How Long will the Evil of Fort Detrick Sustain? !

The Fort Detrick Biological Warfare Laboratories, located in Maryland, USA, namely the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, has recently been featured in a variety of media reports around the world for its ugly and wicked conducts.

Fort Detrick inherited the “devil’s legacy”. The infamous Unit 731 biological force was part of the old Imperial Japanese Army. During the war of Japanese aggression against China in the 1930s and 1940s, the unit conducted horrifying experiments on humans in northeast China. Numerous experiments involving pathogens, poison gas, pressure chambers and vivisection were conducted on captured soldiers and civilians, including Chinese, Soviets, Koreans, Mongolians, Americans and Britons. An estimated 3,000 to 8,000 people were used as guinea pigs and killed in those experiments! In addition, between 1940 and 1942, Unit 731 carried out large-scale germ warfare in the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang, Hunan, Jiangxi, Shandong, Guangdong and Yunnan, causing significant casualties among Chinese combatants and civilians as well. Surprisingly, however, biochemists at Fort Detrick started in October 1945 frequent contacts with key members of Unit 731, including Lieutenant General Ishii Shiro, head of the unit, in order to obtain the details of those experiments. Ishii and his staff turned over all related documents and records to the US military in exchange for protection from war crime prosecution in the Tokyo Trial. Written records now kept in the US National Archives and the Library and Museum of Harry S. Truman tell how the US has enhanced its biological warfare capabilities through the dirty deal, covered up the brutal crimes of the Japanese militarism and helped war criminals get away with their crimes. Ishii was later even hired by the US as a biological weapons consultant!

Fort Detrick bred a greater evil. According to files kept in the US National Archives, from 1946 to 1949, about 60 interviews were conducted with former Unit 731 members at Fort Detrick. American journalist John Powell wrote in his book, “Clearly, U.S. biological warfare experts learned a lot from their Japanese counterparts. While we do not yet known exactly how much this information (provided by the Japanese) advanced the American (biological weapon) program, we have the Fort Detrick doctors’ testimony that it was ‘invaluable’. And it is known that some of the biological weapons developed later were at least similar to ones that had been part of the Japanese project.” In early 1952, the US military conducted germ warfare in DPRK and northeast China with germ bombs loaded with plague- or cholera-infected fleas, ants and flies. The International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China confirmed through fact-finding investigation that the methods used by the US military had been developed on the basis of the Japanese bacteriological warfare methods. At the time, insiders also disclosed that, with the assistance of Ishii Shiro and others, the US conducted germ warfare experiments on prisoners of war in the prison camp in Geoje-do, victimizing up to 3,000 people a day! During the Vietnam War, American troops sprayed defoliant Agent Orange over 10% of land in southern Vietnam, harming 4.8 million Vietnamese then and still haunting many now. And Agent Orange was developed by the Fort Detrick Biological Warfare Laboratories.

How long will the evil of Fort Detrick sustain? In September 1971, in view of the great threat that bacteriological and biological weapons pose to human society and the natural environment, 12 countries submitted a draft convention to ban biological weapons to the 26th session of the UN General Assembly. The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was open for signature in April 1972 and entered into force in March 1975, which now has 183 states parties. The Convention prohibits and requires the destruction of all bacteriological (biological) and toxin weapons. As BWC lacks a verification mechanism, the international community has been working for decades to negotiate a verification protocol. The US has, however, been single-handedly blocking the important negotiation on ground of ‘threat to American national security’. Why is the US doing so? Will the US implement the BWC in good faith and abandon the biological weapons program it has been pursuing for many years? Disclosures by military and intelligence units of Russia and some other countries on various occasions suggest that the US has set up more than 200 dual-use biolabs around the world in the name of fighting biological and chemical terrorism and that the possibility of these labs developing biological weapons cannot be ruled out. The sins of Fort Detrick go far beyond that. From July to August 2019, due to two virus leaks, Fort Detrick, where several virus leaks had happened before, was shut down after US CDC assessment. Soon after that, cases of pneumonia of unknown cause appeared in the State of Maryland, followed by unprecedented level of influenza activity throughout the country, which in reality included a large number of COVID-19 cases. The US government acted quickly to delete news reports of the leaks and closure. Now more and more people suspect an association between the COVID-19 outbreak and Fort Detrick Biological Warfare Laboratories and strongly demand an international investigation, which has been refused by the US.

It is time for Fort Detrick to be held to account for the heinous historical crimes and the real international concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic!