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Page 7 of 10 . THE PENTAGON'S TOXIC ée- Fair Article In early 1997, Asa bought 200 milliliters of squalene from Acres Organics in Geel, Belgium. She developed a scratch test to measure sensitivity to the substance. Al 10 of her Gulf War patients were "reactive." Some suffered symptoms such as rashes or swelling at the injection site. She also tested a control group of healthy patients who had never taken military vaccines; none of them reacted. Still, Asa didn’t have her evidence. The scratch test indicated exposure, but didn't prove squalene had been injected. Around this time, Asa teamed up with Robert Garry at Tulane University. Garry and the university received a US. patent in 1997 for an assay that could detect antibodies to polymers, of which squalene is one. Asa sent Garry an initial batch of serum samples, including one from the subject who had volunteered for the N.IH_ herpes-vaccine trial. Asa didn't tell Garry which polymer he would be testing for, or which patients might have been exposed to it. This would be a blind study. " When the samples ail came back positive for antibodies to the unknown polymer, Garry sepeated the tests and got the same results. He also tested frozen serum samples from Gulf War veterans sent directly to him in 1993 by Department of Defense and V.A. researchers. He had originally been asked to test the blood for evidence that the patients had been exposed to retroviruses including H.L-V., for which they were virtually all negative. Garry got these samples out of cold storage and ran the new assay on them. He had been told that some ofthe samples were from healthy control subjects; now 69 percent of the samples tested positive for antibodies to the unknown polymer. It was at about this time, Asa says, that the phone calls started. She would answer the phone, and no one answered back. Her phone would occasionally dial 911 by itself in the middle of the night. A year and a half earlier, just after she had submitted her report to the D.O.D., there had been two attempted break-ins at her house. Her husband opposed any further involvement with the Gulf War-syndrome patients after the harassment began. If it was tied to this work, their children could be in danger, he believed. But Asa persisted, partly, she says, for the safety of her children. Her eldest. Chris, was in high school and would soon register for the draft. "There not going to equate my son with a lab rat. I don't care what the vaccine is. I don't care what they claim it's supposed to do for mankind. It's not right to experiment on people, ever." Asa sent Garry more samples, and by the fall of 1997, Garry had the results. Ninety-five percent of Asa's Gulf War syndrome patients had tested positive for antibodies to the unknown polymer. Colonel Smith was positive. The subject from the N.1-H. vaccine trial was positive. Of those sick veterans who had never deployed to the Gulf, but who said they had received shots, 100 percent were positive. In all, Asa and Garry tested some 350 subjects, half of them controls. "So what was that stuff?" he asked Asa. “Squalene,"” she said. This left one major question unanswered. If the military used a squalene adjuvant, in which vaccine did they use it? In August 1990, the month Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, there was probable amity at the Pentagon over the prospect that Saddam Hussein might use biological weapons to defend his newly annexed territory. On August 8, intelligence intercepts of Iraqi military communications indicated that Baghdad had produced and probably weaponized (i.e., made suitable for warfare) many deadly biological agents, including botulinum toxin and anthrax. The U.S. Army had been purchasing small amounts of vaccine for both, but its stocks were woefully short of what would actually be needed. A high-ranking army source confirms that by August 1990 the United States had stockpiled between 11,000 and 12,000 doses of anthrax vaccine. We eventually deployed 697,000 troops in the Persian Gulf. According to declassified military documents, in August 1990 the army surgeon general at the time, General Frank E Ledford Jr., ordered a team of doctors and researchers from the army, the navy, and the Air Force to form a secret TriService Task Force on vaccinations for troops in the Gulf. On October 9, 1990, in a conference room at the army's Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, the Defense Department convened the first meeting of the task force, which began to draft plans to "surge" the production of vaccines for anthrax and botulinum toxin. At the next meeting, on October 12, the acting chairperson, Colonel Garland McCarty, and a team of 13 other officers decided to give the task force and its mission the code name Project Badger. http://www. idir.net/~krogers/vantyfair. html 11/8/2005