Fw: The Drug War According to Dr. Mengele

[Richard Weisgerber]

The Drug War According to Dr. Mengele

Agent Green Over the Andes

by Jeffrey St. Clair
Dissident Voice
December 27, 2002

Hostile intentions toward the people of another country. Deployment of
chemical weapons and biological agents. Pursuit of a scorched earth policy.
Sound like Saddam's Iraq? Think again. This neatly capsulizes the Bush
administration's ongoing depredations in Colombia, all under the shady
banner of the war on drugs.

The big difference is that Saddam's hideous use of poison gas against the
Kurds and, most likely, against Iran occurred more than 15 years ago. Since
the Gulf War, Saddam's mad pursuits have been more on the order of chemistry
experiments in bombed out basements. But the Bush administration's toxic war
on Colombian peasants is happening now, day after day, in flippant violation
of international law.

Indeed, as Bush offers pious homilies on Iraq's possible hoarding of
so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction, his administration and its backers
from both parties in congress are poised to unleash a new wave toxins in the
mountains of Colombia, including a dangerous brew of biological weapons its
proponents rather quaintly call mycoherbicides. Let us call it: Agent Green.

The leading germ war hawk in the congress these days is Rep. Bob Mica, a
Republican from Florida. In mid-December, Mica called on his pals in the
Bush administration to uncork a currently banned batch of killer fungi and
begin a campaign of saturation spraying. "We have to restore our
mycoherbicide," Mica fumed. "Things that have been studied for too long need
to be put into action. We found that we can not only spray this stuff, but
we found that we can also deactivate it for some period of time-it will do a
lot of damage-it will eradicate some of these crops for a substantial period
of time."

Of course, Agent Green also kills everything else it touches. There's not
even a pretense to call these germ bomblets "smart fungi." This is the drug
war as it might be waged by Dr. Mengele. Mica's bracing call for an
unfettered germ war on Colombia should jotted down by junior legal eagles
with dreams of becoming future prosecutors of war crimes.

But Mica is far from a lone crazed voice. Even the perpetually conflicted
Colin Powell is on record supporting the use of biological agents as a key
part of Plan Colombia. Indeed, Anne Peterson, the US ambassador to Bogota,
testified recently that she believed bio-weapons had already been deployed
in Colombia. Bizarrely, she later retracted this chilling observation,
saying that it had been made under duress. Ms. Peterson didn't say who had
applied the thumbscrews.

Then there's Rand Beers, one of the few holdovers at the State Department
from Clinton time. It's easy to see why this biowar zealot appealed to the
Bush crowd. Back in the late 90s, Beers was all for using germ weapons on
crops in drug-producing countries. Now, as Assistant Secretary of State for
narcotics, Beers trots across the globe to various international conferences
where he invariably is forced to defend this toxic footnote to Plan Colombia
against critics who charge that it violates, among other treaties, the
Biological Weapons Convention. Beers often says that the toxic weapons are
needed to fight international crime syndicates. This heady bit of sophistry
is hardly an exemption from the prohibitions, which, it must be pointed out,
the Bush administration doesn't believe in anyway, even though they are
trigger-happy to invoke its provisions against enemy states, such as Iraq.

So, as in Macbeth, sin plucks on sin.

Agent Green is a genetically engineered pathogenic fungi, conjured up by the
US Department of Agriculture's experiment station in Beltsville, Maryland.
It is now being produced with US funds by Ag/Bio Company, a private lab in
Bozeman, Montana and at a former Soviet bioweapons factory in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan. The labs are brewing up two types of killer fungi, Fusarium
oxysporum (slated for use against marijuana and coca plants) and Pleospora
papveracea (engineered to destroy opium poppies).

The problem is that both fungi are indiscriminate killers, posing threats to
human health and to non-target species. Add to this the fact that when
sprayed from airplanes and helicopters, Agent Green will be carried by winds
and inevitably drift over coffee plantations, fields, farms, villages, and
water supplies.

Agent Green also threatens the ecology of the Colombian rainforest, one of
the most biologically diverse on the planet. These forests harbor a greater
variety of species per acre than any country's. But the Colombian forests
are already under frightful siege from gold mining, oil companies, logging
outfits and cattle ranching. By one count, Colombia has already lost more
than a third of its primary forest and continues to lose forest at a rate of
3000 square miles (or nearly 2 million acres) a year. It's possible that the
Agent Green operation may saturate more than a million acres of Colombian
rainforest, with potentially devastating ecological consequences for endemic
wildlife and plants.

So it's likely that Amazonia could become collateral damage in the Bushites'
bio-war adventurism.

This grim prospect may place the US in squarely in violation of yet another
international treaty with which Bush, the former cocaine tooter, is
charmingly unacquainted: the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or
Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD).
ENMOD grew out of the worldwide outrage sparked by the use of Agent Orange
and other environmentally malign potions plastered across Southeast Asian
during the Vietnam war. Adopted by the UN in 1976 and signed by the US,
ENMOD prohibits any signatory nation from using the environment as a weapon
of war, which the spraying of Colombia constitutes by definition.

The US bio-bomblets can't even be made to stay in Colombia, but, like the
pesticides and fumigants already dropped, will inevitably stray across the
Colombian border into Ecuador and Peru. Both nations vehemently oppose the
US biowar plan and charge that it violates international law. Specifically,
they cite a non-proliferation section of the Biological Warfare Convention
that prohibits the transfer of germ weapons and technology from one nation
to another. Presumably, the Bush administration now considers Colombia a
wholly owned colony, where even remote Andean valleys are in the toxic grip
of the US empire.

