Darn the luck. The scheduled war between the United States and Iraq failed to start on time in late February. That meant that the anti-Iraq hysteria that was supposed to be generated with the Feb. 18 arrest of "biowarfare terrorist" suspect Larry Wayne Harris was no longer needed.
Harris was arrested in Las Vegas on that Wednesday and "charged" with the following "crimes":William Leavitt Jr. was arrested on the same charges. The night after these arrests, Thursday, Feb. 19, the national hysteria campaign began in earnest -- only to end just as suddenly when U. N. Secretary General Kofi Annan obliterated the Clinton administration's war blueprint by independently traveling to Baghdad, negotiating directly with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and coming away with a firm deal to end the "showdown" peacefully.
So much for the war, and the "terrorists" who were taken into custody. A sheepish federal government had to eat its indictment and release both men. It was a travesty, and potentially a public relations debacle, except that the U.S. mainstream press quickly dropped the story in favor of more Monica Lewinsky ratings-boosters. The Iraqis danced in the streets, celebrating the "victory" over the mighty American armada positioned nearby to unleash lethal firepower, perhaps even a tactical nuke or two -- but instead rendered naked, helpless and red-faced by the botched "war plan." Even more fun was the exposure of the Harris-Leavitt detentions as a faked-up "plan" to further demonize Saddam just as the bombs were starting to explode in the faces of hapless Iraqi civilians.
CBS-TV had even started its "rehearsals" for the war, graphics and all, a la the Persian Gulf War, which did start right on time [Jan. 17, 1991, under President George Bush, who appears to have a better sense of dramatic timing than does President Clinton, not to mention a much better Secretary of State than the shrill, biased Madeleine Albright under Clinton]. Wall Street's defense-contractor stocks, poised to rocket upward as the missiles were fired, instead went down the tubes. Shucks, investors shrugged. What happened to this good ol' money-generating war we were supposed to have?
"Never mind!" as Rosanna Rosanna-Danna would say on the old TV show Saturday Night Live.
Of course, the Las Vegas talk-radio barons, lit it up the night after Harris and Leavitt were arrested and led away in shackles in their own backyard. Lou Epton, whose KXNT radio show out of Las Vegas reaches listeners all up and down the western portion of the United States, naturally dropped his plans for the evening and committed his entire two-hour broadcast (10 p.m.-midnight PST) to the then-fresh arrests.
Radio host Brian Hyatt of KDXU radio, St. George, Utah, upstaged Epton earlier that afternoon when a mysterous caller stated that Iraqi "foreign exchange students" were poised and ready -- complete with stolen Cessna 150s and aerosol equipment -- to "spread bubonic plague and anthrax," a so-called "Russian cocktail" of illnesses, all over the continental United States as soon as U.S. war-planes and missiles attacked the Motherland. This wild tale was first proffered by Harris in his suddenly famous book, Bacterological Warfare: A Major Threat to North America, self-published in 1995 by Harris. It became a creeping underground best-seller among the conspiracy set. Harris claims that a former Iraqi student colleague, Mariam Arif, told him about a vast plot by Saddam Hussein's henchmen to poison the U.S. population with various forms of the "Russian cocktail," using airplanes specially equipped with "venturis," trumpet-shaped devices used to spray germ-tainted mist from airplanes into the air.
Arif's credibility is suspect because, in Harris's book, her father is said to have been a "General Arif" who reputedly was president of Iraq in the 1960s.
Harris is probably referring to Col. Abdul Salam Aref, who was indeed president of Iraq from 1963 until 1968, when his regime collapsed and he was replaced as Iraqi leader by Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. A young officer named Saddam Hussein was quickly rising in the public eye, and it was Saddam who finally wrested power from al-Bakr in 1979.
In short, then, Mariam Arif (or Aref, or however she spells her name) would possess little in the way of enthusiasm for Saddam or his brutal legacy. So why does Harris go to great lengths in his book to paint this "Iraqi student" as an insider to the Saddam regime when, in fact, she would have every reason to do just the opposite -- demonize the Iraqi president by spreading this elaborate scenario about the "spreading" of Russian cocktails?
Until the actual arrest of Harris and Leavitt, the biowarfare propaganda parade had one primary public-relations arm -- the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and its ancillary organization, Klanwatch, which ostensibly "watchdogs" so-called "patriot" and "militia" groups. In the 1996 SPLC tract, The Face of Terrorism, the SPLC went to great lengths to "document" Larry Wayne Harris's "connections" to the Aryan Nations and other racist groups. In a three-page tirade, "Crossing the Theshold: The Increasing Threat of Biochemical Terrorism Has security Experts on High Alert," the SPLC/ Klanwatch staff tried to pawn off Harris's published work on biological warfare as a manual of survival for the "patriots." In the SPLC version, these wild-eyed racist extremists are supposed to use Harris's microbiological knowledge to "innoculate" themselves against their future biowar, run to the hills, then unleash the pathogens among an unsuspecting population of non-white ethnic groups and selectively kill them. Yeah, right. What the SPLC fails to point out is that anthrax and bubonic plague are not selective in what kind of people they infect and kill. Fleeing to Montana and Idaho won't protect the "patriots."
