14 ms·

CIA, MKUltra, and the cover-up of U.S. germ warfare in the Korean war (2022)

267 points by VagueMag 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
[flagged]
- hammock 3y ago
  Which names?
- yellow_postit 3y ago
  This article was first published in 2021
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
TheBlight 3y ago
I've heard another variation of this story. The broad outline is that the USG thought the Chinese/Soviets had some sort of mind-control/brainwashing technique that triggered these confessions. It was allegedly a large part of the impetus that led them to create their own ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA program. But in the end the CIA determined the only technique that was really necessary and used on the men for this purpose was sleep deprivation. I'm not claiming either version of the events is true/false. Just relaying another I've heard.
- VagueMag 3y ago
  > It was allegedly a large part of the impetus that led them to create their own ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA program. This is a commonly repeated refrain, but it just exists to provide a comforting explanation for the fact that the U.S. security state decided to embark on a program of mind control experimentation on many unwitting and unwilling human guinea pigs. The truth is that as WWII wound down, we eagerly imported Nazi scientists who were already engaged in this kind of research, and ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA/etc were just the continuation of it for all the same purposes but under a different name.
  - dmix 3y ago
    Wasn't it somewhat of a natural progression? The world was making multiple major discoveries, tons of new developments in pharma and psychology research, the space race, plus how Telecom, satellites and radio communications impact on spying etc. It makes sense that spies would dream up some super drug that makes people talk. The El Dorado miracle pill to solve hard human problems... you combine that with technological exuberance of the era and cold war pressure, it makes sense. You don't need to have Nazi imports or any one motivation to explain why they tried. The circumstances of them unethically testing it on civilians is another matter.
alwaysthesame 3y ago
[flagged]
- hammock 3y ago
  Examples? Is there any domestic crime as well?
  - alwaysthesame 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - nancyhn 3y ago
      Even sooner, we could see RFK Jr. taking care of this in 2025.
      - KennyBlanken 3y ago
        Whatever you're smoking, you might want to check with your supplier.
      - mistermann 3y ago
        I have a feeling this showdown would resolve much like it did last time.
        nancyhn 3y ago
        That would be too obvious, don't you think?
        VagueMag 3y ago
        [flagged]
        dang 3y ago
        We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
KennyBlanken 3y ago
I stopped reading when the author categorized "prisoners of war being told to read confessions over Chinese propaganda radio" as "testifying publicly", almost at the start of the piece: > It was the propaganda version of an incendiary bomb. In 1952 U.S. Air Force and Marine flyers, shot down during the Korean War, testified publicly that they had been ordered to drop biological weapons (BW) on China and North Korea. The two sentences feel intentionally written to obfuscate the fact that the statements were made under duress as POWs; it strongly implies that they testified, after the war, about dropping biological weapons. Even if much of what he does discuss did happen (the US secretly pardoning Japanese units that did absolutely horrific experiments on people for chemical and biological warfare, for example, and of course we used a lot of horrific shit in Korea and Vietnam), there's so much that is unsourced / uncited mixed in. Half the links in the text are to his own writing, another chunk are to other Medium blogs, with a sprinkling of newspaper clippings (because the newspapers were so trustworthy back during that time)...pass.
- quad_eye_oh 3y ago
  [flagged]
- creato 3y ago
  I really don't know what to think of HN these days. You're absolutely right, and yet this post is at the bottom being downvoted. If the pilots knew, then a large number of support crew also would have known. But the only "testimony" we have is from captured PoWs, after how many decades of opportunities for deathbed confessions? Give me a break.
  - dralley 3y ago
    I ignore any kind of political discussion on HN after the dominant narrative on a couple of Ukraine threads was straight Russian propaganda and "Ukraine is doomed" etc etc.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  >it strongly implies that they testified, after the war, about dropping biological weapons. It directly says it happened in 1952, and links to a newspaper clearly saying the 'confession' was made by captured American officers. How does it imply the exact opposite of what it says?
the-dude 3y ago
