The origin of the COVID-19 virus remains unresolved. When the pandemic finally passes, an international investigation into the origin of novel coronavirus will be necessary to find out the truth. The pandemic has been too invasive in world consciousness, too imposing upon our lives and too disruptive of the global economic order to have the mystery of its origins go unresolved. Three explanatory theories have so far been floated: a) it evolved naturally, b) it’s China’s fault, and c) the US launched it.
To be successful the international investigation into the origins of novel coronavirus must include three components: first, there will be the forensic science investigation to discover the facts from the relevant fields of virology, epidemiology, bio-chemistry, genetics and such. Second, there must be a criminal investigation to locate any culpable parties who have broken the law through negligence or deliberate action, most specifically the 1972 International Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC). And third, there must be a judicial component to review findings, pass judgement and award damages. Nobody at this point can claim definitive knowledge, but the sides have closed ranks. Putting this international truth commission together will be one hell of a global fistfight and highly entertaining for those of us watching from the cheap seats.
We can begin to sort out the parties and the claims in advance. Amongst scientists, the Darwinists say novel coronavirus is a successful genetic mutation by the virus through natural selection. (1) They propose that coronavirus has jumped host from a bat to a pangolin to a human, acquired several new functions in the process, emerged suddenly more toxic to humans, and can now infect house pets. (2) This hypothesis raises the dire existential question which Pope Francis felt compelled to address. (3) Is Nature fed up with human overpopulation and environment destruction? Is coronavirus a salvo against the human global carcinoma? Will Earth now cure itself of human cancer with a rapid and repeated onslaught of virus mutations to send us packing to join our relatives Neanderthal and Homo erectus? The coronavirus natural selection scenario has dire has dire implications for the future of the human species. Evolution is brutal and relentless. Welcome to the Anthropocene.
President Trump, of course, is the leader of the China bashers. Trump immediately labelled the outbreak the “Chinese virus” to insinuate the virus had a racial signature and to finger culpability onto China as the source country. The Republican right-wing has been ramping up the theory which could be called “neo-creationism” (humans playing God). They proclaim the novel coronavirus was genetically engineered at a level 4 bio-weapon laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Accordingly, the virus escaped the lab into the Wuhan live animal market, and the rest is history. Neo-creationist Missouri Senator Josh Hawley proclaims China’s culpability through “communist incompetence”. (4) He stops short of alleging a Chinese bio-weapon attack; perhaps, it is too big a stretch of the imagination to convince FOX-News watchers that China would attack itself? Hawley has called for an international investigation into the cause of COVID-19, and demanded Senate Judiciary Committee hearings as well. The possible motive which has emerged for this new round of China-bashing is to allow Trump to unilaterally cancel repayment of the $1.2 Trillion in treasury notes China now holds. Let’s see if the Republicans can make this tar brush stick.
The political left-wing accuses the US of genetically engineering and releasing the novel coronavirus. From our past experience of bio-weapon contamination, three possible scenarios emerge:
1 The virus escaped laboratory confinement through an accidental toxic leak from Ft. Detrick, similar to the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak of 1979. (5)
2 It was released as a private terrorist action as in the 2001 anthrax letters mailed by Ft. Detrick bio-weaponer, Bruce Edwards Ivins. (6)
3 It was a deliberate bio-weapon attack by the US against China. (7)
None of these prospects is good. There have been decades of documented leaks in the US of highly contagious germs and toxins at Dugway Proving Ground, UT and Plum Island, NY. (8) Bio-weapon spillage is a chronic issue with this science. If coronavirus is a genetically engineered “midspectrum incapacitant” germ weapon, then random human error would be the likely path for the virus’ escape into the world.
If an individual terrorist is found to be the culprit, who might it be? a scapegoat like Lee Harvey Oswald? a brilliant but deranged Unabomber? a super-terrorist Osama bin Laden? Perhaps a new evil archetype would need inventing.
The third possibility gruesome to think about is that the US would deliberately attack China at Wuhan during the 2019 Military World Games. How stupid would the Trump Administration have to be, not to have a coronavirus vaccine made and warehoused ahead of time for Americans? But this is also possible and believable because of the US’s previous hidden history of germ warfare attacks against China and North Korea in 1952 during the Korean War. (9) This in part explains China’s dramatic and effective quarantine measures.
