The Bijlmermeer Air Disaster & Israeli Chemical WMDs

[Ahknaton]

reposted from another thread:

http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2006/10/specialty_chemi.html

"Specialty Chemicals"

If you've never wondered why so much of the world thinks our justifications for invading, bombing, sanctioning and destabilizing various parts of the Middle East are a pile of crap, today might be a good day to start. Because today is the fourteenth anniversary of the Bijlmermeer air disaster, whose sordid aftermath opened up a whole can of worms relating to secret weapons trafficking and unaccountable government, which really gives the lie to all the worthy motivations we claim for our policies. If you want to know just how little our government and our allies' governments really care for all those good causes we say we are bequesting the Middle East - rule of law, non-proliferation, democratic and accountable government, etc. – you only have to look at the Bijlmermeer tragedy.

http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/bijlmermeer_ap.jpg
At 6:21pm on 4 October 1992, a Boeing 747 airliner of the Israeli airline El Al took off from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport for Tel Aviv, following a stopover en route from New York. The plane suffered catastrophic mechanical failure soon after takeoff, losing one right-side engine, which sheared off taking the second with it. The pilot attempted to loop back to make an emergency landing at Schiphol, but lost control short of the airfield. Flight 1862 crashed about 10 minutes after take-off into the Groeneveen and Kruitberg apartment buildings in Bijlmermeer, a working class suburb in south-eastern Amsterdam. Photo left (Associated Press).

The crash of El Al cargo flight LY1862 became the worst air disaster in Dutch history, killing at least 47 people directly, and destroying in subsequent months the health of hundreds of local residents. (Although stonewalling and outright lying by the Dutch and Israeli authorities meant that it was only in 1999 – after a comprehensive expose by investigative journalists at a Dutch newspaper – that a parliamentary enquiry officially acknowledged that the high rate of chronic illness among local residents was a direct result of toxic substances released as a result of the crash).

Local residents had suspected very early on that LY1862 was not a routine flight. Eyewitnesses reported seeing men in hazmat suits removing unidentified debris from the site immediately after the crash. And in the months that followed hundreds of local people and rescue workers complained of a range of chronic health problems, including depression, fatigue and listlessness, breathing difficulties and stomach pains. Tests commissioned by a Dutch citizens' group revealed traces of uranium at the crash site and abnormally high levels of uranium in the bodies of survivors. An independent Dutch nuclear research group revealed that – despite government claims to the contrary – only about half of the depleted uranium that the plane had been carrying as ballast had ever been recovered. As for the 114 tons of cargo on flight 1862: El Al, Israeli and Dutch officials rushed to assure the public that the doomed flight carried nothing but "perfume and gift articles." El Al insisted that the plane carried "a regular commercial load." As late as April 22, 1998, Israeli Transport Minister Shaul Yahalom maintained that there were "no dangerous material on that plane. Israel has nothing to hide."

Almost six years after the event, on 30 September 1998, editors Harm van den Berg and Karel Knip of the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad published the results of an extensive investigation they had carried out into the crash. They had obtained the freight documentation for the flight, and made public for the first time its real cargo. The manifest confirmed the plane was carrying 400 kilograms of depleted uranium as ballast, but also showed that it carried among its cargo about 10 tons of assorted chemicals. The chemicals included ten 18.9-litre plastic drums of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), and smaller amounts of isopropanol and hydrogen fluoride: three of the four chemical precursors for the production of Sarin nerve gas.

A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's office immediately denied that Flight 1862 had been carrying Sarin precursors. When this was contradicted hours later by an El Al spokesman, the Prime Minister's office acknowledged that the chemicals were onboard but stated that "the material was non-toxic and was to have been used to test filters that protect against chemical weapons". An explanation that Earth Island Journal found "puzzling", since "it only takes a few grams to conduct such tests. Once combined, the chemicals aboard Flight 1862 could have produced 270 kilos of sarin - sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city".
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/altaji_mansion.jpg
The Shipper's Declaration of Dangerous Goods published by NRC Handelsblad showed that the DMMP consignment was en route to the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR). The IIBR is located in Nes Ziona, about 20kms south of Tel Aviv, on what used to be the extensive estate of the Al-Taji Al-Farouki family of Ramleh, who were dispossessed in 1948. The family mansion (pictured, left) that was the home of Shukri Al-Taji remains today as the entrance to the IIBR, which was built on the family citrus groves.

The IIBR's web site describes the institute as "a governmental, applied research institute specializing in the fields of biology, medicinal chemistry and environmental sciences", though it is actually believed to be the front organisation for the Israeli government's development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons. A biologist formerly associated with the IIBR told the London Times on 4 October 1998: "There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon...which is not manufactured at the institute."

The freight documentation showed that the DMMP was supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Morrisville, Pennsylvania, which marketed itself as "a leading and innovative manufacturer of ultrahigh-purity gases, chemicals and gas handling equipment". (Solkatronic was bought out in November 1997 by Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. whose web site describes the company as a "manufacturer of… specialty chemicals", which is one way of referring to nerve agents, I suppose). As a chemical weapons precursor, DMMP is subject to tight export controls by the U.S. government, but Solkatronic confirmed that it had requested and received from the U.S. Department of Commerce the export licences necessary to ship to the IIBR the chemicals that went down with Flight 1862.

Following the revelations published in Handelsblad, the Dutch government finally established a parliamentary enquiry into the Bijlmer air disaster. The enquiry, under the chairmanship of Christian Democrat deputy Theo Meijer, heard testimony from about 80 witnesses over four months (Jan-Apr 1999), summarising its conclusions in a 2,000 page report. The main findings of the Meijer Report were:

1. that toxic substances had been released by the crash of Flight 1862 and ensuing fire, and that the chronic illnesses suffered by rescuers and local residents were indeed directly linked to the disaster.
2. that El Al had inexplicably failed to co-operate with crash investigators, despite high-levels requests from the Netherlands to Israel that it should do so. (In fact it was not until February 1999 that the Israelis finally provided the Dutch government with a full listing of the military cargo on the flight, having maintained until then that that information no longer existed).
3. that Dutch government ministers had repeatedly given unclear, incomplete, late or incorrect information about the crash to Parliament, and thence to the Dutch people, in the aftermath of the disaster.

But more enlightening than the commission's formal conclusions were the peripheral details that the enquiry uncovered, which provided some interesting context for the whole affair. For instance, the commission discovered the previously-undisclosed tapes of conversations between El Al employees and Schiphol Air Traffic Control on the evening of the disaster, showing that within minutes of the crash traffic controllers knew that the downed plane contained "poison", "ammunition" and "flammable liquid", and that it would be best to "keep these things under the lid". And the Dutch Attorney General testified before the commission that the El Al security unit at Schiphol wasn't actually an El Al security unit at all, but a front operation for the Mossad. And airport employees testified that since 1973, the Netherlands' authorities had allowed El Al planes to transfer cargo at Schiphol Airport without being inspected by customs or by the Dutch Flight Safety Board; and that every Sunday evening an El Al cargo flight arrived from Schiphol en route from New York to Tel Aviv, whose arrival was never displayed on airport monitors, whose cargo was not checked and whose documentation was processed separately from regular freight traffic...

It's all a bit sordid isn't it? And we'd never have known about any of it, were it not for metal fatigue in a pin attaching engine three to the right wing of flight 1862.

Remember this story when you next hear some cable news pundit pontificating about why we have to bomb those nasty people in the Middle East.

When you hear that we must bomb Syria because it allows Iranian weapons to transit its territory, remember how our own Dutch allies have been deliberately turning a blind eye for years as one of its major international airports is used as a transit point for our shipment of illicit, non-conventional weapons into the Middle East.

Remember too that at the exact same time that the U.S. Administration was demanding that Iraq be sanctioned and its children starved because Saddam Hussein was developing Chemical and Biological Weapons, our Department of Commerce was (and presumably still is) issuing export licences to facilitate the production of exactly the same weapons in Israel.

And next time you hear George Bush talk about the gift of democracy that we are bringing to the Middle East, reflect on the transparency and accountability of our own democracy, and particularly that of our Dutch ally, which preferred for years to leave its own citizens chronically ill and without a diagnosis of their condition, rather than reveal the kinds of operations it was allowing Israel to carry out at Schiphol Airport.

And remember when you hear that we have to bomb Iran for its alleged and unproven contravention of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that the U.S. – a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention – really is faciliating proliferation of Chemical Weapons to a non-member state (Israel).

Just remember the aftermath of the Bijlmermeer air disaster, and you'll never have to ask yourself again why so much of the world listens to our rhetoric, and thinks we're just full of it.

Sources:

Israel says El Al crash chemical 'non-toxic'; BBC News, 2 Oct 1998.
Israeli jets equipped for chemical warfare by Uzi Mahnaimi; The Sunday Times (London), 4 Oct 1998.
Flight 1862 and Israel's chemical secrets by Mouin Rabbani; orig. Middle East International, 16 Oct 1998.
El Al crash linked to illnesses; BBC News, 22 Apr 1999.
Uranium Skies: What Was Aboard Flight 1862? by Gar Smith; Earth Island Journal, Vol. 14 No. 4 (Winter '99/2000).
Israeli WMD by Neil Sammonds; ZNet, October 11, 2002.
Traces of poison by Salman Abu-Sitta; Al-Ahram Weekly, 27 Feb-5 Mar 2003.
Bijlmerramp by Martin Wisse; Wis[s]e Words, 4 Oct 2005.
Profile: Solkatronic Chemicals Inc; Cooperative Research.

(Source articles posted below)

[Ahknaton]

Israel says El Al crash chemical 'non-toxic'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/185199.stm

The El Al plane crashed into a block of flats

Israel has said that the chemicals being carried by a cargo plane that crashed into a block of flats in Amsterdam in 1992 were "non-toxic".

The state-run Israeli airline, El Al, admitted on Thursday that its aircraft was carrying a chemical which is used in the production of the nerve gas sarin.

But a statement from the office of the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, quoted by Israel radio, said "the material was non-toxic and was to have been used to test filters that protect against chemical weapons".

"Israeli Government and aviation authorities acknowledged that the cargo included 190 litres of the chemical dimethyl methylphosphonate, but they insist the material was non-toxic and that it had been clearly listed on the cargo manifest in accordance with international regulations," the radio said.


Special correspondent Ben Brown: "Sarin is one of the deadliest substances concocted by man"
On Wednesday the Dutch media, citing the plane's freight documents, said the plane was carrying the chemical, which was being taken from a US factory to the Institute for Biological Research in Ness Ziona near Tel Aviv.

The Israeli authorities and the Dutch parliament have both ordered further investigations into the crash.

Questions raised

Local MEP Maartje Van Putten: outraged
The local MEP for the area, Maartje Van Putten said she was outraged that the plane had been allowed to fly over the city carrying such a cargo.

A spokesman for El Al said they had informed the Dutch authorities at the outset of the investigation into the crash, which killed four crew members on the plane and 39 people in the apartment complex.

