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FOP 39 : The Micro Wars

[1] The Past as Prologue by Renato Redentor Constantino
[2] Monster at the Door by Mike Davis


In this issue

We have read about the so-called “small wars” or prolonged guerilla wars waged by the United States. In this issue we feature two articles that touch on wars of a much smaller nature, microscopic in fact. The first article is Red Constantino’s “Past as Prologue” a recounting of the horror of Imperial Japan's biological and germ warfare program benignly called Unit 731. The work of Unit 731’s main architect, Dr. Shiro Ishii and his links to the United States prompts Constantino to ask “Where else has the American government used Ishii's secrets? And who else has had access? Fifty years is a long time. Did not America invade Iraq to protect the world "from the potential horror of Saddam Hussein's supposed germ warfare capability?" Stuff happens, said Donald Rumsfeld. Will Ishii's weapons ever be used again? Where? By who?

The second article is the Monster at the Door by Mike Davis-an alarming article on the possibility of an avian-flu pandemic.

Whether it be through the use of biological weapons and germ warfare or the outbreak of killer viruses and diseases, the casualties of these “micro wars” can be staggering. “In May 1942, a cholera epidemic created by Unit 731 in Yunnan province kills over 200,000 people. Three months later, another 200,000 die in Shandong province as a result of Unit 731's germ warfare. In the Zhekiang province city of Quzhou alone, over 50,000 perish from bubonic plague and cholera” writes Constantino. Davis on the other hand cites “ In 1918-19 influenza pandemic: the single greatest mortality event in human history. In only 24 weeks, a deadly avian flu strain killed from 2 to 5 per cent of humanity (50 to 100 million people - including 675,000 Americans) from the Aleutians to Patagonia.


Yet, we are oftentimes caught defenseless against these attacks and are ill-equiped to confront these catastophic threats to peoples lives. Its about time we looked closer.

Red Constantino writes for the newspaper TODAY and its on-line partner abs-cbn.com, where this article is published. Mike Davis is the author of Dead Cities: And Other Tales as well as Ecology of Fear, and co-author of Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, among other books. His article Monster at the Door was lifted from CommonDreams.org The Past as Prologue

By Renato Redentor Constantino
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnnews.com
October 4, 2004


So many good wars launched. So many wars-to-end-all-wars concluded. And yet.

When will respite come? Where will it come from? Difficult to say.

Dr. Shiro Ishii was born in 1892 to a wealthy family of landed aristocrats in Chiyoda Mura, a farming village near Tokyo. Charismatic and driven, Dr. Ishii towered over most people. He was five feet, ten inches tall, had a booming voice and possessed "soaring intelligence."

Ishii was the architect and leader of Imperial Japan's biological and germ warfare program. A program known to a few today as Unit 731 - the name of the nightmare's central headquarters near the city of Harbin in Manchuria.

Unit 731 was his government's "Secret of Secrets," as Ishii himself described the program - one under which many of the best and brightest doctors of Japan's medical and biological research community applied their considerable talents. Talents employed in running an assembly line of human experimentation "in the pursuit of scientific goals completely untethered to morality."

From 1932 to 1945, Japan carried out its biological warfare program with the same horrific efficiency that marked the work of German Nazi doctors. Unit 731 sought to determine the efficacy of the germ and biological arsenal that Japan was developing, using humans as lab rats.

Ishii and his doctors administered tainted vaccine injections to children in selected villages; poisoned food was handed out to hungry people by smiling Japanese soldiers and physicians. Different strains of pathogenic germs such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid were bred and tested on humans alongside the development of tools with which the disease microbes could be let loose.

Virulent strains of malaria "were injected into [captured] Americans suffering from beri-beri and tuberculosis patients were injected with strange concoctions of acid mixed with dextrose, ether, or blood plasma." The objective, recounts the scholar Daniel Barenblatt, in his soul-searing work, The Plague of Humanity, "was to develop medicinal treatments, using Americans as expendable guinea pigs." Australian and British prisoners of war were also subjected to unspeakable pain. Of course, many did not make it.

While Unit 731's ghastly experimentation smote as well the peoples of Russia, Mongolia and Korea, it was the Chinese who suffered the brunt of the madness. Millions of bubonic plague-infected fleas were raised and released aerially on unsuspecting Chinese villages. Feathers contaminated with anthrax were released over population centers by Japanese air squadrons while on the ground, disease-carrying horses, dogs, rats and birds were dispersed and made to mingle with livestock and humans.

And on the doctors of Unit 731 diligently worked, tallying the effects of their creations by performing vivisections on prisoners, recording deformities, and putting together a macabre roster of distress, torment and death.

