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"US Bio-Warfare laboratories in West Africa are the origins of the Ebola epidemic"

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Could Ebola Have Escaped From US Bio-warfare Labs? American law professor Francis A. Boyle, answers questions for tvxs.gr and reveals that USA have been using West Africa as an offshore to circumvent the Convention on Biological Weapons and do bio-warfare work.

Prof. Francis Boyle

Prof. Francis Boyle

– by Aggeliki Dimopoulou

Is Ebola just a result of health crisis in Africa – because of the large gaps in personnel, equipment and medicines – as some experts suggest?

That isn’t true at all. This is just propaganda being put out by everyone. It seems to me, that what we are dealing with here is a biological warfare work that was conducted at the bio-warfare laboratories set up by the USA on the west coast of Africa. And if you look at a map produced by the Center of Disease Control you can see where these laboratories are located. And they are across the heart of Ebola epidemic, at the west coast of Africa. So, I think these laboratories, one or more of them, are the origins of the Ebola epidemic.

US government agencies are supposed to do defensive biological warfare research in these labs. Is there any information about what are they working on?

Well, that’s what they tell you. But if you study what the CDC and the Pentagon do… They say it is defensive, but this is just for public relation purposes than anything. It’s a trick. What it means is what they decide at these bio-warfare labs. They say, “well we have to develop a vaccine”, so that’s their defensive argument. Then what they do is to develop the bio-warfare agent itself. Usually by means of DNA genetic engineering. And then they say, “well to get the vaccine we have to develop the bio-warfare agent” – usually by DNA genetic engineering – and then they try to work on the vaccine. So it’s two uses type of work. I haven’t read all these bio-warfare contracts but that’s typical of the way the Pentagon CDC has been doing this since at least the 1980’s. I have absolute proof from a Pentagon document that the Center of Disease Control was doing bio-warfare work for the Pentagon in Sierra Leone, the heart of the outbreak, as early as 1988. And indeed it was probably before then because they would have had to construct the lab and that would have taken some time. So we know that Fort Detrick and the Center for Disease Control are over there, Tulane University, which is a well-known bio-warfare center here in USA – I would say notorious for it – is there. They all have been over there.

In addition, USA government made sure that Liberia, a former colony of the USA, never became a party to the Biological Weapons Convention, so they were able to do bio – warfare work over there – going back to 1980’s – the USA government, in order to circumvent the Biological Weapons Convention. Likewise, Guinea the third state affected here – and there is an increase now – didn’t even sign the Biological Weapons Convention. So, it seems to me, that the different agencies of the US government have been always there try to circumvent the Biological Weapons Convention and engage bio-warfare work. Indeed, we had one of these two lab bio-warriors admit in the NY Times that they were not over there for the purpose of either screening or treating people. That’s not what these labs are about. These labs are there in my opinion to do bio-warfare work for different agencies of the US government. Indeed, many of them were set up by USAID. And everyone knows that USAID is penetrated all up and down by the CIA and CIA has been involved in bio-warfare work as well.

Are we being told the truth about Ebola? Is that big outbreak began all of a sudden? How does it spread so quickly?

The whole outbreak that we see in the west coast of Africa, this is Zaire/Ebola. The most dangerous of five subtypes of Ebola. Zaire/Ebola originated 3500 km from the west coast of Africa. There is absolutely no way that it could have been transmitted 3500 km. And if you read the recently published Harvard study on the DNA analysis of the west Africas’ Zaire/Ebola there is no explanation about how the virus moved there. And indeed, it’s been reported in the NY Times that the Zaire/Ebola was found there in 1976, and then WHO ordered to be set to Porton Down in Britain, which is the British equivalent to Fort Detrick, where they manufacture all the biological weapons for Britain. And then Britain sent it to the US Center for Disease Control. And we know for a fact that the Center for Disease Control has been involved in biological warfare work. And then it appears, at least from whatever I’ve been able to put together in a public record, that the CDC and several others US bio-warriors exported Zaire/Ebola to west Africa, to their labs there, where they were doing bio-warfare work on it. So, I believe this is the origins of the Zaire/Ebola pandemic we are seeing now in west Africa.

Why would they do that?

Why would they do that? As I suggested to try to circumvent the Biological Weapons Convention to which the US government is a party. So, always bio-warriors do use offensive and defensive bio-warfare work, violating the Biological Weapons Convention. So effectively they try to offshore it into west Africa where Liberia is not a party and Guinea is not a party. Sierra Leone is a party. But in Sierra Leone and Liberia there were disturbances which kept the world from really paying attention of what was going on in these labs.

