The Unz Review has been blacklisted by Facebook and Google in apparent retaliation for its articles exploring the COVID-19 bioweapon hypothesis, especially Ron Unz’s blockbuster “American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?” When deep state censors react that way, we may reasonably assume that they have something to hide. By sending such a strong signal that they don’t want us to explore this critically important topic, the censors have thrown down the gauntlet. People of courage and integrity have no choice but to respond to the challenge by going straight to the place that has been declared off-limits.

And that is what we are doing this Sunday at an interactive webinar on the COVID-19 bioweapon question. Below is my forthcoming article on the webinar for this week’s edition of American Free Press, followed by a transcript of my April 8 interview with biological weapons expert Meryl Nass. Also check out my new Veterans Today article “COVID Made In a Lab! Ex-Skeptics Admit It Due to Accumulating Evidence.“-KB

Symposium to Explore Corona Bioweapon Hypothesis

(A slightly different version of this article appears in the May 29, 2020 issue of American Free Press.)

Did COVID-19 evolve naturally in animals before a freak mutation allowed it to infect humans? Or is it a bioweapon built from a bat coronavirus with an add-on spike protein designed to infect humans? If the latter hypothesis is true, then who built it, and was it released accidentally or deliberately?

These are the key questions that will be explored in an on-line symposium sponsored by the No Lies Foundation, a San Francisco Bay Area based 501c3 nonprofit. The interactive event will take place Sunday, May 21, 2020, 2 to 4:30 pm Eastern, featuring presentations by several researchers who will take questions from the on-line audience. For details visit https://noliesradio.org/donate1.html .

Full disclosure: I will be one of the presenters, alongside Ron Unz, publisher of the Unz Review; Barry Kissin, a leading researcher on the 2001 anthrax false flag attack; Meryl Nass, MD, a leading biological warfare expert; and Thomas Willcutts, an attorney with a strong science background. Francis Boyle, the international law professor who drafted the the U.S. domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, will be represented on video.

Francis Boyle is well known for opining that COVID-19 is an engineered biological weapon, not a naturally-occurring mutation. He argues that the novel coronavirus appears to be engineered for “gain of function,” meaning that its ability to infect humans due to its perfectly-structured spike protein is the telltale sign of a bioweapon. Boyle’s view was recently supported by a new study led by vaccine researcher Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University in Australia, which compared the coronavirus spike protein’s ability to bind to human versus animal cells. The study found that COVID-19’s spike protein is perfectly tailored to powerfully bind with human cells, but cannot bind efficiently with cells from a large number of sampled animal species. Therefore, the authors conclude, the virus cannot have jumped to humans from any animal intermediary. Instead, it must have become specialized for human penetration by “living” in human cells. There is only one plausible mechanism by which the virus could have existed in human cells long enough to become so perfectly specialized: It must have been introduced into human cell cultures in a laboratory. Germ warfare scientists would have taken a bat coronavirus, put it into cultured human cells, and run it through many generations, selectively breeding the virus to get better and better at binding with human cell receptors.

This method—the traditional old-fashioned way of manufacturing biological weapons, perfected during the days before the existence of modern genetic engineering—would have the advantage of not leaving telltale signs of genetic manipulation: A virus pushed to “evolve” artificially in cultured human cells does not have the giveaway markers of a virus that includes artificial “inserts.” So by using the old-fashioned method, the germ warfare engineers would have achieved “plausible deniability”—which has always been the case for previous biological agents that have actually been used in anger, according to Dr. Meryl Nass.

Barry Kissin rebuts the above argument by pointing out that the majority of scientists who have offered an opinion disagree with Boyle. These experts say the virus was probably endemic in bats before it fortuitously jumped to humans, possibly passing through other animal intermediaries.

Meryl Nass argues that the scientific community has been misled by Nature Medicine’s specious, bad-faith argument against the bioweapon hypothesis. Dr. Nass argues that the authors of that article could not possibly have believed what they were saying, since their argument rests on the absurd assumption that a COVID bioweaponeer would have chosen one particular easily detectible method rather than any of the many plausibly deniable ones. Actual bioweaponeers, she says, always choose plausible deniability; there are many ways this could have been achieved in manufacturing COVID-19. The Nature Medicine authors, she says, obviously know this. Their argument is a grotesque big lie by omission.