"Everything was done in accordance with international regulations," he said.

The Dutch foreign ministry confirmed that it had already known about the presence of chemicals on the plane.

Survivors' complaints

Up to 300 people are believed to be suffering from the effects
Since the crash, six years ago, many residents near the site of the crash have complained of mysterious illnesses.

A report published on Wednesday by the Dutch health ministry showed that local doctors believed up to 300 residents could be suffering from effects caused by the accident.

They range from depression and nervousness to fatigue and listlessness.

Cargo was heading to Israeli plant

Correspondents say that the activities of the Ness Ziona institute, which was to receive the chemical, are classified.

But it is believed to be a facility for the manufacturing of chemical and biological weapons and antidotes for such arms.

DMPP has other uses beyond nerve gas. It is also used in building materials as a flame retardant, and transporting sensitive chemicals by air is a well-tried practice.

BBC Europe correspondent David Eades says, however, that as a country which insists it does not manufacture weapons of mass destruction - and nerve gas is one of those - Israel is bound to come under suspicion as to the purpose of this cargo.

Israel has accused Syria, Iraq and Iran of developing chemical and biological weapons.

Sarin nerve gas was used in March 1995 by the Japanese cult, Aum Shinri Kyo, which released it in the Tokyo underground, killing six people and injuring more than 3,000.

[Ahknaton]

http://www.middleeast.org/archives/1998_11_08.htm

ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR, CHEMICAL, AND BIOLOGICAL ARSENAL

NUCLEAR POLLUTION SPREADING FROM DIMONA

MER - Washington - 7 November 1998:

The country that has the tremendous arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East is not Iraq, but Israel. The country that has the greatest record of defying the U.N. Security Council and the world community is not Iraq, but Israel. The country history will hold responsible for initiating and fueling the arms race in the Middle East more than any other is not Arab or Muslim, but rather the Jewish State of Israel.

In addition to the weapons themselves, serious nuclear pollution is spreading from Israel's nuclear plant at Dimona in the Negev. Satellite pictures soon to be shown on television in Arab countries will highlight this threatening situation.

The following recent article from the Sunday Times in London, the same newspaper that broke wide open Israel's nuclear weapons story in the 1980s, resulting in the kidnapping and imprisonment of Mordechai Vanunu, tells part of today's story. In addition to its considerable nuclear arsenal of hundreds of weapons, the Israelis are also preparing chemical and biological weapons, explaining why other countries in the region feel such pressures to develope similar weapons of their own.

ISRAELI JETS EQUIPPED FOR CHEMICAL WARFARE

by Uzi Mahnaimi

[The Sunday Times, London, 10/4]: ISRAELI assault aircraft have been equipped to carry chemical and biological weapons manufactured at a top secret institute near Tel Aviv, military sources revealed yesterday.Crews of F-16 fighters have been trained to fit an active chemical or biological weapon within minutes of receiving the command to attack, they said.

The weapons are manufactured at the Institute for Biological Research in a suburb of Nes Ziona 12 miles southeast of Tel Aviv.

The plant attracted unwanted scrutiny last week when the Dutch authorities confirmed that it was the intended destination of 42 gallons of a chemical called DMMP aboard an El Al 747-200 that crashed into high-rise flats in Amsterdam six years ago, killing the four crew and 39 people on the ground. The chemical is used in the manufacture of sarin nerve gas, and local inhabitants have complained of health problems since the crash.

The Israeli plant manufactures not only chemical and biologicalweapons for use in bombs, but more unusual arms as well. It supplied the poison for a bizarre attempt last year on the life of Khaled Meshal, a leader of the Hamas Islamic fundamentalist group.

Agents of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, sprayed a liquid into his ear as he arrived at his office in Amman, the Jordanian capital. If one of Meshal's bodyguards had not chased and caught the agents, the mysterious chemical would have caused Meshal to die within days of apparent heart failure. Instead, the institute was forced to supply an antidote when King Hussein of Jordan threatened to put the captured Israelis on trial.

Israel has accused Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iran of developing chemical and biological weapons, but has never acknowledged its own programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The Jewish state signed but never ratified the chemical weapons convention, a treaty that prohibits countries from developing, producing, stockpiling or using such weapons. The Israeli programme for weapons has been an open secret for years.

"There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon . . . which is not manufactured at the institute," said a biologist who once held a senior post in Israeli intelligence.

The institute is one of the most secretive in Israel. Founded in1952 as a single building hidden in an orange grove, it now sprawls over several acres. It is surrounded by a 6ft-high concrete wall topped with sensors that reveal the exact location of any intruder but is erased from local and aerial survey maps.

Official publications disguise its more sinister activities, indicating merely that the institute provides services to the defence ministry as well as chemicals for agriculture and research for civilian companies.

Following rumours about risks to the neighbourhood from toxins, members of the parliament's foreign affairs and defence committee asked to visit the plant. They were denied access.

Nes Ziona's mayor won a temporary injunction last week freezing plans to expand the institute by 14 acres. His anxiety is well-founded. Accidents at the plant have killed at least six workers but details have been protected by military censorship.

[Ahknaton]

Flight 1862 and Israel's chemical secrets

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1998/343/343p14.htm

By Mouin Rabbani

On October 4, 1992, El Al cargo flight LY1862, which originated at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, took off from Amsterdam's Schiphol airport for Tel Aviv. Approximately 10 minutes later, the Boeing 747-200 ploughed into the Groeneveen and Kruitberg apartment buildings in Bijlmermeer, a south-eastern suburb.

In addition to all three crew members, 43 inhabitants are known to have been killed. Since many undocumented immigrants lived in the incinerated buildings, the actual death toll was almost certainly higher.

Whereas the initial investigation concentrated on the causes of the disaster, a systematic yet incompetent pattern of obfuscation by the Israeli and Dutch authorities concerning the doomed flight's cargo led to mounting suspicion that LY1862 was transporting more than the alleged “perfumes and gift articles”.

Indeed, the past six years have witnessed a steady series of disclosures in the Dutch media relating to Israel's use of El Al passenger and cargo flights to transport “strategic military goods” from the United States to Israel via Amsterdam, as well as routine fraud by Israel's state airline over freight documents.

Nerve gas revelations

The most shocking revelation so far was made on September 30, when editors Harm van den Berg and Karel Knip of the prestigious Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad provided their readers with incontrovertible documentation that LY1862 was transporting three of the four components required for the manufacture of Sarin nerve gas.

Sarin, a highly lethal chemical weapon outlawed by international convention, is last known to have been used in the March 1995 Tokyo subway attack, in which several grams of the gas killed 12 commuters and injured more than 5000.

According to freight documents uncovered by NRC Handelsblad, LY1862 was carrying 10 18.9-litre plastic drums of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), and smaller amounts of the Sarin precursors isopropanol and hydrogen fluoride (no revelations have been made regarding the remaining precursor, thionylchloride).

The 189 litres of DMMP, sufficient for the production of 270 kg of Sarin, had been supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals of Morristown, Pennsylvania, in the US, also Israel's supplier of the lethal CS and CN gases, which have been used by its military and police forces to kill dozens of Palestinians (including many infants) in the occupied territories during the past decade. (”Specialty gases” and “security-related products” are just a few of the goodies advertised on the company's web site, <http://www.solkatronic.com>.)

Although DMMP is subject to stringent export controls by the US government, John Swanciger, executive vice-president of Solkatronic, confirmed that his firm applied for and received the required Department of Commerce export licences.

He added that this was the case not once, but twice: after the initial consignment was scattered all over Bijlmermeer, and despite a subsequent tightening of US export regulations, Solkatronic was allowed to replenish Israel's chemical arsenal with an identical second shipment.

Swanciger also stated that Israel is the only foreign country to have ordered DMMP from his firm.

The role of IIBR

According to the Shipper's Declaration of Dangerous Goods uncovered by NRC Handelsblad, the DMMP consignment was intended for use by the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) in Nes Ziona, near Tel Aviv.

(A second batch was ordered by Shalom Chemicals of Nes Ziona, a firm which, according to Ha'aretz, nobody has ever heard of and may be presumed to be a cover for 1IBR.)

Among those concerned with the proliferation of unconventional weapons, it is common knowledge that IIBR is the Israeli military and intelligence community's front organisation for the development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons.

As demonstrated by Mossad's attempted murder of a Hamas leader in Jordan last year (in which IIBR supplied both the lethal poison and its antidote), it is also a pioneer in the field of medical warfare.

An anonymous biologist formerly associated with IIBR, quoted on October 4 by Uzi Nahmaini in the London Sunday Times, states, “There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon ... which is not manufactured at the institute”.

Nahmaini adds that the highly secretive gas factory is “surrounded by a 6ft-high concrete wall topped with sensors that reveal the exact location of any intruders, but [it] is erased from local and aerial survey maps”. He notes that at least six of the installation's employees have been killed in “work accidents” and that even members of the Knesset are denied entry.

The common view of IIBR's unsavoury activities is shared by residents of Nes Ziona and, apparently, Israel's Supreme Court as well: several weeks ago, the Nes Ziona local council obtained a Supreme Court injunction barring the poison centre from expanding by 5.7 hectares on the grounds that its programs pose a potentially catastrophic public health hazard.

LY1862's cargo also explains why the doomed flight's pilot rejected repeated demands by Schiphol air traffic control to attempt an emergency landing in the direction of the nearby Ijsselmeer lake, instead making straight for Schiphol with precisely the consequences traffic control feared most. According to chemical warfare experts, DMMP reacts “furiously” with water, and would have resulted in a calamity too frightening to contemplate.

True to form, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's media adviser, David Bar-Ilan, immediately issued an angry and categorical denial in response to the NRC Handelsblad story, emphasising in the strongest possible terms that LY1862 was not carrying Sarin precursors.

The Israeli defence ministry, which not coincidentally functions as IIBR's spokesperson, issued a more cryptic declaration that the flight was carrying no dangerous goods but that “this statement only concerns cargo intended for the ministry of defence”.

Despite such efforts, Israel's disinformation campaign collapsed some 12 hours later. El Al spokesperson Nachman Kleiman, who since 1992 had remained steadfast in his tongue-tied account that El Al was unaware of the specific items transported on LY1862 but had fully disclosed these specifics to the Dutch authorities after the accident, was forced to concede that the flight was indeed transporting three of Sarin's four precursors.

Rather pathetically, he concluded with a claim that El Al's activities were entirely consistent with relevant regulations.

Among the immediate beneficiaries of the latest disclosures are the 700 Bijlmermeer residents and emergency workers who continue to suffer from medical and psychological conditions not dissimilar to those experienced by soldiers and civilians after the Gulf war in 1991.

Whereas initial suspicions centred on exposure to incinerated radioactive material (presumably the depleted uranium used by Boeing in the construction process, although with El Al one can never be sure), a major study is now under way to determine the role, if any, of exposure to the nerve gas ingredients aboard LY1862. The affected individuals are outraged that a possible cause of their illnesses has been kept hidden from them for six years.