Non-germ warfare tests were also performed on Unit 731's prisoners: animal-to-human blood transfusions, for instance. And frostbite experiments where limbs of live humans were exposed to extreme frost, struck with a stick and broken off and reattached to places where they were originally attached - and other places.

It is estimated by scholars that at least 20,000 people were killed inside Unit 731's human experiment prisons in China. And outside, well, it was the same hell.

May 1942: a cholera epidemic created by Unit 731 in Yunnan province kills over 200,000 people. Three months later, another 200,000 die in Shandong province as a result of Unit 731's germ warfare. In the Zhekiang province city of Quzhou alone, over 50,000 perish from bubonic plague and cholera. And so on and so on and so on.

How did it all end? As typical stories go, the good side eventually prevails over the butchers and the malevolent: Japan's imperial drive is defeated and Unit 731's designs are discovered and trounced - its army of ghoulish doctors and the infamous Shiro Ishii captured, tried and executed. That should be a nice story but reality is not typical and the story of Unit 731 is not a typical story. "Few," said Goethe, "have the imagination for reality."

Within months after World War II ended US army officials - acting upon the instructions of the very head of the Allied occupation forces in Japan, Gen. Douglas MacArthur - were already in Japan meeting - over dinner - with Shiro Ishii and other veterans of Unit 731. The Americans desired the knowledge possessed by Ishii and his colleagues. Ishii promised the Americans the full set of keys to his secret kingdom if ...

In return for immunity "for myself, my superiors, and subordinates," Ishii replied explicitly in one of the meetings, "I would like to be hired by the U.S. as a biological warfare expert. In the preparation for the war with Russia, I can give [America] the advantage of my 20 years research and experience."

In a radio message to Washington on May 6, 1947, MacArthur urged the combined US military and State Department group which supervised occupation policy in Japan to give - in writing - immunity to Ishii and all others involved the Japanese military's germ warfare and human experiments program.

"Additional data possibly including some statements from Ishii," said MacArthur, "probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'war crimes evidence' ... complete story to include plans and theories of Ishii and superiors, probably can be obtained by documentary immunity to Ishii and associate."

MacArthur advised Washington: "Request for exemption [from prosecution] of Unit 731 members. Information about vivisection useful."

On December 27, 1949 - against the mountain of evidence that American forces had gathered since the surrender of Japan - evidence in the form of reports, documents, photographs and testimonies from victims who lived through the ordeal and confessions of captured Japanese soldiers and physicians - MacArthur's headquarters announced to the world "that the Japanese had done some experimentation with animals but that there was no evidence they ever had used human beings."

At the Tokyo war crimes trial, which the press had dubbed "the Nuremberg Trial of the East," the Americans suppressed evidence concerning the atrocities of Unit 731 and "not one individual was charged in the Japan hearings with biological or chemical warfare crimes." Thus did thousands of Unit 731 doctors enjoy the rest of their lives - some more prosperous than others, some heading Japan's leading universities; others leading Japanese conglomerates.

Crimes against humanity on top of genocidal deeds. Crimes that allowed the US government to use Ishii's secrets against its enemies, such as the "systematic spreading of smallpox, cholera and plague germs over North Korea" which, during the period in which it was unleashed, "shocked and horrified the entire world."

Where else has the American government used Ishii's secrets? And who else has had access? Fifty years is a long time. Did not America invade Iraq to protect the world "from the potential horror of Saddam Hussein's supposed germ warfare capability?" Stuff happens, said Donald Rumsfeld. Will Ishii's weapons ever be used again? Where? By who?

Hard to answer these things. Painful to contemplate. Yesterday may have already brought whatever it is that tomorrow was never meant to bring.

-------------
The Monster at the Door
by Mike Davis

Thursday, September 30, 2004
CommonDreams.org


As in a classic 1950s sci-fi thriller, our world is imperiled by a terrifying monster. Scientists try to sound the alarm, but politicians ignore the threat until its too late. Indifference ultimately turns into panic.

The monster, of course, is H5N1, the lethal avian flu that first emerged in 1997 in Hong Kong and is now entrenched - in an even more lethal strain - in a half dozen Southeast Asian countries. It has recently killed scores of farmers and poultry workers who have had direct contact with sick birds.

For seven years researchers have warned that H5N1 would eventually fall in love with a human influenza virus in the body of sick person (or possibly a pig) and produce a mutant offspring that could travel at pandemic velocity from human to human.

The media episodically gives page fifteen coverage to these warnings, which, at most, cause a small shudder before readers turn the page to more important stories about Paris Hilton's sex video or John Kerry's war record.

Ironically, in our 'culture of fear' - with Ashcroft and Ridge ceaselessly ranting that the terrorist apocalypse is nigh - the least attention is given to the threat that is truly most threatening.