Thomas Willcutts reinforces Dr. Nass’s case by analyzing another absurdity in the Nature Medicine argument: The claim that no bioweaponeer would have built COVID-19’s spike protein because an obscure error in an obscure paper would have dissuaded them from even trying. Together, Willcutts and Nass show the Nature Medicine authors appear to be guilty of scientific fraud.

So if COVID-19 is a bioweapon, how did it emerge? It could have been an accident. But there are also reasons to suspect a deliberate biological attack. Ron Unz, perhaps the most accomplished figure in alternative media, lists some of those reasons and sketches a plausible scenario involving a biological attack on China by American neoconservatives, followed by unintended “blowback.” I will supplement Unz’s presentation by arguing for another scenario in which an international banking elite may be attacking not just China, but the entire world.

Kevin Barrett Interviews Bioweapons Expert Meryl Nass, 4-5-20

Dr. Meryl Nass is a world-class bioweapons expert. She recently published a must-read article:

Why are some of the US’ top scientists making a specious argument about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2? It seems that the usual-suspect Lancet authors who were trotted out to dismiss the “bioweapon conspiracy theory” are the same kind of so-called scientists as the NIST “experts” who assured us that WTC-7 miraculously disappeared at free-fall into its own footprint due to minor office fires.

Kevin Barrett: Truth Jihad Radio is often the best place to go for the most important stories that the mainstream won’t cover. Today I’m talking to Meryl Nass. She’s an expert who has written a very important article about how the propaganda push by very suspicious scientists to claim that Covid-19 couldn’t possibly be bioweaponized is a red flag that everybody should be paying attention to.

But you won’t see anything about this in the corporate controlled mainstream Mockingbird media. So please help this kind of material continue to come to light, by subscribing to DrKevinBarrett at Patreon.com.

Welcome to Truth Jihad Radio. I’m Kevin Barrett searching fearlessly for truth in all of the most forbidden places, bringing on people who are also going to those kinds of places. And sometimes I find genuine experts on various subjects. And we have one of those with us today, Meryl Nass. She is definitely one of the go-to experts on biological warfare related topics. Yet for some reason, the mainstream media isn’t going to her. I wonder why that would be. Maybe because the things she wrote about the anthrax attacks back in 2001 were a little bit too truthful. Anyway, she’s got some very interesting posts up now at her anthrax vaccine blog. But first, before we jump into that, let me just say that when I say she’s an expert: She has consulted for the World Bank. She’s testified to Congress. She diagnosed Zimbabwe’s 1978 anthrax epidemic as an episode of biological warfare. She’s consulted for Cuba’s Ministry of Health on its optic and peripheral neuropathy epidemic, and on and on. So she has a pretty good, solid basis for her views.

And she recently posted what I thought was a critically important piece “Why are some of the US’ top scientists making a specious argument about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2?” pointing out, why is this that the top U.S. scientists are being trumpeted all over the media, making a specious argument about the natural origin of Sars CoV-2. So why are they, Meryl? Why is it that they’re telling us this could not possibly be a bioweapon, and yet obviously it could?

Meryl Nass: Well, that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? Maybe we should go back and explain what I’m aware of that happened. Sometime in late February, a group of scientists, which included the former head of the National Science Foundation and a former top person at CDC, as well as a bunch of other people, many of whom had worked in the biological defense / biological warfare area— possibly all of them had—published a very short statement in The Lancet saying they wanted to stand with the Chinese public health officials and scientists and point out that rumors about the unnatural origin of coronavirus were a conspiracy theory and should be dismissed. They didn’t provide evidence, but they made this very strong statement in the top medical journal in the world, The Lancet. And so, OK. I have to say that the first author—and it was alphabetical, so this is the first author alphabetically who signed that—is someone that I was told about 27 years ago when I consulted in Cuba, when they had a very severe epidemic of blindness and other neurologic symptoms. And it turned out it was due to cyanide.

Anyway, they named this particular person, this researcher, as having come to Cuba and identified the fact that there were Aedes mosquitoes in Cuba. Which the person had not been aware of. And shortly thereafter, the Cubans were attacked with the illness Dengue, which is a viral disease transmitted by a Aedes mosquitoes. So the Cubans blame this person who worked for a federal agency for their Dengue outbreak.