USA sent troops to «fight» Ebola. What do you think about that move?

The US military just invaded Liberia. They send in the 101st Airborne Division to Liberia. That’s an elite division of combat and they have no training to provide medical treatment to anyone. They are there to establish a military base in Liberia. And the British are doing the same in Sierra Leone. The French are already in Mali and Senegal. So, they’re not sending military people there to treat these people. No, I’m sorry.

Weren’t they afraid Ebola’s going to go out of control even in the USA or EU in a massive way?

It’s already gone in the USA and the European Union. So, there it is. Which raises the question: Was this Zaire/Ebola weaponized at any of these labs? I don’t have an answer to that question. I am trying to get an answer. And therefore it is much more dangerous than the WHO and the CDC are telling everyone. The WHO and the CDC are up to their eyeballs in this. They know all about what ‘s going on. It was the WHO that ordered the original Zaire/Ebola in 1976 to be sent to Porton Down for biological warfare purposes. So this could be more dangerous than the WHO and the CDC are saying.

And you can’t believe anything they telling you because they are involved in that. But certainly I can’t say it has been weaponized. I don’t know that yet for sure. I have the Harvard genetic analysis of it. When I was in college I had very good courses in genetics, and biochemistry and population biology but I am not a professor of genetics. I have a friend who is a professor of genetics and he is going to take a look at this and try to figure out if there’s been DNA genetic engineering perpetrated or performed on the Zaire/Ebola. Is there a genetically modified organism at work, a GMO? I don’t know. But if a GMO is at work that’s a pretty good sign it’s been weaponized. But in anyway, it is far more dangerous than the CDC and the WHO are telling anyone, because it’s clearly transmitted for a certain distance – we don’t know how far – by air. Breathing and coughing and sneezing. So, anyone treating people, seems to me, are going to need not only a protective suit but probably a breathing apparatus, at minimum. And you saw what happened to that Spanish nurse and that Spanish priest that were brought in, infected with Ebola. So right now the WHO and the CDC are telling healthcare workers that in addition to suits they need breathing apparatuses. So, again, I don’t believe you can trust anything the WHO or the CDC are telling you. And I really don’t know about the European Health Agency… If they‘re believing the WHO and the CDC then, in my opinion, they ‘re not properly protecting the health of the European people. And it’s simply bizarre that the CDC and WHO are relegating the screenings to the people in west Africa. It’s just bizarre. They need to be protecting health of their own people and they aren’t doing that. I read some of the European press but I’m not sure precisely what the European Health Agency is recommending but they certainly can’t rely upon the WHO and the CDC. As for Greece, I know you have your own Health Ministry there and they cannot rely upon them at all, as well.

Some experts told recently the Forbes magazine that even ISIS could use Ebola as a biological weapon. I would like to have your comment on that.

This is total propaganda. These people are trying to distract public opinion from the fact. My opinion is that the origins of the current pandemic came out of the USA bio-warfare labs in west Africa. That’s what is going on here. ISIS has nothing to do with this. That’s just propaganda which is trying to scare and distract public attention away of what really is going on here. They doing the same thing here in USA. That’s what we need to concentrate on. Number one. And number two? We have to find out: was this Zaire/Ebola GMOed by either Porton Down or CDC or these US bio-warfare labs? It is far more dangerous than it currently appears. That’s the real issue. And I don’t have an answer to that question. It was the US government labs that research here. I’m not saying that Ebola was released deliberately by these labs. I have no evidence to that. It could have escaped. But this is really what we need to be focusing on. Not ISIS. It’s ridiculous, it’s preposterous.

What do you think should be done?

I would encourage the Greek government to convene an emergency meeting of your top health science people and to look into this on comprehensive bases and figure out what to do under these circumstances to protect the health of people of Greece. In particular they must not believe anything they are being told by the WHO and CDC. There is a need of open objective minds here about what is really going on. I think this needs to be done.