Disinformation and obfuscation

The investigation into the LY1862 crash, which one Dutch researcher has likened to “a puzzle in which nearly half the pieces are missing and most of the rest are heavily damaged”, has already resulted in a number of official inquiries.

On account of Israeli stonewalling and disinformation, and a campaign of obfuscation by the Dutch government and law enforcement agencies, they have produced more questions than answers. Indeed, even before the latest disclosures, outraged parliamentarians passed a motion to begin a full parliamentary inquiry into the El Al affair.

Among questions still to be answered are why neither of LY1862's flight data recorders have yet to surface, and the matter of two groups of “men in white suits”.

The latter, whose presence at the crash site immediately and several hours after the disaster has been alleged in sworn affidavits by Bijlmermeer residents, emergency crew members and law enforcement personnel, were said to be wearing thick protective clothing (one group was likened to “astronauts”), which permitted them to “walk through the flames unaffected” and disappear with various pieces of debris.

Although a report in June 1998 did its best to minimise the allegations and dismiss them as figments of the imagination, it nowhere contains a clear and categorical denial of the allegations themselves.

The accounts, some of which claim that the second group arrived in vehicles bearing French licence plates, raise the possibility that operatives from Mossad's European headquarters in Paris were involved in the removal of evidence. Staff attached to the Mossad station at Schiphol airport, and covert Dutch (or NATO) emergency units, may also be shown to have been involved if the allegations are ever seriously investigated.

Another aspect requiring clarification concerns the multiple and contradictory freight documents supplied to Dutch authorities.

A Dutch TV program early this year featured statements by former El Al employees at Frankfurt airport and elsewhere that they regularly tampered with such documents on behalf of their superiors.

The Amsterdam engineering firm Omegam, which investigated the crash site, discovered extensive traces of tributylphosphate (TBP) and concluded that at least several hundred litres of the liquid must have been aboard. Yet TBP, a fairly common industrial chemical which can also be employed to recycle uranium and plutonium from spent fuel rods in a process Mordechai Vanunu revealed is used in Israel, appears nowhere in LY1862's freight documents.

The parliamentary inquiry is expected to concentrate on Israel's refusal to provide full and timely information to the Dutch authorities, including the fact that the nature of 20,000kg of LY1862's cargo has yet to be clarified.

No less important, the Dutch government's own process of disclosure will also come under scrutiny. Prime Minister Wim Kok's complaint about Israel's lack of cooperation in the wake of the latest revelations notwithstanding, there is considerable evidence that his government (and particularly the ministry of transport) at various points held back, and subsequently failed to make known the significance of, technical and other information in its possession.

Allegations that government agencies, perhaps in collaboration with their Israeli counterparts, worked to conceal aspects of the affair may also be discussed.

It remains unclear whether the role of Schiphol airport as the key transit point for the “strategic military goods” routinely flown by El Al from New York to Tel Aviv will be critically assessed by the parliamentary inquiry. Had El Al transported its morbid cargo through rather than to Dutch territory (as may well have been the case with the second DMMP consignment), it would scarcely have raised an eyebrow.

For the same reason, the functional extraterritoriality enjoyed by El Al and Mossad at Schiphol, where the Dutch authorities as a rule ask no questions and monitor nothing concerning the activities of their Israeli guests, exempting them from national and international laws and regulations, is likely to be studiously ignored.

It is ironic that shortly after the LY1862 disaster, The Hague was chosen as the seat of the United Nations Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

No less ironic is the role of the US in this affair. It now appears that during precisely the same period that Washington has been using Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to prolong the economic siege of Iraq, it has itself been actively engaged in chemical weapons proliferation in the Middle East.

[Reprinted, slightly abridged, from Middle East International, October 16.]

[Ahknaton]

El Al crash linked to illnesses

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/325872.stm

At least 43 died as the plane crashed into a residential building

A report into the 1992 crash of an El Al cargo plane into a block of flats in Amsterdam has found a "direct link" with subsequent health problems in the area.



The BBC's Leon Hawthorne: "For years Dutch people have suspected a cover up"
It also blasted the Dutch Government for its handling of the disaster and criticised the Israeli carrier for failing to co-operate with crash investigators.

On 4 October 1992, the El Al Boeing 747 ploughed into an apartment building in the poor, high-rise Amsterdam suburb of Bijlmer shortly after take-off, killing at least 43 people.

The real death toll may never be known, because the area housed many unregistered immigrants.

Chemicals released

Hundreds of people, ranging from rescue workers to local residents, have since complained of illness, including nausea and neurological problems.

The Dutch parliamentary committee investigating the crash published its final report on Thursday, although many details were leaked in advance of publication.



The BBC's Gillian Sharpe: "This really is the final word"
The report, which took six months to compile with more than 80 witnesses interviewed, found that there was no reason to disbelieve El Al's description of the aircraft's cargo as mundane.

Last year, the Israeli Government confirmed Dutch newspaper reports that up to 190 litres of the chemical DMMP - which can be used to make sarin nerve gas - was on board, but said that it was non-toxic.

But the report says that toxic substances were released during the ensuing fire, including sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, metals and dioxins.

In addition, only 152 kg of 282 kg of depleted uranium used as ballast in the Boeing's wings was recovered after the crash and fire.

'Unclear, late or incorrect information'

The 2,000-page report said: "There is a direct link between health complaints and the Bijlmer disaster."

Ministers, aviation authorities and civil servants were all criticised for their roles in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Deputy Prime Ministers Els Borst - also health minister - and Annemarie Jorritsma - also transport minister - were both harshly criticised for failing to provide adequate information to Parliament and the public.

The committee found: "The number of occasions when Parliament received unclear, incomplete, late or incorrect information is, in the commission's opinion, too high.

"The government paid too little attention to public worries, even those that were based on misconceptions."

Both ministers said they would resign if it was found that they had failed in any way. It remains to be seen if either will go.

The commission also confirmed press speculation that Labour Prime Minister Wim Kok would be criticised for failing in his co-ordinating role.

El Al was cleared of falsifying freight papers, but the inquiry found the airline's failure to co-operate fully "incomprehensible"

This was especially so "given the public concern in the Netherlands over the past six-and-a-half years, the requests for co-operation at a high diplomatic level and the bond of friendship between the Netherlands and Israel."

The authoriities hope the report will now bring to a close what one MP described as a "shameful" chapter in Dutch politics.

[Ahknaton]

Uranium Skies: What Was Aboard Flight 1862?

http://www.earthisland.org/eijournal/win2000/fe_win2000uranium.html

by Gar Smith

Plane crash in Holland exposes a global health threat

Within minutes of clearing the runway at Amsterdam's Schi-phol airport at 6:25 PM, October 4, 1992, El Al flight LY1862 was in trouble. Engine #3 was not only on fire, it had broken free of the wing and taken engine #4 along with it. Ten minutes later, Captain Yitzhak Fuchs radioed his last message: "Going down, going down."

The 400-ton Boeing 747-200 careened into a block of 12-story tenements in Bijl-mer, on the outskirts of Amsterdam, killing all three crew, an unidentified "nonrevenue passenger," and at least 43 people on the ground. The exact number of deaths remains unknown, since many of the incinerated victims were undocumented immigrants.

Seán MacCárthaigh, an Irish Times reporter who arrived shortly after the crash, described the scene: "The El Al plane had scythed through the top five stories of two buildings; about 40 flats took a direct hit. Then a huge fireball rolled through the complex and apartment after apartment popped into flames.... A giant cloud of choking white smoke engulfed the area."

Seven years later, the exact chemical composition of that choking white cloud remains a mystery. Since the crash, 850 Bijlmer survivors - residents, police and rescue workers - have sought treatment for a host of maladies including fatigue, breathing problems, hair loss, neurological ailments, mental confusion, depression, encephalomyelitis and disabling joint pains. They ascribe their ills to the crash.

As rescue crews rushed to the crash scene that night, El Al, Israeli and Dutch officials rushed to assure the public that the doomed flight carried nothing but "perfume and gift articles." El Al insisted that the plane carried "a regular commercial load." As late as April 22, 1998, Israeli Transport Minister Shaul Yahalom maintained that there were "no dangerous material on that plane. Israel has nothing to hide."

The denials collapsed on October 4, 1998, when the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad printed a leaked copy of a page from the plane's cargo manifest. According to the previously secret freight document, Flight 1862 was hauling 10 tons of chemicals, including hydrofluoric acid, isopro-panol and dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) - three of the four chemicals used in the production of sarin nerve gas.

The DMMP had been supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Morrisville, Pennsylvania. The shipment was destined for the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) in Nes Ziona, outside of Tel Aviv.

While the export of DMMP is strictly controlled by the US government, the US Department of Commerce had no problem granting Solkatronic's license to ship DMMP. (In fact, after the initial shipment was consumed in the flames of the Bijlmer crash, the Commerce Department quickly authorized a replacement shipment.)

Mouin Rabbani, writing in Middle East International, describes the IIBR as "the Israeli military and intelligence community's front organization for the development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons. It was IIBR that provided the poison (and the antidote) used in the attempted assassination of a Hamas leader in Jordan in 1998."

On October 4, 1998, a former IIBR biologist told the London Sunday Times: "There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon... which is not manufactured at the institute." The IIBR is so secretive that it does not appear on any maps and is off-limits even to members of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament.

Israel maintains that the chemicals were to be used to test gas masks but this explanation is puzzling since it only takes a few grams to conduct such tests. Once combined, the chemicals aboard Flight 1862 could have produced 270 kilos of sarin - sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city.

Pressing the Question
The Dutch dailies pursued the Bijl-mer story with a vengeance. Vincent Dekker, a reporter for De Trouw, interviewed dozens of Amsterdam police officers who claimed that they had been assisted by rescue specialists who arrived in cars bearing French license plates. But France never sent any rescue crews. Dekker noted that Israel's secret service, the Mossad, maintains an office in Paris. Mossad denied involvement.

There were 126 tons of freight aboard the doomed flight but El Al refused to supply information on 6 tons of "military" cargo. Schiphol cargo handlers told reporters that the plane had been loaded with seven pallets of "unspecified munitions."

Recent disclosures revealed that the disaster could have been much worse: Among some 83 tons of cargo off-loaded at Schiphol was a shipment of "oil industry" explosives.

The Dutch press raised a host of vexing questions: Why were the 12 hours of videotape made during the rescue and clean-up operation (42 cassettes in all) erased and shredded? Why were police audiotapes also run through the shredder? What happened to seized El Al documents that subsequently disappeared? Why had the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) mysteriously disappeared?

In January 1996, the US-based Flight Safety Foundation concluded that "the possibility has to be considered seriously that the CVR was stolen from the area."

Not-so-Depleted Uranium
In the months following the crash, the Dutch citizens' group Onderzoeksgrep Vliegramp Bijlmermeer revealed that, "in addition to the cocktail of toxic chemicals that came free during the disaster," traces of uranium, zirconium and lanthanum had turned up in soil samples taken from the crash site. More alarmingly, the OVB found traces of uranium in feces samples taken from survivors.

