Swallowing Seamans (Corrected) Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit [An earlier version of this piece got two URLs mixed up because I was laughing so hard at the time. As a result, Manuel Cereijo was credited with the vice presidency of a website which in fact is quoting him. They do not list him as a member their staff. I apologize for the mistake. -Peter Bell] Swallowing Seamans by Peter Bell On May 9th the Miami Herald published a piece by Ike Seamans entitled "No Outcry About Biological Weapons in Cuba." > Russian scientist Ken Alibek was perplexed. He couldn't understand > why there wasn't an outcry about Cuba's biological-weapons threat. Wow, Seaman's lying like a rug and he's got Alibek lying, too. > Alibek is on solid ground. In the 1980s, he taught Cuban scientists much of > what they know about weapons of mass destruction. "This work was to be used > for developing biological weapons or biological agents," he told me in his > suburban-Washington office. "As a result, we helped Fidel Castro create > biological weapons. It was such a stupid decision." "Or biological agents." Vaccines turn out to be biological 'agents.' Cuba's selling a lot of its great encephalitis vaccine. You also need biological 'agents' to research diseases like hepatitis, or to develop bacteria that can produce streptokinase for treating stroke patients. > In his book, Biohazard, Alibek says that against the advice of many Soviet > scientists, then-Premier Leonid Brezhnev gave the technology to Cuba, after > meeting with an enthusiastic Castro in 1981. " Within a few years," Alibek > writes, "Cuba had one of the most sophisticated genetic engineering labs in > the world, capable of the kind of advanced weapons research we were doing on > our own." What they gave Castro was seed stocks for commonly used critters and some training in the kind of research work that's used for all modern molecular biology. The book is a lot less exciting than this version. Here's the context of that snippet from Alibek's book: "Castro had been taken during a visit to the Soviet Union in February 1981 to a laboratory where E. coli bacteria had been genetically altered to produce interferon, then thought a key to curing cancer and other diseases. Castro spoke so enthusiastically to Brezhnev about what he had seen that the Soviet leader magnanimously offered his help. A strain of E. coli containing the plasmid used to produce interferon was sent to Havana, along with equipment and working procedures. Within a few years, Cuba had one of the most sophisticated genetic engineering labs in the world -- capable of the kind of advanced weapons research we were doing in our own." Capable. Not "engaged in." And the initial motivation was research into stopping cancer. Nice selective quote, Seaman. > The inventor of one of the most deadly strains of anthrax, Alibek > defected to the United States 10 years ago. He's the former deputy > director of Biopreparat, the Soviet Union's secret biological-weapons > program. Alibek's also never been to Cuba. Note that here he's referred to as *the deputy* director. > There's another clue that Cuba was creating a germ-warfare program. Whenever > Soviet scientists went to Havana, they were denied entry to areas suspected > of conducting biological-weapons research -- the same technique that Alibek > used when U.S. inspectors visited his labs after the 1975 U.S.-Soviet > nonproliferation agreement. The laboratories were secretly producing tons of > biological agents and chemical weapons. Alibek says that after one trip to > Cuba the Biopreparat director returned to Moscow convinced that Castro > had an active bioweapons program. Yes, he relates in his book: that someone *else,* the director, had been to Cuba and come home worried. Here, it's deliberately written to make a hasty reader think that it's Alibek who went. I couldn't find the locked doors incident mentioned in Alibek's book. Also, notice that the "tons of germs" passage is constructed to make it sound as if that's what was being produced *in Cuba* to a hasty reader. It's pretty absurd that in the narrative of Cuba's history according to the right, on the one hand, the Cubans at the time were Soviet sockpuppets and nothing more, and that on the other hand, they weren't letting their instructors see their work. > The story has been largely ignored by many experts and journalists, > many of whom have denied that Cuba has the resources or ability to > develop biological-weapons technology. Um, no, they've read the parts of the book dealing with Cuba. Three pages, easy to find in the index, you don't even need to buy the book to see that Alibek has nothing concrete to say on the topic. Anyone can see this the way I did: pick it up off the shelf, consult the index, and read. > But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence: > > In 1995, the U.S. Senate released a report charging that Cuba is one of > 17 countries believed to possess biological weapons and to be capable of > making them. Um, that's evidence? A Senate report? Didn't Senator McCarthy release reports about hundreds of Commies? Also, did this report mention Israel? [Since the first writing, I found a list of the countries flagged in the report. Israel is on it. So, given the fantastic success of the Jenin Investigation, who's going to lead the team to inspect the Israeli facilities?] > In 1996, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which investigates > terrorist threats, said: "Cuba has been a supply source [to terrorist > groups] for toxin and chemical weapons." I've heard this one bandied about before, but curiously, never with the context given or cited in a way that would let me find it for myself. > In 1998, former SouthCom Commander Gen. Charles Wilhelm told the Senate > Armed Services Committee: "They have the capability to produce those types > of substances, but they have not weaponized them." You can make anthrax, too, if you'll run the risk. Read up on it - you can use off-the-shelf hardware to do it, just like the Army was doing to see how easy it was. The New York Times covered it in early September. > Also in 1998, then-Defense Secretary William Cohen warned of "Cuba's > potential to produce biological agents." Potential to produce - Cohenspeak for "good biotech research facilities" - is a long