MORE INFO ABOUT LYME DISEASE & PENTAGON BIO-WARFARE PROJECT AWARENESS is RAISED THANKS to REP CHRIS SMITH (NJ) & BILL THAT DEMANDS ANSWERS

Lyme Disease and Biowarfare

  COUNTERPUNCH
Article written by Karl Grossman, with additional information, research and content added
 by RTR Truth Media Staff Collaborative

Photograph Source: Alan R Walker – CC BY-SA 3. “Pentagon May Have Released Weaponized Ticks That Helped Spread of Lyme Disease: Investigation Ordered” was the Newsweek headline last month. The article below it was about the U.S. House of Representatives having “quietly passed a bill requiring the Inspector General of the Department of Defense to conduct a review into whether the Pentagon experimented with ticks and other blood-sucking insects for use as biological weapons between 1950 and 1975.”

The article continued: “If the Inspector General finds that such experiments occurred, then, according to the bill, they must provide the House and Senate Armed Services committees with a report on the scope of the research and ‘whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experimental design’…potentially leading to the spread of diseases such as Lyme.”

The measure was introduced by Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, “who was ‘inspired’ by several books and articles claiming that the U.S. government had conducted research at facilities such as Fort Detrick, Maryland, and Plum Island, New York, for this purpose.”

One of the books, published earlier this year, was Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Stanford University science writer Kris Newby. It includes interviews with Willy Burgdorfer who is credited with having discovered the pathogen that causes Lyme disease and earlier developed bio-weapons for the Department of Defense. Said Smith on the House floor: “Those interviews combined with access to Dr. Burdorfer’s lab files suggest that he and other bio-weapons specialists stuffed ticks with pathogens to cause severe disability, disease—even death—to potential enemies. With Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases exploding in the United States…Americans have a right to know whether any of this is true.”

Whether Lyme disease resulted from activities on Plum Island, a mile-and-a-half off the North Fork of Long Island, New York and 10 miles from Old Lyme, Connecticut—where the first cases surfaced in 1975 and thus where the disease got its name—is an issue I’ve pursued since tick-borne Lyme disease became widespread on Long Island where I have long been based as a journalist. I’ve been writing articles and doing television programs about Plum Island for decades.

A 1982 book linking Plum Island and Lyme disease was The Belarus Secret: The Nazi Connection in America written by John Loftus, an attorney specializing in pursuing Nazis for the Office of Special Investigations of the U.S. Department of Justice. He tells of former “Nazi germ warfare scientists” brought to the U.S. after World War II who “experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I have received some information suggesting that the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range during the early 1950s…Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret U.S. document confirming that ‘clandestine attacks on crops and animals’ took place at this time.”

Loftus points to “the hypothesis that the poison ticks are the source of the Lyme disease spirochete.” And adds: “Sooner or later the whole truth will come out, but probably not in my lifetime.”

In 1995, with Lyme disease epidemic on Long Island, indeed in many areas of the U.S., a just-elected congressman from Long Island, Michael Forbes, conducted what he told me would be a “raid” on Plum Island. He would go to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and demand information about tick weaponization there and a link to Lyme disease as related by Loftus. He took John McDonald, an investigative reporter at the Long Island newspaper Newsday, and me.

McDonald has also focused on Plum Island. In a November 21, 1993 article in Newsday, McDonald documented the biological warfare mission of Plum Island with records he obtained. The piece began: “A 1950s military plan to cripple the Soviet economy by killing horses, cattle and swine called for making biological warfare weapons out of exotic animal diseases at a Plum Island laboratory, now-declassified Army records reveal.” A facsimile of one of the records, dated 1951, covered the front page of that issue of Newsday.

The article went on: “Documents and interviews disclose for the first time what officials have denied for years: that the mysterious and closely guarded animal lab off the East End of Long Island was originally designed to conduct top-secret research into replicating dangerous viruses that could be used to destroy enemy livestock.”

When Representative Forbes on his “raid” on Fire Island confronted the center’s director, Dr. Harley Moon, in the presence of McDonald and me, under intensive questioning Moon took the position that “we don’t have any paperwork on that.”

