http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34608
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
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IN THE MILITARY
Mystery deaths fuel vaccine anxieties
Pentagon accused of mislabeling adverse reactions, won't share autopsy reports
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Posted: September 16, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
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By Timothy W. Maier
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© 2003 News World Communications Inc.
Since Persian Gulf War II began about 6,000 soldiers have been shipped home
for recovery. Of these, 1,200 were wounded in combat.
Many of the others consider themselves part of an army of "walking dead" -
troops who appear to be so physically and mentally exhausted that the
military has no recourse but to discharge them.
Why they are ill has become a matter of intense debate inside the Pentagon.
Some claim a series of anthrax and smallpox vaccinations made them so
gravely ill that they have trouble breathing or sleeping and have
experienced a loss of memory. Others have been diagnosed with lupus and
heart problems.
At least six died shortly after rolling up their sleeves to receive the
anthrax and smallpox shots. But the Pentagon dismissed related claims with
such regularity and intimidation that many GIs tell Insight they no longer
report the illness. They are told to "suck it up" and move on.
"Don't blame the vaccinations" has been a Pentagon mantra since it began
inoculating nearly half a million troops almost two years ago and pumping
millions of dollars into BioPort Corp., the Lansing, Mich.-based sole
supplier of the anthrax vaccine.
But an alarming outbreak of more than 100 suspected pneumonia cases among
Gulf War II veterans serving in Iraq and southwestern Asia has drawn the
ire of Congress.
Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., held eight congressional hearings on the safety
of the vaccination while chairman of the House Government Reform
subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International
Relations, and issued a seething report that found serious safety and
regulatory problems with the vaccine. Now Shays is asking again, "Could
these vaccinations be hurting our troops?"
The Pentagon reluctantly admitted that two Army soldiers - Spc. Joshua M.
Neusche, 20, of Montreal, Mo., and Sgt. Michael L. Tosto, 24, of Apex, N.C.
- died from complications arising from pneumonia on July 12 and June 17,
respectively. The Army is investigating their deaths. Between 1998 and
2001, the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine
reported 17 soldiers died from complications of pneumonia. The Pentagon has
confirmed that this year at least 17 others have been placed on respirators
but insists the vaccinations have nothing to do with the deaths or illness.
The two pneumonia-related deaths reported recently apparently are an
understatement. Family members of Army Spc. Zeferino E. Culunga, 20, of
Bellville, Texas, and Staff Sgt. Richard S. Eaton, 37, of Guilford, Conn.,
claim their sons died in August after being diagnosed with pneumonia. A
third death involved Spc. Rachael Lacy of Lynwood, Ill. According to her
autopsy, "smallpox and anthrax vaccinations" contributed to her death on
April 4 after she first had been diagnosed with pneumonia.
When the victims' families reached out to Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, he ordered a team of military investigators to Germany and Iraq
to review the recent pneumonia cases.
"We as a family are concerned that we are not being told the truth," wrote
the family of Spc. Neusche in an Aug. 12 letter to Rumsfeld. Like the other
families, they asked to see medical records in an effort to get a second
opinion on the cause of death. Culunga died of acute leukemia. Lacy was
never deployed, so she is not considered part of the cluster of pneumonia
cases.
"It is our right to receive truthful, honest and unfiltered answers just as
the military required truth, honesty and commitment from our son," says the
Neusche-family letter to Rumsfeld.
But the Army is not investigating the deaths of Culunga or Lacy, and is
awaiting autopsy results for Eaton.
Besides those who died from pneumonia-like complications, families of six
others claim the vaccinations contributed to their sons' deaths - including
two who committed suicide because, say the complaints, the vaccinations
made them so seriously ill that it destroyed their will to live.
While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has acknowledged the nature of
these deaths, the Pentagon has not because military doctors have refused to
confirm that the vaccines contributed to the deaths of any of these victims.
Despite mounting criticism, the Pentagon repeatedly claimed the pneumonia
cases had nothing to do with the anthrax or smallpox vaccinations.
"In 200 years of vaccination, no vaccine has ever been shown to cause
pneumonia, and there are multiple reasons to believe that the vaccines have
no role," Col. John D. Grabenstein, deputy director for clinical operations
at the Military Vaccine Agency, told United Press International.
