All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And our next guest is Dr. Meryl Nass.
She's a doctor of internal medicine and an expert on bioterrorism, biodefense, anthrax, and anthrax vaccine injuries.
She's testified before Congress on the subjects of Gulf War illness, anthrax vaccines, and bioterrorism.
Her blog and anthrax information websites can be found at anthraxvaccine.org.
And, in fact, you'll find a link there to the blog as well.
That's anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com.
Welcome back to the show, Meryl.
How are you?
Hi, I'm good, thanks.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Great.
So, listen, mostly I wanted to ask about the anthrax case, but it just occurred to me that I'd like to ask you about the Gulf War syndrome, I think, or illnesses.
I think the last time we spoke we discussed this just a little bit, but this seemed to me to be a pretty big deal in the 1990s, although it was mostly dismissed by the government as an imagined thing or not really a big deal.
I don't know if anybody ever narrowed down various causes, but there were, I think, more than 10,000 or 20,000 first Gulf War veterans who came down with some pretty serious illnesses.
I wonder what you can tell us about the possible role in the anthrax vaccines in causing that.
A number of people have estimated over 200,000 veterans who deployed to the Gulf are affected.
Over 200,000?
Yes, about 30% of the 700,000 that were deployed are ill in one or more ways.
Actually, the way the syndrome is defined, you need at least two significant components of illness.
So fatigue, some mental confusion or memory loss, emotional disturbance, and chronic pain.
There's actually a scene in the movie Jarhead where they line up all the, I think, Marines and say, all right, everybody line up, take your anthrax vaccine.
If you don't get your anthrax vaccine, I guess they had the right to refuse in the movie anyway, but then you don't get to have your war.
You have to go back to the base or whatever, so everybody lined up and took the shot.
Well, in the United States for most of the time, except for two years, over the last 12 1⁄2 years, you were required to get the anthrax vaccine, and if you tried to refuse, you could be court-martialed, and at least hundreds of soldiers have been court-martialed, have had Article 15s and other punishments for refusing.
Now, the two-year period happened when I and a bunch of other people brought a lawsuit and showed that the vaccine had never been licensed properly.
It had never gone through the normal procedures at FDA.
There really wasn't good evidence that it worked or that it was safe, and so a judge basically pulled the license, but then FDA, without having the data that it needed, decided that, yes, the vaccine was safe and effective, and FDA is the agency that gets to make those decisions, and you're not allowed to look over their shoulder and say they don't have the right data in order to make those decisions.
So that happened about four years ago, and since then, again, all soldiers who deploy have to get anthrax vaccine and, by the way, smallpox vaccine as well, which was too toxic for civilians to take.
Well, now, we don't hear too much about any Gulf War II illness.
I guess I remember from right after the Iraq War started, maybe the first couple of years after the invasion, I heard a little bit about some possible Gulf War II-type illnesses, whether possible depleted uranium poisoning or who knows what.
Have there been any effects from the anthrax vaccines this time around, do you know?
Or any other of the noxious exposures that soldiers have to face.
Yeah, the firm hits and on and on, yeah.
It's hard to say.
When I testified at a Senate hearing on Gulf War syndrome in September 2007, one of the military physicians admitted to, when he was queried by the media, that 15% of people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan had undiagnosed illnesses.
So there may be, there's a good chance that there is a similar Gulf War syndrome happening now, but the government hasn't really released any statistics.
The data that we have on the illnesses is subsumed into data about which organs are affected.
So it's not the kind of information that you can use to figure out whether these people actually have an illness that meets the criteria that are already established to define Gulf War syndrome.
Also, we know that probably 25% or 30% of people coming back have had blunt head trauma, head injuries that may cause chronic problems and or PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.
So, again, any other illnesses are probably occurring at a lower level and are not being noted.
Another issue is that the VA system does not have a good way of identifying or treating veterans with Gulf War syndrome so that they don't have experts in it at the VA hospitals.
They don't have a meaningful definition or a meaningful, program that the VA has defined for Gulf War syndrome is basically give these veterans psychiatric drugs.
So since they don't have people who can identify and treat Gulf War syndrome throughout the VA system, they wouldn't probably be able to identify it in soldiers coming back now, even if they had it.