This reminds me of a video I stumbled across on YT : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMq-fApmzts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMq-fApmzts This guy alleges that the US were 'kind' on Japan (only light tribunal?) after the war because they wanted to acquire the bio-warfare knowledge of the Japanese. And the Japanese tested bio-bombs.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  The US had invaded Japan, they did not need to be "nice" to acquire any of Japan's knowledge. My understanding is that the US were worried about the communists and Japan's stability in general and decided not to unduly rock the boat.
  - discardedrefuse 3y ago
    There's some interesting analysis of WWII that posits that the nukes were completely unnecessary. Stalin was poised to invade Japan from the north so the US had to act fast. https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap... I don't know how accurate this is, but its a good read.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - daemoens 3y ago
      The issue with this argument is that neither the bomb nor the imminent Soviet invasion ended the war. The bombs were certainly one of the largest factors that ended the war, but it also wasn't the sole factor that ended the war.
    - refurb 3y ago
      One piece that is always missing in these arguments is - what was the alternative? Blockade Japan into submission? Is hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians dying of hunger better than being killed by an atomic weapon?
GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
This reminds me of Gulf War I when Iraqi TV was displaying what they claimed was the wreckage from a downed America fighter jet. It was shell halves from an American cluster bomb, a CBU-58 I think.
ttctciyf 3y ago
If you don't have a medium login (like me) you can read the full article archived[1] A bit tangential to the central thesis, but John Marks' 1979 classic The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, referenced by TFA, is online[2]. Chapter 8, Brainwashing[3], has interesting details about CIA-friendly journalist Edward Hunter's PR campaign to frame "brainwashing" (a term he coined) as a uniquely communist form of political indoctrination via technological means. > In September 1950, the Miami News published an article by Edward Hunter titled " 'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party." It was the first printed use in any language of the term "brainwashing," which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who worked under cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. He made up his coined word from the Chinese hsi-nao—"to cleanse the mind"—which had no political meaning in Chinese. > American public opinion reacted strongly to Hunter's ideas, no doubt because of the hostility that prevailed toward communist foes, whose ways were perceived as mysterious and alien. Most Americans knew something about the famous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, at which the Cardinal appeared zombie-like, as though drugged or hypnotized. [...] Americans were familiar with the idea that the communists had ways to control hapless people, and Hunter's new word helped pull together the unsettling evidence into one sharp fear. Marks then touches on the bioweapon allegation without further examination: > The brainwashing controversy intensified during the heavy 1952 fighting in Korea, when the Chinese government launched a propaganda offensive that featured recorded statements by captured U.S. pilots, who "confessed" to a variety of war crimes including the use of germ warfare. 1: https://archive.is/8stAi https://archive.is/8stAi 2: https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm 3: https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm
_8j50 3y ago
In unrelated news: war is very not nice. Makes people do mean things.
phpisthebest 3y ago
You can not have "Government by the people, for the people" when you allow some people to keep secrets from other people under the guise of "national security" Self governance is incompatible with states secrets, and only leads to abuse, corruption, and tyranny. History is full of known abuses, and for every known abuse there is the potential for LOTS of unknown abuse. One can say "well congress will hold them accountable" but along time ago congress passed a law to declassify everything around JFK assassination, yet multiple presidents after bring pressured by the CIA for "national security reasons" have refused to release all kinds of document in direct violation of that law. the CIA, any other agency with the power to "classify" things, is a direct and ever present threat to not only liberty but the underpinning of democracy everyone claims to support.
- colordrops 3y ago
  Another problem with state secrets is that the class of people with access to secrets is usually biased toward specific groups, races, or creeds, and said secrets are used to keep the group in a position of power.
- kornhole 3y ago