Could Grabenstein be wrong? During congressional hearings on the
vaccination program in 1999, Pentagon officials acknowledged there had been
three reports of serious illness coincidentally associated with the
vaccination involving hypersensitivity pneumonia. A study last year in
Pharmacoepidemiolgy and Drug Safety said the vaccine was the cause of
pneumonia in two soldiers.
But Grabenstein dismisses such evidence. In fact, in his recent study of
vaccination patients published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, or JAMA, he insists there have been no deaths related to the
smallpox shot. He ignores the Lacy case because she was never deployed
overseas.
"Totally bogus," says Meryl Nass, a civilian doctor who has treated
soldiers who became ill after receiving the vaccinations. "I e-mailed JAMA
a copy of the death certificate for Lacy. I asked him why he didn't report
it. He said, 'We don't accept diagnoses from outside the military.' The
Mayo Clinic [in Rochester, Minn.] did the autopsy. They don't believe the
Mayo Clinic!"
In fact, Lacy's death is not even listed in the military's Noteworthy
Adverse Events report - an omission that critics suggest smells of cover-up.
"My concern regarding the Lacy case is that it was parsed to death in an
effort to keep it out of the official reports," says Jeffrey Sartin, a
former U.S. Air Force doctor who now works in the Infectious Disease
Department at the Gunderson Clinic in La Crosse, Wis. "If it could not be
proven with 100 percent certainty that vaccines caused her illness, it was
not going to be reported as such."
While Sartin says it should have been reported, Nass wonders if Grabenstein
may have a serious conflict of interest that has prevented him from
reporting such incidents. She notes Grabenstein sits on a number of
pharmaceutical boards and is well known for advocating legislation that
would allow pharmacists to administer vaccinations.
Some civilian doctors charge that the Pentagon mislabeled these cases in an
effort to avoid making adverse-reaction reports that the military keeps to
monitor vaccination programs.
Indeed, Lacy may not be the only death overlooked. The death of NBC
correspondent David Bloom, who died of a blood clot after receiving
vaccination shots, as well as the death of a 55-year-old Missouri National
Guardsman who had a heart attack under similar circumstances, also were
disregarded.
"I am not sure they had pneumonia," Nass says. "They are trying to obscure
it. They have something else in the lungs and they're not telling us what
it is. The Pentagon knows something, but they are not sharing it. And if it
isn't pneumonia, what is it?"
What is known is that about one-half of these military patients with
pneumonia also had elevated eosinophils in their blood. Eosinophils are
responsible for allergic reactions and also help defend against parasites,
says Sartin, who worked with a team of doctors that treated Lacy.
"Elevated eosinophils were seen in the blood count of Rachael Lacy before
she died, and both her autopsy and the heart biopsy of a servicemember who
had myopericarditis showed eosinophilic infiltration of heart tissue,"
reports Sartin. "This suggests to me the possibility of an immune-mediated
reaction to something such as a vaccine."
Another possibility, he says, could be Churg-Strauss syndrome, an
autoimmune disease in which "you get asthma, pulmonary infiltrates [in
other words, the chest X-ray can look like pneumonia] and eosinophilia."
Sartin reports this can lead to vasculitis, which is what killed Bioport
employee Richard Dunn. A coroner claimed the anthrax vaccine contributed to
Dunn's death.
"If we could get the test results on these patients, and in particular the
autopsy results on Neusche and Tosto, we might be able to draw some
conclusions about what caused their illnesses and whether it was
vaccine-related," he believes.
Pointing to the sharing of information on the SARS outbreak and how that
helped civilian doctors diagnose and treat the disease, Sartin argues that
the same could be done with data about the sick soldiers. However, for now,
the military would rather keep those records under wraps, which puzzles
Sartin.
"All of us close to the [Lacy] case, including her family members, wonder
why a perfectly healthy young woman, in the top 10 percent of her PT
[physical-training] testing, would get sick right after her vaccinations
without any other explanation and the authorities would not consider that
the vaccine probably, or at least possibly, caused her illness and death."
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Timothy W. Maier is a writer for Insight Magazine.
