All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Brett Wilkins, regular writer at Common Dreams, Counterpunch, and at antiwar.com.
This one is called Veterans Exposed in Cold War Bioweapons Testing, Still Awaiting Answers.
Welcome back to the show.
Brett, how are you?
Thanks for having me, Scott.
It's great to be here again.
Great, man.
Good to talk to you.
And I love this subject.
This is one of the things that really got me interested in politics and so forth back in the early 1990s.
And I guess it was Bill Curtis on investigative reports had covered this.
And, you know, part of the movement around exposing the truth about the Gulf War illnesses also talked a little bit about this stuff.
But then, as you write here, in the year 2000, CBS Evening News broke this huge story, expanding really on the story of Project Shad and bioweapons testing on the American people, civilians and military alike.
So first of all, go ahead and give us the basics, please, if you could, sir.
Well, it was the Cold War.
And so in the name of fighting communism, the United States has done a lot of things in the name of fighting communism, some of them nearly as bad, if not worse, than the communists themselves.
And this was definitely one of them.
It was originally Project 112, which the Kennedy administration kicked off.
And the SHAD, which stands for Shipborne Hazard and Defense, was a way of trying to see the vulnerabilities, trying to probe the vulnerabilities of United States naval vessels to attack by chemical and biological agents.
And in the course of this testing, which involved many ships, involved thousands of troops, involved some of the most deadly agents known, of course, they were used in trace amounts or less than lethal amounts of VX and sarin, as well as lots of other lesser known bacteriological agents, some of which were unleashed on American cities and sometimes in tracer amounts and sometimes in amounts that made people sick.
And so there had been some history of this.
We'd hired, the United States had hired Japanese and Germans, including Nazi war criminals, including Japanese Unit 731 members who had experimented on living prisoners of war, as well as releasing, killing hundreds of thousands of Chinese.
So there's a long history of this.
And by the early 1960s, it was the height of the Cold War hysteria, and it seemed like the United States would be willing to do just about anything, including testing some deadly agents on its own troops.
Now, that's not to say any of them died from this, but a lot of them claim that they have a lot of health problems from this, and the VA isn't addressing it adequately.
Yeah, man.
So talk a little bit about the different germs and the different ships and cities that they tested them on.
This is some shocking stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
As far as the ships, there was the USS Granville, the Hull, the George Eastman, a lot of tugboats.
Sometimes these agents were dispersed aerially, so they involved aircraft sometimes.
And as far as the actual agents themselves, there was one called, sorry, I'm not a biologist.
There's a bacteria, marcicense, that was released on San Francisco in 1950 in a test that actually resulted in one death.
It was a guy who was immunocompromised anyway, but there were- I was trying to memorize that one too.
Serratia marcicense.
I swear to God, for 25 years, I've called it something or other marcicense.
Yeah, there was- Serratia.
I'm trying to memorize it too, is why I'm saying it now.
Yeah.
Serratia, they released an Operation Sea Spray, it was, in 1950.
The Navy sprayed San Francisco with a big cloud of Bacillus globali and serratia to study how the cities were vulnerable to bio-weapons attack.
And there were about a dozen people in the Bay Area.
I live in the Bay Area.
I remember reading about this in the Chronicle and it's definitely piqued my interest.
Around a dozen people were hospitalized and one of them died.
And they say that the test may have permanently altered the microbial ecology here.
Zinc cadmium sulfide was another one.
The Army sprayed- Well, wait, no.
On that previous point, I think I had read that too, that there are more instances of illness caused by this germ and proven prevalence of this germ in San Francisco to this day.
Hey, correct.
Yeah.
And- 70 years later.
Yeah.
And then there was the zinc cadmium sulfide test where they sprayed in the poor housing project of St. Louis, as well as in a Minneapolis, Clinton Elementary School in Minneapolis.
And students there later reported an unusually high number of stillbirths and birth defects.
And at the time, they thought it was harmless.
But cadmium is a toxic metal and now known to be undeniably a carcinogen.
And so there was experience using these even on civilians.
So when they used them on the troops, they considered it something helpful.
And they didn't think that these agents were very harmful, but they had to have known that via VX and sarin, I mean, there's no way.
And I think I should also mention Project MKUltra here as well, the mind control experiments led by the CIA.
Of course, when we start talking about these things, those who don't know, it might sound a bit on the conspiracy theory side, but dozens of US institutions involving thousands of citizens, many of them unwitting, were subject to mind control experiments, often using LSD.
