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As part of an ongoing effort to “exploit medical intelligence,” the National Security Agency teamed up with the military-focused Defense Intelligence Agency to extract “medical SIGINT” from the intercepted communications of nonprofit groups starting in the early 2000s, a top-secret document shows.
Medical intelligence can include information about disease outbreaks; the ability of a foreign regime to respond to chemical, biological, and nuclear attacks; the capabilities of overseas drugs companies; advances in medical technology; medical research, and the medical response capabilities of various governments, according to the document and others like it, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents show that such intelligence is used in efforts to protect U.S. forces, assess the readiness of foreign armies, create opportunities for U.S. diplomats to build goodwill, uncover chemical weapons programs, identify specific bio-weapons facilities, and study how diseases spread.
The existence and broad contours of U.S. medical intelligence collection have been previously disclosed (as has one of its more nefarious uses, in which the flow of medical supplies would be used to hunt down a targeted individual). But a top-secret, previously-unreleased article published in November 2003 in the NSA’s internal newsletter, SIDtoday, details the birth of a collaboration between the agency and the DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence, then known as the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center. (The article is being published along with 262 others by The Intercept today; here are some other highlights.)
A billboard shows medical workers wearing masks to prevent the spread of the SARS virus at a tram stop in Hong Kong in 2004.
Photo: Samantha Sin/AFP/Getty Images
Work began when the NSA brought in a DIA expert on infectious diseases to help its hamstrung International Organizations Branch — tasked with spying on non-governmental organizations, or NGOs — exploit medical intelligence it collected from the nonprofit groups’ reports on outbreaks. The DIA staffer became an NSA “integree” and was granted access to signals intelligence, or SIGINT, that was considered “raw,” meaning it had not been edited or stripped of personal information. Topics of interest included “SARS in China, cholera in Liberia, and dysentery, polio, and cholera in Iraq,” according the article, which was written by the NSA’s “account manager for DIA.”
“The timing of the integree’s arrival, as it coincided with a worldwide SARS epidemic, could not have been better,” the article stated. SARS, a respiratory virus, infected over 8,000 people worldwide, with an epicenter in China, before it was contained.
During that time, the NSA and its partners researched “the effect of the epidemic on the state security apparatus,” media coverage of the disease, the political and economic impacts of its spread, as well as the “impact” of SARS on China’s People’s Liberation Army “readiness” — according to NSA documents about a SARS conference published by The Intercept in May.
But SARS wasn’t the only purpose of the coupling, according to the SIDtoday article.
“In addition, the partnership has generated unique SIGINT [signals intelligence] reporting that supports the larger DoD and Intelligence Communities,” it stated.
“Efforts to develop related topics will inform and facilitate future endeavors to exploit medical intelligence in the International Organizations Branch,” they continued — though it’s not clear how else the information might be exploited.
The collaboration joined NSA communication intercepts with NCMI’s longstanding expertise on medical issues. Within NCMI, military and civilian experts, mostly medical doctors and researchers working at a facility now based in Fort Detrick in Maryland, study information on diseases and other topics clustering around health, medicine, pharmaceuticals, and biological weapons, with one of the goals being to protect U.S. forces widely deployed abroad.
Photo: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
The joint effort to mine “medical SIGINT” is particularly noteworthy 13 years later, as medical devices and body monitors are increasingly connected to the internet, opening up new possibilities to expand intelligence gathering beyond epidemics and bioweapons and into more focused forms of surveillance. The NSA’s deputy director, Richard Ledgett, said in June that the spy agency was “looking … theoretically” at exploiting biomedical devices like pacemakers in order to surveil targets, even as he admitted that there are often easier ways to spy.
The NSA did not comment on the collaboration. Speaking on behalf of DIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not answer specific questions about the partnership, instead writing, via a spokesperson, that “from forecasting and tracking infectious disease outbreaks to assessing foreign health threats, medical intelligence is key to protecting our deployed forces from a wide range of threats across the globe.”
The Evolution of Medical Intelligence Gathering
One of the more prominent examples of focused medical spying came in 2010, when the agency crafted a plan to stow tracking devices with medical supplies bound for an ill Osama bin Laden in order to locate the terrorist leader, as detailed in Snowden documents published by The Intercept last year. It’s unclear if the plan was ever carried out.
But the military has been gathering intelligence on medicine, health, and scientific developments in biology since early World War II, according to Dr. Jonathan D. Clemente, a North Carolina physician and researcher who wrote a 2013 report on medical intelligence for The Intelligencer, a journal published by the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. During the war, the Army surgeon general began disseminating public health information about various countries to field commanders and military surgeons prior to combat.
By the later stages of the war, the Allies began seizing foreign medical technology and drugs to improve its own stock — and spying on Germany for any plans it had to unleash a biological weapon.
Medical intelligence programs dissipated and were reborn under the CIA around 1947 — playing an important role in intelligence on the Communist Bloc, and during the Korean War.
After several leadership and name changes, the medical intelligence unit was permanently transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1992, tasked with “prepar[ing] intelligence assessments and forecasts on foreign military and civilian medical systems, infectious disease and environmental health risks, and biomedical research,” according to Clemente.
Concerns about drug-resistant infectious diseases were only heightened after the September 11 attacks, strengthening the need for medical intelligence analysts to monitor aggressors’ attempts to weaponize biological tools like anthrax.
Other known partners of agency, now called the National Center for Medical Intelligence, include the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the Department of Agriculture.
A former director of the DIA’s medical intelligence unit, now a biology professor, Anthony Rizzo, described his mission as “protecting this country from threats that people will never even know we faced.”
John Schindler, a writer, former NSA intelligence analyst, and former professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College described the medical intelligence capabilities in the U.S. government in a blog post as “decidedly unique,” claiming the NCMI is “the only full-fledged medical intelligence outfit on earth.”
Bio-Warfare and Nuclear Weapons
Additional SIDtoday articles further elucidate the NSA’s focus on medical intelligence in 2003 — including its strategies to combat possible weapons of mass destruction and coordinate with the new Department of Homeland Security.
One article from August 2003 identifies an NSA project to keep an eye on the evolution of biotechnology in various countries. “Can we … determine the specific features that would distinguish a Bio Warfare Program from a benign civilian pharmaceutical production effort?” the author wrote, identifying a “suspect Iranian [biological warfare] facility” as a target for inspection.
