Malachi Smith's List: BEAST TECH

• Transhumanism and the Posthuman Future: Will Technological Progress Get Us There?
• By Ted Peters
• The prospect of a posthuman future replete with ecological harmony, cybernetic immortality, and the imbuing of the entire universe with evolving intelligence tantalizes our imagination with a utopian vision.
• All we need do is turn a couple technological corners and, suddenly, the abundant life will be ours.
• We will be liberated from the vicissitudes of biological restraints such as suffering and death; and we will be freed by enhanced intelligence to enjoy the fulfilling life of a cosmic mind.
• The transhumanist or H+ vision is as inspiring as it is extravagant.
• How do we get there from here? How do we make the leap from our biological inheritance to a future of machined mind? How do we accelerate evolutionary development to carry the present generation into an unprecedented new era of posthuman flourishing?
• How can our technological future gain a decisive victory over our biological past?
• What we find in transhumanist prognostications is reliance on the doctrine of progress.
• Transhumanists assume that progress, understood as betterment over time, is inherent in nature and inherent in culture.
• Evolution constitutes progress in biology. Technological advance constitutes progress in culture.
• Betterment is inevitable as the inexorable wheels of progress keep turning. The direction of progress is set; and the task of transhumanist technology is to increase the speed forward.
• In this paper I would like to begin with a brief exposition of the central claims and promises being lifted up by members of the transhumanist school of thought, explicating especially their assumptions regarding the nature of progress.
• I will place the futurist orientation of today’s transhumanists in the broad context of futurist thinking which has developed over the last half century.
• I will distinguish between two types of futurist thinking: futurum relying upon growth or progress versus adventus which anticipates the advent of the new.
• I will show how transhumanism fits squarely into the first of these, not the second. Finally, I will turn to distinctively theological resources to critique the concept of progress with which the transhumanists work.
• I will explicate briefly the positions taken by neoorthodox theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Langdon Gilkey, who helped make us aware that progress is ambiguous—that is, all technological advances can be pressed into the service of either good or evil.
• Progress in technology does not in itself foster progress in culture or morality.
• My thesis is this: transhumanist assumptions regarding progress are naive, because they fail to operate with an anthropology that is realistic regarding the human proclivity to turn good into evil.
• It is my own view that researchers in the relevant fields of genetics and nanotechnology should proceed toward developing new and enhancing technologies, to be sure; but they should maintain constant watchfulness for ways in which these technologies can become perverted and bent toward destructive purposes.
• In the process I would like to correct one mistake made by transhumanst theorists.
• They presume that religion will attempt to place roadblocks in their way on the grounds that the religious mind is old fashioned, out of date, Luddite, and dedicated to resisting change.

  • What the Transhumanists find so abhorrent in religion (here by religion, I mean fundamental Christianity) is it's high ethics and moral principals which says, yes, there are and ought to be restraints on how far mankind can go to the borders of decency. Transhumanists oppose Christianity for it's absolutes and principles.
• When this image is applied to Christian theology or even Jewish theology, it is mistaken.
• The Hebrew Scriptures include the prophets who look forward to the future, because God promises new things. “I am about to do a new thing,” says God in Isaiah 43:19. The most significant of the new things God promises is the coming Kingdom of God, the transformation of this creation into a new creation.
• The Bible closes in Revelation 21:5 with God saying, “See, I am making all things new.” Rather than fixate things in the past, biblical theologians are inspired to anticipate the new, to look forward to transformation, to celebrate innovation.
• If a theologian would become critical of a transhumanist, it would not be in defense of what has been. Rather, it would be because of a naiveté in thinking that we could accomplish with technology a transformation that can be achieved only by the eschatological act of a gracious and loving God.
• What is a Transhumanist?
• A transformation of apocalyptic proportion is imminent. According to the Transhumanist Declaration of the World Transhumanist Association, “Humanity will be radically changed by technology in the future. We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition, including such parameters as the inevitability of aging, limitations on human and artificial intellects, unchosen psychology, suffering,
• Astounding changes belong to our medium range future.
• and our confinement to the planet earth.”¹
• The human race of the present generation has the opportunity to speed up its own evolution through technological self-transformation.
• “Transhumanism is the view that humans should (or should be permitted to) use technology to remake human nature,” is the definition offered by Heidi Campbell and Mark Walker.²
• It is a science and a philosophy that seeks to employ genetic technology, information technology, and nanotechnology to greatly enhance the healthy life span of persons, increase intelligence, and make us humans happier and more virtuous.
• The key is to recontextualize humanity in terms of technology.
• This leads to a vision of a posthuman future characterized by a merging of humanity with technology as the next stage of our human evolution. Humanity plus (H+) is calling us forward. Posthuman refers to who we might become if transhuman efforts achieve their goals.

  • Tinker..tinker and tinkering....SEE: Genesis chapter 6
• The transhumanist movement seeks to fill the widening cultural void in Western civilization due to the disintegration of the former religious glue that held us together in a common spirit.
• In addition to the failure of tradition to hold us together, so also postmodernism is failing, because this nihilistic philosophy refuses to recognize the gifts of the modern scientific age, namely, reason and progress.
• What we need at this moment is an inspiring philosophy that reveres scientific reason and which will pull us toward a positive future. To meet this need, transhumanism offers a “totalized philosophical system”³ with a three level worldview: a metaphysical level, a psychological level, and an ethical level.
• At the metaphysical or cosmological level, the transhumanist sees a world in a “process of evolutionary complexification toward evermore complex structures, forms, and operations.”
• At the psychological level, transhumanists believe we human beings are “imbued with the innate Will to Evolve—an instinctive drive to expand abilities in pursuit of ever-increasing survivability and well-being.”
• By acting in harmony with the essential nature of the evolutionary process—complexification—we may discover a new sense of purpose, direction, and meaning to life, and come to feel ourselves at home in the world once more.”⁴
• What Simon Young plans is to replace “Darwinian Evolution with Designer Evolution—from slavery to the selfish genes to conscious self-rule by the human mind.”⁵
• The future will differ from the past. Whereas in the past we have been prisoners of our biology, in the future we will become liberated. Our liberation will come from increased intelligence, an intelligence that itself will find a way to remove itself from our deteriorating bodies and establish a much more secure substrate for endurance.
• Our mental lives in the future may take place within a computer or on the internet. What we have previously known as homo sapiens will be replaced by homo cyberneticus.
• “As humanism freed us from the chains of superstition, let transhumanism free us from our biological chains.”⁶
• Once freed from the limits of our inherited bodies, the expansion of human intelligence would be limited only by the size of our universe.
• What the transhumanist foresees is a cosmic imbuing of matter with consciousness. “Liberated from biological slavery, an immortalized species, Homo cyberniticus, will set out for the stars.
• Conscious life will gradually spread throughout the galaxy...until finally, in the unimaginably distant future, the whole universe has come alive, awakened to its own nature—a cosmic mind become conscious of itself as a living entity—omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.”⁷ The entire universe will be converted into an “extended thinking entity,” writes Hans Moravec.⁸

  • Someone is utilizing humanity, once more; the human being with his planting within the material, tangible dimension to create and build the means to expand to the fartherest reaches of the universe in conquest and settlement. Having been defeated at least once before in the spiritual dimensions, Lucifer, perhaps not certain of victory in the prophsied coming 2nd war in Heaven, is trying to hedge his bets by using human beings (once again) to accomplish via the material plane what he could not, cannot and will not be able to achieve in the spirit realm: ruling the universe as "God." Whether within or outside the human body and mind, the Minions of Hell seek to utilize the material plane of humanity to seek an "end run" around God and the Holy Angelic armies of Heaven via God's special creation to which HE has lavished such love upon, human beings.
• The mood of transhumanism is aggressively promethean.
• Here is the promise: we humans will arrest from the gods and from nature the principles and resources we need to take our destiny into our own hands.
• With a wave of the philosophical hand we will expel the old fatalisms, the nay sayers, the Luddites. “Bio-fatalism will increasingly be replaced by techno-can-do-ism—the belief in the power of the new technology to free us from the limitations of our bodies and minds...
• In the twenty-first century, the belief in the Fall of Man will be replaced by the belief in his inevitable transcendence—through Superbiology.”⁹
• The torch of Prometheus will lead us into the new world of transhumanism. “Let us cast aside cowardice and seize the torch of Prometheus with both hands.”¹⁰
• This Promethean confidence in the advance of technology is accompanied by a utopian vision, a vision of future human fulfillment or even posthuman fulfillment in a kingdom where rational intelligence has transcended its previous biological imprisonment.
• Not only as individuals but also as a social community and even as a cosmic community we will experience ecstatic human flourishing, the abundant life which previous religious visionaries could only dream of.
• The Singularity is Almost Here
• How will we get there from here? Crossing the threshold of the Singularity—the creation of smarter-than-human inelligence—will mark the transition.¹¹

  • And the source or fountainhead of this super intelligence? That super intelligent liar, murderer and thief from of old...The Enemy of God and true enemy of mankind...Satan.
• Ray Kurzweil prophecies a dramatic future event—not in the distant future but rather just around the corner, 2045 to be exact. This will be a threshold event, an event known in his field as the “Singularity.”¹²
• Leading up to the Singularity we will see how the pace of technological change will be so rapid and its impact so deep that human life will be irreversibly transformed.
• What follows this nose is the observation that human intelligence will leap from human bodies to machines, making high tech machines more human than we are.

  • Something will be leaping from the human body to a machine but it won't be human...And it can leap back and forth just as well too.
• The nose on this transformation face will be enhanced human intelligence.
• This can happen because intelligence is not dependent upon our biological substrate; rather, as information in patterns, intelligence can be extricated from our bodies. Our intelligence can live on in an enhanced form even when extricated from our bodies and placed in a computer.
• “Uploading a human brain means scanning all of its salient details and then reinstantiating those details into a suitably powerful computational substrate. This process would capture a person’s entire personality, memory, skills, and history.”¹³

  • Just as in a less technological way, demonic spirits have the ability to imitate the person and personality of deceased human beings...i.e. ghosts; that fool the living into believing they are being visited by a loved one from the "beyond."
• On the one hand, this would require disembodied intelligence.

  • Demon possession
• On the other hand, we would have new bodies, namely, machines.

  • Satan's attempt to mimic God's promise to Christians of a "new", resurrected body. Satan cannot create from out of nothing but he chooses to imitate the Almighty by "building" from materials already existing...in this case..the human body and the human brain.
• “Future machines will be human even if they are not biological,” writes Kurzweil. “This will be the next step in evolution.”¹⁴
• Rather than a biological substrate, humans of a future generation will rely upon a machine substrate.
• When we have escaped our biological limitations, we will be able to program a much longer life, a disembodied yet intelligent life.

  • Actually the deceived scientists, engineers in this instant do not know this is not referring to the human soul/spirit but to the disembodied minions of demonic beings who have for millenia sought material bodies to inhabit...even pigs if necessary and failing that, even inanimate objects..."machines."
• “The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want..

  • That ages old, familiar lie first propogated to Eve in the Garden of Eden.
• By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence.”¹⁵
• Living in cyberspace could seem attractive. One would not be alone. One’s cybermind would be in community with all other cyberminds, a variant on Teilhard’s noosphere.
• This is what Margaret Wertheim celebrates. Despite the dangers lurking in our computers, she thanks cyberspace for establishing a network of relationships. Further, the global community of electronic relationships is eliciting a sense of responsibility toward one another.
• One might even celebrate a new higher level of community.
• “If cyberspace teaches us anything,” writes Wertheim, “it is that the worlds we conceive...are communal projects requiring ongoing communal responsibility.”¹⁶ Once Kurzweil has successfully uploaded our minds into cyberspace, we will enjoy a communal network of shared intelligence.
• Even though we can thank our evolutionary past for bringing us to the point of intelligence, we the human race must move still further forward.
• Our generation has the opportunity to enhance our intelligence, to advance still further in evolutionary development. Computers along with GNR—genetics, nanotechnology and robotics—are all tools whereby we can build a dramatically new future for abundant living and cosmic community.
• What we note here is how Kurzweil conflates biological evolution and technological progress.
• He sees the latter as an extension of the former. The key characteristic of both evolutionary and technological progress is inevitability, according to Kurzweil.
• Both natural evoluton and human technology benefit from a guiding purpose, a built-in purpose. And this built-in logos or entelechy virtually guarantees the future he is forecasting.
• What is this built-in purpose? Increased intelligence. “The purpose of the universe reflects the same purpose as our lives: to move toward greater intelligence and knowledge....

  • Mankind once stood before the first and same monumental choice. 1) The Tree of Life and 2) The Tree of Knowledge...of Good and Evil. Mankind chose the latter. The rest is history. And once again mankind is faced with an equally monumental choice...Guess what he is choosing..at least those who reject God and HIS revelation of HIMself
• we will within this century be ready to infuse our solar system with our intelligence through self-replicating non-biological intelligence. It will then spread out to the rest of the universe.”¹⁷

  • True enough..but that "intelligence" will not be biological or mechanical..i.e. "technological." What it will be is created intelligence, yes; but an intelligence so old that it predates humanity and so evil that God declares HE will destroy it. This "Intelligence" apparently is seeking to make an end run around the power of God's might in the Evil's failure to conquer Heaven, by using humanity to conquer the heavens.
• How do we get there from here? Through applying our existing intelligence to leaping the hurdles that currently need technological transcending.

  • SEE: Tom Horn's "Raiders News Network" and his book, "The Ahriman Gate" for the truth of the "intelligence" behind humanity's technological advances of late and the purpose.
• “Insight from the brain reverse-engineering effort, overall research in developing AI [Artificial Intelligence] algorithms, and ongoing exponential gains in computing platforms make strong AI (AI at human levels and beyond) inevitable.
• Once AI achieves human levels, it will necessarily soar past it because it will combine the strengths of human intelligence with the speed, memory capacity, and knowledge sharing that nonbiological intelligence already exhibits.”¹⁸

  • The combining of the human body with the mind/spirit of demons.
• Note Kurzweil’s confident vocabulary: “inevitable” and “necessary.”
• Simon Young makes this explicit, “The furtherance of human evolution through advanced biotechnology is not only possible, but inevitable.”¹⁹
• Salvation from the Environmental Crisis
• This technological utopia will bring not only maximized intelligence; it will also bring ecological harmony.
• Working for clean alternative technologies that not only preserve but also restore the biosphere sits high on the agenda of what some transhumanists embrace as technogaianism, an ethic for technology that supports the Gaia philosophy.

  • Now we are arrived at the "sop" thrown to benighted humanity that wishes to turn it's back on the light of the true God and revealed religion; to turn back to the pagan myths of antiquity. The Bible refers to this as, "a dog returning to it's vomit."
• Kurzweil believes that nanotechnology will rescue us from our environmental crisis.
• By building devices at the molecular scale out of nanoparticles, we can reduce the size and surface area of such devices, lowering their impact on the surrounding environment.
• In addition, new biological properties will be introduced, so that nanotechnology “will eventually provide us with a vastly expanded toolkit for improved catalysis, chemical and atomic bonding, sensing, and mechanical manipulation, not to mention intelligent control through enhanced microelectronics.
• Ultimately we will redesign all of our industrial processes to achieve their intended results with minimal consequences, such as unwanted by-products and their introduction into the environment.”²⁰
• In short, manufacturing in the future will do less damage to our surroundings.
• In addition, we will develop better methods of cleaning up pollution. And we will even overcome hunger and poverty. “Emerging technologies will provide the means of providing and storing clean and renewable energy, removing toxins and pathogens from our bodies and the environment, and providing the knowledge and wealth to overcome hunger and poverty.”²¹ Nanotechnology in the service of progress can lead today’s world into a tomorrow of social justice and ecological harmony.
• The Coming Technological Victory over Aging and Death
• Transhumanism can be described as a philosophy of life with a central tenet: “the belief in overcoming human limitations through reason, science, and technology.”²²
• One limitation on the transhumanist list to be overcome is aging. Death too.
• Aubrey de Grey says he is “not in favor of aging.” When one is not in favor of something, then it is time to apply technology to overcome it. This is what de Grey plans.
• If we could eliminate aging, then “we will be in possession of indefinite youth. We will die only from the sort of causes that young people die of today—accidents, suicide, homicide, and so on—but not of the age-related diseases that account for the vast majority of deaths in the industrialized world today.”²³
• Now, we might ask: might this be realistic?
• Until recently demographers assumed that once gains made by reducing mortality in early and mid life had reached completion, then growth in longevity would level off and we would see a fixed maximum for human age. However, to our surprise, this is not happening.
• In much of the developed world, life expectancy continues to increase; and people reach old age in healthier condition than their grandparents did. Might realism be on the side of the transhumanists?
• “Clear consensus now exists that ageing is caused by the gradual, lifelong accumulation of a wide variety of molecular and cellular damage. At the heart of the genetic determination of lifespan is the extent to which the organism’s genome invests in survival.”
• With the many tasks genetic expression needs to perform, why waste time and energy on repairing what is broken in order to lengthen the life span of the host organism. After all, the body is expendable, at least according to the disposable soma theory.
• Might we intervene to patch up molecular and cellular damage? Yes. “If ageing is a matter of things falling apart, can research realistically hope to achieve anything useful? The answer is emphatically yes—there is plenty of evidence that it is possible to intervene in the underlying causative mechanisms.”²⁴

  • Agnostic or apostate man rejects the Biblical fact that death is a result of sin (rebellion/disobedience) and therefore physical death has a deep connection with the realm of the spirit.
• Now, if the genome does not care about lifespan, might we with the help of our medical scientists care?
• Ray Kurzweil offers an ebullient version of this otherwise cautious forecast: “We are beginning to understand aging, not as a single inexorable progression but as a group of related processes. Strategies are emerging for fully reversing each of these aging progressions, using different combinations of biotechnology techniques.”²⁵
• With emphasis Kurzweil trumpets, “We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever.”²⁶

  • "Thou shall not die...", the Serpent.
• Can we slow down if not actually stop the aging process?
• Kurzweil answers affirmatively. He claims he has already achieved something notable in his own case. At age fifty-six his biological age is only forty. How has he accomplished this? “I have been very aggressive about reprogramming my biochemistry,” he writes. “I take 250 supplements (pills) a day and receive a half-dozen intravenous therapies each week (basically nutritional supplements delivered directly into my bloodstream, thereby bypassing my GI tract). As a result, the metabolic reactions in my body are completely different than they would otherwise be.”²⁷

  • SEE: Oprah Winfrey's latest prize pet, Dr Mehmet Oz
• Taking vitamin supplements enhances the health of the body; and this indirectly supports the operations of our intelligent brains.
• Might we do more? Might we find a way for our intelligence to escape the limits of our aging bodies entirely? Yes, say the transhumanists.
• “Currently, when our human hardware crashes, the software of our lives—our personal ‘mind file’—dies with it.