Some of the LSD people, they were volunteers, but others were not, and they even dosed their own agents.
Scott Olson jumped out of a window, a 13-floor window in New York after he was dosed.
Oh yeah, no, he was murdered, but that's a different subject.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, that's the only explanation that I can think of for that one.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, no, so there's huge developments in that story.
You got to watch Wormwood on Netflix.
There's a documentary all about that, and apparently that guy's son spent his entire life trying to solve the case.
I don't want to ruin it for you, but yeah, they killed him.
But anyway, yeah.
So with S.H.A.D., so with S.H.A.D., Shipboard, Hazard, and Defense, it was 1964 to 1968, and that didn't mean, even though the agents weren't necessarily deadly that they used, it didn't mean they were safe.
I mean, the ship's logs themselves show a surge in nausea, upper respiratory tract infections.
There's one, Robert Bates, who was an electrician aboard the USS Navarro, he actually testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that he developed chronic pneumonia, permanent breathing problems.
There are others on the ship as well, a lot of reproductive issues too, a lot of, and people might not necessarily connect this, but a lot of miscarriages and infertility.
And they were, James Druckmiller was the medical corpsman on the power.
He got sick.
He had lesions on his head, on his foot, but he, again, bacterial pneumonia, chronic respiratory illnesses.
Some of them suffered from scarred lungs, cysts, allergies, heart, kidney, and skin problems.
And of course, they were good soldiers, so they thought that theirs was not to reason why, but theirs was but to do or die.
And the Veterans Administration told them that since the agents were harmless, quote unquote, that the benefits would be denied.
So they've actually denied hundreds and hundreds of claims by veterans who believe that their illnesses are related to this.
And to date, they claim they've issued several reports.
You can go on the Department of Defense website and see them.
They claim that to quote, to date, there is no clear evidence of specific long-term health problems associated in participation with Project Shad, unquote.
And so these veterans, they're sick and they want to know why.
The National Academy of Sciences actually concluded that there can be no question that some of them were mistreated by twice, by the secret testing and the official denials that followed.
And during the Obama, actually it was the late Bush administration, it was early 08, the Government Accountability Office said that tens of thousands of troops and civilians were exposed.
And as far as, there's a precedent for apologies in addressing this.
I mean, Bill Clinton apologized for the human radiation testing in 1994, and there was a presidential inquiry, there was a massive report, thousands of names.
That's how we learned a lot about MKUltra.
That's how we learned about the Eskimos in Alaska that were given radioactive pills to study the effects of cold weather on the thyroid glands, just like the Nazis did when they, you know, they did these experiments to try to see how soldiers would hold up under.
So I mean, there's a precedent for addressing and apologizing, but for this one, there still hasn't been any, any acknowledgement either.
I mean, there's acknowledgement that these tests occurred.
You can go and read the documents.
They're still, they're still partially classified, though, a lot of them are.
And so Mike Thompson, who's a representative from, he's a Vietnam War veteran, and he's a representative nearby in Sonoma County here.
He's known about it since the beginning.
He's known about it since the 90s.
One of his constituents worked on a tugboat that was exposed.
And so he's been a tireless champion of this, actually.
He's sponsored multiple bills meant for the Pentagon to declassify.
And he's, he's saying that for 40 years, they did not even happen.
And for the last 10 years, he said they're dragging their feet.
And so it seems like we're just hit this impasse where they acknowledge that it's happened.
They acknowledge that some of these agents were, including VX and Sarin, were used.
But like you mentioned, the Gulf War earlier, we still, you know, there's still a reluctance, not a reluctance, there's still a denial there.
And that's what we need to break through now.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny, the economics of the bureaucracy here, when the truth has long been out.
You know, as I said, this is, you know, when I was young, this is one of the things that made me decide I hated the government enough to really dedicate my life to this stuff.
You know, that that's, that's not just who they are.
But that's also the amount of accountability, you know, in play here, too, when it comes to them doing these things and getting away with it for all these years.
But when it's been all these years, I mean, the cost of treating people who are still suffering from the effects of this, you know, in the scheme of things is completely negligible.
You know, all the people, the individuals responsible, if they're not all dead, they would never be held responsible in any way anyway.
It's not like their wages are going to be garnished for this thing.
So even without a presidential level apology or whatever, why not go ahead and just let the people, especially the sailors, go to the V.A.
