I grew up in St. Louis and I found out about chemical testing[0] that went on here awhile ago.
I think the scariest part was that I'm sure it was specifically tested in a low-income area purposely, because the people there could probably do less about it. A relevant bit from the article:
> Spates, now 57 and retired, was born in 1955, delivered inside her family's apartment on the top floor of the since-demolished Pruitt-Igoe housing development in north St. Louis. Her family didn't know that on the roof, the Army was intentionally spewing hundreds of pounds of zinc cadmium sulfide into the air.
> Three months after her birth, her father died. Four of her 11 siblings succumbed to cancer at relatively young ages.
The fact that there probably are still people in the US government making similar decisions makes me a lot more nervous about life.
"... the court held that the government was immune to a lawsuit for negligence and that they were justified in conducting tests without subjects' knowledge.".
I sincerely hope there was some rationale to this decision that I do not know or understand. Otherwise it would be very hard for me to have any faith left in our judicial system.
"rationale to this decision that I do not know or understand"
I imagine the rationale went like this:
We have intelligence that the soviets are developing weapons with deadly bacteria X with delivery mechanisms {Y, Z, ...}. We believe they can deliver an attack on this set of cities and we have this set of probabilities of stopping it. We've conducted experiments on animals and understand how X would affect an organism similar to a human. Now we need to figure out how it would spread through a city to prepare for the scenario where an actual attack took place. We need to test our metropolitan areas for spread by an airborne bacterium. Let's pick the most harmless bacteria we can find not native to an area and see how it spreads.
The framing in the article is incredibly biased. By no definition of the word is it accurate to call humans the subjects of the experiment.
If the risk of a bacterial attack was real, then it would be negligent not to prepare for such an attack, as it could mean the loss of tens of millions of lives across all metropolitan areas. The "subjects" of this test were not the humans, but the interaction of a bacteria and the structure of the city - to see how a similar but harmful organism would spread through a metropolitan area. These tests were not testing how these bacteria affect humans (it was known that they don't, and for the extraudinarily vast majority of cases, they didn't). As a matter of fact, the bacterial strains were chosen specifically because they have little or no immunity to antibiotics [1] and posed no known threats to humans.
How can you tell if an agent is harmless enough? In 1950, San Francisco had a population over 750,000 (see [0]). There was one death that we know of that seems likely linked to this bacteria. How would you find an agent that is more harmless? After all, the effect of this agent seems to be on the order of one in a million.
How can you find out an agent causes death one in a million times without testing it on (roughly) a million people?
I think that there are valid reasons to be concerned or upset about this test, but that they chose an insufficiently harmless agent is not one of them.
They probably argued that the test was more like surveying defenses than an experiment. i.e. "we need to try it because we need to know if we should be concerned about the Soviets doing it with seriously harmful bacteria."
Additionally, when you do anything involving a group that large there's bound to be an few outliers. Winning the lottery, getting bitten by a shark and dying from complications caused by normally harmless bacteria are all incredibly uncommon but they still happen.
Are you attempting to justify this? If I ran a "harmless" experiment over a population of 100M that happened to kill 10 or 20 "outliers" should I be exempt from consequences as well?
I understand the vitriol, and I'm not even sure where I stand on the issue, but this quickly gets into a philosophical debate. This is something akin to the "railroad switch" question. Do you pull the level and divert a railroad car killing one person, but saving five or do you let the runaway care run its course and kill the 5.
If the impetus for the experiment was to test some potential attack vector as the grandparent post suggests, would you rather they didn't risk some catastrophic attack? It's the notion of "the greater good" and all that.
In writing this, I seem to have discovered my own answer. This is largely similar to the NSA going beserk as it has done because, "What if?". So do you want to risk & sacrifice for ostensibly better security?
Your "philosophical debate" is about an impending, unintended catastrophe. These were conscious actions by people who could have (to use situation in your debate) replaced the live, innocent human beings with straw dummies.
They shouldn't have done it at all. But even if in some twisted world they needed to, they could have warned everyone and come up with ways to protect hospitals.
They did not believe it would have any effect and believed that in good faith. It's easy 60 years later with dramatically advanced science to say "well of course it would and should" but that misses the point.
Agreed. This isn't a hypothetical, unavoidable event. This was an act that required an affirmative decision to initiate. Call me a Nuremberg protocol hardliner.