  How would we be able to weaponize human rights abuses in other countries if the world knew we were deploying bioweapons? Censhorship, propaganda, and secrecy is the answer.
- jeffreyames 3y ago
  Not just secrets but deliberate misinformation in the name of national security
- the-printer 3y ago
  "Self governance" at the scale being discussed here is a myth.
  - api 3y ago
    I wonder to what extent governance itself becomes a myth at mega-nation scales. The system may behave as if governed, but if it decides not to could anyone stop it?
reso 3y ago
Highly recommend the third season of the podcast Blowback, which does a broad re-history of the Korean War and touches on these topics.
GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
Biological weapons are not used by the US due to practicality, not morality. 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities. 2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die. 3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area. Spray tanks require flying at low altitude at slow speeds, or multiple deployments at high speeds. Munitions with bursters are problematic because the explosive burster tends to destroy much of the biological agent that you're trying to spread. 4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so. 5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect. Long after the Korean War, the Soviet microtoxin program overcame many of these problems. The Americans took a different approach and focused on improving nerve agents, with the most recent development (that I know of) being a multi-part agent called GB-2.
- rvba 3y ago
  GB is sarin. What is that GB-2? Cannot find much information about anything like that via google.
  - GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
    https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/831901-overview https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/831901-overview "Known binary agents include the following: GB binary (sarin, GB2): DF is located in 1 canister, while OPA is in a second canister. The isopropyl amine binds to the hydrogen fluoride generated during the chemical reaction. After deployment of the weapon, the 2 canisters rupture and the chemical mixture produces GB."
    - rvba 3y ago
      Binary of sarin is latest they got? Doesnt sound very "new".
      - GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
        The US destroyed it's chemical weapons stockpile in the 1990's and 2000's. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there's no use case for chemical weapons and precision weapons are more profitable.
sillywalk 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_biological_warfare_in_the_Korean_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_biological_warf...
Julesman 3y ago
[flagged]
photochemsyn 3y ago
The birth of the US biological warfare program took place at around the same time as the birth of the US nuclear weapons program, but the former is far less well known - because the nuclear weapons were actually used, and the biological weapons were not. At the same time, Nazi Germany had also developed a massive chemical weapons program based on the novel nerve agents, sarin and tabun (developed as organophosphorus pesticide agents but found to be far too toxic for use on crops), at the same time. Nazi Germany never used these agents (though Goebbels apparently called for their use against the Normandy invasion by US allies, but Hitler feared retaliation by similar means so nixed it). A not-too-bad overview of some of this history is in "The Biology of Doom" by Ed Regis, but it was written with CIA cooperation and hides a lot of facts, such as the scale of the insect-borne disease vector program (i.e. things like spreading fleas infected with bubonic plague, or distributing insect pests to destroy crops, or the chemical destruction of cropland by Agent Orange in Vietnam). Regis claims the US biological warfare program wasn't sufficiently advanced to launch attacks on Korea, but the US had also collected all the data from the Japanese biological warfare program from Shiro Ishii, of notorious Unit 731, and this wasn't revealed until the 1970s. Best evidence points to a fairly experimental biowarfare assault being launched on North Korea, with poor results. Quite psychotic, but that's America in the 1950s for you. The offensive biowarfare program ran from 1942 (see 'Merck Report') to 1969 when Nixon closed it down (publicly anyway) after a massive sheep kill caused by US Army testing of VX agent outside Dugway Utah. Look up "Shady Grove" etc, for example, which demonstrated you could infect the entire eastern seaboard with a few jets loaded with liquid suspension of anthrax spores: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3092154 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3092154 That's by Jonathan Tucker, longtime researcher of this subject. Died somewhat mysteriously in 2011 right before being put in a position to expose a lot of shady behavior related to the 9/18 and 10/9 anthrax attacks: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/biological-weapons-expert-tucker-56-was-known-for-fluency-in-politics/2011/08/02/gIQAiIV2sI_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/biological-w... Governments just hate having their history of recklessly stupid biological warfare research exposed. P.S. here's the most likely source of the those anthrax attacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Clear_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Clear_Vision Oh, and the ~ $12 trillion economic damage Covid epidemic which killed about as many people as the Holocaust was caused by idiots in a Chinese virus lab who got their technology and funding from the USA. Oops...