One year after the crash, the Laka Foundation, an independent Dutch nuclear research group, revealed that the El Al jet - like all Boeing 747s - carried 1,500 kg of depleted uranium (DU) onboard in the form of cadmium-clad counterweights hidden in the aircraft's tail fins, horizontal stabilizers and wings.

Depleted uranium is an extremely dense metallic by-product of the production of U235, the fissionable uranium isotope used to manufacture nuclear weapons and fuel. Despite its name, DU contains residual amounts of radioactive U235, along with less radioactive U238 and trace amounts of U236.

The journal of the American Society for Metals explains that DU counterweights "are used in the aerodynamic controls of planes, rockets and helicopters to maintain the aircraft's center of gravity... in many civil and military aircraft."

"For many years," reads a December 20, 1984 Boeing document uncovered by Dutch investigators, "aircraft manufacturers have used 'depleted' uranium to balance ailerons, rudders, and elevators on certain jet aircraft and rotor blades on certain helicopters."

The document acknowledges that swallowing or breathing DU dust can cause "a significant and long-lasting irradiation of internal tissue." DU has been implicated as a cause of Gulf War Symptom - a series of physical and mental debilities remarkably similar to the symptoms reported by the Bijlmer survivors.

DU counterweights are manufactured by Nuclear Metals, Inc. Nuclear Metals (which became the Starmet Corporation in 1997) claims to be "one of the leading suppliers of low-cost DU ammunition for US government weapons systems" and boasts that it maintains "the only FAA approved facility for the repair and refurbishing of DU aircraft counterweights." (Starmet's facility in West Concord, Pennsylvania is a toxic superfund site involved in a $6.5 million effort to remove 28 years worth of radioactive sludge containing 175 tons of DU.)

While DU does not burn readily, Starmet admits that its wing and tail-fin counterweights could "oxidize rapidly in a long-lasting fire" at temperatures above 500 C.

Batelle Laboratory experiments have shown that DU begins to oxidize at temperatures as low as 350 C. Above temperatures of 700 C, DU begins to burn on its own. Batelle estimated that an hour-long fire could vaporize from 4 to 20 percent of the DU and that, with the kind of "heavy turbulence" associated with larger fires, incineration losses could reach 30 percent. The kerosene-fueled inferno at Bijlmer reached temperatures around 1100-1400 C.

In an article in Nature, physicist Robert L. Parker estimated that a worst-case 747 crash could expose 250,000 people to health risks from inhaling uranium oxide particles.

When a long-awaited Dutch government report assured the public that the counterweights had remained intact and never posed a threat to health, the Laka Foundation went public with its findings that only 163 kg of the 430 kg of depleted uranium aboard the downed 747 had been recovered. Laka's stunning disclosure helped to trigger the demand for a full Dutch Parliamentary inquiry.

The Bijlmer Hearings
The Bijlmer hearings were chaired by Christian Democratic opposition deputy Theo Meijer. Carried live on Dutch public television, they transfixed viewers, who likened the weekly series to The X-Files. The emotional impact of the broadcasts was so intense that Dutch TV began flashing a special number viewers could call if they felt they needed psychological counseling.

The committee discovered that every Sunday evening a mysterious El Al cargo flight routinely touched down at Schiphol en route from New York to Tel Aviv. These flights were never displayed on the airport arrival monitors and the documentation for the flights was processed in a special, unmarked room. Unlike other Israel-bound flights, the cargo on these flights was not subjected to tests in a buried vacuum bunker (designed to trigger bombs set to explode at high altitudes).

On January 29, 1999, Dutch Attorney General Vrakking testified that the El Al security detachment at Schiphol was a branch of Mossad.

On February 5, a Dutch Air Guidance Organization employee told the hearing that the "policy" since 1973 was to keep quiet about all El Al activities. Schiphol workers testified that El Al planes were never inspected by customs or the Dutch Flight Safety Board.

Two technical maintenance officers told the committee that their supervisors sometimes ordered them to clear El Al flights for take-off when they were not comfortable that it was safe to do so. They testified that the 25-page maintenance sheet for Flight 1862 was filled with numerous "carry-over items" that had not been corrected.

The Dutch press reported that security officials had been waving Israeli air cargo through Schiphol since the 1950s. While shipping the kinds of chemicals aboard LY1862 ordinarily would be a violation of the Chemical Weapons Treaty (which the US has signed), sending cargo jets to commercial airfields for refueling (rather than to a NATO airfield) apparently circumvents the Atlantic Alliance's military treaties.

"Schiphol has become a hub for secret weapons transfers," charged Henk van der Belt, an investigator working on behalf of the Bijlmer survivors. "Dutch authorities have no jurisdiction over Israeli activities at the airport."

A Televisieproduktie Amsterdam (TVA) report identified Schiphol as one of several European airports that allows El Al to transfer cargo without supervision. TVA claimed that Belgian politicians now fear that "a disaster like the crash in Holland in 1992 is possible at [Belgium's] Zaaventem. This airport is, like Schiphol, under control by the secret police of Israel."

Secret Tapes Show Cover-Up
In February, the Meijer committee uncovered secret tapes of phone conversations between El Al and Schiphol Air Traffic Control (SATC). On these tapes (recorded within minutes of the crash and hidden in a safe for more than six years), an El Al employee warns: "There is poison on board: ammunition and flammable liquids." In reply, SATC personnel are heard promising: "We will keep these things under the lid."

The lid remained sealed as Dutch authorities ordered workers to clean up the contaminated area without benefit of protective clothing. The cover-up was so complete that even the Netherlands' Queen Beatrix was not informed of the danger. Unaware of the risks, she was allowed to undertake a "sympathy visit" to the impact site the day after the crash.

For six years, Dutch officials had claimed that the flight carried only "video-record-ers, flowers and perfume." Shortly after the hidden tapes surfaced, Prime Minister Wim Kok suspended three SATC employees for withholding information and several ministers were threatened with firing. On, February 18, Israel finally agreed to hand over top-secret information on the 20 tons of "missing" cargo aboard the El Al jet. (Ironically, only one week earlier, Israel authorities had told Dutch investigators that "the papers are probably destroyed.")

Meijer's 2,000-page report, released on April 22, concluded that there was "a direct link between health complaints and the Bijlmer disaster" and accused the health and transport ministers of providing "unclear, incomplete, late or incorrect information."

The Meijer report also blasted Israel's cover-up as "incomprehensible," especially "given the public concern in the Netherlands over the past six-and-a-half years, the requests for cooperation at a high diplomatic level and the bond of friendship between the Netherlands and Israel."

Hazmat on the Horizon
Seven years after the deadly crash, Robert Jan van den Berg of the Laka Foundation's Bijlmer Project informs the Journal that "El Al is still flying the same routes." Despite calls for greater controls, the public still has little idea of what kinds of cargoes are passing overhead - a matter of mounting concern since the Geneva-based International Air Transport Association (IATA) expects air freight shipments to increase "at an average rate of 5.3 percent per annum between 1998-2002." Air cargo loads are expected to increase 5.7 percent in North America and 7.9 percent in Central America - nearly double the anticipated traffic in Europe's busy air corridors.

Because regulations for carrying hazardous materials ("hazmat") are more stringent for passenger jets, dangerous goods increasingly are being shipped via less-regulated air-cargo jets. Currently, the only source of information on a plane's cargo is the pilot notification (NOTOC) form carried aboard the plane but, as Air Cargo World magazine observes, this is "hardly the best spot for details while the plane itself may be burning."

The National Transport Safety Bureau (NTSB) recommended that carriers "provide consolidated, specific information about the identity" of hazardous cargo "within two years." In the meantime, the NTSB admits that even these regulations won't address the greatest risk in the $143 billion-a-year air-cargo industry - the shipment of "hidden" cargo.

"Transportation of undeclared hazardous materials on airplanes remains a significant problem," the NTSB warns. According to the IATA, nearly 26 million tons of air cargo were shipped in 1997. While hazardous materials comprised a significant portion of that cargo, no one knows how much "hidden" hazmat the world's air freighters carry.

For many carriers, keeping the wraps on one's cargo is tantamount to a First Amendment right. Air Cargo World notes that FedEx opposes reporting "undeclared" goods because "questions about shipment contents will infringe on customers' privacy rights and place an unreasonable burden on carriers." (The undeclared goods aboard a FedEx DC-10 that crashed in New York in 1996 included several bags of marijuana.)

The IATA has established global rules for the air shipment of dangerous goods but, until recently, compliance with these regulations has been voluntary. In 1998, compliance was made mandatory but the US Department of Transportation has created a loophole that allows carriers to receive an exemption from the IATA's safety rules.

With more hazmat traversing the skies, it's only a matter of time before another Bijlmer crash occurs. And, statistically, the next crash most likely will occur in the heavily-trafficked corridors of Europe, Central America or the US.

Gar Smith is the editor-in-chief of Earth Island Journal.

RADIOACTIVE CRASH SITES AROUND THE WORLD

Neither the Federal Aviation Administration nor the major aircraft manufacturers publish information about which planes and helicopters contain DU components. As one industry insider told the Journal, "No one brags about DU."

The Starmet Corp. website, however, states that "wide-body aircraft such as the Boeing 747, Lockheed L-1011, McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed military C-130 all require the use of counter-balance weights for proper flight control."

DU weights have been installed on more than 1,600 jumbo jets operated by all major world airlines, including: TWA, United, Delta, Continental, Pan Am, Northwest, American, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Air France, Alitalia, BOAC, British Airways, Qantas, Air China, SAS and Swissair.

Since Boeing 747s were first deployed in 1968, 27 of the superjets have crashed. Several of these accidents, may have left crashsites contaminated with dangerous residues of incinerated DU.

The danger may have begun as early as 1974, when a Lufthansa jet crashed and burned at take-off in Nairobi, Kenya.

In 1977, two 747s burned in a horrendous landingstrip collision on the Spanish island of Tenerife. The Pan Am airliner blown out of the skies by a terrorist bomb over Scotland in 1988 may also have rained DU on the residents of Lockerbie.

Between 1991 and 1993, three 747s crashed after pylon-mounted engines fell off. One was the jet that crashed into Biljmer. The other incidents included a China Airlines jet that crashed in Wanli, Taiwan and a Japan Airlines jet that crashed in Anchorage.

On December 20, 1995, a Tower Air 747 crashed at JFK International. On July 17, 1996 a TWA 747 crashed shortly after take-off in New York. In 1997, a Korean Air Lines 747 crashed in Guam.

Between 1980 and 1997, two DU-equipped Lockheed L-1011s have crashed - in the Arabian Gulf and Malaga, Spain. In the same period, seven DC-10s have gone down - in Spain, Libya, Portugal, New York, Dallas, Boston and Iowa.