  • It most certainly does not. It goes on to one of two destinations.
• Our minds can move into a computer, and then into cyberspace.
• However, this will not continue to be the case when we have the means to store and restore the thousands of trillions of bytes of information represented in the pattern that we call our brains..
• They [the bodiless intelligences] will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality, holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology.”²⁸

  • What is not readily or handily divulged by these influencing "spirits" to the gullible scientists and human technocrats is, these "bodiless intelligences" are demonic; not human.
• Such a personal eschatology consisting of immortalized intellectual life is reminiscent of Socrates, who found comfort when anticipating the death of his body. Once liberated from his temporal body, Socrates’ disembodied mind could go on to contemplate eternal ideas.²⁹
• Once the transhumanist has liberated our intelligence from our biological bodies and placed our minds into computers or into cyberspace, we will be able to think cosmically and escape the threat of extinction through death.
• Technological progress will carry us from our biologically inherited bodies into a future of cybernetic immortality.
• How do we get there from here?
• Socrates presumed that his intellectual soul was inherently immortal. Transhumanists presume that progress is inherent to evolution and that our future liberation from biological constraints is inevitable.
• Like a rocket taking off from a launching pad, our computer generation has been thrust by evolution upward into the stratosphere of technological progress; and very soon we will find our immortalized minds winging throughout the cosmos.
• Transhumanist Ethics
• What kind of ethical deliberation or moral code might transhuanism lead to?
• It leads in two opposite directions.
• One direction is toward laissez faire capitalism. After all, only the sectors of the modern economy flushed with money can afford to invest in GNR: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.
• Capital investment and technological advance provide cyclical support for one another. Investors invest in GNR, and the sales earnings from GNR increase the amount of capital available for reinvestment. “It’s the economic imperative of a competitive marketplace that is the primary force driving technology forward and fueling the law of accelerating returns....
• Economic imperative is the equivalent of survival in biological evolution.”³⁰
• What we find here is an ethical principle—the "will to evolve," mentioned earlier—drawn from evolutionary biology and applied to economics, “survival of the fittest.”
• The other direction taken by transhumanist ethical thinking is toward increased cooperation, even altruism or benevolence. Support for altruism takes the form of a common sense admonition to cooperate with one other for the betterment of all.
• Benevolence is more highly valued than selfishness, according to transhumanist ethics. When this direction is taken, the Darwinian struggle for existence with its competitive aggression is replaced.
• Simon Young, for example, asserts that we should advance from genethics to nurethics. By the former term he is referencing Richard Dawkin’s theory that the “selfish gene” directs the course of evolution, and that human ethics are a social expression of the selfish gene’s pressure to replicate.³¹
• Dawkins’ selfish gene theory is his interpretation of nineteenth century Social Darwinism, where the “struggle for existence” in nature provided justification for a social ethic celebrating the “survival of the fittest.”
• Should we today construct an ethic based upon our selfish genes? Should today’s society be governed by the competition between all those struggling to survive?
• Young answers in the negative. Now that we have brains and reason and science, however, we are no longer puppets dancing on the strings of our DNA; we are no longer merely struggling for biological existence. Our brains can transcend our biological inheritance. We can devise a rational ethic.
• This rational ethic Young describes as benevolence, a “common sense” ethic that includes altruistic care for one another. “Morality is the replacement of Genethics with Nurethics—from control by the selfish genes, to self-rule by the human mind...
• In the language of Nurethics, the self-governing mind may learn to inhibit stupidly selfish instincts in its own best interests of ever increasing survivability and well-being.”³²
• The problem with selfish human behavior is that it is stupid. In contrast, benevolence is smart.
• As our intelligence increases, we will replace stupid selfish morality with more reasonable benevolent behavior such as cooperation.
• What Young perceives as a contradiction between the naturalistic ethics tied to evolution and his more benevolent values was a contradiction already seen during the era of Social Darwinism.
• American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce pointed this out in the late nineteenth century. “The Origin of Species of Darwin merely extends politico-economical views of progress to the entire realm of animal and vegetable life...As Darwin puts it on his title-page, it is the struggle for existence; and he should have added for his motto: Every individual for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost!
• Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, expressed a different opinion.”³³ If today’s transhumanists affirm values akin to those of Jesus, they will have to do so in opposition to the values inherent in previous forms of evolutionary ethics.
• If in our era of biomedical progress human existence is no longer oriented toward mere survival, then we are ready to reorient our lives around a new purpose, namely, fulfillment. Darwinian values that may have supported survival of the fittest will need replacing by values that promote cooperation and social harmony.
• Theologian Jûrgen Moltmann has offered a similar analysis.
• “The change in human interests evoked by biomedical progress can be described as a transition form the struggle for existence to striving for fulfillment,” writes Moltmann. “The principle of self-preservation against others can be transformed into the principle of self-fulfillment in the other.
• Systems of aggression can be overcome by systems of co-operation.”³⁴
• The implication for transhumanist ethics is this: despite the conflation of biological evolution and technological progress, Darwinian values such as self-preservation in the competition for existence can not be thought to be progressive in light of the picture of the future that transhumanists are painting. Yet, their reliance upon the "will to evolve" in the form of laissez faire capitalism reiterates the nineteenth century reliance on Social Darwinism, the very value system that apparently needs replacing.
• In sum, transhumanist ethics is torn by a tension between the capitalist values adhering to survival-of-the-fittest and the altruistic values of a benevolent community.
• The Ethic of Relinquishment
• With this in mind, we turn to another question: should a transhumanist ethic place us totally at the beck and call of every proposal for technological progress?
• Does this mean unbridled social subservience to any and every advance?
• No. We must be selective, say the transhumanists.
• We might find we need to relinquish some opportunities while embracing others. Discerning which to relinquish and which to support is one of the ethical tasks consciously taken on by transhumanists.
• Kurzweil addresses ethical issues with his concept of relinquishment. Should we relinquish the opportunity for technological advance? If so, at what level?
• Kurzweil objects to naturalists who advocate “broad relinquishment”—that is, the broad rejection of technology in order to preserve what nature has bequeathed us. Yet, Kurzweil is drawn toward “refined relinquishment”—that is, relinquishing select technologies which threaten our safety or the safety of the environment.
• Saying “no” to developing physical entities that can self-replicate in a natural environment makes sense to Kurzweil, even though the principle of self-replication will be necessary in certain cases such as self-replicating intelligence.³⁵ We want to avoid inundation by “gray goo,” by unrestrained nanobot replication. What we need is “blue goo”—that is, “police” nanobots that will combat the criminal nanobots.³⁶
• In the case of the computer virus, we find an example of a nonbiological self-replicating entity that has appeared on the scene along with the spread of internet communication. This software pathogen threatens to destroy our computer network medium; but, the bright inventors of computer software can design an “immune system” to prevent serious damage.
• We cannot avoid at this point introducing the phenomenon of the computer virus.
• What is Kurzweil’s interpretation? “Although software pathogens remain a concern, the danger exists mostly at a nuisance level,” he comments. Then he adds, “When we have software running in our brains and bodies and controlling the world’s nanbot immune system, the stakes will be immeasurably greater.”³⁷
• Anticipating my theological analysis yet to come, I recommend that we pause for a moment to consider the significance of the computer virus for understanding the human condition.
• The invention of the computer virus is an invention with one sole purpose, namely, to destroy.
• Despite the benefits or even blessings of computer connections around the world, something at work in the human mind leads to the development of brute and unmitigated destruction. No increase in human intelligence or advance in technology will alter this ever lurking human proclivity.
• Is the transhumanist understanding of human nature realistic enough? Does the transhumanist vision include a realistic anticipation of our human proclivity for twisting good things into the service of evil?
• What we see in transhumanism is a vague awareness of this ever lurking threat; but is it being taken with sufficient seriousness? Does the confidence in progress as inherent and inevitable blind transhumanists from seeing the potholes in the road they are traveling?
• Transhumanists seek protection from evil in the free market. Here is the path their ethical logic follows. Society should organize itself to foster the advances they are proposing. Technology needs money, private money; so society should be ready and willing to provide funding. This is where capitalism becomes incorporated into the transhumanist ethic.
• Laissez faire capitalism will protect us from evil and keep progress progressing.
• “Inherently there will be no absolute protection against strong AI. Although the argument is subtle I believe that maintaining an open free-market system for incremental scientific and technological progress, in which each step is subject to market acceptance, will provide the most constructive environment for technology to embody widespread human values.”³⁸ The free market will provide enough good to overcome the evil nuisances.
• The highway of technological progress will take us there; and free market capitalism will clear the road of evil obstructions. So, the transhumanists assume.
• Again we ask: how will we get there from here?
• In another essay I parse the various ethical issues arising from within the advancing field of nanotechnology, one of the service roads that connect to the transhumanist highway.³⁹ Here, at a more abstract level, I simply wish to point out that the ethical values the transhumanists think they are trucking are likely to hit a detour, because investors from the free market will most likely divert the technology they fund into the service of their own economic ends.
• Does Religion Block Progress?
• Such detour signs are apparently invisible. What transhumanists think they see in front of them are roadblocks put there by religion.
• Through the eyes of today’s transhumanists, religion looks like a roadblock, an obstruction. What the transhumanists think they see in religion is an atavistic commitment to the past, to the status quo, to resistance against anything new.
• Religion is allegedly Luddite.
• This image is misleading; although we must admit that some religious reactions to scientific and technological advance can take Luddite form.
• Be that as it may, later in this paper I will show that Christian theology strongly affirms change. It even looks forward to radical transformation.
• The reluctance to embrace progress on the part of theologians does not come from a posture of resistance. Rather, it comes from an entirely different source, namely, a critique of the naiveté on the part of those who put their faith in progress, especially technological progress.
• What is so naive about transhumanism, I will try to show, is its dismissal of the ambiguity that unavoidably accompanies all technological progress.
• What a Christian theologian can in good conscience do is encourage the advance of life-enhancing technology while keeping a wary eye open for the potential destructive proclivities of sinful human beings.
• Simon Young provides an example of one who would like to clear religious blockage to make way for transhumanism.
• He assumes that a religious faith in God is necessarily atavastic and recalcitrant. After all, if God created the world the way it is, then it follows that it is immoral to change it. After all, if God allowed a child to be born with a genetic defect, it follows that it is immoral for medical therapists to repair it. This is Young’s logic, applicable to the Christian faith if not other religions.
• “The greatest threat to humanity’s continuing evolution is theistic opposition to Superbiology in the name of a belief system based on blind faith in the absence of evidence.”⁴⁰
• The God of the Bible does “new things,” says Isaiah. God even promises a new creation, a renewing of nature. And if one only looks in the local telephone book or an on-line directory, more than likely a Good Samaritan hospital can be found just around the corner.
• However, the historical evidence does not fit Young’s assumptions.
• Medical care for those who suffer began with Jesus the healer and continues right down to present day Christian consciousness.
• No Christian opposition to biology, either regular unleaded or the Super type, exists, especially when biology is pressed into medical service. So, Young’s complaint regarding at least Christian recalcitrance is based upon blind assumptions rather than open eyed observation.
• Out of an apparent fear that religious tradition might attempt to slow down technological innovation, transhumanists accuse religious representatives of holding a vested interest in provenance over matters of death and immortality. One of the impediments to the advance toward cybernetic immortality is religion, they say.
• What about the transhumanist attempt to attain everlasting life?
• Religion stands in the way. Religion threatens to block progress. This is because religion has traditionally sought to provide a palliative for people faced with death.
• Religion brings acceptance of death, and comfort with that acceptance.
• Ready to engage in combat with traditional religion, in Promethean style Kurzweil wants to defy death and use nanotechnology as a weapon to defeat death. “The primary role of traditional religion is deathist rationalization—that is, rationalizing the tragedy of death as a good thing.”⁴¹ In order to benefit from what the Singularity can bring, we need to overcome our deathist rationalization.
• We need to sweep traditional religion out of our road.
• Given what was mentioned just above, it would appear to me that any improvement in human health or even longevity would be greeted by Christian moralists as a blessing from science, a gift to be thankful for. No theological recalcitrance would block progress toward human betterment through medical technology.
• On the other hand, a Christian theologian is likely to contend that the extension of the present form of human life for the indefinite future offered in the transhumanist scenario simply does not correspond to the biblical vision of resurrection from the dead.
• But, that is another matter, and not one I want to make central in this essay. Rather, I would like to understand more clearly the ramifications of transhumanist assumptions regarding progress in light of the Bible’s promise of a coming future transformation.
• Our redemption through resurrection into the new creation does not correspond to cybernetic immortality.
• Futurology and Eschatology
• The appearance of transhumanist thinking and future forecasting has been made possible by recent advances in technology nested within a three century tradition of belief in progress.
• What belief in progress has done for Western civilization is hold in front of us a positive vision of the future. Transhumanism holds up a positive vision of the future, a variant of visions which have become quite familiar over the last half century.
• Here, let us expand the context for understanding the place of transhumanist thinking within the wider horizon of Western culture, and also within Christian theology.
• Two key elements in the transhumanist vision I would like to analyze are these: belief that the future will be different from the past plus the confidence that we can rely upon progress to bring this new future to pass.
• I would like to analyze these two commitments within a review of just what the concept of the future entails.
• Two distinctive yet complementary ways for viewing the future stand before us. The first way is to foresee the future as growth, as an actualization of potentials residing in the present or past. The second way is to anticipate something new, to prophesy a coming new reality.
• The first can be identified with the Latin term futurum. This term suggests growth, development, maturation, or fruition. An oak tree is the actualized futurum of a potential that already exists in the acorn.
• The Latin term adventus, in contrast, is the appearance of something new, a first, so to speak. It is a future that can be expected or hoped for, but it cannot be planned for.
• Whereas futurum provides an image of the future that can result from present trends, adventus provides a vision of a future that only God can make happen.⁴²
• We might date the birth of futurology with the founding of the World Future Society in 1967, although pioneering thought in the 1950s led up to it.
• The now nearly effete era of futurology relied upon futurum.
• Alvin Toffler spoke of the futurists as “a growing school of social critics, scientists, philosophers, planners, and others who concern themselves with the alternatives facing man as the human race collides with an onrushing future.”⁴³
• That school of futurists who flourished before many of today’s transhumanists were born is all but dead now; but their legacy remains instructive for us today.
• The “Earth Day” futurists of the late 1960s and 1970s set forth projections based upon then present trends.
• They forecasted alternative scenarios of damage to our planet and terrifying die backs of starving people if trends continued toward increased population growth, increased natural resource depletion, increased agricultural and industrial production, increased pollution, along with increased threats to the ozone layer. They even warned us of global warming.
• These futurists structured their thinking according to what I call the understanding-decision-control (udc) formula: we need to understand present trends along with the alternative scenarios they could lead to; we need to make a decision regarding which alternative future we should actualize; and then we the human race can take control over our destiny rather than be pilloried by the onrush of an otherwise uncontrollable future.⁴⁴
• Futurology provided the science that was thought would provide human control over our planetary future.
• Whereas the path to the future pictured by the futurists was a movement from here to there, the path envisioned by Christian theologians reversed the direction.
• The vision of God’s future would require the advent of something new, the arrival of a reality that we ourselves could not control.
• Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, spoke of God’s future as a “mystery,” as a coming reality beyond our rational control.
• Human consciousness transcends present reality with an openness toward the future, to be sure, Rahner said; but we must rely on the fact that “this future wills to give itself through its own self-communication....which is still in the process of historical realization.”⁴⁵
• Lutheran theologian Carl Braaten sharply defined the difference between futurology and eschatology: “A crucial difference between secular futurology and Christian eschatology is this: the future in secular futurology is reached by a process of the world’s becoming. The future in Christian eschatology arrives by the coming of God’s kingdom. The one is a becoming and the other a coming.”⁴⁶
• In light of these understandings of the future, it is clear that the concept with which transhumanists work is the future as futurum, the future as a futurologist would grasp it.⁴⁷ New and startling things await us in the future, but the way from here to there is growth, technological advance.
• Human and posthuman flourishing will be the result of step by step advances.This understanding of the posthuman future depends on a related concept, namely, progress.⁴⁸ To the doctrine of progress we now turn.
• Progress in Technology
• As we have seen, transhumanism relies on the doctrine of progress.
• Adherence to progress lies at the level of assumption. One might ask: is such an assumption warranted? There is no doubt that progress in technology is a reality.
• Technological progress is the poster child of Enlightenment civilization.
• Yet, we have reason to ask whether progress is limited to technology or whether all of reality is being carried toward the future by the flow of progress. Specifically, is it reasonable to think of human nature as progressive?
• The backbone of the doctrine of progress is that “something is better than it had been and promises to get better still in the future.”⁴⁹
• This Western idea burst forth during the Renaissance, and originally included a vision of a better future for culture. Eventually, cultural advance was eclipsed by industrial and then scientific or technological progress.
• Since the Enlightenment, “contemporary science and technology in effect co-opted the idea of progress, claiming improvement as self-evident.”⁵⁰ We find ourselves today thinking objectively about the progressive advance of technology and, to some extent science; but we cannot be confident that we see progress culturally or morally.
• “Because the notion of purpose or end in relation to nature was abandoned in modern science, there is no basis in science or in technology for judging the value of the ends to be served by technologies and therefore no basis for judging that changes to natural entities are improvements.
• This isolation of ends from means creates an ethical gulf between technical knowledge and its applications.”⁵¹
• What is key here is that our post-Enlightenment civilization has witnessed a split between technological progress and moral values.
• This split can be invisible, however, when the idea of progress seems to assume its own inherent definition of “better” and places this value in conflict with the values of the surrounding culture. When this happens, culture feels overrun by progress; and then technology is viewed as dehumanizing.
• So, we ask: in what direction? Does technology determine the direction for us? Or, do we draw upon values from other sources and press technology into the service of actualizing those values?
• Despite the threat of dehumanization, it is clear that technological progress is driving our civilization.
• Does the dazzle of technological innovation temporarily blind us to the need for retrieving our fundamental value stance?
• Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, Georgetown University futurist Victor Ferkiss cautioned against allowing technology to follow its own course without being directed by human commitment to values such as justice, equality, and human well-being. “To control technology, to control the direction of human evolution, we must have some idea of where we are going and how far, else we will be mere passengers rather than drivers of the chariot of evolution.”⁵²
• Over the last four decades futurists such as Ferkiss have wrestled with the role of technology in bearing our civilization toward its future.
• Not merely the machines we invent are relevant. Perhaps more relevant is the technological mindset, the cultural incorporation of the machine into our self-understanding as human beings.
• The nearly primordial concept of techne or technique—refers to the complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result.
• The technical mind converts otherwise spontaneous and unreflective behavior into behavior that is deliberate and rationalized.
• What distinguishes our modern world is the sheer delight we take in technique, finding fascination at more complex computers, faster jets, and bigger bombs. New nouns such as “technological man” or “technological civilization” have come to describe the ever expanding and apparently irreversible rule of technique in all domains of life.
• Technique has expanded not only our practical lives, but it has also entered into our inner lives. Technique has become constitutive of the identity of modern human being. “Technology is what has made man man,” wrote Ferkiss.⁵³
• But, we might ask: could progress take us to the point where a fully “technological man” or perhaps a fully “technologized humanity” could emerge? To believe such a thing is either possible let alone desirable is to embrace a myth.
• “Technological man is more myth than reality,” warned Ferkiss.⁵⁴ Why? Because of the split between technique and value. Technique is still pressed into the service of values that transcend it, whether we observe this or not.
• And what critical observers have seen during the industrial age in the modern West is the subordination of both science and technology into the service of economic greed and political domination.
• Today’s technology is still supported and guided by yesterday’s bourgeois values. Nothing suggests this arrangement will change.
• “What if the new man combines the animal irrationality of primitive man with the calculated greed and power-lust of industrial man, while possessing the virtually Godlike powers granted him by technology? This would be the ultimate horror.”⁵⁵

  • "End Time man.."
• Now, just how is this relevant to our analysis of the transhumanist project?
• Note two things: first, note the false assumption that technological progress has a built in direction or purpose, false because it fails to recognize the split between progress and value; second, note the close alliance between transhumanist progress and free market capitalism.
• The values allegedly inherent within evolution and progress will not be able to sustain themselves in the face of the pressure to serve the demands of the funders. Money talks. What money says goes.