kornhole 3y ago
https://sc.vern.cc/@jeff-kaye/cia-mkultra-and-the-cover-up-of-u-s-germ-warfare-in-the-korean-war-3e3cce505d35 https://sc.vern.cc/@jeff-kaye/cia-mkultra-and-the-cover-up-o... was a good long read. Biowarfare and mind control have come a long way since those relatively ancient times. Now we have synthetic DNA to develop gain of function in viruses that can target segments of population such as the elders and those with comorbidities. We can follow up on that with proprietary MRNA shots formulated to take down targeted individuals in a one two punch. MKULTRA ended in name only. NATO now has a sixth operational domain of cognitive warfare that uses social media and other advanced tools. https://www.projectcensored.org/18-the-human-mind-as-new-domain-of-war-nato-plans-for-cognitive-warfare/ https://www.projectcensored.org/18-the-human-mind-as-new-dom...
dukeofdoom 3y ago
[flagged]
- _kbh_ 3y ago
  > Bioweapon labs in Ukraine is one of Putin's stated reasons for the Invasion. Allegedly work was being done on targeting specific ethnicities, like slavs. Ukraine was a very politically corrupt country, for a long time. Would not surprise me if this was true. This is one of Putins and his supporters Krokodil inspired fever dreams that never existed, Russia also said they wouldn’t invade the day before they did. They have also been saying that Ukraine is using black magic witch battalions to be attack them, do you believe?.
  - dukeofdoom 3y ago
    I base my opinon on the following: 1) Gain of function research was being done in China by Ecohealth Alliance, funded under a program headed by Fauci. The most logical motivation for this is bioweapon research. Testimony to this fact was solicited by Rand Paul in congress. Covid was made in a lab. 2) The US did send Al Qaeda prisoners to Black sites in Eastern Europe for enhanced interrogation (torture). This establishes a previous willingness to skirt international rules. 3) Given the geopolitical situation, I do think that the government in Ukraine would do almost anything the West asked of them.
    - lyu07282 3y ago
      Absolute gibberish. But on a meta level it's really scary how seemingly directed disinformation by a hostile power is so effective in a large population in the western world and we still don't have any effective way to combat it at all. It's like the potential of a third world war and a significant part of our civilian population's are allied with the enemy.
    - _kbh_ 3y ago
      > I base my opinon on the following: Your opinion appears to be a fever dream that has no basis in reality. What you posted in no way shape or form follows or proves anything that you posted previously.
motohagiography 3y ago
Reading this, my meta conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theories are rarely false, it's just that talking about them at all disqualifies you from being invited to participate in them. Your option is either to be a practical conspirator by joining in, or remain on the outside as a just theorist.
- shlant 3y ago
  > conspiracy theories are rarely false I think you might be unaware of how many conspiracies there are. Any major event at any point in history most likely has a conspiracy attached. This goes exponential the closer you get to present day.
  - tchvil 3y ago
    To make it slightly more complex, some are true
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
indigodaddy 3y ago
I thought medium.com content wasn’t allowed to be posted? Or at least anytime I post anything from medium, it is shadowbanned or whatever the term for not allowing comments..
coolhand2120 3y ago
CIA: Oh we totally did that in the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and we totally tried to cover it up for decades but hey we totally stopped now! Proof? We said we stopped didn't we? Why do you need proof? Anyone who thinks we're still not doing it is a fool. COVID19 is in all likelihood bioweapons research gone wrong. It doesn't take much sleuthing to uncover the Eco Health Alliance application DARPA to test furin cleavage sites on bat corona viruses. DARPA told them "no" and yet here we are. Saying what I'm saying will get you labeled a conspiracy theorist. Would be a shame if there were ever people that conspired and we used that heuristic to dismiss people. But that's OK with me, conspiracy theories are having a phenomenal few years! We should may consider changing the name to "spoiler alerts".

