DC Comics Legion of Substitute Heroes is a fan-favorite super team, being a spin-off of the better-known Legion of Super-Heroes, DCs premiere superhero team of the 31st century. The Substitutes consist of would-be heroes that didnt make the cut in the main Legions superhero auditions but still wanted to help others. As such, they formed their own team, vowing to perform substitute superhero services when the main Legion couldnt spare the time.

The Legion of Substitute Heroes spoke to many fans who felt slighted by the mainstream cool kids like the Legion of Super-Heroes. The team also inspired some endearing characters with offbeat powers but few had a weirder name or power set than Drura Sehpt, aka Infectious Lass. Known for having the dubious power to make people sick, Infectious Lass seemed doomed to be a pariah, even among other superhero rejects.

Related: Which Marvel Superhero Has The Most Valuable Blood?

Yet, surprisingly, the girl who had literally every illness in the universe proved quite popular with men. In one continuity, she even went on to marry Jacques Foccart, the second Invisible Kid, and the President of Earth. Theyre probably one of the more unusual couples in the DC Universe, but perhaps a closer look at Infectious Lass can reveal why guys want to reach out to the girl with all the diseases.

Infectious Lass first appeared in Superboy Vol. 1 #201. An alien from the planet Somahtur, Infectious Lass people have bodies that house colonies of bacteria that they themselves have become immune to. Believing she could use this quality to become a superhero, Dura designed a costume (complete with a mask and cape that looks like dripping mucus) and auditioned for the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Although Infectious Lass powers could potentially be a huge asset (just imagine how ineffective a team of supervillains could be if they all suddenly came down with stomach flu), she often had a hard time aiming her diseases or turning them off. As a result, she often accidentally made her teammates sick as shown when she made Legionnaire Star Boy horribly ill during her audition. To top it off, some of Infectious Lass otherworldly illnesses were just plain weird and did bizarre things to other people like the time she accidentally hit Color Kid with a gender-switching virus.

Despite this, Infectious Lass soon gained membership in The Legion of Substitute Heroes who thought she deserved a chance to prove herself. Her friendly, somewhat nerdy personality made her an endearing recruit, but the nature of her powers did make her very insecure in some stories. In one hilarious story, she attempts to seduce Ambush Bug with her feminine wiles but proves completely inept, even telling him how she makes people sick while trying to make small talk. In another story, she bemoans the fact that Ill never know the tender touch of a man, prompting one of her teammates to suggest she change her name.

As time went on, however, Infectious Lass grew more attractive in both looks and personality. Perhaps artists and writers found the dichotomy of a kind-hearted woman in a lethal body weirdly titillating, but Infectious Lass began to be drawn in a more seductive matter. Where her earlier appearances emphasized her gross, phlegm-like costume, during the 1990s, Drura was frequently depicted posing in bedsheets and lingerie. Moreover, she was clearly sleeping with Legion of Super-Heroes member Invisible Kid indicating that she had finally achieved some control over her powers (in the past her merest touch usually sent men into convulsions).

Related:Batmans Son is Joining DC's Legion of Super-Heroes, Too

Infectious Lass also finally gained membership in the official Legion of Superheroes. While this was initially seen as a way of simply filling the ranks after the main members all left the team, Drura still managed to serve with distinction infecting only those she chose to. Moreover, she ended up marrying the Invisible Kid and when he became Earth President wound up becoming First Lady and living in the London Presidential Palace. Drura even became one of her husbands advisors, showing how she had grown in confidence since her early appearances.

Unfortunately, during the Zero Hour storyline, Infectious Lass was wiped from the timeline. She later showed up in a rebooted universe, once again trying out for the Legion of Superheroes. It wasnt a complete backslide, however, as Drura was shown to still have better control over her germ warfare abilities. In Legion #37, Infectious Lass is actually accepted into Legion Academy and is even considered one of their most promising cadets. Once again clad in her mask and costume, Infectious Lass is nonetheless still showcased as an attractive young woman more exotic alien than a gross sick girl.

And while Druras relationship with the Earth President appears to have been retconned out of existence, her popularity with men has apparently not waned. In Tales of the Unexpected #4, another rebooted version of Infectious Lass showed up in the past fighting a group of powerful overlords known as the Architects. Again wearing her classic mucus-like costume, Infectious Lass retained her cheerful attitude and managed to attract the swashbuckling pirate Captain Fear who confessed Drura left him lovesick.

For a character initially designed as a joke for the Legion of Super-Heroes, Infectious Lass has acquired a remarkably devoted following. Although the Legion has probably gone through more reboots than any other superhero team in the DC Multiverse, making her current status (or even existence) questionable, theres an excellent chance this fan-favorite character will show up again complete with some new admirers!

Next: How Morbius Saved Spider-Man With His Poisoned Blood

The Final Death of DEADPOOL Revealed By Marvel Comics

Michael Jung is a mild-mannered freelance writer-for-hire, actor, and professional storyteller with a keen interest in pop culture, education, nonprofit organizations, and unusual side hustles. His work has been featured in Screen Rant, ASU Now, Sell Books Fast, Study.com, and Free Arts among others. A graduate of Arizona State University with a PhD in 20th Century American Literature, Michael has written novels, short stories, stage plays, screenplays, and how-to manuals.

Michaels background in storytelling draws him to find the most fascinating aspects of any topic and transform them into a narrative that informs and entertains the reader. Thanks to a life spent immersed in comic books and movies, Michael is always ready to infuse his articles with offbeat bits of trivia for an extra layer of fun. In his spare time, you can find him entertaining kids as Spider-Man or Darth Vader at birthday parties or scaring the heck out of them at haunted houses.

Visit Michael Jungs website for information on how to hire him, follow him on Twitter Michael50834213, or contact him directly: michael(at)michaeljungwriter(dot)com.

Visit link:

DC Hero's Most Disgusting Power Was Popular With The President - Screen Rant

Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being Ive ever known in my life.

from The Manchurian Candidate (1959), by Richard Condon

When you think about it, after 9/11, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush did Americans a favor by taking off the gloves, so that we could wring our hands to the toll for freedom in the upcoming dark battle against Terror and Reality-based thinking. Dont ask for whom the bell tolls, we thought, it tolls for Us. The torture trills and flourishes that followed, poor Abu rolling over in his shallow Ghraib, and the mad scientists brought in to offer up new, frightful concepts in torture, such as waterboarding, were the American equivalent of Chinese drip-drip-driven insanity, but, in our shock and aweful style, we wrung out the entire black cloud the whole inshallalah on one tormented terrorist after another.

We video-taped the enhanced interrogations techniques (EIT), but later destroyed the tapes, much to Congresss quiet chagrin, because they would have shown that the methods were excessive and the results meaningless. Later, much later, in 2014, Senator Diane Feinsteins intelligence committee found that EIT were ineffective and consequently illegal. (See the Senates The Report and the recent film, for more details on the committee findings, and CIA head John Brennans illegal attempts to quash the report by spying on the Senate.) In effect, her committee found, we tortured some terrorists who provided no valuable information, and tortured many, many others who turned out to be not terrorists at all. We rang dem bells some more.

The only CIA officer who ever went to jail for revealing the excesses of EIT, John Kirikaou, admitted, in a 2007 interview (pages 15-18 especially) with ABCs Brian Ross, that enhanced interrogation amounted to torture, and that he and colleagues thought it necessary at the time, and that it worked, leading, he said, to countless heads-up details that led to Jack Bauer-like last minute interventions in new al Qaeda plots. It almost sounded like an apologists gambit.

Kirikaou went to jail, became dubbed a whistleblower (by the likes of Glenn Greenwald), and was in jail when the Torture Report came out and contradicted his assertions about the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation. (Hed known about its ineffectiveness a year or so before his 2007 ABC News interview. In February 2015, he told Amy Goodman, It wasnt until something like 2005 or 2006 that we realized that that just simply wasnt truehe wasnt producing any informationand that these techniques were horrific. So, he knew a year or so before the Ross interview). Despite this apparent contradiction, and its implications, the MSM were supportive of his conversation starter about EIT especially waterboarding.

Reading Stephen Kinzers new book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, you could find yourself believing that there were parallel Americas. The list of grisly murders, lethal cover-ups, assassination mindedness, and graphic details of super-enhanced interrogation techniques that made up the CIAs approach to handling the Fifties demonstrate unequivocally that the gloves were off way before Dick Cheney publicly stated the Bush administrations intended approach to those that done us harm on 9/11. If anything, Kinzer shows in Poisoner in Chief, that, by comparison, Cheney may have put the gloves back on to fight al Qaeda. The stuff Kinzer details about CIA operations, especially in the Sydney Gottlieb era, is so depraved you wonder if youve been conned by Bush and company.