  • Much as we are seeing now globally but specifically to the alteration in traditional American values within the USA regarding liberty, personal freedom and the Constitution under the Neocon or Elite control of the U.S. Government today.
• No way exists to liberate technological progress from the vested interests of the economic and political powers which make such progress possible.
• Despite their feeble whisperings of liberal values such as altruism, cooperation, and ecology, the progress transhumanists anticipate will be unavoidably pressed into the service of consolidating and expanding the wealth of its investors.
• Does Technology De-Humanize Us?
• Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems Bill Joy opened the twenty-first century with a prophetic essay, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Can we imagine a future in which we, members of the human race as we know it, will be no longer?
• “But if we are downloaded into our technology,” Joy asks, “what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human?”⁵⁶
• Will downloading our intelligence into a machine threaten the continuance of or humanity?
• The transformation of the natural world around us along with the transformation of ourselves into something new that surpasses us raises the question: will the kind of technological progress advocated by transhumanists actually de-humanize us? Would such a dehumanization be due to this specific technological proposal, or is it due to the very nature of technique itself?
• Watching the incorporation of technique into human self-understanding has alarmed both theologians and secular humanists for half a century now.
• Some fear that technology applied to the inner life de-humanizes us, that it cuts us off from our otherwise spontaneous joy at being natural creatures. “Technique is opposed to nature,” writes French social critic and Reformed theologian Jacques Ellul. “It destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, and does not allow this world to restore itself or even to enter into a symbiotic relation with it.”⁵⁷
• Now, Ellul’s pitting human nature in opposition to technique is a bit extreme; because most anthropologies would affirm that the pursuit of technological innovation is one of the obvious attributes of human nature. We are homo faber, the species that makes things.
• So, the threat of dehumanization comes not from technological advance per se; rather, the threat comes from our temptation to so identify with our technological production that we forget our relationship to the natural world.
• In order to protect us from such forgetfulness, Ferkiss proposes a new norm: “man is part of nature and therefore cannot be its conqueror and indeed he owes it some respect.”⁵⁸
• Just how it is that technology threatens our humanity is subtle. On the one hand, transhumanists propose a technology that will enhance our humanity, at least the intelligent aspect of humanity.
• On the other hand, once technology takes over and replicates itself, it will leave our present stage of humanity in the evolutionary dust.
• An emerging posthumanity will replace us. We might ask: if we replace ourselves with posthumanity, will we have given expression to our essential human potential for self-transcendence through technology? Just how should we think about this?
• If yesterday’s futurists could speak to today’s challenge, they would most likely warn us of tendencies within us to surrender what is human to the mindset of technique.
• “While it is untrue that technology determines the future independently of human volition, there is no question that that human individuals and human society are increasingly under pressure to conform to the demands of technological efficiency, and there is a real possibility that the essence of humanity will be lost in the process, that human history will come to an end and be converted into a mere prelude to the history of a posthuman society in which machines rather than men rule.”⁵⁹
• Ferkiss admonishes us to avoid this pitfall. “Man must maintain the distinction between himself and the machines of his creation....not only must man stand above the machine, he must be in control of his own evolution.”⁶⁰
• Almost presciently anticipating today’s proposal to create a posthuman intelligence, Ferkiss declares that we should preserve our humanness; we should maintain today’s humanity over against the temptation to replace it with something more advanced. “Man’s greatest need is not to transcend his species as such but to develop it fully...
• Man is not a superape; he is no longer an ape at all. Before we abandon man for a machine-man or a genetic mutant, we should learn what he can do in his present form once liberated from hunger, fear, and ignorance.”⁶¹
• Perhaps Ferkiss the humanist would represent the religious road block the transhumanists would like to clear out of the way.
• Now, this observation that we human beings belong to nature and are embedded in nature is important, to be sure; yet this is not the point I would like to stress here. What is more important to the present analysis is the naive sense of control or false sense of dominance that technological victories over nature might elicit.
• University of Chicago theologian David Tracy alerts us to the dangers of sacrificing our better judgment to naive trust in technological progress.
• “Now techne becomes the productof the will to domination, power and control...a power on its own, leveling all culture; annihilating all at-home-ness in the cosmos, uprooting all other questions in favor of those questions under its control; producing a planetary thought-world where instrumental reason, and it alone, will pass as thought.... The object cannot think. The subject will not. We began as technical agents of our willful destiny. We seem to end as technicized spectators at our own execution.”⁶²
• The Theological Critique of Progress
• The assignment given me by the conference leadership is to examine the concept of progress underlying the transhumanist vision, and to look at it from the distinctive perspective of a Lutheran theologian.
• For resources, I will turn to a theological subtradition which is not exclusively Lutheran but which relies upon Luther’s Reformation insights into human nature. This is the neo-orthodox school of theological thinking which reigned during the middle of the twentieth century.
• One key figure was Reinhold Niebuhr, long time professor of social thought at Union Seminary in New York, along with one of his disciples, Langdon Gilkey, the late professor of theology at the University of Chicago.
• In the tradition of Augustine and Luther, they proffered a version of “Christian realism” regarding the sinful condition in which we human beings find ourselves; and they cautioned against overestimating what we can achieve within history apart from the gracious action of God.
• In his writings during the 1930s and 1940s, Niebuhr shows awareness that our modern Post-Enlightenment culture which plays host to both natural science and European imperialism is a branch growing on a larger historical tree.
• The tree’s trunk stands with roots in classical Greece and Rome, as well as in the soil of Israel’s history and the Christian Bible.
• The modern idea of progress, he avers, is both an outgrowth and a pruned version of biblical eschatology.
• The prophets and the apocalypticists of Scripture saw human history as dynamic, as changing, as moving from promise to fulfillment. But human advance is also subject to divine judgment. What this means is that all events within history are ambiguous—that is, the advance of each human potential can lead to either a good actualization or an evil actualization.
• Unambiguous goodness is not guaranteed by progress.
• Only eschatologically—only at the advent of God’s Kingdom which will come by an act of divine grace—will unambiguous fulfillment be possible. In the meantime, we live in the paradox of being able to envision fulfillment while experiencing the inescapable dialectic of success and failure.
• If that assumption is challenged the whole structure of meaning in the liberal world is imperiled....The creed is nevertheless highly dubious....It is false in so far as all historical processes are ambiguous.”⁶³
• “The idea of progress is the underlying presupposition of what may be broadly defined as ‘liberal’ culture.
• The ambiguity of which Niebuhr speaks is the ever present potential created by human freedom, namely, the potential to choose evil and chaos as well as what is good and fulfilling.
• The problem is that today’s believers in progress are blind to this ambiguity.
• They trust that inherent to the progress of history is a built-in logos or guiding principle that transforms otherwise meaningless growth into a process of betterment. This belief is a truncation of the biblical eschatology which preceded it. It is an outgrowth of the effect of Scripture on Western culture, to be sure; but the concept of progress prunes off this growth the previous recognition of the ineluctable continuation of creative evil.
• “The ‘idea of progress,’ the most characteristic and firmly held article in the credo of modern man, is the inevitable philosophy of history emerging from the Renaissance. This result was achieved by combining the classical confidence in man with the Biblical confidence in the meaningfulness of history.
• It must be observed, however, that history is given a simpler meaning than that envisaged in the prophetic-Biblical view...[Progress] did not recognize that history is filled with endless possibilities of good and evil...It did not recognize that every new human potency may be an instrument of chaos as well as of order; and that history, therefore, has no solution of its own problem.”⁶⁴
• We moderns have inherited the optimism of the Renaissance while tacitly rejecting the realism regarding human nature given us by the Reformation.
• A sinner in need of divine grace was the starting point of Reformation anthropology, a starting point quickly forgotten during our eras of science building and nation building.
• “Original sin really means that human nature has completely fallen,” writes Reformer Martin Luther. “The intellect has become darkened, so that we no longer know God and His will...our conscience is no longer quiet but, when it thinks of God’s judgment, despairs and adopts illicit defenses and remedies. These sins have taken such deep root in our being that in this life they cannot be entirely eradicated.”⁶⁵
• We are soiled by sin, so to speak. No amount of progress will wash it away. “Sin remains, then, perpetually in this life, until the hour of the last judgment comes and then at last we shall be made perfectly righteous.”⁶⁶
• No amount of human intelligence, wit, will power, creativity, reform, or revolution can enable us to dig ourselves out of this hole. We are unable to transform ourselves. Only God can deliver us.
• Now, says Niebuhr, without this acknowledgement of who we are as human beings, we will find ourselves with something less than a purchase on the reality of our situation. “This tragic aspect of history, towards which the Renaissance was partly oblivious, was precisely that aspect of history which the Reformation most fully comprehended.
• This comprehension is contained in the Reformation polemic against all doctrines of sanctification, whether Catholic, secular or sectarian-Christian, in which it detects a too-simple confidence in historical possibilities.
• Its doctrine of ‘justification by faith’ contains implications for an adequate interpretation of history which have never been fully appropriated or exploited...”⁶⁷ No historical ideology or scientific technology can possibly provide us with unambiguous sanctification—that is, unambiguous improvement let alone perfection. Failure to realize this leaves us in unreality.
• Realism requires an accurate portrayal of the human situation.
• This ever present risk of sinful activity is a universal contingent—that is, though unnecessary it is always and everywhere possible.
• At any time and in any place, otherwise happy and fulfilled human beings may initiate evil and destruction.
• “Sin is natural for man in the sense that it is universal but not in the sense that it is necessary.”⁶⁸
• At the birth of the computer age, we should have been able to predict the coming of the computer virus, or something like it. Now, at the birth of transhumanist technology, similar predictions would be in order.
• Niebuhr structures the insights of the Reformation paradoxically, so that they shine with a double dimensional illumination upon our experience.
• When it comes to spiritual health, the realism of Luther’s Reformation becomes Niebuhr’s prescription.
• Here is Niebuhr’s list of “the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of its dialectical affirmations: that the Christian is justus et peccator, ‘both sinner and righteous’; that history fulfills and negates the Kingdom of God; that grace is continuous with, and in contradiction to, nature; that Christ is what we ought to be and also what we cannot be; that the power of God is in us and that the power of God is against us in judgment and mercy; that all these affirmations which are but varied forms of the one central paradox of the relation of the Gospel to history must be applied to the experiences of life, from top to bottom.
• There is no area of life where ‘grace’ does not impinge.”⁶⁹ Because of who we human beings are, subject to sin, our fulfillment will require gracious divine action on our behalf. The good news of the Christian gospel is that God promises us such grace.
• Progress Under Judgment
• The core worry of the Christian theologian here is the naiveté with which believers in progress remove the ambiguities of human history, with which they maintain confidence in the good that progress can bring while denying the potential growth of evil.
• What the theologian ought to steadfastly maintain is that our vision of human abundance and human flowering must hold on to its transcendence; we must hold on to the judgment that the eschatological kingdom of God renders against the accomplishments of human history.
• “There is a great temptation today to confuse sociological evolution with spiritual progress,” writes Jacques Ellul. “The Bible expressly tells us that the history of mankind ends in judgment.”⁷⁰
• That Christian reliance upon a transcendent judgment against human history is a necessary antidote to the naiveté of faith in progress seems confirmed by events during the first half of the twentieth century.
• Technological and even cultural advance in the European West were insufficient to prevent political tyranny, mass genocide, and global war.
• Langdon Gilkey recites the litany of events that confirmed the need for seeing a dialectic between immanent progress and God’s transcendent kingdom. “In the First World War—despite the refinement of European culture and the moral idealism of that culture’s self-understanding—Europe experienced the apparent self-destruction of this most modern and developed of societies in a prolonged and senseless bath of blood.
• In the Depression and its aftermath, the West as a whole experienced the self-contradiction of its economic forms, and the consequent rise of fascist and communist totalitarianisms that dissolved the hard-won political freedoms of modernity.
• And in the Second World War, with its slavery, genocide and technology of ultimate destruction, the world experienced an eruption of technological and sophisticated evil: personal, political and social, unknown to history before. History seemed to manifest demonic regress not progress in the social, political and moral realms.”⁷¹
• “It seemed the obvious lesson of current events that morals do not advance in history.
• Hence, a progress of technology may in fact augur a regress in social harmony and social justice, and thus all that is cumulative, instead of ‘saving’ mankind, can threaten to become the demonic instrument of mankind’s destruction.
• This permanent ambiguity of historical process, this continuation of sin even in an advancing culture, meant that if there be a kingdom, it could not be realized through a sociohistorical development leading to a perfect society in history.”⁷²
• When considering our evolutionary history and technological future, what direction should a realistic anthropology follow?
• Paul Jersild, in a recent article on science and faith, points a cautious way. “In some respects, a more civilized society does emerge with the evolution of cultures, but there is ample evidence that evolving societies invent still more horrific ways to exalt themselves and destroy their neighbors. Evolution, whether biological or cultural, does not mean inexorable progress on the road toward perfection.”⁷³ In sum, we should move forward, but we should not presume progress in every respect is inevitable or guaranteed.
• Conclusion
• It is my conclusion that members of the transhumanist school of thought are naive about human nature; and they are overestimating what they can accomplish through technological innovation.
• They are naive because they take insufficient account of the propensity we human beings have for using neutral things or even good things for selfish purposes, resulting in chaos and suffering.
• The assumption transhumanists seem to make that both biological evolution and technological progress have their own built in entelechy or purpose from which we can derive our social ethic overlooks the threat to their values posed by the funders.
• The result will be technological advances that benefit the investors to the detriment of the wider society and the ecosphere they would like to rehabilitate.
• The forecast of a future replete with cybernetic immortality and cosmic consciousness seems extravagant and fantastic. Whether it is possible for our intelligence and self-consciousness to be reduced to information patterns and then uploaded on to a non-biological substrate is not a question I can address here. But I would like to point out that there is no warrant for believing that all our human problems will be solved by transhumanist technology.
• There is no warrant for thinking that the currently selfish human race will be able to transform itself into an altruistic or benevolent one. There is no warrant for thinking that we human beings with our history of economic injustice and ecologically unhealthy habits are willing or able, on our own, to eliminate poverty and protect the ecosphere.
• No amount of increased intelligence will redeem us from what the theologians call sin.
• I call this the eschatological problem.
• What transhumanists are hoping for is adventus, but they have only futurum to work with.
• God has promised some of what appears in the transhumanist vision. But the transformation of the human heart so that it exudes benevolence and justice requires divine grace.
• The advent of the new creation will require much more than what our evolutionary history by itself can deliver. It will require God’s transforming power.
• Increased human intelligence cannot on its own accomplish what it will take divine grace to make happen.
• One more observation. I would like to point out that this near apocalyptic vision projected by the transhumanists includes some elements which appear irreconcilable with the biblical promise of a new creation.
• The biblical promise begins with Jesus’ Easter resurrection as a model. This includes suffering and death, complete death. It also includes a divine act of raising the dead to new life. What happened to Jesus is what will happen to us. NRS 1 Corinthians 15:20: “ But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.”
• The New Testament does not look forward to living forever in our present state; rather, it presumes we will pass through death to the new life God promises. Eternal life is not the same thing as extended life.
• The picture of cybernetic immortality painted by the transhumanists does not look like the Bible’s promise of resurrection.
• Even if genetic enhancement and nanotechnology are able to increase human longevity or even lead to cybernetic immortality, the uploaded self-consciousness will still need to pass through the purgatorial cleansing of death and resurrection.
• Apart from the fulfillment of this promise, the future of human history will remain like its past, ambiguous.
• Finally, a Christian theologian can only encourage continued scientific research into genetics and nanotechnology when the goals are improved human health and well-being.
• Attempts to enhance human intelligence through technological augmentation might also be greeted with approval, although probably not with overwhelming enthusiasm.
• Because the theologian looks forward to the advent of divine transformation, he or she can celebrate anticipatory transformations brought by advances in science and technology. Biblical theology need not be recalcitrant or Luddite.
• Biblical theology can be ready to celebrate technological breakthroughs while remaining realistic about what to expect from human nature.

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• The Bush Administration's
    Secret Biowarfare Agenda
• By Stephen Lendman
    7-28-8
• When it comes to observing US and international laws,  treaties and norms, the Bush administration is a serial offender.
• Since  2001, it's: 

    

  -- spurned efforts for nuclear disarmament to advance  its weapons program and retain current stockpiles;
• -- renounced the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty  (NPT) and asserted the right to develop and test new weapons;
• -- abandoned the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM)  because it expressly forbids the development, testing and deployment of  missile defenses like its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and  other programs;
• -- refuses to adopt a proposed Fissile Material Cutoff  Treaty (FMCT) that would prohibit further weapons-grade uranium and plutonium  production and prevent new nuclear weapons to be added to present stockpiles  - already dangerously too high;
• -- spends more on the military than the rest of the world  combined plus multi-billions off-the-books, for secret programs, and for  agencies like the CIA;
• - advocates preventive, preemptive and "proactive"  wars globally with first-strike nuclear and other weapons under the nihilistic  doctrines of "anticipatory self-defense" and remaking the world  to be like America;
• -- rescinded and subverted the 1972 Biological Weapons  Convention (BWC) to illegally develop new biowarfare weapons;
• in November  1969 and February 1970, Richard Nixon issued National Security Decision  Memoranda (NSDM) 35 and 44; they renounced the use of lethal and other  types of biological warfare and ordered existing weapons stockpiles destroyed,  save for small amounts for research - a huge exploitable loophole; the  Reagan and Clinton administrations took advantage; GHW Bush to a lesser  degree;
• -- GW Bush went further by renouncing the US Biological  Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that prohibits "the Development,  Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons....;"
• on May 22, 1990, GHW Bush signed it into law to complete the 1972 Convention's  implementation; what the father and Nixon established, GW Bush rendered  null and void;
• "Rebuilding America's Defenses" is his central  policy document for unchallengeable US hegemony; among other provisions,  it illegally advocates advanced forms of biowarfare that can target specific  genotypes - the genetic constitution of individual organisms.
• A Brief Modern History of Biowarfare 

    

  -- the Hague Convention of 1907 bans chemical weapons; 

    

  -- WW I use of poison gas causes 100,000 deaths and 900,000  injuries;
• - Britain uses poison gas against Iraqis in the 1920s;  as Secretary of State for War in 1919, Winston Churchill advocates it in  a secret memo stating: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned  gas against uncivilised tribes;"
• -- the 1928 Geneva Protocol prohibits gas and bacteriological  warfare;
• - in 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads infects human subjects  with cancer cells - under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for  Medical Investigations; Rhoads later conducts radiation exposure experiments  on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients;
• -- in 1932, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study begins on 200  black men; they're not told of their illness, are denied treatment, and  are used as human guinea pigs to follow their disease symptoms and progression;  they all subsequently die;
• -- in 1935, the Pellagra Incident occurs; after millions  die over two decades, the US Public Health Service finally acts to stem  the disease;
• -- In 1935 - 1936, Italy uses mustard gas in conquering  Ethiopia; 