Back in 1985, I was down in Nicaragua investigating atrocities of the Contras there and all of a sudden the country was hit with an outbreak of a hemorrhaging Dengue Fever which is similar to Ebola. And it seemed pretty suspicious to me. So I met with some of the highest level officials of the Nicaraguan government and said: “you know, this very well could be US bio-warfare against Nicaragua. They did the same thing to Cuba. And my advice is you convene health care medical experts, not politicians, to look into this. And if you agree with me and that’s the result, file a complaint with the UN Security Council for violation of the Biological Weapons Convention against the USA”. And eventually that is what they did. Here I am not recommending the Greek authorities to file a complaint against the USA. What I am recommending is the same thing I did to the Nicaraguans. That you need to convene some of your top experts geneticists, doctors, etc.

And don’t get anyone in this group who has ever done any type of research for any agency of the US government. They are completely unreliable. Get Greeks experts completely independent of the US government or the British government. It’s funny here in the USA when the media want to get experts on this, all the experts they talk to are people who have done biological warfare work for the USA. And they are up to their eyeballs on this Ebola. And doing research on this Ebola. Of course they’re not going to give you proper advice. So, find this experts and make sure they never done any research for USA or Britain on any of this stuff but are qualified and can give you a qualified opinion of what is really going on and how dangerous this stuff is. And then aim to protect the health of Greek people. You definitely don’t have to wait for the European Union in Brussels to do it for you. I’m not telling Greece what to do. I’m just telling you how to do it. And this should be done immediately. It should have been done already. But ok, better late than ever.

Francis A. Boyle is a leading American professor, practitioner and advocate of international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia – Herzegovina at the World Court. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign. He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University.

He is also the author of “Biowarfare and Terrorism”. The book outlines how and why the United States government initiated, sustained and then dramatically expanded an illegal biological arms buildup.

Read the Greek version of the interview here.

The UN is a colossal fraud just ideas—or disaster—will triumph

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United Nations

– by Fidel Castro

Absolutely no one has the right to destroy cities; murder children; pulverize homes; sow terror, hunger and death anywhere.

If today it is possible to prolong life, health and the productive time of persons, if it is perfectly possible to plan the development of the population in accordance with growing productivity, culture and development of human values, what are they waiting for to do so?

Global society has known no peace in recent years, particularly since the European Economic Community, under the absolute, inflexible direction of the United States, decided that the time had come to settle accounts with what remained of two great nations which, inspired by the ideas of Marx, had achieved the great feat of ending the imperialist colonial order imposed on the world by Europe and the United States.

In former Russia, a revolution erupted which moved the world.

It was expected that the first great socialist revolution would take place in the most industrialized countries of Europe, such as England, France, Germany or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This revolution, however, took place in Russia, whose territory extended into Asia, from northern Europe to southern Alaska – which had been Czarist territory, sold for a few dollars to the country which would later be the most interested in attacking and destroying the revolution and the country where it occurred.

The greatest accomplishment of the new state was the creation of a union capable of bringing together its resources and sharing its technology with a large number of weak, less developed nations, unwilling victims of colonial exploitation. Would a true society of nations be convenient or not, in the current world, one in which respect is shown for rights, beliefs, culture, technologies and resources in accessible places around the world, which so many human beings would like to visit and know? And wouldn’t the world be much more just today—when in fractions of a second anyone can communicate with the other side of the planet—if people saw in others a friend or brother, and not an enemy disposed to kill, with weapons which human knowledge has been capable of creating?

Believing that human beings could be capable of having such objectives, I think that absolutely no one has the right to destroy cities; murder children; pulverize homes; sow terror, hunger and death anywhere. In what corner of the world can such acts be justified? If it is remembered that, when the last global conflict’s killing ended, the world placed its hopes in the creation of the United Nations, it is because a large part of humanity imagined it with such a perspective, although its objectives were not fully defined. A colossal fraud is what is seen today, as problems emerge which suggest the possible eruption of a war, with the use of weapons, which could mean the end of human existence.

There are unscrupulous actors, apparently more than a few, which consider meritorious their willingness to die, but above all to kill in defense of their indecent privileges.

Many are surprised to hear the statements made by some European NATO spokespeople, expressed in the style and look of the Nazi SS. On occasion, they even wear dark suits, in the middle of summer.

We have a powerful enough adversary, our closest neighbor: the United States. We warned them that we would withstand the blockade, although this would imply a very high cost for our country. There is no greater price than capitulating to an enemy, which for no reason, or right, attacks you. This was the sentiment of a small, isolated people. The rest of the hemisphere’s governments, with a few exceptions, went along with the powerful, influential empire. This was not a personal attitude on our part, but rather the sentiment of a small nation which had been not only the political, but also the economic property of the U.S. since the beginning of the century. Spain had ceded us to this country, after we had suffered almost five centuries of colonialism, and innumerable deaths and material losses in our struggle for independence.

