The military tested bacterial weapons in San Francisco in 1950

The presumed original intent of the test was to assess the military risk from a bacteriological attack upon a U.S. city.

You couldn't build an empty mock city and test with it. Humans are a necessary element of biological contagion.

You couldn't get voluntary, informed consent from the inhabitants of an actual city, because behavioral patterns might change in response to the knowledge that the test was being conducted, and a lot of people would refuse to participate. Public knowledge of the test would screw up the test and make the results unreliable.

So there's no way to ethically perform such an experiment. But many soldiers also consider it their ethical imperative to protect the civilian populations of their country as well as they are able. Therefore, the rationale would be that in order to protect the lives of 300 million, the experimenters must trespass upon the rights upon 1 million, in a manner that most of them probably wouldn't even notice.

Of course, those people, having entirely too much trust in the essential goodness of their government, didn't consider that the same data could also be used to make bacteriological attacks on foreign populations more effective. They didn't consider whether their "harmless" bacterium was actually harmless. And they refused to take responsibility for the actual, demonstrable harm to unsuspecting humans.

This is why we have international conventions against certain military activities, and why we should not tolerate such tests to be conducted upon us, or anyone else. It makes no difference whether the humans are the subjects or the test medium, because the purpose of the test was to study biological warfare upon humans. And a biological weapon is one of the few weapons creatable at our current technology level that have the potential to annihilate our entire species. Any data gathered at all in this domain can only serve to make such weapons more effective, and defenses against them more complex. None of us can afford a human-versus-human arms race in this, as the one conducted between us and other species is a difficult enough struggle already.

I'm not clear on how this is a productive comment. We have 60 years more science on how bacterial infections work. It was only 10 years ago that it was found to be dangerous. How many things are you doing today that will be found appalling in 60 years?

The U.S.A government is known to fund and train terrorist groups. There isn't exactly a shortage of CIA-funded/CIA-trained terrorists out there.

I don't put it outside the realm of possibility. There is a lot of motivation to invading Iran/Iraq under a guise and what better way to usher in a surveillance state than "preventing terrorism and keeping you safe"?

People in power have a lot of motivation to remain in power. That includes keeping "the masses" ignorant and satisfied with their lives. Satisfied people don't rebel or overthrow systems of power that appear to be working in their favor.

After hundreds of years of history repeating itself with same/similar stories over different time periods. I find myself thinking people are completely ignorant of history when they full trust their own government at its word. I will always entertain the possibility my government did something bad. Because history proves that it isn't all that unlikely...

Now entertaining the possibility of and actually believing it occurred are two different things. I cannot disprove 9/11 being an inside job - and I can see motivations as to why a government may do it (if I didn't see why a government would, I wouldn't entertain the thought). The fact that, as an individual, I can see motivation for a government to commit an act against its own people means the government itself might reach this same conclusion. So the idea is possible.

Do I think it was? No. I think it was simply government negligence. Failing to respond to warnings we received from Russia (2001 wasn't much past the 90's) and general disorganization.