> This is something akin to the "railroad switch" question. Do you pull the level and divert a railroad car killing one person, but saving five or do you let the runaway care run its course and kill the 5.
In the railway scenario, you know you'll save 5. In this case, they were just experimenting to see if a certain attack was possible. Avoiding the experiment would not have resulted in any deaths.
Avoiding the experiment would make an attack more effective and hence more likely to take place. It's not identical to the simple philosophical construction, but it's not wholly unlike it, either.
I'm not sure if it counts as a rationale, but the incentives are pretty clear. The court, after all is part of the government. There is very little incentive for them to rule in such a way as to reduce the power or increase the accountability of another part of government. As for having faith in our judicial system, well this is just one in an enormous list of reasons why any such faith is profoundly uncalled for.
I know this kind of comment happens a lot, and I'm not just focusing exclusively on you when I say this, but I find it hard to believe you woke up this morning, did some stuff, read this article, and at that point no longer had any faith left in our judicial system.
I'm risking sounding pedantic, but it wearies me to read sweeping platitudes like this -- no faith? You'd not sue your doctor if he cut the wrong leg off? I'm not even sure what "faith" means in this sense -- trust without evidence? You shouldn't have had "faith" in the first place, if that's the case.
Countries are in general immune to lawsuits (sovereign immunity). The federal government has waived that immunity in many cases (e.g. Federal tort claims act) but it's still the overriding rule.
Sovereign immunity is an Anglo concept, but almost every country on your list has some form of sovereign immunity. And sovereign immunity is a well-accepted principle of international law (to the extent that exists): http://ejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/4/853.full ("Foreign sovereign immunity belongs without doubt to the traditional domains of public international law.")
Sovereign immunity serves important purposes: 1) keeping courts from getting tangled up in political matters; 2) keeping the actions of individual officers from leading to claims against the public treasury.
Note that just because the sovereign is immune (the government itself) does not mean that individual officers of the government cannot be sued. That's why you see all these lawsuits styled Somebody v. Secretary of State.
If you read through the list, you'll notice that USA is the only one where the government has sovereign immunity. In all other cases it's only the monarch/president/pope personally who is immune. The article does agree that countries are immune from legal proceedings in another state.
The monarch or the crown is often a proxy for the government itself. Sovereign immunity in the U.S. arises from the fact that under English law, the Crown could not be sued in its own courts. Canada inherited the same concept, and so they have a statute that waives the immunity (the Crown Liability Act) for torts: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-50/page-1.html#h-3. That's the same thing as the U.S. did with the FTCA.
My mistake about UK/etc. then, but my point still seems to stand; in most countries it's only the ruler personally that's immune. If Sweden does something that harms me, I can't demand that the king be punished, but I can demand compensation from Sweden (as long as the legal proceedings take place there).
Yes. Like most immunities it can be waived by consent. Laws like the FTCA are a blanket waiver for certain kinds of suits. In practice that covers a lot of what you'd want to sue the government for. But the government can also waive the immunity in specific cases, even unintentionally. For example by defending a suit on the merits instead of merely invoking immunity, it implicitly consents to the suit.
To their defense, they seem to have thought that they were using harmless bacteria. The background seems to be that they wanted to test the distribution of the bacteria rather than the effects on humans (which they thought to be zero any way).
Add to that the fact that bacterial infections often hitchhike on other injuries, infections or conditions, it's not clear that the death was entirely the fault of the particular bacterium.
In any case, it was a violation of the Nuremberg code, and I'd hope no democratic state would do such a thing in the current time.
I'm pretty sure that such a trial would come out within years. The wikileaks and Snowden affairs have shown that it is virtually impossible for a reasonably democratic state to keep such secrets for long.
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 difference is awareness. Everyone is aware that there are radiowaves flying everywhere that could one day give us cancer. Everyone is aware when they're using a cloud based email that it's on the internet. If they're not then shame on them, because the information is readily available. If said email provider is snooping on emails without informing, well then shame on them in the same way shame on the Gov for this. It's about making the people aware or not explicitly attempting to hide it.
I understand your concern and agree that we have a lot more knowledge now so we know better. However, it is hard to believe that no one thought something could go wrong during a simulated germ warfare attack on a major city. Furthermore, they violated the Nuremberg Code using their own citizens. So it is hard to absolve those involved of guilt simply due to their own ignorance. This is what makes me angry and I suspect it is what led the parent to use such colorful language.
