NEO – Lugar Bioweapons Laboratory: a Time Bomb in Georgia and Region?

… by  Seth Ferris, … with New Eastern Outlook,  Moscow

[ Editor’s note: Our coverage of the bio-weapons lab scandal continues with Seth Ferris’ latest NEO report below, with Gordon’s intro. The Russian media has been the only follow up coverage for the handful of brave journalists there who have reported on the ground, at great danger.

The various thugs in Georgia murder politicians and prosecutors, so it is open season on journalists. We will keep banging on this drum to force more coverage. The pile of bodies from the swine flu continues to grow, and we have exposed a full scale cover up… Jim W. Dean ]

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– First published  … February 25, 2016  –

Introduction by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor, VT

Despite treaties prohibiting the use of biological and chemical weapons, treaties prohibiting the development and use of nuclear weapons and the wars, some passive through sanctions and others, wholesale slaughter such as the invasion of Iran in 2003, something entirely different is going on.

There is little question that those who have ordained themselves, who have assumed the mantle of power in order to save the world from the horrors of radiation or biowarfare or chemical weapons are, in fact, doing so in order to secure exclusive access to these weapons, deniable access and deniable use.

VT investigations of the continual use of nuclear munitions by non-proliferation signatory nations, of chemical weapons including sarin gas, white phosphorous, VZ and BZ among others, that and the more insidious diseases, including the widespread use of anthrax as a “postal party favor” by American intelligence agencies, will continue despite the threats.

We have identified bioweapon facilities in Georgia, Kazakhstan, Libya, Romania and, of course, the United States.

We have come to realize that the curious and unexplained research of these diseases that seldom or never leads to findings is little more than childish cover for mischief, now long proven as we can read below, in Georgia.

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…by Seth Ferris, Tbilisi, Georgia

Reports by New Eastern Outlook and VT on the clandestine bio weapons programme in Georgia are now being republished like wildfire.

Interviews are appearing all over the Georgian and Russian media and international outlets are also talking an increasing interest, as these articles provide the missing link between pieces of information they themselves have.

Jeffrey Silverman, the VT Bureau Chief in Georgia, has been writing about the biolab for a number of years and has collaborated with Henry Kamens and various new agencies on these stories. He writes:

“I found a bad translation of some of the recent articles as I was interested to know what people were thinking. I get the impression that most people are saying that they don’t know if I am sane or not but it seems I am telling the truth, based on what they can see happening in Georgia and Armenia regarding flu deaths and other deadly and potentially deadly diseases.”

Already the official death toll from these diseases has reached nearly 20 in both of these countries, without any explanation of how these diseases got there or became so deadly. Georgian TV is reporting that the death toll is now rising, as if some ghastly experiment has gone badly wrong, suggesting that worse may soon follow.

All this is taking place while the Western coalition is losing ground in Syria and war has broken out on the Turkish border. It is the Syrian conflict in which bioweapons are known to have already been used. Henry Kamens in Azerbaijan has quoted one of his sources:

“Is it possible that as part of a combined operation between Ukraine and Turkey, or rather their intelligence agencies, someone went to an employee (or more than one) at the Lugar facility in order to obtain Swine Flu?

This would account for the timeline of employee illness prior to the outbreaks in Ukraine, the dead in Kiev, many more in Ukraine, an uncounted number in the Donbas region and the outbreak in Russia, and [now] a secret outbreak in Southern Turkey amongst the Kurdish population there… I don’t believe in happenstance, all this is part of organising an outbreak in Northern Syria in order to clear the way for a Turkish move against the PYD/YPG forces closing in on Turkey’s ISIS allies in the North.”

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Impossible to hide in the open

The Georgian media is reporting that the Lugar Laboratory is a slow-acting lethal bomb. Giorgi Chkheidze, a Georgian journalist who has been reporting on this story, has pointed out that none of a succession of Health Ministers, or any other “competent person” in the new government, has been willing to live up to their oaths by addressing this matter, and for good reason.