A separate slideshow from April 2013, called “Special Source Operations Weekly” briefs analysts on an intelligence gathering mission into two Iranian universities that the NSA suspected might be involved in state chemical and biological warfare programs.
Their research, involving human trials on patients exposed to chemicals in pesticides, “could also be used in the event of … nerve agent exposure,” the slideshow reads. “This type of information enabled [intelligence community] customers, such as NCMI (National Center for Medical Intelligence) … to assess the types of medical countermeasures being developed by Iran, as well as Iran’s ability to respond to and protect against [chemical and biological warfare] threats,” reads a footnote at the bottom of the slide.
Medical intelligence gathering has continued since then, according to the so-called “black budget” proposed for the 2013 fiscal year, published in February 2012.
The document specifies a request for the NMCI to “expand its warning capability for health and biological events that have strategic implications by fielding more sophisticated analytic tools to forecast, detect, prepare, and respond to foreign health threats, emphasizing models for infectious disease spread and toxic and radiological contaminant dispersion.”
Further information from the 2013 budget request identifies other goals of the National Center for Medical Intelligence: tracking “foreign pharmaceutical industry capabilities,” “health-related opportunities for US diplomatic/goodwill efforts,” “foreign military and civilian health care and response capabilities and trends,” and “foreign medical advances for defense against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear warfare.”
And the budget request specifically targeted research in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to gather information about “military and civilian medical capabilities” as well as funds to allow analysts to “support joint targeting and no-strike list selection for medical facilities.”
Top photo: Medical personnel train for quarantine situations at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.
After MSF-Kunduz I have to suggest the phrasing, “support joint targeting and no-strike list selection for medical facilities,” sounds like a warning – that could go either way.
Weather-people frequently do the same in their forecasts though, to cover all bases. One of my favorites is, “Fair to partly cloudy with a chance of light showers to thunderstorms.
The farse is that nefarious or unnefarious blanket surveillance and building community is not the same thing hemingway.
The farse is that nefarious placing of RMFID devices without the peoples awarness and consent withing their bodies (cell-phones, cars) is worst than all the kosher tatalitarian regimes combined. – Alejandro Grace Ararat.
RMFID=radio-magnetic frequency identification device.
There is no one and no way to stop the NSA permanent electronic world war. Indeed US citizens are viewed as the enemy or adversary. The history books may note their self created world confalgration as the beginning of the end of civilized society. If everyone is the enemy, how can there be a community?
but this is the small minority that matters. You can’t quantify spying by the number of people who do “collaborate” with “intelligence” agencies vs. those who don’t.
One of the things I find suspect about theIntercept is that they never question or criticize U.S. Academia’s role in the degree and level of moral corruption that USG is undergoing.
I will talk to you about the kind of sh!t I know well:
Once, I met a U.S. Anthropologist who had been to Cuba and asked me to read her thesis, discus with her anything I found lacking. I was actually impressed. She was smart and sensitive, but I was amazed that she would write specific addresses of places and names of people in charge … I asked her why she was including that kind of personally identifiable information in her Anthropology, if she knew that that information could be used for nefarious purposes and her answer was: “they would not accept my thesis if I don’t write it like that”, “anyone could use any kind of information to do harm”, “it is not my intention at all” …
I visited Nicaragua and when people heard me speak, they all invariably asked me: “Are you a Cuban from Miami or from Cuba?” In order to test their reactions I told them I was from Miami, and they would disfigure their smile and treat me in an insipid, business matter (the natural, happy friendliness washed out of their faces) I tried to figure out why and the closest I got to an explanation was that the bombs falling on them said: “Made in U.S.A.” and they love their Cuban doctors and teachers.
Cuba a small and poor island nation under a dictatorship has kept more doctors in poor countries than the World Health Organization. In Cuba they train doctors in weird, non monetizable ways about their business such as actually caring about their patients (past the customary smile + “how are you?” within the 10 min visit) and actually teach their patients about not getting sick …
https://www.ted.com/talks/gail_reed_where_to_train_the_world_s_doctors_cuba
Cuba also has a way greater than self pesky enemy messing with them in anyway they can (USG), but they don’t use their doctors as spies, in fact, what they do is train locals, who then go back to their countries to help their communities instead of using NGOs and “US Aid” orgs to “goodwillingly” mess with and spy on people.
RCL
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/microsoft-accidentally-leaks-golden-keys-that-unlock-every-windows-device-1575542?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=rss&utm_content=/rss/yahoous/news&yptr=yahoo
@Jenna,
Thought you might find this article interesting
“Microsoft accidentally leaks golden keys that unlock every Windows device”
Here’s the first paragraph.
“Microsoft accidentally leaked the golden keys to the Windows kingdom. The keys allow hackers to unlock every Windows device, including tablets, phones and other devices that are protected by Secure Boot. The most alarming part about the leak is that it is believed that it may likely be impossible for Microsoft to fully recover from the leak.”
Here is the source of the persons who revealed it on their website.
https://rol.im/securegoldenkeyboot/
The article linked off of that one about that protocol flaw was also worrying.
When I clicked on that web site, this is what I got
Ricardo Camilo López
TI: Please, don’t hold you breath waiting for any kinds of explanings from us, satisfactory or not. You should first understand “ethical journalism” …
TI: As the “ethical journalists” we are we must protect the privacy of individuals’ illusions about their privacy. No, this is not a line straight from Orwell’s 1984. We are doing you a favor of “responsibly” standing in the way of truth, so you don’t get hurt by it. You should at least be a little thankful for that.
By the way, many of us have been raising those issues for a long time one way or the other, but the mere “irresponsible” mortals we all are, we have no way of influencing our “Gods” in their noble efforts to brainwash us and fence our minds.
This is a possible (and certainly lousy (I would say)) way to rationalize it. Some other ways would be that theIntercept journos are just into some kind of rhetorical “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” thing.
TheIntercept started its “talking dog” phase (we were all thrilled to see anyone questioning flagrant excesses and abuses by NSA/US, GCHQ/UK in anyway), after Glenn announced on the guardian he would start some firstlook.org’s media thing sponsored by some business tycoon. Faster, than we started wondering about “what the dog was actually talking about” and at times right after publishing articles about “canary in a coal mine” aspects of user agreements, they let us know that our comments were being “shared” with 3rd parties (“to augment readershipv), that they were hiring “web design experts” to transmit “the ‘visual essence’ of the articles” (I am not being sarcastic, they actually said and “worked” on that), then they started to block our comments … and lately, ready?: criticize Assange …
Why is the Intercept working so hard at becoming part of the Western media b#llsh!t cluster?