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http://www.rense.com/general40/secret.htm
Horrifying US Secret Weapon Unleashed In Baghdad
Exclusive By Bill Dash
c. 2003 All Rights Reserved
8-25-03
A nightmarish US super weapon reportedly was employed by American ground
forces during chaotic street fighting in Baghdad. The secret tank-mounted
weapon was witnessed in all its frightening power by Majid al-Ghazali, a
seasoned Iraqi infantryman who described the device and its gruesome
effects as unlike anything he had ever encountered in his lengthy military
service.
The disturbing revelation is yet another piece of cinematic evidence
brought back from postwar Iraq by intrepid filmmaker Patrick Dillon. In the
film, al-Ghazali, whose english is less than fluent, describes the weapon
as reminiscent of a flame thrower, only immensely more powerful.
It is unclear what principle the weapon is based on. Searching for a
description, al-Ghazali said it appeared to be shooting concentrated
lightning bolts rather than just ordinary flames. Drawing on his many years
as a professional engineer, al-Ghazali speculates that radiation of some
kind probably figures into the weapon's hideous capabilities.
Like all men in Saddam's Iraq, al-Ghazali was compelled to serve in the
Iraqi equivalent of the Army National Guard and fought in three wars over
the past thirty-odd years. Via email, he told me he has seen virtually
every type of conventional weapon employed in battle, and is well
acquainted with their effects on people and machines, but nothing in his
extensive combat experience prepared him for the shock of what he saw in
Baghdad on April 12th.
On that date, al-Ghazali and his family sheltered in their house as a
fierce street battle erupted in his neighborhood. In the midst of the
fighting, he noticed that the Americans had called up an oddly configured
tank. Then to his amazement the tank suddenly let loose a blinding stream
of what seemed like fire and lightning, engulfing a large passenger bus and
three automobiles. Within seconds the bus had become semi-molten, sagging
"like a wet rag" as he put it. He said the bus rapidly melted under this
withering blast, shrinking until it was a twisted blob about the dimensions
of a VW bug. As if that were not bizarre enough, al-Ghazali explicitly
describes seeing numerous human bodies shriveled to the size of newborn
babies. By the time local street fighting ended that day, he estimates
between 500 and 600 soldiers and civilians had been cooked alive as a
result of the mysterious tank-mounted device. In a city littered everywhere
with burned-out civilian and military vehicles, US forces were abnormally
scrupulous about immediately detailing bulldozers and shovel crews to the
job of burying the grim wreckage. Nevertheless, telltale remnants remained
as Dillon found when al-Ghazali later took him to the site. Dillon said
they easily uncovered large puddles of resolidified metal and mounds of
weird fibrous material that, al-Ghazali explained, were all that remained
of the vehicles' tires.
Dillon, who accumulated plenty of battlefield experience as a medic in
Viet-Nam, and has since covered a number of wars from Somalia to Kosovo,
told me that he has witnessed every kind of conventional ordnance that can
be used on humans and vehicles.
"I've seen a freaking smorgasbord of destruction in my life," he said,
"flame-throwers, napalm, white phosphorous, thermite, you name it. I know
of nothing short of an H-bomb that conceivably might cause a bus to
instantly liquefy or that can flash broil a human body down to the size of
an infant. God pity humanity if that thing is a preview of what's in store
for the 21st century."
For Majid al-Ghazali, images of the terrifying weapon and its victims haunt
his every day. In addition to his work as an engineer, he is also a highly
accomplished classical violinist, occupying the first chair in the Baghdad
Symphony. He is widely acknowledged as one of the preeminent violinists in
the Middle East. Besides his family, one of his greatest joys is teaching
at Baghdad's premier music conservatory.
Unfortunately, the conservatory was utterly destroyed. Yet somehow, despite
the war's horrors and its seemingly endless privations, he manages to
maintain a remarkably hopeful outlook. He recently informed me that the
Baghdad Symphony continues to exist and has been invited to perform in the
United States in December.
Copyright ©2003 - Bill Dash
See also associated article by Bill Dash... Iraqi Commander Swears He Saw
US Evacuate Saddam
Comment From Fred Gunn Hi Jeff, Found this article from Cox News published
on Thursday, August 15, 2002 and knew I had to send you this link:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/82658_micro15.shtml
It was truly terrifying reading the article on your newsite about Patrick
Dillon's far reaching journalism into the war in Iraq. There's a true hero
in my mind. The weapons described by Majid al-Ghazali would seem to me to
fit into the electromagnetic pulse weapons category. And then, these
weapons are mentioned in a New York Post article the day before the Cox
News article appeared, and President Bush speaks of using these pulse
weapons as a means to "disable Saddam (Hussein)'s entire command and
control structure."