Americans have been in a cold war with Russians since 1949, the year they successfully exploded an atom bomb of their own and the nuclear arms race began. It has been a relationship powered by fear, paranoia, and not a little madness, as America sees her ambition to be an empire partially checked by Russia and her potent missiles. If Kinzers read of the Fifties was accurate, it was an era marked, for Americans (and maybe the Soviets) by the terror of instant nuclear annihilation. There were fall-out shelters, procedures for hiding under your desk, and the occasional TV and radio transmission interruptions by the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS). Kinzer repeatedly emphasizes that this fear of annihilation was so often proffered as the motivation for the actions early covert operators.

George Orwells 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was not only a look to the future but a pulse-taking of his zeit geist. The Spanish Civil War and the Great Depression sandwiched between two world wars crushed the spirits of millions. The kind of nihilistic impulses described by Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness or even in The Waste Land poetry of T.S. Eliot seemed manifest everywhere. Ideologies duked it out: Capitalism, Communism, and Fascism. Out of one nation fearing anothers impulses, weapons of mass destruction had evolved from brute force to chemical weapons to biological weapons to LSD and other psychoactives to nuclear weapons. This is what was on the minds of writers, politicians, soldiers, and the CIA, back in the day.

So when the Soviets exploded their first atomic weapon in 1949 and then followed that up with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, American spies felt that they were dealing with a race against time. They started gathering German scientists, Nazi eugenecists, Japanese torturers, and others of twisted scientific persuasion who could lead military programs especially in mind control. Kinzer cites CIA director Allen Dulles mission statement as the basis for what the agency did:

By the early 1950s he had concluded that mind control could be the decisive weapon of the coming ageAny nation that discovered ways to manipulate the human psyche, he believed, could rule the world.

The CIA has always wanted to rule the world in the name of national security.

Operation Paperclip was the means by which totally unpalatable scientists mostly from Nazi Germany were allowed to escape post-war justice at Nuremberg, in order to help the Cold War effort against the Soviets. So, what was supposed to be a patriotic fervor to keep Mama America safe for baking apple pies, soon led to the recruitment of war criminals.

Most prominently, from Nazi Germany, came Kurt Blome, who had been director of the Nazi biological warfare program. Kinzer writes,

They had learned how long it takes for human beings to die after exposure to various germs and chemicals,and which toxins kill most efficiently. Just as intriguing, they had fed mescaline and other psychoactive drugs to concentration camp [especially Dachau] in experiments aimed at finding ways to control minds or shatter the human psyche.

He fit right in with Dulless vision. Their thinking was, writes Kinzer, instead of hanging Blome, lets hire him.

But the most important decision Dulles made regarding his desire to find a way to reach his Mission Accomplished goal was to hire Sydney Gottlieb to run his research and development umbrella program in mind control. As head of the Technical Services Staff headquartered at Fort Detrick in Maryland, Gottlieb coordinated the hundreds of myriad sub-projects and experiments that made up the notorious MK-ULTRA program. Though many twisted details would eventually be disseminated about the doings of these experiments, Gottlieb himself was regarded as a quiet and unassuming man. Kinzer describes him: [He was] a psychic voyager, far from anyones stereotype of the career civil servant. His home was an eco-lodge in the woods with outdoor toilets and a vegetable garden. He meditated, wrote poetry, and raised goats.

Nevertheless, one of the first things that Gottlieb did was to not only hire Nazi scientists, but head East, to Japan, to confer (and hire) General Shiro Ishii, a possibly criminally insane Japanese army surgeon who had headed Unit 731, a horror camp in Manchuria, where Ishii went to work on internees. Kinzer describes prisoners

slowly roasted by electricityhung upside downlocked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out; spun in centrifuges infected with anthrax, syphilis, plague, cholera, and other diseases; forcibly impregnated to provide infants for vivisection; bound to stakes to be incinerated by soldiers testing flamethrowers; and slowly frozen to observe the progress of hypothermia.

Blome and Ishii were model types of the vision the CIA sought in order to gain an edge on similar Russian experimenters looking to create Manchurian candidates.

Black sites, East and West, were set up, where expendables were brought to be mercilessly and brutally tortured, sometimes in such ways that they could not be identified as humans any more. These sites were intentionally beyond US accountability, not set up to interrogate terrorists but to experiment on the mind. Such experiments were not carried out only overseas, but, also, stateside people were unknowing participants in CIA miscreance.

Project Bluebird, for instance, called for an experiment on everyone in San Francisco. Kinzer describes how a psychiatric team performed Operation Sea Spray:

scientists from Camp Detrick directed the spraying of a bacterium called Serratia marcescens into the coastal mist. According to samples taken afterward at forty-three sites, the spraying reached all of San Franciscos 800,000 residents and also affected people in Oakland, Berkeley, Sausalito,and five other cities.

Scores of people had to seek help at a hospital, a few people died from toxic reactions, but these psychiatric scientists proved that the Bay Area was vulnerable to germ warfare. Just in case anyone was wondering.

Gottlieb kept adding shadier characters to perform more and more outrageous tasks, in his effort to nail down how humans tick, deep down inside. But nobody was shadier than ex-cop George Hunter White, who, writes KInzer, stood out even in the dazzling MK-ULTRA cast of obsessed chemists, coldhearted spymasters, grim torturers, hypnotists, electroshockers, and Nazi doctors. Gottlieb had him open up a safe house in Greenwich Village where he lured unsuspecting expendables and others to parties where they could be doused with LSD for study (think: the psychedelic scene from Midnight Cowboy). In 1949, he arrested Billie Holiday for opium possession, which she claimed was planted and which put her through an ordeal that Kinzer says led to her decline toward early death. He later worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Later, White was transferred back to his hometown of San Francisco, where he expanded on his doings in Greenwich Village, starting up a safe house that added the full gamut of sex acts to LSD studies, including Operation Midnight Climax. He leaned toward fascist leathers and stilettos, and provided prostitutes with get out of jail free assurances for assisting in the experiments. There were kundalini-driven orgies, whips and chains, acid trips, and gentle Gottieb with Whites wife, humping her brains out, while he recovered from tripping.

Gottlieb was originally employed as a master chemist. But the mild-mannered meditator also had a covert killer side to him. Kinzer describes the Poisoner-in-Chiefs hand in the assassination of world leaders. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai escaped one of Gottliebs plots with a last minute change of plans. Gottlieb was put in charge of killing Cuban leader Fidel Castro with poison, both directly (cigars) and indirectly (causing his beard to fall out so hes lose face with his people). He was involved in the takedown of Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, personally concocting a poison that if it didnt kill Lumumba outright, writes Kinzer, would leave him so so disfigured that he couldnt possibly be a leader (again with the losing face theme).

And the craziest characters kept joining his subprojects. At McGill University in Montreal, Dr. James Hebb studied the isolation technique [that] could break any man, no matter how intelligent or strong-willed. In another subproject he brought Ira Feldman, a master of old-fashioned interrogation techniques who observed, If it was a girl, you put her tits in a drawer and slammed the drawer [and if] it was a guy, you took his cock and you hit it with a hammer. And they would talk to you. Now, with these drugs, you could get information without having to abuse people.

In New York, John Mulholland, a professional magician whod worked with Houdini, joined MK-Ultra subproject 4, taught sleight of hand and misdirection to the CIA, and even developed a manual for them, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception. The crazies and subprojects of MK-ULTRA just kept piling up. Under Subprojects 9 and 26, Gottlieb studied ways that various depressant drugs can shake a persons psycheSubproject 28 was to test depressants ..Subproject 47 would screen and evaluate hallucinogens, Subproject 124 tested whether inhaling carbon dioxide could lead people into a trance-like state, and Subproject 140 tested the psychoactive effects of thyroid-related hormones.

It wasnt until Dr. Harold Wollf came along in 1954 that CIA methods took a turn toward the ways and means we wring our hands over today. Wolff shared Dulless fascination with the idea of mind control, writes Kinzer. Wollf headed up the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. He proposed placing subjects in inescapable situations that eroded their psyches to the point where, desperate to escape,

doctors could create psychological reactions within them.to test special methods of interrogation, including threats, coercion, imprisonment, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, torture, brainwashing, black psychiatry,hypnosis, and combinations of these with or without chemical agents.

Hello, Gitmo. Hello, Abu Ghraib.

Gottliebs reputation for dark arts intrigues was at its height when in 1953 CIA operative, Frank Olson, suffering from acute anxiety and having reportedly confided to a colleague that hed made a big mistake being part of MK-ULTRA, either fell or dove from the 10th floor of the Statler Hotel in New York. MK-ULTRA almost went down with Olson. Was he heave-hoed out the window or did he somehow stumble through closed curtain and plate glass? It was a mystery that investigative journalist Sy Hersh looked into and opined that, based upon uncorroborated information hes been made privy to, Olson was murdered. A whole 2017 six-part Netflix series Wormwood was produced and does an excellent job of recreating the vibe of the 50s and the somewhat hallucinogenic event.