There were two. They were the first in 100 years, I think, in the Western Hemisphere. And if I remember correctly, this was a long time ago, about 150 or more Cubans died, mostly small children, as a result of the Dengue epidemics. So I thought, that’s interesting that this bio-warrior is signing a statement saying that the core idea that the coronavirus might be due to a biological warfare construct should be dismissed outright as a conspiracy theory.

Kevin Barrett: Wow. What a coincidence, that that would be the guy who would do that. You say he’s the first author alphabetically?

Meryl Nass: Yes.

Kevin Barrett: Well, we can figure out who that is then.

Meryl Nass: A group of five scientists, and I knew of several of them. I’ve been in contact with at least one of them in the past, and they too were sort of biological defense, biological warfare people. Well, let me just say two of them I would call spooks with Ph.Ds, who have come out and done research on a whole very odd collection of subjects, all of which the US government has tried to cover up in the past. So I’ll just name some of those things: Gulf War Syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, anthrax vaccine induced illnesses, autism, Ebola, and coronavirus. So that’s an odd group of different things that you might be researching and writing about. But oddly enough, a couple of these scientists have chosen that obscure group of things that are somewhat unrelated to each other to comment about. And so these five scientists wrote a piece in Nature Medicine which claimed to have found the scientific linchpin to be able to make the argument that the new coronavirus is a natural occurrence. And the argument they made was that had it been constructed in the lab, it would have used the particular backbone that laboratorians know about. But because it didn’t have that backbone, it couldn’t possibly be a lab construct.

The problem with that argument is basically it was a straw man argument. They said, well, if I were going to make the novel coronavirus, I would have made it this way. But because it isn’t made that way, it’s not a lab construct. Of course, you can make the novel coronavirus a lot of different ways. And I pointed out three different ways one might have come up with a novel coronavirus that weren’t using the method they suggested.

And I’ve gotten confirmation. I’m a physician, I’m not a scientist, but I did work in a lab. I went to M.I.T.. So I do know biology, although I am not well versed in modern genetic engineering. But I do know a lot about how biological weapons used to be made, how they were made before and during World War 2 and afterwards. And there were very effective biological weapons made and used in the period around World War 2 and subsequent to it that are documented in the literature. There are no books telling you what’s been made in the last 10 years. But we know a lot about what was made 50 to 80 years ago.

So I then looked at the connections between the first group of scientists who had published in The Lancet and the second group that had published in Nature Medicine and found that…well, for example, that the person I mentioned before who had been to Cuba and looked at the Aedes mosquitoes, even though that person is now of the retirement age, is a member of the institute of one of the second authors. And I saw other connections between these two groups.

Kevin Barrett: Sounds like the usual suspects.

Meryl Nass: Yes, exactly. It seemed that the second group, anyway, the guys who were trotted out to provide the last word on all these other controversial medical subjects had been again trotted out to provide the last word. Then I thought, who else is talking about this? And when I looked that up, I found the head of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, an MD-Ph.D, cited the work of these five scientists to say basically now we’ve proven that this is a natural occurrence and everyone can forget about the conspiracy theory. And he further said if you’re if you’re concerned about what you read about coronavirus, just go to the FEMA website where they are telling you what is a rumor and what isn’t. So I thought, well, that’s interesting that the policy makers or the people who pull the strings are able to pull Francis Collins’ strings and get him to comment on this, again agreeing with an argument that he must have known to be specious.

Kevin Barrett: You don’t have to comment on this, but this sure reminds me of what’s been going on post-9/11, with first the ridiculous FEMA report on the so-called collapses of the Trade Center towers and then the NIST reports culminating in the most absurd one of all, the NIST report on Building 7. Throughout that whole process, the usual suspect so-called scientists were putting out utter baloney and rubber stamping it, and all the officials were rubber stamping it mindlessly, and any independent voices speaking common sense and truth were marginalized.

Meryl Nass: Yes. So that is of course what’s happening here. And it’s very helpful, it seems, to be able to identify them as this same group, the same group who can be used over and over and over again over decades to whitewash what the system wants whitewashed. And then you look at their grants. Ugh! Some of these people are making unbelievable grants.

Kevin Barrett: They’re probably flying on Epstein’s Lolita Express and things like that, too.

