Source:
http://www.counterpunch.org/albarelli1.html
March 13, 2002
Anthrax Investigation Provokes Charges of Cover-Up
By H.P. Albarelli Jr.
News reports that the FBI is not close to making an arrest in its
investigation of last year's deadly anthrax mailings and may be
"dragging its feet," have provoked charges of a possible
cover-up and secret domestic experiments conducted during the 1950s by
Fort Detrick researchers.
Beginning one week after the September 11 terrorists attacks, anonymous
and threatening letters, some containing anthrax, were mailed from
Trenton, New Jersey and St. Petersburg, Florida to a number of media
outlets and Congressional offices. Eventually, as a result of these
mailings, five people died and twenty-three other people fell seriously
ill.
The new charges concerning domestic experiments center primarily on a
1957 anthrax outbreak in Manchester, New Hampshire. In August and
September of that year, three employees at the Arms Textile Mill
contracted anthrax inhalation and died. A fourth employee died in October
and a few weeks earlier five other employees came down with cutaneous
anthrax, a less dangerous form of the disease. A fifth employee came down
with inhalation anthrax on September 5, but remarkably recovered from the
disease.
A routine activity at the Arms Mill was the processing of goat's hair
imported from Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and India for use in the lining of
expensive suits and coats. The mill employed 632 workers spread
throughout a complex of large brick buildings located on the banks of the
Merrimack River and near the edge of downtown Manchester.
Curiously, the mill never ceased operations, even temporarily, during the
outbreak and continued to operate until 1968 when it went out of
business. Two years prior to its closing a man working in a machinery
shop across from the mill died of anthrax inhalation. State health
officials conjectured that spores remaining from the 1957 incident
migrated from the Arms buildings through a shared ventilation system into
the machinery shop.
Following its closure, state health officials sealed the mill off while
trying to decide the best way to make the site environmentally safe.
Following an expensive decontamination process in 1971, after which the
mill still tested positive for anthrax, the buildings were demolished.
The colossal pile of rubble was systematically soaked in chlorine for
decontamination and, when that proved ineffective on the mill's huge
hickory beams, an incinerator was erected on the site that burned the
wood to fine ash. The remaining bricks and stone were carted away for
nearby burial. Today the old Arms site is a parking lot for an upscale
commercial area.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, the
Arms Mill outbreak is "the only anthrax epidemic" that occurred
in the United States. The CDC also reports "that only 18 cases of
inhalation anthrax were reported in the U.S. from 1900 to 1978 and that
"two of the cases were laboratory associated."
In an amazing coincidence, at the same time of the Arms outbreak, the
mill was the site of tests using an experimental anthrax vaccine. The
Biological Warfare Laboratories of the U.S. Chemical Corps at Fort
Detrick, Frederick, Maryland, sponsored the tests, which began quietly in
May 1955. Additionally, Fort Detrick scientist, Dr. George G. Wright,
developed the prototype vaccine used at the mill. The vaccine was briefly
produced a few years later by the pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp
& Dohme, today Merck and Co., Inc. Company head, George W. Merck, was
a principal advocate of biological warfare in the 1940s and 1950s and was
a founder of Fort Detrick. Wright's vaccine is essentially the same serum
administered today to American military personnel and others at risk to
anthrax.
Also involved in the 1957 Arms mill tests, according to declassified Fort
Detrick documents and former scientists who worked on the project, were
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, and Britain's top secret
Microbiological Warfare Research Laboratories at Porton Down.
In recent weeks, a number of former Fort Detrick researchers who have
been interviewed by the FBI as possible sources of information, as well
as possible suspects, in the anthrax-letters investigation, have
confidentially expressed concerns that "the anthrax mailer" may
never be arrested because "he knows too much" about incidents
like the Arms Textile Mill tests and other surreptitious Army experiments
conducted throughout the 1950s.
Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a microbiologist who chairs the Working
Group on Biological Weapons for the American Federation of Scientists,
has also aggressively advanced this same hypothesis. According to an
"Analysis of the Anthrax Attacks" released by Rosenberg early
last month, "the FBI has known that the perpetrator of the anthrax
attacks is American" for over three months, but speculates
Rosenberg, the perpetrator may be "untouchable to the FBI"
because he may "know something that he believes to be significantly
damaging to the United States." Also, in early February, Rosenberg
told Salon reporter, Laura Rozen: "This guy knows too much, and
knows things the U.S. isn't very anxious to publicize."
FBI director Robert Mueller has dismissed Dr. Rosenberg's remarks as
"inaccurate" and said that the FBI "is in no way, shape,
or form dragging its feet in the investigation." Other FBI officials
who have declined to speak on-the-record about the investigation say that
it "would be imprudent to discuss the details of the case publicly
at this juncture."
In all of her statements about the anthrax mailings, Dr. Rosenberg has
said nothing about the attacker's motivations, but another anthrax
expert, Dr. Meryl Nass, has advanced a provocative theory.
Dr. Nass, a biologist and medical doctor who spent three years studying
the worlds largest anthrax epidemic in Zimbabwe, said that she believes
the motivational factors in the anthrax mailings may be financial and
political. In an interview this week, Nass said: "To me it appears
the attacks were designed to get publicity, no deaths, and were
politically motivated."
Without doubt, the anthrax investigation, which thus far has visibly
produced little in the way of hard results, has generated a number of
embarrassing reports to the federal government. First, there was the
revelation that the anthrax strain used in the attacks came from a
government-sponsored laboratory which in turn obtained the anthrax from
the British government's Porton Down facility which in turn obtained it
from Fort Detrick. That strain, commonly called the Ames strain,
originated from specimens taken in 1979 from an infected dead cow by
scientists at Iowa State University's Ames Laboratory. The strain's
moniker came into play in 1980 after Fort Detrick researchers requested a
virulent culture sample from the University. Once received, the Army
dubbed it the "Ames strain."
Second, came reports that the Army has been unable to account for many of
its anthrax specimens and that, since at least 1992, some have been
misplaced, lost, or stolen. The Army admits that a 1992 audit at Fort
Detrick discovered that nearly a dozen anthrax specimens were missing. Of
equal concern is that the same audit revealed that other specimens of the
deadly Ebola virus were also missing.
Third, is the Army's "lack of security" at some of its assumed
"highly secured" Fort Detrick laboratories. A January 20, 2002
article in the Hartford Courant by Jack Dolan and Dave Altimari states
that two former Fort Detrick scientists "said that as recently as
1997, when they left, controls at Fort Detrick were so lax it wouldn't
have been hard for someone with security clearance for its handful of
labs to smuggle out biological specimens." The same article quotes
the former chief of one of Fort Detrick's laboratories, Lt. Col. Michael
Langford, as saying that the lab he took over in 1992 had "little or
no accountability" and that he ordered an immediate inventory of the
facility. According to other former Fort Detrick scientists, some of the
specimens that Langford's audit revealed missing were "tissue
samples" taken from "dead animals and humans who had been
infected with lethal diseases."
Reports of lack of security perhaps should come as no surprise to the
Army or FBI investigators. In September 1986, Neil Levitt, a former
laboratory director at Fort Detrick's Research Institute on Infectious
Diseases, publicly claimed that security was so lax at the facility that
someone walked off with "more than a quart" of a deadly virus.
The virus caused a disease called Chikungunya, an affliction found in
Africa and Asia that produces rapid and severe flu-like symptoms.
Even earlier in September 1975, Dr. Edward Schantz, a University of
Wisconsin professor and former Fort Detrick researcher, testifying before
the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence Activities, told Sen. John
Tower that there was no "formal process" for handling lethal
substances at the Maryland facility. Schantz said that researchers
routinely "passed [substances] back and forth" to other
laboratories with virtually no controls in place.
