Latest news with #MKUltra
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
When the U.S. Military Gave People Radiation Poisoning To Study the Effects of Nuclear War
Uncle Sam conducted several pointless and destructive experiments on his own people during the Cold War. The most infamous was MKUltra, the CIA's project to develop procedures for mind control using psychedelic drugs and psychological torture. During Operation Sea-Spray, the U.S. Navy secretly sprayed San Francisco with bacteria to simulate a biological attack. San Francisco was also the site of a series of radiation experiments by the U.S. Navy. A 2024 investigation by the San Francisco Public Press and The Guardian revealed that the city's U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory had exposed at least 1,073 people to radiation over 24 experiments between 1946 and 1963. The tests came during a time when the effects of nuclear radiation were a pressing concern, and were conducted without ethical safeguards. Conscripted soldiers and civilian volunteers were sent into radioactive conditions or purposely dosed with radiation without their informed consent. The lab didn't bother following up on the long-term health effects. In fact, the government didn't even bother holding on to its own results. The Public Press had to piece together the stories from papers in old cardboard boxes after the Navy shredded millions of pages. The cleanup of the Radiological Defense Laboratory, which closed in 1969, has been a well-known issue in San Francisco politics. In 2013, whistleblowers brought a lawsuit against a decontamination contractor for cutting corners and faking results; in January 2025, the contractor agreed to pay a $97 million settlement. The Public Press used the Freedom of Information Act and other archives to figure out what exactly the government was doing that needed cleaning up. The laboratory's work began with decontaminating ships that had been irradiated during nuclear tests. Scientists later developed "synthetic fallout"—dirt laced with radioactive isotopes to simulate the waste created by a nuclear war. They had test subjects practice cleaning it up, rub it on their skin, or crawl around in it. At least 35 men were injected with radioactive materials to see how they traveled through the body. Even the consenting volunteers were often given doses higher than the limits the scientists themselves had set. Cpl. Eldridge Jones was an example of how much radiation the government might expose a single person to. He was deployed with the U.S. Army's 50th Chemical Platoon to five different nuclear tests in 1955. Later, the Radiological Defense Laboratory had him shoveling synthetic fallout to test decontamination techniques. "In the military, they tell you what to do, and you do it," he told the Public Press. Jones, who is still alive as of press time, says many of his platoonmates died young and blames his own health problems, such as impaired blood flow and partial blindness, on the experiments. The U.S. government's negligent curiosity about radiation poisoning was an overcorrection to its previous negligent ignorance about the subject. Robert Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves, who ran the World War II–era nuclear weapons program, were completely unconcerened by the effects of nuclear fallout, according to research by historian Sean Malloy. U.S. military planners were told that they could send troops "immediately" into cities struck by atomic bombs, and Groves dismissed reports of radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as Japanese propaganda. By November 1945, when the number of radiation victims was impossible to deny, Groves testified to the Senate that radiation poisoning is "a very pleasant way to die." Radiation does terrifying and gruesome things to the human body. And those things were militarily relevant because the U.S. and Soviet Union were preparing to fight each other in the postnuclear ruins of Europe. Both countries combined nuclear testing with army exercises, having soldiers march toward radioactive mushroom clouds. Scientists whose work was related to this kind of warfare could get a virtually unlimited supply of money and test subjects (willing or not) from the government. Radiological Defense Laboratory Director Paul Tompkins was clear that the work had value only to the military, not to the public at large. "Research from the scientific viewpoint doesn't have much to offer at the present time, but 'basic' data from the viewpoint of the military problems is so sparse that it is somewhat dangerous," he wrote in a 1953 memo obtained by the Public Press. One of his colleagues, Stanton Cohn, was more blunt in a 1982 interview with a government historian: "We could buy any piece of machinery or equipment, and you never had to justify it….We did a lot of field studies and got nothing to show for it." The post When the U.S. Military Gave People Radiation Poisoning appeared first on
Los Angeles Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Errol Morris' new Charles Manson documentary presents alternative theories about killings
One of the prevailing theories around Charles Manson is that the infamous cult leader had intended to incite a race war by orchestrating his so-called family's killing spree in the 1960s. But Errol Morris casts doubts on that narrative in his new documentary, 'Chaos: The Manson Murders,' out now on Netflix. Based on the book by Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring, Morris' film presents alternative theories surrounding the 1969 Tate–LaBianca murders — including how Manson may have had links to government programs related to mind control and brainwashing. Featuring music by Manson, 'Chaos' presents these alternative takes primarily through interviews with O'Neill, Manson case prosecutor Stephen Kay and former Manson associate Bobby Beausoleil. The documentary also includes archival interviews with Manson and his followers. The film challenges the accuracy of (and the motivations behind) the 'Helter Skelter' theory presented by lead prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in the Tate-LaBianca trial. Through separate interviews, both O'Neill and Beausoleil offer different theories about how and why the Manson-directed killings could have happened. Here's a breakdown of the alternative theories presented in 'Chaos: The Manson Murders.' Manson possibly had links to secret government mind-control programs While acknowledging that there are still some loose threads to this theory, O'Neill suggests that Manson possibly had connections to secret government programs researching mind control and brainwashing, such as the CIA's project MKUltra. According to O'Neill, Manson's time as a parolee in the Bay Area coincided with the time the government was conducting research into the effects of drugs such as LSD on individuals' mental states. During that time, Manson and his followers frequented the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic for treatment as well as to meet with his parole officer Roger Smith. Patients of the clinic were reportedly used as research subjects for these mind control studies. O'Neill also explains that psychiatrist Louis Jolyon 'Jolly' West, who is known to have ties to the MKUltra project, was conducting research on brainwashing in the Haight-Ashbury area at that time. Although he acknowledges there is no proof that Manson and West definitively crossed paths, O'Neill points out that the two men were within each other's orbit while Manson was gaining followers whom some could describe as 'brainwashed' at a time when the government was researching brainwashing. O'Neill also believes Manson having ties to these government research programs could explain Smith's leniency on Manson despite his breaking rules that should have jeopardized his parole. The attempt to pin the killings on the Black Panthers could have been personal or a government conspiracy Among the facts known about the 1969 killings is that words written in the victims' blood were left on various surfaces at the crime scenes. These words — including 'pigs,' 'rise' and 'Helter Skelter' — helped build the prosecution's case that Manson had intended to incite a race war. According to the documentary, around the time of the murders, Manson believed the Black Panthers were going to retaliate against him for killing one of its members. (Manson had shot Bernard 'Lotsapoppa' Crowe, who survived the encounter and was not a member of the Black Panthers, in July 1969. The Tate–LaBianca murders occurred in August.) Alternatively, O'Neill explains that secret government counterintelligence programs at the time were intent on discrediting left-wing political movements such as the Black Panthers. Manson was possibly just motivated by paranoia Beausoleil, a former Manson associate who was convicted of killing Gary Hinman for a drug deal gone bad, believes that Manson's motivation behind orchestrating the 1969 killing spree is much more simple. He suggests Manson urged his acolytes to commit these severe crimes because of his paranoia. According to Beausoleil, Manson probably intended to use these killings to keep his followers in line. (The Hinman killing is also cited as a motive for the Tate-LaBianca murders. It has been suggested that Manson orchestrated the subsequent killings in order to make it seem like all three incidents were connected.)
