Posted on 03/23/2006 8:10:18 AM PST by Gritty
No, I haven't read the book. I'm familiar with the Mena Airport operation, which was set up by the CIA after the Democrats in congress denied any funding for the Contras in Nicaragua.
Bush senior (as Reagan's VP and former CIA director) and Bill Clinton (as Governor of Arkansas) worked together on this project. My sense of the business, however, is that clinton was in it for the drug money and Bush was in it as a matter of patriotism, to defeat the Sandinistas. Iran-Contra, of course, was demonized by the Democrats and the media. But it was preferable to letting Communists take over Latin America, as they threatened to do.
It's not just "Iran-Contra" but the fact that there was drug smuggling going on and they were behind it and helping to grease the wheels to make it happen.
"Doubling the death rate from the 1918 Flu makes me question his other data. He's hyping. According to the link below the death rate was 2.5%"
The case mortality rate varied widely. An overall figure is impossible to obtain, or even estimate reliably, because no solid information about total cases exists. In U.S. Army camps where reasonably reliable statistics were kept, case mortality often exceeded 5 percent, and in some circumstances exceeded 10 percent. In the British Army in India, case mortality for white troops was 9.6 percent, for Indian troops 21.9 percent.
In isolated human populations, the virus killed at even higher rates. In the Fiji islands, it killed 14 percent of the entire population in 16 days. In Labrador and Alaska, it killed at least one-third of the entire native population (Jordan, 1927; Rice, 1988).
From your own cite:http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/
"The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster."
Clearly, if it is not known how many people died it cannot be precisely determined exactly what the mortality rate was. Dr. Osterholm did not claim to have an exact figure and niether did the article you cite. You need more than this to (honestly) attack the credibility of one of the foremost researchers in the field.
Hello,
I recalled our conversation about the 1918 Spanish flu:
>"The extremely rapid spread (i.e. hours) of the Spanish flu among troops at military bases can only be explained by airborne transmission."<
Related to that, I thought you might find this interesting:
http://www.fumento.com/disease/flu2005.html
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