Equally embarrassing to the government have been reports over the past
five months that were recently confirmed by a December 23, 2001 Baltimore
Sun article by reporter Scott Shane. The article revealed that Fort
Detrick scientists had harvested bacteria from the dead bodies of persons
"accidentally infected" with anthrax. Several former Army
researchers who are now retired and live in Florida, including Bill
Walter who to reporter Shane, have reported that at least three people
affiliated with Fort Detrick who died from anthrax had their cadavers
harvested so as to assist in the development of a new virulent anthrax
strain. Army officials dispute these reports and say that harvesting was
never performed at Fort Detrick. However, the same officials admit that
accidental anthrax deaths did occur at the facility.
One of the allegedly harvested bodies was that of a Fort Detrick
microbiologist, Dr. William A. Boyles. According to former colleagues,
Boyles died on November 25, 1951 after "accidentally inhaling
anthrax spores used in a controlled experiment." Within 48-hours
Boyles fell seriously ill and developed an extremely high fever.
According to once classified Army documents, Boyles was first taken to a
public hospital in Frederick, Maryland and then within hours transferred
to the Fort Detrick Hospital where oddly the day before he had sent home
after being diagnosed as having a common cold. Boyles died after slipping
into a coma five hours after his transfer. The Army falsified his death
certificate and issued a press release stating he had died from bronchial
pneumonia. In 1975, after the Army admitted covering-up Boyles' death,
his widow told reporters that she was not bitter about the Army's
deception, but was angry that the private physician who admitted her
husband to the public hospital had been harshly reprimanded for bringing
in a patient "with such a contagious disease." (According to
the CDC, anthrax is "not contagious.")
For years speculation that the Arms Textile Mill anthrax epidemic may
have been far more than an accidental occurrence has been the subject of
debate among scientists. In 1999, former United Nations official and BBC
correspondent, Edward Hooper, published a book entitled, "The River:
A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS." Buried deep within the
1,070-page tome is a brief section that concerns the Arms Mill outbreak.
Hooper's research inadvertently led him to the incident through his
unrelated interviews with Dr. Stanley A. Plotkin who at the time of the
Arms tests worked for the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service and was
assigned to medically evaluating the anthrax outbreak. In 1960, Dr.
Plotkin wrote a medical paper on the Arms outbreak, which is still widely
circulated and studied today among anthrax experts. Published in the
American Journal of Medicine and entitled, "An Epidemic of
Inhalation Anthrax, the First in the Twentieth Century," it was
co-authored with Dr. Philip S. Brachman who was the U.S. Public Health
Service's chief epidemiology investigator of the 1957 outbreak. Oddly,
the paper, which meticulously details the facts of the Arms Mill
outbreak, makes no mention whatsoever that Fort Detrick had any
involvement in the events surrounding the outbreak or that the mill had
been the simultaneous site of anthrax vaccine tests.
In his book Hooper recounts the basic facts of the Arms Mill incident and
writes: "It may of course be that [Fort Detrick] scientists were
simply very lucky from a research perspective, and that Mother Nature
started an epidemic of inhalation anthrax at just the right moment to
test their vaccine under field conditions. And yet, of course, there is
another, more ominous possibility. This is that, unbeknownst to...
Plotkin and Brachman, humans played a conscious role, and that a decision
was made by [Fort Detrick] to subject the vaccine to the ultimate field
test-- that of challenge with virulent anthrax organisms."
The Arms Mill debate came up again recently at a November 2000 Institute
of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences committee meeting in
Washington, D.C. Attending the meeting as separate expert witnesses were
Dr. Meryl Nass and Dr. Stanley Plotkin. The meeting concerned the Defense
Department's anthrax vaccine program and Nass raised a number of concerns
about safety, which Plotkin strongly rejected. When the subject of the
Arms Mill study came up, Nass remarked that the outbreak occurred
"serendipitously at the same time" that Fort Detrick scientists
were conducting their tests on human subjects. Plotkin heatedly
responded, "I reject any implied or stated accusation that this was
a biological warfare experiment."
