Hate Tour-How the State Department invites and pays for extremists to visit the US.

What do an immigration advocate who claims that San Diego County is an open-air jail for Latinos and a radical Islamist who fights for the introduction of Shariah law worldwide have in common? Both have been chosen to participate in the State Department’s International Visitors Program (IVP).

The IVP has been used for more than 50 years to bring thousands of foreign politicians, scientists and other influential individuals to the United States in order to “experience America firsthand. Understandably, after 9/11, the amply-financed program has been focused on bridging the gap with Muslims worldwide and showing that the Islamic community in America also benefits from the freedoms that all Americans enjoy. However, while the program has scored some successes in achieving these goals, on more than one occasion it has proven to be poorly organized and even counterproductive. The State Department does not always appear to have a good understanding of who it is inviting to the U.S. and who it is choosing to represent America.

Last September, a group of seven Muslims from the Netherlands were chosen by the US Embassy in The Hague to tour America from coast to coast. The seven spent almost three weeks meeting with individuals and organizations that would expose them, according to officials at the Embassy, to “Diversity in America.” One of the invitees was Haci Karacaer, a Turkish national who happens to be the representative for the Dutch branch of Milli Gorus, an organization of interest to intelligence agencies throughout Europe for its strident anti-Semitic and anti-Western propaganda. German intelligence has described the group as a “foreign extremist organization” that is “anti-Democratic and hostile toward integration.” The Dutch branch of Milli Gorus, which is headed by Mr. Karacaer, organized the group’s 2002 European meeting, where former Turkish Prime Minister Nehmettin Erbakan declared (amidst the cheers of 20,000 adoring supporters) that “after the fall of the Wall, the West has found a new enemy in Islam.”

But Mr. Karacaer was not the only questionable choice. While the State Department’s guidelines describe the individuals who should be invited as “distinguished leaders from the public and private sector,” some of the seven Dutch visitors were twenty-something college students who have appeared on Dutch television to speak about immigration but have no position of relevance within the Dutch Muslim community. It is clear that the US Embassy in Holland did not check the members of the delegation with due diligence.

What is more troubling is that some members of the Dutch delegation overtly displayed the utmost contempt for America and its institutions from the very beginning of their tour. Arriving in the U.S. with the idea that they were visiting the Great Satan, they appeared determined to share their anti-American sentiment with anyone they encountered on the trip, uttering statements like “the world’s most corrupt country is the U.S.” and “American history is one of the nastiest of all times.” This continuous disrespect led their State Department-assigned escort, Daniel Paseiro, to complain to his superiors at Foggy Bottom.

Mr. Paseiro, who had escorted groups from the IVP for more than 21 years, was shocked to hear additional negative comments from some in the group about their home country of Holland (whose current prosperity was attributed by some members of the group to “profits from the slave trade”) and on Jews. In fact, when Mr. Paseiro explained to some in the group that there are only about 15 million Jews in the world, one of them, Famile Arslan, reportedly replied, “Even that number is still too many.” But the unpleasant surprises were not over for Mr. Paseiro. Following his complaints, he was shocked to realize that the State Department had no intention of taking any measure against the group and actually ordered him to be “more diplomatic” with them.

Unfortunately, this represents a common attitude at the State Department. The most shocking example of State’s hyper-sensitivity not to offend its guests came in the days immediately following 9/11, when the organizers of the IVP were faced with a controversy over what to do with a delegation of Chinese journalists who reportedly cheered and laughed while watching the attacks unfold on television. For days, State refused to suspend their program and only after the group’s escort threatened to leak the story to the media did it take some action. The suspension was officially attributed to “security reasons,” yet no other delegation was sent home during the days following 9/11.

The International Visitors Program is not intended to be a reward for people who have espoused pro-American sentiment; on the contrary, it is meant to win over the hearts of people who have negative views of the U.S. but have not necessarily had the opportunity to see the object of their contempt first-hand. Nevertheless, inviting members of extremist organizations or individuals that refuse a rational, civilized debate is, frankly, a waste of money. If, moreover, the Americans chosen to meet with the program’s foreign participants happen to be hard-line critics of the US, we have a recipe for disaster.

From Minneapolis to Atlanta, the Dutch group met with representatives of fringe organizations that only reinforced their idea that America is a racist and evil country. According to Mr. Paseiro, in San Diego, an ACLU immigration lawyer went so far as to tell the group that Hispanics are routinely stopped by INS officers and that the US Border Patrol has a policy of “shoot to kill” along the border.

In its noble attempt to improve relationships with Muslims worldwide, the State Department is reaching out to anybody who claims to be a Muslim leader, no matter if they have no following or if they have affiliations with radical or terrorist organizations. At the same time, the Americans who have been chosen to represent the country often harbor anti-American sentiments themselves and do not give a positive view of the US to the Muslim visitors they meet with. The IVP is, potentially, a very powerful weapon in the war for the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide, but the State Department is turning it into a boomerang.

Lorenzo Vidino is a senior terrorism analyst at the Investigative Project, a Washington DC-based counterterrorism research institute.

CDC gave Saddam
West Nile samples
Did Iraqis weaponize mutated form of virus?

While health officials reported this week West Nile virus has sickened 108 people in 10 states this summer, they continue to withhold opinions on how, where and why the mosquito-born disease originated.

Maybe, say some U.S. intelligence sources of Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, that's because they know.

The Centers for Disease Control gave samples of West Nile virus – among other deadly biological agents – to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s.

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Some national security sources – as well as health professionals – believe Saddam Hussein weaponized those samples and sent them back to the United States, via his ally Fidel Castro in Cuba, in revenge for his defeat in the Persian Gulf War and the decade-long sanctions imposed on his country by the U.S.