The very existence of the Lugar laboratory makes it physically impossible to conceal its true purpose. Officially it is there to protect public health, despite basing itself on the site of a historic bio agent facility.

But it is also working with newly discovered viruses and bacteria, under the guise of providing timely diagnosis of new diseases, and co-operates with the international community for the purpose of sharing of clinical research under the auspices of the US-funded Biological Threat Reduction Program.

We are told this is part of a broader international project, involving a number of EU and other international organisations working together.

Apparently however all these organisations put together have been unable to diagnose or stop the latest disease outbreak, or explain a number of similar spikes in the incidence of other deadly diseases, such as Hepatitis, which began occurring in Georgia after the centre was founded. Nor has it produced one single research paper.

All the government bodies which fund this facility are audited. If the lab has the purpose it is supposed to have its funding would have been cut off long ago, by order of those auditors, as it is colossal and illegal waste of public money. But it continues regardless, impervious to government control, thereby demonstrating it can only be an intelligence facility.

Furthermore, for several years the Government of Georgia and the US both denied the facility even existed, even though it was named after a US Senator, Richard Lugar, and was officially opened by the then President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.

If the Centre were really doing what it was claiming, then Georgians would be shouting the success from the rooftops, as its existence would make this small country a leader in the bio threat reduction field and thus a more serious international player, able to attract more inward investment for scientific research and infrastructure. In reality however it was only press articles which forced the two governments to admit it was there, once again demonstrating the facility’s true nature.

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This is not a game

Jeffrey Silverman, who was once Saakashvili’s media advisor, first broke the story to the Georgian media in 2011 and gave many details about this laboratory. Many people expressed doubt then, but they aren’t now.

If you ask any doctor in Georgia about this facility and the disease outbreaks, and see how quickly they refuse to talk, you will see how much of the truth is already known, and will eventually explode on Georgia just like the bio weapons it is manufacturing for use elsewhere.

The Russians have long known what is going on.

This lab and its purported research direction continue to sour relations between Tbilisi and Moscow. The present Georgian government has tried to reestablish these relations, which were broken after the 2008 war, but is bound by a number of secret clauses in the agreements it has signed.

For example, as soon as it signed the EU Association Agreement a huge military plane, which had taken off from an airbase in Germany, arrived at Tbilisi Airport transporting weapons to Syria. I have the tail number, if investigators are interested.

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Why does the US need such a facility in Georgia?

As Silverman explains, “It’s all about the biological weapons convention. It needs a way of evading the rules. The US has no right to conduct research into dangerous pathogens which can be weaponised.

The terms of the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty prohibit the development of biological weapons, and especially conducting experiments on human subjects.”

This latter point is the most significant, as Georgian food hygiene practices make it easy for anyone to infect the population should they choose to do so. Processed meat to HACCP standards is a rarity – you get chunks of the actual animal, untreated, which have not been kept in conditions which would be acceptable in the West.

The Lugar Lab claims to be studying diseases which occur in livestock and human, and the biological agents which cause them. This involves testing the animals themselves and injecting things into them—and that includes humans too with experimental vaccines.

Silverman has research which shows that this lab, located in the suburbs, has been testing health hazardous substances on the local population. The laboratory has the capacity prepare anthrax, plague and swine flu. Why does it do this, if it a public health facility rather than a military project? There is also new documentation workers from the lab have died. That story will soon be share with a wider audience.

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Freedom of speech and human rights

Silverman has become persona non grata even to his own government since he began publishing a series of revelatory articles about the Richard E. Lugar laboratory. His US nationality has been unceremonious revoked by Federal Declaratory Judgment by the US State Department, and he has had repeated difficulty obtaining health insurance and other things which remain part of his civil rights, even the right to vote; this is a harsh punishment for a decorated US army veteran, one who served his country with pride.

As he says, “I have been kidnapped here, in the middle of the street, I have been beaten by order of the American Embassy at the building of Georgian counterintelligence, and they have tried to neutralise me in various ways. Early in my military service I dealt with biological and chemical weapons, I know this is a bio weapons lab/facility!