Super surge protectors are being designed that would possibly block the
pulse of the weapon. I put the two together in my mind's eye and I saw the
opening scene from the Terminator movie. It had better be a brave new
world, with governments beginning to wield these sorts of weapons into our
battlefields now. Who knows where next. The Cox News article goes on to say
China, Great Britain and France are also experimenting with these arsenals.
No mention of Russia, though. Interesting.
Peace please,
Fred Gunn
San Diego Super-Secret Microwave Weapons May Be Used In Iraq
By George Edmonson
Cox News Service
August 15, 2002
WASHINGTON -- An army may still travel on its stomach, but a vital point of
attack these days is the brain -- the electronic brain.
With modern warfare so dependent on computers and communications devices, a
weapon that renders them useless could be invaluable.
And after decades of research, U.S. scientists and engineers may be close
to fielding an effective technology known as high-powered microwave weapons.
At least, that is the latest buzz. Recent articles have speculated
microwave weapons could be deployed if the United States invades Iraq. But
some experts -- including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- say
considerable work remains.
"It's been this elegant promise for decades that never quite seems to
happen," said John Alexander, author of "Future War: Non-Lethal Weapons in
Twenty-First Century Warfare" and a retired Army colonel who directed
non-lethal weapons development at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "The
check's always in the mail."
The concept behind high-powered microwave weapons is simple. A burst of
electromagnetic energy is created and directed at an enemy's electronics.
The force burns them out much like a lightning strike can destroy home
appliances.
Challenges, though, lie in a number of areas, according to several experts.
For example, delivering the weapons would likely be done by cruise missiles
or unmanned aerial vehicles to help get close to the target. That requires
making the weapons not only high powered, but also rugged and relatively
small, which Air Force Col. Eileen Walling labeled "extremely challenging
and technically difficult" in a paper she wrote in 2000 on the weapons.
Alexander explained another problem: unpredictability, even when everything
goes right.
"Electrical components are really rather tricky," he said. "You can put the
same amount of energy into 10 identical targets and you can destroy two of
them, upset five of them and, in three of them, nothing happens."
High-powered microwave weapons are one component of a broader category
known as directed energy weapons that includes lasers.
"When people are talking about high-powered microwave weapons, they're not
talking about a single device like the stealth bomber," said John Pike,
director of globalsecurity.org, a Washington-area policy organization
seeking to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons. "Rather, they're talking
about a physical principle and an effect which can be generated a number of
different ways for a number of different purposes."
Most of the Defense Department's work on high-powered microwave weapons
takes place at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M.
"We are looking at different sources and devices that can produce that
microwave energy and propel it," said Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the
project where nearly all of the work is classified.
Researchers also are exploring ways to block incoming high-powered
microwave weapons. That will require something of a super surge protector,
experts point out, because the blasts are so intense and brief they can
escape detection.
The former Soviet Union once was deeply involved in exploring high-powered
microwave weapons, but it is now thought Russia is no longer pursuing them.
Other nations believed to be conducting research are China, Great Britain
and France.
Earlier this month, the widely respected magazine Aviation Week & Space
Technology printed an article stating that "an attack on Iraq is expected
to see the first use of high-power microwave weapons..."
The New York Post, citing unnamed U.S. military officials, reported
yesterday that a preliminary Iraq battle plan "outlined for President Bush
last week calls for the most extensive use of electronic and psychological
warfare in history -- including secret new electromagnetic pulse weapons to
disable Saddam (Hussein)'s entire command and control structure."
********************************
Ingri Cassel, President
Vaccination Liberation - Idaho Chapter
P.O. Box 457
Spirit Lake, ID 83869
(208)255-2307/ 888-249-1421
[email hidden]
www.vaclib.org
"Free Your Mind....
From The Vaccine Paradigm"
"When we give government the power
to make medical decisions for us, we,
in essence, accept that the state owns
our bodies."
~U.S. Representative Ron Paul