by Janet Phelan
20 August 2016
from
Journal-NEO Website
Janet C.
Phelan, investigative journalist and human rights
defender that has traveled pretty extensively over the
Asian region, an author of a tell-all book EXILE,
exclusively for the online magazine "New
Eastern Outlook". |
This November, a meeting will take place in Geneva, Switzerland, in
a large hall filled with delegates from around the world.
This meeting, which has the potential of
affecting every single living person on the planet, will get at most
passing mention in newspapers. Some reporters will be present, duly
noting which country provided what recommendation and which country
approved and which country objected.
At the most, this may result in an
article on page 18 in the larger, more comprehensive daily
newspapers.
The hometown dailies probably won't run anything.
Every five years, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) convenes a
Meeting of State Parties at the United Nations in Geneva.
Every five years, there is some sort of
objection raised by one country or another to the fact that this
arms Convention has no mechanism to verify that its member nations
are complying with the terms of the treaty and every five years, the
US pooh poohs the relevance of concerns about the lack of
verification and reporting protocols.
However, this upcoming convening of the BWC in 2016 may be special.
For at this juncture, it appears that
forces working through the US government, and with knowledge and
complicity of other world leaders, are perched on the edge of
deploying a
biological weapons attack that will simply change the
human footprint on the globe.
Despite concerted efforts to keep this from public attention,
certain little tells keep popping up.
Stories hit the press which should, were
we in normal times, result in teams of reporters being dispatched,
with all the forensic investigative capabilities that newspapers and
magazines used to require of top reporters.
As we too well know, the
funds for in-depth research have virtually dried up and
investigative reporters are now an endangered species.
And in the current political climate, even as disturbing as some of
these indicators are, they usually end up being reported as "errors"
and any intentionality is buried in the dung heap of denial issued
by culpable parties.
And in the face of all the other
negative news, the real weight of these indicators seems to get
lost.
Cover-up of
the Cover-up
Item:
The US was recently reported as having
sent live anthrax to nearly 100 labs, worldwide.
The labs receiving the active anthrax
were both government and private labs.
-
Did any reporter actually ask
why the US is sending anthrax, dead or alive, to so many
labs?
-
Did a reporter cull through the
spending records available at the government website
usaspending.gov to ascertain if any of these labs had
unlisted anthrax projects?
An unlisted project might well be one
funded by the CIA and the implications of a secret anthrax project
might well have raised some questions.
What the press did with this story was to dutifully report that the
Pentagon stated that the anthrax de-activating equipment at
Dugway
Proving Ground, which was the sender to all those labs, worldwide,
was examined and fixed.
Does that make you feel better? It shouldn't. Dugway was previously
caught about eight years ago sending out live anthrax.
No one thought to examine the equipment
then?
Item:
Speaking of Dugway Proving Ground,
-
Would you sleep any better
knowing that Dugway possessed in their labs the very same
strain of anthrax that was purportedly used by Fort Detrick
researcher Dr. Bruce Ivins, whom the FBI alleges
mailed live anthrax to a number of Congressmen and media in
September of 2001, resulting in five deaths?
-
Would you sleep better knowing
that the FBI refused to investigate personnel at Dugway,
instead pinning this crime on the unfortunate Dr. Ivins, who
conveniently committed suicide, giving the FBI a "Case
Closed" verdict on the mailings?
In fact, Ivins did not have the
equipment to weaponize anthrax.
Item:
Freedom of Information requests
concerning biological and chemical weapons are routinely given the
deep freeze by the US Military.
An investigative group called
Muckrock filed a 2014 FOIA with Dugway Proving Ground requesting a
document named "Cold Death, Chemical Weapons and Means of Mass
Destruction."
After doing the hot potato with this request between
various branches of the military, the agencies simply stopped
responding.
The FOIA was killed through passive non-compliance with
the laws governing transparency (Cold
Death, Chemical Weapons and Means of Mass Destruction).