On 14 September, Dr. Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization's (WHO) regional director for the western Pacific, tried to shake complacency with an urgent warning that human-to-human transmission of avian flu was a "high possibility."

Two weeks later (28 September), grim-faced Thai officials revealed that the dreaded viral leap had already occurred. A young mother, who had died on 20 September, most likely had contracted virus directly from her dying child.

A crucial threshold has been crossed. Of course, as Thai officials hastened to point out, one isolated case doesn't make a pandemic.

Human-to-human avian flu would need a certain critical mass, a minimum initial incidence, before it could begin to decimate the world.

The precedent always invoked to illustrate how this might happen is the

1918-19 influenza pandemic: the single greatest mortality event in human history. In only 24 weeks, a deadly avian flu strain killed from 2 to 5 per cent of humanity (50 to 100 million people - including 675,000 Americans) from the Aleutians to Patagonia.

But some researchers worry that H5N1 is actually an even more deadly threat than H1N1 (the 1918 virus).

First of all, this flu - at least in its bird-to-human form - is a far more vicious killer. In 1918-19, 2.5 per cent of infected Americans died. In contrast, more than 70 per cent of this year's H5N1 cases (30 out of 42) have perished: a lethality comparable to ebola fever and other nightmare emergent diseases.

The Center for Disease Control has estimated that a new pandemic would infect 40 to 100 million Americans. Multiply that by a 70 per cent kill rate and ponder your family's future.

Secondly, as the WHO has repeatedly emphasized, the avian flu seems to have conquered an ecological niche of unprecedented dimension. The rise of factory poultry farming in Asia over the last decade, and the dangerously unhygienic conditions in farms and plants, have created a perfect incubator for the new virus.

Moreover, in the face of desperate WHO efforts to geographically contain the avian pandemic by destroying infected bird populations, the virus has literally taken flight. H5N1 has been identified in dead herons, gulls, egrets, hawks and pigeons. Like West Nile, it has wings with which can cross oceans and potentially infect bird populations everywhere.

In August, furthermore, the Chinese announced that the avian strain had been detected in pigs. This is a particularly ominous development since pigs, susceptible to both bird and human flu, are likely crucibles for genetic 'reassortment' between viruses. Containment seems to have failed.

Thirdly, a new pandemic will use modern transportation. The 1918-19 virus was slowed by ocean-going transport and the isolation of rural society. Its latterday descendant could jet-hop the globe in a week.

Finally, the mega-slums of Asia, Africa and Latin America are like so many lakes of gasoline awaiting the spark of H5N1. Third World urbanization has created unparalleled high-density concentrations of poor people in ill health, ripe for viral slaughter.

What are the frontlines of defense against such an unthinkable catastrophe?

One of the most urgent tasks is to ensure that poultry workers in Southeast Asia receive ordinary flu vaccinations in order to prevent possible mixing of human and avian genes. But current production of seasonal flu vaccine is mostly consigned to the richer countries, and Thai officials have complained that they cannot obtain enough donated doses to conduct a systematic vaccination.

Meanwhile a prototype H5N1 vaccine is under development, but only in quantities to safeguard frontline public health and safety workers in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Pharmaceutal companies to date have not found sufficient profit incentives to increase their output of vaccines and virals. As the New York Times emphasized last Thursday (30 September), there has been a disastrous "mismatch of public health needs and private control of production of vaccines and drugs."

Indeed last April, at a historic WHO-convened summit about global defenses against a possible pandemic, leading experts expressed their deep pessimism about existing preparations.

"The consultation concluded that supplies of vaccine, the first line of defence for preventing high morbidity and mortality, would be grossly inadequate at the start of a pandemic and well into the first wave of international spread."

"Limited production capacity largely concentrated in Europe and North America," the WHO report continues,"would exacerbate the problem of inequitable access."

"Inequitable access,' of course, is a euphemism for the death of a large segment of humanity: a callous triage already prepared in advance of the

H5N1 plague by indifference to third world pubic health.

This is the moral context of the deafening silence about the H5N1 threat in the current presidential debate. Although the General Accounting Office recently concluded that "no state is fully prepared to respond to major public health threat," the Kerry camp has failed to sound the tocsin about the Bush administration's lethargic preparations.

Only Ralph Nader appears to be fully awake to the peril. In a letter to President Bush in August, he repeated scientific warnings that the "The Big One" was coming and urged a 'presidential conference on influenza epidemics and pandemics" to confront "the looming threats to the health of millions of people."

It has become fashionable, of course, in some 'progressive' circles to excoriate Nader's presence in the campaign as divisive egoism. But who else is warning us about the Monster at the door?
 
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