Then in 2004 came another book, Lab 257, also by an attorney, Michael Carroll, formerly a law firm associate of the late New York State Governor Mario Cuomo. Using documents he found in the National Archives, he exposes a full story about Plum Island. He detailed how Erich Traub during World War II was the “lab chief of Insel Riems—a secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory” in the Baltic with a mission in World War II of poisoning cattle in the Soviet Union.

Eric Traub - Operation Paperclip - Lyme Disease - Plum Island - Excerpt From the Book the Nazi Hydra in Ame... by Tom Lacovara-Stewart RTR TruthMedia on Scribd

Traub and hundreds of other Nazi scientists among them Wernher von Braun were brought to the U.S. in the U.S. government’s “Project Paperclip” after the war. Traub was the “father” of the establishment of a bio-warfare center on Plum Island, says Lab 257, with the same mission Insel Riems had—going after Soviet livestock now with the Cold War having begun.

Lab 257 relates how “animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. They called him the Nazi scientist…they were inoculating these ticks.” Carroll, too, points to the possibility of Lyme disease emerging from activities on Plum Island with ticks.

Before the war, Traub spent time in the U.S. “Ironically, Traub spent the prewar period of his scientific career on a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, perfecting his skills in viruses and bacteria under the tutelage of American experts before returning to Nazi Germany on the eve of war,” writes Carroll. While in the U.S. in the 1930s, too, relates the book, Traub was a member of the Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund which was involved in pro-Nazi rallies held weekly in Yaphank on Long Island for Nazis from the New York Metropolitan Area.

Making use of scientific contacts he had made before the war, when Traub came back to the U.S. under Project Paperclip, Traub’s “detailed explanation of the secret operation on Insel Riems” given to officials at Fort Detrick in Maryland, the Army’s biological warfare headquarters, and to the CIA, “laid the groundwater for Fort Detrick’s offshore germ warfare animal disease lab on Plum Island,” says Lab257.

Lab 257 also tells of why in 1954 suddenly Plum Island was transferred from the Department of Defense to the Department of Agriculture: the Pentagon becoming concerned about having to feed millions of people in the Soviet Union if it destroyed their food animals. The Joint Chiefs of Staff “found that a war with the U.S.S.R. would best be fought with conventional and nuclear means, and biological warfare against humans not against food animals,” says Lab 257. “Destroying the food supply meant having to feed millions of starving Russians after winning a war”

Still, Lab 257 questions whether there ever was a clean break. Officials at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center have insisted over the years—including to me—that the center’s function after the Army ended its management has been to conduct research into foreign animal diseases not found in the U.S. especially foot-and-mouth disease—but “defensive” biological warfare research remains being done, they also say.

Largely because of security concerns involving Plum Island in the wake of the 9/11 attack—a 2003 a report by the Government Accountability Office cited the ease of terrorists to land on the island which sits amidst busy marine traffic lanes and close by the population center of the U.S.—New York City to the west, Boston to the north—the U.S. government moved to move Plum Island’s activities to a new federal laboratory to be built in Kansas. What is to be called the National Bio and Agro-defense Facility, a $1.25 billion project, is “expected to be operational by 2022-2023” on the campus of Kansas State University, according to the university’s website.

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Interesting - 2013 Article - 

Donald Trump wants Plum Island for golf course 

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington files FOIA in seeking Trump Organization in the purchase of Plum Island 

From the FOIA:

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (“CREW”) makes this request for records pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”), 5 U.S.C. § 552, and General Services Administration (“GSA”) regulations. First, CREW requests copies of all records from November 9, 2016 to the present regarding the decision of GSA, announced in 2008, to sell Plum Island off the coast of Long Island, New York as well as the Orient Point Support Facility and related property and transportation assets. Second, CREW seeks all communications between any GSA official(s) and Donald J. Trump or any members or representatives of the Trump Organization including but not limited to his sons Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, regarding the sale of Plum Island. 

CLICK HERE for COPY of FOIA 

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But the congressman now representing the New York district in which Plum Island is located, Lee Zeldin, close personally and politically to President Trump, has introduced legislation and been pushing hard for the federal government not to sell Plum Island but to hold on to it as a “nature preserve”—and allowing research to continue on it.