267 points by VagueMag 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

[flagged]

hammock 3y ago
Which names?
yellow_postit 3y ago
This article was first published in 2021
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

TheBlight 3y ago

I've heard another variation of this story. The broad outline is that the USG thought the Chinese/Soviets had some sort of mind-control/brainwashing technique that triggered these confessions. It was allegedly a large part of the impetus that led them to create their own ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA program. But in the end the CIA determined the only technique that was really necessary and used on the men for this purpose was sleep deprivation. I'm not claiming either version of the events is true/false. Just relaying another I've heard.

VagueMag 3y ago
> It was allegedly a large part of the impetus that led them to create their own ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA program. This is a commonly repeated refrain, but it just exists to provide a comforting explanation for the fact that the U.S. security state decided to embark on a program of mind control experimentation on many unwitting and unwilling human guinea pigs. The truth is that as WWII wound down, we eagerly imported Nazi scientists who were already engaged in this kind of research, and ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA/etc were just the continuation of it for all the same purposes but under a different name.
- dmix 3y ago
  Wasn't it somewhat of a natural progression? The world was making multiple major discoveries, tons of new developments in pharma and psychology research, the space race, plus how Telecom, satellites and radio communications impact on spying etc. It makes sense that spies would dream up some super drug that makes people talk. The El Dorado miracle pill to solve hard human problems... you combine that with technological exuberance of the era and cold war pressure, it makes sense. You don't need to have Nazi imports or any one motivation to explain why they tried. The circumstances of them unethically testing it on civilians is another matter.

alwaysthesame 3y ago

[flagged]

hammock 3y ago
Examples? Is there any domestic crime as well?
- alwaysthesame 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - nancyhn 3y ago
    Even sooner, we could see RFK Jr. taking care of this in 2025.
    - KennyBlanken 3y ago
      Whatever you're smoking, you might want to check with your supplier.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      I have a feeling this showdown would resolve much like it did last time.
      - nancyhn 3y ago
        That would be too obvious, don't you think?
        VagueMag 3y ago
        [flagged]
        dang 3y ago
        We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

KennyBlanken 3y ago

I stopped reading when the author categorized "prisoners of war being told to read confessions over Chinese propaganda radio" as "testifying publicly", almost at the start of the piece: > It was the propaganda version of an incendiary bomb. In 1952 U.S. Air Force and Marine flyers, shot down during the Korean War, testified publicly that they had been ordered to drop biological weapons (BW) on China and North Korea. The two sentences feel intentionally written to obfuscate the fact that the statements were made under duress as POWs; it strongly implies that they testified, after the war, about dropping biological weapons. Even if much of what he does discuss did happen (the US secretly pardoning Japanese units that did absolutely horrific experiments on people for chemical and biological warfare, for example, and of course we used a lot of horrific shit in Korea and Vietnam), there's so much that is unsourced / uncited mixed in. Half the links in the text are to his own writing, another chunk are to other Medium blogs, with a sprinkling of newspaper clippings (because the newspapers were so trustworthy back during that time)...pass.

quad_eye_oh 3y ago
[flagged]
creato 3y ago
I really don't know what to think of HN these days. You're absolutely right, and yet this post is at the bottom being downvoted. If the pilots knew, then a large number of support crew also would have known. But the only "testimony" we have is from captured PoWs, after how many decades of opportunities for deathbed confessions? Give me a break.
- dralley 3y ago
  I ignore any kind of political discussion on HN after the dominant narrative on a couple of Ukraine threads was straight Russian propaganda and "Ukraine is doomed" etc etc.
boomboomsubban 3y ago
>it strongly implies that they testified, after the war, about dropping biological weapons. It directly says it happened in 1952, and links to a newspaper clearly saying the 'confession' was made by captured American officers. How does it imply the exact opposite of what it says?