I think it's hard to underestimate the degree to which our knowledge of biology has changed in the last 60 years. I'm sure there was the thought that something could go wrong, as almost always that's the case. That it would kill someone, I don't think that was a possibility in their minds. Nonetheless the outrage here still isn't correlated with risk including the risks that for instance the current use of antibiotics on livestock introduce. If you want outrage, be outraged that we're destroying the main thing we have to protect ourselves against these sorts of threats.
> I think it's hard to underestimate the degree to which our knowledge of biology has changed [...]
That's not the issue. That relates to us understanding why it's dangerous. But wondering if it's dangerous and testing small and willing populations at first is something we knew how to do back then too.
> That it would kill someone, I don't think that was a possibility in their minds.
If they thought it was harmless they'd have tested it at the military base first.
> If you want outrage, be outraged that [...]
I don't, thanks. And I don't appreciate the redirect. (I agree, but it's not the topic.)
How so? The article is a bit biased in calling humans the subjects of the test, where it doesn't sound to me like an objective definition of the word supports that framing in the least. A subjects of an experiment is the entity being observed and on which data is being gathered. In this case, it is the bacteria, and the data that was gathered was their movement through the city. The humans were part of the environment the subject was tested in, but effects of the bacteria on the humans was not part of the hypothesis, and believed to be wholly negligible to humans.
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.
The article is a bit biased in calling humans the subjects of the test... A subjects of an experiment is the entity being observed
It's actually pretty conventional to label any research that involves changing the environment of people as involving "human subjects" -- even if the purpose of the research is not directed at understanding how the change affects people.
Here [0], for example, is a U.S. Department of Energy web page that defines the "scope of research" for human subjects studies. It says, in part, [R]esearch using human subjects encompasses a broader range of research than many investigators... often realize. In addition to traditional biomedical and clinical studies, human subjects research includes, but is not limited to, studies that... evaluate environmental alterations
To make that even more explicit, they have a "regulations" web page [1]. The top link there is to a memo that clarifies that any "research involving intentional modification of an individual's or a group of individuals' environment" must be managed according to the rules for human subjects research.
(All that said, it's possible that the military did go through an internal "human subjects" review, which might have concluded that the trials were OK, on the basis that the agents were supposed to be harmless.)
> (All that said, it's possible that the military did go through an internal "human subjects" review, which might have concluded that the trials were OK, on the basis that the agents were supposed to be harmless.)
I find it likely that the military assessed the risk that their alteration posed (the inclusion of a single additional strain of "harmless" bacteria to the many that live in a city) against the danger posed by not understanding the spread of bacteria introduced to a city, and concluded that the research was a reasonable use of human subjects.
Just like the NSA concluded that it was reasonable to do what they did.
The frightening thing about the government is not that they do these things without concern for the moral implications, but rather that the government as a system fosters a disconnect from the people they govern and a fanaticism towards duty that drives reasonable people to unreasonable ends.
Very rarely does the government do atrocities without considering the moral implications: they simply believe they're doing good by them.
> the military assessed the risk [of including] a single additional strain of "harmless" bacteria to the many that live in a city
This does not seem as if it should have a very high risk...
> Just like the NSA concluded that it was reasonable to do what they did [...] they do these things without concern for the moral implications
Which NSA activity do you mean? Bulk collection of phone metadata on US residents? If the legal folks said they have a way of defending it as long as certain internal checks are in place, I don't think there are many "moral implications" to collecting data as an agency devoted to signals intelligence does all over the world, aside from the moral implications of signals intelligence itself.
> rarely does the government do atrocities without considering the moral implications
Now you're really escalating. "The government doing atrocity" usually involves intentionally killing a lot of people, not spraying the equivalent of sugar water or collecting phone records.
...must be managed according to the rules for human subjects research
I think applying the directive for human subjects research does not imply the humans involved are "human subjects" in the way nuremberg uses the term, because those rules don't appear say anything about being notified or opting out [1].
Correct my history if I'm mistaken, but I think Nuremberg was a result of direct experimentation on humans. It is using the still common definition of "experimental subject", which is the entity which is being studied, i.e. the properties of which are being measured.
I don't think it's practical to say the DoE or DHS cannot study air movement through a city without getting every occupant's approval. And how would that reasoning apply to a new radar dish design at an airport?
> To their defense, they seem to have thought that they were using harmless bacteria.