Meryl Nass: That I did not look up.

Kevin Barrett: I wouldn’t be surprised, anyway.

Meryl Nass: There is a lot of money flowing through their laboratories. So anyway, the final point I made was that every scientist who signed these two documents and then Francis Collins has had something to do with biological defense. If you’re a top scientist in the U.S. government, you are asked to look into pandemics and the risk that they could be due to a biological weapon. And so as far as I could tell, virtually all these people have had some background in looking at these things. And they’re all old. They all remember the days before the last three decades of genetic engineering and they all must realize, if they have any competence as scientists, that there are other ways to create biological agents, microorganisms. And so for them to all have signed this, knowing that, just makes you wonder—why did they do this?

They presumably did it because they had some sense that it was a lab organism. Perhaps it was a lab escape and perhaps they were trying to protect the whole enterprise of biological defense, which is a multibillion dollar yearly industry that feeds many, many people, including themselves.

Kevin Barrett: I would argue that’s a relatively innocent explanation. There are worse ones than that.

Meryl Nass: The interesting thing is that all these countries do research together. So China, US, (former) Soviet Union, Ukraine… All different countries send people to labs in other countries to work on micro-organisms. So you can put your finger on people from many different countries who were working on bat coronaviruses in labs around the world. And this could have been a lab escape from many different places. I mean, it could have been a deliberate attack. But in my understanding of biological warfare, no country used a biological agent against another country if they didn’t think they could control it. If they thought it might blow back onto their country, it wouldn’t be used. So historically, I don’t think this is the kind of agent that would deliberately be used at a nation level.

Kevin Barrett: Let me just give you a possible opposing argument. John Mearsheimer wrote in, I believe 2015, in a very famous article about China’s unpeaceful rise that said, in so many words, the US is stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of trying to contain China’s rise, which is based on its double digit growth averaging out since 1980 or so. And that that growth inevitably is pushing China to break out of U.S. containment in Asia and become a regional hegemon, which is unacceptable to U.S. decision makers. And more likely, it will actually “pose global challenges” meaning displace the U.S. as global hegemon as well, simply based on its economic growth, which now has supposedly slowed to maybe 8 percent. But still, the differential between that and the U.S. and its Western allies is such that within a decade or two, at the very most, it’s a done deal. As long as there is no huge history-changing event that radically ends this trajectory that we’re on and that there’s no obvious way off of, the US essentially will acquiesce to Chinese global hegemony. And that is 100 percent unacceptable, even to sensible realists like Mearsheimer, much less the neocon fanatical crazies at places like PNAC looking for a new American century.

And those people did 9/11-anthrax and they’re back in power in the Trump administration. So Mearsheimer says that the only way to stop China’s rise is essentially to destroy the global economy. He says even wrecking the U.S. economy along with the global economy would would be worth it because security is more important than prosperity. And this is a relatively sensible guy writing back in 2015.

I’ve argued with Ron Unz about this. He he thinks it would have been a U.S. attack designed not to escape China, like previous U.S. (bio-)attacks on China. But I don’t see why they would be particularly averse to it escaping, going global and doing precisely what it’s doing, because it is doing exactly what they want, which is destroying the global(ized) economy, which ultimately in the long run stops China’s displacing the U.S. And number two, it militarizes the United States even more than 9/11 did. And they want to bring us back to the thirties and head towards a World War 2 situation to stop China, although they hope it may not be necessary to go that far. So basically, if the neocons didn’t invent coronavirus, they would have had to invent some (similar) virus or its equivalent. This is precisely what one would have predicted five years ago would happen.

Meryl Nass: That’s a reasonable argument. But the economy is not being totally destroyed. It’s just that factories are, closed, people aren’t going to work. Nothing’s been destroyed. When we come out of this, China will still have all the factories and we will have all the monetarists and all the play money. So it seems like China could get its engines going a lot quicker than we can when we come out of it.

Kevin Barrett: We won’t come out of it.

Meryl Nass: So if we don’t come out of it, then it’s not what the neocons chose.

Kevin Barrett: They don’t want to come out of it. They want to wreck global prosperity while the U.S. still has most of the military hardware.

Meryl Nass: I’m sorry. I guess I don’t understand that.

