war zone
for months, while others were stationed there for as little as nine days. And
the illness has affected troops stationed in widely scattered geographic areas
in the region.
One factor
common to all the troops is that they were given experimental and potentially
dangerous drugs and vaccines employed to protect them against Iraqi chemical
and biowarfare agents. As early as December 1990, there were warnings about
using our servicemen as medical guinea pigs. In an unprecedented legal
decision, the FDA allowed the Pentagon to give unapproved drugs and vaccines
without requiring consent of the soldiers. Claiming security reasons, the
Pentagon also refused to identify the types or the number of drugs and
injections they forced the troops to take.
An angry
serviceman stationed in Saudi Arabia maintained his civil rights were violated,
and sued the government in January 1991. Ever since the post World War II
Nuremberg trials, which convicted many top-ranking Nazis for crimes against
human nature, it has been unethical and unlawful to use people as guinea pigs
in experiments without their informed consent. This legal requirement was
waived when the lawsuit was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Stanley S. Harris,
who cited the necessity of the military to protect the health of its troops.
Soldiers who
rejected the injections were given them forcibly. Physicians who refused to
cooperate with the military’s experimental vaccine program were treated
harshly. Army reservist Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn protested it was her duty under
the Nuremberg Code of Justice not to vaccinate personnel with experimental
vaccines without their consent. At Huet-Vaughn’s court-martial trial, a
military judge ignored these considerations of international law and medical
ethics, and sentenced the mother of three children to 30 months in prison.
Under pressure from activist groups, the doctor was released from military
prison after serving eight months.
Allegations
that experimental drugs and vaccines are a cause of GWS have been downplayed
for obvious reasons. The Pentagon does not want to publicize the idea that PGS
could be a man-made disease due to unethical experiments with dangerous and
possibly contaminated vaccines. Furthermore, the military has a long history of
conducting covert medical experiments on its own personnel, as well as
civilians; and the Agent Orange cover-up is still fresh in the minds of Vietnam
war vets.
GWS is not
limited to American soldiers. More than 1,100 British vets are ill. Many blame
the injections they received against anthrax and plague. Englishman Tony Flint,
associated with the Gulf War Veterans and Families Association, claims more
than 100 vets have died of ailments ascribed to the inoculations. He says he
was forced to take 13 inoculations in one week, and states there is no evidence
of GWS among French troops who did not receive these vaccines.
The HIV
Connection
Garth Nicholson
and his wife Nancy, both respected microbiologists, have recently discovered a
bacterium, a so-called “mycoplasma” in the blood of half the vets ill with GWS.
The microbe associated with GWS has been identified as Mycoplasma fermentans
(incognitus strain). Discovered a century ago in plants, mycoplasmas are the
smallest known self-replicating microbes. Larger than viruses and much smaller
than common bacteria, mycoplasmas have been implicated in a variety of
diseases.
The mycoplasma
in GWS could not be identified using standard lab tests. Through special
genetic testing Garth Nicolson was able to discover the mycoplasma. Incredibly,
the microbe had a piece of the envelope gene of the AIDS virus (HIV-1) attached
to it! The HIV gene makes the mycoplasma even more aggressive, allowing it to
attach to cells, which it then penetrates and poisons. According to Nicolson, a
mycoplasma combined with the envelope gene of the AIDS retrovirus could never
have originated in nature, but only through gene splicing in a laboratory.
Both Nicolsons
contracted GWD from their daughter when she returned home from Desert Storm.
Because of the contagious nature of the disease, the microbiologists suspected
an infectious agent, rather than a chemical weapon. When the mycoplasma was
identified, the research team discovered that treatment with antibiotics,
particularly doxicycline, was helpful in some cases.
In an interview
on the Dave Emory radio show (10/20/96), Garth Nicolson theorizes that the
microbe could have been deployed through contaminated vaccines, through the
deliberate release of Iraqi bioweapons, from blowback from destroyed Iraqi
bioweapon factories, or possibly from scud missile attacks. He says there has
been a Mycoplasma Unit at the University of Baghdad for 22 years, manned by
Iraqi scientists who were trained in the U.S. Before the war, the U.S.
government exported to Iraq various biological agents, both classified and
unclassified, that could be used or developed as biological warfare agents.