Now going back to your possible hypothesis, way more than rating and timing news release for maximal impact, it would be speaking in direct ways to “we the people” out there. As the yes men (who exposed and put Ray Nagin behind bars) and John Oliver do:
// __ Former New Orleans major Ray Nagin convicted on 20 counts
youtube.com/watch?v=-dgJgXbFg44
~
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2748233/Ex-New-Orleans-mayor-reports-federal-prison.html
~
// __ Posing as U.S. Officials, Yes Men Announce Renewable Energy Revolution at Homeland Security Congress
youtube.com/watch?v=EyaZlt-Xr_A
~
RCL
I get the idea that those of us who hold these views represent some fraction of Intercept readers, a large enough fraction to deserve attention to legitimate concerns.
Over the years I have learned the lessen over and over, journalists and especially “public editors” or “ombudsmen” are among the most arrogant and insular people on earth. They admit to mistakes about as often as Obama does and are insulted when you call them out for their sycophantism toward established Neoliberal power. Really, as you say, hoi polloi have no understanding of journalism and should just shut up and read what’s on offer as if it is all the gospel truth.
I am no fan of Government overreach but this is from the epidemiological stand point is a good idea for manmade of natural infectious diseases. Even a relatively lower infectious but lethal virus Ebola almost caused a World pandemic. If not for the international community final waking up to the danger and a first rate monitoring contacts and isolation of illness response by Nigeria we could have been off to the races.
Our over populated world is ripe for a pandemic. Even with the best intelligence and intelligent measure and dealing with a know pathogen it can be a close run thing. A few billion can go bye-bye real quick. Our own actions and lack of planning have placed mankind on a precipice, nature my one day give us a little push.
Ms. McLaughlin does a pretty good job reporting, however, the larger context is missing, probably necessary otherwise it would be a book instead of an article.
From the Conspiracy Analyst’s point of view this fits into a larger puzzle. Mention is made of Germany, however it was Japan Imperial forces who brought bio weapons to the forefront is WWII. Japanese Unit 731 was infamous in this regard. Most people know about Operation Paperclip, but fewer people realize that Japanese scientists were also brought to America and their bio weapon research incorporated into the newly forming MIC.
Which leads to their use in by the US against North Korea in the 1950s and subsequent denial and coverup ever since. Which explains why the North Koreans hate and distrust the U.S. and most other people.
There are various subtexts here. The Japanese used bio weapons against the Chinese with an estimated 2 to 3 million people killed. Unit 731 did some of their dirty work under the guise of public health organizations such as water purification projects and the like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
it actually started happening way before
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States
There are a number of documented cases where diseases were deliberately spread among Native Americans as a form of biological warfare. The most well known example occurred in 1763, when Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Commander-in-Chief of the Forces of the British Army, wrote praising the use of smallpox infected blankets to “extirpate” the Indian race. Blankets infected with smallpox were given to Native Americans besieging Fort Pitt. The effectiveness of the attempt is unclear.[56][57][58]
~
https://wwionline.org/articles/chemists-war
~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_weapons_in_World_War_I
~
RCL
IMO, important aspects of that “new” “medical SIGINT” is that:
* nowadays all our medical records are part of NSA’s purview
* USG has never really stopped such horrendous “medical ‘research'” projects as MK-Ultra
* all NGOs, “humanitarian” US agencies are used one way or the other as spies by USG
“goodwill”? The NSA creating opportunities to build goodwill? … How exactly? by spreading diseases? Instead of reading this brief account in English:
afrocubaweb.com/biowar.htm
I would suggest to use google translate to read:
http://www.afrocubaweb.com/guerrabio.htm
They were even using genetic knock offs which samples the Cuban government sent to U.S. Universities and research centers. As usual all USG would have to say is that “they don’t discuss allegations”
Cuban police noticed something was bound to happen when USG started vaccinating all Cuban nationals used as workers at Gitmo against diseases which had never happened in Cuba …
No one has to tell me about Castro. Doctors and scientists who were friends of mine and didn’t like Castro a bit either, told me that “very weird things” were “happening” in “very weird ways”, that “if those were just prophylactic issues” diseases would have decimated many other countries. Cuba is a small and poor country, but their police and people are not stupid. Diseases were particularly fatal to small children and elderly people.
// __ INVESTIGATED: Elite Hacker Barnaby Jack Murdered by NSA?
youtube.com/watch?v=TjHbQJERoso
~
Arabs taught to us Westerners about prophylaxis, quite literally, that we should wipe our @ss after taking a sh!t.
I think a much easier way to deal with it would simply be by now keeping U.S. military bases across the globe and thinking that you have a God given right to own, “care” about the globe … (expect when it comes to China or Russia, of course, then you should be “responsible”)
USG (quite naively): What are you talking about?
Is it that theIntercept sounds more and more like the NSA, NCMI, … or that they sound more like the Intercept?
black budget …
One of the things they do is tracking when the Cuban gov has manage to get medical supplies from 3rd countries somehow affiliated with gringo companies
http://dunyanews.tv/en/World/305753-Cuban-cancer-kids-on-doordie-side-of-US-sancti
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/10/un-urges-end-us-embargo-cuba-20131029181034233544.html
and no, this is not a form of state terrorism for more than half a century, USG terrorism is called “freedom loving”, “spreading democracy”
RCL
It’s a damn good thing the U.S. has *somebody* doing some medical intelligence. I mean, I always kind of assumed that if you order up some PCR primers for smallpox you might get invited to some kind of conversation. But the “intelligence” part of it is only a temporary stopgap against the more pressing and universal solution of disease surveillance – surveillance in the public health sense. It’s no good to stop every terrorist in the world from making up a hybrid avian flu that kills 50% of the population if it comes out naturally anyway and you’re caught unprotected.
We actually have to have a much stronger commitment in this area, a defense on the same level as conventional defense where if a strain of flu enters the country and kills four people there are congressional hearings about it. Every time people catch “just a cold” (which can and sometimes does have polio-like effects) or the “yearly flu” gets underway, we are showing the world we are defenseless. We need to be putting Iraq-scale funding into the business of stopping disease. We should have people all over the world wiping out diseases (like terrorists…) proactively instead of waiting for them to come here.
