Nexus - 1703 - New Times Magazine-pages

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GLOBAL NEWS TIME magazine wrote at the time: "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead.” Albarelli claims that the outbreak resulted from a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the US Army's top-secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. He came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of Frank Olson, a biochemist working for the SOD who fell from a 13th-floor window two years after the "Cursed Bread" (Le Pain Maudit) incident. One note transcribes a conversation between a CIA agent and a Sandoz official who mentions the "secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit" and explains that it was not “at all” caused by mould but by diethylamide, the D in LSD. While compiling his book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and he CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, Albarelli spoke to former colleagues of Olson, two of whom told him tha he Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was part of a mind-control experimen run by the CIA and the US Army. Scientists at Fort Detrick told him hat agents had sprayed LSD into he air and also contaminated "loca oot products". Albarelli said that the rea "smoking gun" was a White House document sent to members of the 1975 Rockefeller Commission, formed to investigate CIA abuses. | contained the names of a number o French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA, and i made direct reference to the "Pont- Saint-Esprit incident". In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Albarelli claims, the US Army also drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between 1953 and 1965. (Source: The Telegraph, UK, 1 March 2010, http://tinyurl.com/yo8sn7n) DECADE OF THE DRONES: AMERICA'S AERIAL ASSASSINS he year 2010 marks the 10th consecutive year of the United States’ war Te Afghanistan and in the 15-nation area of responsibility subsumed under Operation Enduring Freedom. It is also the 10th and deadliest year in Washington's use of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) for targeted assassinations and untargeted "collateral damage". Originally designed for battlefield surveillance and reconnaissance, albeit often to call in lethal military strikes, drones have been employed by the US since 2001 to identify and kill human targets. The Predator and its successor, the Reaper, capable of carrying 15 times more weaponry and flying at three times the speed, have been used for deadly attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and with particularly murderous effect in Pakistan since the autumn of 2008. They are equipped with cameras connected by satellite links to bases in the United States. US drone missile strikes on both sides of the Afghanistan—Pakistan border have been increased by 50 per cent since the Obama administration took over the White House on 20 January 2009. Pakistan's influential Dawn.com news service published an account of what that policy has meant to Pakistanis. In the 2 January 2010 article titled "Over 700 killed in 44 drone strikes in 2009", the source, quoting Pakistani government statistics, wrote: "Of the 44 Predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Oaeda and Taliban eaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians." For each alleged Al- Qaeda and Taliban member killed by missiles fired from US drones, "140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die”. Drone missile attacks are increasingly becoming the weapon of choice of he US Central Intelligence Agency (as in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq), he Joint Special Operations Command (in Yemen) and the Air Force, which as of last year had 195 Predators and 28 Reapers. All indications are that hey will soon have more. This year, the Obama administration has sought rom Congress $33 billion more for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq "on top of a record request for $708 billion for the Defense Department next year" Associated Press, 12 January 2010]. The US conducted 11 deadly Predator attacks on Iraq in April 2008. USA Today [29 April 2008] reported at the time: "Commanders are expected to rely more on unmanned systems as 30,000 US troops sent last year are withdrawn. The military has dozens of Predators in Iraq and Afghanistan. In all, it operates 5,000 drones, 25 times more than it had in 2001." In December 2009, the government of Venezuela called on the world community to condemn incursions into its airspace by US military drones operating from Aruba and from Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles. The types of drones that flew for several days over Venezuelan territory weren't specified, but under both bilateral and NATO military obligations the Netherlands would not refuse the US the right to station Predator and Reaper drones on bases in their Caribbean island colonies. The United States has not only increased its arsenal of unmanned aerial vehicles by 25 times over the past decade, it has massively increased the range and lethality of its hunter-killer drones. A recent report on Wired.com [5 January 2010] disclosed that, in 2008, the Air Force Research Laboratory started to "build the ultimate assassination robot", described as "a tiny, armed drone for US special forces to employ in terminating ‘high-value targets". (Source: By Rick Rozoff, Stop NATO, 9 March 2o10, http://tinyurl.com/yewlvjt) APRIL - MAY 2010 NEXUS ¢ 9 www.nexusmagazine.com