It's the "seem to have thought" that I have a problem with. How thoroughly did they do their research? It is one thing if someone puts his finger up and says, "hmm, I think it's safe". It's another if rigorous, thorough tests are done that show conclusively that the bacteria is safe.
Analogy: I fire a gun straight into the air. The bullet eventually comes down and kills someone. Is a defense that "I thought it was safe" valid?
> Analogy: I fire a gun straight into the air. The bullet eventually comes down and kills someone. Is a defense that "I thought it was safe" valid?
This is more like firing directly into a group of people, but believing the gun is a harmless reproduction (or perhaps a paintball marker) when it actually a real weapon loaded with live ammo.
And, yes, in that case it would be valid, at least to the extent that the crime you would be guilty of, if any, with that belief would be substantial less than the one you would be guilty of if you believed it was a live weapon and committed the same act.
I would hope NO state would do such a thing in the current time. We are well past the point in civilization to accept this type of action from any state or organization.
Pre 2001 a lot of people would claim that we are also against torture, extrajudicial kidnapping, secret trials, locking people up without trial, mass surveillance, and unprovoked wars. Things change.
Just as between WWII and the cold war people likely claimed "we'll never let stuff like what the Nazi's did happen again!" then the country(s) feel threatened and the gloves come off.
You can find lots of people after the Great Depression and the various responses arguing that the economic debates were settled and nobody would ever argue for unfettered investment banks and the like ever again. Meanwhile we got Alan Greenspan.
Per Wikipedia: "Historians have not fully agreed on the dates, but 1947–1991 is common" (WWII ended in 1945 for reference). But the cold war was a slowly building thing that took many more years to reach fruition.
So now that we've dealt with pedantic complaints that are wrong anyway, do you have any substantive problems with what I said?
The 1950s wasn't the dark ages. People in positions of power had already been through the horror of gas attacks in the First World War, which is about the closest equivalent. The Nazis had experimented with biological weapons, and this was reasonably widespread knowledge at the time.
So if your point is that it was a simpler, more ignorant time, I don't think that works.
What we all have to face is that, when allowed to operate in secret, this is what governments have done and will continue to do. Often with "good" intentions.
If there's something we need to evolve, it's the oversight of our institutions, or indeed abolishing some of them.
The UK did the same between 1940 and 1979 in various tests with zinc cadmium sulphide, e.coli and bacillus globigii. I suspect these kind of things are largely the basis for the Chemtrails conspiracy theories.
Pardon me for this comment, I'm low on coffee this morning. It's going to be mostly rambling, but I'll try to keep it short.
I remember reading and hearing that one of the reasons young people get addicted to things like heroin, etc., is due to the fact that schools, parents and government told them that things like beer and marijuana were deadly in any amount - then they would go on to have a few beers at a party, and maybe smoke a joint, and when they wake up the next morning with no negligible negative effects, they reject everything else they've been taught - including warnings about things that are that dangerous.
This was certainly my experience to some extent, though I am having trouble connecting it to the conspiracy theory thread. It's a basic credibility problem – if the grown-ups lied to us about weed, why should we believe them about heroin? etc.
And how do you reconcile your condescending dismissal with the reality that some conspiracy theories, even some pretty grand ones, have turned out to be true?
To look at it the other way, the unwillingness to accept "alternative" theories is probably gated more by emotion than by logic. We need to believe in the basic good of humankind, even in spite of such aberrations as genocide, syphilis experiments, etc.
But, when we look at history, it is probably more logical to be skeptical. Our history is replete with Massively Bad Things that are nearly unbelievable in scale, and we would certainly prefer not to believe humans capable of such things, if given a choice.
At the same time, we also know that there are people with a vested interest in creating certain beliefs and outcomes.
So, what I find interesting is people's determination to believe something, simply because it is offered as the "official story". These stories don't require nearly the same degree of evidence, or even plausibilty to be accepted, as long as they are mainstreamed as official. The logic gate is then not even activated by the masses. Yet, the moment an alternative is posed, it is immediately (and often angrily) seized upon by those same people who now suddenly require a massive degree of evidence.
I believe that a default position of skepticism is far healthier in a society than blind acceptance of official stories. Where I believe skeptics get into trouble is when they move beyond questioning to actually posing an alternative story that is no more provable than the official one.
> Where I believe skeptics get into trouble is when they move beyond questioning to actually posing an alternative story that is no more provable than the official one.