The far more likely reason why Harris has taken this line of research is that his own fraternal grandparents, Curvin and Alpha Harris, lived through the great swine flu epidemic of 1918 and were well aware of path-ogens and chemical warfare and how they were used during World War I. Troops in the trenches carried swine flu infection back to the United States from Europe, and the stage was set for the devastating epidemic that killed an estimated 20 million people worldwide.
Still, the SPLC line was very much in force as Harris and Leavitt were arrested in February. They were painted as bioterrorists and it was a brutal embarrassment for federal officials when they had to drop the charges and release the men. The PR leverage used was the 1995 arrest of Harris after he routinely ordered bubonic plague cultures from a medical laboratory, a perfectly legal act at the time. Now, medical researchers will have to jump through all manner of legal hoops to get the cultures they need for research and pay up to $16,000 in "licensing fees" to get to these cultures. Understandably, the pharmaceutical industry is deeply concerned about the considerably added costs of their own legitimate research in the wake of this hysteria over Harris and his anti-biowar crusade.
Congress, though, still held "emergency" hearings in March in the wake of the Harris-Leavitt arrest despite the demonstrable falsehood of the charges. Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) brought the recent arrests (and releases) into the March 4 hearings on Capitol Hill regarding the "ominous threat" of "bioterrorism."
"The recent events in Las Vegas, even though there was fortunately no real danger to human life, served as an important reminder to all of us of the threat these horrible substances pose to Americans," Shelby preached. "The use of biological weapons in warfare dates to ancient times. In one of the earliest recorded attacks of this type, a 15th century Tatar force catapulted the bodies of plague victims into what is now the Ukraine. A lot of you will remember this from history. More recently, in World War I, German forces and agents used biological weapons to infect livestock destined for Allied armies."
Sen. Shelby also cited the Japanese military's use of biological warfare from 1930-42 at its now-infamous Unit 731 in Manchuria. Bubonic plague-infested fleas, anthrax, cholera and other lethal biological agents were used to attack 11 Chinese cities, and more than 10,000 prisoners died in barbaric test experiments alone, according to research cited by Shelby.
The day before, March 3, the Village Voice published a hysterical account by a normally sensible journalist, James Ridgeway, titled "Germ Warfare in Jew York?" The story was a character smear of Harris based on little more than conjecture, guilt by association and comments from people in the "racist underground" who frankly did not care for Harris's blanket warnings of biowarfare and who wanted him discredited.
"For the racist underground, New York is the ultimate Babylon, a seething cauldron of half-human 'mud people.' Movement zealots, like Larry Wayne Harris, the microbiologist and former Aryan Nations member who was jailed last week after police seized vials of nonlethal anthrax from him and another man outside of Las Vegas, routinely refer to it as Jew York," Ridgeway railed.
Nice try, but Larry Harris has never referred to New York as "Jew York." Maybe H.R. Haldemann used such a derisive term when he served under President Richard Nixon during the dark days of Watergate, but not Harris. Note how the sentence is worded: "Movement zealots" are the ones using the "Jew York" slur, not Harris, but Ridgeway, in classic SPLC semantics, connects Harris's name to the "racist underground" when in reality the "racist underground" cares little for Harris' crusade and, in fact, is totally against warning the public of biowarfare threats. Think about it. Let us concede, for the sake of argument, that the SPLC, Ridgeway, et al, are correct, and that the "racist underground" really wants to use biological weapons to get rid of all the minorities. Why would Harris then publish a detailed book outlining the ways to help protect people from such attacks? Surely not for the very "mud people" the "racist underground" seeks to eliminate.
In fact, the book's primary distributor out of Las Vegas states that the race of the buyer is a non-sequitor. "Mud people" can also purchase Biological Warfare: A Major Threat to North America, just as easily as white people can.
The more constructive approach would be to forget all this "biowarfare" nonsense and get on with more important matters. Anthrax and bubonic plague are just diseases, after all, and can be treated like anything else. Instead of panicking, common sense should be maximized and sensationalism minimalized.
Too bad Harris and Leavitt were innocent, I guess, and it's really too bad the Iraqi war didn't start on time. Had we started murdering Iraqi civilians, Harris and Leavitt might still be behind bars helping to fan the hatred for Saddam and his nation.