0 OPINION Page 4 Friday, November 17, 1989 The Michigan Daily W 4be 3icbigau t i Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan Biowarfare, AIDS & the CIA r By Mike Sobel 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Vol. C, No. 53 Unsigned editorials represent a majority of the Daily's Editorial Board. All other cartoons, signed articles, and letters do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Daily. El Salvador's civil war explodes: Prevent intervention Y ESTERDAY MORNING an El Salvadoran government death squad drove into the University of El Salvador and summarily executed six Jesuit priests. This action took place against the backdrop of indiscriminate government bombing of civilians in an attempt to defeat guerrillas of the Farabundo Martf National Liberation Front (FMLN). The FMLN has initiated a strong offensive against the U.S.-sponsored government and called on the people of that country to rise up in an insurrection. With U.S. reporters in El Salvador confined to San Salvador, and even there to areas largely controlled by the government, the problem of finding an accurate source of information on the rebel insurrection is becoming more apparent every day; information is in- creasingly coming from U.S. govern- ment sources, including daily briefings at the U.S. Embassy reminiscent of the Vietnam War. The U.S. media has generally ac- cepted that the government of El Sal- vador is using U.S.-supplied planes, E{ I {er one of its role models, claiming that the kind of policies Hitler had towards the Jews are what El Salvador needs now to quell the popular revolution. ARENA is well known as a the party of the death squads; its leader, Roberto D'Aubuisson, was the center of the death squad network in the early 1980s. More than 70,000 people have been killed by the government in El Salvador, the majority by death squads. While the media has conceded that hundreds of civilians are being killed by the government, largely unreported are the successes of the FMLN both in the cities and in rural areas. The rebel leadership claims to control at least one major city completely, and with gov- ernment forces confined to defending urban areas, the rebels are said to have mounted massive recruitment and or- ganizational drives in the countryside. There are also reports that at least one brigade of the Salvadoran army has refused to continue the massacre of civilians and laid down its arms. And Western journalists have also reported seeing U.S. "advisors" in combat, in direct violation of the law. Reports downplaying the signifi- cance of the insurrection are not fooling the governments of the region, or of the United States. U.S. forces in Panama are said to be on full alert, and there are reports of mobilizations in Guatemala and Honduras as well. Ten years of organization and mobi- lization have proven that the rebels have the support of the majority of Sal- vadorans. Those areas liberated from government control during the course of the war have already seen significant improvements - including health and education campaigns - brought about by the FMLN's popular interim gov- ernments. If the U.S. public is led to believe that the FMLN represents a fringe movement without the support of the Salvadoran public, the justification for U.S. intervention - either directly or indirectly through our surrogate gov- ernments in the region - will be made more plausible. A strong show of sup- port for self determination and against U.S. intervention is needed to help prevent further destruction and violence against the Salvadoran people. To find out more and help make a change, attend today's rally, sponsored by the Latin American Solidarity Committee, at noon on the Diag. The use of chemical biological weapons (CBW) pre-dates World War I. Although the United States did not launch its formal CBW program until after World War II, there has been documented use of CBW in both World Wars, in Ethiopia, in China, in Korea, in the Yemen and in Vietnam. . The history of Cold War CBW research is not as well documented as CBW use during wartime. In this part of the series, I will try to show how the military's goals for and abuses of research on biological agents, prior to 1972, 1) precludes the possibility that the military could resist the temptation of using recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology in biowarfare research after 1972 and 2) weakens any claims that the military could or would not investigate the possibility of producing a pathogenic retrovirus like AIDS. The very nature of biological weapons means that they are likely to kill unpre- dictably, and over a long period, with con- sequences which cannot easily be assessed. It is hard for anyone with an understanding of the unpredictable nature of microbial pathogens to reject this claim; if the mili- tary were to release a bacterial or viral agent during wartime, it would be difficult to target a single population. The plan could easily backfire. A mutated pathogen could easily spread to other populations. Use of biological warfare could just as easily create an epidemic at home as it could in a targeted country. Examples exist that prove the military has accidentally released a pathogen into a human population. As Lappe mentions in his 1984 book Broken Code, The Ex- ploitation of DNA, this occurred in an ex- periment "with Serratia Marcescens in the late 50s which exposed several thousand people to an agent previously thought to be non-pathogenic, but by the late 60s known to be capable of producing pneu- monia." There is also documented evidence that in the 50s and early 60s, research began on the possibility of producing 'ethnic weapons:' the task set was to come up with a biological agent that selectively in- capacitated or killed a particular racial group. For example, the Cubans accused the United States of introducing (via the CIA) 'African Swine Fever' into that country. The above examples illustrate that 1) there is precedent for the accidental release of a pathogen into a human population by the military and 2) Africa has possibly been an