Kevin Barrett: Well, OK, first we could go to the neocon philosophy, which is that human flourishing only occurs during extreme situations of stress, suffering, struggle and strife epitomized by warfare. So for them, the only real purpose of human life is all out war to the death. And that’s where heroic qualities emerge from human beings who are otherwise lazy and worthless. That’s their basic philosophy of life. And then secondly—

Meryl Nass: No, wait a minute. If that’s the neocon philosophy of life, why were they all chickenhawks? Have any of them gone to war?

Kevin Barrett: Well, that’s the point. They’re projecting these fantasies in the privacy of their studies and their twisted, warped imaginations. But yeah, they’re happy to inflict this suffering and struggle and death on everybody else. And they want the other guy to be the one to die, of course. And so I assume that they’re planning to not be casualties of this disaster that they’re setting off. But setting the philosophical thing aside, I think that strategically they are really planning for this to take down the current globalized economy, to force countries to go back to more localized manufacturing, certainly to follow Trump’s and Kissinger’s neocon agenda, the anti-China agenda of bringing back manufacturing to the US.

Meryl Nass: And is there anything wrong with that? That seems to me a worthy goal.

Kevin Barrett: Well, actually, yes, I would support bringing back manufacturing. I would support never having sent it to China in the first place. However, it’s in the context of their plan to stop China’s rise. And China is just as committed to its rise as these guys are to stopping it. Which means a lot of danger of war and unpleasantness. And I think this is just the first shot of what’s going to be a long round of war and unpleasantness through the next decade.

Meryl Nass: Perhaps. Right. We don’t know. Another thing I’ve written is that the whole reason this (pandemic) is (being) stopped. My theory is that, I’ve tried to think like a politician—and I did write this before the lockdown—which is that what would have happened once this coronavirus had spread widely in the US, is that had it not been halted, we would have gotten to a point where the coronavirus had required way more medical facilities, personnel, equipment, etc. than we had, and there would be people dying without access to any medical care. And I thought that given that in America, based on polls, the one thing Americans want from their government is a health care system, and that the idea of people dying in the street without being able to get into a hospital was so beyond the pale for politicians who saw that they would never be re-elected under those circumstances, that they then did everything they could to stop that from happening. And by the point they decided to do something, the only thing that could be done was a lockdown. And then finally attempting to get more equipment, supplies and personnel.

Kevin Barrett: So, yeah, I agree, that’s plausible.

Meryl Nass: That’s what happened. And I’m sure everybody is trying to now use this very extraordinary circumstance to their own benefit in the near and far future.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I agree. We’ll see. The thing is, if if you were planning this thing, assuming that my scenario and your scenario are both true, a very small group of people would have unleashed it, and then everybody else would be reacting according to their own self-interest, including the politicians doing precisely what you described.

Meryl Nass: Yeah, that’s certainly possible.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. And I’m using as my model for this 9/11, which is what I’ve studied quite a lot over the past nearly two decades. And I see parallels here between the two events in that 9/11 was about going to war with Islamic civilization, just as this seems to be a strike against Chinese civilization—both occurring in the wake of the Samuel Huntington—Bernard Lewis claim that “the clash of civilizations will be the new paradigm for us.” And if it hadn’t been for 9/11, that probably wouldn’t have happened. There would’ve been no clash of civilizations per se.

Meryl Nass: I think, yes, you’re right. And yet it looks like China is going to get out of this way more unscathed than we are.

Kevin Barrett: That’s possible. Of course, you know, “they plot and Allah plots and Allah is the best of plotters.” Ron Unz may be right that some of this may have been unforeseen. And it’s also possible that I could be wrong. It could be a coincidence. Sometimes the coincidence theorists, even the craziest coincidence theorists, can be right once in awhile.

Meryl Nass: Well, yes, given the fact that there are documented many hundreds of lab escapes of different organisms, going by what’s most likely, that seems to be the most likely explanation.

Kevin Barrett: Do you think that’s what happened with Lyme disease? Willy Burgdorfer, whose name was applied to the spirochete organism that causes Lyme, is on record, filmed and recorded by Timothy Grey, confessing that he, Burgdorfer not only provided a name for the organism, but he unleashed it on the world as a U.S. biodefense guy. So a lot of people think Lyme was an external escape. Others hypothesize there may have been some U.S. versus Soviet element there, because Burgdorfer had a lot of money he was getting from somebody, and he was flying to places where he might have been meeting with Russians, et cetera. So have you looked into the Lyme issue?

Meryl Nass: I have. So there’s a book which goes into Burgdorfer quite a bit that came out last year by Kris Newby.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. Bitten.

Meryl Nass: And then there is a very old book about Plum Island by a guy named Mike Carroll. My reading of Chris Newby’s book is that Burgdorfer admitted that there’s information he was not telling. And then after he died, Kris was able to see that he did have money in foreign banks that there was no explanation for. But the full story of Willy Burgdorfer has not been told.

Lyme disease of the type we have in the U.S. and was not apparently not around until the 70s, when it was first diagnosed. The small deer ticks also were very uncommon. And now they are the primary tick in the northeast where I live. Treating tick borne diseases as the primary thing I do now.

Kevin Barrett: Really? I should have met you 10 years ago. I was suffering from a fairly nasty case of Lyme at that time.

Meryl Nass: Yeah. We have a lot of Lyme. We have a moderate amount of Babesia. We have a lot of Anaplasma in Maine. And then we have we have other Borrelias. We have quite a variety of tick borne diseases. And we have a Bartonella-like organism. And when you treat them with the appropriate antibiotics for those—you can get more than one infection from one bite, and I live in Hancock County, Maine, where we’ve had the highest rates of Lyme in the country—so if you do treat it correctly and you make sure you are not ignoring the Babesia and Bartonella-like organisms, you have a high rate of success.

Kevin Barrett: That’s interesting. I briefly told the story of my experience with Lyme in that book review I did of Newby’s Bitten and two other books. So do you think that it likely would have been an accidental escape from Plum Island?

Meryl Nass: Who knows. Kris Newby showed that there were deliberate releases of ticks in New England, probably to see what they did, whether they would extend their range or disappear, probably. And there were experiments using ticks on Plum Island.

Also there were releases from Burgdorfer’s lab in Montana, which is part of NIAID or part of the NIH. But why is it out in Montana? And the CDC has a lab in Fort Collins, Colorado. And both these labs may have done biological warfare work. But there may have been many, many labs around the United States which have done biological defense. You’re not supposed to use the word biological warfare anymore because the United States signed a treaty in 1972 which went into effect in 1975 that said we wouldn’t do any more biological warfare work. So now it’s all termed biological defense, but much of it is dual use.

Kevin Barrett: What could be done to actually limit and stop this activity and limit the dangers from this activity? I’m thinking that the current COVID-19 pandemic should be a wakeup call, that we need to find some way to put some teeth into the treaty.

Meryl Nass: Thank you. Which (is what) I’ve been saying since I researched the anthrax epidemic in Zimbabwe, which occurred in 1978 to 1981. But still there are outbreaks every couple of years in Zimbabwe because so much anthrax was left in the soil there. So, yes, I think I think it’s a huge problem. There’ve been so many accidental releases from around the world, both in China, in the United States, and in other countries. The Marburg—Marburg is like Ebola. And there was a Marburg outbreak in, I believe, Germany maybe in the 80s. I have to I have to look these things up. But that was, again, an outbreak within a hospital lab that was studying the virus. We’ve had people die from anthrax at Fort Detrick, although that was in the 1950s. We’ve had people who worked at Fort Dietrich wind up in the hospital in Frederick, Maryland, thinking they caught a bug and they had caught a bug at Fort Detrick. A very unusual bug. Anyway, SARS has escaped from labs in China more than once.

USA Today has researched this and done a series on it in the past. And also the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has sometimes written about lab escapes. There were lab escapes of anthrax at the CDC labs. No lab is free of this. NIH and the FDA have found vials of what you might call biological warfare agents such as smallpox in their freezers and nobody remembers when it was left there. There are just enormous possibilities for things to get out. And so what we need is a much better treaty than the one we signed in 1972, which the U.S. initiated, because that one does not have teeth. It doesn’t have enforcement mechanisms. It did not when it was first signed, no inspection mechanisms. But still, now there is some ability to inspect, but there’s nothing strong enough. The treaty has no teeth. The treaty is basically meaningless and provides cover to the countries that have signed it. I think Israel hasn’t even signed it. We need to get rid of the whole concept of biological defense and biological warfare from the earth. We need to impose tremendous penalties on the scientists, the manufacturers, the government planners, everybody involved in this, so we don’t have to deal with this again.