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Author of main body of article and  more articles by:      KARL GROSSMAN

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

More Lyme Disease Information Resources:
(Disclaimer: Some information comes from political left & political right. To us, this is irrelevant as the veracity of the information is far more important as people are suffering and dying with Lyme Disease. The truth is all that matters to us in this subject. )

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HOUSE ORDERS PENTAGON TO REVEAL INFO ON ITS PAST WEAPONIZED TICK BIO-WARFARE PROGRAM and ITS RELEASE INTO THE PUBLIC

The House quietly voted last week to require the Pentagon inspector general to tell Congress whether the department experimented with weaponizing disease-carrying insects and whether they were released into the public realm — either accidentally or on purpose.

The unusual proposal took the form of an amendment that was adopted by voice vote July 11 during House debate on the fiscal 2020 defense authorization bill, which lawmakers passed the following day.

The amendment, by New Jersey Republican Christopher H. Smith, says the inspector general “shall conduct a review of whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975.”

The video below is archived on the Way Back Machine and below is the YouTube version

Everyone familiar with RTR Truth Media ™  knows that the founder has been afflicted with Lyme Disease since age 12. It went un-diagnosed for 2 decades because of the suppression by "officials" who tried to long cover it up. As a result Tom Lacovara-Stewart ended up fighting for his life, sanity, and to put back together his life after the effects of this disease shattered it. We will be sharing more of his story in the future. 

If the answer is yes, then the IG must provide the House and Senate Armed Services committees with a report on the experiments’ scope and “whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experiment design.”

The amendment is an attempt to confirm or deny reports that Pentagon researchers — at places such as Fort Detrick in Maryland and Plum Island in New York — implanted diseases into insects to learn about the effects of biological weapons and also looked into using such insects to disseminate biological agents.

President Richard Nixon banned U.S. government research into biological weapons in 1969, but research into protecting U.S. military personnel from such agents may have continued, Smith said in an interview Monday.

Is Congress why the military isn't ready for climate change?

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A book called “Bitten,” published this year, makes the case that the Defense Department research occurred and hints at a possible connection between the experiments and the spread of maladies such as Lyme disease, which is borne by ticks.

To Smith and other advocates of the Pentagon IG report, studying the past may provide data that can help stem the spread of Lyme disease in the future.

Between 300,000 and 427,000 new cases of Lyme disease occur each year, with further growth expected in the years ahead, said Smith, a founding co-chairman of the Congressional Lyme Disease Caucus, which advocates for greater awareness of the disease and for more funding for research into a cure.

“We need answers and we need them now,” Smith said.

Smith’s amendment was co-sponsored by Minnesota Democrat Collin C. Peterson, who is the House caucus’s other leader, and by Maryland Republican Andy Harris.

Pat Smith, president of the Lyme Disease Association, said in an interview Monday that she is hopeful the IG report could provide information that could save lives.

“We need to find out: is there anything in this research that was supposedly done that can help us to find information that is germane to patient health and combating the spread of the disease,” she said.

It remains to be seen whether Congress will send President Donald Trump a defense authorization bill with the weaponized ticks amendment. The Senate has passed its version without any similar provision, and now House and Senate negotiators must reconcile the two bills.

The Officially Ignored Connection Between Lyme Disease and Plum Island - TruthStreamMedia

Melissa Dykes Sep 09, 2017

Lyme Disease is one of those illnesses that, unless you have it or know someone who afflicted by it, most people don’t know that much about it other than that it is caused by a tick bite.

Lyme Disease has been referred to as “the great imitator” because it mirrors many other awful medical disorders including chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, Fibromyalgia, and even Alzheimer’s disease. Initially, Lyme causes a barrage of awful symptoms, including tiredness unrelieved by resting or sleeping, insomnia, abdominal pain, nausea, confusion, mood swings, joint pain, recurrent headaches, fever, chills, dizziness, difficulty concentrating or sustaining one’s attention and even impaired short-term memory, but ultimately it can harm organs and systems throughout the body, including the heart, the circulatory, digestive, and reproductive systems, and the brain and nervous system.

Lyme Disease is pretty common these days, despite the fact that many people are fuzzy on the details. According to the CDC, Lyme was the sixth most common Nationally Notifiable disease in 2015 and the most commonly reported vector-borne illness in the U.S., thought to affect some 300,000 people a year in this country. Strangely though, when people attempt to get medical attention for Lyme Disease, a lot of times they are told that Lyme Disease is really rare and they probably have something else. Many times a person is forced to go through exhaustive medical testing for other ailments to rule those out before a doctor will even administer a test for Lyme Disease, but I’ll expand on that momentarily.