the-dude 3y ago

This reminds me of a video I stumbled across on YT : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMq-fApmzts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMq-fApmzts This guy alleges that the US were 'kind' on Japan (only light tribunal?) after the war because they wanted to acquire the bio-warfare knowledge of the Japanese. And the Japanese tested bio-bombs.

mytailorisrich 3y ago
The US had invaded Japan, they did not need to be "nice" to acquire any of Japan's knowledge. My understanding is that the US were worried about the communists and Japan's stability in general and decided not to unduly rock the boat.
- discardedrefuse 3y ago
  There's some interesting analysis of WWII that posits that the nukes were completely unnecessary. Stalin was poised to invade Japan from the north so the US had to act fast. https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap... I don't know how accurate this is, but its a good read.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - daemoens 3y ago
    The issue with this argument is that neither the bomb nor the imminent Soviet invasion ended the war. The bombs were certainly one of the largest factors that ended the war, but it also wasn't the sole factor that ended the war.
  - refurb 3y ago
    One piece that is always missing in these arguments is - what was the alternative? Blockade Japan into submission? Is hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians dying of hunger better than being killed by an atomic weapon?

GartzenDeHaes 3y ago

This reminds me of Gulf War I when Iraqi TV was displaying what they claimed was the wreckage from a downed America fighter jet. It was shell halves from an American cluster bomb, a CBU-58 I think.

ttctciyf 3y ago

If you don't have a medium login (like me) you can read the full article archived[1] A bit tangential to the central thesis, but John Marks' 1979 classic The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, referenced by TFA, is online[2]. Chapter 8, Brainwashing[3], has interesting details about CIA-friendly journalist Edward Hunter's PR campaign to frame "brainwashing" (a term he coined) as a uniquely communist form of political indoctrination via technological means. > In September 1950, the Miami News published an article by Edward Hunter titled " 'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party." It was the first printed use in any language of the term "brainwashing," which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who worked under cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. He made up his coined word from the Chinese hsi-nao—"to cleanse the mind"—which had no political meaning in Chinese. > American public opinion reacted strongly to Hunter's ideas, no doubt because of the hostility that prevailed toward communist foes, whose ways were perceived as mysterious and alien. Most Americans knew something about the famous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, at which the Cardinal appeared zombie-like, as though drugged or hypnotized. [...] Americans were familiar with the idea that the communists had ways to control hapless people, and Hunter's new word helped pull together the unsettling evidence into one sharp fear. Marks then touches on the bioweapon allegation without further examination: > The brainwashing controversy intensified during the heavy 1952 fighting in Korea, when the Chinese government launched a propaganda offensive that featured recorded statements by captured U.S. pilots, who "confessed" to a variety of war crimes including the use of germ warfare. 1: https://archive.is/8stAi https://archive.is/8stAi 2: https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm 3: https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks8.htm

_8j50 3y ago

In unrelated news: war is very not nice. Makes people do mean things.

phpisthebest 3y ago

You can not have "Government by the people, for the people" when you allow some people to keep secrets from other people under the guise of "national security" Self governance is incompatible with states secrets, and only leads to abuse, corruption, and tyranny. History is full of known abuses, and for every known abuse there is the potential for LOTS of unknown abuse. One can say "well congress will hold them accountable" but along time ago congress passed a law to declassify everything around JFK assassination, yet multiple presidents after bring pressured by the CIA for "national security reasons" have refused to release all kinds of document in direct violation of that law. the CIA, any other agency with the power to "classify" things, is a direct and ever present threat to not only liberty but the underpinning of democracy everyone claims to support.

colordrops 3y ago
Another problem with state secrets is that the class of people with access to secrets is usually biased toward specific groups, races, or creeds, and said secrets are used to keep the group in a position of power.
kornhole 3y ago
How would we be able to weaponize human rights abuses in other countries if the world knew we were deploying bioweapons? Censhorship, propaganda, and secrecy is the answer.
jeffreyames 3y ago
Not just secrets but deliberate misinformation in the name of national security
the-printer 3y ago
"Self governance" at the scale being discussed here is a myth.
- api 3y ago
  I wonder to what extent governance itself becomes a myth at mega-nation scales. The system may behave as if governed, but if it decides not to could anyone stop it?

reso 3y ago

Highly recommend the third season of the podcast Blowback, which does a broad re-history of the Korean War and touches on these topics.