The airline industry, aware of the "stigma" of DU, has been quietly replacing the aging radioactive counterweights with equally dense but more expensive tungsten.

In light of the Journal's findings about the health hazards of on-board DU, the Environmental Protection Agency would be well advised to revisit all past 747 crashsites and test both the crashsite environment and the local residents for possible DU contamination.

Epidemiological studies of the neighborhoods surrounding crashsites would also be advisable. - GS

[Ahknaton]

Israeli WMD

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=2461&sectionID=22

by Neil Sammonds; October 11, 2002

The tenth anniversary of the crash of El Al flight LY1862 in the Netherlands passed virtually unnoticed by the world’s media. On 4 October 1992, a Boeing 747 airliner of the Israeli airline El Al crashed into apartment blocks at Bijlmermeer, near Schiphol Airport, south-east of Amsterdam, en route from New York to Tel Aviv (MEI 585, 598). At least 47 people were killed and over a thousand local residents fell ill to respiratory, neurological and mobility ailments and experienced a rise in cancer and birth defects.



Facing official Dutch and Israeli stone-walling, an independent Dutch nuclear research group discovered that the plane used depleted uranium as ballast. In 1998 the Dutch daily Handelsblad revealed even deadlier material in the cargo: flight LY1862 was carrying 10 tons of chemicals, including hydrofluoric acid, isopropanol and dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) — three of the four chemicals used in the production of sarin nerve gas. A belated Dutch parliamentary enquiry into the crash discovered unpublicized weekly flights from New York to Tel Aviv stopping off at Schiphol, where cargoes were not inspected and — as the Dutch attorney general testified — El Al security staff worked for Mossad. In the words of an investigator working on behalf of the Bijlmermeer survivors, Schiphol had become, and continues to be, “a hub for secret weapons transfers”. “Invisible” facilities



The DMMP was supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Morrisville, Pennsylvania, and was destined for the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) at Nes Ziona, near Tel Aviv. As MEI noted in 1998, the IIBR is “the Israeli military and intelligence community’s front organization for the development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons”. A “senior Israeli intelligence source” told the Sunday Times: “There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapons which is not manufactured at Nes Ziona.” The IIBR is not shown on maps, and access to it was denied even to members of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committees, who were concerned about health risks to the neighbourhood.



The 1993 report by the US Office of Technology Assessment for Congress states that Israel has “undeclared offensive chemical warfare capabilities” and is “generally reported as having an undeclared offensive biological warfare programme”. The Sussex-Harvard Information Bank on Chemical and Biological Warfare Armament reports that Israel allegedly used poison gas in the 1960s and early 1980s, chemical warfare against Egyptian forces in 1948, and against Palestinians in 1969 and during the first Intifada. The Sunday Times reported in 1998 that Israel’s F-16s had been equipped to carry chemical and biological weapons manufactured at Nes Ziona, and that crews were trained to fit an active chemical or biological weapon within minutes of receiving a command.



The newspaper also reported that it was at Nes Ziona where research into an “ethno-bomb” was carried out. One of the most disturbing revelations made during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee hearings was that the apartheid regime and its ally Israel were cooperating on such a project. Scientists reportedly pinpointed a particular characteristic in the genetic profile of certain Arab communities, particularly in Iraq, and were trying to engineer deadly micro-organisms that attack only those bearing the distinctive genes. The disease could be spread by spraying the organisms into the air or putting them in water supplies.



Israel’s nuclear weapons programme is better documented than its biological and chemical weapons programme but remains as “invisible” as the Nes Ziona plant. There is no doubt that Israel’s nuclear capability was developed from the 1950s at Dimona in the Negev, with French and then American and South African assistance. In 1986 the Moroccan- born Israeli scientist Mordechai Vanunu blew the whistle on the activities at Dimona, claiming it had produced “over 200” nuclear warheads. Five years later a US Strategic Air Command report said Israel had between 75 and 200 nuclear weapons. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) estimates Israel has “over 185” nuclear weapons. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) estimates “over 100, but not significantly over 200”. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates 200. In 2000, Israeli MK Issam Mahoul broke the parliamentary taboo on discussing Israel’s official policy of “nuclear ambiguity” and stated that Israel had 2-300 nuclear warheads. Jane’s Intelligence Review estimated in 1997 that Israel had over 400 thermonuclear and nuclear weapons. The Campaign to Free Vanunu estimates 500 nuclear warheads.



Blind spots



In both the 1967 and 1973 wars, Israel reportedly put nuclear warheads on a number of missiles. In August this year Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic International Studies told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that were Israel to feel threatened by attack from Iraq it might retaliate with nuclear strikes on Iraqi cities not yet occupied by US forces. Despite the overwhelming evidence of Israel’s nuclear weapons and readiness to deploy them, London and Washington refuse to see them. A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office told MEI: “Britain continues to encourage Israel to ratify the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear state.” There is a similar blind spot in the US, where a 2001 Pentagon report omitted Israel from a list of states with nuclear weapons capability.



Evidence about Israel’s nuclear weaponry that the Foreign Office and Pentagon, among others, refuse to acknowledge, includes well sourced information about Israel’s delivery systems. The latest edition of Nuclear Notebook says Israel’s F-16 squadrons based at Nevatim and Ramon are the most likely warplanes to carry nuclear warheads and that a small group of pilots has been trained for nuclear strikes. Israel’s F-4s, F-15s and Jaguars are also nuclear-capable. The newsletter adds that Israel possesses ground-to-air missiles — the Jericho I, Jericho II and Shavit — than can be equipped with nuclear warheads. The Jericho I has a range of 500km and can be fired from stationary positions or from mobile launchers. Jericho II missiles can travel 1,500km and are kept, according to the BAS, at the Zechariya base 45km south-east of Tel Aviv. The Shavit intercontinental ballistic missile, which launches Israel’s Ofek spy satellites from the Palmahim air base south of Tel Aviv, could deliver a nuclear payload 8,000km away. Between July 1999 and October 2000, the Israeli navy reportedly took delivery of three Dolphin-class submarines — Dolphin, Leviathan and Tekuma — which are believed to have been modified to carry nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. A considerable body of research suggests that Israel also possesses a tactical nuclear capability, including small nuclear landmines and strategic nuclear warheads that it can fire from cannons.



Notwithstanding a white-washing, complicit visit to Dimona by a Norwegian team in 1961 that “verified” that exports of heavy water were not being put to illicit use, and a farcical visit there in 1969 by an American team that was guided around a fake control room, there has been no known scrutiny of Israel’s non-conventional weapons programmes. Israel has not signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and while it did sign up to the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993, it is yet to ratify it. UN Security Council Resolution 487, of June 1981, “calls upon Israel urgently to place its nuclear facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards,” and Resolution 687 of April 1991 notes “the threat that all weapons of mass destruction pose to peace and security in the area and… the need to work towards the establishment of a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East”.



Meanwhile, Washington marshals an international campaign to force inspection and dismantlement of Iraq’s comparatively modest (at best) weapons of mass destruction programmes and the probable overthrow of the regime that pursues them. Mordechai Vanunu may be expecting his release in 2004, but no one is predicting when there might be international scrutiny of Dimona and Nes Ziona, or of the unpublicized, weekly El Al flights between New York and Tel Aviv. http://meionline.com/

[Ahknaton]

Traces of poison

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/627/focus.htm

Israel, not Iraq, holds that distinction of being the first country in the region to use weapons of mass destruction with genocidal intent. Salman Abu-Sitta* digs into a dark history

At a time when TV screens are filled with images of perceived weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq among people who are on the verge of starvation, the West turns a blind eye to the first biological terrorist in the Middle East, Israel, where the largest depot of WMD between London and Peking is located.

When confronted with the anomaly, the United States ambassador to the UN, John Negroponti, responds with typical cynicism, "Israel did not use these weapons against its people or its neighbours." Assuming that the ambassador is well-informed, this statement is a patent lie. Israel used biological weapons even before it was created on Arab soil in 1948 and ever since. The purpose, according to Ben Gurion, is genocide, and if not complete, the purpose is not to allow the dispossessed Palestinians to return to their homes.


Click to view full caption
Acre Aqueduct feeding the city was poisoned by typhoid injected by Zionists in May 1948
POISONING ACRE WATER SUPPLY: In the wake of Haifa's occupation on 23 April 1948 by the Zionists, under the nose of the British Mandate forces commended by General Stockwell, a man still historically discredited for this failure, thousands converged on Acre, a nearby city, which was still Arab under the "protection" of the British forces.

Acre was to be the next Zionist target. The Zionists besieged the city from the land side, and started showering the population with a hail of mortar bombs day and night. Famous for its historical walls, Acre could stand the siege for a long time. The city water supply comes from a nearby village, Kabri, about 10kms to the north, through an aqueduct. The Zionists injected typhoid in the aqueduct at some intermediate point which passes through Zionist settlements. (see map)

The story can now be told, thanks to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) files which have now become available, 50 years after the event. A series of reports, under the reference G59/1/GC, G3/82, sent by ICRC delegate de Meuron from 6 May to about 19 May 1948 describe the conditions of the city population, struck by a sudden typhoid epidemic, and the efforts to combat it.

Of particular importance are the minutes of an emergency conference held at the Lebanese Red Cross Hospital in Acre on 6 May, to deal with the typhoid epidemic. The meeting was attended by: Brigadier Beveridge, Chief of British Medical Services and Colonel Bonnet of the British Army, Dr Maclean of the Medical Services, Mr de Meuron, ICRC delegate in addition to other officials of the city. The minutes stated that there are at least 70 known civilian casualties, others may not be reported. It was determined that the infection is "water borne", not due to crowded or unhygienic conditions as claimed by the Israelis. It was decided that a substitute water supply should now come from artesian wells or from the agricultural station, just north of Acre (see map), not from the aqueduct. Water chlorine solution was applied, inoculation of civil population started, movement of civil population was controlled (lest refugees heading north towards Lebanon will carry the typhoid epidemic with them, as intended by the Zionists).

In his other reports, de Meuron mentioned 55 casualties among British soldiers, who were spirited away to Port Said for hospitalisation. General Stockwell arranged for de Meuron to fly on a military plane to Jerusalem to fetch medicine. The British, who left Palestine in the hands of the Jews, did not want another embarrassing incident to delay their departure.

Brigadier Beveridge told de Meuron that this is "the first time this happened in Palestine". This belies the Israeli story, including that of the Israeli historian Benny Morris, that the epidemic is due to "unhygienic conditions" of the refugees. If that was so, how come there was an almost equal number of casualties among British soldiers? Why did such conditions not cause epidemic in such other concentrations of refugees, under far worse conditions, in Jaffa, Lydda, Nazareth and Gaza?

ICRC delegate, de Meuron admired greatly the heroic efforts of Arab doctors, Al-Dahhan and Al-Araj from the Lebanese Red Cross hospital in Acre, Dr Dabbas from Haifa and Mrs Bahai from Haifa.