Kevin Barrett: To me, that sounds like a complete no brainer. And the more you look into the history of the use of these things, and the more you learn about the advances in genetic engineering, the more you realize that this could be right up there with a handful of other really huge threats that people need to take a lot more seriously. And certainly this is a good moment to try to wake people up. But as you say, the establishment usual suspects are being trotted out to tell us, oh, no, this couldn’t possibly be a biological weapon. Don’t worry about biological weapons. They’re perfectly harmless.

Meryl Nass: Exactly.

Kevin Barrett: You know, it’s it’s it’s almost comical. It’s so ridiculous. But that’s the world we live in, I guess.

Meryl Nass: Right. And they are the people who get their bread and butter from doing this.

Kevin Barrett: Wow. Well, it’s a dirty job, but they I guess they say somebody has got to do it, but I’m not sure why they do. It’s one of those too-dirty jobs.

Meryl Nass: It’s well-rewarded.

Kevin Barrett: Oh, boy. Well, let’s go back and talk a little bit about the anthrax case, because you wrote a very perceptive piece way back in 2001 about that. And you know, I’ve studied that. And I agree with Graham McQueen’s hypothesis that it looks like the 9/11 hijacker patsies were sheep-dipped in anthrax. They were treated in Florida during the run up to 9/11.

Meryl Nass: One of them. Treated for a lesion, a skin lesion, which Tara O’Toole and Tom Inglesby later claimed—they’re also biodefense mavens, both physicians. But they didn’t see the patient. They are also biodefense mavens who get their money through creating scenarios of biological warfare attacks and how we would respond. So anyway, these two people who are deep into the biowarfare establishment claimed much later that one of the alleged hijackers of 9/11 had had a skin lesion consistent with anthrax. And that was the hook that connected them to the anthrax letters. Now, there had never been a culture of the lesion. There was no evidence of any kind. Anything with a black scab on it could have been said to have looked like anthrax. So this was just a spurious sort of claim, but it got a lot of media.

Kevin Barrett: It echoes the Mohamed Atta visit to the Small Business Administration. Do you remember that?

Meryl Nass: Yes. Right. And then he started screaming. Nobody in their right mind behaves in this way unless they’re trying to create a sheep-dipped image of somebody else.

Kevin Barrett: “Mohamed Atta” visits the Small Business Administration and demands, how much was, half a million dollars in cash? He won’t leave the office until he’s given half a million in cash to buy a crop duster airplane. And then I think even mentions anthrax doesn’t he. Or maybe not. But he wants money for a cropduster airplane. He’s ranting about how wonderful bin Laden is. And then he says he also won’t leave the office until they tear down the aerial photo of Washington, D.C. from behind the desk and give it to him because he needs it. You know, you can’t make this stuff up.

Meryl Nass: Yeah, I know. I know. Shades of Lee Harvey Oswald at the Russian embassy.

Kevin Barrett: Right. And test driving the car at over 125 miles an hour ranting about how great Castro is. And then at the rifle range, the guy who looks sort of like Oswald probably wasn’t Oswald, firing at all the other guys’ targets and screaming about how great Castro is. These people aren’t particularly subtle.

Meryl Nass: You wonder how many clues they left behind, to have a few of them pop up. But you’re right. They lack imagination.

Kevin Barrett: So with the anthrax case, obviously Bruce Ivans looks like he was a suicided patsy. And what about the Dr. Assad vs. Philip Zack scenario. I’ve kind of always wondered whether to accept this notion that Philip Zack and other Zionist people there who were harassing their Arab and Muslim co-workers like Dr. Assad (at Fort Detrick) by creating a so-called Camel Club were, in fact, anthrax perpetrators, or as you suggest in your article, that whoever did the anthrax was using this as a cover story to falsely implicate the Camel Club and Philip Zack. Because whoever did the anthrax attack must have been the one who wrote the letter trying to cast blame on Dr. Assad, who’d had a fallout with the Zionists of the Camel Club when he was working at Fort Detrick. But the question is, was it in fact Philip Zack and the Camel Club or was it just somebody who knew about that but wanted to falsely implicate them?