In the end, as unfriendly changes and unwanted scrutiny took place at the CIA in the wake of changing times, Gottlieb retired. And he and his wife travelled by freighter to India where they volunteered at a lepers colony. Did he spend much time in retirement recalling his Jewish roots? Thinking, there but for the grace of God (his name suggests love of God) might my Hunagrian Jewish parents have gone and me with them into some death camp, where I might have been done by Nazis in ways very similar to the methods I employed? He was essentially a Holocaust Denying Jew. Netanyahu would have called him a self-loathing Jew, then hired to mow lawns in new ways on the West Bank, returning at night to his kibbutz.

So, whats the future of mind control? Kinzer doesnt speculate much. But its clear, without a lot of thinking, that the more we humans become addicted to the honey of the Internets hive mindedness, we become more vulnerable. Edward Snowden has already warned about the mere collection of dossiers (Permanent Records) on every person connected. But there is also the risk of contagions brought on by manipulations of algorithms and newsfeeds. Think of the online white blood cell mobbing of Joseph Kony back in 2012 that created a fever to capture the black cancer, only for the fervor to die suddenly, when it was discovered he hadnt been in the country of capture for years.

Gottlieb is said to have abandoned his pursuit of the Grail for mind control in the end. But there is no question that the dark Quest to control minds is still active, as there are still Rove-Cheney-Bush type people out there who believe, as Allen Dull did, that Any nation that discovered ways to manipulate the human psychecould rule the world.

We are in the middle of a new brain warfare, as Kinzer puts it, without knowing it, because these manipulations and brain hacks are kept from us. As Kinzer suggests,

The target of this warfare is the minds of men on a collective and on an individual basis. Its aim is to condition the mind so that it no longer reacts on a free will or rational basis, but a response to impulses implanted from outside it is proving malleable in the hands of sinister men.

We are the black sites of future interrogations, by machine-like men, who, if they have their way, will not be out make AI androids of the future more human, but humans more machine-like. It might be as simple as a gizmo implanted in the brain to take the free will away and leave us open to the programming of remote sinister forces.

Think about it.

Go here to see the original:

The Fall or Dive of Sydney Gottlieb and Company - CounterPunch

My brain and I have often been at war with each other. At times in the past it was a blitzkrieg of bad decisions. At others it was like constantly shifting alliances mediated by therapists, friends and family. At the moment things are good, better than good but theres a tension there; as if the bullets might start flying again. When I play Night in the Woods I relive all those battles and ceasefires. Mental health and, by extension, mental illness is something that has to be fought and negotiated with. Its a constant push and pull that in a lot of cases never has a definitive victory or defeat, only the constant promise or threat of either. Thats what makes Night in the Woods such a cathartic, warm and often heartbreaking journey.

Mae is a recent college dropout, also a cat but thats not hugely important, who has made her way back to her hometown of Possum Springs. A former mining town Possum Springs is starting its descent towards economic ruin. Mae suffers from some kind of disassociative disorder a symptom of which seems to be depression. The signs are all there from the start: poor diet, heavy drinking, nightmares, a lot of sleeping and fragmenting personal relationships. Maes old friends Bea, Gregg and Angus are in the middle of going about their lives when Mae lands back in Possum Springs. All is not right however as disappearances and shadowy figures haunt the edges of both the town and Maes psyche.

I have a lot of respect for Mae. It takes a lot more strength than a lot of people know to up and quit when things get hard. The phrase When the going gets tough, the tough get going gets thrown around a lot and its true that sometimes the best thing to do in a difficult situation is to persevere. On the other hand it takes a great deal of courage to admit that perseverance can hurt more than giving up. Mae, through previous experience realises this but shes afraid that her loving parents and supportive friends wont see things the same way.

SUPPORT HEADSTUFF

Locking yourself away behind emotional or even physical barriers is pretty common when the fog descends. Being depressed, whether chronically or only occasionally, can feel like wandering through thick fog or looking at the world through a heavy pane of glass. Being close to people whether physically or emotionally doesnt help. Its a chemical imbalance in the brain. Even though youre in control of your body and all its functions the emotional centers of the brain are misfiring, flooded as they are with the wrong kind of emotional chemical. And so we close ourselves off not content to wallow in misery but incapable of doing anything else.

It all paints a dark, grim picture of life for the people in small town America but Night in the Woods isnt all doom and gloom.

These things are easy to do. To lock the bedroom door, to not talk when someones willing to listen, to stop seeking professional help. Whats hard is opening up. Mae doesnt make it easy on herself though. Shes a headstrong, difficult young woman with severe emotional issues but shes also a loyal friend and a loving daughter with a mischievous fun streak. Night in the Woods is a game after all and although games arent necessarily meant to be fun it really helps when they are.

For as many razor sharp reveals and moments of heartbreaking darkness that Night in the Woods has it also has a great deal of levity. Mae and her fellow Gen Z-ers view the world with the sort of ironic detachment and humour common to those raised on message boards and MySpace. But life in small town America tends to fuck you more often than life in the Big City does.

Bea, Maes chain-smoking childhood crocodile friend, has recently lost her mother and is now in charge of the family hardware store. Gregg, the manic anarchist fox Mae has known since adolescence, can also feel the clouds moving in darkening his view of himself, his relationship with his bear boyfriend bearfriend? Angus and life in general. And thats without mentioning Maes parents financial troubles brought about by recession and bad luck. It all paints a dark, grim picture of life for the people in small town America but Night in the Woods isnt all doom and gloom. It wouldnt be much fun to play otherwise.

Gameplay-wise beyond some short mini-games Night in the Woods pretty much boils down to walking, jumping and talking. Your time in Possum Springs will be spent traversing the town from its bustling but slowly shuttering Main Street to its starkly gorgeous church to the oppressive woods of the title. In Possum Springs youll while away the mornings and afternoons talking to the townsfolk like Pastor Kate, the bad-good poet Selmers and the homeless drifter Bruce.

The evenings is when Night in the Woods truly comes alive as Mae embarks on adventures with either Mae, Gregg or her bird friend Jeremy Warton aka Germ Warfare. This can involve a trip to the mall with Bea, a friendly knife fight with Gregg and several ghost-hunting trips with the gang. Its in these moments as well as those that Mae spends at home in the kitchen talking to her mom Candy, watching TV with her dad Stan or reminiscing on her role model: her Granddad.

As much as Night in the Woods is about finding the light through the fog as provided by friends and family its also about the things we leave behind as life goes on. Whether it be the place we grew up, the friends we left there or the people that passed on along the way Night in the Woods has a great reverence for memory. I relate to Mae in a lot of ways both in her struggles and successes. She and I have fought our bad brains to a standstill time and again. Weve both surrounded ourselves with good friends willing to support us ad be supported by us. And perhaps most important of all to me: we both really miss our granddads.

Losing an older relative hurts. Ive lost both grandfathers in the last dozen years. Losing a grandparent or any older family member, especially when youre close to them, feels like a very special kind of loss. A door to a specific view on and interpretation of history has closed forever. The past is no longer as accessible as it once was but that makes memories shine all the brighter.

I wasnt as close to my granddad as Mae was. He read to her in bed. He left her his old collection of horror stories. He visited her as a ghost in a dream. As people pass on their image grows in our mind. My granddad might not have been much of a talker but what he said may as well have been gold. He always knew what to say and when to say it, a talent that seems to have skipped a generation or two in my family. The images that myself and Mae have are idealised but theyre all we have now and that has to be enough, even when its not.

Despite its distinct focus on mental health and the debilitating effects grief and mental illness can have on it Night in the Woods never feels like a game exclusively about either of these issues like, say Depression Quest or Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice. Instead Night in the Woods with its get-up-and-go attitude to depression and distinct, ironic sense of humour feels like a game about coping as best we can with life and all the things it can throw at us. Even when it descends into an occult nightmare inspired by Algernon Blackwood stories Night in the Woods is quick to return to the themes powering it. Night in the Woods is a game about life in all its fragile beauty and how despite all its hardships and losses it is ultimately worth both living and enjoying.

Featured Image Credit.