I interviewed a doctor who led a team that did a study about depleted uranium poisoning among the Iraqi population.
And I was asking him about, is this heavy metal poisoning or is it radiation poisoning?
Because it is depleted uranium after all, like heavy.
And he says, and there's natural uranium in the ground all over the earth anyway that we're exposed to.
And he said what he thinks that they found out is that it's the combination of the two, because once you're poisoned with the tiny little depleted uranium dust inside your cells, then it acts as a little antenna and basically amplifies or collects or whatever the natural radiation in the environment.
And so it magnifies the effect that we all have of regular radiation in our daily lives.
But I guess I'm just bringing that up as kind of another thing that, you know, I guess some European scientists will do some work and try to figure out, but that the U.S. government doesn't seem to have the will to do the research and take care of the veterans at all.
Exactly.
And they would prefer to bury what is known.
So I would say that you have the toxicity of uranium as a heavy metal.
So even if it was all uranium-238 and it wasn't radioactive, that still is toxic to the kidneys and to some other organs.
In addition, it's unclear how much radiation you're getting.
Now depleted uranium is supposed to have had half the radiation removed.
But in fact, when European scientists studied some of the depleted uranium that was available, I think from the Bosnia war, they found that there were radioactive isotopes that should not have been present.
And it turned out that the United States government was mixing waste products, highly radioactive waste products from nuclear power plants or the production of nuclear weapons in with depleted uranium.
So there were additional, even more toxic radioactive isotopes in the mix.
And this was probably not mixed evenly throughout all the depleted uranium.
So some areas may have a lot more of this material than others.
It's kind of like Vietnam.
We're worried about our soldiers who came back after the Vietnam war and were exposed to Agent Orange.
And they have a variety of illnesses.
And in fact, the government is compensating many of them for illnesses related to Agent Orange.
But we left a lot more Agent Orange on the ground in Vietnam.
And Vietnam has had all sorts of children with birth defects.
But we only use it in South Vietnam, not in the north.
So Vietnamese scientists have been able to compare cities in the north and the south where the north was not exposed at all, and the south was very highly exposed and showed very significant illnesses, and in particular, serious birth defects in people who are exposed.
So it's very likely that the Iraqis have much more exposure to this material than we had.
We were there for a few days, a few weeks.
They're living in it.
So certain contaminated areas.
I'm sorry, Marilyn.
I'm going to have to stop there.
It's Dr. Meryl Nass.
We're going to go out to this break, come back, and talk about the anthrax letters after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Dr. Meryl Nass.
Her website is anthraxvaccine.org and anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com.
And that was extremely informative about the Gulf War illness, and I'm sorry we have to leave that part of it there, but that wasn't even the plan.
The plan really was to ask you about the mystery of the anthrax letters of the fall of 2001, and it's still a mystery, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
All right.
Well, I guess according to the government, the latest they told us it was this one guy who killed himself, Bruce Ivins, and that's the end of that.
Is that the end of that for you?
No, of course not.
The FBI basically provided no evidence implicating Bruce Ivins.
There was no physical evidence.
They didn't find any spores on his person, in his house, in his car.
They couldn't even pin him at the spot where they said the letter was mailed at the right time.
There were hundreds of people that had access to the flask which contained the cumulative preparation of spores that had been made both at Fort Detrick and at Dugway Proving Ground that he had collected.
So there were hundreds of people who had, and he had shared those spores with a number of places as well.
So there were a large number of people who had access to the same spores.
They never pinned it on him.
They were working very hard to try to break down several different scientists at Fort Detrick.
There had been a former anthrax scientist who the FBI had gone after several years earlier who had started drinking heavily and died while he was still in his 40s.
And then, of course, they went after Stephen Hatchell for a few years.
But he was a tough guy, and he went after them back and won a 5.8 million settlement because he was improperly investigated and improperly treated.
His name was splashed all over the newspapers, and they didn't have any direct evidence linking him to the crime either.
So then they went on to some more people, and when Ivins finally committed suicide or perhaps was helped to commit suicide, not clear at all why, when he was under 24-7 surveillance by the FBI from the house next door, somehow he was able to overdose and nobody found out about it for at least a day and a half.
