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Horrific, yet sadly not the only time the US government has used bio weapons on their own population. The most well known examples are MKUltra: https://en.wiki
by bluefishinit 3y ago
Horrific, yet sadly not the only time the US government has used bio weapons on their own population.
The most well known examples are MKUltra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
And the Tuskegee Syphilis Study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
If you want to look at something slightly more speculative, I recommend Dr. Mary's Monkey: https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Marys-Monkey-Cancer-Causing-Assassination/dp/0977795306 https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Marys-Monkey-Cancer-Causing-Assass...
It talks about how the CIA worked with Dr. Mary Sherman and Dr. Alton Ochsner to develop a cancer causing bio-weapon intended to give Castro cancer, but ultimately became part of the plot to assassinate JFK when that fell through.
- lelandfe 3y agoAlso Sea-Spray: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray
- ImHereToVote 3y agoI think the takeaway is that the CIA doesn't do anything nefarious nowadays. After all those sizeable reforms and firings, the CIA is now a completely benign entity. After those famous reforms that they had. It is now for instance illegal for the CIA to have psyops propaganda campaigns targeting American civilians for instance. Thank god for all those reforms that they have had. Those good old CIA reformed fellas.
- lucubratory 3y agoI also agree that the CIA has been completely reformed and all wrongdoing was in the past; it really doesn't make any sense to examine their conduct too closely today, that just makes everyone's life worse. I would also like to note that myself and my family are not under duress but unfortunately cannot make physical appearances at the moment.
- colpabar 3y ago> it really doesn't make any sense to examine their conduct too closely today I personally believe that anyone who has ever even thought of doing this is a far right extremist and honestly we should just put them in jail.
- hulitu 3y agoYou forgot the/s.
- dennis_jeeves1 3y ago/s Not needed for good reason.
- _8j50 3y agoThe CIA is not an independent organization. They are directed by the president and have congressional oversight. Keep in mind thar these "nefarious" programs, as far as I know were not hidden from congressional oversight. This stuff just isn't an election time issue.
- ImHereToVote 3y agohttps://thehill.com/homenews/administration/312605-schumer-trump-being-really-dumb-by-going-after-intelligence-community/ https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/312605-schumer-t...
- jacooper 3y agoIm sure all the people who lived through CIA backed coups would agree
- the_only_law 3y agoI’m guessing GP is sarcasm.
- Convolutional 3y agoRegarding MKUltra - the only reason we know what we know about it, after the CIA director directed in 1973 that all documents on it be destroyed, is that some of the MKUltra documents were mislabeled and not destroyed. They were discovered in a 1977 FOIA request.
- willcipriano 3y agoRemember when the CIA spent six years putting together six thousand page report on the torture it conducted and then "lost" it right before it was to be delivered and then "found" it again once it was clear that they weren't going to get away with that lame excuse? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cia-torture/cia-says-mistakenly-shredded-senate-torture-report-then-did-not-idUSKBN1CM2ZT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cia-torture/cia-says-...
- prottog 3y agoI liked it better when the "Deep State" was just a conspiracy theory.
- l33t233372 3y agoThe term deep state was first used popularly far after these things were made public.
- George83728 3y agoUse of the term dates back decades, and it's popularity accelerated through Bush the Younger's reign (for obvious reasons I think, Bush was widely perceived as an idiotic puppet, a theatrical figurehead for the real government (e.g. Cheney and co.)) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=deep+state&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=deep+state&yea...
- mr-wendel 3y agoLets add https://www.deseret.com/2001/2/28/19781208/toxic-utah-a-land-littered-with-poisons https://www.deseret.com/2001/2/28/19781208/toxic-utah-a-land... too the list too. Thankfully, far less "let's test on people", but Dugway, Utah has quite a history of testing and mass animal slaughters from fallout clouds and such.
