CIA Dispatch: Dengue's Friend in Florida

The Dengue virus in Florida: sweats, headache, body ache, vomiting, oral/nasal/rectal bleeding, feverish visions that the CIA is, somehow, behind it all.

It appears highly unlikely that any “detective work” performed by the CDC and Florida health officials will unearth any evidence of dengue fever being imported into Florida, but the evidence certainly exists. Prior to the recent Key West findings and still today, the CDC has consistently reported that there have been no outbreaks of dengue fever in Florida since 1934, and none in the continental U.S. since 1946. Remarkably, this report is incorrect.

Unknown to most Americans is that dengue fever has been the intense focus of U.S. army and CIA biological warfare researchers for over fifty years. As early as the 1950s, the army’s Fort Detrick in partnership with the CIA launched a multi-million dollar research program under which dengue fever and several addition exotic diseases were studied for use in offensive biological warfare attacks. Indeed, as several CIA documents, as well as the findings of a 1975 Congressional committee reveal that 3 sites in Florida, Key West, Panama City, and Avon Park, as well as 2 other locations in central Florida, were used for experiments with mosquito borne dengue fever and other biological substances.

The experiments in Avon Park, about 170 miles from Miami, were covertly conducted in a low-income African American neighborhood that contained several newly constructed public housing projects. CIA documents related to Project MK/NAOMI clearly indicate that the mosquitoes used in Avon Park were the Aedes aegypti type. Interestingly, at the same time experiments were conducted in Florida there were at least two cases of dengue fever reported among civilian researchers at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Avon Park residents still living in the area say that the experiments resulted in “at least 6 or 7 deaths". One elderly resident told this journalist, “Nobody knew about what had gone on here for years, maybe over 20 years, but in looking back it explained why a bunch of healthy people got sick quick and died at the time of those experiments.”

A 1978 Pentagon publication, entitled Biological Warfare: Secret Testing & Volunteers, reveals that the Army’s Chemical Corps and Special Operations and Projects Divisions at Fort Detrick conducted “tests” similar to the Avon Park experiments in Key West, but the bulk of the documentation concerning this highly classified and covert work is still held by the Pentagon as “secret.” One former Fort Detrick researcher says that the army “performed a number of experiments in the area of the Keys” but that “not all concerned dengue virus.”

In the spring and summer of 1981, Cuba experienced a severe hemorrhagic dengue fever epidemic. Between May and October 1981, the island nation had 158 dengue-related deaths with about 75,000 reported infection cases. Prior to this outbreak, Cuba had reported only a very small number of cases in 1944 and 1977. At the same time as the 1981 outbreak, covert biological warfare attacks on Cuba’s residents and crops were believed to have been conducted against the island by CIA contractors and military airplane flyovers. Particularly harmful to the nation was a severe outbreak of swine flu that Fidel Castro attributed to the CIA.

In 1985 and 1986, authorities in Nicaragua accused the CIA of creating a massive outbreak of dengue fever that infected thousands in that country. CIA officials denied any involvement, but army researchers admitted that intensive work with arthropod vectors for offensive biowarfare objectives had been conducted at Fort Detrick in the early 1980s, having first started in the early 1950s. Fort Detrick researchers reported that huge colonies of mosquitoes infected with not only dengue virus but also yellow fever were maintained at the Frederick, Maryland installation, as well as hordes of flies carrying cholera and anthrax, and thousands of ticks filled with Colorado fever and relapsing fever.

A review of declassified Army Chemical Corps documents reveal that the army may have also been engaged in dengue fever research as early as the late 1940s. Several redacted Camp Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal reports indicate that experiments were conducted on state and federal prisoners who were unwittingly exposed to dengue fever, as well as other viruses, some possibly lethal. Freedom of Information requests filed months ago for details on these early experiments remain unanswered.

More ...

CIA violated ...

There's a newish report out by PHR (Physicians for Human Rights), documenting the various roles played by medical personnel in the CIA torture programs during the Bush years. Many of these so-called medical professionals appear to have a rather unseemly hankering for understanding the effects of torture on the human subject. Fascinating, to be sure, but that "do no harm" thing also seems a quaint anachronism in our doped up and fiendish times.

Now, the CIA part:

said the report appears to demonstrate that the CIA violated "all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation."