    
• - In its 1936 invasion, Japan uses chemical weapons  against China; in the same year, a German chemical lab produces the first  nerve agent, Tabun;
• -- in 1940, 400 Chicago prisoners are infected with malaria  to study the effects of new and experimental drugs;
• -- the US has had an active biological warfare program  since at least the 1940s; in 1941, it implements a secret program to develop  offensive and allegedly defensive bioweapons using controversial testing  methods;
• most research and development is at Fort Detrick, MD; beginning  in 2008, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore labs will also conduct it; production  and testing are at Pine Bluff, AR and Dugway Proving Ground, UT;
• -- from 1942 - 1945, (US) Chemical Warfare Services begins  mustard gas experiments on about 4000 servicemen;
• -- in 1943, the US begins biological weapons research  at Fort Detrick, MD;
• -- in 1944, the US Navy uses human subjects (locked in  chambers) to test gas masks and clothing;
• -- during WW II, Germany uses lethal Zyklon-B gas in  concentration camp exterminations; the Japanese (in Unit 731) conduct biowarfare  experiments on civilians;
• -- in 1945, German offenders get immunity under Project  Paperclip; Japanese ones as well - in exchange for their data and (for  Germans at least) to work on top secret government projects in the US;
• -- in 1945, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) implements  "Program F;" it's the most extensive US study of the health effects  of fluoride - a key chemical component in atomic bomb production;
• it's  one of the most toxic chemicals known and causes marked adverse central  nervous system effects; in the interest of national security and not undermining  full-scale nuclear weapons production, the information is suppressed;
• fluoride  is found naturally in low concentration in drinking water and foods; compounds  of the substance are also commonly used for cavity-prevention, but few  people understand its toxicity;
• -- in 1946, VA hospital patients become guinea pigs for  medical experiments;
• -- in 1947, the US has germ warfare weapons; Truman withdraws  the 1928 Geneva Protocol from Senate consideration; it's not ratified until  1974 and is now null and void under George Bush;
• -- in 1947, the AEC's Colonel EE Kirkpatrick issues secret  document #07075001; it states that the agency will begin administering  intravenous doses of radioactive substances to human subjects;
• -- in July 1947, the CIA is established; it begins LSD  experiments on civilian and military subjects with and without their knowledge  - to learn its use as an intelligence weapon;
• -- in 1949, the US Army releases biological agents in  US cities to learn the effects of a real germ warfare attack; tests continue  secretly through at least the 1960s in San Francisco, New York, Washington,  DC, Panama City and Key West, Florida, Minnesota, other midwest locations,  along the Pennsylvania turnpike and elsewhere; more on outdoor testing  below;
• -- after the (official) 1950 Korean War outbreak, North  Korea and China accuse the US of waging germ warfare; an outbreak of disease  the same year in San Francisco apparently is from Army bacteria released  in the city; residents become ill with pneumonia-like symptoms;
• -- in 1950, the DOD begins open-air nuclear weapons detonations  in desert areas, then monitors downwind residents for medical problems  and mortality rates;
• - in 1951, African-Americans are exposed to potentially  fatal stimulants as part of a race-specific fungal weapons test in Virginia;
• -- in 1953, the US military releases clouds of zinc cadium  sulfide gas over Winnipeg, Canada, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne,  the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland, and Leesburg, VA - to determine  how efficiently chemical agents can be dispersed;
• -- in 1953, joint Army-Navy-CIA experiments are conducted  in New York and San Francisco - exposing tens of thousands of people to  the airborne germs Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii;
• -- in 1953, the CIA initiates Project MKULTRA - an 11  year research program to produce and test drugs and biological agents that  can be used for mind control and behavior modification; unwitting human  subjects are used;
• -- in 1955, the CIA releases bacteria from the Army's  Tampa, FL biological warfare arsenal - to test its ability to infect human  populations;
• -- from 1955 - 1958, the Army Chemical Corps continues  LSD research (on over 1000 subjects) - to study its effect as an incapacitating  agent;
• -- in 1956, the US military releases mosquitoes infected  with Yellow Fever over Savannah, GA and Avon Park, FL - to test the health  effects on victims;

  • U.S. Government experiment over Savannah, GA with yellow fever infected mosquitos
• -- in 1956, Army Field Manual 27-10, The Law of Land  Warfare, specifically states bio-chemical warfare isn't banned;
• -- in 1960, the Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence  authorizes LSD field tested in Europe and the Far East;
• -- in 1961, the Kennedy administration increases chemical  spending from $75 - $330 million; it authorizes Project 112 - a secret  program (from 1962 - 1973) to test the effects of biological and chemical  weapons on thousands of unwitting US servicemen;
• Project SHAD was a related  project; subjects were exposed to VX, tabun, sarin and soman nerve gases  plus other toxic agents;
• -- in 1962, chemical weapons are loaded on planes for  possible use during the Cuban missile crisis;
• -- in 1966, the New York subway system is used for a  germ warfare experiment;
• -- in 1968, the Pentagon considers using some of its  chemical weapons (including nerve gas) against civil rights and anti-war  protesters;

  • This is "our" government!!
• Nixon issues two National Security Memoranda in 1969 and  1970; the first (in November 1969) ends production and offensive use of  lethal and other type biological and chemical weapons; it confines "bacteriological/biological  programs....to research for defensive purposes" and has other loopholes  as well; the second (in February 1970) orders existing stockpiles destroyed,  confines "toxins....research and development (to) defensive purposes  only," and declares only small quantities will be maintained to develop  vaccines, drugs and diagnostics - a huge exploitable loophole;
• -- in 1969, an apparent nerve agent kills thousands of  sheep in Utah;
• -- in 1969, the General Assembly bans herbicide plant  killers and tear gases in warfare; the US is one of three opposing votes;  despite being banned, open-air testing intermittently continues to the  present, and the Pentagon apparently authorized it in its most recent annual  report; it calls for developmental and operational "field testing  of (CBW) full systems," not just simulations, and followed it up in  a recent March 2008 test;
• in Crystal City, VA, it released perflourocarbon  tracers and sulfur hexaflouride assuring residents it's safe; it's not  and may harm persons with asthma, emphysema and other respiratory ailments;
• -- in 1969, DOD's Dr. Robert MacMahan requests $10 million  to develop a synthetic biological agent for which no natural immunity exists;
• -- from the 1960s through at least the 1980s, the US  assaults Cuba with biological agent attacks;
• -- in 1970, US Southeast Asian forces conduct Operation  Tailwind using sarin nerve gas in Laos; many die, including civilians;
• Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Joint Chiefs Chairman, confirmes the raid  on CNN in 1998;
• under Pentagon pressure, CNN retracts the report and fires  award-winning journalist Peter Arnett and co-producers April Oliver and  Jack Smith because they refuse to disavow their report;
• -- in 1971, US forces end direct use of Agent Orange  in Southeast Asia; also in 1971 with CIA help, an anti-Castro paramilitary  group introduces African swine fever into Cuba; it infects a half a million  pigs and results in their destruction;
• a few months later a similar attack  fails against Cuban poultry;
• in 1981, a covert US operation unleashes a  type 2 dengue fever outbreak - the first in the Caribbean since the turn  of the century involving hemorrhagic shock on a massive scale; over 300,000  cases are reported, including 158 fatalities;

  • This is our government
• -- in 1975, the Senate Church Committee confirms from  a CIA memorandum that US "defensive" bioweapons are stockpiled  at Fort Detrick, MD - including anthrax, encephalitis, tuberculosis, shellfish  toxin, and food poisons;
• -- in 1980, Congress approves a nerve gas facility in  Pine Bluff, Arkansas;
• -- during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the US supplies Iraq  with toxic biological and chemical agents; Ronald Reagan signs a secret  order to do "whatever (is) necessary and 'legal' " to prevent  Iraq from losing the war;"
• a 1994 congressional inquiry later finds  that dozens of biological agents were shipped, including various strains  of anthrax and precursors of nerve gas (like sarin), gangrene, and West  Nile virus;
• -- in 1984, Reagan orders M55 rockets retooled to contain  high-yield explosives and VX gas; his administration begins researching  and developing biological agents allegedly for "defensive purposes;"
• -- in 1985 and 1986, the US resumes open-air biological  agents testing; it likely never stopped;
• -- in 1987, Congress votes to resume chemical weapons  production;
• -- in 1989, 149 nations at the Paris Chemical Weapons  Conference condemn these weapons; after signing the treaty, it's revealed  that the US plans to produce poison gas; at the UN, GHW Bush reaffirms  the US commitment to eliminate chemical weapons in 10 years; the US implements  the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 - "to implement....the  Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological  (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and Their Destruction....;"
• -- in 1990, GHW Bush signs the 1989 act making it illegal  for the US to develop, possess or use biological weapons; Bush also signs  Executive Order 12735 stating: the spread of chemical and biological weapons  constitutes an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security  and foreign policy of the United States;"
• -- following the Gulf War, reports surface about US forces'  health problems - later called Gulf War Syndrome; the likely cause - widespread  use of depleted uranium, other toxic substances, and the illegal use (on  nearly 700,000 theater forces) of experimental vaccines in violation of  the Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation;
• over 12,000 have since died  and over 30% are now ill from non-combat-related factors; they've since  filed claims with the VA for medical care, compensation, and pension benefits;
• -- in 1997, Cuba accuses the US of spraying crops with  biological agents;
• -- in 1997, the US ratifies the Chemical Weapons Convention  (CWC) banning the production, stockpile and use of these substances;
• -- in 2001, the Bush administration rejects the 1972  Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) citing 38 problems with it, some called  serious; claiming a need to counter chemical and biological weapons threats,  it's spending multi-billions illegally to develop, test and stockpile "first-strike"  chemical and biological weapons that endanger homeland security and threaten  good relations with other countries;
• -- all along, a BWC loophole allows appropriate types  and amounts of biological agents to be used for "prophylactic, protective  or other peaceful purposes" - construed to be defensive; it also permits  "research," not "development;" the CIA took full advantage  to conduct programs for offense, not defense or to further peace; further,  the BWC includes nothing about genetic engineering because it didn't exist  at the time.
• The US Secret Bioweapons Program
• In November 2001, Michel Chossudovsky used this title  for his Global Research.ca article. It was when "an impressive military  arsenal of aircraft carriers and gun-boats" was building up in the  Persian Gulf in preparation for "a major bombing operation....against  Iraq" at a future designated time.
• Back home, the administration used the 2001 anthrax attacks  as "justification for extending the 'campaign against international  terrorism' to Iraq....Washington singled out Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Syria  and Libya of violating the international treaty banning weapons of germ  warfare."
• At the same time, ample evidence "confirms that  the US has built an extensive arsenal of biological weapons (in blatant  violation) of international laws and covenants." It was enlarged in  the 1980s and 1990s but significantly expanded under George Bush on the  pretext of being strictly "defensive" and to "curb the use  of germ warfare by 'rogue states.' "
• On October 29, 2002, the London Guardian reported that  "Respected scientists on both sides of the Atlantic warned that the  US is (illegally) developing a new generation of weapons that undermine  and possibly violate international treaties on biological and chemical  warfare" - ironically at the same time it accused Iraq of these same  type violations.
• University of Bradford international security professor  Malcolm Dando and University of California microbiology lecturer Mark Wheelis  accused the Bush administration of "encouraging a breakdown in arms  control" treaties by secretly conducting these programs.
• Dando said  they include: 

    

  -- developing a cluster bomb to disperse bioweapons; 

    

  -- building a bioweapons plant from commercially available  materials to prove "terrorists" can do it; 

    

  -- genetically engineering a more potent anthrax strain; 

    

  -- producing dried and weaponized anthrax spores in quantities  far larger than for research; 

    

  -- researching and producing hallucinogenic weapons such  as BZ gas; and 

    

  -- developing "non-lethal" weapons similar  to the gas Russia used to end the 2002 Moscow theater siege that killed  around 170 people and injured hundreds.
• In February 2008, the Sunshine Project suspended operations,  but its website is still accessible. It was an NGO dedicated to banning  and "avert(ing) the dangers of" bioweapons. In 2001, it accused  the Bush administration of advancing "a plan to undermine international  controls on biological weapons."
• On May 8, 2002, it issued a press release titled "US  Armed Forces Push for Offensive Biological Weapons Development - genetically  engineered microbes that attack items such as fuel, plastics and asphalt"  in violation of international law.
• The proposals date from 1997 and involve  the (Washington, DC) Naval Research Laboratory and the (Brooks Air Force  Base, San Antonio, Texas) Armstrong Laboratory. They come at a time when  the US rejected "legally-binding" UN inspections of "suspected"  facilities producing weapons "explicitly for offense."
• Additional documents have been suppressed and those known  "are probably only the tip of the iceberg....The National Academies  are also concealing related documents.
• After the Sunshine Project requested  copies....on March 12, 2002, (they) placed a 'security hold' on the public  file" without explanation.
• "The research proposed by the Air  Force and Navy raises serious legal questions. Under the (1989) US Biological  Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act, development of biological weapons, including  those that attack materials, is subject to federal criminal and civil penalties."
• It also prohibits development, acquisition and stockpiling of agents intended  as bioweapons.
• On May 21, 2004, AP reported that arms control advocates  warned the Bush administration that "proposed research for a new (Fort  Detrick) Homeland Security center may violate an international ban on biological  weapons and encourage other countries to follow."
• Experts said proposals  for the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC)  flout bioweapons prohibitions by crossing the line between "defensive"  research and banned weapons development.
• On July 31, 2007 the London Guardian reported that the  US is "Building (a) Treaty-Breaching Germ War Defence Centre"  near Washington, DC" - NBACC.
• It's to be completed in 2008 and will  be a "vast germ warfare laboratory intended to help protect the US  against an attack with biological weapons, but critics say the laboratory's  work will violate international law and its extreme secrecy will exacerbate  a biological arms race (by) accelerat(ing) work on similar facilities around  the world."
• It will house "heavily guarded and hermetically  sealed chambers....to produce and stockpile the world's most lethal bacteria  and viruses" -
• forbidden by the 1972 BWC and 1989 US Biological Weapons  Anti-Terrorism Act.
• The Fort Detrick facility will be used for the new  160,000 square foot lab, and it's authorization coincided with the 2001  anthrax attacks that killed five people, and along with 9/11, unleashed  everything that followed.

  • And "conveniently" yesterday (July 31, 2008) it was announced the "real" suspect in the deadly anthrax letter mailings shortly after 9-11 was the work of a Fort Detrick scientist who "conveniently" committed suicide a day or so ago.
• DHS calls Fort Detrick the home of "The National  Interagency Biodefense Campus."
• Besides NBACC, other agencies there  include: 

    

  -- the Health and Human Services' (NIH) National Institute  of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); 

    

  -- the Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research  Service and Foreign Disease-Weed Science Research Unit (FDWSRU); and 

    

  -- the Department of Defense's US Army Medical Research  Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).
• DHS says USAMRIID "conduct(s) basic and applied  research on biological threats (to provide) cutting-edge medical research  for the warfighter against biological threats."
• International law  and bioweapons expert, Francis Boyle, disagrees. He says the "program  constitutes clear violations of the international (1972 BWC) arms control  treaty....ratified by the United States in 1975."
• He also cites BWC's  preamble that states in part: 

    

  "....Parties to this Convention (are) Determined  to act with a view to achieving effective progress towards general and  complete disarmament, including the prohibition and elimination of all  types of weapons of mass destruction, and convinced that the prohibition  of the development, production and stockpiling of chemical and bacteriological  (biological) weapons and their elimination, through effective measures,  will facilitate the achievement of general and complete disarmament under  strict and effective international control...."
• The BWC goes on to  say that use of these weapons are so "repugnant to the conscience  of mankind....that no effort should be spared to minimize this risk."
• In Boyle's view, Fort Detrick's NBACC and USAMRIID heighten  risks because their work involves: "acquiring, growing, modifying,  storing, packaging and dispersing classical, emerging and genetically engineered  pathogens."
• This work is an "unmistakable hallmark of an offensive  weapons program" in violation of the 1989 Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism  Act that he authored.
• Even worse according to Edward Hammond, former director  of the Sunshine Project: Recreating the deadly 1918 "Spanish flu"  germ that killed an estimated 40 million worldwide (or other dangerous  pathogens) increases "the possibility of (a) man-made disaster, either  accidental or deliberate....for the entire world." If a single viral  particle or cell escapes or is unleashed, an enormous outbreak may result  with potentially catastrophic consequences.
• The Fort Detrick plan derives from a Bush Homeland Security  Presidential Directive (HSPD-10) written April 28, 2004. It states: "Among  our many initiatives we are continuing to develop more forward-looking  analyses, to include Red Teaming efforts, to understand new scientific  trends that may be exploited by our adversaries to develop biological weapons  and to help position intelligence collectors ahead of the problem."  Boyle calls it "a smoking gun" aimed at the BWC.
• "Red Teaming means that we actually have people  out there on a Red Team plotting, planning, scheming and conspiring how  to use biowarfare" and sooner or later will unleash it using living  organisms for military purposes.
• They may be viral, bacterial, fungal,  or other forms that can spread over a vast terrain by wind, water, insect,  animal, or humans, according to Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The Biotech  Century."
• Rifkin also asserts it's "impossible to distinguish  between defensive and offensive research in the field," and given  this administration's penchant for lying and secrecy, other nations will  be justifiably suspicious.
• The Bush administration proceeded anyway.
• Since 9/11,  it spent or allocated around $50 billion on bioweapons development through  11 federal departments and agencies, including DOD and DHS.
• For FY 2009,  it wants an additional $8.1 billion or $2.5 billion more than in FY2008.  It calls its program preventive and defensive and cites Project BioShield  as an example. It became law in July 2004 as a 10 year program to develop  countermeasures to biological, chemical, radiological and nuclear (CBRN)  agents.
• It was, in fact, a gift to companies like Gilead Sciences, the  company Donald Rumsfeld led as chairman from 1997 to 2001 (and remains  a major shareholder) until he left to become George Bush's Defense Secretary.
• It would have also required every American to be vaccinated  under the Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005.
• It passed the Senate but not the House and would have, under a public emergency,  allowed experimental or approved drugs to be used with insufficient knowledge  of their safety - in violation of the Nuremburg Code on medical experimentation.  It also would have immunized companies from liability and denied those  harmed the right to sue.
• Private Bioweapons Labs Cashing In
• According to the Sunshine Project, "scores of US  universities and biotechnology companies (since 2001) have benefitted handsomely  from billions of dollars in 'biodefense' cash.
• Across the country, 'biodefense'  labs are sprouting up like weeds. The unrelenting spigot of federal money  (has) thousands of scientists and technicians" doing bioweapons research  on some of the deadliest pathogens.
• But the problem is much greater than  that: 

    

  -- projects underway are illegal; 

    

  -- immense secrecy enshrouds them; and 

    

  -- federal oversight is so lax that NIH safety guidelines  aren't enforced and CDC poorly identifies problems it should address; as  a result, "accidents are popping up everywhere" amidst a "pervasive  cover-up culture" that hides them - in direct violation of federal  rules and responsible practice that:
• (1) require government agencies to protect the public  from dangerous pathogens, and 

    

