YOU MAY NOT KNOW IT BUT YOU HAVE A NEED TO KNOW

A couple of years back, I met Klare Alan, an outspoken resident of Roxbury, the densely crowded black community in Boston. As a resident and community resident she was astounded to learn that Boston Univetrsity had decided to build anew bio-lab research facility in her neighborhhod but not to employ local people but to handle some of the most dangerous pathogents known to man, viruses for which there are no known cures like EBOLA and plague. The state of the art faculity would include secretive BLS 4 labs, supposedly, the highest secure level.

As word spread in he community, safety concerns spread with them. True to form, Boson University had not consulted with its neighbors but went ahead in the name of bringing government funds to town, bolstering its prestige and pocket book. It was presented arrogantly as a “fact on the ground”–done, finito– without an impact study, by the way, or much conversation, When worries about safety were raised—since Roxbury is a neighborhood—they were dismissed by their betters in the scientific cognescenti.

Klare & Co. didn’t buy it!

In response, people created an organizaton called SAFETY NET and did what communities of color are often forced to do—fight for their rights, especially the right to be heard. (BU even tried to bribe Klare Alan with a job, to buy her silence!)

This is did not sit well with the community and soon a battle was raging with protest marches and lobbying at the City Hall where the City Councilman from Roxbury, Chuck Turner, a former civil rights worker and old friend of mine got engaged to challenge the powers that be which could see the new lab only as more money for Massachusetts and a feather in their cap. (Chuck would later be set up in a Bush era federal investigation and accused of corruption in a sting operation which he is fighting. He insists he is innocent.)

This BioLab issue, although seemingly local, caught my attention and soon I was working with a Boston area activist to investigate. The safety issue was compelling but as it turned out just the tip of a very deep iceberg that led directly to a massive multi-billion dollar national bio defense program that may be disguising a bio-offense or BIO WAR initiative involving shadowy intelligence agencies, defense contractors, and sacary as shit pathogens.

First announced in 2003, the Lab has yet to open althoughs similar labs are being funded nationwide. The National Institite of Health aclnowledged some of the concerns and is currently undertaking a year long review process. Meanwhile, the movement to stop the lab is growing. See this website!

Our efforts to make a film about all of this ran up against the realities of insufficient interest from media outlets and funders. It was like a variant on “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Ho-hum. We finished a hard hitting proposal after speaking to many experts in the field. They were all worried. The story is compelling; the issues are grave. We begged for help. It was not forthcoming.

THE ANTHRAX TRAIL

Happily, fellow producers, Bob Cohn and Eric Nadler, our former Globalvision colleagues from the South Africa Now days, were able to put together an international collaboration with producers in France and a network in Canada and produce new hard-hitting and need to know film on another angle. It takes off from what they argue are still the unsolved Anthrax cases of 2001. They investigate mysterious deaths and “suicides” of scientists and whistle blowers in the US and Britain. They travel to England, South Africa (where they meet the mysterious “Dr Death,” the scientist who ran the apartheid era biowar program) and even to Russia to show us where the anthrax trail leads. (50 people attended a Congressional screening on Wednesday.)

Check out this website:

See their videos here:

And read their new book DEAD SILENCE from Counterpoint Press.

This is a relevant and important project that is well done, even gripping. It is scary and compelling.It should be all over the mainstream media. It affects our futures. Check it out.

CRITICAL ARTS ENSEMBLE: YES!

As it happens, when I was in Buffalo last weekend, I heard a fascinating talk about biowar.

It was described the FBI investigation for TERRORISM of the critical Arts Ensemble and its organizers in Buffalo who dramatized the bio-war danger with creative artistry and other tactics that lead to the prosecution of its lead organizer and a colleague.

Artist/activist/researcher and provocateur Steve Kurtz described his ordeal and efforts to publicize the issue in an imaginative way. His book MARCHING PLAGUE: Germ Warfare and Global Public Healh (Autonomedia) is incredibly well-written as you can see from this excerpt published on their equally challenging website documenting what they did and are doing to challenge the bio war industry and alert the public.

Why is this important?

“The use of the symbolic abstraction of fear as an exchangeable sign has always been a helpful means to justify and manifest the most perverse needs of authority invested in the expansion of militarized orders and the erasure of individual autonomy. But in the United States after the 9/11 attacks, fear reigns supreme as a fundamental unit of exchange across the entire political, economic, and military spectrum.

The sign of fear filtered through the sign matrix of threat, now more than ever, not only serves the authoritarian forces of order, but the engines of profit as well. Signs such as these move at astonishing speeds through cultural and political barriers. Even the slowest bureaucracy responds to their appearance with surprising vigor, while the fastest corporate vector can use them to fuel ideological and material engines that move production and distribution at maximum velocity.”

AMEN.