Read the original:

Depression Quest: Bad Brains, Good Friends and Night in the Woods - HeadStuff.org

This post will eventually contain a key plot spoiler, some distance down the page from here, so if you want to see this 1969 film with virgin eyes, stop reading. But do come back after youve seen it. The second spoiler is no spoiler at all, no surprise to anyone: Sean Connery is not James Bond in it, and the Bond of On Her Majestys Secret Service, George Lazenby, is most famous for never having played the role again. That set of facts and how they came about is the main subject of this post, although we will also cover the merits and flaws of the film itself, which some Bond snobs consider one of the best, if not the best, of the entire series. But I cant tell you why yet, not here at the top of the post, because it will involve the spoiler. You have been warned.

By the time Thunderball (1965) wrapped, Sean Connery was tired of being Bond. Actually, thats English-style polite understatement that the blunt, Scottish-born Connery would have impatiently penciled out in favor of thoroughly sick of it. He felt his character was becoming overshadowed by ingenious gadgets, Ken Adams enormous sets, one-liner quips and a growing fantasy element. Connery started the series in 1962 as a relatively unknown actor, quickly became a leading international star, and made an astonishing amount of money. Being a practical Scot, adding to that pile was the only reason he reluctantly stayed aboard for You Only Live Twice (1967). Then he was gone, he swore, for good. So EON Productions, producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli, conducted an ostentatiously well publicized search for the next Bond. Each new actor in the role of James Bond is a multi, multi-million-dollar box office gamble, and from that standpoint this very first replacement would be by far the most ill-fated.

Established movie stars such as Richard Burton were considered, but Saltzman and Broccoli wanted to repeat what theyd done with Sean Connery, create their own star, who would presumably cost less and be easier to control. Australian actor George Lazenby, whod so far mostly done commercials for British television, seemed to fill the bill. Less slender, more muscular than Connery, he radiated confidence. Even his TV commercials worked in his favor, as they were mostly for luxury products that showed how at home he looked with beautiful women, expensive tailoring, exotic cars, and champagne. True, he had a case of loving-cup ears, but that hadnt stopped Clark Gable, among others. In screen tests, he handled himself well in fight scenes. He was hired.

British film writer (and lifelong conservative) Alexander Walker was one of the few whod treat Lazenbys career arc with some sympathy. Walker points out one critical difference between the way men became stars in Britain and classic-era Hollywood. At that time, most UK actors went to acting school, often RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and learned their profession on stage. By contrast, most American stars didnt; they were truck drivers (James Stewart), worker in a tire factory (Clark Gable), cowhands (Gary Cooper), bodyguards (George Raft), WWI sailor (Humphrey Bogart) or what have you, and got hired primarily for their looks. Sometimes that minimal preparation for the sound stage was a handicap, but frequently it gave our guys a rough, untutored masculine edge. Sean Connery, though he briefly trod the Shakespearean boards, came up the American style. Hed been a boxer in the Royal Navy, and despite his ability to project refinement, he never lost the brusque suggestion of real, not just on-screen toughness, even in extremes a touch of cruelty. Thats a fair part of what made him so good as Bond, a quality that present-day Daniel Craig has, and as it turned out, George Lazenby lacked. But that wasnt evident when production began on On Her Majestys Secret Service.

To accompany the new Bond, the writer and producers tried out a back-to-basics style; far fewer flashy gadgets and tricks, less over-the-top sets, and returning to sticking (mostly) with the original Ian Fleming story, all things they hadnt done since From Russia With Love (not so coincidentally, another film much beloved by Bond purists). OHMSS would be notable for spectacular winter photography and skiing stunts, all of course real and dangerous in that pre-CGI age. Downhill Racer, another skiing picture, this one with Robert Redford right before Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made him a superstar, filmed in the same location during that season, and the crew of Downhill Racer would enviously tell stories to pals at Paramount Pictures about how elaborate the special camera platforms, cradles and mounts were on the higher budget Bond picture. This time, the flashy gadgets were behind the camera.

There were other differences. Telly Savalas was every bit as bald as Donald Pleasance, the original Ernst Stavro Blofeld (the best of the bunch, IMHO), but he comes across less like Pleasances evil global mastermind and more in the manner of a conventional mob boss, except for one thing: while the main weakness of other Bond villains was an unfortunate desire to take over the world, the Blofeld of OHMSS has a most surprising weaknesssocial status insecurity. It leads him to try to establish an aristocratic family tree, giving British Secret Service a chance to plant Bond in Blofelds inner circle as Sir Hilary Bray, expert in heraldry, arbiter of ancestry. James Bond is a secret agent, but not generally an actual spy, as he is here, working within the enemy camp under a concealed identity.

When housed in a spectacular mountainside hideaway with a bevy of nave beautiful young women, Bond has to pretend to be a stereotype sniffy, diffident English gentleman, asexual if not outright hinted to be homosexual (a point made in the novel.) Of course, this being James Bond, he strategically beds one and then another of the women and begins to unravel Blofelds plot: using the women to unwittingly spread germ warfare. The Sir Hilary Bray cover story falls apart, and Bond makes his last-minute escape in one of the best action sequences of the first decade of the series.

Thats the outline of the main plot, but the subplot is what makes OHMSS special to fansthe character of The Girl. (Dont faint at the term, Ricochet stalwartsits 1969, remember.) Shes Tracy Draco, played by Diana Rigg, the tempestuous, troubled daughter of a mafia superboss. In the pre-credits scene, Bondwho we first see only in glimpsesrescues her from a seaside attack, with a longer fight scene than usual, but she drives away without a word of thanks. This never happened to the other fellow, he grumbles. By coincidence, shes staying at the same posh hotel, and Bond begins to pursue her. At least as gorgeous as any of her (many) predecessors, she doesnt tumble into bed, and it becomes clear that Riggs Tracy Draco is something new for the series, the closest thing to James Bonds equal weve ever seen. Her scary dad actually encourages Bond to pursue his spirited daughter, and with the mobs army at his disposal Draco becomes a key factor in the fight against Blofeld.

Diana Rigg was an excellent choice, not only because of her talent and looks, but because unlike Lazenby, she was already a known quantity to worldwide TV audiences, well liked as Mrs. Peel in The Avengers. (Honor Blackman, Goldfingers Pussy Galore, was her predecessor in the role, but the early years of that UK series never made it overseas.) We cant credit womens lib for Riggs strong role; its pretty much as Fleming wrote it in 1963. Blofeld captures her, giving Bond the motivation to ignore official Britains reluctance to violate Swiss borders, and do a rescue raid on the mountain stronghold with the assistance of Dracosthe mafiasbest killers.

They escape. Bond realizes that this is the woman hes always wanted, after whats been, after all, a pretty thorough search. They get married. On the drive to the honeymoon, Blofeld and his gunwoman ambush them and kill her, with one shot through the windshield. As the film ends, hes holding her in his arms, silently crying. Its largely this stunning ending, straight out of the book, that has earned the film cult status. Thered be no Bond movie finale with this emotional power until Skyfall, 43 years later.

Lazenby fans, and he acquired a few, claim that Sean Connery could never have pulled this off. I dont know about that. Connerys a fine actor. It should be conceded, though, that Lazenby, the smiling Bond, managed to make the saddest ending in the series believable.

But the bottom line cant be denied. Call it the downbeat ending, call it lack of Connery, On Her Majestys Secret Service earned less than half of what You Only Live Twice did, alarming United Artists with what seemed to be a franchise-killing loss. Panic ensued. But they didnt have to get rid of Lazenby; incredibly, hed already quit, relieving UA of paying off his contract options for sequel films. Unlike Sean Connery, who in his early films was (sensibly) grateful for the chance to become rich and famous, George Lazenby was inexplicably spoiled, arrogant on the set, and difficult to work with. He apparently thought he could do better. He thought wrong. Like Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, who quit Mission: Impossible, like Chevy Chase, whod quit Saturday Night Live just as the party was getting started, Lazenby walked away for greater opportunities that proved imaginary.

Thats the OHMSS story, but for United Artists it couldnt end there. UA studio chief David Picker managed to get Sean Connery back for one more film. He did it the old-fashioned way, by offering a deal that was unprecedented at the time, lucrative beyond even the greediest kings ransom, including $2 million up front (roughly $20 million today), 10% of the actual, un-steal-able gross, and the right to produce two independent films of Connerys choice, a come-on to his artistic vanity that sealed the bargain.

So he made Diamonds Are Forever (1971), the weakest of Connerys Bonds, which gave the box office a shot of adrenaline. When it was over, Connery walked away again, as he said he would, with a public vow of Never again that would provide the rueful title of his final Bond film. Fans who associate Roger Moore with the sillier, more lightweight Seventies Bonds (or blame him for them) should give Diamonds a critical eye; Connery cheerfully phones it in, with all the sets, gadgets, and jokes he previously disdained.