"If Agent Green is used anywhere, it will legitimize agricultural biowarfare
in other contexts," says Edward Hammond, director of The Sunshine Project,
the anti-biowar group that has done excellent work in exposing the
environmental consequences of toxic spraying in Colombia. "Reasoning in a
similar manner as the US, others might prepare a biological attack on the US
tobacco crop, which poisons millions worldwide, or those opposed to alcohol
might target grapes or hops."

Eradication programs are a foolhardy way of addressing problems associated
with drug consumption. It doesn't work, it oppresses the weak, and merely
plays into the pockets of the drug profiteers, from the cocaine generals to
the drug cartels and the banks who launder the money.

"In much of rural Colombia, there is simply no way to make a legal living,"
says Adam Isacson, of the Center for International Policy. "Security, roads,
credit, and access to markets are all missing. The most that many rural
Colombians see from their government is the occasional military patrol or
spray plane. When the spray planes come, they take away farmers' illegal way
of making a living, but they do not replace it with anything. That leaves
the farmers with some bad choices. They can move to the cities and try to
find a job, though official unemployment is already 20 percent. They can
switch to legal crops on their own and risk paying more for inputs than they
can get from the sale price. They can move deeper into the countryside and
plant drug crops again. Or they can join the guerrillas or the
paramilitaries, who will at least keep them fed."

Of course, the drug war has little do with the real motives of this ghastly
program. The truth of this can be divined in the numbers. Billions in US aid
and thousands of gallons of chemical pesticides have been poured on Colombia
with little dent in coca production. In fact, the flow of drugs from
Colombia is increasing at a rapid clip.

Back when the Clinton administration was pushing a somewhat reluctant
congress to approve its multi-billion project dubbed Plan Colombia, none
other than Rand Beers swore that the spray and burn tactics would "eliminate
the majority of Colombia's opium poppy crop within three years." Congress
bought Beers' song and dance, approving $1.3 billion dollars. (As a
pre-condition for receiving the money, Congress required Colombia to begin
operational testing of bioweapons. Bowing to world pressure, President
Clinton waived the requirement.)

In the past five years, nearly a million acres of land in Colombia has been
blitzed by pesticides and fumigants, rendered as sterile as the fields of
Carthage after Scipio Africanus' last cruel visit. But over the same period
production of cocaine in Colombia has more than tripled. Opium production is
also soaring, increasing by more than 60 percent since 2000. Colombia now
accounts for more than 30 percent of the heroin consumed in the US.

The reason for this will be obvious to anyone who has read our book
Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press. War, especially covert ones, and
drugs go hand in hand. Colombia is mired in a three-way civil war, with each
side, guerillas, paramilitaries and the government troops, funding their
operations from proceeds from the sale of drugs. The bloodier the conflict,
the greater the flow of drugs.

But from the beginning Plan Colombia was only ostensibly about drugs. It was
really a way to use the drug war to underwrite the Colombian military's
savage war against the FARC and other rebel groups and secure US control
over Colombian oil, gas and mineral reserves. The so-called eradication
programs have targeted areas controlled by the FARC, rather than even larger
swaths of land held by paramilitaries, serving as vicious proxy-warriors for
the Colombian government.

According to Rep. Bob Barr, since the implementation of Plan Colombia at
least 22 US helicopters have been shot down by Colombian rebel groups-a
figure the Pentagon coyly refuses to confirm or deny. However, the State
Department confirmed that last month 3 US planes were struck by groundfire
on the same day.

The US presence in the war is being waged under the jurisdictional banner of
the State Department, so often in the past a sign of the darker presence of
the CIA and other covert warriors. In December, Colin Powell revealed his
intention to up the permanent fleet of US attack helicopters in Colombia to
24. The State Department informed congress that new pilots were being
trained at "a classified location" in New Mexico.

Now, it appears that the Bush administration has given Congressman Mica the
greenlight to work his dark magic on the reauthorization of Plan Colombia,
where he would insert language once again requiring the use of Agent Green
as condition of the Colombia government getting its hands on US billions.
These days they don't even go to the bother of trying to hide the strings.

There's plenty of evidence that Colombian government is now totally under
the sway of Washington and will be only too happy to oblige, even if that
means allowing the US to launch biological warfare attacks on its own
peasants.

In a bracing irony, Colombia now presides over the UN Security Council,
which is poised to clobber Iraq for hiding its history of bioweapon
development. Indeed, it was the Colombian delegation that made the
controversial call to hand over an early copy of Iraq's weapons declaration,
which the US generously returned a week later-minus 8,000 pages.

This scandalous project drones on under the radar of the mainstream press,
ever loath to tackle seriously any topic wrapped in the holy robes of the
drug war. Yet, what it really adds up to is a form of environmental
terrorism. The toxic wasteland and human suffering left in the wake of these
operations is not accidental, not, to use the fetching term of the
economists, a uncomfortable externality of an otherwise benign project.
Instead, it is a calculated tactic, designed to evoke fear and terror-the
carpetbombing of the drug war.

Don't say the toxic warriors in the Bush administration aren't bibliophiles.
Obviously they've read Silent Spring. Only not as the stark warning Rachel
Carson intended, but as a war plan which they are now bent on putting into
global action.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the co-author of Five Days that Shook The World: The
Battle For Seattle and Beyond with Alexander Cockburn, and is a co-editor of
Counterpunch, the nation's best muckraking newsletter. Email:
stclair at counterpunch.org.




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