The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments

[vi-va]

How Long will the Evil of Fort Detrick Sustain? !
(Li Yang, Consul General of China in Rio de Janeiro)
2020/06/05

The Fort Detrick Biological Warfare Laboratories, located in Maryland, USA, namely the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, has recently been featured in a variety of media reports around the world for its ugly and wicked conducts.


Fort Detrick inherited the "devil's legacy". The infamous Unit 731 biological force was part of the old Imperial Japanese Army. During the war of Japanese aggression against China in the 1930s and 1940s, the unit conducted horrifying experiments on humans in northeast China. Numerous experiments involving pathogens, poison gas, pressure chambers and vivisection were conducted on captured soldiers and civilians, including Chinese, Soviets, Koreans, Mongolians, Americans and Britons. An estimated 3,000 to 8,000 people were used as guinea pigs and killed in those experiments! In addition, between 1940 and 1942, Unit 731 carried out large-scale germ warfare in the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang, Hunan, Jiangxi, Shandong, Guangdong and Yunnan, causing significant casualties among Chinese combatants and civilians as well. Surprisingly, however, biochemists at Fort Detrick started in October 1945 frequent contacts with key members of Unit 731, including Lieutenant General Ishii Shiro, head of the unit, in order to obtain the details of those experiments. Ishii and his staff turned over all related documents and records to the US military in exchange for protection from war crime prosecution in the Tokyo Trial. Written records now kept in the US National Archives and the Library and Museum of Harry S. Truman tell how the US has enhanced its biological warfare capabilities through the dirty deal, covered up the brutal crimes of the Japanese militarism and helped war criminals get away with their crimes. Ishii was later even hired by the US as a biological weapons consultant!


Fort Detrick bred a greater evil. According to files kept in the US National Archives, from 1946 to 1949, about 60 interviews were conducted with former Unit 731 members at Fort Detrick. American journalist John Powell wrote in his book, "Clearly, U.S. biological warfare experts learned a lot from their Japanese counterparts. While we do not yet known exactly how much this information (provided by the Japanese) advanced the American (biological weapon) program, we have the Fort Detrick doctors' testimony that it was 'invaluable'. And it is known that some of the biological weapons developed later were at least similar to ones that had been part of the Japanese project." In early 1952, the US military conducted germ warfare in DPRK and northeast China with germ bombs loaded with plague- or cholera-infected fleas, ants and flies. The International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China confirmed through fact-finding investigation that the methods used by the US military had been developed on the basis of the Japanese bacteriological warfare methods. At the time, insiders also disclosed that, with the assistance of Ishii Shiro and others, the US conducted germ warfare experiments on prisoners of war in the prison camp in Geoje-do, victimizing up to 3,000 people a day! During the Vietnam War, American troops sprayed defoliant Agent Orange over 10% of land in southern Vietnam, harming 4.8 million Vietnamese then and still haunting many now. And Agent Orange was developed by the Fort Detrick Biological Warfare Laboratories.


How long will the evil of Fort Detrick sustain? In September 1971, in view of the great threat that bacteriological and biological weapons pose to human society and the natural environment, 12 countries submitted a draft convention to ban biological weapons to the 26th session of the UN General Assembly. The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was open for signature in April 1972 and entered into force in March 1975, which now has 183 states parties. The Convention prohibits and requires the destruction of all bacteriological (biological) and toxin weapons. As BWC lacks a verification mechanism, the international community has been working for decades to negotiate a verification protocol. The US has, however, been single-handedly blocking the important negotiation on ground of 'threat to American national security'. Why is the US doing so? Will the US implement the BWC in good faith and abandon the biological weapons program it has been pursuing for many years? Disclosures by military and intelligence units of Russia and some other countries on various occasions suggest that the US has set up more than 200 dual-use biolabs around the world in the name of fighting biological and chemical terrorism and that the possibility of these labs developing biological weapons cannot be ruled out. The sins of Fort Detrick go far beyond that. From July to August 2019, due to two virus leaks, Fort Detrick, where several virus leaks had happened before, was shut down after US CDC assessment. Soon after that, cases of pneumonia of unknown cause appeared in the State of Maryland, followed by unprecedented level of influenza activity throughout the country, which in reality included a large number of COVID-19 cases. The US government acted quickly to delete news reports of the leaks and closure. Now more and more people suspect an association between the COVID-19 outbreak and Fort Detrick Biological Warfare Laboratories and strongly demand an international investigation, which has been refused by the US.


It is time for Fort Detrick to be held to account for the heinous historical crimes and the real international concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic!

http://riodejaneiro.china-consulate.org/pot/gdxw/t1786000.htm

 

[vi-va]

The Fort Detrick horror: a closer look at the US’ largest biochemical weapons research center

File photo: VCG

The Trump administration seems to turn a blind eye to growing international appeals for an investigation into an infectious disease research lab under the US Army, which once again shows its irresponsibility and arrogance on the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, observers said.

