US Navy research lab under microscope in Indonesia

JAKARTA (AFP) — The future of a major US Navy research laboratory in Indonesia is in doubt amid allegations, dismissed as "crazy" by US diplomats, of espionage and secret experiments.

Negotiations between Washington and Jakarta over the renewal of the operating contract of US Naval Medical Research Unit-2, or Namru-2, have stalled over a range of issues including diplomatic immunity for its US staff.

Established in Indonesia in 1970 and charged with researching infectious diseases of military importance, the facility employs 19 Americans and more than 100 Indonesians and is based in Indonesian health ministry grounds.

Its operations have attracted suspicion from a number of quarters in the world's largest Muslim country, from anti-US religious hardliners to outspoken Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari and Defence Minister Juwono Sudarsono.

"We'll conduct some checks on their presence in Indonesia," Vice President Jusuf Kalla said after Friday prayers last week.

Supari, whose ministry has worked with the US laboratory on projects including malaria research and bird flu early warning systems, has thrown fuel on to the diplomatic fire.

"Until today there have been no significantly useful results for the people (from Namru-2's research)," she said last month.

"Problems with contagious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever are still relatively the same... My people ask me why is there a health laboratory working together with a foreign military?"

Pardon me for being a tad suspicious, but they might have a point. Bio defense and offense research are identical, and there are amazingly tight controls on research in the US, under bio war treaty obligations, not to mention common sense.

There was a very intense scandal some years ago, when some fool at the Pentagon tried to sneak through an appropriation for an “aerosol lab”, a biological weapons research facility, hidden in a massive spending bill, which was only caught by a congressional aide flipping through the enormous document in the early morning hours, out of sheer boredom.

He didn’t know what an “aerosol lab” was, so he called a friend at the Pentagon to ask. Shortly thereafter, it hit the fan in a massive and unpleasant way.

So since it basically can’t be done in the US, by treaty, and to avoid a potential major disaster, I would not be surprised if someone had decided to “outsource” it to where it wouldn’t be noticed.

Biological offense is the same as biological defense, and very close to ordinary medical research. Any nation with a modern hospital has the capability to create bio weapons. This is why everybody is so antsy about it.

And yet, the major powers still try now and again to mess around with it, sometimes with bad result.

Update:

Jakarta, US at odds over 'spy' lab (Excerpted)

Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta correspondent | May 03, 2008

NEGOTIATIONS over whether a controversial US military laboratory should remain in Indonesia have reached a knife-edge, as officials argue about biological sample-sharing and the diplomatic status of staff in the facility.

Politicians and sections of the media have joined the fray over the work of US Naval Medical Research Unit No2, known as NAMRU, which was established in Jakarta in 1970 and is one of five such facilities worldwide.

[snip]

Dr. Supari may in fact be close to sacrificing her job, after a senior government source told The Weekend Australian that her bellicose rhetoric, including comments on the bird flu epidemic in a rambling treatise entitled "Time for the world to change: the hand of God in bird flu" - had made life "awkward" for fellow ministers.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23635645-2703,00.html

This raises some very ugly possibilities. Remember how not too long ago, a large group of scientists were applauding the idea of a massive reduction of the world’s population:

“Dr. Eric R. Pianka gave a speech to the Texas Academy of Science last month in which he advocated the need to exterminate 90% of the population through the airborne ebola virus. Pianka’s chilling comments, and their enthusiastic reception again underscore the elite’s agenda to enact horrifying measures of population control.”

Airborne ebola is not a realistic way of accomplishing this holocaust of billions. A “perfect storm” Avian flu influenza might achieve a respectable percentage of this insane goal, however.

But this raises the very troubling concern that there may be scientists who may actually want to either promulgate an H2H Avian Flu pandemic, or interfere and inhibit efforts to control a naturally occurring pandemic, and by doing so to directly cause the death of millions, or even billions, of people they want to die.

This is much, much worse that al-Qaeda attempting to obtain and detonate a nuclear weapon in a city. This is equivalent to trying to provoke a global thermonuclear exchange. It reaches the very zenith of the idea of “terrorism”.

It should not be overlooked by the government, either.

Anyone in a position of authority or trust and in a position to influence public policy before or during a pandemic, should be carefully screened to determine if they are sympathetic to such a massively homicidal scheme. If so, they should no more be allowed access to the public health effort that a fanatical jihadist should be allowed access and the means to launch a hundred ballistic nuclear missiles.