Still, if we don’t press for a better society or at least not a worse one we may yet come to the point where we welcome the plague as God’s will, so this inactivity may not be altogether malign.
I should add though that tracking pacemakers is NOT medical intelligence, but just more creepy invasive technology. If they put smart dust in your breakfast cereal or track you via terahertz signatures of your DNA, that isn’t medical intelligence either, but something altogether worse than useless.
I think your disease surveillance is the ruse and entry point to any level of social control we can imagine. They don’t plan to stop disease any more than they plan to address climate disaster and the coming immigration waves. A few elites in gated sections will have medicine, food, and clean water, while most will be exploited bodies and beings on the outside.
Well, you can say the same thing (accurately!) about defense. And yet, it’s a good thing somebody stood up to the Nazis. When the next great plague comes, it’s probably best if there’s someone ready to stand up to that also.
Probably with a cover charge! Good grief.
“Laws” had been enacted by British politicians forbidding the publication of accounts of parliamentary debates when Jonathan Swift wrote his widely popular political satire “Gulliver’s Travels”.
Everybody in those times understood his writings to be a scathing satire hoping to make people reflect on their social reality. Even though all names were made up and the narratives were based on highly hyperbolic allegories, people could clearly read his satire for what it meant. No one took it for journalism.
Lilliputians were divided in two religious sects: those who crack open their soft-boiled eggs from the little end and those who use the big end. That description of British society at that time was not only very exact, but the terms big-, little endian were even recycled in computer engineering.
Dostoevsky references Gulliver’s Travels in his novel Demons (1872): “… Gulliver, returning from the land of the Lilliputians … had grown so accustomed to consider himself a giant among them, that as he walked along the Streets of London he could not help crying out to carriages and passers-by to be careful and get out of his way for fear he should crush them, imagining that they were little and he was still a giant” …
RCL
God damn it this just pisses me off! The Intercept has sat on these documents FOR YEARS!!! What legitimate reason is there for holding these vital documents and keeping them secret? What is the difference when NSA keeps stuff secret and the Intercept does the same? What is the justification for this aside from profit for the oligarch owner? What is the motivation behind this censorship or whatever you want to call it?
I’m not holding my breath for satisfactory explanations – not now after 3-4 years of sitting on important documents for no reason which is evident. The crap about needing to read and worry over every document disclosed just does not wash any more – how much time is really necessary? Years? I don’t believe it any more.
Obviously I am frustrated I don’t want to get personal about this but this story, as good as it is, coming after so much time has passed sense they were delivered by the brave acts of Snowden only serves to cast suspicion on just what the agenda at the Intercept is.
And please don’t trot out Snowden again to tell us about the perfection of Intercept reporting.
On what “authority” by what power does the Intercept hold back and keep secret this kind of information which has been available for years now (other that treating it like the private property of an oligarch)? Is it that spying on medical NGOs was not vital information a year ago or two years ago?
You know, I really don’t want to hear any more bull shit – I want to see the documents!!!
If the released everything at once, there would be a press feeding frenzy for about one week, maximum. During that time the top one or two stories would receive attention, and everything else would be ignored. The way it is being done maximizes the impact of the entire body of information, and keeps it in the public light for years. You obviously don’t like it, but it is very smart.
You know what, there is a middle ground between sitting on important documents for years and “releasing them all at once” — there is absolutely no excuse for holding these documents as long as the Intercept has.
The Intercept is behaving the same way the Guardian or NYT do, it supports and protects above all the interests of its oligarch owner and the established Neoliberal order he represents.
I think more than rating and timing it is more of an issue of actually reaching out to the people out there and talking to them in a language they can’t understand. John Oliver couldn’t put it more clearly when he showed a picture of his thing to Snowden …
// __ Government Surveillance: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M
~
Imaging if the Intercept shows to politicians pictures of the dig pic databases the NSA keeps about them and the recorded phone calls they have been making a la wikileaks in order to show to them the scale of their practices, showing to them once and for all that it is not just about ”metadata”!
That would squarely put the ball on their court and would generate all kinds of discussions by “we the people” that would actually make you pace yourself.
When Martin Luther penned his 95 theses vertically criticizing the Catholic Church, his intention was not starting a back and forth with them or tease the populace with brief “articles” in order to “maximizes the impact of the entire body of information“ …
RCL
One has to look no further than the criminal enterprise and anti-science DEA – to understand how corrupt politicians “feel” they can also deny climate change (in exchange for campaign contributions from big oil).
The DEA’s decision to NOT reschedule cannabis means the establishment means to continue its insane war on people (drugs), and their eradication wherever possible of what’s now proven to be one of Earth’s most valuable plants.
The empire of predation denies its own mind – for its greed.
Is it any wonder that foreign NGO’s have been ousted from China on accusations of spying? They were right, after all.
China bans Microsoft Windows 8 on government computers.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27494650
China building own OS, take that Microsoft, Google and Apple …
techtimes*dot*com/articles/13991/20140825/china-building-os-take-microsoft-google-apple.htm
The thing that gets to me the most, and that also illustrates the stovepipe mentality of the IC as a whole, is how they find it necessary to spy on NGOs in the health field. It has been my experience that NGOs are quite open and transparent about what they are doing, both because the handling of health threats is an international issue that requires international cooperation, and since the publicity about what they are doing and the severity of the situation enables them to appeal to donors like myself for contributions. But the IC cannot simply ask for the information, or rely on cognizant organizations like the NIH and CDC to obtain and disseminate the information (which they do anyway), they need to collect it themselves, then classify (or in most cases overclassify) it.
This attitude is pervasive and goes across into other areas of intelligence gathering. Navy submarines sneak into territorial waters and poke ELINT masts up to collect data on systems that are sold in the commercial marketplace, for which detailed specifications can be obtained on the internet (or by writing a letter to the manufacturer). Overhead assets are tasked to photograph new aircraft when the aircraft themselves could be inspected by simply going to an international air show. And so on.
There are of course areas (such as chemical/biological weapons research, development and production) that are legitimate targets for spying. But by deciding to collect everything, the IC dilutes its efforts and as a result is frequently surprised by events.
The USG, owned and operated by money-changing wallstreet profiteers who rob America at every opportunity, is busy building a power hierarchal framework from which to operate – as opposed to open, transparent, equal.
