Miller served three months in jail for contempt before she agreed to disclose the identity of her confederate, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, V.P. Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby, who told Miller that Plame was a clandestine CIA agent and directed her to publish the revelation, subsequently went to prison for the crime. It will be many years before the CIA releases documents explaining the agency’s true relationships, if any, with Miller and Libby. Libby, a PNAC founder and key visionary and promoter of America’s 100-Year Reich, was an early champion of the modern biosecurity agenda, with multiple personal connections with the intelligence community at Yale, Rand, Northrop Grumman, and the Pentagon. The State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs—his employer in the early 1980s—had, and still has, deep CIA ties. His obsession with bioterrorism led Libby to write a novel about a smallpox pandemic and earned him the White House nickname “Germ Boy.” Following his pardon and subsequent prison release by President Donald Trump, Libby joined Robert Kadlec’s Blue Ribbon Panel for Biodefense (BRPB), which promotes: biosecurity as the fulcrum of US foreign policy, the twenty-first century as the age of US empire, and mass vaccination as a foreign policy tool. Libby’s fellow BRPB director, William Karesh, is the executive vice president of Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, the organization through which Dr. Fauci, Kadlec, and the Pentagon— through DARPA—were laundering gain-of-function payments to Chinese scientists in Wuhan. Libby also serves as senior vice president of the Hudson Institute, a think tank with deep connections to the pharmaceutical industry, Monsanto, and the CIA. He guides the institute’s program on national security and defense issues. In 2021, former CIA Director Mike Pompeo joined the Hudson Institute.
The pervasive CIA involvement in the global vaccine putsch should give us pause. There is nothing in the CIA’s history, in its charter, in its composition, or in its institutional culture that betrays an interest in promoting either public health or democracy. The CIA’s historical preoccupations have been power and control. The CIA has been involved in at least seventy-two attempted and successful coups d’état between 1947 and 1989,50 involving about a third of the world’s governments. Many of these were functioning democracies. The CIA does not do public health. It does not do democracy. The CIA does coups d’état.
Smallpox: Biosecurity Blossoms
Dark Winter was part of a persistent campaign by the intelligence agencies and the bioweapons lobby to keep smallpox fears alive in the public consciousness. Even before the disease was eradicated in 1977, public health regulators had discontinued smallpox vaccinations in the United States. Public health advocates urged the federal bureaucracies and the military to destroy their smallpox stockpile,51 to prevent the disease from escaping and, possibly, decimating humanity. Ignoring these warnings, the George W. Bush administration purchased even more. During the run-up to the Iraq war, President Bush aimed to inoculate the US population with smallpox vaccines. Skeptics charged that the reckless scheme was PNAC’s transparent gimmick for hyping fear of Saddam Hussein’s mythological bioweapons program. Dr. Meryl Nass, writing on the history of smallpox vaccine, later reported:
The smallpox vaccine was known to be highly reactogenic. . . . When the vaccine was given to healthcare workers and first responders in 2003, episodes of heart failure, heart attacks, myocarditis, and death quickly mounted. Doctors and nurses learned that they could not sue for damages if injured, and at first there was no federal compensation either. They began refusing to be vaccinated.52
The Clinton administration continued to stockpile millions of smallpox vaccines and Congress allotted money for a compensation program, but the maximum award was only $250,000 for a permanent disability or death. After distributing 40,000,000 inoculations, the wave of alarming injuries caused the government to abandon the project’s civilian arm. The military continued vaccinating soldiers with the untested, unapproved, deadly vaccine, with catastrophic results.53 The vaccine caused symptomatic myocarditis in one in every 216 soldiers, and subclinical myocarditis in one in thirty-five soldiers, according to a 2015 US Army study. Government officials have since recognized vaccines as a probable culprit in the era’s epidemic of Gulf War Syndrome, which affected vaccinated soldiers, both deployed and those vaccinated in preparation for deployment, but never deployed. (The court observed that “Absent an informed consent or presidential waiver, the United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs.”54,55)
10/4 Anthrax Attack
Less than four months after the Dark Winter simulation and three weeks after 9/11, a mysterious spate of letters containing fine white anthrax spores arrived by mail at several news media outlets and the Capitol Hill offices of two senators, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Those two senators had been the most vocal in condemning the post-9/11 infringements on civil liberties pushed by the PNAC crowd. Administration and press accusations pegging Saddam Hussein as the probable culprit in the anthrax attacks, which killed five Americans, fueled Congress’ hasty passage of the Patriot Act—as Michael Moore proved, not a single elected member had read the bill—and its jingoistic declaration of war on Iraq.
By abolishing traditional privacy protection, the Patriot Act created “an entire terror industry,” according to a 2021 report by Action Center on Race and Economy. The biggest beneficiaries have been Silicon Valley tech companies, particularly Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who have partnered with federal intelligence agencies to mine data and “profit from the war on terror by at least $44 billion since 2001.” The Patriot Act passage, the report says, “opened the door for Big Tech to become, first and foremost, the brokers of our personal data, selling it to secret agencies and private companies at home and abroad unleashing the era of the digital economy.”56
Second only to Vice President Dick Cheney, the staunchest war hawk among George W. Bush’s beltway coterie was his secretary of defense, former Searle Pharmaceutical CEO and PNAC chieftain Donald Rumsfeld—the very man who, fourteen years earlier, had given Saddam his anthrax arsenal. While no one has ever proven the origin of the anthrax in those letters, the FBI concluded that the powder had come from a US military lab.57
Robert Kadlec was first among the large coterie of pharmaceutical companies and military contractors to benefit from the anthrax scare. Immediately after the anthrax letters arrived, Kadlec became a special adviser on biological warfare to then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and his PNAC deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.
Three Suspects—All Linked to the US Military
The PNAC cabal was determined to blame the anthrax attack on Saddam Hussein, and Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, tasked Kadlec with confirming the presence of bentonite in the anthrax used in the attacks. Experts had advised Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz that bentonite was a “fingerprint” unique to Iraqi anthrax stocks; its presence would therefore put the blame on Saddam. Kadlec did not succeed in finding bentonite in any of the anthrax samples that the FBI tested. But repeated media reports claiming otherwise allowed warmongers to drum up jingoistic hysteria against Saddam. By late October 2001, one nationwide poll found that 74 percent of respondents wanted the United States to take military action against Baghdad, despite a complete lack of evidence connecting Iraq to either 9/11 or the anthrax attacks.58
Instead of pointing the finger at Saddam, the FBI lab found that the anthrax spores originated from one of three US Army labs; Fort Detrick; a lab at the University of Scranton; or Battelle’s West Jefferson facility, owned by an El-Hibri business partner.59