That kind of thing, you know, I mean, anybody who claims they were living in San Francisco at that time, I guess that's maybe a little bit more difficult.
But in New York, too, you know, they're driving around New York with fake exhaust pipes, dumping germs out and then put them in the light bulbs in the subway tunnels and God knows what.
At least for the sailors where there's like, and I don't mean to favor them, but just it's easier to prove this specific instance of their poisoning, you know, and when it's already a government owned hospital, just put it on everybody else's tab like you would anyway, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For people like us who at some point in their life, they underwent, they experienced a revelation and then you just start diving into it all and you start learning and you're learning and you're learning.
And one of those things you mentioned in New York, I didn't mention those in my article because it seems like you search for sensational sometimes.
And actually, the truth is that many, many, many of these tests were trace elements or the ones with the mosquitoes in Florida and Georgia.
I thought that was but it's it's their trace elements or they're relatively harmless.
But the fact that they would do that at all and the fact that there are ones like Shad out there that are NK Ultra that are so egregious, that are straight up things that the Nazis would have done that makes you dismiss ones like the ones that the ones you mentioned as you know, not worthy of even being in my article just shows you how much of this that we do.
Right.
You've heard of the Avon Park yellow fever experiments and in Savannah and Jacksonville, they released mosquitoes, thousands of mosquitoes.
But then you hear things about, you know, the North and North Korea during the Korean War.
They accused the United States of dropping biological agents there as well as in Cuba.
And then you find out that, wow, we actually waged a 40 year war of basically a war of terrorism against Cuba in which we, you know, really swine fever.
We released bacteriological agents on them, too.
And it's just something that we've done so many times.
It goes back to human experimentation and mental institutions and prisoners, vulnerable members of society have been subjected to this for a long time.
So we like to say how much we support our troops, but it just shows that nobody, nobody is immune.
Even our troops are not immune from this kind of thing.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what, I think that's right.
And it's an important thing for people to realize, too, that, you know, I guess as David Hackworth used to put it, and he was no leftist, you know, he was the most decorated colonel from the Vietnam War.
And but in his later days, I don't know if he ever phrased exactly this way, but he essentially was fighting a class war for the enlisted men against the officers, you know, and say, you know, and always talked about how little the officer, in fact, the way he talked about it was the soldiers.
Those are the people, the officers, that's the government, you know, they don't give a damn about you, they will give you something or other more seasons and just to test it out.
They don't give a damn.
You know?
True.
Yeah.
Good lesson to learn when you're about 16 or 17 before you sign up.
Well, you can tell me that I've gotten a couple of emails from this article, and one of them is from a veteran, he's an attorney now.
He's a veteran of Vietnam era, or a little bit earlier, maybe, and he was stationed somewhere on a subject, he participated in testing in Alaska.
And the more you look, and there was ones I missed, there was, there was, there was testing on land.
The Shad was just the, the naval portion of it, but their Project 112, you know, there were chemical and biological weapons tested in Hawaii, tested in Alaska, Fort Greely in Alaska, sarin was tested there on troops, thousands of them.
Devil Hole was the name of the operation.
Devil Hole 1 and Devil Hole 2 were designed to test how sarin gas would disperse after being released in artillery shells and rockets, in Aspen and Spruce Forest specifically.
So they used Alaska for those tests.
And I've been reached out to by a couple of veterans who, you know, like you just said, if they would have known that then, and one of them, we discussed Smedley Butler a lot, who is my hero.
I love, he's, if you, if you want someone to get across to our message, who better to have it than someone who's participated in, you know, the racket known as war.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a lot of people listening who may have never heard of Smedley Butler.
I try to remind myself all the time about how old I am and how that leaves room for new young inexperienced people who are just tuning into this kind of thing for the first time.
Maybe have never heard of this kind of thing and maybe have never heard the name Smedley Butler.
Well, Smedley Butler was at the time, he was the most decorated United, he was the most decorated United States troop of all time.
He was a Marine Corps general.
He fought in the Mexican revolution in World War I, but he's most known now, he's for, he actually, he's actually won two medals of honor, he's two medals of honor.
So during his 30 year career, and he became one of the most, one of the most ardent anti-war critics.
He's famous for his pamphlet and speaking tour in the early 1930s titled War is a Racket.
And it's easy, it's a quick read.
Everybody should, it should be required reading in every classroom in America.
And basically he says that, you know, his service was, he was not serving his country.
He was serving the interests of, you know, Wall Street and there was no official military industrial complex term coined then.