As long as Hellery Clinton supports the genocide of Palestine by her allegiance to the genocidal maniacs, the direction of policy in the US is set.
Preventing biological warfare is about as legitimate as foreign intelligence gets. The potential damage is on par with nuclear war. No, really.
Except that while this may have ostensibly offered some benefits (often dubious) in areas like vaccine research (which have largely stalled and often have bad side effects and usually have limited effect due to these weapons’ very natures (change a few sequences, suddenly no more use), they are actually creating weapons to see what weapons are possible. That is no more sane than dropping nukes on Japan just to show the world that nukes are bad and study the results. Most (sane) people wouldnt release most of the more virulent weapons, and most of the more insidious ones tend to be simpler and require no such craziness (and even then, it is not being done) — especially ones that might lay waste to crops or wildstock.
The corrupt American establishment considers it essential to be at the forefront of all technology and all applications and responses to technical advances. This makes for strange bedfellows and extremely dubious behavior in many areas. But until information is released that breaks the back of the corruption, this status-quo-preserving underworld of intrigue will continue unabated.
If the Intercept has information that is actually consequential anymore, it is doing a good job of pretending not to have any.
It is wretched and deeply ominous to see this kind of close collaboration between the medical and military communities. Just like the program dev eloped in the 1950s, whereby members of the US military were inured on how both to endure and to outwit torture if captured, was after 2001 meticulously retro-engineered by CIA operational psychologists in such a way as to existentially break & destroy captured individuals through torture, sure as hell will the specialist knowledge of epidemics and poisons and the like one day get aggressively used & abused by the military against its enemy du jour — and this regardless of what the quisling scientists and physicians might then have to say. Nota bene, once Oppenheimer & Co. built the big bomb, not even Einstein would have been able to dissuade the generals from using it, had they even bothered to politely forewarn him. — P.S., No doubt agent orange was once upon a time no more than a gentle garden weedkiller, until one day there came a day when … … … well, to cut right to the chase, fuck the Vietcong and fuck the jungle and fuck the environment when American lives, of course all of them so exceptional, are what’s at stake. And if some US soldiers are to get poisoned as collateral damage, this on the model of friendly fire, then so what? — there’s always the VA that’ll look after them and provide them all a good life.
Nope. The Vietnam War resulted in thousands of American lives lost. So it was “fuck American lives” too. It was about containment, the existential threat of the Cold War, and a disregard for the atrocities that actually did happen.
Also, it wasn’t just the Viet Cong who American soldiers attacked. They couldn’t tell friend from foe, so they often simply slaughtered anyone who looked Vietnamese. Grandparents. Children. Babies.
yer both right but Useless is saying that this “chem+ warfare” pervention is a crock of bull because it probably is. US has engaged in it and imo, no amount of medical spyguy is going to change anything. The USG is the duplicitous master of hypocrisy- Mr. Hyde does the murdering and Dr Jeckyl denies it.
It is telling that we (the US) were the ones who pushed for an antiproliferation treaty but then didnt want to sign it. This tends to be what we do once we master a field of weaponry, to centralise the power, while being horrified of other people using it (because we know how bad it is and so nobody else can have it — not that it isnt a particularly awful thing; it is; but rather that the US doesnt destroy its own weapons or at least cease development afterward; it hoards and surreptitiously grows, in secret, thus becoming all the more dangerous). It happens with every major nonsymmetrical type of weaponry. Why should we expect them to be any less ruthless than they have exposed themselves as being?
US politicians and power fiends were either born paranoid or attended and graduated from the School for Scoundrels and have a degree in One Upmanship.
Agent Orange (a mixture of 2,4,5 T and 2,4 d) never was a gentle garden weed killer; it was developed for military use as a defoliant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange), and was planned for use against Japan in the event of an invasion. Our pals the Brits used it later in defense of their empire. Scientists started warning of ill effects as early as 1957, but nothing was going to stop Dow and Monsanto from profiting from its production, or the US military from using it. Many US service personnel, along with three million Vietnamese have suffered the effects of this terrible stuff.
Good post. I flew all over Vietnam, as well as having driven over much of II Corps. To see the effects of that stuff is sobering, indeed. I recently initiated a claim for exposure to it, but said fuck it, seeing all the red tape involved. Nasty, nasty shit.
Aside from the Vietnamese and Vets, the children and grandchildren of exposed vets are also effected. The US government is currently tracking effects of female offspring, but as the son of a Vietnam Vet who has strange health issues that I have only heard of in other sons of vietnam vets who were also heavily exposed, I can state that the current tracking is insufficient.
@John & subbob: Indeed I should have also taken a shot at the statement about the VA, which has been letting our veterans down for as long as I can remember. Every year someone like Bernie Sanders calls them to task for their malfeasance and every year they promise to fix things if only given more money. They usually get the money, which then disappears into a constellation of black holes, and nothing gets better. The VA wants the sick vets and their families to just go away, and both Congress and the Administration love to get on their high horses once or twice a year, but do nothing to fix the situation.
If it were me, I’d do away with the VA and force the services to deal with the vets. Put some active duty guys and gals in charge of holding the bureaucrats’ to the fire, and maybe something would improve. But to their eternal discredit, the services don’t want the job. They will use you up then throw you away; that is apparently their attitude.
DT has stated that war is a loser, and an expensive one. I believe he will hand the elitist establishment for the whole bill. I know Hellery wont, she is all in favor of people being expendable so her thieving billionaire backers can get a return on their investment.
I don’t see any factual basis for what you say. He has promised to massively increase war (excuse me, defense) spending while cutting both the corporate tax rates (to 15%) and the taxes on the highest income bracket. So if he is indeed a man of his word, the 99% will be footing the bill.
Before you respond with this bullshit of his about making other countries pay more, kindly consider for instance the situation of the three small Baltics. Where are they supposed to get the money from? Moreover, the entire thesis of his is inverted. It is not that others should be paying more, it’s that we should be paying a hell of a lot less. On one hand we have all this chest thumping about how great and smart and technically advanced we are, and on the other we find it necessary to spend more on the military every year than all our adversaries and principal allies combined. And we have been doing that for forty years (at least). It is a sign of abject ignorance that Trump should be demanding that other countries pay more, instead of asking the question as to how we can do what is necessary for much, much less.
Release some Snowden stuff with teeth, for God’s sake!