Those are not skeptical. They are believers, just like the people that believe on the official version.
> ...the moment you start believing in one you will start believing in most of them.
Maybe what you're seeing is more like belief in the possibility rather than belief in the fact.
For instance, after I learned about Operation Northwoods and a half a dozen other cases, I am completely open to the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job. (edit: And people who are not open to that possibility seem completely illogical to me.)
An "inside job" comes across like the government explicitly set the terrorists on the path they took (or some of the terrorists were government agents). It seems more likely to me that certain elements in the government could have become aware of the plot and turned a blind eye.
The necessary element is not what you call it, but rather that the event is presumed to be evidence that the implied compact between government and the governed had been violated in some way by the government.
Loyalty and support in exchange for protection. Scholarship and industriousness in exchange for liberty. Moral behavior in exchange for justice. Voluntary taxation in exchange for uniform public benefits.
You need not show that the government was directly involved, if you can support the assertion that the government did not effectively use its granted authority for the benefit of the public. Conspiracy theories are primarily useful for convincing those people who demonstrate too much faith in their public institutions that they should be a bit more skeptical.
Whether you think that 9/11 was the work of Al Qaeda terrorists or CIA terrorists, the facts remain that the efforts of the government were ineffective to prevent the deaths, injuries, or destruction of property, and the resulting public grief and outcry was used inappropriately to justify almost entirely unrelated shifts in policy.
The idea that someone, somewhere might have said, "That many deaths? Hooray! We can go have a war now!" is just grossly abhorrent to me, and I can't shake the feeling that it actually happened.
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.
Talking about the government as if it were a single unit seems inappropriate. There are many groups and many people within the government and within the military and the intelligence agencies. I don't think it would be very hard for a determined group to infiltrate and hide within the government.
I do think it's a lot more complicated than "the government" knew or "the government" did not know.
What I always found "fascinating" about conspiracy theories is how educated, smart people can be convinced by some of them. It's just something that I can't understand.
Well, after many conspiracy theories turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg of truly heinous government actions it's not hard to understand why previously skeptical people now think twice about immediately dismissing crackpot ideas.
Some of us have also worked, through ignorance I will add, for heinous government contractors and sat with people having discussions on how best to kill lots of people efficiently without a thought as to any ethical consequences of their actions.
What seems to happen is that you come across a compelling set of evidence. The evidence is faked, or skewed heavily, but it might be hard to know this. And, as presented, the cases are usually pretty good. If you're unable to immediately dispute them, it isn't totally irrational to think they might be real.
This is the reason I don't watch documentaries on modern "issues". The story presented is all very manipulated and you're certain to get an incorrect set of evidence.
What is boggling is how smart people _stay_ convinced by conspiracies, after contradictions are pointed out. But changing your mind is a hard thing to do, so perhaps it's not that surprising?
An effective tactic to prevent people from looking into something is to promote obviously false information, bonus if it's offensive, and associate it with information that can be verified. Another related tactic is for people who have a long track record of promoting false information promote something that's verifiable. That way people will dismiss real information that has been associated with bs. There is a paper, by a good friend of mine on this "Discrediting By Association: Undermining the Case for Patriots Who Question 9/11", and links to much more info in my profile.
And I agree, there are many documentaries on modern issues that are pure junk.
> This is the reason I don't watch documentaries on modern "issues". The story presented is all very manipulated and you're certain to get an incorrect set of evidence.
That's true of essentially any source but I don't know that becoming ignorant of anything that happened during your lifetime is the right answer.
>> educated, smart people can be convinced by some of them
I love this implication that you're probably dumb if you think the government sometimes engages in conspiracy. Like mass surveillance. Or bacterial experiments in San Francisco.
No, you're dumb when you turn and twist the available evidence to considerable degrees to get to your crazy conclusion. Snowden is an educated and smart man with the proper evidence to back his claims (mass surveillance). What was exposed in this case is proper evidence (bacterial experiments in SF).
What is dumb is seing a few bright pixels in a New Horizons image and saying "that's a swarm of alien space ships", when in fact it's just a cosmic ray distorted by the JPG lossy compression algorithm.