But he was, you know, he was in the Spanish American war, the Philippine American war, which has direct, direct parallels to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In both timeline and death toll and tortures that were used by the troops there, waterboarding Americans were actually prosecuted for waterboarding in the Spanish, during the Philippine, Philippine occupation, unlike today.
And he, he was there through all of it.
And he said that, you know, war is a racket, you know, he was in the banana republics in Central America, Honduras, China during the, you know, he, he saw it all.
And I'm looking for a quote here from him, but everybody should read it.
War is a racket.
It's, you know, he's, he's my hero.
Yeah.
A four-star general calling himself a bag man.
Yeah.
It was a bag man for Wall Street.
Ouch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He said that the mafia, he's like the mafia, he compared it to the mafia and he goes, they have their racket, but there's nothing that's aimed, nothing compared to the global racket that the U.S. military is running or the U.S. government.
Here I spent 33 years and four months in active military service.
And during that period, I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers.
In short, I was a gangster for capitalism.
I helped make Mexico safe for oil interests.
I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the national city bank boys to cleric revenues.
I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers.
I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests, and I helped make Honduras ripe for American fruit companies.
Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.
The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts.
I operated in three continents.
I love that.
And of course, the joke is he's a Marine general.
So the whole thing is all of those capitalists that he cited as being the ones he was serving, they were socializing their costs on everyone else by using the public Marine Corps to do all their dirty work, which is the height of irony and hilarity to me.
But yeah.
Yeah, that's how it goes.
Not so funny for the people of the Dominican Republic, but still.
Oh, and you know, that place was, if I remember correctly, it was under occupation for about 20, 25 years, US occupation, and then we went in there again in 65.
And nobody talks about that, and it wasn't that long ago.
And Haiti, of course, right next door, we've been in there, we've occupied there and been in there about three or four times in my lifetime.
I think Bill Clinton invaded it the last time, or was it Bush?
It's hard to remember.
Yeah.
Well, I know Bill Clinton did.
I don't remember if Bush did, too.
I think we might have went in there under humanitarian guise back with guns, of course.
Yeah.
After the earthquake that they had, too.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
Lucky them.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Well, that makes sense.
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Now back to the accountability here.
You say you got this one good congressman from California who's been really pushing for this is for, well I'm not sure what all, some accountability and help for the victims here I think.
Is he having any kind of luck with this?
He co-sponsored a bill back in 2017.
It was a bipartisan bill, and its goal was to force the Defense Department to declassify records about it.
I don't think it passed because they're still classified, but it was Mike Thompson, and I don't see who the other two were, but I think it was definitely a bipartisan measure.
No, the short answer is no.
They're still classified.
The benefits are still being denied.
They haven't changed, and we see this in every war.
Did not we see it with Agent Orange?
Do we not see it with the Gulf War syndrome?
Do we not see it in the second Gulf War with the burn pits and with the depleted uranium in both of them?
This is nothing new.
It's just, we saw it with the bonus army.
Support the troops until they really need help.
Yeah, or until they start losing and then just turn away.
Forget the whole thing, but yeah, and then when they're complaining, and this is the thing that really got me back in the 1990s with the Gulf War illness, right, is you got all these guys who are, by definition, they're strong, healthy young men.
That's who they all are, and they're coming down with these crazy chronic illnesses, and they all just happen to have this one big war in the desert in common here, and then the entire narrative was that this isn't an illness.
It's a syndrome, and what that means is, it's all in your head, soldier.
Quit being a wimp.
Drink a beer and chin up and stop complaining about it, but meanwhile, they've been poisoned six ways, whatever, from actual exposure to sarin to exposure to anti-sarin pills and anthrax vaccines and depleted geranium and God knows what was all making them sick, and they spent 10 years pretending like it didn't happen, and it was no big deal.
I guess they still deny proper treatment to a lot of guys on that.
I don't really know the latest on that.
They spent 10 years saying, that's not true.
That's crazy.
That's crazy, and only conspiracy kooks believe in that, and that entire narrative, and it was just, unfortunately for them, study after study by credentialed doctors proved that there really was something going on there, and they finally had to back down on some of that, but they would just deal with the problem with ridicule, basically, for a decade.
Yeah, absolutely, and if you start talking about shad, people think you're talking conspiracy, and so even with the Gulf War, I still couldn't tell you, honestly, you probably know more about this than I do.
I'm sure you do.