Similarly, researchers at Muckrock also
filed a FOIA for documents relating to "Anthrax File Parke Davis and
Co" and received a reply stating the request was denied because it
was too broad.
The denial was appealed and the subsequent document
that was sent to the Muckrock investigator was 100% whited out.
In case you happen to think that the Army really doesn't have
certain records or that it is in the best interests of all concerned
that these records remain private, consider this:
Item:
In 2013, Muckrock filed a FOIA with the
Army requesting contracts and copies of reports with
mega-contracting firm Booz Allen Hamilton over a certain time
period.
The reply came back stating that no documents existed.
However, a quick visit to the US government contract tracking
website,
usaspending.gov, reveals 6,766 unclassified contracts with
the Army and BAH during the relevant time period, for a total of
$4,310,543,269.
Item:
This reporter filed a FOIA last year
requesting a certain contract between the DTRA, a branch of the US
military, and a company called Translational Genomics Research
Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.
The reply from the FOIA office stated
that the DTRA does not recognize or honor the contract numbers
listed at
usaspending.gov. A second FOIA was then filed using a
different contract number. There has been no production of
documents to date.
I filed a similar request for a specific
contract between the Department of Homeland Security and
Translational Genomics. In fact, I filed the request five times. No
reply has ever been received.
It appears that access to information is
regularly being limited. What we need to understand is why.
Bio=Life
Item:
The US government is violating the
Biological Weapons Convention and the UN won't do a thing about it.
The violations are multiple and severe.
To start with, when the US Congress passed into law the USA Patriot
Act, in 2001, a section of the Act made it legal for the US
government to violate its own biological weapons laws. In so doing,
the US essentially violated the international accord known as the
BWC.
The State Department attempted to keep
the existence of Section 817 away from BWC oversight. According to
State Department official Chris Park, the US "forgot" to inform the
Convention at large about the changes to the US domestic
legislation.
Any changes in bw legislation must be reported, but
then again, as we have seen, there is no mechanism to ensure that
states are adhering to their responsibilities under the BWC.
The reactions of UN officials and the
Convention at large to notification of the US's violations were
reported in "Dancing
the Apocalypso with the Microbial Gestapo".
All the way up the UN food chain, the UN
Disarmament Affairs officials reacted as if they were being handed
an envelope laced with anthrax. And no action was taken.
In the five years since the 2011
BWC convening, we have seen an
Ebola crisis crisis, a
Zika crisis crisis and
continued warnings about emerging threats associated with bird flu
and swine flu.
If the realities behind
Ebola and
Zika can be
verified, it would appear that testing on civilian populations is
well under way. We are becoming conditioned to the emergence of
strange and deadly new bugs which have the capacity to kill people
en masse.
Mainstream news organizations, while assuring as that governments are doing everything in their power to protect us from bioweapons, continue to serve in a dual capacity by reminding as
that, as far as pandemics go, The Big One is coming.
The double message is clever and
contrived:
"A major pandemic is looming on
the horizon and we did not cause it!"
Ebola
isn't the big one...
So what is? And
are we ready for it?
According to a former
employee at Dugway Proving Grounds, who spoke with this
reporter under conditions of anonymity, Dugway has been
testing biological and chemical weapons for decades.
Dugway recently cancelled a media tour which could have
reassured us that there is no threat posed by the
research ongoing at that facility.
A review of the human rights
record of the US indicates that, at this juncture, only
certain types of people have rights. This is most
clearly in evidence in the lackadaisical response from
law enforcement agencies when police kill minorities and
in the wholesale judicial disposal of the rights of one
of the most vulnerable groups in any society, the
elderly and disabled.
If there were to be a
globe changing event, from which certain types of
people would perish while others remain healthy and
intact, a selectively engineered or delivered
bioweapon would provide the perfect cover.
Both
sorts of technologies-race specific bioweapons and
selective delivery systems - now exist. The signs pointing to
future deployments are everywhere now.
The only question
remaining is, will we awaken to history before
history ends...?
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