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 with bursters are problematic because the explosive burster tends to destroy much of the biological agent that you're trying to spread.
4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so.
5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect.
Long after the Korean War, the Soviet microtoxin program overcame many of these problems. The Americans took a different approach and focused on improving nerve agents, with the most recent development (that I know of) being a multi-part agent called GB-2.
Plus, considering there's substantial evidence that McArthur was close to nuking Manchuria, it seems likely he would have been willing to try something slightly less escalatory and much easier to hide and plausibly deny.
Cannot find much information about anything like that via google.
"Known binary agents include the following: GB binary (sarin, GB2): DF is located in 1 canister, while OPA is in a second canister. The isopropyl amine binds to the hydrogen fluoride generated during the chemical reaction. After deployment of the weapon, the 2 canisters rupture and the chemical mixture produces GB."
What would you describe this as? This was proposed to the US military. Then it was executed by the Chinese military.
Some historians say that the English defeated Napoleon at Waterloo because many French soldiers (including Napoleon) had diarrhea.
An important difference between French and English soldiers was that the former boiled water for tea, while the French preferred wine.
I used to think AI was fictional pipe dream. Yet it came to be.
> 1. It's difficult to manufacture biological agents in large quantities.
Yet the covid vaccine was manufactured in huge quantities in short time.
> 2. It's hard to store biological agents for long periods of time, since living things tend to die.
The covid vaccine was kept cold storage of -60, and it was good for 18 months.
>3. It's hard to disperse biological agents over a large area.
This would not be an issue for a respiratory virus, that targets a specific ethnic group.
> 4. It's easy to protect troops in the field from biological agents and all major countries maintain and exercise the capability to do so.
Yet almost everyone got infected by covid.
> 5. Biological agents are slow acting and unreliable in their effect.
Covid was fast acting. Yet not that deadly. So i suppose if it was more deadly this too would fall.
(Metal Gear superweapon that eventually begins to decay and loses its specific-person targeting ability to the point where Snake needs to die to save the rest of the world)
> 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.
The two sentences feel intentionally written to obfuscate the fact that the statements were made under duress as POWs; it strongly implies that they testified, after the war, about dropping biological weapons.
Even if much of what he does discuss did happen (the US secretly pardoning Japanese units that did absolutely horrific experiments on people for chemical and biological warfare, for example, and of course we used a lot of horrific shit in Korea and Vietnam), there's so much that is unsourced / uncited mixed in.
Half the links in the text are to his own writing, another chunk are to other Medium blogs, with a sprinkling of newspaper clippings (because the newspapers were so trustworthy back during that time)...pass.
If the pilots knew, then a large number of support crew also would have known. But the only "testimony" we have is from captured PoWs, after how many decades of opportunities for deathbed confessions? Give me a break.
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.
It directly says it happened in 1952, and links to a newspaper clearly saying the 'confession' was made by captured American officers. How does it imply the exact opposite of what it says?
Of course they would have prepared. They knew what was coming.
If one believes these confessions THEY MUST ALSO believe confessions obtained under police torture, right?
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.
I suspect the real reason is close to the usually accepted story, though. Millions of Japanese thought the emperor was a living god. That's how many Americans viewed it then. It's a useful interpretive lens even now.
If the Emperor concedes and surrenders, all of his legitimacy transfers to whoever the Emperor says to listen to. MacArthur got the unofficial title gaijin shogun -- foreign Shogun, the shogun being the military dictator who ruled pre-Meiji Japan, in the name of the Emperor.
Dépose or kill the emperor and all bets are off. What would be institutionally legitimate in its place? How long to construct it? When you have an entire administration in place, it'd be awfully tempting to whitewash the imperial institution. Which is exactly what MacArthur did. Speaking of which, the personality of Douglas MacArthur dominates this whole topic. He had carte blanche. Complete unlimited authority. And he exercised it, often in ways not anticipated in Washington. He was an eccentric man and quite opaque as to his decision-making.
It was clear from the start that the Emperor's involvement was being whitewashed. The Australian judge at the Tokyo trials, William Webb, argued publicly that Hirohito should be prosecuted, but it seems he could gather no political support. Since the trial, several books have covered this ground. This article by one such author gives a bit more context on the politics of the trials. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-12/tokyo-trial-70th-anni...)
Capture high-ranking Islamic clerics, give them a choice: "Go on TV and explain to everyone that Allah's will is for all good Muslims to throw down their weapons and surrender to the Americans. If you refuse, we'll put you on trial for war crimes."
[1] In this post I'm not taking a position on the morality or legality of the US taking such an action, either in WW2 or the War on Terror. I'm merely noting that:
- The US did this sort of thing with the Emporer in WW2, and it seemed to work.
- The US didn't do this sort of thing in Afghanistan / Iraq, and those wars were definitely same kind of overwhelming success story that WW2 was. (I don't dispute some key objectives were obtained: Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were eventually killed; and there has no been 9/11 level terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 itself.)
Genuine question: I thought it was well understood that his decision making was guided by a fear of Russian expansion, and that conservative measures (such as keeping the Emperor in place and several important politicians) were aimed at quickly reestablishing the country to avoid communist impetus from arising. Is this not the case?
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.
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.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...
I don't know how accurate this is, but its a good read.