The science and military strategy of biological warfare has evolved since 1952. It is now conventional wisdom among war planners that midspectrum incapacitants are superior weapons to lethal diseases. Dead bodies can be quickly collected and buried in mass graves while treating sick patients ties up much more of a nation’s resources in total war scenarios. Incapacitant germ attacks also appear as naturally occurring, and therefore are much more difficult to prove. The US germ war industry today is also highly focused on plant and livestock diseases including insect plagues which create food shortages and potential famine as a political and military tool of hegemony.
The thought that the US might engage in bio-warfare is repugnant and difficult to believe for most Americans, but the long-term experience of Cuba with US germ war terrorism against its people and agriculture is very sobering. This history is not known in the US, but in these times of coronavirus and shelter in place, Cuba has much to teach us of quarantine and food shortage. The US government portrays Cuba as a Third World country with poor infrastructure and little public health. Cuba’s BW claims are routinely dismissed as unsubstantiated communist allegations from the former Fidel Castro regime, but the Cuban perspective is far more informative. Biological Warfare Against Cuba by historian Ariel Alonso Pérez (10) lays out the Cuban charges of the US germ attack in the 1981 dengue fever outbreak, Pérez writes,
The notorious terrorist and counterrevolutionary of Cuban descent Eduardo Arocena, leader of the terrorist group Omega-7 linked to the US Central Intelligence Agency, was charged [in 1984] with the 1980 murder of Cuban diplomat Felix Garcia Rodriguez, one of Cuba’s UN representatives, and with participation in a number of bomb blasts in America. In his court statement, before the New York Federal Court, he said that: “My group’s mission was to receive certain germs to introduce them in Cuba . . . to start the so-called ‘chemical war.’”
Arocena admitted to the court that his boat and another boat participated in the December 1980 germ attack. Dengue fever was spread by mosquito vectors brought ashore, and the outbreak began shortly thereafter in early 1981. Using insects as vectors to spread disease or plant blight is entomological warfare (EW).
As recognized by the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization, the hemorrhagic dengue epidemic in Cuba, in 1981, had no precedent in the history of this disease. It was also the most serious and significant case recorded in the world, with a total number of 344,203 people effected; 10,312 of them developed serious conditions . . . 158 people died of which 101 were children.
The US-led international trade blockade against Cuba made purchasing pesticides and larvacides on the international market very expensive and difficult to acquire. Schools were converted into makeshift hospitals to provide care. The epidemic lasted for ten months.
No sooner had the dengue fever subsided when a new scourge hit Cuba. African swine flu broke out affecting the entirety of Cuba’s national swineherd. 400,000 pigs across the island were mass slaughtered and buried in pits to contain this epidemic.
On October 21, 1996 at 10:08 am, the pilot and co-pilot of Cuban National Airlines Flight #710 witnessed an A2S “fumigator” type airplane identified by its American registration number, N3093N, emitting spray clouds in bursts from its wing-mounted tanks as it flew across Cuban air space within the Giron international air corridor which bisects Cuba on a north/south axis. Within weeks, a plague of insects previously unknown in Cuba, the thrips palmi insect, had swarmed widely. This miniature eating machine indigenous to South East Asia lays its eggs in the fleshy part of plant leaves making it highly resilient to many pesticides. The Cuban potato and bean crops were devastated by this infestation.
At this same time in 1996, the Cuban economy hit rock bottom following the collapse of the USSR. Cuba overnight lost its sugar market and petroleum subsidies, and its export economy slid into a deep economic depression. The agricultural sector still organized around monoculture sugar collapsed causing widespread shortages of bread, meat, food imports, and basic commodities. Grocery shelves emptied, food was scare, rationing was instated. The 1990’s, called the “special period” in Cuba, was a decade of great hardship. The loss of the 1996 potato and bean harvest brought Cuba close to famine.
Other US insect attacks against Cuba include the 1992 “black plant louse” released from Guantanamo Naval Base, the 1993 “citrus leafhopper” which ravaged citrus orchards, and the 1994 “coffee bean borer” that destroyed 80% of the coffee harvest. In 1997 Cuba suffered a “rice mite” infestation which facilitated a fungus bloom, the “mite-fungus complex.” This plague was previously unknown in the Western Hemisphere. Additional BW attacks against Cuban agriculture include the tobacco blue mold, and varroasis, a mite which attacks bees and destroys apiaries. These infestations are documented in US academic research. (11)
The common element in each insect infestation was the very first appearance of these vectors inside Cuba, an island nation isolated by the Caribbean Sea and further quarantined from the rest of the world by trade embargo. A dozen new insect plagues infested Cuban agriculture in a very brief window of time. In 1997, against the layers of US skepticism, denial and political pressure, Cuba could not win UN recognition of its formal BW complaint. The US had the means to poison Cuba anytime it wanted, and to get away with the crime.