The city of Acre, now burdened by the epidemic, fell easy prey to the Zionists. They intensified their bombardment. Trucks carrying loudspeakers proclaimed, "Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the last man." That was not a figure of speech. Palumbo, in The Palestinian Catastrophe, notes the "typical" case of Mohamed Fayez Soufi. Soufi with friends went to get food from their homes in a new Acre suburb. They were caught by Zionist soldiers and forced at gun point to drink cyanide. Soufi faked swallowing the poison. The others were not so lucky, they died in half an hour.

Lieutenant Petite, a French UN observer, reported that looting was being conducted in a systematic manner by the army, carrying off furniture, clothes and anything useful for the new Jewish immigrants and also part of "a Jewish plan to prevent the return of the refugees." Lieutenant Petite also reported that the Jews had murdered 100 Arab civilians in Acre, particularly those who refused to leave.

More horrors have been reported by de Meuron. He spoke of "a reign of terror" and the case of the rape of a girl by several soldiers and killing her father. He also wrote that all male civilians were taken to concentration camps and considered "prisoners of war" although they were not soldiers. This left many women and children homeless, without protection, subject to many acts of violence. He also notes the absence of water and electricity. He demanded from the Zionists a list of civilians detained as "prisoners of war", demanded to know their whereabouts and permission to visit them. More importantly he asked that Acre be placed under ICRC protection and care. Anyone who reads the familiar dry and matter-of-fact language of ICRC would not fail to notice the tone of abhorrence of Zionist actions in de Meuron reports from Acre.

This episode, which started with poisoning Acre water supply and ended with the collapse of the city, the depopulation of its inhabitants, and its occupation by the Jews, whetted their appetite to try this crime again.

GAZA POISONING: Two weeks later, after their "success" in Acre, the Zionists struck again. This time in Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of refugees had gathered after their villages in southern Palestine were occupied. The end however was different.

The following cable was sent from the commander of the Egyptian Forces in Palestine to General Headquarters in Cairo:

"15.20 hrs, 24 May [1948] Our Intelligence forces captured two Jews, David Horeen and David Mizrahi, loitering around army positions. They were interrogated and confessed they had been sent by Officer Moshe to poison the army [and the peoples'] water supply. They carried with them water bottles divided in the middle. The top part has potable water and the bottom part has a liquid contaminated with typhoid and dysentery, equipped with a rear opening from which the liquid can be released. They confessed they were members of a 20-strong team sent from Rehovot for the same purpose. Both have written their confession in Hebrew and signed it. We have taken the necessary medical precautions."

In Ben Gurion's War Diary, the following entry is found on 27 May 1948:

"[Chief of Staff Yigel Yadin] picked up a cable from Gaza saying they captured Jews carrying malaria germs and gave instructions not to drink water". This is typical of Ben Gurion's oblique writing of history. He was fully aware of the weight of history when such crimes are discovered. Nuremberg trials were held only three years before. More on the background of this cable was given in Yeruham Cohen's book, In Daylight and Night Darkness, Tel Aviv, 1969, pp66-68 (in Hebrew).

The criminals were executed three months later. On 22 July 1948, the [Palestinian] Higher Arab Committee (AHC) submitted a 13-page report to the United Nations accusing the Jews of using "inhuman" weapons and waging a genocide war against the Arabs through the use of bacteria and germs, developed in specially-built laboratories. The report also accuses the Jews (the word Israel was not used) of spreading cholera in Egypt and Syria in 1947/48. The story was picked up by the award-winning journalist, Thomas J Hamilton of the New York Times and published on 24 July 1948. The story now has a new twist- adding Egypt and Syria to the Jewish field of operations.

CHOLERA IN EGYPT AND SYRIA: The summer of 1947 was hot with diplomatic activity. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was busy touring Palestine and Arab countries in order to propose the partition of Palestine such that the new Jewish immigrants to Palestine, who controlled only six per cent of Palestine under the British Mandate, be given a big chunk of Palestine (turned out to be 54 per cent) in order to establish a foreign state in the midst of Arab land.

The Arabs, still under the tutelage of Britain, were debating how to resist the Western-supported scheme to take away their land. The forces to reckon with were neighbouring countries with common borders with Palestine. Lebanon was weak. Trans-Jordan was still controlled directly by the British and King Abdullah was conciliatory to the Jews. This left Egypt, the stronger Arab country and Syria, recently freed from the clutches of the French Mandate. Syria was the centre of Arab resistance to the foreign occupation of Palestine. Training centres were established in Qatana to prepare Arab volunteers to enter Palestine under the banner of "The Arab Rescue Army". Egypt and Palestine were thus the most important targets.

In his 220-page continually updated report, entitled: Bioterrorism and Biocrimes: The Illicit Use of Biological Agents since 1900, dated February 2001, Dr W Seth Carus of the Center for Counterproliferation Research, National Defence University, Washington, DC, lists the following subtitle, p.87: Case 1947-01: "Zionist" Terrorists 1947-1948.

Under this section, he mentions that the cholera outbreaks in Syria and Egypt received extensive attention in the international press. The first report about the cholera in Egypt was published in the Times of London on 26 September, 1947, p4. By the time the final cases appeared in January 1948, 10,262 people died.

He also states that the outbreak in Syria is much smaller. It was limited to two towns, about 60 kilometres south of Damascus, i.e. close to Palestine border. The first report appeared in the New York Times on 22 December, 1947, p5.

The Syrian army formed a cordon sanitaire and the casualties were limited to 44, including 18 deaths. Soon after, the Beirut French-language newspaper, Orient, reported that several Zionist agents, who employed cholera to disrupt the mobilisation of the volunteers' army, were arrested. Their destiny is unknown.

These incidents, together with Gaza poisoning, Carus states, were described in the AHC complaint to the UN and quotes the report in saying that:

"The Jews plan to use this inhuman weapon against the Arabs in the Middle East in their war of extermination."

Carus adds information from other sources about the Gaza poisoning. Rachel Katzman, Horeen's sister, Carus stated, said: "I met one of [my brother's] commanders in a lecture in Jerusalem. I asked him whether my brother had really attempted to poison wells. 'These were the weapons we had', he said, 'and that's that.'"

Carus also adds another source about Acre poisoning: This source sates, "This account also claims that the Israelis poisoned the water supply of the Arab town of Acre, causing a major outbreak, and other Arab villages to prevent the villagers from returning, citing military historian Uri Milstein as a source" [Wendy Barnaby, The Plague Makers: The Secret World of Biological Warfare, London, Vision Paperbacks, 1997, pp114-116].

The writer has obtained a copy of an e-mail in which an Israeli peace activist asked Uri Milstein about Acre poisoning story. Milstein, the military historian, is described in the e-mail as "very knowledgeable, intelligent, courageous, original, honest" -- although his views belong to the Israeli far-right (!). Milstein replied:

"I am sorry to say it, but the story is true and the name of the operation was "Shlach Lachmecha" -- that is "donate your bread", which is a part of Hebrew saying: donate your bread because sooner or later you will get it back, meaning you have to be generous and one day, you will profit from it yourself. Is this not a cute name for an operation to use biological weapons?"

HOW DID BEN GURION START ALL THIS? On the fourth of March 1948, Ben Gurion wrote a letter to Ehud Avriel, one of the Jewish Agency operatives in Europe, ordering him to recruit East European Jewish scientists who could "either increase [our] capacity to kill masses or to cure masses; both are important". This truncated quotation is given by Avner Cohen who cited an author in Ben Gurion Research Centre at Sdeh Boker.

To understand the meaning of this quotation we must recall Ben Gurion's doctrine: the destruction of the Palestinian Society in Palestine is a necessary condition for the establishment of the state of Israel on its ruins. As a corollary to this doctrine, ethnic cleansing became an integral part of Zionism. If Palestinians cannot be removed by massacres and expulsion, they shall be removed by "extermination". Such words were specifically used in AHC letter mentioned above. The significance of this word is that it was rarely used by Arabs regarding their fate. Europe's horrors were either remote or not widely known then.

The caveat by Ben Gurion as "to cure the masses" is yet another twist by Ben Gurion with an eye on history. For it is inconceivable that the Arabs have the ability or the will in 1948 to cause "mass killing" of the Jews using biological weapons. As it happened, Ben Gurion was the first to use such weapons. His legacy, much more refined and expanded, remains true till today.

Avner Cohen, a senior fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies, and the Program on Security and Disarmaments at the University of Maryland, wrote a comprehensive paper on Israel's chemical and biological weapons, which was published in the Non-Proliferation Review, Autumn 2001. Notwithstanding his background, which furnishes a sympathetic understanding of Israel's motives, his paper traces in 50 pages of detail, from open sources and few interviews, the establishment and development of Israel's centre for biological terrorism.

Thrusting Israel in the heart of the Arab world, Ben Gurion was determined to achieve this extraordinary objective against all odds. "We are inferior to other peoples in our number, but no other people is superior to us in intellectual prowess," Ben Gurion remarked.

In the 1940s, he gathered around him Ernst David Bergmann, Avraham Marcus (Marek) Klingberg (from the Red Army) and the brothers Aharon and Ephraim Katachalsky (Katzir) -- all experts in microbiology. They formed the nucleus of the Science Corps in the Haganah during the British Mandate. Ephraim Katachalsky was named commander of this new unit, renamed HEMED, in May 1948. A dispute arose between Chaim Weizmann who wished to establish a scientific institute for "clean" science, while Ben Gurion insisted on building a "dirty" centre for biological weapons. Both got their wishes realised. Weizmann Institute for scientific research was built in Rehovot. A new unit within HEMED, devoted to biological weapons and named HEMED BEIT, was formed as a branch of the Israeli Army. Its head was Alexander Keynan, a microbiologist from the medical school at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

With the depopulation of 530 Palestinian towns and villages in Al-Nakba of 1948, many buildings and homes became vacant and over half of the Jewish immigrants in the 1950s were housed in them. The Chief of Staff Yigal Yadin selected a home for the new biological weapons development unit in a mansion located within a large orange grove west of Nes Ziona. This unit, publicly known as Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR), is still there today. The building was expanded, surrounded by a three metre wall, movement sensors and watch towers.

While IIBR represents the front of a scientific institution, producing a "clean" papers and receiving invitations to scientific conferences, the real biological weapons developed is carried within IIBR in a highly classified centre (Machon 2, one of four) funded and controlled directly by the Ministry of Defence.

IIBR Web site states that the institute's staff comprises 300 employees, 120 of them PhD holders, in addition to 100 certified technicians. But these figures are misleading because there are many other scientists who hold positions in microbiology departments in faculties of medicine in Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Ephraim Katzir was rewarded for his service to the state by being elected as president of Israel in 1973. Aharon Katzir was killed in the Japanese attack on Lydda airport on 30 May, 1972.