This time EON Productions didnt go for an unknown actor, but for Roger Moore. Like Diana Rigg, he was already known worldwide for a British TV show, in his case The Saint, where he played a vaguely Bondish leading man. No, Moore wasnt Connery, but at least he wasnt Lazenby. Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli had learned their lesson, and didnt clutter Moores entrance with OHMSSs too-elaborate attempts to link the new Bond to the earlier films. He just stepped into the part, Live and Let Die was a big success, and that was that.

Much later, in the pre-credit scenes of For Your Eyes Only (1981), the film would begin with Moore in a cemetery, solemnly placing flowers at a tombstone: Teresa Bond, 1943-1969, Beloved Wife of James Bond. We Have All the Time in the World. It was a rare acknowledgment of a unique moment.

Visit link:

On Her Majesty's Secret Service: This Never Happened to the Other Fellow - Ricochet.com

Recently, many countries in Asia have suffered from deadly and costly epidemics. While globalization and climate change may play a causal role, germ geopolitics cannot be excluded any longer.

Entomological, anti-animal and crop-based diseases typically occur for natural reasons. All three have also be aggravated by globalization and climate change. However, evidence suggests that some of these outbreaks may also involve prior deployment in "biological programs" and "research.

Take anthrax, for instance. Despite the post-9/11 concerns, the bacteria continue to be researched. In May 2015, Pentagon confirmed that its lab in Utah had inadvertently sent live anthrax samples to one of its military bases in South Korea. Last April, civic groups and residents took to the street to protest against biological agent experiments, which the US was reportedly conducting at Busans Port Pier 8. Pentagons budget estimates suggest the project was ongoing with funds set aside for live agent tests.

These issues remain sensitive in East Asia, in light of the US biowarfare against North Koreans and Chinese in the 1950s and contemporary geopolitics. Biological agents have dual-use functions. Like new technologies, they can save but also incapacitate and destroy human lives.

Asian Swine Fever: Epidemics Vs Geopolitics

Asian swine fever (ASF) is a hemorrhagic fever of pigs with mortality rates close to 100 percent and major economic losses. Historically, the first ASF outbreak took place in Kenya in 1907 and the first outside Africa in Portugal in 1957. That's the official story.

In reality, by the early '50s, several viruses, including ASF, were available in Fort Terry, a US bio-warfare facility in Plum Island, New York. Between the 1960s and late 90s, Cuba accused Washington of ten biological warfare attacks following serious infectious disease outbreaks. None were proven conclusively, but several most likely occurred. In 1971, pigs in Havana hog farm were diagnosed with ASF virus, which caused half a million pigs to be slaughtered. As Cuba suffered food shortage, the UN labeled the outbreak the "most alarming event" of 1971.

The debacle remained a mystery until 1977, when Long Island Newsday reported the virus was delivered from a US army base; the site of joint Army-CIA covert operations in the Panama Canal Zone. US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) denied involvement. Yet, bio-warfare historian Norman Covert has affirmed CIA had access to the laboratories.

CIA Denies Link to Cuban Swine Fever

Following the Cold War, the ASF threat seemed to have been defused. But as a series of color revolutions took off in Eastern Europe in countries targeted for NATO enlargement - the ASF in 2007 spread to Georgia in the Caucasus and thereafter widely to neighboring countries, including Armenia, Azerbaijan and several territories in Russia.

After a decade of relative quiet, the first ASF outbreak in China was reported in Shenyang in August 2018. It was thought to have come to China via Russia or Eastern Europe; that is, through the "color revolutions" countries.

The timing is intriguing. In China, the spread of ASF began with the US trade war after mid-2018. As a result, US pork sales to China were over three times pricier already last spring than a year before, despite the US retaliatory tariffs. Chinas over 400 million pigs account for half of the world total. The ASF is a major threat to global food security.

US Trade War, Chinas ASF Epidemic, Soaring Import Prices

Chinas Breeding Saw Population, 2016-19

Source: FAO (UN), USDA (US), MARA (China)

Ethnic Bio-Bombs, Non-Endemic Outbreaks

After the Cold War, the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (CTRP) was created presumably to keep the former Soviet Unions nuclear and chemical infrastructure from rogue nations and terrorists. But as Congress in 1996 began to expand the program internationally, so did efforts to capitalize on its offensive uses.

In particular, the neoconservative Project for New American Century (PNAC), the ideological force behind the subsequent Bush administrations foreign policy, declared in its manifesto Rebuilding Americas Defenses (2000) that advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

Previously, such efforts at biological ethnic bombs had occurred mainly in apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia; the PNAC builds on the Israeli ethno-bomb idea to target specific genetic traits among target populations.

By May 2007, Russia banned all exports of human bio samples, due to concern for "genetic bio-weapons" targeting Russian population. Reportedly, some of these institutions, including Harvard Public Health and USAID, have collected biological material in China as well. In October 2018, Russian Defense Ministry claimed the spread of viral diseases from Georgia, including African swine fever since 2007, could be connected to a US lab network in the area, where more than 70 Georgians had died in odd conditions.

The lab network, a branch of the Nunn-Lugar bio-initiative, belongs to the multimillion-dollar Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) funded by Pentagon's Cooperative Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The CBEP labs are located in 25 countries, including in Eastern Europe (e.g., Georgia and Ukraine), the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. In several locations, there have been reported outbreaks of tropical diseases, which are not endemic to the area.

Despite high-level Russian calls for a comprehensive evaluation and joint inspections, pleas for multilateral cooperation have been ignored. In its 2020 multimillion-dollar budget, the DTRA characterizes the "bio-security" program in Asia as the partner of choice in a region competing against Chinese influence.

Pressing Need for Multipolar Cooperation

Even the discoverer of the devastating Lyme disease Willy Burdorfer participated in US bio-warfare, according to science bestseller Bitten (2019). That has triggered New Jersey Rep. Chris Smiths investigation into whether Pentagon has experimented with tics and other insects as biological weapons.

International concern is rising over the role of potential covert goals in viral outbreaks. By September, the Fall armyworm, a pest that can damage a wide variety of crops, had spread to 25 Chinese provinces posing a severe threat to food security. Described first in 1797, it used to be endemic only to Americas. After the Trump 2016 win, it has globalized faster than Facebook. Only crisis measures permitted China to contain the threat for this year.

A new Pentagon program called Insect Allies funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) relies on gene editing and hopes to infect insects with modified viruses, presumably to make US crops more resilient. In contrast, international scientists suggest such programs do not represent agricultural research but new bio-weapon programs, which violate the Biological Weapons Convention.

During the Cold War, the threat of the mutually assured destruction constrained nuclear and bio-warfare risks, however. The contemporary era is devoid of such constraints and thus far more dangerous. The most effective way to resolve the contested bio-warfare challenges would be to build on international multilateral biological arms control, particularly the 1925 Geneva Protocol, the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

With rising climate risks and geopolitical tensions, no single country should have monopoly over biological agents in the 21st century. Whats desperately needed is multipolar cooperation among the major advanced economies and large emerging powers.

Dr. Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore).

A shorter version of the commentary was released by China-US Focus on October 10, 2019

Read this article:

The Concern for the Secretive Bio-Geopolitics - FXStreet

Unit 731 (Japanese: 731, Hepburn: Nana-san-ichi Butai) was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (19371945) of World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Imperial Japan. Unit 731 was based at the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China).

It was officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army (, Kantgun Beki Kysuibu Honbu). Originally set up under the Kempeitai military police of the Empire of Japan, Unit 731 was taken over and commanded until the end of the war by General Shir Ishii, a combat medic officer in the Kwantung Army. The facility itself was built between 1934 and 1939 and officially adopted the name "Unit 731" in 1941.

At least 3,000 men, women, and children[1][2]from which at least 600 every year were provided by the Kempeitai[3] were subjected as "logs" to experimentation conducted by Unit 731 at the camp based in Pingfang alone, which does not include victims from other medical experimentation sites, such as Unit 100.[4]

Unit 731 participants of Japan attest that most of the victims they experimented on were Chinese while a lesser percentage were Soviet, Mongolian, Korean, and other Allied POWs. The unit received generous support from the Japanese government up to the end of the war in 1945.