But what was the motive? Why should the US attack Cuba with dengue fever in 1981, and follow it up with the swine flu assault? That decision was made at the CIA in1980 without the approval of the Carter administration. Carter tried to rein in US clandestine activities in Latin America and he was soundly disliked within the US intelligence community. In 1977, the Cuban army intervened in the Angolan civil war. By 1980 Cuba had deployed 30,000 troops to Angola. The dengue fever attack in December 1980 was both a kick in the pants from the CIA spooks to the exiting Carter administration for its effete foreign policy (which had negotiated peace at Camp David, given away the Panama Canal and botched the Iran hostage rescue) and it was a sobering wake-up call to Castro. The incoming Reagan era would restore American jingoism.
We can also learn something from Cuba’s response to US germ war attacks; it has invested in medical schools and its public health sector. Cuba is responding to the coronavirus pandemic with internationalism. As of April 5th, Cuba sent 172 doctors, 453 nurses, and 14 lab technicians to 16 countries in Central America, the Caribbean, and Europe with medical supplies and ventilators [https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2020/04/17/good-news-from-cuba-dr-ariel-alonso-perez-sends-updates-from-the-islands-heartland-concerning-sars-cov-2-china-rising-radio-sinoland-200417/]. Cuba also gave safe haven to a COVID-19 infected British cruise ship, MS Braemar, which was denied port entry to the US. (12)
The United States will be among the most deeply impacted countries in the world from this coronavirus pandemic. If the evidence points to the US bio-weapon industry as the culpable party for this global crisis it will be a real bite on the butt for American prestige. Regardless whether it was caused by leak or by attack, now is the time for the US germ war industry to be closed finally and for good. Richard Nixon, of all people, tried to shut down world-wide bio-weapon development and stockpiles with his sponsorship of the 1972 International Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. (13) This international law contains covenants and inspection regimens enforceable on all signatories. This is not a Democrat or Republican issue, not a communist or capitalist issue. The experience of world-wide disease quarantine is a rare occurrence, like the hundred-year flood. It’s been a novelty for us, and it’s allowed plenty of lock-down time to ponder coronavirus. The creation of toxic disease in a bio-weapon lab is not the sane path of human survival. It is shortening our timeline on earth.
Links
- https://www.genengnews.com/news/coronavirus-evolved-naturally-and-is-not-a-laboratory-construct-study-shows
- www.sciencealert.com, Evidence Suggests Pangolins May Have Passed Coronavirus from Bats to Humans, 11 April 2020
- CNN, Pope says coronavirus pandemic could be nature’s response to climate change, 09 April 2020
- https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/sen-josh-hawley-investigate-chinas-coronavirus-actions-make-beijing-pay-for-lives-and-billions-lost
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Edwards_Ivins
- https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/china-locked-in-hybrid-war-with-us/
- Michael Christopher Carroll, Lab 257: the Disturbing Story of the Government’ Secret Germ Laboratory, Harper, New York 2004,
- Thomas Powell, “Biological Warfare in the Korean War: Allegations and Cover-up”, Socialism and Democracy, Vol 31, No.1, March 2017, pp 23-42
- Ariel Alonso Pérez, Biological Warfare Against Cuba, Editorial Capitán San Luis, Ave. 25 no. 3406, Playa, Habana
- Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Six-Legged Soldiers, Using Insects as Weapons, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, Chap 19
- https://www.thenation.com/article/world/coronavirus-cuba-cruis-ship/
- https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/bwc
A message from Jeff:
Tom Powell and I are good friends and comrades. He is a founding member of the Bioweapon Truth Commission (BWTC – www.bioweapontruth.com) and continues to be an outstanding researcher and writer on the subject of biowarfare. He is also an accomplished professional artist and art teacher. He asked his colleague, Sam Kerson for permission to present four of his Cuba and Covid related prints, in honor of the proud and free Cuban people’s deeply rich cultural heritage, as well as their life saving medical missions fighting coronavirus around the world (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2020/04/17/good-news-from-cuba-dr-ariel-alonso-perez-sends-updates-from-the-islands-heartland-concerning-sars-cov-2-china-rising-radio-sinoland-200417/). Sam is director of the acclaimed Dragondance Theater. He can be contacted at samkerson6@gmail.com.
You can also read Tom’s other work published on China Rising Radio Sinoland,
One last thing, PLEASE sign the Bioweapon Truth Commission (BWTC) Coronavirus Truth Tribunal Statement and Petition. We all deserve to know what’s going on! Thank you!