Soon after the poisoning of Acre and Gaza, Ben Gurion launched a crash project to develop "a cheap non-conventional capability" in 1955. Why the rush? As Cohen reports, Munya Mardor, the founder of Israel's Weapons Development Authority (RAFAEL), says that Ben Gurion was "evidently concerned that we would not meet the deadline he had set, worrying that the enemy would have such capability and we would have nothing to deter or retaliate". It turned out that the rush was to meet the deadline for the Suez Tripartite Aggression of 1956. Ben Gurion was prepared to bomb Egypt with biological weapons if his campaign failed. As if that was not enough, Israel signed an agreement with France to build a nuclear programme in the same year. Ben Gurion's emissary to France was none other than the peace-loving diplomat Shimon Pensky (Perez).

Anver Cohen says that the location of IIBR is classified and not shown on maps or aerial photographs. It is still possible, however, to determine its location with accuracy.

WHERE IS IIBR? In the 1930s, the road from Ramleh to Nabi Rubin, a popular religious site visited annually, passes through Wadi Hunein, a good sandy soil with spots of marshes. The wealthy Al-Taji Al-Farouki family from Ramleh purchased large tracts of this land and developed it into successful citrus groves which exported hundreds of thousands of Jaffa orange boxes to Europe. Shukri Al-Taji built for himself a beautiful mansion (photo) -- a two-storey rectangular building on top of a hill, on a plot of land, 134,029 m2 in area. The plot number is 549/32 and the property deed is entered in the Land Registry under E42/260 on 16 March 1932. He also built a mosque on the asphalt road from Jaffa to Qubeiba. On another hill, one kilometre to the west, his cousin Abdel-Rahman Hamed Al-Taji built a house which consists of several buildings. The mansions in the midst of vast orange groves depicted an idyllic scene in quiet surroundings.

This is the location chosen by Yigal Yadin for his biological weapons research. Shukri Al Taji mansion became the home of IIBR. The IIBR Web site ([url]www.iibr.gov.il[/url]) proudly shows on the opening page its building entrance, which is nothing but Shukri's mansion with its arched façade and tall lush trees (compare with photo). Shukri died broken hearted in Cairo some ten years later.

If you drive from Nes Ziona going west on road 4303, then turn left at road 42 heading south, you will find IIBR at your right at a distance of 500 metres. (see photo of the location). The coordinates of IIBR are:

According to Palestine/ Israel grid : 128.263 E, 147.022 N

New Israel grid : 178.263 E, 647.022 N

Geographical coordinates : E 34D 46' 27 N 31D 55' 7

The area is called "Ayalon" in Hebrew. Directly to the west on the sea coast is the missile launching pad of Palmahim.

Other Al-Taji buildings were expropriated and used. The mosque is transformed into a synagogue, named "gulat Israel". Abdel-Rahman's house became a mental hospital.

CHASING THE CULPRITS: Sara Leibovitz-Dar is a persistent investigative journalist. The trauma experienced by her parents in their native Lithuania left an indelible mark on her. She abhorred injustice and, particularly, the meek acceptance of it. She investigated the Gaza and Acre poisoning and shooting down of the civilian Libyan aircraft. The Israeli military historian, Uri Milstein, identified for her the names of the officers responsible for biological crimes.

In 1993, Sara tried to interview the commander who was responsible for Acre poisoning. He refused to talk. "Why do you look for troubles that took place 45 years ago?" he asked. "I know nothing about this. What would you gain by publishing?"

Again, Sara interviewed the officer responsible for Gaza poisoning. He refused to respond, "You will not get answers on these questions. Not from me and not from anyone." Sara was persistent. She asked Colonel Shlomo Gur, former HEMED chief, whether he was aware of the secret operations in 1948. "We heard about the typhoid epidemics in Acre and about the Gaza operations. There were many rumours but I did not know whether they were true or not," he responded.

Sara published her findings in Hadashot under the title "Microbes in State Service", on 13 August, 1993, pp6-10. Sara, who now moved to Ha'aretz, concluded with the following comment,

"What was done then with deep conviction and zealotry is now concealed with shame." True to the Israeli tradition, Sara declined twice to respond by e-mail to an enquiry from the writer.

Not all are afraid to talk. Naeim Giladi is an Iraqi Jew who was lured to Israel by Mossad agents in the early 1950s. Working with the zealotry and dedication of a new Zionist, he soon found out that within the Ashkenazi establishment "there was not much opportunity for those of us who were second class citizens", he told the editor of The Link in New York where he immigrated after leaving Israel. "I began to find out about the barbaric methods to rid the fledgling state of as many Palestinians as possible. The world recoils today at the thought of bacteriological warfare, but Israel was probably the first to actually use it in the Middle East. Jewish forces would empty Arab villages of their population often by threats, sometimes by gunning down a half-dozen young men so that the Arabs could not return. The Israelis put typhus and dysentery bacteria in the water wells to prevent the refugees from returning". [The Link, Vol. 31 Issue 2, April-May 1998].

Another witness who spoke, former Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky, claims that lethal tests have been performed on Arab prisoners inside the IIBR compound.

THE DUTCH INVESTIGATION: On 4 October, 1992 at 6.21pm, El Al Flight 1862 left Amsterdam's Schiphol airport on route to Tel Aviv, carrying three crewmen, one passenger and 114 tons of freight. Seven minutes later, it crashed in a high-rise apartment complex in Bijlmer. El Al Flight 1862 became the worst air disaster in Dutch history, killing at least 47 (the actual number is unknown because many victims were immigrants) and destroyed the health of 3000 Dutch residents. Cases of mysterious illnesses, rashes, difficulty in breathing, nervous disorders and cancer began to sprout in that neighbourhood and beyond.

The Dutch government, in collusion with Israel, lied to its citizens saying the plane was carrying perfumes and flowers. Some flowers! It took the energetic and persistent science editor in the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, Karel Knip, several years to discover the facts. Knip published on 27 November 1999 the most detailed and factual published investigation about the workings of biological terrorism housed in IIBR.

First he found out that the plane was carrying 50 gallons, among other things, of DMMP a substance used to make a quarter ton of the deadly nerve gas Sarin, 20 times as lethal as cyanide. It was carrying a shipment from Solkatronic Chemicals of Morrisville, Pennsylvania to IIBR in Israel, under a US Department of Commerce licence. This is contrary to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) to which the US, but not Israel, is party.

With dogged determination, Knip reviewed the scientific literature produced by IIBR and the microbiology departments of the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Tel Aviv and the Hebrew University since 1950. He was able to identify 140 scientists involved in biological weapons (BW) research. The number could be more as scientists have dual positions or they move around. Many take their sabbaticals invariably in the United States. There are strong links with Walter Reed Army Institute, the Uniformed Services University, the American Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) Center in Edgewood and the University of Utah.

Remarkably, Knip was able to identify three categories of IIBR production: diseases, toxins and convulsants, and their development in each decade of the five past decades. (See table)

The research moved from virus and bacteria to toxins because they are many times more poisonous. Nerve gases known as Tabun, Soman, Sarin, VX, Cyclo-Sarin, RVX and Amiton are all deadly gases and function in the same way.

Knip went further. He sought the assistance of experts in this field such as Professor Julian Perry Robinson, University of Sussex, Brighton, Dr Jean Pascal Zanders of SIPRI, Stockholm and Professor Malcolm Dando, University of Bradford. They guided his research and explained his findings.

Knip also discovered close cooperation between IIBR and the British-American BW programme. This programme deals with viruses and bacteria spread by rodents and insects and covers smallpox, fungal diseases and Legionnaires disease. It is to be noted that there was a breakout of this disease in Philadelphia some years ago, and, surprisingly, in an Eilat hotel in mid- January this year.

The interest in the plant poison Elate-Ricin is confined to very few institutions beside IIBR. It will be recalled that amateur biologists were arrested in UK in January attempting to prepare Ricin.

The novel and dangerous trend in BW research in IIBR is the development of incapacitants which paralyse, disorient, cause uncontrollable movements and severe pain in the stomach. Most of these incapacitants have antidotes to repair the damage done. These incapacitants have been and are used against the Palestinians in the Intifada.

There is also extensive collaboration on BW research with Germany and Holland. That is probably the reason for the Dutch official silence over the deadly crash over Amsterdam.

The cooperation with the US is quite open. The Congress "Joint Medical, Biological and Nuclear Defence Research Programs" openly lists cooperation with Israel on nerve agents and convulsants under the guise of finding antidotes. It is plainly simple to realise that in order to develop the antidote it is necessary to identify the poison itself. Dr Avigdor Shafferman, IIBR director, is a frequent contributor to this programme. (see [url]www.acq.osd.mil/cp/nbc98/annexd.pdf)-[/url] Annex D.

The Preparatory Commission for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague turns a blind eye to the Israeli criminal activities. Ironically, Israeli researchers guide OPCW on methods to detect Chemical Weapons. Israeli researchers R Barak, A Lorber and Z Boger of IIBR, CHEMO Solutions and Rotem Industries respectively propose methods to detect chemical warfare agents. No international body seems to be willing to apply these methods on Israel.

The mechanism to do this monitoring is available. The American Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center has the wherewithal to inspect suspect laboratories. But it is unlikely to see a team of inspectors headed by an American Blix searching the secret chambers of IIBR.

This may, however, not apply to conscientious scientists. Professor Keith Yamamoto, of the University of California and Dr Jonathan King of MIT criticised the American BW research and showed that attempting to modify toxins (as IIBR does) can hardly be considered "defensive" research. But Israel's turn in such criticism seems far-off at present.

THE PALESTINIAN VICTIMS: The biological crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians in Acre and Gaza in 1948 are still being enacted today.

In 1997, Mossad agents tried to assassinate Khaled Mish'al, Hamas Political Bureau's director in Amman. King Hussein was furious at the blatant violation of Jordan's sovereignty and of the Peace Treaty with Israel. As the attempt failed, thanks to Mish'al's bodyguard, Israel sent a lady doctor with the antidote. The toxin used is likely to be SEB applied through a special gun which has a range of 50 metres. and could inject the toxin in the neck.

The stories about nerve gas applied against school children abound. So are the cases in which CBW are used. Neil Sammonds lists these cases:

ï Chemical defoliants against Palestinian crops in Ain Al- Beida in 1968, Aqraba in 1972, Mejdel Beni Fadil in 1978 and Negev in 2002.

ï Chemical Weapons, including hydrogen cyanide, nerve gas and phosphorous shells in the 1982 war on Lebanon.

ï Lethal gas against Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners.

But the case which was widely publicised all over the world and fully documented by several international NGOs is the application of incapacitants, particularly in Khan Younis, in February 2001. The pictures of victims twisting with severe pain and uncontrollable convulsions were splashed on TV screens everywhere.

James Brooks of "Just Peace in Palestine/Israel" gave a detailed account of this BW attack on civilians day by day as it happened. First, the victims thought it was tear gas. It had a faint odour like mint. It smelled "like sugar", one victim reported. It changed colour "like a rainbow". Fifteen minutes later, the victim felt that his "stomach was torn apart, with burning sensation in [his] chest, could not breathe". Soon convulsions started. The victim would jump up and down, left and right, thrashing limbs around, with a kind of hysteria. Some victims were unconscious. The victim would vomit incessantly and then pain would return. This would go on for days or, for some, weeks.

