I’m not surprised by this; the ‘conspiracy claim’ that is. The Bush regime breeds these types of claims -- given the amount of secrecy, hegemonic coercion and pervasive illegality -- they practice all over the world on a day-to-day basis. It’s not only American citizens who don’t believe anything BushCo says or does anymore. The rest of the world has also lost any trust in our government.
This is indeed a bizarre claim and I’m not endorsing its veraciousness. I absolutely detest conspiracy theories, and I’m only shedding light on this now for the following compelling (at least to me) reasons:
• Veracity (or lack of) aside, the claim has been made by a presumably credible government official, and is therefore newsworthy.
• The story appears in the Australian paper, The Sidney Morning Herald, a newspaper that I’ve always found credible in the past.
• The Australian Broadcasting Company has now picked up the story.
• The claim originates from a [presumably sane] official currently serving in the Indonesian federal government (a staunch, U.S. ally in the GWOT).
• The book in which this claim appears (written by the Indonesian health minister herself) includes an ‘introduction’ written by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who [by writing it] has ostensibly endorsed the book.
• Rightly or wrongly, much like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organization is increasingly seen around the world as little more than an extension of the U.S. government.
The claim
The Indonesian Health Minister has said the United States and the World Health Organisation (WHO) are part of a global conspiracy to profit from the spread of bird flu and the US may use samples to produce biological weapons.
This extraordinary claim appears in Wednesday’s Sidney Morning Herald:
In the book, Dr Supari writes that WHO laboratories forwarded influenza viruses to Western companies so they could profit by selling vaccines back to developing countries:
"The system of world health management has been very exploitative. It has been controlled by inhumanly desires, based on the greediness to raise capital and to control the world."
Some Indonesian samples had been sent to a US Defence Department laboratory, Dr Supari says, adding that:
According to Dr. Supari, some samples had been sent to a U.S. Defense Department laboratory. She added that: "... some of our seed viruses had been in a laboratory known as a facility developing biological weapons in a superpower country."
Privately, anonymous officials said Dr Supari's belief that she was engaged on a God-driven crusade against an evil and "neo-colonialist" world health system - on the book's cover she describes herself as the "divine hand behind avian influenza" - had caused her to lose touch with reality.
The President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, appears to have endorsed the book, having written its introduction.
Dr Yudhoyono also supports Dr Supari's claim that the virus is under control in Indonesia, stating the "occurrence rate and the number of affected areas are decreasing".
The WHO declined to comment and no US officials were available.
I don't know yet how to take this story. It's small vindication that the story is still alive but the absence of hard proof once again relegates it to the annals of the unsubstantiated. The fact that these samples were supposedly sent to the Defense Department is certainly new. I wrote about a different aspect of this subject back at the beginning of February, (here), but that story had nothing to do with the Defense Department but rather with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Energy Department (DOE).
From that diary: (Source -- San Francisco Chronicle)
Among the microbes held in the [Livermore] laboratory are bacteria that cause such highly dangerous and often deadly diseases as bubonic plague, anthrax, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Q fever, tularemia and brucellosis or undulant fever, Director Eric Gard said.
But scientists in his lab will also be researching other microbes unlikely to be used in terror attacks and that pose such major public health problems as tuberculosis, flu, and SARS, the severe acute respiratory syndrome that proved so deadly among elderly people in China, he said.
As it stands now, the story is still alive -- not just in the U.S. press either -- but rather, in newspapers clear across the world as well. Where it goes from here is anyone's guess.
As they say, time will tell.
Peace