early target for biowarfare experi- mentation. In the mid to late 60s, military research on microbial agents reached a fevered pitch. This was largely due to the poten- tial for new microagents created by the rapidly increasing body of knowledge in the field of genetics. By 1972, the first re- combinant DNA molecule was constructed in a lab at Stanford University. The U.S. government began to hire corporations and universities to conduct biowarfare research. The University of Michigan was one of them. In the late 60s, biological engineering was given top priority by the military. In his Survey of Chemical and Biological Warfare, published in 1969, Cookson maintains that the production of virus hy- brids may prove an extremely useful tech- nique in the development of BW virus agents because if a pathogenic strain were to gain the protein coat of a non- pathogenic strain, it would be suitably disguised to the animal or plant it was in- fecting. Cookson also mentions that this method of virus hybridization "may in fact be more useful when viruses are of the RNA type and seem more amenable to this treatment." It is important to note that Cookson mentions the potential of RNA viruses for military genetic engineer- ing in light of the fact that HIV-1, as dis- cussed in the first two parts of this series, is a retrovirus and of the RNA type. Under public pressure from the scientific community, who realized the potential for AlP~ ::::::::.::.:::::::::. . . military abuse of new genetic technology, the U.S. government signed the Geneva convention in 1972, agreeing to use rDNA technology to produce microbial agents for "prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes." Any violation of the Geneva treaty by the United States would be classified and unattainable for my purposes. Since the Geneva convention, however, as Murphy points out, the army has consistently de- nied allegations that hundreds of millions have been spent on rDNA technology for bioweapons research. Yet under the Geneva treaty, governments can initiate programs and ultimately produce highly pathogenic organisms under the flag of medical or protective research. In 1976, John Allen, a Department of Defense spokesperson in Research and Ad- vanced Technology, declared that the "DoD is prohibited from developing biological agents by international treaty. As a result of the approval of the treaty, all work in- volving rDNA experimentation (in the U.S.) has been terminated." Yet four years later the DoD admitted that they had used rDNA for research on Rift Valley Fever Virus and Dengue-2. The research was purportedly conducted to find vaccines. In 1967, Fort Detrick (the largest biowarfare lab in the U.S.) sent two re- ports to Litton Industries discussing means of effectively producing Rift Valley Fever Virus in large quantities. As Mur- phy mentions, Richard Goldstein of the Harvard Medical School pointed out that since most viruses researched by the mili- tary, such as RVFV, are rare and esoteric, developing vaccines is "useless in any other than a military context." It seems that, ultimately, there is no distinction between defensive and offensive research in the mind of the military. A re- cent Pentagon report admits that "research done for medical, biological and public health reasons is also relevant to develop- ing disease agents." John Stockwell, a former CIA official, recently spoke here at the University. Ill his speech he said the CIA "reports that there were 175 projects in the MK Ultra Program in which the CIA was experi- menting on American peoples and popula- tion groups with the disease and drugs...some of these diseases were viral diseases which closely resembled AIDS." In a phone conversation, Stockwell told me that there was a group of scientists and pseudo scientists carelessly conducting ex- periments for the military BW program during the 70s. It is clear that there was heavy military enthusiasm in the late 60s towards the po- tential for genetic engineering in biowar- fare research. Keeping in mind their past record, I believe it isat the very least, reasonable to doubt the military 1) re- frained from engineering viruses in the 70s, 2) did not conduct experiments on human subjects with some of these viruses, and 3) could necessarily avoid the possibility of experiments backfiring. As Murphy points out, one thing is cer- tain: since the early 70s, the military has possessed the technology to create "rampant pathogens" which could render the immune system useless by "genetically transferring existing infec- tious agents into novel strains." In the fourth and final part of the series I will point to some characteristics of th9G AIDS virus and related viruses that might' independently suggest in vitro manipula- tion. I will then provide some possible scenarios in which the CIA might have unleashed this disease. Mike Sobel is a senior in LSA and a Daily news staff reporter. helicopters and bombs to indiscrimi- nately bombard and destroy the areas of the city which the rebels control. These are the poor neighborhoods in which the FMLN's message of free- dom from economic and political op- pression has gained substantial support from the population. This week the Red Cross asked for a cease-fire to evacuate the hundreds of wounded civilians who are going with- out treatment in the capital. The gov- ernment refused the offer. The government's barbarity in deal- ing with the uprising is consistent with its fascist ideology. The ruling ARENA party openly names Adolph Hitler as Agee speaks out: Ex-agent exposes CIA atrocities al Freedom fo FOR THE past three years the Federal Government has tried, and failed, to establish a case for the deportation of eight residents of Los Angeles, one Kenyan and seven Palestinians, based on the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. The Act, which is rooted intthe worst red scare ideology, outlaws most of what the First Amendment is designed to protect. Though the sections of the Act which form the "basis" for the case have been reversed in recent court de- cisions, the feds, in spite of tremen- dous public