I still couldn't tell you.
If somebody asked me, what was the cause of the Gulf War illness?
I don't know.
Do you know?
Yeah, I mean, that was it.
It was four or five different major things.
It was the anthrax vaccine, it was exposure to chemical weapons at the Kamasuya detonation of the bunker there, and it was anti-sarin pills that guys had been given that had apparently caused some damage to the brain stem.
There's the depleted geranium dust, which is heavy metal poisoning, and possibly radiation risk of some kind, because it's not purely depleted, right?
It's waste, so it's probably mixed with all kinds of crap.
You look at the birth defect rates, and even in Basra area in the 1990s, and very much so in Fallujah, after the two invasions of Fallujah in 2004, horrific, horrific rates of increase in the rate of birth defects, some deformities, same kind of images you saw in Vietnam.
Serbia, too, from Clinton's war in 99.
And in Palestine, as well.
And it wasn't just American veterans, either, with the Gulf War.
You saw Brits, you saw Australians, and not to mention the local people.
Yeah, and you know what we don't know too much about?
Afghanistan and the use of depleted uranium and the consequences of that there.
I mean, the problem is so many people, when they die in Afghanistan, there's no reporter around for 200 miles, so nobody knows.
Nobody really knows what happened to them.
The people out in the countryside, anyway.
And that's who's been getting bombed for 20 years.
So yeah, overall cancer rates in the Helmand Province, I'd like to see that, you know?
I bet it's ugly as hell.
Yeah.
Well, we're going to be getting out of that one, one of these years.
You know, this really goes to the heart of the whole thing about whether we could fight the kind of war that the American people imagine they might like to fight, you know, like against the Wehrmacht out in the field and it's mostly fine and doesn't include carpet bombing civilians and doesn't include, you know, spreading disease and doesn't include all these terrible things.
But apparently not.
This is the Defense Department we have, and this is the Defense Department we go to war with.
And this is how they do business.
Even that, if you'll remember the glorious tank battles of 1991 on the plains of Iraq or the desert plains of Iraq, even that, which was that kind of battle he was discussing, there were hundreds, if not thousands of Iraqi conscripts that were buried alive by bulldozers that were, you know, they didn't want to be there.
But yeah.
And massacred on the highways of death, too, as they tried to retreat.
And then, of course, you know, a lot of those shells being fired, those were depleted uranium rounds that were taken out those tanks.
And so leaving, you know, maybe it's way out in the desert somewhere, but permanent pollution.
And, you know, you mentioned Iraq War II in the burn pits.
Kelly Vlahos had also pointed out that you're also talking about, well, if you go back to Jimmy Carter and and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran and all of this, you're talking about 40 years of artillery shells pounding that desert sand.
And so all those heavy metals that over the centuries had settled deep, deep into the soil, all are getting stirred up and into the air, you know, in a way from all of that violence and all those trucks, you know, banging around and everything else out there that just the levels of sickness from those kinds of heavy metal poisonings and stuff like that are way through the roof as well.
And that's the kind of stuff that for the most part will never really be counted.
You know, talk about collateral damage.
It's on the margin, but it counts for the people who are the ones dying of it.
Yeah, I never thought about it until right now when you just said that, that that's yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's terrible.
But yeah, so.
Well, there you have it, folks, your government test biological weapons on your grandpa and probably you, you know, I don't know if they do it to them, they do it to us.
And, you know, got plenty of current examples of this kind of thing, you know, as we're talking about here with the results of our more recent wars.
But yeah, so now I think you mentioned here about lawsuits to Brett, is that right, that they're some of the victims are first person trying to go after the some accountability here?
I'm not sure.
I don't remember anything about loss of anything about that.
OK.
Really speak to that.
All these guys that had spoken to CBS News about what had happened to them, they weren't suing.
I don't just asking.
Yeah, I don't remember that they did or that they could really.
I can't answer that question.
Sorry, Scott.
No, that's all right.
It wasn't that good a one.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate all your stuff.
I'm glad that you let us reprint yet antiwar dot com.
It's always great.
And this one especially.
So really appreciate that.
And your time on the show.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Have a great weekend.
You too, man.
All right, you guys, that's Brett Wilkins.
He's at Common Dreams at Counterpunch and also here at antiwar dot com.
Veterans exposed in Cold War bioweapons testing still awaiting answers.
The Scott Horton Show, antiwar radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org.
And Libertarian Institute dot org.