Surprisngly, it was the CDC that sent the samples directly to several Iraqi sites that weapons inspectors later determined to be part of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program, according to both CDC files and congressional records from the early 1990s. Iraq had ordered the samples, saying it needed them for legitimate medical research.

The CDC and a biological-sample company, the American Type Culture Collection, sent strains of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons, including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinum toxin, and the germs that cause gas gangrene, the records show. Iraq also got samples of other deadly pathogens, including West Nile virus.

The transfers came in the 1980s, when the United States backed Iraq in its war against Iran.

As previously reported in G2B, some U.S. health officials question why the U.S. strain of West Nile virus is deadlier to humans and birds than anywhere else on the planet – with the exception of Israel. They know West Nile virus has mutated into an illness far deadlier to human beings in the United States – but they don't know why. Interestingly, the U.S. strain appears almost identical to only one other strain in the world – the one found in Israel.

The disease is spread by mosquitoes, which feed off both birds and humans – along with other susceptible animals.

In most parts of the world where it has surfaced, the virus typically causes illness akin to the flu, bringing fever, headache, muscle aches and fatigue – unpleasant, but rarely fatal. The virus has not even proven fatal to all birds in other parts of the world. But the U.S. strain appears nearly 100 percent fatal to birds. They usually die within five days.

This has caused some health officials and scientists, as well as intelligence sources, to wonder if West Nile Virus is not a weaponized virus – one perhaps deliberately engineered and delivered to the two biggest targets of Islamic terrorism.

Israel was the first place in the world where West Nile virus was associated with killing birds. Until that outbreak in 1997, the virus was known to sicken birds, but not fatally.

Israel also was the site of an outbreak of West Nile virus in humans that caused 450 cases of neurological disease in 2000.

While some American intelligence sources are still suspicious about claims that Saddam Hussein had an active chemical and biological weapons program, others believe he unleashed that program on the U.S. in the form of West Nile virus.

While it is well-known that WNV is of Middle East origin, what is less well-known is the New Yorker report dating back to 2000 in which Saddam Hussein was quoted by a defector referring to "his final weapon, developed in laboratories outside Iraq ... free of U.N. inspection, the laboratories will develop strain SV 141 of the West Nile virus." There is also a report that the Centers for Disease Control actually sent WNV samples to Iraq in 1985.

There is increasing suspicion that one of his labs was not in Iraq at all – but less than 50 miles from the Florida coast. Cuban defectors say that Castro's Biological Front studied ways of using migratory birds to spread infectious diseases to the U.S. Saddam Hussein was also known to have close ties to Castro. And, according to Soviet defector Ken Alibek, Cuba, Iraq, Iran and other countries simultaneously received transfers of Soviet biotechnology.

Undersecretary of State John Bolton said Cuba's biological weapons capabilities underscore lingering concerns. He told an audience at the Heritage Foundation the U.S. is suspicious about Cuban biomedical laboratories and their ability to transfer biological weapons technology to Iraq, Syria and Libya – all countries that Castro visited the previous year.

In 1998, Clinton administration Defense Secretary William S. Cohen wrote a letter to Armed Service Committee Chairman Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., stating that he was "concerned about the use of Cuba as a base for intelligence activities directed against the United States" and "Cuba's potential to develop and produce biological agents, given its biotechnology infrastructure."

Cohen's letter concluded by telling Thurmond that the Department of Defense "remains vigilant to the concerns posed by Castro's Cuba." Attached to the letter was the defense secretary's classified report, "The Cuba Threat to U.S. National Security." The report's publicly released summary read: "Cuba's biotechnology industry is one of the most advanced in emerging countries and would be capable of producing biological warfare agents."

That same year, the CIA released a report that warned of the dangers of a biological terrorist attack on the U.S. The report explained that such an assault, if launched by a country with sophisticated means, could go undetected and be erroneously attributed to natural causes. The report listed a little over a dozen smaller nations as suspected of possessing biological weapons. Included high on the list was Cuba.

But it was a July 12, 1999, article in The New Yorker magazine by Richard Preston, a best-selling author, that perhaps laid the groundwork for the concerns about a Cuba-Iraq connection to West Nile.

Preston stated that the U.S. government "keeps a list of nations and groups that it suspects either have clandestine stocks of smallpox or seem to be trying to buy or steal the virus." That list is now known to include Cuba.

Preston's article also laid out suspicions that the outbreak of West Nile Virus on the East Coast may have come from a deliberate terrorist act and not from naturally occurring causes. Initially, some scientists scoffed at Preston's claim, but things have now changed.

One entomology expert who maintains an open mind on the West Nile outbreak, Dr. Jonathan F. Day of the University of Florida, said: "The sporadic appearance of WNV is disturbing, especially its appearance in the Florida Keys. It really appears that WN has been seeded throughout the eastern half of the United States. I guess the question is, by whom?"

Day continued, "The Florida and East Coast situations relative to human cases are remarkable. In some places, Atlanta, the Florida Keys, WNV appeared in humans without any other indication that the virus was present. In some cases, humans are acting as sentinels for the sentinel (animal carriers). This is unlike any other mosquito-borne virus in North America."

Dr. Manuel Cereijo, a professor at Florida International University, wrote in an October 1997 paper, titled "Castro: A Threat to the Security of the United States": "To conduct a bacteriological attack, a country or a terrorist group does not need to have any sophisticated means of delivery, such as a missile. A container the size of a five-pound sugar bag can bring bacteriological materials capable of causing over 50,000 causalities in an urban area, depending on the flow of air and atmospheric conditions."

In the same paper, Dr. Cereijo states, "Many Cuban engineers and scientists have been trained by former East Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam and China."

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