The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, is causing wide anger for its reopening in April regardless of the US and global citizens' opposition after months of shutdown for reported "structural defects."

The public doubts the possible link between the institute and a series of deadly disease outbreaks in this country, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has caused some 103,000 deaths as of Thursday local time.

Experts slammed the US for its evasive, ostrich-like attitude towards the rising voices calling for a USAMRIID investigation, while slandering a laboratory in China's Wuhan city for "originating" the coronavirus.

Only an open, transparent investigation can be a persuasive response for the US, said Ni Feng, director of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"The US' current attitude reflects its deep-rooted double standard," Ni told the Global Times Thursday.

A spotty history

USAMRIID, the US largest research center for biochemical weapons, has long been enmeshed in scandal.

The institute once had shady connections with Unit 731, a Japanese Imperial Army unit notorious for its atrocious and lethal chemical experimentation on Chinese and Russian people during World War II, said a Chinese biosecurity expert who spoke on anonymity.

The US had a backdoor deal with then detainees of Unit 731 after the war, granting immunity from prosecution to many of the unit's members in exchange for its biological warfare and experiment data for USAMRIID, the expert told the Global Times Friday.

For years the public had known little about what was going on inside USAMRIID. Its nearby citizens, however, had made frequent accusations and claims, saying their health was largely harmed by its biochemical pollution.

In 2006, a petition that asked local senators to take a further look at a possible "cancer cluster" near the institute got more than 14,000 signs on US petition website Change.org.

Randy White, a resident who initiated the petition, denounced the "reckless practices" of the US army who "buried dangerous chemical weapons" at Fort Detrick near their home, which he said had made over 2,500 people, including his wife and daughter, die from "a rare form of cancer."

All this time, the US army has continued to block calls for accountability, dismissing hundreds of health claims from sick residents, White wrote in the petition.

"They've created a major health emergency, and they're refusing to acknowledge it, even as people continue to get sick and die," he added. "That's unacceptable."

White has not yet replied to the Global Times' interview request as of Friday.

More suspicion and blame on USAMRIID occurred when an unprecedented e-cigarette or vaping product use associated lung injury (EVALI) broke out in its surrounding areas in August 2019.

According to researchers who examined samples of lung tissue from 17 EVALI patients, all the samples implied the people "had been exposed to toxic chemicals," reported the New York Times in October.

Days before the institution's temporary shutdown in 2019, a respiratory illness was reported on June 30 at a community one hour's drive away. The Greenspring Retirement Community in Fairfax County, Virginia, had had 63 infected cases of the disease and three deaths by July 15, said local health authorities.

In an email response to the Global Times on Friday, Fairfax County Health Department said there had been an established etiology for the outbreak of the illness. "Testing of specimens collected showed several bacteria, including Haemophilus influenzae (H. flu) and rhinovirus," it wrote, saying these were "the cause of the common cold."

Nonetheless, this epidemic has recently led to speculation on its probable relevance to USAMRIID on US social media aimed at the COVID-19 pandemic. A Twitter user named "The Paper" posted in March that his bet of the virus escaping from the institute was "a 50 percent or higher chance."

Similarly, in the past flu season in the US, which has reportedly infected over 32 million people and caused 18,000 deaths, some of the deaths were acknowledged by CDC Director Michael Redfield as COVID-19 caused, which has brought USAMRIID greater controversy.

"...We have reasons to ask the US government to publish the real reason for the close of Fort Detrick, to clarify whether the laboratory is the research unit for the new coronavirus and whether there is a virus leak," wrote netizen "B.Z." on a White House website, petitioning for more USAMRIID information.

B.Z., as well as many other US netizens, have been pointing the finger at the US information cover-up of USAMRIID, saying "a large number of English news reports about the close of Fort Detrick were deleted, displaying '404 not found.'"

A few Chinese experts told the Global Times they have similar experiences when searching USAMRIID-related information on Google. The Global Times reporter also failed to access some pages of the institute.

The Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., the US, December 4, 2019 (photo: Xinhua)

Secrecy and deception

The US army and intelligence departments have long practiced secrecy and deception, which run counter to the principles of transparency and authenticity, the anonymous bio-security expert reached by the Global Times said.

"Worse still, they have the 'power' to bypass the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) restrictions and public scrutiny," said the expert, adding that the US has been obstructing negotiations for a BWC protocol with a verification regime for some 20 years.

While keeping outside international norms, the US has been maintaining the world's largest bio-defense systems, increasing bio-security risks to the people of its country and the world, he added.

