"'Our family has been through a living hell, to almost see your 23-year-old son die-' exclaims Cheryl. 'The government is wrong, and they need to take care of all these people that they've hurt.' The Department of defense says they continue to believe that the vaccine is 'safe' ..." - Firstcoastnews.com
Fuad El-Hibri arranged investments for well-heeled Saudi clients as a broker at Citibank's Jeddah office. Tom Suber, a contributor to the Rouge Forum, a grassroots Internet think-tank, reports that the broker handled "the individual financial holdings of the bin Laden family group and the larger $18 billion Carlyle Group."
The bin Ladens and Carlyle are "reputed to have had partnership interests with Fuad El-Hibri's Porton International and Bioport investments. These embarrassing partnerships are the result of complex web of interlocking private corporate holdings and are publicly denied by the El-Hibri family."1
Carlyle Management Group, of course, is America's eleventh leading defense contractor, founded by Iran-contra's Frank Carlucci, James Baker III and George H.W. Bush.
Ties to the bin Ladens and Carlyle constituted one "embarrassing" pact with the devil. Another was El-Hibri's acquisition of the Center for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR) at Porton Downs in the UK, a government-held toxic stockpile-research laboratory privatized by Margaret Thatcher. CAMR was launched under private ownership - El-Hibri's - as Porton International in 1993.
Porton Downs was the English mirror-image of Ft. Detrick. Both military laboratories conducted Auschwitz-style experiments on human subjects during the Cold War. In 2002, Express reported that scientists of the Ministry of Defense faced prosecution "over horrifying experiments on service men and women during chemical and biological weapons tests."
Subjects were duped into volunteering, led to believe that the military doctors were searching for an innocuous "cold cure." The guinea-pigs said they were "impregnated with deadly chemical agents such as sarin and mustard gas." Ronald Maddison, a volunteer airman, died after a cloth treated with sarin was wrapped round his arm. Another subject said he was coerced to participate "under threat of court martial. During three nightmare weeks at the center, he said he was stripped to his underpants and marched repeatedly into gas chambers where he was impregnated with sarin, tabin and mustard gas."2
El-Hibri inherited a horror factory, and this it remained. By 1996, Suber says, "the rape of the public resources of Great Britain was virtually complete," speaking of the "conservative" agenda behind privatization. The profit-lusting "interests of the Saudis and the Carlyle Group began to look to the United States for more promising plunder."
Michigan Governor John Engler was urged by fellow Republicans to privatize the state-owned vaccination lab - exactly as Thatcher had done with CAMR. It was renamed the Michigan Biologics Products Institute.
"Governor Engler gave the most respectable and profitable agency in Michigan government to Fuad El-Hibri without any individual investment whatsoever," Suber writes. The new owners "incurred no individual expense, made no investments, and did not owe any individual promissory notes or obligations of any kind for their new lab purchase. Receipt of a $180 million business for absolutely nothing. The next hand-out the company received was an unsecured, interest-free loan of $18.7 million as an advance payment from the Defense Department."3
All this fuss and expense over a vaccine that didn't even work against inhalation anthrax - it just made people sick.
But homeland defense was never the idea, as Houston attorney Linda Minor noted after scanning BioPort's directors' page: "This group is obviously an investment syndicate composed of numerous intelligence agency members representing assorted countries."4
Bio-economic terrorism is the CIA's kind of low-intensity conflict. Dr. Edgar J. DaSilva, director of the Division of Life Sciences of the UN, says the approach is predicated on "the undermining and destruction of economic progress and stability" by "the development and use of biological agents against economic targets such as crops, livestock and ecosystems."
Germs, bacilli and viruses have certain advantages over conventional armaments - explosives and noxious gases have to be explained, but viral agents are plausibly deniable: "Such warfare can always be carried out under the pretexts that such traumatic occurrences are the result of natural circumstances that lead to outbreaks of diseases and disasters of either endemic or epidemic proportions."5 The Zimbabwe anthrax outbreak, the West Nile Virus, conceived at SAIC-USAMRIID, for instance. Add a trained provocateur - a biochemical warfare specialist from a Rhodesian death squad with a parafascist history will do - a little media manipulation, and the result is anthrax psychosis.
That's exactly what the collective response was called in Argentina when a false alarm was tripped by a suspect piece of mail. "Anthrax psychosis," an Argentine newspaper reported, spread in October 2001, "when a travel brochure mailed from Miami to a Buenos Aires family initially tested positive." The spores tested inactive the second time, but "within hours, frantic citizens swamped police stations, hospitals and all kinds of government offices throughout the country with about 1,000 pieces of suspicious mail, most of them posted from the United States or Pakistan."6
The Ame strain did get around. The lethal dust was found in mail rooms - in a Princeton borough - in the Senate - in Dan Rather's CBS office - in a Kabul factory - in New York City Hall - in a diplomatic pouch to the US Consulate General in Yekaterinburg, Russia - in the Supreme Court's basement mailroom - in a letter mailed to Kenya - at the Bureau of Prisons headquarters in Washington - at the broadcaster's headquarters in 30 Rockefeller Plaza - on and on.
And the FBI, by focusing on Hatfill, gave the false impression that the perpetrator was a lone gunman. He had accomplices, ran with a death squad in the United States as he did in Rhodesia.
The anthrax plot - as reconstructed by Leonard Horowitz, Robert Lederman and other researchers - began with the meeting at the White House regarding the fate of OraVax, attended by representatives of the company, the administration, and DoD officials. It was agreed that the company, facing bankruptcy, would receive a pass to inventory vaccines. The idea was to allow OraVax to bail itself out with government contracts, not murder.
But some of those attending this meeting were active in our American Pinay Circle. One of them was William Patrick III, President and CEO of Advanced Biosystems Inc. (ABS). Patrick ran the anthrax "weaponization" program at the Ft. Detrick-SAIC lab where Hatfill worked. In 1999, Patrick wrote a study, according to the Baltimore Sun, that discussed "the danger of anthrax spores spreading through the air and the requirements for decontamination after various kinds of attacks. The author, William C. Patrick III, describes placing 2.5 grams of Bacillus globigii, an anthrax simulant, in a standard business envelope - slightly more than the estimated amount of anthrax in each of the letters that killed five people last fall
Stephen Hatfill, we learn, "is a friend and protegé of Patrick, 75, a bio-weapons legend who has himself experienced the dual status of expert and possible suspect."7
2) Suber. Also see, The Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs, and International Relations of the House Committee on Government Reform June 30, 1999.
4) Linda Minor, e-mail exchange with author, November 8, 2004.