way from circumstantial evidence. > In the October journal, Nature Biotechnology, a Cuban defector charged > that because of a deteriorating economy, Cuba was selling its vaunted > biotechnology to terrorist nations, which might use it to produce lethal > biological agents such as anthrax and smallpox. Jose de la Fuente, former > director of research and development at Havana's Center for Genetic > Engineering and Biotechnology, claims that Iran has been a big customer > since 1995. A few months before his article appeared, Castro traveled > to Teheran and, standing beside grinning Iranian leaders, proclaimed: > "Together we'll bring America to its knees." Yes, but yesterday, in your very own newspaper de la Fuente is quoted saying that he'd never heard anyone in Cuba discussing making biologicals. We *were* talking about Cuba, weren't we? > Several members of Congress, notably Florida's Sen. Bob Graham and > U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, also have been sounding the alarm. > Yet Cuba's biological-weapons connection continues to be overlooked. Ros-Lehtinen asked an incoherent question of Colin Powell in a hearing I saw a transcript of. She did not understand what she was saying enough to render it intelligible when Powell asked for clarification. This is some form of evidence now? Hey, there's evidence that the CIA controls the thought of local street people, then. In fact, it's rock-solid circumstantial evidence. While they're not in Congress, they do produce fairly readable pamphlets about it. > On March 19, Carl Ford, assistant secretary of state for intelligence > and research, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Cuba has > "provided dual-use biotechnology to rogue states." I couldn't find the > story reported by the media. Again, weren't we going to talk about Cuba making weapons? Not Cuba selling fermenters and metal tubing? Or having labs with spill-proof benchtops? I've seen the spillproof benchtops cited as evidence of devious plans in the crank literature on this topic. If you took high school biology, by the way, you used spill-proof desktops in lab, and hence were at a Dual Use Facility. > Now State Department Arms Control Chief John Bolton charges in a recent > speech (which received wide coverage) that Cuba is developing > biological-weapons technology and working with terrorists. He quotes an > unnamed Bush administration official who claims that the evidence is > "incontrovertible." Curiously, though, Bolton presented *none* of the evidence. In fact, he stated that what we know is what we believe. Quite the eloquent boy, Bolton. > Undoubtedly, there's at least one reason why the story has been disregarded: > Castro's critics have complained so loudly and for so long about everything > he does, including developing biological weapons, that this story sounds > like "crying wolf." Maybe it's time to start listening. Maybe it is - and it's also certainly time to examine carefully the specifics of the allegation. Oops, Bolton won't give them, and the best evidence the clowns have is spillproof benchtops and centrifuges of the kind that are used in diagnostic tests. > "There are plenty of activities going on with bioweapons in Cuba," says > retired Florida International University Professor Manuel Cereijo, who > gathers information about Cuba's biological threat. "It merits an > international inspection like we have done with Iraq." Does he gather this evidence via the fillings in his teeth? He's popular with the editors of a ludicrous website which claims (amongst other things) that Cuba was working with yellow rain-style toxins -- the very same toxins which Al Haig tried to introduce as evidence, only to find that his evidence was, quite literally shit: bee excrement, to be precise. They include as one of their layouts an 'investigative article' which relies heavily on Cereijo: http://www.bioweaponcuba.com/cubaweapons.htm This article and others on the site mention data supplied by South Africa's "Doctor Death" and Aubin Heyndrickx alleging Cuban use of CW in Africa. The US Air Force admits Heyndrickx is unreliable due to his refusal to share his samples with anyone else to test. His conviction for fraud doesn't help matters, and the subsequent discovery that white apartheid South Africa's biowarfare program (one that *is* in the record, documented extensively by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) was supporting itself by selling drugs doesn't exactly make the moldy reports on this site any more compelling. Oooh, and bioweaponcuba are running not one but two reports suggesting that either Hussein, or Castro, or perhaps both together, were responsible for the West Nile outbreak in New York. Still, my personal favorite from the site is the /cubaweapons piece which uses Cereijo as one of its main experts: In a report on this site ostensibly about the kind of toxins that appear in bee shit (ignoring studies showing that application of those toxins would need to be done by the metric ton for them to be poisonous) http://www.bioweaponcuba.com/cubaweapons.htm if you scroll to the endnotes you'll find the following cited: 14. Frank J. Tipler, "Extraterrestrial Beings Do Not exist" (Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 21, 267(1981)); "A Brief History of the Extraterrestrial Intelligence Concept" (ibid 22, 33(1981)); "Additional Remarks on Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (ibid 22, 279(1981)). This footnote isn't actually cited by the text, so it's hard to be sure just where the authors think it fits into Castro's devious schemes -- perhaps they're exultant that extraterrestrials, at least, aren't helping Cuba with its research? It also presents a return to a puzzle existing throughout Seaman's writeup: how does what he's on about relate to Cuba, again? Perhaps it provides better evidence of the level of sanity of those giving Seaman his background intel? Jesus, Seaman, vet your fucking sources. Doesn't Langley cover this in their briefings any more? * [Note: Ike Seamans is senior correspondent for WTVJ-NBC 6. Let him here from you at: Ike.Seamans @ nbc.com You might want to let NBC hear it, too. This guy deserves a job with the Village Idiot in Residence at the White House.] ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcov-05.10.02-16:25:22-3206