In addition to the numerous press and human rights reports, convulsing poison gas victims in Khan Younis were filmed by the American filmmaker James Longley, in a documentary that "pushes the viewer headlong into the tumult of the Israeli- occupied Gaza". Longley compiled a 43-page document of interviews with 19 gas victims, their relatives, nurses and doctors.

These devilish incapacitants drew the protest of some NGOs but little else. No international investigation or censureship of any kind, even though this was repeatedly used in March in Al- Birch, Nablus and West Bank and yet again in Gaza later that month.

Just the contrary. There was a wide-spread Zionist- orchestrated condemnation and disapproval when, in November 1999, Suha Arafat, the president's wife, charged the Israelis with the use of "poison gas" in the presence of the aspiring politician Hillary Clinton. The height of hypocrisy and cynicism was attained when the incensed Israeli authorities declared that Suha's factual statement is "a violation of the peace process"!

There are as yet unseen and long-term effects of toxins and incapacitants. On 3 February, 2003, Dr Khamis Al-Najjar, director of Cancer Research Centre of the Ministry of Health in Ramallah reported an alarming increase in cancer cases, especially among women and children. The report covers the period 1995-2000 and shows 3646 cases, with more than half among females. The cases in Gaza are more than the West Bank. The report, citing the rate of increase, predicts that cases will triple in the near future. Taking note of the Israelis' paranoia about Palestinian demography and judging by their previous record, it is possible that the accumulative effect of the Israeli application of toxins and incapacitants has produced the increased incidence of cancer cases. A similar study is yet to be made on fetus and newborn babies.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Israel has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention and is not a party to the Biological Weapons Convention. Israel does not recognise the application of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza, as the rest of the world does. This is not surprising. Israel violates every rule in the book.

Article 147 of the Geneva Convention stipulates that to "willingly cause [civilians] great suffering or serious injury to body or health" is a "grave breach", which, according to Article 146, requires all High Contracting Parties to "search for persons alleged to have committed or to have ordered to commit such grave breaches" and must "bring such person regardless of their nationality before their own courts". If this is applied, Sharon and his officers will stand behind bars in a Belgian court for a long time.

There is a plethora of conventions which Israel constantly violated, starting with Geneva Protocol of 1925 on Poisonous Gas to the 1993 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons.

With this background, it seems a mockery of justice to despatch hundreds of inspectors to destroyed workshops and private homes in Iraq, while huge tons of weapons of mass destruction are staring them in the eye in Israel. Perhaps the 10 million people in 600 cities around the world who demonstrated against the war on Iraq on 15 and 16 February were trying to point out this irony in refusing this war. Some placards said so in clear terms.

Perhaps the domestic voice in Israel may be listened to more attentively. The Mayor of Nes Ziona, located a mere 10 kilometres away from Tel Aviv centre, complained that the proximity of IIBR to his city poses a great danger to the population, in case of accident. He is right. The Science Committee in the Knesset reported 22 casualties including three fatal cases in the last 15 years. But these were mild cases.

What would be the situation if a big accident happens on a windy day, causing explosion of tons of toxics and its evaporation in the sky, in a congested neighbourhood, where three million people live in an area of barely 1000sqkms, that is 35X35 km? Ben Gurion, while cooking his evil plans to "exterminate" the Arabs, did not envisage this scenario in his wildest dreams.

* The writer is president of Palestine Land Society, London.

DISEASES

1950-1960

Yersinia pestis (plague)
Rickettsia species (typhus)
Rabies

1960-1970

West Nile virus
Leptospira species (e.g. Weil's disease)
Cryptococcus neoformans (a yeast)
Sindbis virus
Newcastle disease (birds)

1970-1980

African Swine fever
Coxiella burnetti (Q fever)
Western Equine encephalomyelitis
Semliki Forest virus
Brucella abortus (brucellosis)
Pasteurella multocida (fowl cholera)

1980-1990

Lassa virus
EMC (encephalomyocarditis)
Legionella
Rift Valley fever
Marek's disease (poultry)
Coccidioides immitis (fungus)

TOXINS

1960-1970

Elatericin

1970-1980

Saxitoxin
Tetrodotoxin
Pilocarpine-derivatives
Wasp venom
Elatericin-derivatives
Brevetoxin
SEB (Staphylococcus enterotoxin B)
Scorpion venom
1. Cobra venom
SEA (Staph.enterotoxin A)
Cholera toxin
Bungarotoxin
Pseudomonas aeruginosa exotoxin A Shiga Toxin
1. Conotoxin
Diphteria toxin

INCAPACITANTS

1. Bradykinin
Psychotropic substances
Cannabis (hashish)
Phencyclidine (hallucinogen)
1. Chlorpromazin (anti-psychoticum)
Cannabis-derivatives (tetrahydrocannabinol)
Fentanyl (narcoticum)
QNB-derivatives (hallucinogen)
Enkephalin
Endorphin
Morphin
1. Etonitazen
Phencyclidine derivatives
Benzodiazepin derivatives (convulsants)
Heroin
Cannabis derivatives (amino-cannabinoida)

[Ahknaton]

Bijlmerramp

http://www.cloggie.org/wissewords/index.php?entry=/20051004-bijlmerramp.txt

On October 4th, 1992, at 18:35 in the evening, an El Al Boeing 747 freight plane landed on two flat buildings in Amsterdam South East, in the Bijlmer district. At least 43 people died in this disaster. It was a disaster that struck hard in the poor, close knit Bijlmer community, with many people losing nnot just a friend, family member or co-worker, but also their homes. A horrible tragedy, but nothing special: aircraft accidents do happen after all. However, there's more to it than that...

Some months after the accident, rumours leaked out and were published in the newspapers about men in moonsuits having been on the accident site. Though later research would officialy state that these rumours were just confused eyewitness reports about rescue workers, doubt kept existing about these sightings.

After the accident, the Amsterdam health care organisations arranged aftercare for the survivors of the disaster and the people living nearby. They started noticing that a lot of people came to them with strange physical complaints: sleeping disorders, chronical pulmonary infections, impotence, bowel and stomach pains. At around the same time, it became known that the Boeing carried depleted uranium as counterbalance weights; not unknown in airplanes but not very reassuring to the people suffering from those complains. Official reactions to questions about this stressed that no toxic, dangerous or radioactive cargo had been on board of the plane. However, what kind of cargo the plane carried exactly was still unclear. Officially it was all harmless stuff: fruit, perfume and "machine parts", but there were other rumours.

Especially when it turned out that much of the cargo had not been checked, with not even the documentation spot checked. Rumours that this cargo did contain dangerous elements therefore kept appearing. And then it became clear that the depleted uranium probably did release harmful toxins during the crash and resulting fire, with medical research done on survivors in march of 1998 showed they had higher levels of uranium in their bodies then was normal.

So what was El Al hiding and why did the Dutch government seem to support them in trying to cover this up?

Well, we still don't really know, though we do now know that the plane's cargo was not as innocent as it first seemed. It's only in 1999, seven years after the disaster that the whole truth becomes known. It turns out that there was some 6,5000 kilogram of dangerous substances on board, mostly flammable substances of one kind or another, as well as some toxic substances. Alos on board are two shipments of military cargo destined for the Israeli army. This cargo would largely consist of spare parts for DC3 cargo planes. More interestingly, the cargo also contained dimethyl m ethylphosphonate, a precursor chemical for the production of Sarin nerve gas... No wonder El Al tried to hide this.

All of this finally came to light during the parliamentary inquiry held in 1998-1999 (PDF report in Dutch here), after more and more had been reported or rumoured in the press and earlier inquiries. But is was only due to the consistent badgering by survivors and their supporters in the press and parliament (with my own party, the Dutch Socialist Party playing its part) that the inquiries came so far. If it had been for the then governments, El-Al and the aerospace establishment, all this would still be hidden.

Because that's the default for the powers that be. With almost any disaster there will be hidden sides to the story, things They don't want us, the public to know: because they fucked up, because of corruption or powerful commercial interests doing the wrong thing, deliberately or not. Politics will always play a role and if the victims are poor, they willbe screwed over...

[Ahknaton]

Profile: Solkatronic Chemicals Inc

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?id=1521846767-813

Positions that Solkatronic Chemicals Inc has held:

Solkatronic Chemicals Inc actively participated in the following events:
6:25 pm October 4, 1992

El Al Flight LY1862, en route from New York to Tel Aviv, crashes into a block of apartment buildings shortly after take-off from Schiphol Airport, located south-east of Amsterdam. At least 43 people on the ground are killed (The exact number of deaths is unknown, since many of the incinerated victims were undocumented immigrants). Information about the plane’s cargo and the crash is suppressed: El Al withholds information about the plane’s several tons of “military cargo;” 12 hours of videotape made during the rescue and clean-up operation (42 cassettes in all), along with police audiotapes, are erased and shredded; and El Al documents and the plane’s cockpit voice recorder (CVR) mysteriously disappear. It is later learned that the plane, a Boeing 747, was carrying several tons of chemicals, including hydrofluoric acid, isopro-panol and dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP)—three of the four chemicals used in the production of sarin nerve gas. The shipment of chemicals—approved by the US commerce department—reportedly came from Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Morrisville, Pennsylvania and its final destination was the Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) in Ness Ziona near Tel Aviv, Israel, which is reported to be the “Israeli military and intelligence community’s front organization for the development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons.” A former IIBR biologist later tells the London Sunday Times in October of 1998, “There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon... which is not manufactured at the institute.” In fact, it was IIBR that provided the poison and the antidote used in the attempted assassination of a Hamas leader in Jordan in 1998. The IIBR does not appear on any maps and is off-limits even to members of Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset. Israel denies that the chemicals were to be used in the production of chemical weapons and instead claims that they were needed to test gas masks. But as an article in Earth Island Journal notes: “[T]his explanation is puzzling since it only takes a few grams to conduct such tests. Once combined, the chemicals aboard Flight 1862 could have produced 270 kilos of sarin—sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city.” During hearings on the crash in 1999, it is learned that since 1973, El Al planes are never inspected by customs or the Dutch Flight Safety Board and that El Al security at Schiphol is a branch of the Israeli Mossad. Furthermore, it is discovered that every Sunday evening a mysterious El Al cargo flight arrives at Schiphol en route from New York to Tel Aviv. The flights are never displayed on the airport arrival monitors and the flights’ documents are processed in a special, unmarked room. [Earth Island Journal, 1999; BBC, 10/2/1998; Covert Action Quarterly, 10/20/2004] Over a thousand residents living near the crash site later become sick with respiratory, neurological and mobility ailments and a rise in cancer and birth defects is later detected among the population. [ZNet, 10/12/2002]

Entity Tags: El Al, Solkatronic Chemicals Inc, Institute for Biological Research (IIBR)