  (2) obligate research labs to disclose the nature of  their work; failure to do so suggests alleged biodefense research is, in  fact, cover for offensive biowarfare programs to complement Fort Detrick  and other government site efforts.
• The Sunshine Project believes about 400 private bioweapons  labs now operate around the country with no public disclosure of their  activities - and plenty of reasons to worry Francis Boyle that the Bush  administration is up to mischief.
• It "sabotaged the Verification Protocol  for the BWC (and) fully intend(s) to (engage in) research, development  and testing of illegal and criminal offensive biowarfare programs."  That prospect should frighten everyone.
• Reporter Sherwood Ross for sure. He calls the administration's  project "the costliest, most grandiose research scheme ever attempted  (with) germ warfare capability....going forward under President Bush and  in defiance of" US and international laws. Far worse, where once "germ  warfare was an isolated happenstance, (today's efforts elevate it) to an  instrument of (deadly and loathsome) policy.
• Other Recent Developments
• On February 21, 2008, the Sidney Morning Herald reported  that the Bush administration rejected claims made by Indonesian Health  Minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, in her book titled: "It Is Time for  the World to Change! God's Hand Behind Bird Flu Virus." She questions  whether the US is using bird flu samples collected from developing nations  to develop biological weapons, not new vaccines as claimed.
• On July 20, 2008, the Jakarta Post reported: "If  there were a "National Darling Award" contest....Supari would  probably win it. (Her) supporters praise her as a great third world heroine  who dares challenge the global structure of injustice and inequality perpetrated  by powerful states (like the US) and networks of international institutions.  Most of the praise is based on opinions" from her new book mentioned  above.
• She claims the US is transferring virus samples to the  Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• It's one of two US nuclear weapons labs  that will operate new biological research facilities capable of researching  and developing dangerous pathogens in violation of the BWC and US Biological  Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.
• California-based Lawrence Livermore  National Laboratory is the other one. On January 25, it began operating  a new Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) lab.
• In August, Los Alamos is scheduled  to complete a federally mandated environmental study for a similar lab  to begin operations shortly thereafter. Given the Bush administration's  penchant for secrecy, Supari's accusations may be justified.
• The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) establishes biosafety  classifications. BLS-4 ones, like for Ebola, are the most dangerous, in  part, because no known cures exist.
• Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore currently  operate BLS-2 labs. They'll now have BLS-3 ones to study infectious agents  able to cause serious or fatal illnesses if inhaled.
• But there's no way  to know if both labs, Fort Detrick, others like the former Edgewood Arsenal  (now the Edgewood Area at the Aberdeen Proving Ground), Oak Ridge Ridge  National Laboratory, and still more we don't know about will secretly research  any type pathogens, including the most dangerous ones, for any purpose  - offense or defense.
• What is known is that government labs will study pathogens  posing serious public health and safety threats. Ones like anthrax, botulism,  brucellosis, plague, Rickettsia, tularemia, Avian influenza, H5N1 (the  recent strain reported and called the most dangerous), and valley fever  plus whatever others are planned but kept secret.
• Most important is this. These labs conduct weapons research,  so they'll likely focus on bioweapons and not follow BWC "prophylactic,  protective, or other peaceful purposes" guidelines.
• For example, vaccines  and potential biological weapons defenses may, in fact, be for offense.  Distinguishing between the two is impossible so other nations and figures  like Supari are suspicious.
• They're not comforted by Lawrence Livermore's Lynda Seaver.
• On February 12, she told Arms Control Today that the US is "a signatory  to the Biowarfare Convention and does not conduct bioweapons research."  She also said most work there will be unclassified. On February 15, however,  a CDC spokesperson suggested otherwise and informed Arms Control Today  that Lawrence Livermore security restrictions are tight as they are at  Los Alamos, Fort Detrick and other US weapons research facilities.
• They  bar transparency and place strict limits on sharing select agents research  to prevent other nations from knowing it exists or its purpose.
• Further, later this year DHS will complete construction  of the new Fort Detrick lab (NBACC), and a new $500 million animal research  facility is planned.
• Both will have BLS-3 and 4 capabilities. They'll work  on the most dangerous known pathogens and conduct controversial type threat  assessment research - to develop and produce new biological weapons and  develop defenses against them.
• Once again, differentiating between offense  and defense is impossible, and given their penchant for deception and secrecy,  no one takes Bush administration officials at their word nor should they.
• Francis Boyle's "Biowarfare and Terrorism"
• Boyle drafted the 1989 Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism  Act and covers it in his 2006 book. It's now codified in Title 18 of the  US Code, sections 175 - 178 and was the implementing legislation for the  landmark 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).
• MIT molecular biology professor Jonathan King wrote this  about the book in its forward: 

    

  It "outlines how and why the United States government  initiated, sustained and then dramatically expanded an illegal biological  arms buildup....Boyle reveals how the new (multi-) billion-dollar US Chemical  and Biological Defense Program has been reoriented (endorsing "first  strike" CBW use in war) to accord with the Neo-Conservative pre-emptive  strike agenda - this time by (illegal) biological and chemical warfare."
• This "represent(s) a significant emerging danger to our population  (and) threaten(s) international relations among nations." These programs  "are always called defensive (but) with biological weapons, defensive  and offensive programs overlap almost completely."
• "Boyle (also) sheds new light on the motives for  the (2001) anthrax attacks, the media black hole of silence (about them),  and why the FBI may never apprehended the perpetrators of this seminal  crime of the 21st century."

  • As of 8-2-08 a "suspect" has been named and the previous "suspect", a certain "Hatfield" released and a 6 million dollar settlement the government is to pay to Hatfield for damages to his name and reputation. The "new suspect" (or patsy) for the anthrax mailings in 2001 is reported to have committed suicide (or was suicided) just a few days ago. He too was a scientist working at the Fort Detrick lab.
• They killed five people, injured 17 others,  and temporarily shut down Congress, the Supreme Court, and other federal  operations.
• Army scientist Dr. Steven Hatfill was unfairly implicated as  a "person of interest" but was never charged. He sued the Justice  Department and in June was awarded $2.8 million and a $150,000 annuity  for violating his privacy, leaking false and inflammatory information,  costing him his job and reputation, and blasting his name all over the  media for days. It was the beginning of the frightening events that followed.
• Boyle is currently a leading proponent of an effort to  impeach George Bush, Dick Cheney and other high-level administration figures  for their crimes of war, against humanity and other grievous violations  of domestic and international law.
• In his "Biowarfare and Terrorism,"  he sounds an alarm about the administration's bioweapons program and what  it means for humanity. He fears "a catastrophic biowarfare or bioterrorist  incident or accident (is) a statistical certainty."
• It highlights  enormous new risks plus other frightening ones like the possibility of  nuclear war and catastrophic fallout from it. That, permanent wars, a potential  Andromeda Strain, police state justice, and destroying the republic are  but five among other threats since the advent of George Bush and his roguish  team.

  • Criminals all...
• In "Biowarfare and Terrorism," Boyle addresses  the bioweapons threat as an expert on the subject and gives readers an  historical perspective.
• He asserts that the US government dramatically  expanded an illegal biological arms development, production, and buildup  that endangers all humanity with its potential. It's part of an extremist  agenda for unchallengeable power and right to unleash "proactive"  wars with the most aggressive weapons in its arsensal - nuclear, chemical,  biological, others, space-based ones, and new ones in development.
• Since WW II, America has actively developed, tested,  and used terror weapons, including biological ones.
• Even after Nixon ended  the nation's biowarfare programs, they never stopped. The CIA remained  active through a loophole in the law, then the Reagan administration reactivated  what Nixon slowed down.
• It acted much like the current regime with many  of the same officials espousing similar extremist views - that America  must exploit its technological superiority and not let laws, norms, or  the greater good deter them.
• The Bush administration raised the stakes and threatens  all humanity.
• Boyle believes it used 9/11 and the anthrax attacks to stampede  Congress and the public into aggressive wars and a menu of repressive laws.
• He also thinks the FBI knows who's behind the anthrax attacks: criminal  US government elements planning a police state and another frightening  enterprise - to fight and win a future biowar.

  • As do I...
• A possible nuclear one as  well.
• Boyle sounds the alarm about what may lie ahead and its potential  consequences.
• In October 2003, the National Academy of Sciences did  as well. It warned about the "misuse of tools, technology, or knowledge  base of (bioweapons) research for offensive military or terrorist purposes."  That's the present risk.
• It makes everyone unwitting subjects of a recklessly  endangering experiment.
• Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre  for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at  lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

    

  Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com

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• Brotherhood of the Bell: Black Arts & Black Sciences
• by William Dean Ross
• The majority of people worldwide do not know what the  terms Black Operations and Black Sciences mean or how they are  used.
• Black Operations were developed after World War I; but,  really flourished after World War II during the Cold War.
• Congress  allocated money to the Pentagon, the CIA and other Defense  Department sectors to make the United States military as strong as  possible, but certain projects became more secret than others did.

  • UFOs too?
• The more secret projects were funded by the civilian sector at  first - such as "pet peeve" defense contractors already in the  loop.
• As time went on, the "privy" developed into a real clique of not  only specially screened corporations but also choice individuals  found by federal talent hunts.
• A new sub-culture was born with a  new personality and belief system - separate from mainstream  Americans.

  • The "Sirius Cult"???
• Cutting-edge technology such as stealth aircraft, invisible  hovercraft, extremely low frequency mind control, weather control,  and cloning became secret sciences.
• The new knowledge was and still  is not available to the regular Army, to Congress, or to any  University.
• The most secret of the secret was in the hands of a  power-hungry few that tied itself to the World Bank for the future  funding of its projects.

  • Dangerous and evil men...
• They developed "think tanks" - like  Stanford and Tavistock - to keep the masses fooled about  everything.
• The deception grew like a cancer into every area of industrialized  society.
• They moved into everything from the Mafia to Harvard  University to International Banking.
• They learned how to control  the media and, thus, they controlled the television, Hollywood,  every newspaper, every educational institution and every person's  mind - at least to a certain point.
• Accusations of abuse and inhuman acts by the C.I.A. and F.B.I. were  investigated by Congress in 1977.
• Under the guise of  "national security", there has not been an investigation of their  highly illegal activities since 1977.
• They used the excuse of "national  security" for every crime they committed.
• Your Congress, your President  and your Supreme Court are actually scared of them.
• A mountain of  evidence points to the fact that they have killed thousands,  including corporate executives and politicians - like JFK. They are  thus considered the "Invisible Government."
• The "Invisible Government" needs a name at this point, so let us  call it "The Brotherhood of the Bell."
• This was a 1960's movie  about such a conspiracy.
• By the way, Bell Corporation made the  first flying saucer called "The Bell" - for the "Invisible  Government" because it was shaped like a bell. Therefore, I shall  call the "Brotherhood of the Bell", or simply, "B.O.B."
• B.O.B. became an internationally funded and operated organization  that developed its totalitarian tactics for worldwide economic,  political and military control.
• B.O.B. led us to believe that half  of the earth was religious-capitalism defended by the CIA and the  other half of the world was atheist communism defended by the KGB.  But, in actuality the International Bankers and ancient esoteric  secret societies with an octopus of intelligence agencies  controlled the entire earth - even through World Wars I and II.
• Whenever a few cliques decided to go into business for themselves  and break away from the monopoly system, we would have a world war.  The same is true today; so do not mess with the super-bankers.
• The Cold War ended because of a worldwide cry for "peace". The old  industrialist-banker game of churning up another war for the  military-industrial complex was becoming more and more difficult.
• Their "think-tanks" had to come up with a new strategy to subdue  this "New Left" ideology. Time, also, changed technology thus the  bankers and industrialists no longer needed large populations to do  the farming, work in the factories or even fight in their  war-machine game.
• Advanced computers, robots and artificial  intelligence bio-electronics and cloning eliminated the need of all  of these useless eaters.
• Top secret meetings were held as early as  1960, developing strategies like, for example, "The Report From  Iron Mountain."

  • "Report From Iron Mountain"
• The "New Left", with all of it's altruistic and humanitarian  concepts would be the "Trojan Horse" that would bring in the  largest "shadow of death" to fall on mankind in the written history  of the earth.
• In "Globalist" books, in their reports at the United  Nations, on their statues and art at the new Masonic airports, on  their shrines like the "Georgia Guide Stones", they all call for a  massive de-population of the earth!
• They also command eliminating  democracy and culture under the guise of a new "think tank"  invented international religion and government.
• On the other hand, certain racist New Right organizations have and  are being manipulated by the Black Ops agent provocateurs to appear  hostile to the masses through their song bird media. The truth is  that these groups are very aware of certain concepts of the New  World Order; but, they cannot see that they are being used as  "scapegoats" and "patsies" for Black Operations" sabotage.
• The  invisible government always uses some sort of chaos they create to  steer public demand for social change - such as gun control.
• Their  hoodwinking games are from the old Masonic term "Ordo Ab Chao."  They create the problem secretly but their politicians come forward  openly with a new solution - Order Out of Chaos.
• B.O.B.'s old excuse was "national security" for its cruelty to  mankind. Now it is made of a string of excuses, like: "To save the  children", or: "To save nature!"
• The truth is that "The Brotherhood  of the Bell" is destroying more nature with its' top secret  projects like the nuclear bomb, chemical and biological warfare,  and H.A.A.R.P. (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program)  than we the "useless eaters" could ever imagine doing.
• When the Berlin wall came down, the Black Operations of the East  merged with the Black Operations of the West.
• The "think tanks" now  include Soviets and Red Chinese.
• They have mixed their ideas for an  One World Order and have mixed their military Special Forces  together in a scheme to execute the "cleansing" or "killing  fields."
• What these "Brave New World" types do not know is that once again  they are being used to satisfy the greedy appetites of the super  power-elite!
• Those in the Cabal know that an inter-dimensional  society, an etheric civilization more invisible than they are  controls their minds and souls.
• They honor these Ascended Masters  or Gods with blood and sacrifice - as they always have through the  history of the Dark Nobility and Black Arts Occultism! They know  the Lord of this earth is Lucifer and that he must be appeased.
• The "Black Budget" then started to be used for the "Black Arts" and  became known as the "Black Sciences."

  • "Black Budget" to "Black Science"
• The earliest projects  actually started prior to World War I while the more popular ones  started around World War II. The U.S. Army was in charge of making  the "A-bomb" in the "Manhattan Project" and the U.S. Navy was in  charge of making stealth equipment and invisibility in the  "Philadelphia Experiment."
• After the war, the scientists of both projects were joined with  Nazi scientists from Germany and NASA and the National Security  Agency were formed.

  • NSA
• Previous experiments, like "The Babalon  Working", and "The Montauk Project" used Nazi occultists and  scientists to communicate with and materialize inter-dimensional  beings.
• They also started working on inter-dimensional time travel  and eugenics/cloning. Thus, the Black Sciences were born.
• The Black Sciences are the most secret of all secrets and are  seriously guarded by specially screened soldiers of Black  Operations.
• It is their hope to merge the seen world with the  unseen world.
• It is their goal to make sure we have a "oneness-of  mind" and are spiritually harmonized to a frequency that will bring  this about.
• The Ascended Masters have commanded them to eliminate  the "Old World", with all of its old ideas and all of its old  people. A new generation with a "New World View" is the agenda of  the day.
• That is why many conservatives, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and  Buddhists are on the surveillance and extermination lists.
• That is  why more anti-Constitutional laws are becoming the "New Law."
• That  is why those in the know from all religions and political  ideologies are getting concerned.
• The "Black Operations" work for the "Black Sciences" who worship  "Black Occult Religions" of the "Brotherhood of the Bell."
• Copyright, William Dean Ross, 2000 All Rights Reserved.

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• Dobbins Air Force Base
• Marrietta, GA  
• County: Washington
• Submitted by: Anonymous      Last updated on : 7/3/2006    
• Location Description:     
     
    Dobbins Air Force Base, Marrietta GA
• Function: test site for plasma and antigravity air craft, experimental crafts and weapons

4 more annotations...

• Jacques Vallee - On Messengers of Deception
• July 17th, 2008 by Greg   
  • Interviews
• As mentioned recently, Daily Grail Publishing has just released a reprint of Jacques Vallee's UFO classic, Messengers of Deception (Amazon US and Amazon UK).
• Last week I had a quick chat with Jacques about the book, and the controversy it created in ufology
• It was intentionally short - I could talk to Jacques for a couple of days on all manner of topics, but in this case I just wanted to address the elements of his work which have made him, as he describes it, "a heretic among heretics" -
• namely, his concern about uncritical acceptance of the UFO phenomenon,
• and also the 'psychic' manifestations found in UFO reports which suggest that they may not be "nuts and bolts" craft.
• Jacques' answers are succinct and incisive - here's a few pull-outs:
• "Many erstwhile ufologists don’t want the deceptive reports exposed, just as the Catholic Church long denied instances of abuse in its ranks."
• "People linked to the intelligence community of the major countries have been closely involved in studying UFO cases since World War Two. That interest is legitimate, whether it is purely personal (as most of them claim) or related to their official duties. The same is true in parapsychology."
• [T]he phenomenon comes in an environment of manifestations that include heightened awareness of synchronicities, paranormal sounds and lights and occasionally absurd coincidences similar to those described in the poltergeist literature."
• "By denying the reality of the reports, brushing aside the witnesses...and treating them like fools or crooks, the academic skeptics are actually teaching the public that science is impotent at studying the phenomenon."
• The full interview is below.
• Let's get straight to the new release: the original publication of Messengers of Deception in 1979 marked quite a turning point in your standing with the ufology community.
• TDG: Jacques, thanks for talking with us here at The Daily Grail.
• Your warning that we should be more careful about embracing the phenomenon, and that its underlying qualities could well be negative and deceitful in nature rather than benevolent, was rejected by many (and still seems to cause angst to this day).
• I'm keen to know what acted as the catalyst for the writing of Messengers of Deception, and if you have thoughts on why so many in the UFO research community paint it as a betrayal of sorts?
• Jacques Vallee: The evidence for an “undercurrent” of deceit behind some alleged UFO cases only becomes visible when you spend time in the field interviewing witnesses and tracking down the evidence.
• It became annoying to me because it represented a waste of time and a distraction from studying genuine observations.
• Researchers who collect reports only through books or media accounts would not necessarily encounter this level of the phenomenon and would understandably resist the suggestion that the belief in extraterrestrial intervention is being manipulated to serve political or cultist goals.
• Even people who are fully aware of this negative aspect don’t want to bring it up into the open because they think it will call disrepute to the subject. Many erstwhile ufologists don’t want the deceptive reports exposed, just as the Catholic Church long denied instances of abuse in its ranks.
• Whistle-blowing is never welcome. My own position has always been that, on the contrary, the best way to gain the respect of the intellectual community is to expose hoaxes, sloppy research and manipulation whenever we encounter them.
• TDG: The underlying message of the book seems more relevant now than ever - in the last few years, we've had the "Serpo" case gain high traction in certain parts of the community, and now the "CARET Drones" story seems to have taken on a life of its own, despite there being little to no evidence behind either.
• Considering the dangers in uncritical belief that you warn of in Messengers of Deception, do you think high profile ufologists and media should be more diligent in exercising a 'duty of care' when presenting these cases so eagerly?
• Jacques Vallee: If we do not establish a high standard for the data we publish, the entire field suffers.
• Then it becomes easy for skeptics to claim that the phenomenon only appears before “cranks and weirdoes,” as astrophysicist Stephen Hawking recently stated in England.
• This is exacerbated by the increased credulity of the public and its blatant exploitation by the media.
• It seems that people – including some highly educated folks – are ready to believe almost anything they see on the Internet or on Larry King.
• TDG: In Messengers of Deception, you warn people to be careful of 'psy-ops' initiated by intelligence agencies and the military -

  • SEE: Tom Horn of "Raiders News Network" and all his study and research.
• you cite the World War II case of the 'London Controlling Section' (LCS), whose sole purpose was strategic deception, often using "tricks of science".
• How far do we take this caution though?
• A large portion of ufologists, most of the individuals who have worked in researching/conducting remote viewing, and also a significant portion of parapsychologists, all have fairly strong links to military or intelligence groups.

