Korean activists urge withdrawal of DU weapons
The headquarters of the movement for eradicating the crime of U.S.troops and members of an environmental organisation in south Korea held a rally in front of the U.S.8th army unit in Ryongsan district of Seoul and demanded the immediate withdrawal of radioactive
weapons. Following the rally the organisations published a statement of protest urging the withdrawal of the weapons.
The organisers said that depleted uranium bullets which the U.S. troops have kept in secrecy only in south Korea, their use is prohibited by international law. They are dangerous one, which destroy ecological environments and
do harm to human bodies. The south Korean government , imploring the U.S.troops' permanent presence in south Korea, are closing the eyes to the shipment and storage of radioactive weapons, which will inflict unbearable
misfortunes on the Korean nation, according to the humiliating "status of forces agreement" between south Korea and the United States.
UNITED Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is in possession of a report
submitted by Cuba
which contains more than sufficient evidence linking the U.S. government
to the appearance of a
plant disease currently causing severe damage to corn, bean, squash,
cucumber and other food
crops in four Cuban provinces and the Isle of Youth. According to charges
made on October 21, 1996, a fumigation aircraft operated by the U.S. State
Department, registration number N3093M, released the Thrips palmi insect
plague along the international air corridor that passes over the western
Cuban province of Matanzas. Thrips palmi is an invertebrate of between
one and two millimeters in length, and is resistant to a considerable variety
of insecticides.
Back in the early 1960s, U.S. intelligence services and the military
began to elaborate plans for
biological warfare, which have included blights that attack food crops,
sugar cane defoliants, bacteria that thwart sugar cane cultivation and
the interruption of rain by way of highly sophisticated methods.
In 1962, the CIA designed an operation known as Mongoose with the goal
of destroying the Cuban Revolution. The operation's strategies included
the use of military force, sabotage and the assassination of the country's
leaders, as well as the introduction of nonlethal chemical agents that
would cause illness among sugar cane workers (hundreds of thousands of
individuals) and keep them off work for a period of between 24 and 48 hours,
thus hindering the production of Cuba's leadingexport.
The Long Island newspaper Newsday revealed in 1971 that a virus originating
in Fort Gulik, in the
Panama Canal Zone, had been delivered by fishing boat to agents working
against Cuba.
A book entitled The Fish is Red, for its part, reports that in 1972,
CIA agents first introduced the
African swine fever virus that decimated Cuba's livestock population.
It is estimated that more than
half a million pigs were sacrificed, burned and buried in order to
combat the epidemic.
Several years later, Newsday reported that a biological warfare program
aimed against poultry
production in Cuba had failed, for reasons not revealed.
Between 1979 and 1981, four destructive diseases were unleashed that seriously affected individuals and crops vital to the Cuban economy: hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, dengue fever, sugar cane rust and tobacco blue mold. Covert Action, a Washington-based publication, stated that as part of the CIA-Pentagon anti-Cuba arsenal, a disease known as hemorrhagic dengue was introduced on the island, where it infected hundreds of thousands of people, leaving 158 dead; 101 of them were children.
Eduardo Arocena, a leader of the anti-Cuba terrorist group Omega 7,
admitted before a U.S. court in 1984 - while he was being tried for murder
- that in 1980 he had participated in an operation to introduce germs into
Cuba as part of the United States' war against the island.
Five years earlier, in 1979, The Washington Post had reported that
the CIA had a program aimed
against Cuban agriculture, and that since 1962 Pentagon specialists
had been manufacturing
biological agents to be used for this purpose.
The secret bases operated in the United States for the development of
chemical and bacteriological warfare include the Edgewood arsenal, near
the city of Baltimore, and Fort Detrick, in the state of Maryland. A report
issued in 1969 by the U.S. Senate committee on labor and social security
recognized that under certain conditions, it is difficult to prove guilt
in a bacteriological attack if the organisms causing the harm are sent
clandestinely, which would allow for the argument that the situation created
is the result of a spontaneous epidemic.
Of course, Cuba is not the only country against which the United States
has used these prohibited
forms of weapons. During the war in Viet Nam, there was ample media
coverage throughout the
world, including in the U.S. press, regarding the indiscriminate use
of highly toxic chemical and
bacteriological agents affecting both humans and animals, as well as
defoliants aimed at devastating
plantations, crops and forests, such as Agent Orange.
Other antecedents are far too numerous to catalog. In 1981, for example,
the Press Asia agency of India reported that bacteriological experiments
being carried out by U.S. scientists in Lahore,
Pakistan, had led to 30 mysterious deaths. A year earlier, in 1980,
the U.S. government declassified documents revealing that in 1956, there
had been plans to use the mosquito which spreads yellow fever against the
former Soviet Union.
Source: Granma