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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Examples? Is there any domestic crime as well?
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I've been hearing that for decades. It's not like people don't already know about the US' largely lamentable foreign policy.
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 accoun…
"Self governance" at the scale being discussed here is a myth.
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.…
Did the US do a bunch of sketchy things in the 1950s and 60s? Absolutely. How do we know? We have the government documents. This guy has nothing, except sources of very dubious reliability and his own biases.
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
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-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
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...
This reminds me of a video I stumbled across on YT : 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.
This is a constantly changing area of history, so we're on shaky ground. The diaries of the chamberlain to Hirohito were only published a couple years ago, for example. They implicate the emperor deeply in war-time decisions in a way that contradicts the post-war narrative of a hapless well-meaning buffoon misled by his underlings. I suspect the real reason is close to the usually accepted story, though. Millions of…
I think perhaps the narrative, the evidence on-hand, primary sources, etc. could all be considered and as a body of historical evidence we could say the understanding from our perspective continues to evolve; but there's no world in which the history changes. Events, causality, arrow of time, etc.
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 s…
> 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 s…
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.
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 accoun…
The part I put in italics is too stringent. National security quite obviously necessitates classification. E.g., Turing's classified Enigma team was definitely less of a threat to democracy than, say, the WWII equivalent of an HN public bikeshedding marathon about how best to use the newly discovered codebreaking to win for the allies.
What matters is what happens when we discover abuses. E.g., AFAICT nobody from the CIA has been held accountable for what was documented (when not redacted) in the Torture Memos that came out of Feinstein's office. That kind of lack of accountability is a threat to democracy.
But it in no way implies that nothing should ever be redacted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is 1945, before the decades long alliance and best friendship between US and Japan, before Internet, computers, and most electronics. Americans can't even read the signposts in the streets, let alone find and interpret the results of extremely secret operations.
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 w…