  • Is THIS that "Lie" often referred too in the New Testament writings of the End Time and the Book of Revelation; so that "many being deceived..", will "believe the lie" and "be damned."????
• Should we therefore be highly skeptical of the claims made in regards to each topic, even if it seems scientifically sound?
• Jacques Vallee: The same standards should apply here that apply in science generally: Look at the evidence behind every claim, track down the references, and test the data yourself.
• People linked to the intelligence community of the major countries have been closely involved in studying UFO cases since World War Two.
• That interest is legitimate, whether it is purely personal (as most of them claim) or related to their official duties. The same is true in parapsychology.
• This only becomes a problem when that quasi-official interest goes beyond pure research and extends to actually faking sightings, disseminating false photographs or films and promoting weird beliefs, either to serve as distraction from actual intelligence operations, or as a cover for the development of advanced prototypes.
• A good example is given by the claims of UFOs seen over the USSR in the seventies, that were planted by the KGB to cover-up the launching of soviet satellites that violated the SALT treaties.
• Every nation can play this game, and has.
• TDG: When we look at ufology in the 1960s, versus today, I'm not sure a lot of progress has been made (perhaps even the opposite).
• Is ufology a sisyphean endeavour, unworthy of our prolonged attention?
• You've personally devoted almost 50 years of research and writing to exploring the phenomenon - can you give a simple opinion to the question: what is behind the UFO phenomenon?
• I have convinced myself that there was a real UFO phenomenon once the errors, hoaxes and occasional manipulations were screened out.
• Jacques Vallee: You’re asking me two different questions here.
• We do know a great deal more today than we did just 10 years ago, thanks to dedicated researchers who have invested their time and resources to documenting the data. That is not as good as a serious scientific research effort, but one should never underestimate what can be achieved by motivated amateurs.
• This being said, it would be unrealistic to expect quick solutions, in this field as in any other scientific endeavor.
• I have also been interested in the nature of consciousness, and that field has not gotten closer to a solution in fifty years either.
• Similarly, look at some of the lingering enigmas in archaeology, or in medicine: all we can do is document our data and hope someone will make sense of it at a later time.
• TDG: Turning to another aspect of your research that has made you a 'heretic' within ufology: You were one of the first to explore the idea that UFO events were as much 'psychic' in nature as 'physical'.
• Can you detail some of these 'psychic' aspects, and what you think the cause is?
• Jacques Vallee: This is still a little-known aspect of the sightings because most investigators don’t probe into this area, either for lack of background in parapsychology, or simply because they think they already know the answer, and it must involve simple “nuts and bolts” spacecraft.
• It takes a very brave witness to bring up such experiences in the face of skeptical researchers.
• I don’t believe a UFO observation makes anyone “psychic,” to use the popular terminology, but the phenomenon comes in an environment of manifestations that include heightened awareness of synchronicities, paranormal sounds and lights and occasionally absurd coincidences similar to those described in the poltergeist literature.
• TDG: On that note, Margaret Mead once wrote: "When we want to understand something strange, something previously unknown, we have to begin with an entirely different set of questions. What is it? How does it work? Are there recurrent regularities?"
• I've been intrigued myself with some of these "recurrent regularities" when it comes to paranormal phenomenon - in particular the strange sounds heard, although there are other things such as strange fogs, odd tastes and smells in the mouth -
• but find it odd that ufology research doesn't seem to address these so much.

  • Because these "researchers" are as much in denial in their way as the "conventional" scientists are accused of being in their way.
• From your own research, have you been able to identify such "recurrent regularities", which to me would provide solid evidence that there is some sort of objective, structured phenomenon at work here?
• Jacques Vallee: The phenomenon is very robust in its manifestations, both physical and physiological.
• The former can be seen when plotting the time of day when observations are made (the “Law of the Times”) and the development of specific waves or flaps.
• Physical traces, interference with car ignition, patterns of light phenomena and energy have all been documented by serious authors.
• The physiological factors include evidence of exposure to UV radiation, frequent effects on the eyes (from conjunctivitis to temporary blindness), skin blisters or injuries in reaction to focused beams of light, temporary inhibition of muscle control, disturbances in the sleep cycle, and general fatigue and anemia lasting over 7 days and life-threatening in some extreme cases.
• TDG: Despite these intriguing pieces of evidence though, 'skeptics' (of the CSICOPian kind) still tend to write off ufology as a mass of "Venus sightings".
• Is the skeptical/rationalist movement - and academia in general - guilty of ignoring the phenomenon based almost purely on intellectual ego and fear of embarrassment? And is there a danger that by alienating themselves (pardon the pun) from the experiences of the public, they will actually enable those very beliefs?
• As you rightly note in Messengers of Deception, "When the Establishment is rational, absurdity is dynamite."
• Jacques Vallee: By denying the reality of the reports, brushing aside the witnesses (including trained observers like pilots or military personnel) and treating them like fools or crooks, the academic skeptics are actually teaching the public that science is impotent at studying the phenomenon.
• As the belief in the reality of UFOs grows among the population along with the evidence that a real phenomenon exists, people naturally tend to turn away from science in their search for answers, and that is a very dangerous trend.
• TDG: Similarly, in Messengers of Deception you note that "the experience of a close encounter with a UFO is a shattering physical and mental ordeal".
• Are UFO experiencers unfairly shunned (and worse, ridiculed) by medical and psychological support networks, based simply on the nature of their experience?
• Jacques Vallee: What these people go through is worse than being shunned. In most cases, they are left to fend for themselves, and they become easy preys for groups with quick answers.
• In the words of a woman who wrote to me after she had a horrible experience she interpreted as an alien abduction, followed by a series of disastrous hypnotic sessions at the hands of incompetent researchers, “the ufologists were worse than the beings who abducted me.”
• The vacuum that has been created by academic neglect is getting filled by all kinds of irrational belief systems, often linked to conspiracy theories and political paranoia. That was true when I wrote the book thirty years ago, and it is even more true now.
• The 2008 reprint of Jacques Vallee's classic work "Messengers of Deception" has been re-edited by Dr Vallee, and also comes with a new Foreword. You can purchase the book via Amazon US and Amazon UK.
• Jacques Vallee was born in France, where he received a B.S. in mathematics at the Sorbonne and an M.S. in astrophysics at Lille University.
• Coming to the U.S. as an astronomer at the University of Texas, where he co-developed the first computer-based map of Mars for NASA,
• Jacques later moved to Northwestern University where he received his Ph.D. in computer science.
• He went on to work at SRI International and the Institute for the Future, where he directed the project to build the world's first network-based groupware system as a Principal Investigator on Arpanet, the prototype for the Internet.
• He is now a venture capitalist, and lives in San Francisco. He continues to research the UFO phenomenon.

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• The Pentagon’s alarming project: Avian Flu Biowar Vaccine
• by F. William Engdahl
• Global Research, August 14, 2008
• There is alarming evidence accumulated by serious scientific sources that the US Government is about to or already has ‘weaponized’ Avian Flu.

  • If this report is true (and at this point in time, I can almost believe anything), the U.S. Government is prepared to make war, not just against offending armies of foreign foes but entire populations of nations around the world; including it's own!!! If so..this is truly evil and an Evil the world would be justified in correcting. I hardly recognize the government in Washington DC anymore and barely can identify my America from even a few decades ago. Surely something monstrous and evil has taken it's place within the borders of the United States. It's government is prepared to kill millions...even billions, so it appears.
• If the reports are accurate, this could unleash a new pandemic on the planet that could be more devastating than the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic which killed an estimated 30 million people worldwide before it eventually died out.
• Pentagon and NIH experiments with remains in frozen state of the 1918 virus are the height of scientific folly.
• Is the United States about to unleash a new racially selective pandemic through the process of mandatory vaccination with an alleged vaccine "against" Avian Flu?

  • Population reduction; culling the herd as the NWO/Illuminati Elite have been advocating for?
• There is reason to believe that sections of the international pharmaceutical industry cartel are acting in concert with the US Government to develop a genetically modified H5N1 virus substance that could unleash a man-made pandemic, perhaps more deadly than the 1918 ‘Spanish Influenza’ pandemic claiming up to 30 million lives.1
• Rima E. Laibow, MD, head of the Natural Solutions Foundation, a citizen watchdog group monitoring the pharmaceutical industry states, "Our best intelligence estimate is that pandemic Avian Flu has already been created through genetic engineering in the United States,
• fusing the deadly genome of the 1918 Pandemic, misnamed the ‘Spanish Flu’, with the DNA of the innocuous H5N1 virus in a growth medium of human kidney cells, according to the National Institutes of Health and the vaccine’s manufacturer.
• Some virologists believe that this would insure that the man-made mutant virus recognizes human cells and knows how to invade them." 2

  • A weapon specifically targeting human beings and human populations...Not enemy militaries or armies necessarily but whole swaths of innocent civilians. Is this not a demonic scheme? Not "who" but "what" has taken over our government?!!!!!!!!
• If true, as Laibow points out, "A basic virological fact that the public has not been told is that it is impossible to make a vaccine against a virus that does not yet exist.

  • NOTE: #1
• Public relations efforts to the contrary, IF a vaccine is being made against the Avian Flu virus in its pandemic form, that means that the pandemic virus must already exist, period, end of discussion."3

  • NOTE: #2
• The genome of the 1918 pandemic, the so-called "Spanish Flu", was recently intentionally resurrected by the United States government from a frozen corpse that died of the flu in 1918 in Alaska.
• Because of that resurrection, both the Avian Flu, and its "vaccine" are now a significant threat to public health.
• The Spanish Flu, which was not Spanish at all, was created in the US through an early bioweapons program and injected into healthy young men (i.e., ’soldiers’) as the first mandatory vaccination in the military during World War I.
• The "Spanish Flu", which originated in Kansas on US Military bases, was one of the deadliest pandemics in modern history.
• It was also one of the most successful biological weapons ever created, until now.
• To date, there have only been around 385 human cases of Avian Flu identified worldwide (assuming those identifications are trustworthy, of course), with 243 deaths.
• To put the absurdity of this effort into perspective, Laibow points out, Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD), which researchers believe is heavily associated with aspartame consumption, is a leading cause of death which, according to the CDC, for example, killed 460,000 Americans in 1999 and the numbers keep rising (www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5106a3.htm.)
• But, aspartame is not under criticism.
• Interesting as a footnote on Aspartame, G.D. Searle, the Chicago drugs company that held the patent on Aspartame was in danger of losing its license from the US Government Food & Drug Administration in the 1980’s until Donald Rumsfeld, out of Government, was named President of Searle.

  • Aspartame responsible for SCD..
• Rumsfeld used his contacts in Washington to get the FDA to approve Aspartame despite known tests showing serious health effects on rats.

  • Maybe there are after all such a thing as "Reptilians" masquerading as humans!
• As I document in detail in my book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, the same Don Rumsfeld went on to become chairman and principal stockholder of a California pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences Inc., which developed and patented Tamiflu in 1996, first as a drug for AIDS, later as a vaccine for H5N1 Avian Flu.
• In 1997 Donald H. Rumsfeld was named Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences, where he remained until early 2001 when he became Defense Secretary.
• As Secretary he refused to sell his stock at the time he came under conflict of interest allegations when he ordered $1 billion worth of Tamiflu be bought to injected into the US military personnel as a "precaution."
• It was later proven that Tamiflu was in no antidote for H5N1 and its side effects were sometimes very severe.
• Laibow adds, "Given the shockingly obvious lack of any threat from an un-weaponized H5N1 virus, how can we explain the Bush Administration spending billions of dollars preparing each of the 50 States, for what it calls the ‘inevitable Bird Flu pandemic,’ which they say could kill half or more of all Americans and similar numbers of people around the globe?"4
• Ominously, on June 3, Associated Press reported, "Tyson Foods Inc. has begun killing and burying the carcasses of 15,000 hens from a flock that tested positive for exposure to a strain of the bird flu in northwest Arkansas, state officials said Tuesday."

  • Tyson Foods
• Tyson Foods is the largest industrialized producer of chickens in the world and has been repeatedly under attack for its unsanitary conditions of breeding and slaughtering.
• In January 2005, a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report to the US Senate, "Safety in the Meat and Poultry Industry," concluded that US meat and poultry processing plants had "one of the highest rates of injury and illness of any industry."
• They cited exposure to "dangerous chemicals, blood, faecal matter, exacerbated by poor ventilation and often extreme temperatures. Workers typically faced hazardous conditions, loud noise, must work in narrow confines with sharp tools and dangerous machinery."
• The industrialization of chicken-raising and slaughtering in the USA has progressed to the point that by 2003 when the first cases of H5N1 Avian Flu virus were reported from Asia, five giant multinational agribusiness companies dominated the production and processing of chicken meat in the United States.
• The five companies were Tyson Foods, the largest in the world; Gold Kist Inc; Pilgrim’s Pride; ConAgra Poultry; and Perdue Farms.5 Most outbreaks of Avian Flu in Asia have been traced back to such mass chicken industrial factory centers.6
• In May this year, The Canadian Press reported from Toronto, "An experiment mating H5N1 avian flu viruses and a strain of human flu in a laboratory produced a surprising number of hybrid viruses that were biologically fit, a new study reveals.
• And while none of the offspring viruses was as virulent as the original H5N1, about one in five were lethal to mice at low doses, showing they retained at least a portion of the power of their dangerous parent." 7
• The Toronto article went on, "The work suggests that under the right circumstances - and no one is clear what all of those are - the two types of flu viruses could swap genes in a way that might allow the H5N1 virus to acquire the capacity to trigger a pandemic.
• That process is called reassortment.
• ‘This study is just showing exactly that: There is a risk this virus can successfully reassort with a human virus,’ said Richard Webby, director of the World Health Organization's collaborating centre for influenza research at St. Jude Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee." 8
• Pentagon Bioweapon research
• Prof. Mathew Meselson, a professor of molecular biology at Harvard, and well-respected scientist in the area of chemical and biological warfare, confirms that the United States government has extensively researched and developed biological weapons in the past.
• Meselson described an American facility, north of Terre Haute, Indiana, built in 1944 that would have produced 500,000 four pound anthrax bombs monthly once in full operation.
• Meselson was part of a team that proved the accidental release of anthrax at a Soviet facility in 1979, disproved charges of biological warfare in Laos and Cambodia in the late 1970s, and was a driving force behind popularizing the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1994.
• Since coming in office, the Bush-Cheney Administration has done much to weaken that Chemical Weapons Convention as well as ones on biological weapons.

  • And Evangelical Christians voted for..TWICE!!!...and still support (though in smaller numbers than before) this Monster!!!!!!!!!!!!
• One of George W. Bush’s first acts as President in early 2001 was to oppose a proposed international Biological and Toxic Weapons Protocol, without explanation, leading to the death of the talks.
• In a 2004 study, the British Medical Association warned that the world was perhaps only a few years away from "terrifying biological weapons capable of killing only people of specific ethnic groups," citing advances in genetic weapons technology. 9
• The US Department of Homeland Security has ominously enough announced it is ordering production and stockpiling of a pandemic influenza vaccine: "The U.S. Government is taking steps to minimize the need to make vaccine allocation decisions by supporting efforts to increase domestic influenza vaccine production capacity.

• Significant funding is being

   

  provided to develop new vaccine technologies that allow production of enough pandemic influenza vaccine for any person in the United States who wants to be vaccinated within six months of a pandemic declaration."
• The US Government has been financing the development of a vaccine against H5N1 on a "fast track" basis since 2004.
• Sanofi Pasteur in Swiftwater, Pennsylvania, a subsidiary of the giant French pharmaceutical firm, the third largest in the world, manufactured an inactivated vaccine made from an H5N1 virus isolated in Southeast Asia in 2004.
• Sanofi Pasteur, part of the French-based Sanofi Aventis Group, was awarded a contract by the US Government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIAID to manufacture the H5N1 vaccine in May 2004.11
• In April 2007 the FDA approved the Sanofi Pasteur vaccine for H5N1 even though one year before the FDA cited Sanofi Pasteur for producing contaminated Fluzone vaccines.12
• The FDA approved H5N1 vaccine is itself apparently not really effective in event of a human-to-human outbreak of Avian Flu.
• On announcing its approval, the FDA stated, "two injections given 28 days apart may provide ‘limited’ protection if a pandemic occurs. About 45% of people who got the vaccine in a study developed an immune response to the virus."13
• Until now H5N1 has not mutated into a form that can easily spread from person to person.
• Is that what the researchers at Sanofi Pasteur and various labs under contract to the US Government are engaged in? If so it would be classified Top Secret, clearly.
• The respected British magazine, New Scientist, commented, "If H5N1 does mutate, it is unclear if vaccines developed now would still work against a pandemic strain. Manufacturers could tailor a new vaccine to that strain, but current production methods take months."14
• The magazine noted that research on the Sanofi vaccine was conducted by the National Institutes of Health as part of the US Government's efforts to prepare for a flu pandemic.
• The salient question is whether they prepare "for a flu pandemic" or whether they prepare a flu pandemic.

  • Good question..
• Why is the US Government spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to stockpile this H5N1 vaccine which likely would not work against such a pandemic outbreak?
• On July 2, 2008, the London Daily Telegraph newspaper reported, "Three Polish doctors and six nurses are facing criminal prosecution after a number of homeless people died following medical trials for a vaccine to the H5N1 bird-flu virus." 15

  • Poland and the US Government are real tight right now...thick as thieves, as the old saying goes.
• The report added that the medical staff, from the northern town of Grudziadz, were being investigated over medical trials on as many as 350 homeless and poor people last year, which prosecutors say involved an untried vaccine to the highly-contagious virus.
• Authorities claim that the alleged victims received €3 to be tested with what they thought was a conventional flu vaccine but, according to investigators, was actually an anti bird-flu drug.
• The director of a Grudziadz homeless centre, Mieczyslaw Waclawski, told a Polish newspaper that last year, 21 people from his centre died, a figure well above the average of about eight.
• The Polish report did not specify if it was the vaccine being developed under contract to the US Government Department of Homeland Security by Sanofi-Pasteur. However, it is known that Sanofi-Pasteur has been producing large quantities of such a vaccine at a factory they have in China.
• Dr. Laibow reports that the "Pandemic Avian Flu Vaccine" was scheduled to be delivered to the United States this month by the French vaccine maker, Sanofi Pasteur, from a facility they own in China, where it is being produced. The US Government issued its "Vaccine" allocation plan in July.
• Laibow fears that a most sinister scenario of a deliberate release of Avian Flu pathogens on the population that could activate martial law and forced vaccination with resulting deaths in the millions could be imminent.

  • A decade or more ago there were those few who were warning the rest of us about sinister, evil things the U.S. Government was up too. They were called conspiracy nuts, conspiracy theorists, kooks and every name in the book; as well as being laughed at. Their ranks have grown down through the years; though many of the original "patriot" bell ringers have died or been terrorized off line by "you know who." Nevertheless, it isn't as difficult as it once was to convince many Americans that Uncle Sam is actually a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; with more Hyde than Jekyll.
• Spanish Flu virus revived by Pentagon
• In 2003 US Army scientists created ‘Spanish Flu’ virus in the laboratory.
• According to a report at the time by the watchdog group, The Sunshine Project, which monitors biological and chemical weapons research of the United States Government issued a statement that "The 'Spanish Flu' influenza virus that killed 20-40 million people in 1918 is currently under reconstruction.