There may be a good reason why doctors are hesitant to test their patients for Lyme, even when those patients are fully willing to pay out-of-pocket for the testing for it and despite the fact that, for some reason in this era of modern medical technology, the test for Lyme is still pretty inaccurate.

For the longest time, the government has been implicated in and repeatedly denied any ties to the creation of Lyme Disease, despite some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary.

Lyme Disease was not discovered or recognized until the mid 70s when there was an outbreak of what doctors originally mistook for juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in several southeastern Connecticut towns including Lyme and Old Lyme, which is how the disease got its name. A newspaper archive search revealed that the bacteria that causes Lyme, Borrelia burgdorferi, wasn’t mentioned in print in newspapers until 1984 (although Google newspapers came back with nothing at all).

If you look at these towns on a map, you’ll notice they are right directly across the Long Island Sound from Plum Island, which has been a government animal disease research facility since the mid 1950s and doubled as a military biological warfare research facility.

It’s less than nine miles from shore to shore the way the crow flies.

The outbreak and concentration of Lyme Disease in this country centers around that place. The CDC admits that 95% of cases of Lyme come from just 14 states, the majority of which are located around Plum Island.

Plum Islands biowarfare ties date back to World War II and Operation Paperclip, a top secret government program to shield Nazi scientists from trial or punishment by quietly bringing them over to the U.S. and giving them new identities and U.S. citizenship in exchange for working for the government and military.

Dr. Erich Traub

One such Nazi scientists was Dr. Erich Traub, lab chief during World War II for Nazi Germany’s Insel Riems – a secret biological warfare laboratory on an island (sound familiar?) in the Baltic Sea where Traub worked directly under Hitler’s #2 Heinrich Himmler. His job included spraying viruses from planes over occupied Russia. Prior to the war, just by the way, Traub had been involved in Nazi activities in the U.S. at Camp Siegfried on Long Island just 30 miles from Plum Island while he was here on a fellowship studying viruses and bacteria at, of all places, the Rockefeller Institute.

Plum Island was specifically named for Cold War biowarfare research alongside Dugway Proving Ground and Fort Detrick back in the early ’50s when the US biowarfare program and clandestine germ warfare trials first began. Seems like they got the location idea from Insel Reims.

Gee, can’t imagine who gave them that idea.

Dr. Erich Traub completed his Operation Paperclip duties working for the American biological warfare program from 1949 to 1953, during which time he consulted with the CIA and scientists at Fort Detrick before returning to West Germany in 1953 to run the country’s own Insel Riems-like experimental virus facility in Tübingen (with the U.S. government’s permission). Not only did USDA officials visit Traub’s lab over there, but Traub also briefly worked for the USDA which oversees Plum Island and throughout the ’50s he was in regular contact with Plum Island’s Director Doc Shahan. Dr. Traub was also at the Plum Island dedication ceremony in 1956 and visited the place at least twice after that in 57 and 58, when Plum Island’s lead scientist Dr. Jacob Traum retired and the USDA considered replacing him with who else? Dr. Erich Traub.

In the 70s, attorney John Loftus was hired by the office of special investigations, a unit set up by the Justice
department to look into Nazi war crimes. He was given a top secret clearance and allowed access to decades worth of classified documents. Among other things, Loftus turned up records of Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to the US and experimented with dropping poison ticks from planes to spread rare diseases. He also specifically mentioned in his book The Belarus Secret that he received information that suggested the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range during the early 1950s. This story was further validated by attorney Michael Carroll in his book Lab 257. Carroll claims that not only did a source who worked on Plum Island in the 50s tell him that some of the workers purposefully released ticks outdoors on the island in 1951 when it was still Fort Terry and that one of the scientists involved was called the quote, “Nazi scientist,” but Carroll says he dug up a box of 1950s USDA files from the National Archives vault that included three folders: two labeled “tick research” and one labeled “E. Traub”. Both were empty.

Even more damning, in an article in the Journal of Degenerative Diseases, Marjorie Tietjen reportedthat 60% of chronic Lyme patients are actually co-infected with several strains of mycoplasma, the most common one being “mycoplasma fermentens” which is patented by the U.S. Army and army pathologist Dr. Lo; Pathogenic mycoplasma, U.S. Patent 5,242,820 issued Sept. 7, 1993.