Did this
mycoplasma + HIV bioweapon originate in the U.S. or in the Gulf? It would be
extremely helpful to know if there are cases of GWS in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi
Arabia, Jordan, and elsewhere in the Middle East. Surprisingly, the government
and the media are silent on this question, although Nicolson claims 300,000
Iraqis have died and one million are sick since the war. It is rumored that
15-20% of the population of the countries surrounding Iraq are ill with GWS.
In a 40-page
report entitled “Germ Warfare against America: The Desert Storm Plague and
Cover-Up, Nicolson reports:
Mycoplasma fermentans (incognitus)
has been tested on the Texas Department of Corrections prisoners in the late
1980s prior to the Gulf War. It was tested on death row inmates as well as
other inmates in Huntsville, Texas. The guards then contracted it from the
inmates, and the guards then gave it to their families and community. This
mycoplasma vaccine testing was funded by the U.S. Army, and today there is an
outbreak of 350 people in the Huntsville area with a strange disease resembling
GWS.
Garth
Nicolson’s important research has appeared in the underground press, but until
recently his research has been ignored by the mainstream, corporate-controlled
media. On the Emory show Nicolson was asked how many soldiers have died of GWS.
Although there are no official figures, he estimates that 12-15,000 vets have
died of “unusual” diseases, and several thousand have died of cancer. If true,
these death rates are very high considering the young age (under 25) of many of
our soldiers. Apparently doctors, nurses, and medical personnel are contracting
GWS from sick patients, indicating another AIDS-like epidemic in the making.
Further
complicating the epidemiology of GWS is that soldiers’ shot records and even
medical records have disappeared or are unavailable. In addition, the Los Angeles Times (12/5/96) reports that
military logs “crucial to Gulf War veterans who believe their health problems
are linked to chemical weapons” are also missing and can’t be found. These
important logs cover the period March 4-10, during the bombings at Kamisiyah.
The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee has recently won permission to examine
General Norman Schwartzkopf’s personal logs.
At the request
of Rep. Norm Dicks of Washington state, a group of military and civilian scientists
and Pentagon experts met on December 23, 1996, at Walter Reed Army Hospital in
Washington, to discuss Nicolson’s research. Walter Reed spokesman Ben Smith
said the Army would agree to study his mycoplasma research as part of its
investigation into the cause of GWS.
On December 27,
1996, a story about Garth Nicolson’s research appeared on the front-page of the
Los Angeles Times. However, the most significant part of Nicholson’s research,
namely that the mycoplasma had a piece of HIV attached to it, was not
mentioned. The origin of the microbe was left in doubt, the writer simply
stating that Nicolson’s research suggests “the primitive bacterium, called
mycoplasma, was deliberately altered for Iraqi use as a biological weapon.”
Also not
mentioned in the media was previous mycoplasma research conducted by the
military a decade earlier. In 1986 Dr. Shyh-Ching Lo, a molecular biologist at
the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C., reported a
“virus-like agent” derived from Kaposi’s sarcoma, the “gay cancer” associated
with AIDS. Using highly technical methods of molecular biology, Lo’s “virus”
was subsequently identified as the bacterium Mycoplasma fermentans (also known
as M. incognitus). In 1989, Lo also reported similar mycoplasma infection as
the cause of death in six young, previously healthy military personnel from New
Jersey, Virginia, Guam, and Turkey, all of whom died within one to seven weeks
from a progressive and mysterious “flu-like disease.” In 1991 Lo found yet
another mycoplasma, Mycoplasma penetrans, in the urine of gays with AIDS. Luc
Montagnier, the co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, has confirmed Lo’s mycoplasma
research. The Pasteur Institute virologist believes mycoplasmas are a necessary
“co-factor” that allows HIV infection to progress to full-blown AIDS.
Are mycoplasmas
being developed as biological warfare weapons? Certainly all known infectious
agents are screened for possible military use by biowarfare scientists around
the world. As stated, there was a Mycoplasma lab in Iraq. Before the Gulf War
the Iraqis freely used nerve gas against the Kurds in Northern Iraq; and after
the war they used mustard gas against Shiite Muslim nomads in southern Iraq.
And the U.S. Army conducted mycoplasma research in Huntsville, Texas.