  • No government would seek actively and purposefully to revive and activate this deadly virus if it was not totally and abjectly a nexus for evil.
• Several genes of the extraordinarily lethal 1918 flu virus have been isolated and introduced into contemporary flu strains. These proved to be lethal for mice, while virus constructs with genes from a current flu virus types had hardly any effect.
• These experiments may easily be abused for military purposes, but provide little benefit from a medical or public health point of view."
• They continued, "The 1918 Spanish Flu was highly infectious and – in comparison to contemporary flu viruses – killed a very high percentage of those infected, including many younger people.
• The Spanish Flu alone caused the medium life expectancy in the US in 1918 to drop by 10 years. Hence, flu viruses are perceived today as a serious biological warfare threat.
• Just two weeks ago, a 15 million dollar research grant was awarded in the US to develop protective measures especially against a bioterrorist attack with flu viruses."
• The statement added, "Despite the very dangerous nature of the 1918 virus, efforts to reconstruct it started in the mid 1990s, when Dr Jeffrey Taubenberger from the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington DC succeeded in recovering and sequencing fragments of the viral RNA from preserved tissues of 1918 victims.
• In the current issue of the scientific journal Emerging Infectious Diseases new genetic details of the 1918 flu virus will be published."
• Most ominously, they report, "But after (partially) unravelling the genetic sequence of the virus, the scientists went a step further and began bringing the Spanish flu back to life.
• Unnoticed by the public, they succeeded in creating a live virus containing two 1918 genes that proved to be very lethal in animal experiments. This experiment is only one genetic step away from taking the 1918 demon entirely out of the bottle." 16
• They conclude, "A resuscitation of the Spanish flu is neither necessary nor warranted from a public health point of view.
• Allegedly, the recent experiments sought to test the efficacy of existing antiviral drugs on the 1918 construct. But there is little need for antiviral drugs against the 1918 strain if the 1918 strain had not been recreated in the first place.
• ‘It simply does not make any scientific sense to create a new threat just to develop new countermeasures against it.’ says Jan van Aken, biologist with the Sunshine Project, ‘Genetic characterization of influenza strains has important biomedical applications.

  • No..they mean to do something else with it..
• But it is not justifiable to recreate this particularly dangerous eradicated strain that could wreak havoc if released, deliberately or accidentally.’"17
• Let us sincerely hope not, but as Prof. Stephen Block, Stanford University biophysicist with years of experience in classified Pentagon and US Government biological research remarked in another context, "We’re tempted to say that nobody in their right mind would ever use these things." Block added, "But not everybody is in their right mind…" 18Sanofi Pasteur delivers H5N1 vaccine

  • Not so much insane as they are demonized to the point they are actively cooperating with some very sinister and malignant forces. Think not? SEE: Tom Horn of "Raiders New Network", his book "Ahriman Gate" and also Google "Lynn Marzulli."
• On April 28 of this year in an official Press Release from Sanofi Pasteur US headquarters in Swiftwater, Pennsylvania and Lyon, France, the company stated, "Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of Sanofi-Aventis Group, announced today that the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has accepted H5N1 bulk vaccine antigen to produce approximately 38.5 million doses of vaccine to protect against a new strain of avian influenza.
• Sanofi Pasteur has a multi-year contract with HHS as part of its pandemic program, and will receive a payment of $192.5 million booked in the second quarter of 2008 for acceptance of the bulk vaccine lot."19
• Then, on June 16 of this year, Sanofi Pasteur issued the following release announcing that it will, "donate 60 million doses of H5N1 vaccine to the World Health Organization (WHO) over 3 years for the establishment of an H5N1 vaccine global stockpile."
• The President and CEO of Sanofi Pasteur, Wayne Pisano, said in the release, "The H5N1 virus is currently circulating in some of the poorest regions of the world and an outbreak of pandemic influenza would most likely hit populations living in areas with limited access to vaccines. This donation of H5N1 vaccine aims to address the needs of those most vulnerable populations.
• In addition to supporting the efforts of governments," Pisano added, "it is essential that industry collaborates with international organizations such as WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other global health players. This is the best way to build a stockpile of vaccines for developing nations, ready to be deployed on the ground in the event of a pandemic flu outbreak."20
• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in addition to being a financial supporter of the so-called Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic, has dedicated its foundation billions to support population control especially inAfrica.

  • Just two members of the murderous "Elite." It was Prince Philip of Great Britain, Queen Elizabeth II's consort who stated he would like to come back in the next life as a "killer virus."
• Among other projects they, as well as the Rockefeller Foundation, are financing The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, whose head is former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. 21
• As the world's leading influenza vaccine manufacturer, Sanofi Pasteur produces approximately half of the influenza vaccine distributed worldwide.
• In the US it produced more than 40 percent of the influenza vaccine distributed for the 2007-2008 influenza season.
• The fact that the US Government has revived the 1918 Spanish Flu virus to make "tests" indicates that anything is possible.
• There are in this world some people not in their "right mind." God forbid if it is so in this instance.
• F. William Engdahl is author of Seeds of Destruction: the Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
  He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net. (see details on William engdahl's book below)
• Notes
• 1Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp.207-8.
• The Spanish Influenza was unusual in that it struck infants as well as elderly.
• Crosby described its effects: "a disease that turned people the color of wet ashes and drowned them in the fluids of their own bodies and inspired names like the ‘purple death.’
• 2 Rima E. Laibow, M.D., Weaponized Avian Flu Intelligence Report, in http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/?p=742
• 6 GRAIN, Fowl Play: The Poultry Industry’s Central Role in the Bird Flu Crisis, http://www.grain.org/go/birdflu , February 2006.
• In their report they note, "The transformation of poultry production in Asia in recent decades is staggering. In the Southeast Asian countries where most of the bird flu outbreaks are concentrated—Thailand, Indonesia, and Viet Nam—production jumped eightfold in just 30 years, from around 300,000 metric tonnes (mt) of chicken meat in 1971 to 2,440,000 mt in 2001. China’s production of chicken tripled during the 1990s to over 9 million metric tons per year." (Cited in Engdahl, Op. Cit., p. 288.).
• 7 As well, a report by a Canadian organization, Beyond Factory Farming, described the transmission likely pathways from the giant industrialized chicken centers: ‘In Thailand, China and Vietnam there is a highly developed industrial poultry industry which has expanded dramatically in the past decade. The large poultry companies raise millions of birds, hatch chicks to supply other intensive poultry operations, export live birds and eggs to countries such as Nigeria (where the first Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza outbreak in Africa was recently reported) and produce and export feed which often includes "litter" (i.e., manure) in the ingredients.

  • Is someone using birds/fowl as a vector for transmitting the virus???
• ‘Manure that may contain live virus is spread on surrounding farmland, or exported as fertilizer, and through run-off may end up in surface waters where wild birds feed and rest. Chicken manure is even found in fish farm feed formulations where it is introduced directly into the aquatic environment.

• Wild birds and poultry that

   

  have fallen victim to HPAI in Asia, Turkey and Nigeria appear to have been directly exposed to HPAI virus originating in the factory farm system.
• In Asia, a flock of wild ducks died from HPAI—after having come into contact with the disease at a remote lake where a fish farm used feed pellets made from poultry litter from a factory farm.
• In Turkey a massive cull of backyard flocks—and the deaths of three children—took place after a nearby factory farm sold sick and dying birds to local peasants at cut rate prices.
• Nigeria has a large and poorly regulated factory poultry production sector which is supplied with chicks from factory farms in China.’ (Engdahl, Op. Cit., p. 289)
• 8 Study shows hybrids of bird flu and human flu viruses fit well, could occur, The Canadian Press, Toronto, undated. May 2008.
• 15 Matthew Day, Homeless people die after bird flu vaccine trial in Poland, Daily Telegraph, July 2, 2008, accessed in http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/2235676/Homeless-people-die-after-bird-flu-vaccine-trial-in-Poland.html.
• 16 The Sunshine Project, Lethal Virus from 1918 Genetically Reconstructed: US Army scientists create ‘Spanish Flu’ virus in laboratory - medical benefit questionable, 9 October 2003, accessed at http://www.sunshine-project.org/publications/pr/pr091003.html.

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• DARPA seeks 'perch and stare' spy-fly robot
• Thursday 21st August 2008
• Pentagon war-boffins have shelled out $4.6m to a noted aerial crazytech firm to develop a spy drone which can "perch" near a target, "stare" at it, then take off again and fly home.
• Aerovironment Inc, already famous for such projects as the Helios solar-powered crewless wingship, the three-inch bugbot-thopter and the hydrogen strato-cruiser skyeye, was chuffed to announce the contract win yesterday.
• One need hardly add that the cash comes from DARPA*, the US military boffin apparat whose early-afternoon dining policy is strictly extramural.
• Aerovironment and DARPA refer to the desired perch'n'lurk mode as Stealthy Persistent Perch and Stare (SP2S), and intend to implement it starting with the existing winged Wasp machine.
• (We would like to offer an alternative term for winged spydroids attaching themselves to buildings etc: "Gargoyle mode".)
• “A UAS that performs hover/perch and stare missions is viewed as an important capability for our armed forces,” said Aerovironment dronebot chief John Grabowsky.
• “Our production Wasp incorporates the latest technologies to provide a day and night capable, hand-launched UAS that fits into a standard backpack while still providing room for other important supplies.
•   

  The existing Wasp - soon with Gargoyle Mode.
• the Wasp-based SP2S... is on track to develop into a portable, practical and affordable perch-and-stare micro air vehicle."
• There's no hint as to just how the Wasp will manage to perch on things, nor quite what kind of landing areas Aerovironment have in mind.
• There has previously been discussion of methods which might allow such drones to snare power or phone lines and hang from them like bats (perhaps even harvesting electricity from them, in the case of power lines - or tapping into phone lines, good lord).
• This would seem to offer an option to drop away again afterwards for the return flight, if the wire were high enough.
• Alternatively, Aerovironment's Puma drone already has a landing mode in which it pitches up sharply into a full stall just above its chosen landing spot, so dropping to a stationary landing just where it wants to without any forward speed.
• A normal plane would destroy itself doing this, but the small tough Puma can survive such landings without damage. This apparently allows a landing on a very small area, such that the new modified Wasp might be able to set down on small ledges or other suitable perch points.
• Getting off again afterwards could be a bit of an issue, however, as would be the effective use of onboard cameras after such a "perch" crash landing.
• A clue may be offered in Aerovironment's language, in which it is said that the new gargoyle-mode Wasp will be "capable of flying to difficult targets, landing on and securing to a 'perch' position".
• *Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency

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• Monarch One 45min  - 45 min  - 2008-04-05 
   marshall thomas - www.monarchnewphoenix.com
• read the book www.MonarchNewPhoenix.com The true story of microwave weapons being used on whistleblowers and dissidents on a government hit list.Experiments that slowly kill with non-ionizing radiation or forces a suicide due to the extended torture.«

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• VVH-TV News: Special Report on PLUM ISLAND
• VVH-TV News Chief Investigative Reporter Karl Grossman interviews author Long Island native and lawyer Michael Christopher Carroll about his work “Lab 257″.
• This work takes us on a shocking journey inside the notorious Plum Island biological research facility.
• Carroll spent five years researching this highly detailed and powerful account of the secretive government installation that sits just off the coast of some of New York’s prime real estate, an installation that has had its share of meltdowns, mishaps and downright scary security breaches, including two known releases of deadly viruses into the air.
• Owned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Plum Island lies just off the coast of the North Fork of Long Island.
• This otherwise uninhabited, woodsy island has a long history of controversy and secrecy, as Carroll so intricately details, and just may have put the millions of residents of the Tri-State area in utter danger of exposure to fatal animal diseases, including Rift Valley fever, West Nile virus, and even anthrax, time and time again.
• Lab 257 is a wake-up call to people to be more aware of what goes on in their own backyards.

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• Gustav and Other Evidence of Weather Control
• 2008 Ted Twietmeyer

• In previous hurricanes like Ivan, geometric shapes were observed in the eye of the storm. One such shape with Ivan was a pentagon-shaped opening in the eye:

   

   

   

  
• Fig. 1 - These shapes defy circular vortex theory. Water going down a drain or toilet always has a circular vortex.

• 

   

  Fig. 2 – Now a square depression is visible in Ivan’s eye with this satellite image
• I began examining Floaters (NOAA’s name for storms without a name) and Gustav images from NOAA to see what might be present. I found more disturbing evidence of some form of storm or weather control taking place.

• Evidence of this is illustrated in the following satellite images.

   

   

   

  These images are completely un-enhanced except for graphic notations added by myself for clarity. Dates and times are shown in each image.

• 

   

  Fig 3 - Here is what NOAA defines as a “Floater,” identified as 08L. White speckled area is usually caused by image sensor saturation. Here is the first observation – 8:15 UTC (Same as London or GMT time) is 3:15AM EST, which is the approximate the time zone where this image was taken. There would be no sunlight present at this location at that hour to cause image sensor saturation. Note saturated white banding across top of storm.

• This is a VISIBLE image, not infrared according to NOAA. Slight counter-clockwise rotation of the Floater is now visible.

  
   

  

   

  Fig 4 – In this image taken just 30 minutes later the saturation is increasing. There is some form of radiation causing this illumination. This is also not an infrared image, but a visible image according to NOAA.
• For unknown reasons, two images representing one hour of the storm’s progression are missing between Fig. 4 and Fig. 5.

• 

   

  Fig. 5 – A sudden, dramatic and detailed change in the imaging is visible here. Weather control technology has apparently been used. Here we see at least FOUR weather control contact points, but there could be others. Each area is roughly rectangular and all of these areas are equally spaced around Floater O8L. This cannot be a coincidence.
• All enlargements shown are exactly 200%. Blue circle indicates the eye of the developing storm. Three red circled areas are all oriented at exactly the same angle.
• This form of weather control is quite different and less obvious than Ivan. It may also provide finer control of the storm for steering and developing it than just targeting the storm’s eye.

• 

   

  Fig. 6 – Thirty minutes after the Fig. 5 image was taken we see that the four contact points for weather control have virtually disappeared. I believe that these contact points were most likely created by a satellite to act as storm “seeds.” The two dark points in the blue are moving apart (compare to Fig. 5) just 30 minutes after the weather control event. The Floater is becoming more concentrated than the Fig. 4 image taken just two hours earlier.

• 

   

  Fig. 7 – The storm continues to evolve as the weather control points continue to dissipate. The two dark contact points in the blue circle have filled in and are now further apart, just one hour after the weather control event.
• FLOATER IMAGES LABELED AS GUSTAV BY NOAA

• 

   

  Fig. 8 – Gustav storm (Floater) as seen just before weather control event. Note how the floater is illuminated similar to the other storm was – but this image was taken well after dawn in the Atlantic. East is to the right in this image, and one would expect that side of the storm to be brighter than the westward side if the Sun is the light source.

• 

   

  Fig. 9 – Only 30 minutes after the image in Fig. 8 was taken, suddenly clear details of the storm are now visible showing three possible Gustav weather control points, almost all equally spaced. There may be other points of contact. In the enlargements, note the similarity of the top and bottom rectangular areas. Like Floater 08L, again we see rectangular areas oriented the same as those in Fig. 5.

• 

   

  Fig. 10 – Just 30 min. after the weather control event, almost all evidence that it ever took place is gone, but now a large rectangular area is present in the lower right corner of the image (red circled area) which wasn’t visible just 30 minutes before (Fig. 9.)

• If Floater 08L and Gustav are the same storm front, then we see two attempts of weather control on Gustav and not one. I could not conclusively find evidence that both Floaters are Gustav.

   

   
• All this just to prove weather control technology works? This is madness.
• The implications of weather control gone wrong are horrific when people die and property is destroyed.
• In order for the Pentagon to control the world’s weather in a few years as they have boldly promised, weather control experiments to refine the technology will have to be underway now. Ivan, Katrina, Gustav and Floater 08L appear to provide evidence of at least several such attempts.

• Ted Twietmeyer

   

  Data4science.net

   

   

   

  SOURCE DATA:

   

  Television networks

   

  NOAA

   

  http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/satellite.shtml

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• False Flags, Ethnic Bombs and Day X

• by Paul Comstock

     

  March 31st, 2007

• 

   

  Alexander Kouzminov
• Alexander Kouzminov was an intelligence operative in the 1980s and early 1990s for the KGB and its successor, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.
• He is the author of Biological Espionage, an inside account of his work within the top secret “Directorate S” where he helped implement Russia’s plans for biological espionage and biological warfare.
• He currently lives in New Zealand with his wife and family.
• The California Literary Review recently spoke with Dr. Kouzminov about his past work and the dangers he foresees in an age of genetic engineering.
• During the 1980s and early 1990s, you worked for the KGB (later the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) within Department 12 of their Directorate S. What is the purpose of these organizations?
• Directorate S is the elite inner core of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) which carries out special operations in target countries primarily through the activities of so-called ‘illegals.’‘
• Illegals’ are a network of Russian (formerly Soviet) intelligence operatives, who are secretly deployed to the West and covertly operate under assumed names, masquerading as citizens.
• We prepared our ‘illegals’ for work in target countries for a period normally of 15-20 years (or even more).

• In the period of the 1980s and early 1990s the key tasks of Department 12 were:

   

   
   
  • international biological espionage;
   
  • running of ‘illegals’;
   
  • cultivation, development, recruitment and running of agents (citizens of the Western target countries);
     planning and preparation for acts of biological terrorism and sabotage on the territory of target countries, carrying them out in an event of a war and/or a large-scale military conflict between the Soviet Union (then Russia) and the West;
   
  • supporting the then existent Soviet and then Russian biological weapons program.
• It is possible that there has been a change in priorities and new tasks have been added to the previous ones. This is because of the amazing achievements in genetic engineering and genomics and the growing possibility of a new generation of biological warfare agents.
• I think that since I resigned, the work of Department 12 has grown.
• Also, there is the dangerous growth of terrorism in the world, which originates not only in ‘traditional’ rogue countries (e.g. Near and Middle East, Arabic and Muslim countries) as it was conservatively thought in the past, but in the West also.
• While ‘illegals’ will work in target countries for 15-20 years, our agents (citizens of target countries) continued to work with the SVR all of their lives.
• In some circumstances we may use so-called ‘sleeping agents.’ A ‘sleeping agent’ is one who has lost his or her intelligence opportunities, but who is still important for Directorate S, and with whom contacts have been stopped, but may be recalled even after a long period of non-operation.
• What does it mean to ‘run’ an ‘illegal’ or agent?
• It means ‘control.’ In my time we had several ways to control ‘illegals’ and agents.
• Each residency (rezidentura) of the Soviet (then Russian after 1991) Foreign Intelligence Service overseas had a so-called ‘Line N,’ meaning ‘support of illegals.’
• There were ‘Line N’ officers in each KGB and then each SVR residency whose prime task was to support the operations of Directorate S that were carried out by ‘illegals.’
• It included numerous important tasks and activities, for example, clandestine meetings with ‘illegals,’ their surveillance, financial support, checking their contacts, and many other trade-craft activities, - it’s hard to enumerate all of them in a few words!
• In addition, a Line N officer had to carry out other numerous tasks, including, for example, approaching and cultivating potential agents – citizens of the target country, and recruiting them.
• In my case, when I worked in the Moscow Centre, I helped to control several ‘illegals’ in target countries (mainly in Western Europe), communicated with them, helped to train them, organised a network of agents in Western Europe, controlled my agents in target countries, worked with agents when they arrived in Moscow, etc.
• Did you have other duties?
• I also participated in the training and deployment of new ‘illegals.’
• Finally, I assessed intelligence information from our sources (‘illegals’ and agents) in the target countries, mainly in England, Germany, and Scandinavian countries, - countries of my ‘European’ geographical Sector, but also those in the USA, Australia, and occasionally from Central Asian, Near, Middle, and Far East countries.
• I also organised new ‘commercial’ covers, including new covers in Western Germany, England and Hungary, and used them during my short-term assignments in Germany and Hungary.
• Can you give us specific details of agents or ‘illegals’ that you controlled?
• I can give you a few examples:First, two ‘illegals’ codenamed TREFY.
• They operated in Western Europe, especially in Western Germany. One of their tasks was to gather information about classified and secret military medical and biological labs in Western Europe, especially in Germany, and the research experiments that were carried out in them.
• Their other task was to seek out people who were involved in secret medical/biological experiments or who had access to them, who could be approached for co-operation with Russian Foreign Intelligence.
• In the UK was a husband-and-wife team codenamed ROSA and ROMAN. ROSA operated in England from the end of the 1970s under cover as a research-microbiologist. She worked in a scientific research institute in a town near London.
• The institute was involved in experiments with potentially dangerous pathogens of lethal human and animal diseases, and we justly presumed that it was also involved in England’s covert biological warfare program.
• Copies of reports about the results of experiments in her lab came from ROSA regularly. She also sent ‘live stuff’: test tubes and ampoules with cultures of new strains, media, samples of new vaccines, etc.
• ROMAN, a molecular biologist by training, was sent as her back-up.