In an interview last week, Plotkin said he didn't "think much of
conspiracy theories" and that author Edward Hooper's "innuendo
that we purposely launched the [Arms Mill] outbreak" is "false
and vicious."
Plotkin, who today is a prominent AIDS researcher and Emeritus Professor
of immunology at the University of Pennsylvania, said he "came to
the Anthrax Investigation Unit in August 1957, fresh from a training
course." He continued, "We had launched a study of anthrax
vaccine in May 1957. I had never been to the mill in question when I
received a telephone call early in September to tell me that anthrax had
been diagnosed in a mill worker in Manchester, New Hampshire. I went t up
to investigate."
Asked why the Army's Fort Detrick was involved in the tests, Plotkin
said, "I think the answer is obvious. The vaccine had been developed
at Fort Detrick and the purpose of our study, aside from protecting the
mill workers, was to find out what value the vaccine had against an
anthrax attack."
On the question of why the mill was never closed, even temporarily,
because of the epidemic, Plotkin said, "The outbreak appeared to be
over before the issue of what to do came up. Closing the mill would have
been an economic hardship for the workers. Instead, all workers were
offered the vaccine in November [1957], ending their utility for the
study, but protecting everybody." Asked if any follow-up studies had
been conducted on the Arms workers after the outbreak, Plotkin said,
"Not to my knowledge."
Recently obtained Fort Detrick documents reveal that interest in the New
Hampshire outbreak was ongoing and intense, and that numerous officials
at the installation closely monitored the outbreak. At the time, the Army
was deeply involved in developing anthrax as an offensive weapon of war.
According to the former chief of Fort Detrick's anthrax production plant,
Orley R. Bourland Jr., throughout the 1950s deadly spores were
manufactured "24 hours a day, seven days a week." Fort
Detrick's massive anthrax fermenters, housed in Building 470, held 1,800
gallons of wet anthrax solution and pumped out about 7,000 grams of
anthrax a week.
One 90-page document, dated June 1958 and stamped "Secret,"
details a meeting that was attended by several ranking Fort Detrick
officials including the heads of its Dissemination and Filed Testing
Division, its Engineering and Production Branch, and at least one
official from Britain's Porton Down Biological Warfare Center. Also in
attendance were Dr. Philip Brachman and Dr. Stanley Plotkin representing
the U.S. Public Health Service.
Dr. Riley D. Housewright, Fort Detrick's Scientific Research Director,
opened the meeting by informing attendees that the gathering was a
continuation of Fort Detrick's commitment to "give maximum support
to the BWL [Biological Warfare Laboratories] program of follow-up
investigation on N resulting from the New Hampshire outbreak of
anthrax." For over a decade, "N" had been the Army's
code-letter for operations involving weapons-grade anthrax.
The document then details Dr. Philip Brachman's review of "follow-up
studies resulting from the New Hampshire outbreak of anthrax." He
explains that "during a 10-week period" in August to November
1957 there had been nine cases of anthrax at the mill, five of inhalation
anthrax and four of cutaneous. Reads the report: "Four of the five
inhalation cases were fatal. In three of the four fatal cases, autopsies
were performed, proving the diagnosis; in the instance of the woman who
was buried without an autopsy, it has been impossible to get permission
to exhume the body."
The document describes how Brachman separated the mill's workers into two
categories for purposes of the vaccine tests, which began, approximately
12-weeks before the first reported case of anthrax. Workers were deemed
either "susceptibles" or "immune." Simply put,
"susceptibles" were those subjects who were either not given
the anthrax vaccine or those who were given "the control
material" or placebo. "Immunes" were those workers who had
"the full course of the antigenic material," or those "who
had had the disease at some time in the past and were therefore assumed
to be immune."
Here it should be noted that from 1948 through 1956 there had been 63
cases of cutaneous anthrax at the Arms Mill, a then-common occurrence
among workers handling animal products. Anthrax during the 19th century
was called the "woolsorters' disease" and, according to medical
literature, about 30 percent of those workers stricken with inhalation
anthrax recovered. During the Arms outbreak only 313 of the mills 632
employees received the actual test vaccine. None of the 5 employees who
contracted anthrax had been vaccinated as part of the tests because 2
received the placebo instead and the remaining 3 did not participate in
the tests.
