"... 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.
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.