Not to mention the reality that aside from some sense of justice, allowing any of these people their freedom is probably irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Which is to say that it's a gambit for valuable, empirical knowledge which for all intents and purposes, I would surmise, couldn't be elsewise obtained due to the moral standards of the West, or some theatrics which will have little consequence.
What this is referring to is the relative immunity Unit 731 got post-war in exchange for research results being handed over, which is a well-known historical fact.
But I think the greater point that you are missing is that you can't walk over a country of 150 million people and achieve total power. Without large doses of good will, collaboration, and soft power, resistance gets in the way of every single goal an occupation has.
Anyone who thinks we're still not doing it is a fool. COVID19 is in all likelihood bioweapons research gone wrong. It doesn't take much sleuthing to uncover the Eco Health Alliance application DARPA to test furin cleavage sites on bat corona viruses. DARPA told them "no" and yet here we are. Saying what I'm saying will get you labeled a conspiracy theorist. Would be a shame if there were ever people that conspired and we used that heuristic to dismiss people.
But that's OK with me, conspiracy theories are having a phenomenal few years! We should may consider changing the name to "spoiler alerts".
I think you might be unaware of how many conspiracies there are. Any major event at any point in history most likely has a conspiracy attached. This goes exponential the closer you get to present day.
I'm not claiming either version of the events is true/false. Just relaying another I've heard.
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 scientists who were already engaged in this kind of research, and ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA/etc were just the continuation of it for all the same purposes but under a different name.
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.
Now we have synthetic DNA to develop gain of function in viruses that can target segments of population such as the elders and those with comorbidities. We can follow up on that with proprietary MRNA shots formulated to take down targeted individuals in a one two punch.
MKULTRA ended in name only. NATO now has a sixth operational domain of cognitive warfare that uses social media and other advanced tools. https://www.projectcensored.org/18-the-human-mind-as-new-dom...
A bit tangential to the central thesis, but John Marks' 1979 classic The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, referenced by TFA, is online[2].
Chapter 8, Brainwashing[3], has interesting details about CIA-friendly journalist Edward Hunter's PR campaign to frame "brainwashing" (a term he coined) as a uniquely communist form of political indoctrination via technological means.
> In September 1950, the Miami News published an article by Edward Hunter titled " 'Brain-Washing' Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of Communist Party." It was the first printed use in any language of the term "brainwashing," which quickly became a stock phrase in Cold War headlines. Hunter, a CIA propaganda operator who worked under cover as a journalist, turned out a steady stream of books and articles on the subject. He made up his coined word from the Chinese hsi-nao—"to cleanse the mind"—which had no political meaning in Chinese.
> American public opinion reacted strongly to Hunter's ideas, no doubt because of the hostility that prevailed toward communist foes, whose ways were perceived as mysterious and alien. Most Americans knew something about the famous trial of the Hungarian Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, at which the Cardinal appeared zombie-like, as though drugged or hypnotized. [...] Americans were familiar with the idea that the communists had ways to control hapless people, and Hunter's new word helped pull together the unsettling evidence into one sharp fear.
Marks then touches on the bioweapon allegation without further examination:
> The brainwashing controversy intensified during the heavy 1952 fighting in Korea, when the Chinese government launched a propaganda offensive that featured recorded statements by captured U.S. pilots, who "confessed" to a variety of war crimes including the use of germ warfare.
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 accountable" but along time ago congress passed a law to declassify everything around JFK assassination, yet multiple presidents after bring pressured by the CIA for "national security reasons" have refused to release all kinds of document in direct violation of that law.
the CIA, any other agency with the power to "classify" things, is a direct and ever present threat to not only liberty but the underpinning of democracy everyone claims to support.
On the other hand, the existence of programs like this cannot and should not be granted a veil of secrecy. It's a sad irony that the US presents itself as the champion of a rules-based international order, human rights etc., while refusing to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court or sign any treaty that might be even slightly disadvantageous.
The foundation of the US was there was not to be a standing army, in fact they made it unconditional. Only allowing for a defensive navy.
Of course likely most things in the constitution it was quickly ignored and/or "interpreted" to mean something else allowing for massive expanding on both power and size of the federal government
This expansion causes pressure to keep more and more things secret for "operational matters" then before long everything is "operational matters" and need to be secret.
One of the primary reasons the CIA gives for not wanting most things declassified it because it would give away "current capabilities, or operational programs" thus this CIA is already abusing this classification (operational matters ) to keep lots of historical records classified.
>>while refusing to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court or sign any treaty that might be even slightly disadvantageous.
Nor Should they and any government official that did that should be tried and convicted of Treason. The US Constitution is the final say for our government, not an international court. I reject globalism of that type.
Free Trade with all nations, entangling alliances with none, including entangling our legal systems
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.
You fail to see they irrevocably connected, the root cause of the abuse it the secrecy, anything other than eliminating the authority, is simply putting a band aid over a bullet hole
Was it wrong to keep D-Day invasion plans secret? The argument is that you couldn't even function as a military without some secrets.
The more consolidated the power becomes the less we the people are able to govern ourselves.
The presidential elections should be the least important in any time we are not at war, but it seems now everyone looks to not only the Federal government, not one branch and one person in one branch of the federal government to fix all the nations problems.
"The President" has become a title of nobility, which is a sad place to find ourselves.
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...