GartzenDeHaes 3y ago

Biological weapons are not used by the US due to practicality, not morality. 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities. 2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die. 3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area. Spray tanks require flying at low altitude at slow speeds, or multiple deployments at high speeds. Munitions with bursters are problematic because the explosive burster tends to destroy much of the biological agent that you're trying to spread. 4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so. 5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect. Long after the Korean War, the Soviet microtoxin program overcame many of these problems. The Americans took a different approach and focused on improving nerve agents, with the most recent development (that I know of) being a multi-part agent called GB-2.

rvba 3y ago
GB is sarin. What is that GB-2? Cannot find much information about anything like that via google.
- GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
  https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/831901-overview https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/831901-overview "Known binary agents include the following: GB binary (sarin, GB2): DF is located in 1 canister, while OPA is in a second canister. The isopropyl amine binds to the hydrogen fluoride generated during the chemical reaction. After deployment of the weapon, the 2 canisters rupture and the chemical mixture produces GB."
  - rvba 3y ago
    Binary of sarin is latest they got? Doesnt sound very "new".
    - GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
      The US destroyed it's chemical weapons stockpile in the 1990's and 2000's. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there's no use case for chemical weapons and precision weapons are more profitable.

sillywalk 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_biological_warfare_in_the_Korean_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_biological_warf...

Julesman 3y ago

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photochemsyn 3y ago

The birth of the US biological warfare program took place at around the same time as the birth of the US nuclear weapons program, but the former is far less well known - because the nuclear weapons were actually used, and the biological weapons were not. At the same time, Nazi Germany had also developed a massive chemical weapons program based on the novel nerve agents, sarin and tabun (developed as organophosphorus pesticide agents but found to be far too toxic for use on crops), at the same time. Nazi Germany never used these agents (though Goebbels apparently called for their use against the Normandy invasion by US allies, but Hitler feared retaliation by similar means so nixed it). A not-too-bad overview of some of this history is in "The Biology of Doom" by Ed Regis, but it was written with CIA cooperation and hides a lot of facts, such as the scale of the insect-borne disease vector program (i.e. things like spreading fleas infected with bubonic plague, or distributing insect pests to destroy crops, or the chemical destruction of cropland by Agent Orange in Vietnam). Regis claims the US biological warfare program wasn't sufficiently advanced to launch attacks on Korea, but the US had also collected all the data from the Japanese biological warfare program from Shiro Ishii, of notorious Unit 731, and this wasn't revealed until the 1970s. Best evidence points to a fairly experimental biowarfare assault being launched on North Korea, with poor results. Quite psychotic, but that's America in the 1950s for you. The offensive biowarfare program ran from 1942 (see 'Merck Report') to 1969 when Nixon closed it down (publicly anyway) after a massive sheep kill caused by US Army testing of VX agent outside Dugway Utah. Look up "Shady Grove" etc, for example, which demonstrated you could infect the entire eastern seaboard with a few jets loaded with liquid suspension of anthrax spores: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3092154 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3092154 That's by Jonathan Tucker, longtime researcher of this subject. Died somewhat mysteriously in 2011 right before being put in a position to expose a lot of shady behavior related to the 9/18 and 10/9 anthrax attacks: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/biological-weapons-expert-tucker-56-was-known-for-fluency-in-politics/2011/08/02/gIQAiIV2sI_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/biological-w... Governments just hate having their history of recklessly stupid biological warfare research exposed. P.S. here's the most likely source of the those anthrax attacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Clear_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Clear_Vision Oh, and the ~ $12 trillion economic damage Covid epidemic which killed about as many people as the Holocaust was caused by idiots in a Chinese virus lab who got their technology and funding from the USA. Oops...

