Pakistan suspects the CIA may be behind an outbreak of Dengue fever in the country. The Pakistan News Servicereports today that the Pakistan Medical Association has called on security agencies to investigate fears of deliberate spread of the deadly disease in the Punjab.
The accusation is not far-fetched. The CIA has a long history of using biological weapons, most notably in Cuba. In Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way, Ellen Ray and Willam H. Schaap document attacks on the communist nation spanning more than 20 years. The operations were exposed in Newsday on January 9, 1977, and later appeared in the Washington Post, Le Monde, the Guardian, and other newspapers.
According to the authors, the CIA prefers Dengue fever. “Dengue and other arboviruses are ideal as biological warfare weapons for a number of reasons. Dengue, especially hemorrhagic dengue, is highly incapacitating; it can be transmitted easily through the introduction of infected mosquitoes; it will spread rapidly, especially in highly populated and damp areas,” they write.
In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee published a CIA memorandum listing a large number of deadly toxins stockpiled at Fort Detrick, including anthrax, encephalitis, tuberculosis, lethal snake venom, shellfish toxin, and half a dozen lethal food poisons, “some of which, the committee learned, had been shipped in the early 1960s to Congo and to Cuba in unsuccessful CIA attempts to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro,” the authors note.
Further Senate investigations revealed that 239 populated areas in the United States had beencontaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969, including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Key West, Panama City, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. The U.S. Army hasacknowledged that Americans were unwitting guinea pigs in biowarfare experiments.
The PakTribune notes a number of biological attacks against Afghanistan, dating back to 1982 and the CIA’s covert war against the Soviet Union. Britain and the U.S. have been accused of a biological attack on Afghanistan’s poppy fields in an attempt to defeat the Afghani resistance, destroy wheat and fruit trees and blight the opium crop, the news website writes.
This is likely a cover story. TheCIA and Wall Street are linked to the production of opium and heroin in Afghanistan and it seems unlikely they would destroy their own business interests. Beginning in 2000, the Taliban enforced a ban on opium production.
”We are at this moment not sure if it is a fungus or some insect. Spraying has been forbidden in very clear words by the President of Afghanistan. Hence, awaiting the results from our lab tests,” Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan, told the PakObserver.
The newspaper points to a CIA-sponsored a fake polio vaccination drive in Abbottabad in early 2011, allegedly to collect a DNA sample of Osama bin Laden.
