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To: HG who wrote (351)	10/28/2001 10:07:40 PM
From: HG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1595

The American history of bioterrorism Varghese K George looks at the history of biological warfare and finds that English settlers in the American continent had used it in the 18th century to eliminate Native American populations New Delhi, October 19 The US and its allies would prefer to describe biological and chemical warfare as acts committed by "rogue states" and terrorists. Going by those standards, however, America itself has been a rogue state until not too long ago. The very colonisation of the American continent by British settlers was achieved partly through biological warfare. As late as in 1974, the US had ratified the 1928 Geneva protocol that banned the use of biological and chemical weapons. Both France and England were simultaneously trying to colonise the American continent in the eighteenth century. The two countries' approach towards the Native Americans were, however, different. English colonizers were ruthless in eliminating the natives while the French were relatively lenient and tried to win them over with guns and clothes. There have been debates in American academic circles about whether British general Jeffery Amherst attempted to infect native Americans with the smallpox virus at Fort Pitt in 1763. Although the official history of the US has already acknowledged that epidemics brought by the colonizing Europeans were instrumental in eliminating the native population, it is still contested whether this was done deliberately. Fort Pitt was of particular historical interest since there was documentary evidence showing Amherst allowing his subordinates to "try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race." This was in reply to a colonel who suggested distribution of contaminated blankets among the natives to "inoculate the Indians." In an article published in the Journal of American History (March 2000), George Washington University historian Elizabeth A Fenn looks at the evidence regarding smallpox transmission in 18th-century America and argues that "contemporary military ethics left ample room for acts of biological terror" and that means of spreading smallpox were well known, and that accusations of deliberate smallpox infection arose frequently. If incidents of willful contagion were not very common, they were probably not so rare as historians previously believed either, she argued. Henry Bouquet, Amherst's colonel, had written to the general that "two blankets and an handkerchief" out of the post's smallpox hospital had been delivered to the natives. This most famous "smallpox blanket" incident in American history happened during the Pontiac Rebellion of May-June 1763, when a loose confederation of tribes inspired by the Ottawa war leader Pontiac launched attacks on British-held posts throughout the Great Lakes and Midwest. They began a siege of Fort Pitt, located in western Pennsylvania at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers on May 29, 1763. Fort Pitt was under the Swiss-born Captain Simeon Ecuyer. On June 16, 1763, Ecuyer reported to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Philadelphia that the frontier outpost's situation had taken a turn for the worse. Local Indians had escalated hostilities, burning nearby houses and attempting to lure Ecuyer into an engagement beyond the walls of the well-protected post. Henry Bouquet, in a letter dated June 23, passed the news on to Jeffery Amherst, the British commander in chief, at New York. The above communications take place in this context. It has not yet been proven that "two blankets and a handkerchief" caused the smallpox that followed, wiping out the resisting natives. Certain historians maintain that this practice continued through the 1800s but it requires more research to establish individual cases. In the 20th century, production of weapons for biochemical warfare continued unabated in Western countries. In the 1920s, Britain used chemical weapons in Iraq against Kurdish rebels. In 1941, the US entered World War II and President Roosevelt pledged a no-first-use of biochemical weapons. In 1943, however, a US ship damaged by German bombing leaked some poisonous mustard gas. In 1945, the Japanese military experimented with biological warfare on its prisoners of war, killing at least 3,000 people. In 1961, the Kennedy administration hiked chemical warfare spending from $ 75 million to $ 330 million. In the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, Agent Orange - a herbicide used by the US destroyed at least 6 per cent of South Vietnam's cropland, enough to feed 600,000 people for a year. According to a 1994 Senate report, US firms supplied Iraq with numerous biological agents for a four-year period, starting 1985, when the Iran-Iraq war was at its peak.