Instead of being tried for war crimes after the war, the researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation.[5] Other researchers that the Soviet forces managed to arrest first were tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949. The Americans did not try the researchers so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into the U.S. biological warfare program, much as they had done with German researchers in Operation Paperclip.[6] On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii, can probably be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence".[5] Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the West as communist propaganda.[7]

In 1932, Surgeon General Shir Ishii ( Ishii Shir), chief medical officer of the Japanese Army and protg of Army Minister Sadao Araki was placed in a command of the Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory (AEPRL). Ishii organized a secret research group, the "Tg Unit", for various chemical and biological experimentation in Manchuria. Ishii had proposed the creation of a Japanese biological and chemical research unit in 1930, after a two-year study trip abroad, on the grounds that Western powers were developing their own programs. One of Ishii's main supporters inside the army was Colonel Chikahiko Koizumi, who later became Japan's Health Minister from 1941 to 1945. Koizumi had joined a secret poison gas research committee in 1915, during World War I, when he and other Imperial Japanese Army officers became impressed by the successful German use of chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres, where the Allies suffered 5,000 deaths and 15,000 wounded as a result of the chemical attack.[8][9]

Unit Tg was implemented in the Zhongma Fortress, a prison/experimentation camp in Beiyinhe, a village 100km (62mi) south of Harbin on the South Manchuria Railway. A jailbreak in autumn 1934 and later explosion (believed to be an attack) in 1935 led Ishii to shut down Zhongma Fortress. He received the authorization to move to Pingfang, approximately 24km (15mi) south of Harbin, to set up a new and much larger facility.[10]

In 1936, Emperor Hirohito authorized by decree the expansion of this unit and its integration into the Kwantung Army as the Epidemic Prevention Department.[11] It was divided at the same time into the "Ishii Unit" and "Wakamatsu Unit" with a base in Hsinking. From August 1940, the units were known collectively as the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army ()"[12] or "Unit 731" (731) for short. In addition to the establishment of Unit 731, the decree also called for the establishment of an additional biological warfare development unit called the Kwantung Army Military Horse Epidemic Prevention Workshop (later referred to as Manchuria Unit 100) and a chemical warfare development unit called the Kwantung Army Technical Testing Department. (later referred to as Manchuria Unit 516) After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, sister chemical and biological warfare units were founded in major Chinese cities, and were referred to as Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Units. Detachments included Unit 1855 in Beijing, Unit Ei 1644 in Nanjing, Unit 8604 in Guangzhou and later, Unit 9420 in Singapore. The compilation of all these units comprised Ishiis network, and at its height in 1939, was composed of more than 10,000 personnel.[13]

Medical doctors and professors from Japan were attracted to join Unit 731 by the rare opportunity to conduct human experimentation and strong financial support from the Army.[14]

A special project code-named Maruta used human beings for experiments. Test subjects were gathered from the surrounding population and were sometimes referred to euphemistically as "logs" (, maruta), used in such contexts as "How many logs fell?". This term originated as a joke on the part of the staff because the official cover story for the facility given to the local authorities was that it was a lumber mill. However, in an account by a man who worked as a junior uniformed civilian employee of the Imperial Japanese Army in Unit 731, the project was internally called "Holzklotz", which is a German word for log.[15] In a further parallel, the corpses of "sacrificed" subjects were disposed of by incineration.[16] Researchers in Unit 731 also published some of their results in peer-reviewed journals, writing as though the research had been conducted on non-human primates called "Manchurian monkeys" or "long-tailed monkeys".[17]

The test subjects were selected to give a wide cross-section of the population and included common criminals, captured bandits and anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners and also people rounded up by the Kempeitai military police for alleged "suspicious activities". They included infants, the elderly, and pregnant women. The members of the unit, approximately three hundred researchers, included doctors and bacteriologists; most were Japanese, although some were Chinese and Korean collaborators.[18] Many had been desensitized to performing unpleasant experiments from experience in animal research.[19]

Thousands of men, women, children, and infants interned at prisoner of war camps were subjected to vivisection, often without anesthesia and usually ending with the death of the victim.[20][21] Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Researchers performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was thought that the death of the subject would affect the results.[22]

Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss. Those limbs that were removed were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of the body. Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and the esophagus reattached to the intestines. Parts of organs, such as the brain, lungs, and liver, were removed from some prisoners.[21] Imperial Japanese Army surgeon Ken Yuasa suggests that the practice of vivisection on human subjects (mostly Chinese communists or common criminals) was widespread even outside Unit 731,[23] estimating that at least 1,000 Japanese personnel were involved in the practice in mainland China.[24]

Prisoners were injected with diseases, disguised as vaccinations,[25] to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhoea, then studied. Prisoners were also repeatedly subject to rape by guards.[26]

Plague fleas, infected clothing and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have killed at least 400,000 Chinese civilians.[27] Tularemia was tested on Chinese civilians.[28]

Unit 731 and its affiliated units (Unit 1644 and Unit 100 among others) were involved in research, development and experimental deployment of epidemic-creating biowarfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace (both civilian and military) throughout World War II. Plague-infected fleas, bred in the laboratories of Unit 731 and Unit 1644, were spread by low-flying airplanes upon Chinese cities, including coastal Ningbo in 1940, and Changde, Hunan Province, in 1941. This military aerial spraying killed tens of thousands of people with bubonic plague epidemics.[29][30][31]

It is possible that Unit 731's methods and objectives were also followed in Indonesia, in a case of a failed experiment designed to validate a synthesized tetanus toxoid vaccine.[32]

Physiologist Yoshimura Hisato conducted experiments by taking captives outside, dipping various appendages into water, and allowing the limb to freeze. Once frozen, which testimony from a Japanese officer said "was determined after the 'frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck'",[33] ice was chipped away and the area doused in water. The effects of different water temperatures were tested by bludgeoning the victim to determine if any areas were still frozen.

Doctors orchestrated forced sex acts between infected and non-infected prisoners to transmit the disease, as the testimony of a prison guard on the subject of devising a method for transmission of syphilis between patients shows:

"Infection of venereal disease by injection was abandoned, and the researchers started forcing the prisoners into sexual acts with each other. Four or five unit members, dressed in white laboratory clothing completely covering the body with only eyes and mouth visible, handled the tests. A male and female, one infected with syphilis, would be brought together in a cell and forced into sex with each other. It was made clear that anyone resisting would be shot."[34]

After victims were infected, they were vivisected at different stages of infection, so that internal and external organs could be observed as the disease progressed. Testimony from multiple guards blames the female victims as being hosts of the diseases, even as they were forcibly infected. Genitals of female prisoners that were infected with syphilis were called "jam filled buns" by guards.[35]

Some children grew up inside the walls of Unit 731, infected with syphilis. A Youth Corps member deployed to train at Unit 731 recalled viewing a batch of subjects that would undergo syphilis testing: "one was a Chinese woman holding an infant, one was a White Russian woman with a daughter of four or five years of age, and the last was a White Russian woman with a boy of about six or seven."[35] The children of these women were tested in ways similar to their parents, with specific emphasis on determining how longer infection periods affected the effectiveness of treatments.

Female prisoners were forced to become pregnant for use in experiments. The hypothetical possibility of vertical transmission (from mother to child) of diseases, particularly syphilis, was the stated reason for the torture. Fetal survival and damage to mother's reproductive organs were objects of interest. Though "a large number of babies were born in captivity", there have been no accounts of any survivors of Unit 731, children included. It is suspected that the children of female prisoners were killed after birth or aborted.[35]

While male prisoners were often used in single studies, so that the results of the experimentation on them would not be clouded by other variables, women were sometimes used in bacteriological or physiological experiments, sex experiments, and as the victims of sex crimes. The testimony of a unit member that served as guard graphically demonstrated this reality:

"One of the former researchers I located told me that one day he had a human experiment scheduled, but there was still time to kill. So he and another unit member took the keys to the cells and opened one that housed a Chinese woman. One of the unit members raped her; the other member took the keys and opened another cell. There was a Chinese woman in there who had been used in a frostbite experiment. She had several fingers missing and her bones were black, with gangrene set in. He was about to rape her anyway, then he saw that her sex organ was festering, with pus oozing to the surface. He gave up the idea, left and locked the door, then later went on to his experimental work."[35]

Human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in different positions. Flamethrowers were tested on humans. Humans were also tied to stakes and used as targets to test pathogen-releasing bombs, chemical weapons, and explosive bombs.[36][37]

In other tests, subjects were deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death; placed into high-pressure chambers until death; experimented upon to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival; placed into centrifuges and spun until death; injected with animal blood; exposed to lethal doses of x-rays; subjected to various chemical weapons inside gas chambers; injected with sea water; and burned or buried alive.[38]

Some tests had no medical purpose at all with instead intent to administer excruciating pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners' kidneys.[27]

Japanese researchers performed tests on prisoners with bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, and other diseases.[39] This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb used to spread bubonic plague.[40] Some of these bombs were designed with porcelain shells, an idea proposed by Ishii in 1938.