A single person with knowledge of how to effectively spread this disease, could on their own not just wipe out a city, but the vast majority of the people in several nations. And they could do so in a single day, with minimal effort.

As a minimum, temporary authorization to kill any person attempting to create a lethal epidemic, or strongly interfere with efforts to limit its spread before it becomes an epidemic, should be given to federal agents. And efforts should be made to determine the extent of, advocates of, and determination of this terrorist organization.

These people represent one of the greatest threats the world has ever known.

Not ironically, it is not a scientific conclusion, but a philosophical conclusion, with very old roots in socialist theory.

Before socialism, there was long a proto-socialism found in Europe that first emerged as a reaction to industrialism. It was characterized by its rejection of modernity and learning, and nostalgic love of primitivism. Its first great advocate was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who imagined mankind returning to the Garden of Eden, or as he called it, “The State of Nature”. Leaving industrialization and civilization behind.

This heavily romanticized primitive peoples living “as one with nature”, in a completely natural setting, like animals. In turn, this led to rapt fascination in the primitive peoples of the world by those who read his works, invariably followed by disappointment when the lives of primitives were discovered to be neither simple nor pleasant, but were more as Thomas Hobbes described life in the State of Nature, as “Nasty, Brutish and short.”

But the intense desire to discard complexity, education, history, civilization, technology, etc., and to live as peasants in isolated villages, has continued unabated since, and is virtually unchanged in its modern advocates, like Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!

It intertwines well with elitist-socialism, who have reached the conclusion that primitivism is actually hard work, so should be only for the, importantly, “9 in 10 people” who should be made to live in a primitive state. The elitist-socialist always assumes that they are of the “1 in 10” who are superior to everyone else. So they are the only ones who should be the masters.

This is where they get, after some philosophical evolution, the “90% of the world’s population should be destroyed” theory.

Some philosophical background to this crops up in interesting places, historically. For example, the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson proposed that mankind should live in isolated villages, far apart from each other (again, identical to Dave Foreman), and their leaders, or masters, should be itinerants, traveling from village to village.

The purpose of these masters is to insure that the villagers remain primitive. Preventing them from technological development and improving their lives. He called such people “Orphic Poets” (how about that for a squishy liberal self description). And they should be honored and feasted by the villagers for doing the hard work of being their masters.

The next really major advance in State of Nature proto-socialist theory in the US came around the time of the Civil War, in a book which was a passionate defense of slavery.

George Fitzhugh’s “Cannibals All: Or Slaves Without Masters”, proposed that slavery was not just good, but so good that “9 out of 10” people should be slaves. The book, of course, is written in such a way that the reader would assume that they would be one of the “1 in 10” who should be masters. An interesting, if disgusting, read.

So the only remaining question is how did elitist-socialist State of Nature philosophy turn homicidal? That is purely a product of the 20th Century and globalism.

It came with the realization that there are no primitive peoples left. No one untouched by civilization and technology. There is no hidden Garden of Eden left on Earth that needs to be discovered. No place to run to and hide and be primitive.

It turned the elitism of the elitist-socialists into downright megalomania. On one hand, they think of themselves as demigods, whose mastery now controls the entire world (think man-made global warming), yet on the other hand, in their minds it has reduced the “9 in 10” who are not elitist-socialists to being nothing but a plague and a pestilence that is destroying their (the masters) world.

So they look forward, passively or actively, to the wiping out of 90% of the people of the world. All these slaves have become the gigantic wall preventing the return to the State of Nature. Until they are killed, mankind cannot be returned to perfection, forced to forget the knowledge of good and evil, and be returned to Eden.

Ironically, the vast majority of elitist-socialists have no idea of the philosophical roots of their obsession. This means that there is some element in their physiology or character that they have in common. It is certainly not superiority. In many ways, their superiority complex is rooted in deep feelings of inferiority. Combined with intense hatred and fear of learning and technology.

For many, collectivism, “equality” to a herd-like extreme, is the means to their philosophical ends. This was the great 20th Century elitist-socialist experiment, that through collectivism, a return to communism would result.

This Hitler, Stalin, or Maoist theory of mass murder on an unprecedented scale, has the same philosophical origins as the applause of the “scientists” in Texas. Heaven help us if it has similar results.

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