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.