Midway through his review, Brachman was asked if the Arms mill was still
open to which he replied that it was "operating full force."
However, he explained, alterations had been made in the mill's operations
and that following the outbreak the controlled tests had been terminated
and all employees had been offered the vaccine.
This question was followed by another concerning "whether the viable
spores," which were assumed to be still present in the mill, ever
got "through the fabric to infect customers" who purchased the
products produced at the mill. The report reads: "The response was
that this is a touchy question," and that "some products"
did test positive for anthrax, but that after further treatment they
tested negative. Yet, the report goes on to state that an unidentified
"grocery clerk in Philadelphia" came down with cutaneous
anthrax after purchasing "a new woolen coatfour weeks before his
illness."
Later in the same document it is noted that Fort Detrick pathologist, Dr.
Edwin V. Hill, reported that autopsies had been performed "on
monkeys which died following a respiratory exposure to the anthrax
organisms isolated in the New Hampshire outbreak." The report reads:
"These animals died very suddenly without premonitory symptoms. The
gross and microscopic findings in the autopsies were similar to those
observed in the work with the strain which has been under study in the
past."
Dr. Edwin Hill was certainly no stranger to the subject of human
experimentation. In October 1947, Hill and another Fort Detrick
pathologist, Dr. Joseph Victor, traveled to Allied-occupied Japan to
interview Shiro Ishii, head of Japan's wartime Unit 731. Ishii is
regarded today the Rising Sun's counterpart to Joseph Mengele because of
his diabolical Manchurian experiments which resulted in the brutal deaths
of thousands of people. Upon returning to the U.S., Hill recommended
immunity for Ishii and his scientists because, as he stated in a letter
to his commander, "Evidence gathered in this investigation has
greatly supplemented and amplified previous aspects of this field
[biological warfare]. Such information would not be obtained in our own
laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation."
Former Army researchers report that the Arms Mill was not the only
textile operation involved in tests conducted by Fort Detrick's tests
during the 1950s and that "at least four other mills" were
involved. A 1960 medical paper also authored by Drs. Brachman and Plotkin
verifies this. The paper, entitled, "Field Evaluation of a Human
Anthrax Vaccine", states that "epidemiological studies"
were conducted in "four mills located in the northeastern United
States" where "Bacillus anthracis contaminated raw material
were handled and clinical infections occurred." The paper identifies
the mills only as code-letters: "A, M, P, and S." The other
mills reported no cases of inhalation anthrax but did experience a total
of 17 cases of cutaneous anthrax. The Army refuses to identify any of the
plants involved in the tests, but other sources have reported that two of
the mills were "in the Philadelphia area" and that another was
the Arel Textile Mill located near Charlotte, North Carolina.
Perhaps significant to note is that in 1995 documents related to the Arms
Mill outbreak were turned over, without explanation, to the National
Committee on Human Radiation Experimentation in response to its request
to the Department of Defense for records related "to human
experimentation." The National Committee was created in January 1994
by President Bill Clinton to "investigate reports of possibly
unethical experiments funded by the government decades ago." The
Committee's Final Report to the President makes no mention of the Arms
Mill incident.
The 1958 Fort Detrick document also reveals the Army's involvement in
then-ongoing human experiments with a compound called EA 1729, which was
the Army's medical code-name for LSD. According to former Army
scientists, researchers from Fort Detrick's ultra-secret Special
Operation Division conducted covert experiments using LSD in Western
Europe in the early 1950s. These same scientists say that fears about
details of these experiments becoming known may also contribute to any
alleged cover-up in the FBI's on-going anthrax investigation.
Copyright � H.P. Albarelli Jr. Albarelli is an investigative journalist
and writer who lives in the Tampa Bay region of Florida.
Edward ><+>
If you have fifty problems and one of them is government, you have only
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