Attachment II - Page 12 
TOE NATION 
becembcr 10, 1983 $1.25; U.K. 65 p 
EDITORIAL 
KILLERS OF 
THE CENTER 
Evenhanded to a fault, the State Department has 
denied entry visas to Nicaragua's Interior Min- 
ister Tomls Borge and El Salvador’s Constituent 
Assembly president Roberto d’Aubuisson. Dep- 
uty Secretary of State Kenneth Dam explained 
that the Reagan Administration is committed 
to stopping “the killers” and “would-be dic- 
tators” of the left and the right. 
But what about the killers of the center? Dam 
would have a problem there, for they inhabit the 
very precincts of his employment. The United 
States is waging a war by proxy against Nicara- 
gua. It is financing and directing the civil war in 
El Salvador and aiding and abetting brutal re- 
pression in Guatemala. President Reagan risks 
global extermination by destabilizing Europe 
whh thermonuclear missiles. And then there’s 
Grenada, the Middle East, the Philippines and 
dozens of other political pies with bloody Amer- 
ican fingers in them. 
It’s hard to claim innocence with so much 
murder loose in the world, but what single stand- 
ard Could possibly indict the revolutionary soldier 
Borge and the “pathological killer” d’Aubuisson 
(as former U.S, Ambassador Robert White called 
him) on the same charge? Dam’s self-righteous 
and ^ transparently hypocritical pronouncement 
should not carry the moral authority of a gnat. 
If the State Department was seriously inter- 
ested in reducing the daiiy body count, it could 
begin in El Salvador, which is probably the 
global champion in state-sanctioned killing these 
days. There, d’Aubuisson holds power through 
the bad offices of the Reagan Administration. 
Simply by withdrawing its support, the United 
States could save tens of thousands of lives — as 
Jimn\y Carter did in Nicaragua when lie aban- 
doned Somoza. Instead, Reagan would impose 
his own brutal peace on El Salvador and all of 
Central America: the peace of the dead. 
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ULTIMATE VACCINES 
DNA— KEY TO 
BIOLOGICAL 
WARFARE? 
CHARLES PILLER 
Officially, the United States has renounced 
“germ warfare,” and in 1981 the Reagan Adminis- 
tration precipitately condemned Vietnam's alleged 
spread of “yellow rain” in Cambodia. In 1969, 
President Richard Nixon pledged that the United 
States would never develop or use biological 
' weapons, and in 1972 he signed the Convention 
on the Prohibition of the Development, Produc- 
tion and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biologi- 
cal) and Toxin Weapons, which bans even the 
possession of such agents. 
Yet under the guise of “defensive" research, 
which the treaty technically permits, the Depart- 
ment of Defense has sponsored a bread program 
of studies, applying the latest techniques of 
genetic engineering in ways that could give the 
U.S. military the capability to wage biological 
war. The results of that research could send the 
arms race off on another dangerous spiral. 
Th; Pentagon’s biological warfare (B.W.) 
researchers are using recombinant DNA (“gene- 
splicing”) technology, whose peacetime applica- 
tions have already raised serious moral ques- 
tions. Recombinant DNA is a process whereby 
segments of DNA, the basic genetic blueprint, 
are removed from the cell of one species and 
attached to that of another, creating a “new” 
organism. A related development is hybridoma 
technology, by which different kinds of cells 
arc fused, creating “immortal” cell lines that 
do not die off after a few generations, as do 
normal cells. 
Pentagon researchers arc not using gene* 
splicing and hybridoma techniques to create new 
“super germs," or to enhance the virulence and 
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