  • Hmmm...Recall all those mysterious deaths and "suicides" of micro-biologists worldwide a few years ago?
• He completed his PhD in one of London’s universities, and became a member of the young scientific research community. His primary task at this stage was to help ROSA gain intelligence information about secret microbiological research experiments, and the secret study and cultivation of research-biologists and government officials with good prospects in areas of interest to Department 12.
• ROMAN died in a car accident in 1984, shortly after finishing his PhD while both ‘illegals’ were on holiday in Italy.
• I helped to train an ‘illegal’ codenamed ANVAR who was deployed to Western Europe to work in Scandinavian countries and in the UK. His primary tasks were biological espionage and support in the development and cultivation of agents.
• One of my agents, codenamed RIO, was born in Brazil. He operated in Portugal and in France.
• His long-term assignment as a young research microbiologist included penetration into the Pasteur Institute in France, one of Department 12’s main targets in that country. We also planned to use RIO in the USA.
• Another of my agents, YAN, was a young medical doctor from East Germany who operated in Western Germany. We planned to use him for the secret study of Western specialists – medical researchers, biologists and officials – with the ultimate goal being their recruitment.
• He was also directed to obtain information about German genetic-engineering research with dangerous pathogens, and the protective and preventive measures against them that existed in Germany.
• YAN was to learn the addresses of research laboratories, institutes, centers and military facilities in the countries of Western Europe that were undertaking covert experiments with recombinant micro-organisms, and to develop relationships with their researchers and officials.
• In addition, I would like to mention a few ‘illegals’ who I did not control, but about whom I write in my book. It is hard to name all of them in the interview, but if a reader is interested in more details about how Directorate S works with ‘illegals’ and valuable agents, he may find more details in my book.
• Another husband-and-wife team of illegals, Elena and Dmitry Olshevsky, operated in Canada in the 1990s. They were arrested in 1996 and sent back to Moscow in 1998. In Toronto, they lived under the names of Ian and Laurine Lambert.
• The ‘illegals’ Igor and Natalia Lyuskow, were documented as citizens of the UK under the names of James Peatfield and Anna Marie Nemeth. They were arrested with British passports during their training assignment in Western Europe in 1992.
• Before my time there was the famous husband-and-wife team of Moris and Leontina Cohen, aka Peter and Helen Kroger (codename DACHNIKI).
• They operated at the start of the 1940s in the USA and made enormous contributions to the Soviet efforts to obtain atomic secrets.
• Moris Cohen also was the head of an agent-network codenamed VOLONTERY (Volunteers) in the USA. Later, in the 1950s - till 1961, under new cover they operated in England.
• In England, this husband-and-wife agent team was put under the control of Gordon Lonsdale, aka Konon Molody, of the KGB Illegal network. Until 1961, these illegals gathered and transferred to the Soviet Union Britain’s most valuable secrets about the creation of biological weapons.
• There are many frightening aspects to your book, but I found the most chilling to be ‘Day X.’ Would you tell us what that is and what is scheduled to happen?
• The formula ‘Day X’ in our documents meant the beginning of a large-scale war against the West.
• Our Department 12 (together with Department 8, - in charge of preparing acts of sabotage and terror on the enemy’s territory in an event of war and/or a large scale military conflict) had to participate in this through so-called ‘direct actions,’ which were clandestine acts of biological sabotage and terrorism against ‘potential strike targets’ on the enemy’s territory.
• The ‘potential strike targets’ were:
• army targets, including classified military biological and medical research labs/centers; biological warfare ammunition stockpiles; military garrisons and bases; and military biological (and other) defense commands, including those that were looking after surveillance of biological weapons activities;
• civil (or so-called ‘soft’) targets, including public drinking-water supplies, food stores, and processing plants; water purification systems; vaccine, drug and toxin repositories; pharmaceutical and biotechnological plants, etc; and
• the economy of a potential enemy.
• The list of potential targets could be extended.
• Terrorist ‘illegals’ who were trained for ‘direct actions’ were to be used in the event of ‘Day-X.’
• Among the ongoing tasks of Department 8 were the training of deep-core agents, ‘illegal’ terrorists, and fighters responsible for the preparation and carrying out of single and massive terrorist acts, acts of sabotage and diversion, and the assassination of key officials in important positions in various target countries in the event of a large-scale war or a local military conflict of the Soviet Union.
• The close partnership of Department 12 and Department 8 began some years before they were joined.
• We (some officers of Department 12) were requested to advise them (Department 8) of vulnerable targets on foreign territory, the kind of targets the destruction of which - or even short-term disruption of which - could have severe ecological, agricultural and public health consequences. More details about our partnership I provide in my book.
• Our ‘tools’ for these actions included first and foremost, terrorist ‘illegals’ whom we had planted in the target countries. These were the most reliable, well-trusted special agents.
• Were these ‘illegals’ in place during your employment and did they possess the biological weapons to unleash if asked to do so? What countries were they working in, and do you believe that a plan for biological terrorism still exists?
• ‘Illegals’ who worked during the period of my employment did not possess biological weapons, if you mean the Soviet-Russian biowarfare agents.
• They may have been provided with them in the case of war.
• I think that the plans for state-sponsored bioterrorism do not exist today, except probably for the bioterrorism threat from a rogue country. The main threat of modern time is bioterrorism and/or biosabotage, which may be performed by terrorist organizations, fanatic religious groups and sects, or by a not mentally or psychologically stable scientist (or scientists).
• Just because a country is undergoing research in the area of biodefense (e.g. research experiments with highly pathogenic agents and biotoxins), doesn’t mean that this country is preparing for an attack on another.
• These could only be research and/or developments for its own defense. At the present time, it is very unlikely that any government (except probably rogue states) would launch a biological war and/or a big scale military conflict with biowarfare agents.
• This would require one country to be in hostile opposition to another, like was the case during the Cold War.

  • SEE: Georgia vs Russia crisis
• Despite the present local military conflicts, the major atmosphere in the world has been peaceful. This is my belief, which may seem a little bit naïve.
• What is an ‘ethnic weapon’?
• ‘Ethnic’, or population-specific-weapons may be defined as weapons which will kill or damage only specific ethnic groups
• Some genetic research experiments may lead to identification and isolation of specific traits of the unique genetic profiles of some ethnic groups. These research experiments show that ethnic specific genetic sequences (or target sequences) do exist in considerable high numbers.
• New modern genetic engineering methods are indeed available to translate specific genetic sequences into markers or triggers for certain biological activity.
• It appears that so-called ‘ethnic’ specific biological weapons may indeed become possible in the near future.
• Ethnic, or ‘genotype-targetable’ weapons, would employ differences in gene frequencies among specific human populations to incapacitate or kill selected target population groups with a selected genetic cluster.
• Future insights into the genetic basis (DNA ethnic groups’ profiles uncovered by the Human Genome and the Human Genome Diversity Projects) of biological differences between human beings are likely to uncover hereditary traits that could be used to military advantage.
• Do you know if research into an ethnic weapon is being carried out anywhere in the world?
• There have been several scientific research publications regarding research experiments on human genome and in the area of human genomics. They quite obviously show that this research may lead to the development of this new type of weapon, if not now, possibly in a foreseeable future.
• I don’t know the definite answer to the question whether this type of weapons already has been developed or not, because you, I believe, understand that it would be a top secret.
• You mention an interesting intelligence technique called ‘false flag’ recruitment. What is that, and can you tell us of any specific instances that you were aware of?
• As a rule, this method of recruitment was used by the Soviet and then Russian Foreign Intelligence Services when it (on the basis of secretly studying the ‘object of cultivation’ – a citizen of a target country) was sure that it would be impossible to approach and recruit in the name of the Soviet-Russian intelligence service.
• We would instead let the person believe they were providing intelligence to another organization.

  • Recruitment by stealth
• Normally, Directorate S would recruit in the name of the following types of organisations:
• non-harmful ones, for example an ‘ecological’ and/or ‘free-trade movement’, ‘fighters for world peace’, ‘for clean environment’, ‘for clean genetic technologies’ or ‘a GE-free society’, ‘medical doctors for peace’, a religious group and/or sect, and many other similar ones, - a reader may imagine the rest;
• in the name of another (Western) country’s secret intelligence service and/or police;
• or even in the name of a terrorist or extremist organisation.
• I mention in my book that for such serious operations (recruitments using ‘false flag’) Directorate S usually used its Special Reserve Officers which are active ‘illegals’ still operating in target countries, former ‘illegals’, and career professionals, who, after lengthy years of overseas work, were recalled to the Moscow Centre and assigned to the staff of Directorate S in order to carry out the most important assignments in target countries.
• In the case of ‘false flag’ recruitment, Russian intelligence carries out recruitment in such a way that it cannot be found out that in reality he or she has agreed to work for Russian Intelligence, rather than for, for example, say Islamic Fundamentalists, Interpol, MOSSAD, MI6, MI5, FBI, CIA, or Chinese Intelligence (GRI), several philanthropic organisations, ‘research centres,’ etc.,
• under which names the person might have been approached ‘for help.’
• Through all the years of their ‘co-operation,’ Directorate S would continue to preserve the source’s belief that he or she is being controlled by people from ‘overseas ecological’, ‘economic’, ‘free-trade’, centres; or from ‘terrorist’, ‘religious’ centres, or from Lyon, Jerusalem, London, Washington or Beijing, and not from the Moscow Centre.
• During your tenure were you aware of any specific ‘false flag’ recruitments. Can you tell us what country it took place in and what organization they thought they were working for?
• Directorate S used ‘false flag’ recruitments during my tenure in the Illegal Intelligence but I don’t know details of such highly secured and secret operations. These are known only to a very closed circle of operatives of Directorate S.
• Namely they are limited to a maximum 4 people: (a) the head of Directorate S, (b) the head of the Special Reserve Department (Department 1), (c) an ‘illegal’’ who carries out this recruitment, and (d) an officer who controls the ‘illegal.’
• I have heard from my experienced colleagues, who had been involved in that type of recruitment, that several recruitments of valuable sources in target countries were performed by ‘illegals’ using ‘false flag.’
• There have been virus outbreaks throughout the world in recent years that you suspect may have originated in laboratories. What are some of those, and why do you find them suspicious?
• Let’s talk, for example, about an outbreak in the Oblivskaya village in the Volgograd-Rostov region of Russia in July-August 1999.Experts of the secret Center of Virology of the Russian Defense Ministry located in Sergiev Posad have failed to identify (or were not allowed to publish their results?) and characterise the agent which caused the outbreak.
• According to an official theory which was put forward by the Center of Virology, the single thing which they could establish, is that the agent doesn’t belong to the first pathogenic category (category A) – meaning a category, which contains agents that were considered to be the greatest threat in terms of producing casualties.
• It is hard for me to believe that experts from this secret centre - in which there are more than 60 grand-PhDs and more than 300 PhDs, and in which there worked and continue to work virologists with world experience and international fame, and in which there are carried out classified and secret experiments on deadly bio-warfare agents - couldn’t identify the agent!
• Several independent experts, medical doctors and virologists, as well as experts from the Center of Virology in their non-official viewpoints, made the following important conclusions and statements:
• The official diagnosis (which was made straight after the first blood tests - which is already suspicious) was Congo-Crimean Haemorrhagic fever. For this kind of verdict there is a need for more detailed analysis;
• According to a list of characteristics, the disease in the village was quite similar to the Congo-Crimean Haemorrhagic fever. However, the symptoms of the disease were not typical for this fever or other well-known diseases, which are typical for this Volga region;
• In the disease, which had spread in the Oblivskaya village and other closely located regions, there were also found strange anomalies, which weren’t typical for this region;
• Before this case, there was never such a large number of people affected by previous Congo-Crimean Haemorrhagic fevers in the region;
• The Chief Infections Officer of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Professor Victor Maleev, expressed his view that the virus had no relation to the Congo-Crimean Haemorrhagic fever;
• A pathogenic agent, which caused the disease outbreak in the village was an unknown engineered virus with characteristics that, according to a list of traits, most closely resembled the characteristics of the West Nile Virus;

  • West Nile virus?
• They concluded that in the village there was an accidental release of a synthesised virus.
• Among the reasons for their conclusion:
• during the analysis of the genetic structure of the virus, there was a shocking result – in the RNA structure of a virus from the Oblivskaya samples was found a fragment, which was identical to the Congo-Crimean Haemorrhagic virus; however all the other fragments of the virus’ structure were not like any other viruses;
• the first people affected were only policemen who worked on the freeway and who confiscated strange canisters, as it was presumed, with chemicals, which were transported without necessary documentation through Oblivskaya;
• the disease had other clinical characteristics, which were different from the Congo-Crimean Haemorrhagic and West Nile fevers, that are described in the medical literature;
• West Nile virus is not particularly deadly and causes only mild flu-like symptoms in most people.

• There were other suspicious claims, including:

   

   
   
  • presence of army guarded troops and presumably FSB operatives;
   
  • an attempt to hide the true information from the public;
   
  • incorrect and misleading statistical data, etc.
   
   

   

  I have planned to publish a more detailed analysis of this mysterious outbreak in the future. 
• How many people were affected by that outbreak, and how many died?
• In the Oblivskaya village, according to official data, 69 people were hospitalized and 6 people died during July 1999 (the peak of the outbreak). It is believed (based on research by independent experts) that this statistic was falsified. In the Volgograd region there were 700 people hospitalized and 36 people died. The outbreak also affected neighboring regions, including the Stavropol and Astrakhan regions.
• How do you envision a bioterror attack being executed?
• If there would be a planned bioterror attack, I think, it would happen in such a way so as to obtain a maximum effect.
• In my book I give some potential scenarios as to how it may be achieved. Even in 1970 experts of the World Health Organisation put out a report. According to the report, if 5 kg of anthrax were to spread above a city with a population of 5 million, about 250 thousands would be infected (affected) and 100 thousand of them would die if there were not preventive urgent measures against the disease.
• According to other data presented in 1993 in a report of the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, 100 kg of anthrax spread above Washington D.C. may cause deaths of from 130,000 to 3 million people.

  • Were the 2001 anthrax attacks in and around Washngton DC an test by the U.S. Government for anti-toxin?
• In March 2005 the Chief Executive Officer of Interpol, Mr Ronald Noble mentioned in his exclusive interview with the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News that (I quote): “al-Qaeda plans to use biological and chemical weapons; and its statements claim ‘the right to kill up to 4 million people’.”
• In the interview, Mr Noble warned that the potential cost of a biological terror attack left no room for complacency. He said that “How could we ever forgive ourselves if millions or hundreds… or tens of thousands of people were killed simply because our priorities did not include bio-terrorism?”
• I would like to provide you with some figures to show how a bio-terrorism attack may harm the country’s economy.
• For example, according to one of the expert commissions of the US Congress, if terrorists could cause an epizootic disease outbreak (an epidemic among animals of a single kind within a particular region), it may cost the USA economy from $10 to $30 billions. If we take into account the inevitable loss of exports, this figure may increase to $140 billion.
• You mention other suspicious outbreaks in your book including the “Navajo Syndrome” in New Mexico in 1993. When reading a non-scientific report of such outbreaks, what information will make you suspect a laboratory origin for the virus? Is there anything about the current Marburg epidemic in Angola that you find suspicious?
• Regarding Angola and other recent outbreaks, as well as suspicious cases with anthrax in the USA in 2001, this is a very sensitive issue, and I am not prepared to comment on it “off the cuff.”
• I don’t want to speculate about this; however I will perhaps state my views on this later in my future articles and/or possibly in a new book.
• Some words about recent events with SARS in 2003. According to the viewpoint of Professor Sergei Kolesnikov, academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, made at his press-conference of April 10, 2003, the virus was artificially created.

  • SARS
• He believes that the genetic makeup of the new virus is a combination of two well-known viruses. Kolesnikov also mentioned that their natural, but not man-made, combination in the natural environment is impossible.
• Academician Kolesnikov believes that this engineering may be made only in a laboratory, but not in a natural environment. He does not exclude that SARS was an accidental release from a lab.
• Your book implies that the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention has been consistently ignored by many countries including the United States and Russia. What steps can be taken to bring the development of biological weapons under some sort of control?
• Right now this is a serious and important question, and it can’t be answered in a few words. This question is currently discussed by many experts in the field of biological warfare. All of the experts have their own different viewpoints about this issue.
• In my book I give my own opinions from the view point of a former intelligence officer.
   Some pre-publishing censorship by an authorised body might be also introduced.
• The key steps that I believe need to be taken are:
• There is a strong need for the creation of a new independent, internationally co-operative agency for biological security under the auspices of, for example, the UN - an organisation similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency - let us call it the International Biological Security Agency;
• Such an agency should deal with conventional, classified and secret biodefense research and clandestine biological weapons activities throughout the world and should have the power to enforce the active co-operation of all countries;
• There is a necessity of a good and active co-operation of the intelligence services to ensure that all possible future technological developments are assessed in terms of both their potential for what is good and what is harmful;
• I think that a need has emerged for an international law that would define personal liability for the results of molecular-genetic experiments, especially research experiments with highly pathogenic agents.
• This liability must be borne equally by the research scientist who produces new potentially harmful pathogens, and by the officials of the central government bodies that are responsible for the final decision to manufacture and use the organisms created in the research biotech lab. Acknowledging personal responsibility for the consequences of such experimentation should become one of the elements of a new code of conduct for microbiologists and geneticists;
• Within the framework of the new international law, an expert counsel from industry and academia might be established to spot evolving areas of risk in the biological sciences while using final products of their research;
• Some restrictions might also be imposed on the publication of the most sensitive outcomes (results of research experiments) in the field of the genetic-molecular research;
• What is your biggest fear given the current state of biological science in both the private and governmental sectors?
• Lack of, or inadequate controls regarding gene-splicing technologies and experiments with potentially dangerous microbial pathogens.
• Why did you leave Russian intelligence?
• Corruption of my bosses. Moral grounds. I was happy to serve, but not to be subservient.
• Your book implies that the corruption came with perestroika. Can you briefly tell us about that?
• There was corruption in the Soviet Union as well, especially under the Brezhnev leadership. But it was corruption at the highest level of society.
• With perestroika, corruption from the highest penetrated into all state and government organisations, the courts and police. This did not exist under the Soviet Union.

   

  A large number of people want to gain political power and access to state funds, natural resources and use this public power for their private benefit. Authority figures often use their power to gain a financial interest in a business.