“The laboratory is located the Alekseevka settlement, a residential district, but has only been given a BSL3 biological security safety level, meaning that the safety of the local population cannot be guaranteed.

It was built as part of the same programme, for the supposed reduction of biological threat, as various facilities in Ukraine, which have also seen sudden outbreaks of deadly diseases on their doorstep in spite of their alleged work. This laboratory was not established for health protection or veterinary inspection. It was created for the weapons development programme administered by the United States Navy!”

The people who work in the laboratory are in fear. Some engineers know him as a journalist, and have contacted me and shared many documents because they are worried about Georgia and their own safety. Others have conveniently “lost” documents, and we won’t say where at this time.

“I’ve also talked to farmers and other people involved in the meat industry, and I know that the lab has a clear political and economic agenda in addition to its civilian research one. There are links to what has happened in Georgia with meat imports. Diseases were spread in domestic animals to kill them off and force Georgia to import food, and the deals done benefited several people close to the previous government. They made lots of money out of them. So the lab has many purposes, and will go to any lengths, political and human, to fulfill them!”

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Non-denial denials

Paata Imnadze, the director of the lab, can only respond to the allegations being made by saying that journalists such as Silverman are amateurs spreading misinformation for personal gain.

He cites a guided tour of the facility given to journalists in 2013, after Russia’s chief sanitary doctor, Gennady Onishchenko, raised suspicions about its purpose.

Anyone who has conducted such a tour of anywhere knows how to hide anything incriminating and present only what you want the visitors to see. Are we to believe that a highly-funded US Defense Department facility cannot do the same?

The fact is that increasing numbers of workers at the facility itself are being hospitalised, and doctors are being threatened not to talk about it. Recently we learned that a few years ago that at least two workers died and this information was covered up by the lab and Georgian security, and is only now surfacing. Two others who were sick were taken to the hospital and never have been heard of since, we expect that they too died.

The fact is that those who investigate the facility end up getting assaulted, or worse. A young journalist helping Jeffrey Silverman is currently in hospital with the same swine flu that has been killing people, and once tame American journalists in Georgia, from the State of South Carolina with Embassy connections, who strangely enough have intelligence from back in the US, are happy to throw bricks at people who ask questions about the lab, just as they themselves should be doing.

Enter a journalistic figure named Will Cathcart, a Daily Beast author form Charleston SC. Will Cathcart just happens to work in Georgia for a company called Maybank Industries, also from Charleston.

The lab story is now becoming international. The Armenian media has blamed the death of 10 of its citizens on the lab, saying that many of those died had been linked with activities near the Armenian-Georgian border, in a region famous in Armenia for outbreaks of “swine and chicken flu” and the presence of potentially deadly anthrax in cattle.

Armenia looked for other explanations of these health problems, as did everyone else. Now it thinks it has found it, and the evidence is growing by the day.

One only needs to look at what is happening in the region with designer viruses-Russia, Ukraine and the Donbass region of that war torn country.

Georgia is exactly the place you would put a bio weapons lab if you wanted to attach Syria, Iraq and former Soviet states like Ukraine for some reason. That is exactly what is happening. All you need is a compliant government which will let you break international law on their territory in exchange for cash and some sort of protection.

The previous Georgian government was desperately eager to be such a government, knowing its own nature. The present one is dealing with its legacy, but is falling apart precisely because it is not stamping out all the practices of the previous one, as it claimed it would to get elected.

During the days of the slave trade African countries fought wars against each other simply to obtain captives they could sell as slaves. But even then, only in the most extreme cases did rulers sell their own people for personal gain. Georgia has been doing this for years, in one way or another, and enabling the murder of thousands of others as well.

Slavery was eventually abolished on moral grounds. What will it take for these US-sponsored bio weapons programmes, and everything associated with them, to be destroyed in the same way?

Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus.  He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.  He now writes and posts periodically for VT.

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