Meryl Nass: For your listeners who may not remember all the details of these people: Many years later there there appeared to be little bits of evidence implicating a number of different scientists in the anthrax letters attack. So a letter was sent to Quantico, which is both a Marine base and an FBI center, alleging that a doctor Assad who had worked at Fort Detrick, but in virology—anthrax is a bacterium, not a virus, and generally, you’re either a virologist or a bacteriologist, and Assad was a virologist—in any event, he’d worked at Fort Detrick and he and some other workers there had not been friends, and there was alleged to have been a Camel Club where the others kind of made fun of him. I have no inside knowledge of any of that. But he had left Fort Detrick and hit them with a discrimination lawsuit.

And then there had been a doctor Zack, who supposedly was having an affair with a woman scientist at Fort Detrick. And he was coming in at night. So anyway, this was all before the anthrax letters. When the anthrax letters were sent, a letter was sent to Quantico, an anonymous letter, providing lots of details of Assad and sort of suggesting that he was the person who sent the anthrax. But the thing was, the letter was sent before there were anthrax cases. So the person who sent that letter knew the anthrax was coming. And so they should have been implicated in the anthrax letters. And there should have been strong efforts to figure out who that person was. They also knew the story about Assad and Zack and the Camel Club suggesting that they either had worked at Fort Detrick or or knew details of the story, knew details about Assad’s family that they wouldn’t have known unless they had been part of that group. What was odd was that the FBI chose to ignore the letter. I think they brought in Dr. Assad for questioning, but they, at least in the media, they never made any attempt to identify who sent the letter and what its purpose was.

And I would say that it just suggests there was somebody with a lot of knowledge who wrote that letter. I would not suggest that either Zack or Assad is likely to have had anything to do with the anthrax letters. I don’t know what Zack’s role was at Ft. Detrick, but he was long gone before the anthrax letters were sent.

But there were also efforts to implicate other people. So Steve Hatfill had lived in Harare. Steve Hatfill had a peculiar career. He he went to some small college, I think in Indiana. And then he dropped out and he dropped into the middle of southern Africa, working at a mission. And then later he marries the daughter of the doctor at the mission and the doctor at the mission is killed by local mercenaries or troops of some kind. Now, how does a college student—I as a college student dropout hitchhiked across Africa, and I can tell you, I stayed at a lot of church missions in my travels. There were very few young Americans winding up at these missions and then working there. He had no training. He wasn’t medical. He was a college dropout and winds up working in a mission where his father-in-law gets murdered later on. And then he winds up going to medical school in Rhodesia. It was then Rhodesia. It became Zimbabwe in 1981. That Rhodesian medical school didn’t accept non-Rhodesians. It’s hard to get into medical school but somehow this guy got in. So I’d like to know who got him in. What connection did he have with intelligence agencies even going back that far?

So he goes to Rhodesia, goes to medical school and was disliked by his classmates. I had one of his classmates tell me he pulled a gun on a teacher once after failing an exam. I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what I was told. Many people did not like him. He was a bullshitter and very rough.

Kevin Barrett: The intelligence agencies actually like those kind of people, the kind of borderline sociopathic types.

Meryl Nass: Right. Well, he turned out to be a very good person to try to pin the crime on because he had so many people who didn’t like him and were ready to tell the story. So he had lived in Rhodesia in Harare. And Greendale is one of those portions of Harare. I’ve been to Harare. I wrote my paper about the anthrax attacks in Zimbabwe, which was published in 1992. And so people wondered, did this guy who was in Rhodesia in the early 80s have anything to do with those anthrax attacks? And I have found no evidence that he had anything to do with them, or any other part of the Rhodesian biological warfare project, which was ongoing.

Rhodesia had broken away as a territory of the UK in 1965. And then between 1965 and 1980, there was a civil war going on for majority rule in Rhodesia, which was fairly smouldering until the last five years. And then a much more active chemical and biological warfare program got going, used against the blacks, which I documented in my paper and has been documented elsewhere.

Kevin Barrett: Killing off cattle herds with anthrax.

Meryl Nass: Killing off cattle herds and killing off people, using a variety of agents, which included rat poison and probably cholera and hepatitis as well as anthra