These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells, and other areas with anthrax, plague-carrier fleas, typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and other deadly pathogens. During biological bomb experiments, researchers dressed in protective suits would examine the dying victims. Infected food supplies and clothing were dropped by airplane into areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces. In addition, poisoned food and candies were given to unsuspecting victims, and the results examined.[citation needed]

In 2002, Changde, China, site of the plague flea bombing, held an "International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare" which estimated that the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments was around 580,000.[30] The American historian Sheldon H. Harris claims that 200,000 died.[31] In addition to Chinese casualties, 1,700 Japanese in Chekiang were killed by their own biological weapons while attempting to unleash the biological agent, indicating serious issues with distribution.[1]

During the final months of World War II, Japan planned to use plague as a biological weapon against San Diego, California. The plan was scheduled to launch on September 22, 1945, but Japan surrendered five weeks earlier.[41][42][43][44]

According to A.S. Wells, the majority of victims were mostly Chinese (including accused "bandits" and "Communists"), Korean, and Soviet, although they may also have included European, American, Indian, and Australian prisoners of war.[45]

Unit 731 participants of Japan attest that most of the victims they experimented on were Chinese[23] while a small percentage were Soviet, Mongolian, Korean, and other Allied POWs.[46] Almost 70% of the victims who died in the Pingfang camp were Chinese, including both civilian and military.[47] Close to 30% of the victims were Soviet.[48] Some others were Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders, at the time colonies of the Empire of Japan, and a small number of Allied prisoners of war.[49]

Robert Peaty (19031989), a British Major in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, was the senior ranking allied officer. During this time, he kept a secret diary. A copy of his entire diary exists in the NARA archives.[50] An extract of the diary is available at the UK National Archives at Kew.[51] He was interviewed by the Imperial War Museum in 1981, and the audio recording tape reels are in the IWM's archives.[52]

In April 2018, the National Archives of Japan for the first time disclosed a nearly complete list of 3607 people who worked for Unit 731 to Dr. Katsuo Nishiyama of the Shiga University of Medical Science, who says that he intends to publish the list online.[53]

Unit 731 was divided into eight divisions:

The Unit 731 complex covered six square kilometres (2.3 square miles) and consisted of more than 150 buildings. The design of the facilities made them hard to destroy by bombing. The complex contained various factories. It had around 4,500 containers to be used to raise fleas, six cauldrons to produce various chemicals, and around 1,800 containers to produce biological agents. Approximately 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of bubonic plague bacteria could be produced in a few days.

Some of Unit 731's satellite facilities are in use by various Chinese industrial concerns. A portion has been preserved and is open to visitors as a War Crimes Museum.

A medical school and research facility belonging to Unit 731 operated in the Shinjuku District of Tokyo during World War II. In 2006, Toyo Ishiia nurse who worked at the school during the warrevealed that she had helped bury bodies and pieces of bodies on the school's grounds shortly after Japan's surrender in 1945. In response, in February 2011 the Ministry of Health began to excavate the site.[55]

China requested DNA samples from any human remains discovered at the site. The Japanese governmentwhich has never officially acknowledged the atrocities committed by Unit 731rejected the request.[56]

The related Unit 8604 was operated by the Japanese Southern China Area Army and stationed at Guangzhou (Canton). This installation conducted human experimentation in food and water deprivation as well as water-borne typhus. According to postwar testimony, this facility served as the main rat breeding farm for the medical units to provide them with bubonic plague vectors for experiments.[57]

Unit 731 was part of the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department which dealt with contagious disease and water supply generally.

Operations and experiments continued until the end of the war. Ishii had wanted to use biological weapons in the Pacific War since May 1944, but his attempts were repeatedly snubbed.

With the coming of the Red Army in August 1945, the unit had to abandon their work in haste. The members and their families fled to Japan.

Ishii ordered every member of the group "to take the secret to the grave", threatening to find them if they failed, and prohibiting any of them from going into public work back in Japan. Potassium cyanide vials were issued for use in the event that the remaining personnel were captured.

Skeleton crews of Ishii's Japanese troops blew up the compound in the final days of the war to destroy evidence of their activities, but most were so well constructed that they survived somewhat intact.

Among the individuals in Japan after its 1945 surrender was Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders, who arrived in Yokohama via the American ship Sturgess in September 1945. Sanders was a highly regarded microbiologist and a member of America's military center for biological weapons. Sanders' duty was to investigate Japanese biological warfare activity. At the time of his arrival in Japan he had no knowledge of what Unit 731 was.[35] Until Sanders finally threatened the Japanese with bringing the Soviets into the picture, little information about biological warfare was being shared with the Americans. The Japanese wanted to avoid prosecution under the Soviet legal system, so the next morning after he made his threat, Sanders received a manuscript describing Japan's involvement in biological warfare.[58] Sanders took this information to General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers responsible for rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupations. MacArthur struck a deal with Japanese informants:[59] he secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731, including their leader, in exchange for providing America, but not the other wartime allies, with their research on biological warfare and data from human experimentation.[5] American occupation authorities monitored the activities of former unit members, including reading and censoring their mail.[60] The U.S. believed that the research data was valuable, and did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons.[61]

The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with "poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians. This took place in August 1946 and was instigated by David Sutton, assistant to the Chinese prosecutor. The Japanese defense counsel argued that the claim was vague and uncorroborated and it was dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence. The subject was not pursued further by Sutton, who was probably unaware of Unit 731's activities. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have been accidental.

Although publicly silent on the issue at the Tokyo Trials, the Soviet Union pursued the case and prosecuted twelve top military leaders and scientists from Unit 731 and its affiliated biological-war prisons Unit 1644 in Nanjing, and Unit 100 in Changchun, in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials. Included among those prosecuted for war crimes, including germ warfare, was General Otoz Yamada, the commander-in-chief of the million-man Kwantung Army occupying Manchuria.

The trial of those captured Japanese perpetrators was held in Khabarovsk in December 1949. A lengthy partial transcript of the trial proceedings was published in different languages the following year by a Moscow foreign languages press, including an English language edition.[62] The lead prosecuting attorney at the Khabarovsk trial was Lev Smirnov, who had been one of the top Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials. The Japanese doctors and army commanders who had perpetrated the Unit 731 experiments received sentences from the Khabarovsk court ranging from two to 25 years in a Siberian labor camp. The U.S. refused to acknowledge the trials, branding them communist propaganda.[63] The sentences doled out to the Japanese perpetrators were unusually lenient for Soviet standards, and all but one of the defendants returned to Japan by the 1950s (with the remaining prisoner committing suicide inside his cell). In addition to the accusations of propaganda, the US also asserted that the trials were to only serve as a distraction from the Soviet treatment of several hundred thousand Japanese prisoners of war; meanwhile, the USSR asserted that the US had given the Japanese diplomatic leniency in exchange for information regarding their human experimentation. The accusations of both the US and the USSR were true, and it is believed that they had also given information to the Soviets regarding their biological experimentation for judicial leniency.[64] This was evidenced by the Soviet Union building a biological weapons facility in Sverdlovsk using documentation captured from Unit 731 in Manchuria.[65]

As above, under the American occupation the members of Unit 731 and other experimental units were allowed to go free. One graduate of Unit 1644, Masami Kitaoka, continued to do experiments on unwilling Japanese subjects from 1947 to 1956 while working for Japan's National Institute of Health Sciences. He infected prisoners with rickettsia and mental health patients with typhus.[66]

Shiro Ishii, as the chief of the unit, was granted war crime immunity from the US occupation authorities, because of his provision of human experimentation research materials to the US. From 1948 to 1958, less than 5% of the documents were transferred onto microfilm and stored in the National Archives of the United States, before being shipped back to Japan.[67]

Japanese discussions of Unit 731's activity began in the 1950s, after the end of the American occupation of Japan. In 1952, human experiments carried out in Nagoya City Pediatric Hospital, which resulted in one death, were publicly tied to former members of Unit 731.[68] Later in that decade, journalists suspected that the murders attributed by the government to Sadamichi Hirasawa were actually carried out by members of Unit 731. In 1958, Japanese author Shsaku End published the book The Sea and Poison about human experimentation, which is thought to have been based on a real incident.

The author Seiichi Morimura published The Devil's Gluttony () in 1981, followed by The Devil's Gluttony: A Sequel in 1983. These books purported to reveal the "true" operations of Unit 731, but actually confused them with that of Unit 100, and falsely used unrelated photos attributing them to Unit 731, which raised questions about their accuracy.[69][70]

Also in 1981 appeared the first direct testimony of human vivisection in China, by Ken Yuasa. Since then many more in-depth testimonies have appeared in Japanese. The 2001 documentary Japanese Devils was composed largely of interviews with 14 members of Unit 731 who had been taken as prisoners by China and later released.[71]

Since the end of the Allied occupation, the Japanese government has repeatedly apologized for its pre-war behavior in general, but specific apologies and indemnities are determined on the basis of bilateral determination that crimes occurred, which requires a high standard of evidence. Unit 731 presents a special problem, since unlike Nazi human experimentation which the U.S. publicly condemned, the activities of Unit 731 are known to the general public only from the testimonies of willing former unit members, and testimony cannot be employed to determine indemnity in this way.