Sometimes the more you know, the more possibilities could be out there. We are not in a 100% transparent world. A single signal could mean a lot that one is not able to see. So based on some signals we could observe, there come related explanations. We could label a category with different tags. Conspiracy theory is one of them. Though I do believe that conspiracy theories weigh people's motivations more, which is not quite fit to most of mainstream perspectives. Hopefully, I won't get downvoted too much with this comment;p
Yeah, I think you are kind of circling around a central issue. Some evidence emerges of something untoward happening and the conspiracy nuts jump on it. There ends up being a lot of noise on top of a little bit of signal. People who fancy themselves rational dismiss it while the nuts keep amplifying it. Then much later more/most of the story comes out and sometimes it's a lot worse than the nut jobs even speculated.
I have read somewhere that conspiracy theories are the pattern matching algorithms in our brains running wild, seening connections where there aren't any. The thing is, our brains are really good at detecting patterns. So good, that sometimes, in fact, we will see patterns where there aren't any. And that's where paranoia and conspiracies and conspiracy theories come in.
For my comment I received many downvotes and also many upvotes (net change was downward, but my karma has been jumping around for about 5 hours now), for pointing out a fact that I find baffling, without criticizing anyone in particular. I'd like to understand why this happened, if possible.
Not just MKUltra - there is a long history of what I would describe as "shockingly unethical" experimentation in the US. The US Government (usually military) is probably the most common actor and/or funder, but they are not the only responsible parties.
This is why a lot of people (myself included) take a hard-line position of any kind of testing involving humans. Yes, it's often a waste of time to run many trivial experiments by an IRB first, but history has shown that some people seem unable to make this kind of judgement call probably. Really, in many case, an IRB simply serves the same purpose as assert(3); it's a "sanity-check". Like all sanity check, in theory it shouldn't be necessary, but history shoes it's worth checking anyway.
If the IRB regime had existed in the 40's, I doubt it would've have stopped this and other experimentation.
IRBs are effective at checking back everyday scientists. I somehow doubt an IRB panel would be need to be consulted by someone powerful enough to have the authority to load a crapton of bacteria onto a boat and spray it into SF.
Of course it wouldn't have stopped everything, but it would have helped - probably a lot. When everybody is getting their 3rd-party stamp of approval, those that do not are a lot more conspicuous.
Also, one of the steps in a typical IRB process is to sanity catch mistakes. As mentioned in another post, the people spraying bacteria over SF probably believe they were doing a "safe" experiment about dispersion properties. In an environment were it was regularly expected use an approval process, there might have been a chance for someone with biological knowledge to inform the experimenters of their error.
They did indeed break the code, in particular, provisions 1 and 9 (it is unclear whether they implemented facilities for point 7 or not), however: they reasonably believed that the experiment was harmless (and they were mostly right, given the experiment's scale), and the data they collected would be very usable for saving civilian lives in case of bacterial attack. So, I'm not saying that it's OK, but it's unreasonable to paint this as something completely evil and vicious.
They did it in St. Louis as well, and that was testing of an offensive chemical weapon. It's probably unwise to defer to military judgement when they want to test a chemical agent.
They clearly weren't harmless, human experimentation can always be argued to save lives (regardless of its morality), and such offences should be under strict liability (which applies whether or not the act was malicious etc).
From what I've read, it seems to be the opposite: it was reasonable to assume, to a certain extent, that they were, indeed, harmless. But I agree that the certainty level was not high enough to conduct experiment on such a big number of participants. (I want to point out, we're only discussing the harmlessness here, not the other points like consent).
> can always be argued to
This is a horrible phrase. You can take any statement, and disregard it because it "can always be argued for". I think in this particular case, the benefit of these experiments is pretty clear.
I am not sure how you could possibly tolerate that military entity broke the law and made biological experiments on humans, especially when the said experiments resulted in a tragic loss of lives.
The experiment wasn't on humans - the position of the CDC is that humans were unaffected, and the data gathered was about how harmless bacteria spread through a densely populated city, to better protect those humans if a harmful agent were to do the same.
At a time when biological warfare was a reasonable threat to make plans for, I don't think it's wholly unreasonable to consider these kinds of simulations justified.
The important takeaway from all of this stuff is that no, the government did not suddenly stop doing all kinds of secret mass-experimentation on civilian populations. If you look at the history of these kinds of experiments and believe anything the government says, you would think they just stopped doing things like MK-ULTRA and Project SHAD thirty or forty years ago. Well, folks... They didn't. Fifty years from now on whatever the new HN is, there will be a post about some kind of massive psychological (or biological, or chemical, or whatever) experimentation the US government conducted fifty years from then on the unknowing civilian population of San Diego, or Portland, or whatever. Mark my words...