The empire reserved the right to intervene militarily in Cuba, on the basis of a constitutional amendment imposed on an impotent Congress, incapable of resisting. Besides being owners of almost all of Cuba, vast land holdings, the largest sugar mills, mines, and banks – with even the prerogative of printing our currency – they did not allow us to produce enough grain to feed the population.

When the USSR collapsed, and the socialist camp disappeared as well, we continued resisting. Together, the revolutionary state and people continued our independent march.

I do not wish, nevertheless, to dramatize our modest history. I prefer rather to emphasize that the empire’s policy is so dramatically ludicrous that its relegation to the dustbin of history will not long be delayed. Adolph Hitler’s empire, inspired by greed, went down in history with no more glory than that of the encouragement given to aggressive bourgeois governments of NATO, which became the laughing stock of Europe and the world, with their euro, which along with the dollar, will soon become wet paper, and they will be required to depend on the yen, and rubles as well, given the emerging Chinese economy, closely linked to Russia’s enormous economic and technical potential.

Cynicism is something which has become symbolic of imperial policy.

As is known, John McCain was the Republican candidate in the 2008 elections. This individual came into the public light as a pilot who was shot down while his plane bombed the populous city of Hanoi. A Vietnamese missile hit the aircraft in action, and the plane and pilot fell into a lake located close to capital, on the city’s outskirts.

Upon seeing the airplane crash and a wounded pilot attempting to save himself, a retired Vietnamese soldier who was making his living in the area came to his aid. As the old soldier offered his help, a group of Hanoi residents who had suffered the aerial attacks, came running to settle accounts with the murderer. The soldier himself persuaded his neighbors not to do so, since the man was taken prisoner and his life must be respected. Yankee authorities themselves communicated with the government, begging that no action be taken against the pilot.

In addition to the Vietnamese government’s policy of respecting prisoners, the pilot was the son a U.S. Navy Admiral who had played an outstanding role in WWII, and was still holding an important position.

The Vietnamese had captured a big fish in that bombing, and, of course, thinking about the eventual peace talks which would put an end to the unjust war unleashed on them, they developed a friendship with McCain, who was very happy to take advantage of the opportunity provided by that adventure. No Vietnamese, of course, recounted any of this to me, nor would I have ever asked anyone to do so. I have read about it, and it coincides completely with a few details I learned later. I also read one day that Mr. McCain had written that when he was a prisoner in Vietnam, while he was tortured, he heard voices in Spanish advising the torturers as to what they should do and how. They were Cuban voices, according to McCain. Cuba never had advisors in Vietnam. The military there knew very well how to conduct their war.

General Giap was one of the most brilliant military strategists of our era, who in Dien Bien Phu was able to place missile launchers in remote, mountainous jungles, something the yankee and European military officers considered impossible. With these launchers, they fired from such a close point that it was impossible to neutralize them, without affecting the invaders as well. Other pertinent measures, all difficult and complex, were utilized to impose a shameful surrender on the surrounded European forces.

The fox McCain took as much advantage as possible of the yankee and European invaders’ military defeats. Nixon could not persuade his National Security Council advisor Henry Kissinger to accept the idea suggested by the President himself, who in a relaxed moment said: Why don’t we drop one of those little bombs, Henry? The true little bomb dropped when the President’s men attempted to spy on their adversaries in the opposing party. This surely couldn’t be tolerated!

Despite this, Mr. McCain’s most cynical behavior has been in the Near East. Senator McCain is Israel’s most unconditional ally in Mossad’s machinations, something that even his worst adversaries would have been able to imagine. McCain participated alongside this secret service in the creation of the Islamic State which has appropriated a considerable part of Iraq, as well as a third of Syria, according to its affirmations. This state already has a multi-million dollar income, and threatens Saudi Arabia and other nations in this complex region which supplies the greatest part of the world’s oil.

Would it not be preferable to struggle to produce food and industrial products; build hospitals and schools for billions of human beings who desperately need them; promote art and culture; struggle against epidemics which lead to the death of half of the sick, health workers and technicians, as can be seen; or finally eliminate illnesses like cancer, Ebola, malaria, dengue, chikungunya, diabetes and others which affect the vital systems of human beings?