Evoking a ‘tut-tut’ every now and then is not going to stop surveillance, corporatism, militarism and imperialism from expanding. Illegality and corruption and destroying democracy and the planet, and we’re focused on ambiguities that produce no grounds for prosecution or mass protest.
I don’t understand why people aren’t upset. If the NSA stopped people from watching a Superbowl on TV once, everyone would be rioting, but violating the human rights of everyone on earth and the constitutional rights of every American doesn’t seem to cut it.
No shit.
Thanks again for the excellent and absolutely relevant work.
Ralph Nader joked about this when he made an appearance in Santa Cruz, CA in 2005. It’s certain he was an intelligence target, and he was smart enough to have some savvy people on his staff.
At about the same time, it was clear DoD was working on medical exploits, if you looked at the DARPA contracts that were put up for bidding. Good luck finding them now, they’re probably TS or higher.
Intelligence always has a lethal aspect, even in the abstract, as John C. Lilly noted many decades ago in “Programming and MetaProgramming the Human BioComputer”.
Ralph had quite a wry sense of humor, I’m certain he still does.
Medical facilities sit at the forefront of how civilian populations cope with emergencies. Though they are designated off-limits as military targets, they are strategically crucial in coping with casualties and countering certain types of weaponry, such as Nuclear, Biological & Chemical weapons and now more pertinently Technological weapons. For example how would countries respond to nano-bots? The technology is supposedly imminent and whoever can disperse and control such a technology could theoretically enslave whole populations if the nano-bots cannot be easily countered.
Biological warfare is not a reliable strategy; their dispersal cannot be controlled or targeted only towards an “enemy”, they are countered by immune systems and disrupted by the environment. They also only kill and weaken, they do not enable subjugation. They can also flare up at unwated times in the future.
The effects of nuclear weapons are known, but the possibility of catastrophic escalation even from their tactical use plus the the long-term pollution from radiation, pulverisation, vaporisation and mass death of all life makes them again unreliable. They also again only kill and weaken, they do not subjugate a population but leave otherwise leave it healthy to work.
Nano-bots are almost perfect, especially if they can indefinitely draw energy from and remain in their host, and if they are sophisticated enough to enable individual indentification from batches of bots of the host they occupy. Dispersal in a military situtation could be done probably aerially like crop-spraying. Otherwise healthy and normal hosts may be coerced and controlled through fear, and terminated if they leave designated areas or engage in undesirable “terrorist” activities.
Terrifying.
People like charliethreeee who are not outraged obviously have their heads shoved up their arses in denial of what is unfolding around them. It takes a grand effort of apologetics to explain away all the nefarious and strange activities of governments and corporations to avoid the simple conclusion that whatever it is they are doing is not Right or Warranted or Democratic or Demanded by the Public or Transparent or Being Conducted by Agents in whom we Trust. The benefits we are being sold are far outweighed by the opportunities for abuse they present and it is high time that they are stopped.
I share your concerns about nanotech but not only because of a possibility of a Crichton-like, minus the overdone weird crap, scenario, but because nanoparticles themselves can be carcinogenic, affect breathing, increase asthma rates, depress the immune system, and so forth, at times. We dont need weapons to see a danger, but I think any danger can be weaponised. Not a world I want to live in.
Did you read the article? She said that part of the intelligence gathering was “to allow analysts to ‘support joint targeting and no-strike list selection for medical facilities.’” In other words, to avoid the very thing you accuse it of seeking.
sure. that “no strike list” works every time – every time you want to make a mistake, that is.
At the very least they should be strike lists not no-strike lists! Horrible, horrific, grotesque, still, but at least they wouldnt require you to be an exception to not be considered a target (Male? Check. Over 16? Check)
USG: Sir, “we” should not worry about such issues, since we have always known about the “American” race being the bestest of them all. Lately we have started to work with Monsanto at genetically consolidating ourselves immune to nature. Isn’t it great that we conquered Nature! We are past playing “God”! You know that playing God thing gets boring after a while …
RCL
USG: Says who? Those are issues “we” should not be worrying about. After conquering nature and knowing for a long time we are the bestest race who has ever walked the earth, we are ready to get to the next stage: “genetically enhance” our genes so that our next generations of X humaricanoids will be genetically resistant to all those lesser human, so-called “enemies”. Isn’t that great!?!
Our cyborg nature will be immune to silly un-American virii and bacteria.
For now we can advance to you that humaricanoids will progressively lack ears and their field of vision will be way more restricted since it won’t be necessary for looking at their cellphone’s screens or watch their indoctrination. The non-invasive proof of concept Monsanto ran on people’s minds/brains were very successful.
After first hearing and accepting God’s commands for a while and then playing God ourselves, it got really boring, so, we have started to determine our own future by genetically modifying our race.
What do you mean: “you are not part of this”?
RCL
I don’t get the outrage. This is what intelligence folk are tasked to do: gather intelligence.
If your outrage is founded on the principle that we ought not have intelligence agencies, well, I get that, I wish we could all just get along also, but I don’t think that is realistic at the moment.
Further, we didn’t really need this newsletter to know about this… we all knew the OBL medical tie in bit.
Well, obviously this kind of “intelligence gathering” would be greatly aided by access to people’s private medical records. This could be of great blackmail value in efforts to manipulate politics – and not just in foreign countries, but also within the United States.
You say that this is to be expected; the NSA, FBI, CIA and other government agencies should be allowed unrestricted access to medical files of American citizens and all foreigners because this would somehow aid national security and protect us from the terrorist threat. . . and that, as Snowden said, is the argument used “to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don’t need to give up and our Constitution says we shouldn’t give up.”
The real question is, why would any American trust the CIA or FBI in the current era, given their record of dishonesty on serious issues like Iraqi WMDs and domestic anthrax terrorism? Should Soviet citizens have trusted the good intentions of the KGB in the 1970s? Should Egyptian citizens trust the good intentions of the Egyptian secret police today?
Face reality: these institutions represent a real threat to democracy if not kept tightly in check.
:). weren’t looking to spell it out knowing photo does the best at this, but THERE ‘TIS.
“government agencies should be allowed unrestricted access to medical files of American citizens and all foreigners because this would somehow aid national security and protect us from the terrorist threat”
I never said that. You are assuming I am some sort of neo con. I don’t think the American voters have much control over the intelligence apparatus. In other words, I have no idea why your comment was directed at me.