kornhole 3y ago

https://sc.vern.cc/@jeff-kaye/cia-mkultra-and-the-cover-up-of-u-s-germ-warfare-in-the-korean-war-3e3cce505d35 https://sc.vern.cc/@jeff-kaye/cia-mkultra-and-the-cover-up-o... was a good long read. Biowarfare and mind control have come a long way since those relatively ancient times. Now we have synthetic DNA to develop gain of function in viruses that can target segments of population such as the elders and those with comorbidities. We can follow up on that with proprietary MRNA shots formulated to take down targeted individuals in a one two punch. MKULTRA ended in name only. NATO now has a sixth operational domain of cognitive warfare that uses social media and other advanced tools. https://www.projectcensored.org/18-the-human-mind-as-new-domain-of-war-nato-plans-for-cognitive-warfare/ https://www.projectcensored.org/18-the-human-mind-as-new-dom...

dukeofdoom 3y ago

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_kbh_ 3y ago
> Bioweapon labs in Ukraine is one of Putin's stated reasons for the Invasion. Allegedly work was being done on targeting specific ethnicities, like slavs. Ukraine was a very politically corrupt country, for a long time. Would not surprise me if this was true. This is one of Putins and his supporters Krokodil inspired fever dreams that never existed, Russia also said they wouldn’t invade the day before they did. They have also been saying that Ukraine is using black magic witch battalions to be attack them, do you believe?.
- dukeofdoom 3y ago
  I base my opinon on the following: 1) Gain of function research was being done in China by Ecohealth Alliance, funded under a program headed by Fauci. The most logical motivation for this is bioweapon research. Testimony to this fact was solicited by Rand Paul in congress. Covid was made in a lab. 2) The US did send Al Qaeda prisoners to Black sites in Eastern Europe for enhanced interrogation (torture). This establishes a previous willingness to skirt international rules. 3) Given the geopolitical situation, I do think that the government in Ukraine would do almost anything the West asked of them.
  - lyu07282 3y ago
    Absolute gibberish. But on a meta level it's really scary how seemingly directed disinformation by a hostile power is so effective in a large population in the western world and we still don't have any effective way to combat it at all. It's like the potential of a third world war and a significant part of our civilian population's are allied with the enemy.
  - _kbh_ 3y ago
    > I base my opinon on the following: Your opinion appears to be a fever dream that has no basis in reality. What you posted in no way shape or form follows or proves anything that you posted previously.

motohagiography 3y ago

Reading this, my meta conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theories are rarely false, it's just that talking about them at all disqualifies you from being invited to participate in them. Your option is either to be a practical conspirator by joining in, or remain on the outside as a just theorist.

shlant 3y ago
> conspiracy theories are rarely false I think you might be unaware of how many conspiracies there are. Any major event at any point in history most likely has a conspiracy attached. This goes exponential the closer you get to present day.
- tchvil 3y ago
  To make it slightly more complex, some are true
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indigodaddy 3y ago

I thought medium.com content wasn’t allowed to be posted? Or at least anytime I post anything from medium, it is shadowbanned or whatever the term for not allowing comments..

coolhand2120 3y ago

CIA: Oh we totally did that in the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and we totally tried to cover it up for decades but hey we totally stopped now! Proof? We said we stopped didn't we? Why do you need proof? Anyone who thinks we're still not doing it is a fool. COVID19 is in all likelihood bioweapons research gone wrong. It doesn't take much sleuthing to uncover the Eco Health Alliance application DARPA to test furin cleavage sites on bat corona viruses. DARPA told them "no" and yet here we are. Saying what I'm saying will get you labeled a conspiracy theorist. Would be a shame if there were ever people that conspired and we used that heuristic to dismiss people. But that's OK with me, conspiracy theories are having a phenomenal few years! We should may consider changing the name to "spoiler alerts".