Guest Post by
The
report issued by the World Health Organization states that the current
Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the largest and most complex since the
detection of the virus in 1976. This outbreak has reached an all time
high in both the number infected with the virus and those deceased from
it than in all the previous outbreaks combined. The outbreak started in
March 2014 in Guinea and it soon jumped across the border to Sierra
Leone and Liberia, and then the infected brought the virus via air and
land transport to Nigeria and Senegal. But this time around, the virus
was not simply spreading across Africa, but it had managed to reach
other continents.
However, if one is to
study the facts carefully, then a question arises: how is it that a
virus that was first identified in 1976 “suddenly” became so active and
able to spread across the African continent and beyond?
To get an answer one
must study the history of US secret experiments in this area, although
Washington strives to hide it from public attention.
As follows from leaked files and a number of media publications, the Ebola virus had been extensively studied back in 1980 in South Africa as a potential biological weapon. This project that goes under the codename Project Coast was launched by Dr. Wouter Basson, also known as “Dr. Death”,
who practiced medicine in South Africa during apartheid times and was a
personal physician to Pieter Willem Botha, who was the sitting prime
minister of South Africa at that time. The project aimed at creating
biological and chemical weapons, which were to destroy or sterilize the
black population, bringing death to all the political opponents of apartheid.
In principle, the
idea behind Project Coast, is not new. As reported in a recent
publication of The Age magazine, an Australian microbiologist and Nobel
laureate Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet urged the Australian government to
develop biological weapons against “over-populated countries of
Southeast Asia” in 1947. During a secret meeting in 1947 with The New
Weapons and Equipment Development Committee microbiologists recommended
“to form a research group tasked to create biological weapons that could
be unleashed by contaminating foods supplies in order to control the
population of Indonesia and other Asian countries.”
Among
the components for the new biological weapons developed under Project
Coast, the United States picked Marburg and Ebola fever viruses whose
strains were shipped to a secret laboratory in South Africa. A report
titled “The Rollback of South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare
Program,” that was published in 2001 by Dr. Stephen F. Burgess, a
professor of the Department of International Security Studies, US Air
War College, and Helen E. Purkitt, a professor of international
relations at the U.S. Naval Academy, states that back in 1984, the US
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) shipped eight tubes with Ebola and
Marburg strains to South Africa. These authors behind the report claim
that not only were the CIA and MI6 informed about Project Coast, but the
Bush administration and Margaret Thatcher were as well.
Bioweapons expert Jeanne Guillemin wrote
in her book “Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored
Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism,” that “the project‘s growth years
were from 1982 to 1987, when it developed a range of biological agents
(such as those for anthrax, cholera, and the Marburg and Ebola viruses
and for botulism toxin)…“
The history of
Basson’s project is surrounded by profound mystery. As he himself stated
in front of the Supreme Court of Appeal: “CIA agents in Pretoria
threatened me with death in two steps from the US embassy entrance on
Schoeman Street, they demanded me to keep the details of our studies a
secret.” According to an article published in 2001 in New Yorker, the US
Embassy in Pretoria was fairly terrified by the prospect that Basson
could reveal the role Washington played in Project Coast.
In 2013, Basson, dubbed “Doctor Death” by the South African media, was found guilty of unprofessional conduct by the Health Professions Council of South Africa.
As for the actual
prosecution of “Doctor Death”, in 2002, after thirty months of trial,
when a total of 150 witnesses were heard and 40,000 documents were
presented to the court that proved Wouter Basson was involved in
numerous cases of poisoning and flat-out slaughter during the apartheid
era, as while being connected to the deaths of more than 2,000 South
Africans, the the Supreme Court of Appeal failed to find any offense in
his actions.
Biological weapons
program led by Doctor Basson saw its end in 1994, but no independent
verification of the actual destruction of pathogenic strains has ever
been provided. A direct order to destroy all strains was issued directly
to Dr. Basson, but according to the Wall Street Journal, the actual
destruction of virus strains depended solely on his honesty.
Basson pointed out
that he had contacts with a number of Western agencies that were
providing “moral and other forms of support” to Project Coast. In
particular, in an interview for the documentary “Anthrax War,” Basson
repeatedly claimed that he met Dr. David Kelly, the prominent UN weapons
inspector that visited Iraq (Kelly was a high level UK expert on
biological weapons).
Some may find it suspicious that
once the investigation of the Project Coast began Dr. David Kelly was
found dead near his house in Oxfordshire in 2003. As for the causes of
death, the official version put forward by the British authorities
states that Kelly committed suicide. However, medical experts had
serious doubts about this fact. In addition, a Mail Online article
published in 2007 specified that a week before his death Dr. Kelly was
to be questioned by MI5 concerning his ties with Dr. Basson due to the
rise of public discontent of the criminal nature of Project Coast and
the degree of British involvement in it.
The suspicions about
the connection of the latest Ebola outbreak in Africa and the “research
work” that “Doctor Death” carried out in South Africa were expressed by
the Ghana Times newspaper in September. Earlier, a similar statement was
made by Zimbabwe’s Minister of Health Dr. Timothy Stamps, when he
underlined that Zimbabwe became the target of biological weapons tests
that had been developed by Wouter Basson.
The Commission that
was studying the crimes committed in South Africa in the 1970s and
1980s, led by Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, confirmed that more than a
thousand people were killed during the apartheid era in South Africa,
not only as a result of arrests, torture and assassinations but also by
biological weapons tests.
It should be noted
that the leakage of harmful strains studied in secret laboratories that
operated under the direct control of Washington in different countries
has already become a pattern. In June more than 80 scientists and
regular employees were exposed to anthrax in a secret biological
laboratory in Atlanta US,
due to carelessness. This accident has not simply presented a threat to
their health and lives, but could potentially trigger an epidemic of
this extremely dangerous disease. Similar incidents are occurring in
other countries where secret Pentagon and US intelligence laboratories
are trying to develop new types of biological weapons in violation of
the “Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and
Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on
their Destruction” that was signed back in 1972 only to enable
Washington to establish its own “control” over microbiological studies .
The troubling fact is
that the number of such biological laboratories has been increasing for
years. Back in 2006 their number reached 400 laboratories which were
designed to facilitate the “war on terror”, Washington is actively
redeploying such research laboratories to third-world countries where
there’s a possibility to study the effectiveness of viruses aimed at
different animals and local populations. In case of a possible military
confrontation in a region, the effect of such viruses can be devastating
for the region. Thus, in Ukraine alone, where the risks of regional
contamination with lethal viruses is extremely high due to ongoing
political instability one can find 11 such laboratories, some of them
are deployed in contested areas. For this reason, one shouldn’t be
surprised by the recent outbreak of anthrax in the Odessa region in the
spring and summer of this year.
Hundreds of such
laboratories exist in other countries, particularly in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, India, Iraq, Tanzania, South Africa,
Central and Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
In this regard, the increasing amount of reports on Pentagon’s involvement in the Ebola outbreak is not surprising, neither are the claims that Pentagon experts have already found “the effective cure” for this disease.
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