Face reality: these institutions are out of our control as there is no means to keep them in check. Maybe The Intercept ought to focus on that instead of the newsletters.
Too bad all that expensive intelligence gathering gadgetry still doesn’t improve US goons’ cerebral intelligence.
If only we had wisdom agencies that had the power we give intelligence agencies.
cringeworthy
How about saving a bunch on high end refrigerators with subsidised prices from the NSA? Bet they didnt think of that one. Save a bunch on a new car purchase with the a 10% rebate from the NSA. Bet they didnt think of that one. Let’s keep it simple and cheap, FREE WIFI ROUTERS.
wonderful planet. if i see an alien ship i’m flaggin it down. or maybe i’ll put an ad in craigslist “volunteer abductee. any planet”.
So if US intelligence tracks the capabilities of foreign pharma, what happens when some of intelligence staff leaves for better pay to the private pharma sector? I’m curious how many drug secrets have been stolen by Big Pharma?
a slightly different method, Sanofi-Aventis vs Introgen.
Can you please expand on that response with more detail?
Didn’t you read the official NSA release?
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use-economic-espionage-benefit-american-corporations/
Quite a few documents indicate that this is exactly what the U.S. government does, and given the number of private contractors involved in the NSA with ties to other corporations, the route such information would take from the NSA to the private sector is pretty obvious. The rationale for this effort is that “the United States’ technological and innovative edge” is collapsing.
This is just standard imperial malaise; manufacturing is outsourced to China to raise corporate profits, so the Chinese become world leaders in manufacturing technology and the U.S. falls behind; this is accelerated as R&D budgets are slashed by corporations to provide larger dividends to Wall Street; and so the NSA tries to make up the difference by stealing innovations invented in more advanced countries.
Greedy and stupid and sleazy: that’s what neoliberal elitism is really all about, just look at Hillary and Donald if you doubt this. Not much different from fat cat aristocrats at the end of the British Empire, or Soviet commissars at the end stage of the Soviet Union.
Thank you for the response. I did remember this article, but I’m glad you refreshed my memory. I agree with your analysis. I’m the son of an Engineering Professor and grew up with Chinese, Indian & Russian students all collaborating together. I just never developed the mistrust of the east. It’s sad to read this again. When this world works together, we do a great job. Einstein was a socialist, and so am I!
Universities need to lead a new era of R&D regulations towards a Patent-free Planet….When will Wall Street admit it’s run on stolen info?
Cooperation and socialism certainly are not the same thing. Cooperation for mutual benefit is a voluntary human action. Socialism is a political system that attempts to control human action without choice to do otherwise, aka force.
Dear Reader
There are surely many shades of socialism with no set definition, but I’d sip a libertarian socialism that’s highly organic with a low fossil blend of non-monetary basic needs for all (food, housing, health) plus monetary income.
2088 Millennial Model grounded in a University Socialist Model built on top of global cooperation with Noam Chomsky & Dilma Rousseff hosting a Carta Conference @ Bologna University
Sincerely
Socialism
they wont, but you know that. I suspect that 99% of the posters on the intercept are sociable and quite “something” about the world the criminal wallstreet enterprise and their pimped outs are doing to OUR PLANET.
Until wallstreet is named as running a criminal enterprise and taken to task for it, the planet will either die or wars and attrocities for the wannabe masters of the universe will prevail. I look at it this way, about wallstreet and wealth gathering and wealth hording… DO THEY NOT WANT TO BE WORSHIPPED?
@photosymbiosis
thank you for that intervention.
exactly my drift
I love this sentence:
“There is no certainty that the proposed rescue plan will proceed, but if it is carried out successfully, investment banks working with Monte dei Paschi will have generated a payday of close to €1bn over the past three years, even though the bank’s market value now stands at €747m.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/07/troubled-italian-lenders-offer-new-fees-bonanza-for-bankers
yikes. And all along i figured it was just the US run by organised criminals running the currency scheme….
gee, appears as if they couldnt find deep pockets to swindle. If they swindle Americans, is that an act of war?
This sort of nonsense is part of the reason polio has made a comeback in Pakistan. People in rural areas no longer trust NGO workers. Only a small minority of NGO workers have any connection with “intelligence” agencies, but all it takes is one incident to destroy trust in well-meaning foreigners.
Well, when we use vaccination and public health programs to gather target data and DNA can we expect to be welcome? We have kill lists and we drone people, after all. Reminds me of the peace corps stories of being used by intelligence agencies. There is a reason that it is supposed to be offlimits for organisations like the Red Cross, etc. Our humanitarian efforts should never be used for war.
Indeed. I was vaccinated for polio in Pakistan when i was about four. Even back then there were some religous elements opposing polio vaccination as some foreign conspiracy. But they were largely ignored. All the effort to eradicate the disease in the north western parts and the tribal areas, of Pakistan, was undone by the osama raid. Almost a hundred polio workers have been killed since then and polio cases have increased. But since a more progressive party came into power in the province, things are looking a bit hopeful. Polio vaccination is now mandatory and not a choice, the police can arrest any parent refusing to get their kid vaccinated.
A couple of historical points:
1) The evidence is very strong that the U.S. deployed biological weapons in the Korean War. It wasn’t revealed until 1980 that the Fort Detrick biowarfare scientists had collected all of the data from Japan’s biowarfare program (or that the head of that program, Shiro Ishii, had been granted immunity by the U.S. government); but if this had been known in the 1950s, U.S. denials of bioweapons use in Korea would have been viewed with more skepticism. The U.S. was actively testing biological weapons in Dugway Utah in the early 1950s, the CIA and the U.S. Army had an active collaboration on biological and chemical agents involving Fort Detrick researchers and CIA spooks in the TSS (which resulted in the murder of biological weapons expert Frank Olson by the CIA in Nov 1953, after he requested to leave the program), and Fort Detrick had a large insect-borne disease program running at that time. CIA documents released in 2006 also indicate that the U.S. used such weapons in Korea:
2) The evidence is also very strong that the 9/18/2001 and 10/9/2001 anthrax mailings used high-tech physically weaponized anthrax spores produced in the United States in the 1990s. Such production programs were implemented after the defections of Abelikov and Pasechnik from the Soviet biowarfare program in the early 1990s. They likely used the Ames strain (which is the strain of anthrax used in “challenge tests” that measure the effectiveness of the anthrax vaccine in animal models, as well as the strain in the letters). These programs included “Project Clear Vision, Project Bacchus and Project Jefferson” and were managed by the CIA, the DIA, and a defense contractor, Battelle, which operates a microbiological testing facility in West Jefferson, Ohio. The justification for these programs was “Biological Threat Assessment”; i.e. creating the weapons in order to test their capabilities and design defenses, but this is very likely also the source of the material used in the anthrax attacks. It’s an open question as to whether the production of such weapons violated the Biological Warfare Convention, which Congress ratified in 1989. The FBI never investigated any links between these programs and the attacks, instead targeting innocent individuals like Hatfill and Ivins from 2002-2008 in a massive coverup operation.