If today it is possible to prolong life, health and the productive time of persons, if it is perfectly possible to plan the development of the population in accordance with growing productivity, culture and development of human values, what are they waiting for to do so? Just ideas will triumph, or disaster will triumph.

Signature of Fidel Raul Castro

More Washington lies on Hong Kong, ISIS, and more

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Barack Obama, Oslo, Norway Photo: Sandy Young/Getty Images

Barack Obama, Oslo, Norway Photo: Sandy Young/Getty Images

– by Paul Craig Roberts

Hong Kong:

Whatever is occurring in Hong Kong, it bears no relation to what is being reported about it in the Western print and TV media. These reports spin the protests as a conflict between the demand for democracy and a tyrannical Chinese government

Ming Chun Tang in the alternative media CounterPunch says that the protests are against the neoliberal economic policies that are destroying the prospects of everyone but the one percent. In other words, the protests are akin to the American occupy movement.

Another explanation is that once again, as in Kiev, gullible westernized students have been organized by the CIA and US-financed NGOs to take to the streets in hopes that the protests will spread from Hong Kong to other Chinese cities. The Chinese, like the Russians, have been extremely careless in permitting Washington to operate within their countries and to develop fifth columns.

ISIS:

Americans are forever deceived. Remember the bullshit about “Mission Accomplished!”

The only mission that has been accomplished is the enrichment of the military/security complex and the creation of the American Police State. After eight years of the US military battering Iraq, Patrick Cockburn, one of the last front line reporters, tells us: “ISIS at the Gates of Baghdad.”

What is ISIS? There are a number of offered explanations. One from Washington and its puppet states is that it is a demonic threat to the West that cuts off people’s heads.

Another is that it is a CIA recruited and funded operation that is carrying out the neoconservatives plan to overthrow the governments in the Middle East.

My tentative explanation is that ISIS consists of Sunnis who are tired of existing in artificial states created by the British and French after World War I when the Western colonialists seized the territories of the Ottoman Empire. They are tired of being suppressed by Shia majorities or by secular dictators who use suppression to control conflict between Sunni and Shia. They are tired of being murdered, plundered, and raped by the Americans and Europeans. They are tired of being displaced and dispossessed. They are tired of the immoral Western culture imposed on them by modern technology. The Islamic State is redrawing the artificial boundaries that the Europeans created, and they are establishing an Islamic government free of the moral corruption of Western materialism and sexual promiscuity.

In short, they are tired of being dictated to and having their culture suppressed.

The huge sums of money taken from the gullible American taxpayers, people who, unlike ISIS, are willing to accept any imposition, for training the Iraqi army went entirely into the coffers of the American firms that got the training contracts. As Patrick Cockburn reports, the American trained and equipped Iraqi Army defending Mosul nominally numbered 60,000, much larger than the attacking force, but only one-third were actually present. The rest had kick-backed half their salaries to their officers in order to stay at home or to work a better paying job. When the Islamic State attacked, the Iraq army collapsed.

Afghanistan:

The new “president” of Afghanistan has agreed to Washington’s demands to which even the corrupt Karzai would not agree. The new bought-and-paid-for-puppet president has agreed for US troops to remain in Afghanistan. We will see what the Taliban have to say about this.

Ebola:

We now have the first ebola case in the US. A person in a hospital in Dallas, Texas, has brought ebola from Liberia to the US. The CDC says that the virus can be contained, like ISIS, and that no one is in danger. This remains to be seen. Because of the years of transparent lies emanating from Washington, many Americans already believe that the importation of ebola is part of the one percent’s plan to destroy the rest of us so that they have the country to themselves.

This is what comes of a government and a media that serves only the One Percent and that inflicts endless lies and disinformation on the rest of us.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

Imperialism and the Ebola catastrophe

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ebola

– by Patrick Martin, Global Research

“The present [Ebola] epidemic is exceptionally large, not primarily because of biologic characteristics of the virus, but in part because of the attributes of the affected populations, the condition of the health systems, and because control efforts have been insufficient to halt the spread of infection.” – Dr. Christopher Dye, director of strategy, World Health Organization

In the understated words of a health professional, this is a diagnosis, not just of the Ebola catastrophe, but of the failure of capitalism as a world system. Thousands have died and millions are at risk because the social conditions in the affected countries, long oppressed and exploited by the imperialist powers, have made adequate treatment of the outbreak impossible.