Which, with the addition of the words 'has continually,' is pretty much a summary of the CIA, which has repeatedly demonstrated an insistent vector toward human experimentation with drugs and torture, all in violation of "accepted legal and ethical standards" since inception. In 1953, the CIA, in combine with the DoD, sprayed LSD on a small town in France. They or their proxies have jacked up unwitting subjects with all manner of dope and ghoulish enterprise, but especially, the CIA liked LSD. Still do. Today, in the 21st century, the CIA are still whacking up subjects, now "detainees," with who knows what cocktails of drugs and ghoulish enterprise. Well, we have some idea.

Of course, the CIA doesn't have dink-weed operations out there yowling about violations of accepted legal and ethical standards by the CIA. Oh, no. They have Congress for that. And congress do about as much as PHR will manage to do with this report.

CIA in the House! Abarelli talks

Ok, the CIA are not actually in the house. Just the letters, so far as we know, make it in, as Abarelli talks about, what else? The CIA.

CIA calls it way back

More missing the boat, smelling the coffee, hammering own thumb.

Declassified CIA documents on South Korea show that the spy agency was surprised by the 1979 assassination of its dictatorial president by his intelligence chief, did not anticipate the military coup d'etat that ensued, and dismissed the strength of growing unrest that eventually erupted in near-civil war.

Following the coup, in May 1980, protest and civil unrest in the southern city of Kwangju plunged the country into near anarchy. President Jimmy Carter, upon the advice of the U.S. State Department and the CIA, and fearing North Korea might take advantage of the instability, authorized U.S.-led South Korean troops to put down the Kwangju “uprising,” resulting in the deaths of hundreds of protesters.

The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Tim Shorrock, a Washington-based journalist and longtime human rights activist, who published them Tuesday on the Web site of Foreign Policy in Focus, a project of the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies.

Shorrock reports that “months before” the uprising, “in an analysis entitled ‘The Outlook for President Pak [Chung Hee] and South Korea's Dissidents,’ the CIA dismissed the worker and student resistance, as well as the political opposition, as unorganized and ineffectual and unable to muster public sympathy for its demands for greater democracy and worker rights.”

CIA Black Arts

The Black Art of "Master Illusions"

How do wars begin? With a "master illusion," according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA's pioneers in "black propaganda," known today as "news management." In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an "incident" that became the "conclusive proof of North Vietnam's aggression." This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.

The CIA," he said, "loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons - the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two Marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam." An invasion that took three million lives was under way.

More ... not necessarily CIA stuff. Or maybe it is. Ahh, who the fuck knows? For all I know, John freakin' Pilger could be a CIA asset, in some weird logistical experimental, Operation Artichoke kind of way.

CIA Project Dormouse: MK/ULTRA Exposure as cover for Operation Artichoke

Yeah, it's that bad.

Houston stressed that deliberate exposure of the MK/ULTRA program by essentially offering it to the press would serve to placate the brewing feeding frenzy over so-called mind control projects, and would divert any investigative attempts into the multi-faceted Artichoke Project.

"Multi-faceted." Multi-faceted, he said. As in crazy-ass mind-fuck Manchurian candidate kinda shit, tossed in with a leeward bend toward drug-addled, mind-fucked assassination robots, while orthogonally conjoined racism and homophobia wrap it all up in one glowing, multi-faceted bow.

Whew, Abarelli whips out another dose of old-time/new-time CIA torture programs. Or program. It's not at all clear whether Operation Artichoke ever really stopped. One of Artichoke's facets was, and still is, the operating interrogation paradigm of the CIA.


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Now, I can finally say without dispute just how ridiculous Spencer Ackerman looks when he writes CIA sponsored drivel in a putative "independent" news outlet. I've been wanting to bust Ackerman on that piece of shit article for a long time.

CIA, with strings attached

Bruce Cameron's marvelous article recounting a brief history of the CIA in Afghanistan, post Soviet withdrawal, brings to light in interesting little factoid:

CIA hardliners also hungered for revenge, with the expressed desire of seeing Najibullah “strung up by a light pole,” one CIA official told then-Newsweek correspondent Robert Parry in 1989.

And, then one day ...

The ousted communist leader Najibullah, who had stayed in Kabul, sought shelter in the United Nations compound, but was captured. The Taliban tortured, castrated and killed him, his mutilated body hung from a light pole, just as CIA hardliners had wanted more than half a decade earlier.

The CIA may fuck up a lot of serious shit, but I suspect that when the CIA want someone dead, they get dead. Except for that damned Castro bastard. Damn you, Castro!