Today, the official story touted by government scientists is that the scientific evidence does not support Lyme Disease originating on Plum Island. This is despite the fact that researchers at Plum Island were experimenting with hundreds of thousands of hard and soft ticks on Plum Island where classified top secret biowarfare research was being carried out by the U.S. military for decades and the first outbreak of Lyme happened right directly across the sound less than nine miles from Plum Island where thousands upon thousands of birds fly AND despite the fact that they have been forced to admit culpability in the outbreak of other types of viruses on the island due to these experiments, the experimental animals for which were kept outside in open air pens up through the late ’70s, when a highly-contagious foot-and-mouth disease outbreak on Plum Island in 1978 ended in the government being forced to put over 200 of their own experimental animals to death.

The U.S. government continues to pretend like it couldn’t have possibly had a hand in Lyme Disease. Then again, the U.S. government denied that there were any biowarfare experiments on Plum Island for decades as well, up until documents proving otherwise were published by Newsday in 1993.

Meanwhile, Canada has been complaining in recent years of Lyme Disease proliferating there due to migratory birds picking up black-legged ticks when they fly south into the U.S. for the winter and come back with them.

Of course, I guess it would be an expensive and embarrassing PR/lawsuit nightmare if they did admit any culpability after this many decades of Americans suffering and probably dying from Lyme, which they would obviously avoid at all costs in the interest of national security.

Earlier I mentioned that it is believed Lyme Disease affects some 300,000 people annually in this country but that number is basically meaningless because people are forced through a medical merry-go-round just to be able to get tested for this disease, and then as Tietjen points out in that article above, many are only treated for it for a month on antibiotics and according to prestigious Yale University (which has only been implicated in government dirty work for decades with Plum Island right in its backyard), if the person still has Lyme Disease symptoms on the 31st day of antibiotic treatment, they are labeled as having something else (including “antibiotic-seeking behavior”), probably whatever affliction the disease has mimicked in their body. In this way, if they die, they die of something else in the official medical record, not Lyme Disease and they no longer get counted in the Lyme Disease statistics the same way unemployed people eventually “fall out of” the unemployment stats if they are unemployed long enough.

And that’s after the patient goes through the rigmarole to even be able to get tested in the first place. My mother went through this when she lived in Missouri and was bitten by a tick. Her doctor straight up told her Lyme Disease did not exist in Missouri, it wasn’t possible for a Missourian to get it, and that it was all in her head, even going so far as to write in her medical chart that the patient is convinced she has Lyme Disease even though her doctor apprised her of the “facts”. She had to go to a different doctor and plead her case to him, essentially arguing her way into even being allowed to get the test to begin with! This is how statistics continued to be toyed with even to this day in order to cover up an epidemic that is linked to government biowarfare research.

If you have ever been to Long Island, you see signs everywhere in parks warning you about ticks and Lyme Disease. The place is absolutely infested with them. The only thing more disconcerting than that is the fact that, after decades of animal disease research and burying the wastes on Plum Island, the whole place an environmental disaster. According to Carroll, repeated attempts to decontaminate the crumbling, unsecured lab 257 have failed. They finally had to build a whole new building (Lab 101) but in recent years the USDA and DHS, who jointly run Plum Island these days, have decided to move the whole thing inland to Manhattan, Kansas — nearly right smack dab in the middle of the country where a large majority of the nation’s cattle and hogs are bred, not to mention there’s a perfectly valid reason the makers of “Twister” decided to make Kansas one of the main settings in the film.

That’s right. As Congressman Michael Burgess pointed out at a September 2009 Oversight and Investigations hearing on Federal Oversight of High Containment Bio-Laboratories before the Committee on Energy and Commerce held just a week after the House vote on moving the Plum Island facility to Kansas:

“…the language of the resolution proudly touting that 45% of the fed cattle in the United States and 40% of the hogs produced in this country are in Kansas. Considering that food-and-mouth disease, which is the primary research being done at Plum Island, is a disease which can spread with devastating swiftness from humans to cattle and hogs… shouldn’t we have done our O&I hearing on the scientific evaluations being done at DHS before [emphasis added] we voted on a resolution saying that Kansas was the best pick?”

Gee… you think?