Ebola is a well-understood disease, spread only through direct contact with bodily fluids, and almost self-limiting in isolated rural areas because it usually kills victims before they can transmit the virus to many other people. The cumulative death toll from all previous outbreaks of Ebola was barely 2,500 people—a number exceeded in only three months by the current outbreak.

The epidemic began in rural Guinea before spreading to neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia. In Liberia, for the first time, Ebola became an urban and not a rural phenomenon, and the capital Monrovia is the first large city to experience such an outbreak, with terrible consequences.

In all three countries, the local health care systems have collapsed under the impact of the epidemic. In Sierra Leone, for example, the country’s only large children’s hospital has been forced to close after a child was diagnosed as suffering from Ebola. In Liberia, there are only a few hundred treatment beds available, meaning that most victims stay home and are cared for by family members, who then become infected.

These three countries are among the poorest in the world, ranking 161st (Sierra Leone), 176th (Guinea) and 181st (Liberia) in per capita GDP according to the 2013 World Bank listing (185 countries total). The combined health care spending of the three countries is only $900 million, a pitiful $45 per head.

Their people live in misery, but the countries themselves are rich in natural resources that have been ruthlessly exploited by major corporations and the imperialist powers that enforce their interests.

Liberia (founded by freed American slaves, and a de facto US colony) has vast resources of iron ore and palm oil, and Firestone (now Bridgestone) has operated the world’s largest rubber plantation there since 1926. Sierra Leone, a former British colony, is a top-ten diamond producer, with large reserves of rutile, a titanium-based ore. Guinea, a former French colony, has iron ore, diamonds, uranium, gold and an astonishing half of the world’s total reserves of bauxite, from which aluminum is derived. The Australian-Canadian firm Rio Tinto Alcan and Dadco Alumina of Germany dominate bauxite extraction in Guinea.

In the past three decades, all three countries have been ravaged by civil wars, coups and ethnic massacres, with their ruling elites fighting to control sources of raw materials to sell to the giant Western corporations amid increasingly difficult economic conditions on the world market. The imperialist powers directly intervened, with British and UN troops occupying Sierra Leone and the US Marines landing in Liberia.

It was the combined effect of decades of imperialist exploitation and intervention, exacerbated by the global economic crisis that erupted in 2008, which created the conditions for the present health catastrophe. When the Ebola virus made its way out of isolated jungle areas where the borders of the three countries come together, the resistance of the social organism to the epidemic was as weak as the resistance of the individual human organism to the attack of the virus.

A worst-case estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention forecasts 1.4 million cases by the end of January. With a 70 percent mortality rate, the Ebola outbreak could account for nearly a million deaths by early 2015. Moreover, as a new report published in the New England Journal of Medicine warns, the transformed role of the Ebola virus means that it could “become endemic among the human population of West Africa, a prospect that has never previously been contemplated.” In other words, Ebola could become a permanent feature of West Africa, with incalculable consequences for social and economic life throughout the region.

Against that backdrop, Thursday’s session of the United Nations General Assembly, devoted to the Ebola crisis, was a further demonstration that there will be no serious response from the major powers.

So far there has been a tiny influx of aid from the wealthy countries, the mobilization of a few hundred dedicated volunteer doctors and nurses—many now dead or withdrawn for fear of infection—and, inevitably, the Obama administration’s decision to send thousands of troops.

These soldiers have no expertise in Ebola and their only contact with the local population is likely to be shooting down victims and their panic-stricken families demanding treatment. Washington’s major concern is that the epidemic could destabilize its political stooges like Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and threaten the profit interests of major corporations.

President Obama, in his third address to the UN in three days, admitted the failure of the world response: “We are not moving fast enough. We are not doing enough … people are not putting in the kinds of resources that are necessary to put a stop to this epidemic.”

The combined total of all aid donations to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea barely tops $1 billion, and that is pledges, not actual deliveries of supplies, equipment and healthcare personnel. Contrast that to the billions made available by the imperialist powers, and their allies among the Gulf monarchies, for the new war in Syria and Iraq, let alone the hundreds of billions squandered on wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan and the trillions made available for the bailout of the banks and other financial institutions in the 2008 crash.

From the standpoint of world imperialism, the value of this region lies in the mineral wealth under the ground. The lives of the human beings who inhabit the territory are entirely secondary. As the epidemic spreads, the local people will be regarded more as an obstacle than a labor force, and their extermination will begin to be regarded as a necessary cost of doing business.

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