A previous investigation reveals that "hundreds of lab mistakes and safety near-miss incidents have occurred" at US biological institutes in recent years, reported USA Today in 2015.

The safety and management of the biological labs erected in its homeland and overseas have been a great global concern as multiple complaints have been filed against these biological labs for causing health problems, said Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of the China Foreign Affairs University.

"The US on one hand strains every nerve to keep its biological labs secret, while trying its best to peep into other country's biological labs," Li told the Global Times Thursday, adding that he thinks a purpose of the US proposal to investigate Wuhan Institute of Virology is to obtain information it is interested in.

The US established a dozen biological laboratories around Russia to maintain its dominant position in the world during geopolitical competition by threatening Russia and China, Li said.

"It is fair to say that the US has been putting its global dominance over the safety of human beings, including its own citizens," he said.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1189967.shtml

 

[vi-va]

The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments
Today, it’s a cutting-edge lab. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. government’s darkest experiments.

In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them “double, triple and quadruple” doses of LSD for 77 days straight. No one knows what became of the victims. They may have died without knowing they were part of the CIA’s highly secretive program to develop ways to control minds—a program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, Fort Detrick.

Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. Seventy-six years ago, however, when the Army selected Detrick as the place to develop its super-secret plans to wage germ warfare, the area around the base looked much different. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. That’s because Detrick, still thriving today as the Army’s principal base for biological research and now encompassing nearly 600 buildings on 13,000 acres, was for years the nerve center of the CIA’s hidden chemical and mind control empire.

Detrick is today one of the world’s cutting-edge laboratories for research into toxins and antitoxins, the place where defenses are developed against every plague, from crop fungus to Ebola. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. For decades, though, much of what went on at the base was a closely held secret. Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973. Some of its secrets have been revealed in declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations. Together, those sources reveal Detrick’s central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders.

In 1942, alarmed by reports that Japanese forces were waging germ warfare in China, the Army decided to launch a secret program to develop biological weapons. It hired a University of Wisconsin biochemist, Ira Baldwin, to run the program and asked him to find a site for a new bio-research complex. Baldwin chose a mostly abandoned National Guard base below Catoctin Mountain called Detrick Field. On March 9, 1943, the Army announced that it had renamed the field Camp Detrick, designated it as headquarters of the Army Biological Warfare Laboratories and purchased several adjacent farms to provide extra room and privacy.

After World War II, Detrick faded in importance. The reason was simple: The United States had nuclear weapons, so developing biological ones no longer seemed urgent. As the Cold War began, however, two seemingly unrelated developments on opposite sides of the world stunned the newly created Central Intelligence Agency and gave Detrick a new mission.

The first was the show trial of the Roman Catholic Primate of Hungary Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty for treason in 1949. At the trial, the cardinal appeared disoriented, spoke in a monotone and confessed to crimes he had evidently not committed. Then, after the Korean War ended, it was revealed many American prisoners had signed statements criticizing the United States and, in some cases, confessing to war crimes. The CIA came up with the same explanation for both: brainwashing. Communists, the CIA concluded, must have developed a drug or technique that enabled them to control human minds. No evidence of this ever emerged, but the CIA fell hard for the fantasy.

In the spring of 1949 the Army created a small, super-secret team of chemists at Camp Detrick called the Special Operations Division. Its assignment was to find military uses for toxic bacteria. The coercive use of toxins was a new field, and chemists at the Special Operations Division had to decide how to begin their research.

At the same time, CIA had just established its own corps of chemical magicians. CIA officers in Europe and Asia were regularly capturing suspected enemy agents and wanted to develop new ways to draw prisoners in interrogation away from their identities, induce them to reveal secrets and perhaps even program them to commit acts against their will.Allen Dulles, who ran the CIA’s covert-operations directorate and would soon be promoted to direct the agency, considered his mind control project—first named Bluebird, then Artichoke, then MK-ULTRA—to beof supreme importance, the difference between the survival and extinction of the United States.

In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control. The man he chose, Sidney Gottlieb, was not part of the silver-spoon aristocracy from which most officers of the early CIA were recruited, but a 33-year-old Jew from an immigrant family who limped and stuttered. He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats.

Gottlieb wanted to use Detrick’s assets to propel his mind control project to new heights. He asked Dulles to negotiate an accord that would formalize the connection between the military and the CIA in this pursuit. Under the arrangement’s provisions, according to a later report, “CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for CIA use.”

Taking advantage of this arrangement, Gottlieb created a hidden CIA enclave inside Camp Detrick. His handful of CIA chemists worked so closely with their comrades in the Special Operations Division that they became a single unit.