So Ivins died, and two or three days after he died, they declared the case closed.
They had solved it.
Ivins was unfortunately the weakest link in the chain of people that the FBI had tried to destroy in order to come to some conclusion so that they wouldn't have to investigate the actual facts of the case.
Now, who was this guy that they were looking at before they invented the term person of interest for Stephen Hatfill?
Oh, gosh, what was his name?
I can't remember it right now, but he used to work at Fort Detrick also.
He has published papers on anthrax.
My blog discusses him, but I don't remember his name at the moment.
Okay, well, we'll get back to that.
We'll find the link by the time we post this thing.
Okay.
Then there was another fellow, an Egyptian, who had worked at Fort Detrick as a virologist, and somebody sent a letter to the FBI implicating him early on.
Well, wasn't there something about that letter must have been mailed right around the same time as the anthrax itself?
Exactly.
So it was probably mailed by the perpetrators or someone associated with the perpetrators because it was mailed early.
But, again, the FBI didn't even let Assad keep a copy.
It was Ayad Assad, the man who was implicated.
They didn't let him keep a copy of the letter.
They've never shown the letter.
They don't want anyone to be able to examine the envelope, might tell us if it was the same handwriting or the same paper as the materials that were sent with anthrax in them.
So we don't know much about how he was implicated, just what he recalled of the letter.
Now— Oh, the other fellow, the other former Fort Detrick, his name was Perry Micasel.
Yes, M-I-K-E-S-E-L-L, I believe.
Well, yeah, there's a lot I don't know about this.
I guess I just want to ask you, do you have suspicions, or is it okay to ask you what you think happened here?
Are you still—or just open mind, just the facts, Joe Friday kind of thing, or what?
Well, I don't know what happened.
I don't have any direct evidence.
But what I do know is that the government spent a lot of years, many millions of dollars, many thousands of hours of FBI agent time pursuing all the wrong leads and ignoring meaningful leads.
The other thing they never did, and it's very clear if you read their final report from last February, is they never entertained the possibility that maybe more than one person was involved, even though they weren't able to link Ivins to the right places at the right times.
They didn't have physical evidence.
So even if you were involved, you would think there would have to be more people involved.
But they never looked into that.
So they chose what not to investigate.
They carefully crafted a report that was just designed to fit all the pieces that fit, we talk about.
And all the pieces that don't fit, they ignored.
Clearly, somebody in the government—I mean, the FBI isn't that stupid.
Somebody made a decision not to find the answer, that the FBI was not going to find the answer.
Well, they also made a decision to pin it on Saddam Hussein.
It started in the Times of London where it said, The Israeli Mossad tells us that they saw Iraqi intelligence hand a flask full of anthrax to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker.
Yes, which is so ridiculous.
I mean, when you look at everything else that exists about the relationship between the Saddam Hussein government and Al-Qaeda, etc., they were enemies.
And whether these alleged hijackers—there's not even good evidence that they were the people who crashed the planes.
We haven't seen their names on the manifest.
Some of these people have allegedly been spotted alive in other countries since then.
So, you know, where's the evidence that a bunch of Yemenis and Saudis crashed a bunch of planes for Al-Qaeda?
There really isn't.
And some of these people whose lives have been discussed in the media did not have religious lives.
You know, they were drinkers and carousers.
Well, but the motive was never religion anyway.
That was the big lie.
But back to the anthrax thing.
I wonder, you know, you say they just excluded the possibility over at the FBI that more than one person could have done it.
But do you exclude the possibility that one person could have done it?
And it sounds like the kind of thing that would have taken the cooperation of several at least.
And I'm sorry, we're almost out of time.
Yeah, it certainly would have been a lot easier if different people did it.
And then you wouldn't have to have one person in the right place at the right time for sending all these letters.
It would make a lot of sense if material that had already been made for a large program, probably a national program, had just been handed over to somebody to use in the letters, rather than assuming that that person made this very highly weaponized, very pure, very professional product.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry that we're up against the hard brick and all out of time here.
But I encourage everyone to go digging through your website and your blog, anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com and anthraxvaccine.org for Dr. Meryl Nass and all of your research and work there.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Thanks for your interest in this continuing problem.
Take care.
