Date: Fri, 6 Jun 97 08:20:16 CDT
/** reg.samerica: 1287.0 **/
** Topic: Cuba -US Bacterial War Details **
** Written 10:25 AM Jun 5, 1997 by peg:jclancy in cdp:reg.samerica **
from: jclancy@peg.apc.org
subject:Cuba -US bacterial War detail
A previous post from details provided by the Cuban Foreign Ministry described the recent release of Thrips Palmi insect over Cuban vegetable growing areas. Granma writer Rodolfo Casals has now provided the history of those attacks. But it is fair to remember that the Miami Mafia appears to act as an independent agent of the US Administration, while providing large financial help to both Democrats and Republicans.
"The US State Dept denies the veracity of these Thrip facts, alleging that "it has not committed a single act of violation of the 1972 agreement on chemical and biological weapons. Cuba maintains that all the following accusations against successive Administations have been confirmed over time from US information releases. In the early 1960's US Intelligence Services and the military began to elaborate plans for biological warfare, which have included blights that attack food crops, sugar cane defoliants, bacteria that thwart sugar cane cultivation and the interruption of rain by highly sophisticated methods.
In 1962, the CIA designed an operation known as Mongoose with the goal of destroying the Cuban Revolution. The opera- tion's strategies included the use of military force, sabotage and the assassination of the nation's leaders, as well as the introduction of nonlethal chemical agents that would cause illness among sugarcane workers (hundreds of thousands of persons) and keep them off work for a period of 24-48 hours.
The Long Island newspaper NEWSDAY revealed in 1971 that a virus originating in Fort Gulik, in the Panama Canal Zone, had been delivered by fishing boat to agents working against Cuba.
A book entitled,'The Fish is Red', for its part, reports that in 1972, CIA agents first introduced the African swine fever virus that decimated Cuba's livestock population. It is estimated that more than half million pigs were sacrificed, burned and buried to combat the epidemic.
Several years later, NEWSDAY reported that a biological warfare program aimed against poultry production in Cuba had failed, for reasons not revealed.
Between 1979 and 1981, four destructive diseases were unleashed that seriously affected individuals and crops vital to the Cuban economy: hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, dengue fever, sugar cane rust and tobacco blue mould. COVERT ACTION a Washington based publication, stated that as part of the CIA-Pentagon anti-Cuban arsenal, a disease known as hemorrhagic dengue was introduced on the island, where it infected hundreds of thousands of people, leaving 158 dead -including 101 children.
Eduardo Arocena, a leader of the antiCuba terrorist group Omega 7, admitted before a US Court in 1984-while he was being tried for murder-that in 1980 he had participated in an operation to introduce germs into Cuba as part of the United States war against the Island.
Five years earlier, in 1979, The WASHINGTON POST had reported that the CIA had a program aimed against Cuban agriculture, and that since 1962 Pentagon specialists had been manufacturing biological agents to be used for this purpose.
The secret bases operated in the US for the development of chemical and bacteriological warfare include the Edgewood arsenal near the city of Baltimore, amd Fort Detrick, in the State of Maryland. A report issued in 1969 by the US Senate Committee on Labor and social security recognised that under certain conditions, it is difficult to prove guilt in a bacteriological attack if the organisms causing the harm are sent clandestinely, which would allow for the argument that the situation created is the result of a spontaneous epidemic.
Of course Cuba is not the only country against which the US has used these prohibited forms of weaponry. During the Vietnam War, there was ample media coverage throughout the world, including the US Press, regarding the indiscriminate use of highly toxic chemicals and bacteriological agents affecting both humans and animals, as well as defoliants aimed at devastating plantations, crops and forests -such as Agent Orange.
Other antecedents are far too numerous to catalogue. In 1981, for example, the Press Agency of INDIA reported that bateriolog- ical.experiments being carried out by US scientists in Lahore, Pakistan, had led to 30 mysterious deaths.
A year earlier, in 1980, the US Gov't declassified documents revealing that in 1956, there had been plans to use the mosquito which spreads yellow fever against the SOVIET UNION.
There is more than sufficient information available to back Cuba in its charges regarding this latest biological attack against it. There are hard facts, conclusive evidence and more than convincing arguments. It would not be just, if this were to remain as simply another chapter in the United States Dirty War against the Cuban people."