- klooney 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Big_Itch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Big_Itch my favorite was the flea warfare testing
- dmix 3y ago> E23s malfunctioned during testing and the fleas were released into the aircraft where they bit the pilot, bombardier and an observer. Lovely
- dundarious 3y agoJeff Kaye is doing great work digging through the archives about US Biological Weapons (BW) use during the Korean War (on the north and on China), and has made a few notable recent discoveries. I recommend reading his work. https://twitter.com/jeff_kaye/status/1657318979378225153 https://twitter.com/jeff_kaye/status/1657318979378225153
- andsoitis 3y ago> Horrific, yet sadly not the only time the US government has used bio weapons on their own population. Hyperbole. You are saying that the US government used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis (the bacterium in question) to attack the US population, which is clearly an exaggeration on several fronts.
- bluefishinit 3y agoI don't understand your comment. Are you suggesting that the OP is false?
- dfxm12 3y agoThey are saying that the bacteria discussed in the article probably shouldn't be called a "bio weapon" and/or that the the situation described in the article is meaningfully different from the other situations brought up. The wikipedia link talks about how this bacteria was known to be safe, even in the 50s (years before the test in the article) when it was understood to be found in large quantities in natto (the Japanese food).
- andsoitis 3y agoPrecisely
- HDThoreaun 3y agoYes, the army did not "test germ warfare" on the subway.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- l3mure 3y agoRadiological testing on the now infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex: [1] > Pruitt-Igoe was not proof of a Cold War logic; it did not display the “inevitable” failures of planned housing. It was an organized sabotage—and a clandestine site for radiological weapons experimentation. These studies were conducted on innocent and unconsenting civilians, who were mostly poor, mostly Black, and mostly women and children. > Residents in some areas of [St. Louis] noticed unusual activity in the days and nights throughout 1953 and into 1954,” Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor writes in Behind the Fog, an examination of the United States’s Cold War-era radiological weapons programs. “Large puffs of a billowy powder were sprayed into the air by strangers in passing vehicles affixed with spray devices. The luminous powder lingered in the air behind the slow-moving vehicles.” [1] - https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-community-under-the-atomic-cloud/ https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-commun...
- George83728 3y agoBut what's the connection between radioactive contamination and the failure of Pruitt-Igoe? Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention any contamination issues, but says that deteriorating building maintenance and social conditions (crime, poverty, segregation, etc) were to blame. Radiation didn't vandalize the elevators or mug residents in the hallways.
- l3mure 3y ago> Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention any contamination issues FTA: > St. Louis’ baby teeth were, indeed, packed with radioactive metals. The study found that children who grew up at the height of the Cold War in 1963 had 50 times as much Strontium-90 in their teeth as children born in 1950. I'm sure we'd know a lot more should we ever be deemed worthy to know. > What is left in St. Louis are unanswered questions, and unknowns that extend further still. The Army’s documentation alludes to “certain special tests,” still unidentified. “Thus,” Martino-Taylor writes, “an unidentified set of additional covert test in St. Louis was conducted by the Army Chemical Corps, SRI, and Ralph Parsons Company that rose to a classification level higher than ‘Secret.’” > Ralph Parsons Company—now Parsons Corporation—is a defense, intelligence, security, and infrastructural engineering firm headquartered in Centreville, Virginia, down the street from the Central Intelligence Agency. > A lot of data from these studies has gone missing; discarded by the Army and other entities. Nothing you need to worry about. At one point in her research, Dr. Martino-Taylor traveled to California to put in a copy order for boxes of Philip Leighton’s papers. She had hoped to find that his files contained more information on the St. Louis experiments. Instead, Stanford University pulled the collection the very next day. As of 2022, the materials remain in the possession of Stanford’s general counsel, closed to the public. --- > Radiation didn't vandalize the elevators or mug residents in the hallways. Never mind that illegally, secretly, and non-consensually irradiating the residents is a wildly worse crime in itself, the social conditions you point out are part and parcel of the same mindset responsible for all it.
- roywiggins 3y ago> And the Tuskegee Syphilis Study This one did not involve deliberately infecting anyone, the subjects in the study already had syphilis. That doesn't make it better, but it isn't a good example of the government "using bio weapons."
- akira2501 3y agoThey wanted to know the long term consequences of syphilis. At a time when we had a readily available cure for it. What do you suppose the value of this study was other than to learn how to weaponize a disease?
- roywiggins 3y agoA disease with a readily-available cure that takes years to manifest seems like an awful candidate for weaponization.