A good article on these programs (Clear Vision, Jefferson, Bacchus) was written by Jonathan Tucker, a scientist working on chemical and biological arms control:
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_10/Tucker
Johnathan Tucker was found dead in his home in July 2011 at age 56; he was waiting for a security clearance for a job in the Department of Homeland Security. The cause of death apparently remains undetermined.
Since the anthrax attacks of 9/18 and 10/9, the U.S. federal government has allocated over $50 billion in federal defense spending for “biological terrorism defenses”, despite the fact that the attack that gave justification to those programs was itself sourced out of the biological warfare programs of the federal government.
It is generally unknown as to whether or not the U.S. government continues to produce biological weapons under the rubric of the “biological threat assessment” programs run by the CIA, the DIA, and various private contractors.
the U.S. federal government has allocated over $50 billion in federal defense spending for “biological terrorism defenses”, despite the fact that the attack that gave justification to those programs was itself sourced out of the biological warfare programs of the federal government.
yep. if the US is the greatest country on the planet, we’re at DEFCON 1.
Not a bad overview.
They do, in small quantities, where they dub it dual use…
One thing I think a lot of people do not realise (and this is not precisely a secret though the organisms kept probably are) is that the number of BSL3 labs has skyrocketed, especially as an adjunct to institutions of higher learning. This has occasionally led to protests in neighbourhoods that understandably dont want these labs (with abominable safety standards and often unfiled or fudged safety and incident reports and underskilled students leading to an increase in lab accidents)… But it has also led to other neighborhoods campaigning for one (jobs, etc). Dual use tech is tricky (see: nsa) and it is my belief is only really considered dual use to continue questionable programs with a patina of respectability. In the meanwhile these programs HAVE supplied CIA (and maybe others?) with poorly tracked samples of various things.
Incidentally I thought the typing showed it was definitely the Ames strain (and one which had been shared). What apparently made it so special was the way it was weaponised and statically charged — something which only a place like Dietrich or Biopreparat was probably capable of. If I recall from the books, apparently there werent even many people at Dietrich who could do it (iirc the books said a handful or two — although labs shared samples all the time and apparently it wasnt well-logged.
I cannot see how it is ever okay to violate medical privacy. Or use it against someone. Especially in the era of targeted medicine, genomics and such. What is farfetched to one generation is often the norm in the next. This is DEFINITELY not a status quo we want.
Four interesting books to read: “Factories of Death, Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, And The American Cover-up,” by Sheldon H. Harris, about the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the establishment of human experimentation factories all over Manchuria. Ishii Shiro makes Mengele look like a piker. Ishii Shiro and many others were given immunity by the US after the war in order to find out everything they could about the results of their human experiments (some of the most ghastly stuff I’ve ever read). The second book I read was “The United States and Biological Warfare, Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea,” by Endicott and Hagerman. Then there’s “Chemical and Biological Warfare, America’s Hidden Arsenal,” published by Seymour Hersh in 1969. And last but not least, “Lab 257, The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory,” by Michael Carroll, begun in the late ’40s, if I remember correctly, with the help of Erich Traub, top Nazi scientist whose area of expertise was biological warfare. Plum Island lies at the end of Long Island right across from Lyme, Connecticut, where the first outbreak of Lyme disease occurred in 1975. All of these books are incredibly well researched.
All these experiments involved, among many others, anthrax, bubonic plague, all kinds of tick-borne illnesses, Rift Valley fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Tularemia and West Nile Virus.
Two salient features that jump out: throughout the decades of these experiments in the US starting in the ’40s, when any of this work was questioned it was described as defensive. Of course, it was primarily offensive. It was used in Korea, dropping infected ticks and mosquitoes from the air on China and Korea. It was of course used in Vietnam, defoliating as much of Vietnam as they could, not only to prevent the Vietcong from hiding, but also to starve the population. That was also one angle of their plans to attack the Soviet Union: how to destroy crops and starve the population. Lovely!
The second interesting feature is by the early ’50s almost all major institutions in the US were captured: universities, medical schools, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, scientists, professors, many bought and paid for by the DOD (Department of Death), as they continue to be today.
You can get these books at Powells.com, abebooks, or some at the Strand in Manhattan. I highly recommend them. Guaranteed to give you nightmares.
wow. Americans are not only ruled by financial organised criminals, but mad scientists as well. It’s ironic, we spend so much time and effort figuring out how to destroy life, or doing that which destroys life as a consequence, only to be smacked by the likes of ZIKA, AIDS, and resistant bacterias – all which are possible consequences of some other life destroying project gotten loose or overused. And in less than 100 years.
Thanks, I’ve read them. In fact, I first stumbled on this history in the late 1990s, when I was a graduate student with an NSF fellowship in microbiology in the University of California – I worked on industrial and environmental microbes, but was pretty shocked at what the Soviet and American and British governments had got up to, but I assumed it was all old history; but then I recall reading about the anthrax attacks, the published characteristics of the material, and thinking, holy shit, that’s a U.S. biological weapons lab product. So I started looking into it in some detail. . . Life really hasn’t been the same since.
In May 2009 I was physically tortured during a routine medical examination by opportunitistc American Stasi thugs — the sort of violent criminal The Intercept protects as a matter of policy, cynically rationalised as responsible professionalism.
Corrupt media corporations such as the NYT, WaPo, CNN, and New Look Media are activly engaged in providing cover for state run domestic stalking, harassment, and torture programs.
New Look Media is by far the most cynical and hypocritical of these organizations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLKuPPe1IhY
Argh. This doesn’t help.
Whatever your motivations — benign or malicious — this helps those paid to discredit targets.
Got perp pics instead of unidentifiable flying objects and a dramatic sound-track? No? Why?