Some scientists outside the tight-knit group suspected what was happening. “Do you know what a ‘self-contained, off-the-shelf operation’ means?” one of them asked years later. “The CIA was running one in my lab. They were testing psychochemicals and running experiments in my labs and weren’t telling me.”

Gottlieb searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted in their place. He tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electroshock or sensory deprivation. In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky.

In Europe and East Asia, Gottlieb’s victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. One of those centers, built in the basement of a former villa in the German town of Kronberg, might have been the first secret CIA prison. While CIA scientists and their former Nazi comrades sat before a stone fireplace discussing the techniques of mind control, prisoners in basement cells were being prepared as subjects in brutal and sometimes fatal experiments.

These were the most gruesome experiments the U.S. government ever conducted on human beings. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. In another, captured North Koreans were given depressant drugs, then dosed with potent stimulants and exposed to intense heat and electroshock while they were in the weakened state of transition. These experiments destroyed many minds and caused an unknown number of deaths. Many of the potions, pills and aerosols administered to victims were created at Detrick.

One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. The CIA called it suicide. Olson’s family believes he was thrown from the window to prevent him from revealing what was brewing inside Camp Detrick.

A decade of intense experiments taught Gottlieb that there are indeed ways to destroy a human mind. He never, however, found a way to implant a new mind in the resulting void. The grail he sought eluded him. MK-ULTRA ended in failure in the early 1960s. “The conclusion from all these activities,” he admitted afterward, “was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.”

Nonetheless Fort Detrick, as it was renamed in 1956, remained Gottlieb’s chemical base. After the end of MK-ULTRA, he used it to develop and store the CIA’s arsenal of poisons. In his freezers, he kept biological agents that could cause diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis and anthrax as well as a number of organic toxins, including snake venom and paralytic shellfish poison. He developed poisons intended to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.

During this period, Fort Detrick’s public profile rose uncomfortably. No one knew the CIA was making poisons there, but its role as the country’s principal center for research into biological and anti-crop warfare became clear. From mid-1959 to mid-1960, protesters convened once a week at the gate. “No rationalization of ‘defense’ can justify the evil of mass destruction and disease,” they wrote in a statement.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered all government agencies to destroy their supplies of biological toxins. Army scientists complied. Gottlieb hesitated. He had spent years assembling this deadly pharmacopeia and did not want to destroy it. After meeting with CIA Director Richard Helms, he reluctantly agreed that he had no choice.

One batch, a supremely potent shellfish poison known as saxitoxin, escaped destruction, though. Two canisters containing nearly 11 grams of saxitoxin—enough to kill 55,000 people—were in Gottlieb’s depot at Fort Detrick. Before Army technicians could remove them, two officers from the Special Operations Division packed them into the trunk of a car and drove them to the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington, where the CIA maintained a small chemical warehouse. One of Gottlieb’s aides later testified that he had ordered this operation without informing his boss. By the time the saxitoxin was discovered and destroyed in 1975, Gottlieb had retired.

Gottlieb was the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century—unless there was someone else who conducted brutal experiments across three continents and had a license to kill issued by the U.S. government. Detrick, his indispensable base, still contains untold stories of the cruelty that began there—just 50 miles from the center of the government that has kept them sealed for decades.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/15/cia-fort-detrick-stephen-kinzer-228109

 

[Arsalan]

@vi-va do not start multiple threads on same topic. Will need to delete these next time. Please make one thread and share all relevant news links/articles there. Preferably, try to find an existing thread suitable for that topic.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

More suspicion and blame on USAMRIID occurred when an unprecedented e-cigarette or vaping product use associated lung injury (EVALI) broke out in its surrounding areas in August 2019.

Here are the "surrounding areas". Notice Maryland with Fort Detrick is not one of them.

The vaping cases were first noted in Indiana and Illinois not Maryland.

 

[vi-va]

@vi-va do not start multiple threads on same topic. Will need to delete these next time. Please make one thread and share all relevant news links/articles there. Preferably, try to find an existing thread suitable for that topic.

Sure. Thanks for reminding me.

 

[vi-va]

US should let WHO in, to find out what happened in Fort Detrick

 

[bshifter]

I have seen the CIA mind control experiments on youtube, one word comes to mind: crazyiness

 

[SEAISI]

Here are the "surrounding areas". Notice Maryland with Fort Detrick is not one of them.
View attachment 653329

The vaping cases were first noted in Indiana and Illinois not Maryland.

The info you used is from Dec 2019. Here is one that shows wide spread "influenza" in Maryland back in Oct 2019, 2 months after closure of Fort Detrick

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

The info you used is from Dec 2019. Here is one that shows wide spread "influenza" in Maryland back in Oct 2019, 2 months after closure of Fort Detrick
View attachment 709229

Ok, so now you are saying ignore the vaping stuff and just look at the flu.