opposition, still maintain that the "L.A. Eight" are a "threat to national security" and are continuing their illegal, McCarthy-esque deporta- tion campaign. Initially charged under a provision of the Act which outlaws affiliation with an organization which distributes litera- ture advocating "worldwide commu- nism," the Eight have correctly main- tained that this case is fundamentally about the rights of immigrants in the U.S. to free political speech. The gov- ernment has admitted that in spite of intense electronic surveillance over a n rin f mnnv, ,mn'nthC, these is nol or the L.A. 8 charge has been brought against the remaining two: affiliation with an or- ganization which "advocates the de- struction of property," namely the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a member group of the PLO. And as with most guilt by as- sociation, or thought crimes, the bur- den falls on the defense to disprove the vague notion of "affiliation." A recent ruling in the case of ADC v. Meese said that alien immigrants and nonimmigrants cannot be deported from the U.S. for activities which would be constitutionally protected if they were engaged in by U.S. citizens. This decision overturned four sections of McCarran-Walter and significantly weakened the government's position. Despite this, the feds won't give up, and they have added a new charge: "affiliation with an organization which advocates or teaches the duty, necessity or propriety of the unlawful assaulting or killing of government officials." If the predictions by legal "experts" are correct, this too will be overturned as unconstitutional, and the government wiAll have to find 2nnther wav tn rn On November 14 former Central Intelligence Agency agent Philip Agee spoke to a crowd of over 700 University students and Ann Arbor residents in the Natural Science Auditorium. The event was sponsored by the Latin American Solidarity Committee. The following are excerpts of an inter- view with Agee and Opinion Page staff writer Liz Paige. This is the first part in a three part series. Daily: Why did you leave the CIA? Was there something specific that forced you to leave the Agency? Agee: No, it was a combination of per- sonal and political reasons. The political reasons were building through the years after I got down to Latin America, because I went into the CIA like any naive young American kid, who had no political educa- tion despite an honors degree from univer- sity. And this type of education, a politi- cal education, is the one I got once down in Central America saw the realities around me day after day. There is a situation throughout Latin America wherein a very few people live like the wealthiest people in the United States. And the bulk of the population, 75-80% or more of the people are in abject poverty, and there are reasons for this, and I began to see that the social, economic and political structures of those countries were the reasons why this gross social and economic injustice existed, and it could only be sustained through political repres- sion. Everything I was doing and my col- leagues were doing in one way or another A: Yes, and that is one of the things that I am doing a lot of, that is, working with students who are working against CIA recruitment on campus. I try to assist in any way I can in this movement across the country to keep Murder Inc. out of academia There is no justification for those peo- ple to come on the campuses to recruit American youth into that work. That work that I am talking about is the overthrow of democratically elected civilian govern- ments, the support of security services and death squads like those in El Salvador, the subversion of democratic institutions. There are two positions which are taken often. One is that students have every right to interview with anyone they want. Second is that it is a free speech issue. Well, the answer to those to objections is that the government has no free speech at all. The first amendment protects the individuals from government power, it doesn't apply to the government at all. Secondly, any student who is interested in interviewing with the CIA can do it at any Federal Building across the country. The CIA stands for many things, if not everything, opposed to what a university stands for in terms of free investigation - free flow of ideas. They stand for secrecy, as opposed to openness. They stand for the twisting of truth. They stand for propa- ganda, as opposed to truth. And when one considers the type of work that they do, and are used to do by the president of the day, there is an in- compatibility with what a university stands for, I feel, and so do a lot of other people. attempts against chiefs of state of foreign countries such as Cuba, as if they were aberrations, that is a misconcept. When the CIA does all of those things it is doing precisely what it was estab- lished in 1947 to do - to carry out the policies of the President. There is a con= cept of plausible denial, which you mayW have heard of, which is when the President can plausibly deny that he gave such orders or even knew about certain things but that is a lie. The CIA has never done things that the presidents didn't know about or ordered specifically. D: Do you believe that governments should or could have intelligence gath- ering agencies especially in light of the of atrocities which you have attributed to the CIA? A: Absolutely. The purpose of any in- telligence agency, which is what the CIA purpose and function should be, is to pre- vent war, to keep the peace, and not to wage terrorist war against defenseless peasants in Central America, for instance. But from the very beginning in 1947 the CIA was used for these other types o activities. The first meeting of the National Security Council in 1947 with President Truman in the chair, decided to set $10 million aside so the CIA could in- tervene secretly in the upcoming Italian elections scheduled for April 1948. And that has been going on ever since. The current intervention in the Nicaraguan elections by the CIA and the rest of the U.S. government is only a con-'