Before the Gulf
War the mixing of the AIDS virus (HIV) with mycoplasmas in the laboratory by Lo
and Montagnier was recorded in the scientific literature. When mycoplasma was
added to HIV-infected blood cells in test tubes, it made the AIDS virus more
pathogenic. Silver-leaf monkeys experimentally infected with Lo’s mycoplasma
all developed infections, immunosuppression, and died within 7 to 9 months with
an AIDS-like “wasting syndrome.”
A “Mycoplasma Workshop,” sponsored
by The National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was held in San
Antonio, Texas, in December 1989. Lo’s research was featured. When asked if his
fatal mycoplasma “flu cases” were contagious, Lo replied, “We don’t know.”
Interestingly, some of Lo’s patients improved with the antibiotic doxycycline,
the same drug Nicolson has found effective in some cases of GWS.
Most physicians
know little about mycoplasma infection, and even less about testing for these
microbes. For many years this writer has reported mycoplasma-like organisms
discovered in the damaged tissue of cancer, AIDS, and in auto-immune disease.
This research has been published in medical journals and summarized in two
books by this author: AIDS: The Mystery
and the Solution (1984) and The Cancer
Microbe (1990). Unfortunately, this research has been largely ignored by
the AIDS and cancer establishments, as well as by so-called mycoplasma experts.
These bacteria can be easily seen microscopically in the diseased tissue of
AIDS (including Kaposi’s sarcoma), cancer, and certain other diseases of
unknown cause.
As some people
in medical science are aware, important and valid scientific discoveries are
ignored because they are “politically incorrect.” Lo’s mycoplasma research has
been largely ignored by the leading virologists who direct AIDS research.
Similarly, Lo has ignored the published research of hundreds of other
researchers who have shown mycoplasma-like microbes in cancer, AIDS, and immune
diseases. The inability of scientists to consider “politically incorrect”
scientific findings may explain why physicians currently have such difficulty
understanding and treating new epidemics like AIDS and GWS, in which these
microbes are operative.
Why does the
military ignore GWS and deny its existence? Undoubtedly, chemical and
biological weapons were employed in the Gulf War. Was the military fully
capable of detecting these bioweapons? Or was the detection of chemical agents
and bioweapons ignored or covered up? Is the military capable of protecting its
troops from modern day biowarfare? Are soldiers now powerless against
genetically engineered “supergerms” deployed by biowarfare scientists?
In the future, will soldiers
willingly go into battle knowing that exposure to bioweapons will be ignored by
their government, and knowing that no one is immune from the effects of these
man-made microbes of death?•
References
“Government study of veterans finds no
evidence of a Gulf War disease,” by Art Pine, Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1995.
“Gulf War toxins: Pentagon’s credibility sinks even lower,” Editorial, Los Angeles Times, October 24, 1996.
“U.N. aide fears Iraq could turn imported medicine into weapons,” by Paul Lewis, The New York Times, November 11, 1990.
“Troops may get unlicensed drug,” by Gina Kolata, The New York Times, January 4, 1991.
“Guinea pigs and disposable GIs,” by Tod Ensign, Covert Action Bulletin, Winter 1992-1993.
“Gulf War veterans seek restitution for ailments,” by William D Montalbano, Los Angeles Times, November 30, 1996.
“Were biological weapons used against our forces in the Gulf War?,” by Garth
and Nancy Nicolson, Townsend Letter for
Doctors & Patients, May 1996.
“Papers on Gulf War missing,” Los Angeles
Times, December 5, 1996.
“Army to review link between germ, Gulf War syndrome,” by Renee Tawa, Los Angeles Times, December 27, 1996.
“Isolation and identification of a novel virus from patients with AIDS,” by
Shyh-Ching Lo, American Journal of
Tropical Hygiene, Vol 35(4), 1986, pp. 675-676.
“Mycoplasma and AIDS: what connection?,” Lancet,
January 5, 1991.
Dave Emory’s “One Step Beyond” interview with Nicolson, available from
Spitfire, Box 1179, Ben Lomond, CA 95005.
Cantwell Jr, Alan, The Cancer Microbe,
Los Angeles, Aries Rising Press, 1990.
Cantwell Jr, Alan, AIDS: The Mystery & The Solution,
Los Angeles, Aries Rising Press, 1986.
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