That's not all: they raised a Nazi flag in SF city hall, too! See John Gutmann's photograph The News Photographer (1935), where he takes the micky out of the subject photojournalist for missing the real story. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/465559680200258166/
Note that I've read the reasoning behind the event was apparently the visit of a German navy crew and 'protocol' (the US and Germany were not yet at war) rather than the weak line discussed at that URL. Still, a little known fact.
I'm just asking because I am curious. If someone's immune system is so weak they can die of a common "harmless" bacteria, would they probably have died of something else anyway? We are surrounded by and filled with millions of bacteria at all times.
Hospitals are somewhat controlled environments and they try to account for every pathogen they expect to find. But they didn't expect a biological attack with an airborne bacteria.
The people of San Francisco had their personalities permanently altered through the Navy's inadvertent distribution of peace juice? The U.S. military created the hippie movement and ended the Vietnam war. Impressive.
What other great wrongs can be righted through careful mass infection of populations?
Maybe the feds liked going to San Francisco enough that they made testing biological or chemical weapons a thing there, like the time the CIA spiked a bunch of people with LSD, including an armed federal marshal who was tripping so bad he almost shot a bartender.
Why would you think there are astroturfers for this? Do you really believe the government hangs out on Hacker News to propagandize support for testing biological weapons on unwitting citizens?
Many large governments do this. The US does too probably:
"It has been reported that HBGary Federal was contracted by the U.S. government to develop astroturfing software which could create an "army" of multiple fake social media profiles.[36][37]"
But this would be such a sinister thing - testing bioweapons on citizens - that catching an astroturfer would be a huge scandal. It wouldn't be worth the risk. This isn't fracking.
Downvoters: If you really think I'm wrong, then this is the story of the century. Stop whatever you're doing and start a doxxing effort against these astroturfers. You believe the government is literally trying to shape opinion in favor of killing its own citizenry. What could be more important than this story? Get to it. This is Pulitzer stuff.
AFAIK, the bacteria used in this experiment is not related to measles.
However, there is the fact that the US government (all governments really) have repeatedly been found to inflict these kinds of nefarious deeds on their own people AND that they have a tendency to cover up those facts (not all governments are such hypocrites, some are proudly jerks) AND that the general public is often unaware or unwilling to admit it after the fact has been brought to light.
So, this is the kind of thing that reinforces the world view of the AntiVaxer side. Every time you try to reason with them, the label "cover-up" comes to their mind and they just disengage and shut down whatever you are trying to convey. Keep trying long enough, and they will label you as a "sheep" (a member of the willingly unaware public) or a "wolf in sheep skin" (basically, and agent provocateur).
I once drove my car during a flash flood, and wound up flooding the engine and ruining it. When my grandfather found out, he asked "Do you think this Osama Bin Laden guy could have had anything to do with it?"
"No, Grandpa, but thanks for your concern. I don't think there's any mystery here."
Back in 1996, some terrorists almost launched VX gas–armed M55 rockets from alcatraz into the middle of san francisco. Fortunately, chemical weapons specialist, Doctor Stanley Goodspeed saved the day.
We're going to test the effect of nuclear weapons on San Franscisco so we can understand the effects of nuclear weapons on San Franscisco so we can protect San Francisco from a future attack by nuclear weapons or so we can understand the effect of the nuclear blast on Vladivostok. Sounds rather like the Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiment. To be fair though, the United States of far from the only country that has done this sort of thing.
They were testing the distribution method and trying to do so in a harmless way.
A better comparison would be "we're gonna load a shipping container with a bomb casing full of concrete and irradiated enough to look like a live nuclear weapon, then try to sneak it into the port and see if we get caught."
I think the scariest part was that I'm sure it was specifically tested in a low-income area purposely, because the people there could probably do less about it. A relevant bit from the article:
> Spates, now 57 and retired, was born in 1955, delivered inside her family's apartment on the top floor of the since-demolished Pruitt-Igoe housing development in north St. Louis. Her family didn't know that on the roof, the Army was intentionally spewing hundreds of pounds of zinc cadmium sulfide into the air.
> Three months after her birth, her father died. Four of her 11 siblings succumbed to cancer at relatively young ages.
The fact that there probably are still people in the US government making similar decisions makes me a lot more nervous about life.
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/army-sprayed-st-louis-with-to...