Swine Flu Weaponized?

Swine Flu Weaponized?
Saturday, 2 May, 2009 10:21 PM


Swine Flu Weaponized?

By Antonio C. Abaya

Written on April 29, 2009

For the Standard Today,

April 30 issue







As of this writing, the swine flu virus has killed 159 people in Mexico and hospitalized some 1,600 others.



The virus has also infected at least 77 persons in other countries – in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Israel and New Zealand.- almost all of them recent visitors to Mexico.



But none of the 77 has died. On the contrary, they seem to be recovering well from the flu, including some 40 school children in one school in New York City who had been in Mexico, according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a recent presscon.



In the state of Texas, where the city of El Paso shares the border with Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, there are only four known victims of swine flu, and none of them has died. .



What in the world is going on?



The apparent selectivity of the swine flu rang a bell in my memory and I went to dig up an article that I had saved, which may – or may not – have relevance to the swine flu outbreak.



I have often referred to this article when I wrote about the neo-cons because it explains many of the policy decisions of the Bush administration: the war in Iraq, the threat of war on Iran, the provocative moves against Russia over Georgia and the missile shields in Romania and the Czech Republic, the recurrent hostility towards China, its dismissive- ness towards the ‘Old Europe’ of France and Germany, even the quasi-permanent presence of American troops in Basilan and Sulu.



And now, possibly, the curiously selective swine flu virus.



This article was written by Michael Meacher, a member of the British parliament, and was published in the September 06, 2003 issue of The Guardian, a prominent newspaper in London. Read the following excerpts from this article and decide for yourself:



“We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defense secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), Jeb Bush (George W. Bush’s younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief-of-staff). The document , entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, was written in September 2000 (one year before 9/11) by the neo-conservative think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).



“The plan shows Bush’s Cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region, whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says ‘while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.’



“The PNAC blueprint reports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must ‘discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.’ It refers to key allies such as the UK as ‘the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership’ It describes peacekeeping missions as ‘demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN.’ It says ‘even should Saddam Hussein pass from the scene’, the US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently…as ‘Iran will prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has.’ It spotlights China for ‘regime change’, saying ‘it is time to increase the presence of American forces in Southeast Asia.’



“The document also calls for the creation of ‘US space forces’ to dominate space and the total control of cyberspace to prevent ‘enemies’ using the Internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons that can target specific genotypes (and) may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool…..” (Emphasis mine.)



End of excerpts from the Meacher article.



Of course, the neo-cons have been driven away from their positions of power in Washington DC and have been replaced by the liberal administration of President Barack Obama, who has dismantled or reversed many of the legacies of the Bush neo-cons: Abu Ghreib prison, Guantanamo, rendition flights of the CIA, water-boarding, domestic spying, etc.



But it is only 100 days since Obama and his liberals ascended to power. It is not possible that it has been able to eradicate completely all the nasty things that the neo-cons had put into play, or even that it knows every single one of those nasty things.



If the neo-cons and their allies in the military organization managed to get started their plan to “develop biological weapons that can target specific genotypes,” it is not outside the realm of possibility that Obama and his liberals do not know anything about it. Until now.



The current swine flu outbreak was originally said to have started with a 39-year old woman in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca who died in April of symptoms associated with swine flu. But now the first victim has been moved back to February, to the illness of a four-year old boy in the nearby state of Vera Cruz.



The boy lived in a village called – I’m not making this up – La Gloria, some 450 of whose residents have been suffering respiratory ailments since February, which they are blaming on a pig farm that lies upwind 8.5 kilometers to the north, in the town of Xaltepec.



The pig farm, which has a population of 15,000 pigs, is owned 50 percent by an American firm, Virginia-based Smithfield Foods Inc. Half the people who live in La Gloria are said to work in Mexico City during the work week, but come home to spend the weekend with their families in La Gloria.



If the pig farm in La Gloria is indeed the source of the swine flu outbreak, then the weekly migration of half the village population to work in Mexico City would explain why most of the fatalities so far have been in the federal capital.



But why is it that, so far, all the fatalities in the outbreak have been Mexicans?



(UPDATE: The first and so far only fatality outside Mexico was recently recorded and identified as a 23-month old boy in Texas. But he turned out to be also Mexican, who fell ill while visiting relatives in the border town of Brownsville, Texas. He was moved to a hospital in Houston, where he died two days ago. So the question remains: Why only Mexicans?)



Perhaps – and this is pure speculation on my part – the US Army bacteriological weapons people do have a facility – let’s call it the Big Mike Research Lab - near the pig farm in La Gloria, that is developing swine flu bacteria agents as a weapon that can target specific genotypes, as suggested in the Meacher article.



If this speculation is correct, then we have to assume that some of those bacteria somehow escaped accidentally into the air and infected some of La Gloria’s inhabitants who then carried the bacteria to their workplaces in Mexico City.



This would not be the first bacteriological weapons accident. In April 1979, some deadly bacteria (anthrax) were accidentally released into the air after an explosion in a Soviet bacteriological weapons facility (Military Compound 19) in the Urals



The Soviets, who kept the accident secret until October, said that 68 people were killed, but Western estimates run from several hundreds to several thousands dead. The accident forced the quarantine of the nearby city of Sverdlovsk, now known by its pre-Revolution name Ekaterinburg. *****



Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail.com. Other articles in www.tapatt.org and in acabaya.blogspot.com.



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