Japanese history textbooks usually contain references to Unit 731, but do not go into detail about allegations, in accordance with this principle.[72][73] Sabur Ienaga's New History of Japan included a detailed description, based on officers' testimony. The Ministry for Education attempted to remove this passage from his textbook before it was taught in public schools, on the basis that the testimony was insufficient. The Supreme Court of Japan ruled in 1997 that the testimony was indeed sufficient and that requiring it to be removed was an illegal violation of freedom of speech.[74]

In 1997, the international lawyer Knen Tsuchiya filed a class action suit against the Japanese government, demanding reparations for the actions of Unit 731, using evidence filed by Professor Makoto Ueda of Rikkyo University. All Japanese court levels found that the suit was baseless. No findings of fact were made about the existence of human experimentation, but the decision of the court was that reparations are determined by international treaties and not by national court cases.[citation needed]

In August 2002, the Tokyo district court ruled for the first time that Japan had engaged in biological warfare. Presiding judge Koji Iwata ruled that the Unit 731, on the orders of the Imperial Japanese Army headquarters, used bacteriological weapons on Chinese civilians between 1940 and 1942, spreading diseases including plague and typhoid in the cities of Quzhou, Ningbo and Changde. However, he rejected the victims' claims for compensation on the grounds that they had already been settled by international peace treaties.[75]

In October 2003, a member of the House of Representatives of Japan filed an inquiry. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi responded that the Japanese government did not then possess any records related to Unit 731, but the government recognized the gravity of the matter and would publicize any records that were located in the future.[76] In April 2018, the National Archives of Japan released the names of 3,607 members of Unit 731, in response to a request by Professor Katsuo Nishiyama of the Shiga University of Medical Science.[77][78]

After WWII, the Office of Special Investigations created a watchlist of suspected Axis collaborators and persecutors that are banned from entering the U.S. While they have added over 60,000 names to the watchlist, they have only been able to identify under 100 Japanese participants. In a 1998 correspondence letter between the DOJ and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Eli Rosenbaum, director of OSI, stated that this was due to two factors. (1) While most documents captured by the U.S. in Europe were microfilmed before being returned to their respective governments, the Department of Defense decided to not microfilm its vast collection of documents before returning them back to the Japanese government. (2) The Japanese government has also failed to grant the OSI meaningful access to these and related records after the war, while European countries, on the other hand, have been largely cooperative.[79] The cumulative effect of which is that information pertaining to identifying these individuals is, in effect, impossible to recover.

There have been several films about the atrocities of Unit 731.

Original post:

Unit 731 - Wikipedia

Edit Storyline

Pai, a severely injured North Korean POW is taking up a valuable bed in Post-Op and Pai requires AB- blood, the rarest type of blood in both Caucasians and Asians. So, naturally Frank wants to ship off Pai to the POW section. Pai is Hawkeye's patient; and Hawkeye will not release Pai. But, the whole 4077 Post-Op situation is dire and Henry takes Frank's side; and the guys tell Henry he is turning into a real Army clown. (Cue M*A*S*H, the movie.) Ruefully, Henry has to acknowledge their censure and he tells Trapper and Hawkeye to care for Pai for as long as they want, but to keep Frank (aka Mrs. Henry Blake in Army drag) OFF Henry's back. With Pai a guest I n The Swamp in Hawkeye's cot, the next issue is blood: Radar scours 4077 personnel records to find their rare blood donor. Poor Frank has a dream he is a giant soda with a big straw sticking out of him! When Pai takes a turn for the worse, the original Swamp Rats, Radar and the crew work overtime to keep one Major Montague from ... Written byLA-Lawyer

Certificate: TV-PG

More:

"M*A*S*H" Germ Warfare (TV Episode 1972) - IMDb

Most of us heard about the horrible experiments on humans of the Nazis done by doctor Mengele. But the Nazis werent alone in conducting cruel experiments on humans.

One of the lesser known atrocities of the 20th century was committed by the Imperial Japanese Armys Unit 731. Some of the details of this units activities are still uncovered.

This webpage was set up to collect and organize the information known to date about Unit 731 and present it to anyone interested.

Unit 731 Complex

For 40 years, the horrific activities of Unit 731 remained one the most closely guarded secrets of World War II. It was not until 1984 that Japan acknowledged what it had long denied vile experiments on humans conducted by the unit in preparation for germ warfare.

Deliberately infected with plague, anthrax, cholera and other pathogens, an estimated 3,000 of enemy soldiers and civilians were used as guinea pigs. Some of the more horrific experiments included vivisection without anesthesia and pressure chambers to see how much a human could take before his eyes popped out.

Unit 731 was set up in 1938 in Japanese-occupied China with the aim of developing biological weapons. It also operated a secret research and experimental school in Shinjuku, central Tokyo. Its head was Lieutenant Shiro Ishii.

The unit was supported by Japanese universities and medical schools which supplied doctors and research staff. The picture now emerging about its activities is horrifying.

Manchurian Plaguev ictims 1910-1911

According to reports never officially admitted by the Japanese authorities, the unit used thousands of Chinese and other Asian civilians and wartime prisoners as human guinea pigs to breed and develop killer diseases.

Many of the prisoners, who were murdered in the name of research, were used in hideous vivisection and other medical experiments, including barbaric trials to determine the effect of frostbite on the human body.

To ease the conscience of those involved, the prisoners were referred to not as people or patients but as Maruta, or wooden logs. Before Japans surrender, the site of the experiments was completely destroyed, so that no evidence is left.

Then, the remaining 400 prisoners were shot and employees of the unit had to swear secrecy. The mice kept in the laboratory were then released, which could have cost the lives of 30,000 people, since the mice were infected with the bubonic plague, and they spread the disease.

Few of those involved with Unit 731 have admitted their guilt.

Some caught in China at the end of the war were arrested and detained, but only a handful of them were prosecuted for war crimes.

In Japan, not one was brought to justice. In a secret deal, the post-war American administration gave them immunity for prosecution in return for details of their experiments.

Some of the worst criminals, including Hisato Yoshimura, who was in charge of the frostbite experiments, went on to occupy key medical and other posts in public and private sectors.

Read more from the original source:

UNIT 731 Japan's Biological Warfare Project

Air power gave the UNC its greatest hope to offset Chinese manpower and increasing firepower. The FEAF clearly won the battle for air superiority, pitting fewer than 100 F-86s against far more numerous Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean MiG-15s. Pilots from all the U.S. armed forces downed at least 500 MiGs at a loss of 78 F-86s. The Soviets rotated squadrons of their air defense force to Korea, losing more than 200 pilots.

Strategic bombing was at first limited by policy to attacks on North Korean cities and military installationsa campaign pursued until Pyngyang resembled Hiroshima or Tokyo in 1945. In 1952 the bombing of power plants and dams along the Yalu was authorized, and the following year approval was given to attack dams and supporting irrigation systems in North Korea. The bombing caused great suffering for the North Koreans, but they had to follow the Chinese and Russians in the wars strategic direction, and the Chinese and Russians were hurt very little.

Throughout the war U.S. political and military leaders studied the possible use of nuclear weapons, and upon four separate occasions they gave this study serious attention. The answer was always the same: existing atomic bombs, carried by modified B-29s, would have little effect except for leveling cities. The one time that Truman suggested (in December 1950) that he was considering the nuclear option, the British led the allied charge to stop such talk.

Without question the UNC air campaign hurt the communists, and in retaliation the Chinese and North Koreans (with Soviet collusion) treated captured pilots with special brutality. Air crewmen made up the largest single group of U.S. POWs who truly disappeared, presumably dying under interrogation in Manchuria, elsewhere in China, and possibly in Russia. The communists also claimed that FEAF bombers were spreading epidemic diseases among the civilian population, and they tortured captured American pilots until they extracted incriminating statements of terror bombing and germ warfare.

U.S. air power might have held the communists at bay in the near term, but the long-term security of the ROK depended on (1) the enlargement and improvement of its own armed forces and (2) the stability of its government. The first requirement was accomplished by the United States Korean Military Advisory Group, which modernized the ROKA and also organized an effective training program. In the political arena, however, the UNC had to deal with the aging Syngman Rhee, who was convinced that he had an unfinished divine mission to save Korea. In 1952 Rhee forced the National Assembly to make the election of the president a matter of popular vote, immediately calling an election and winning a second term with five million of the six million votes cast. Rhees political coup had a ripple effect that spread to the armistice negotiations, as his dogmatic opposition to a cease-fire increased in scope and vigour. Essentially, Rhee could not believe that a likely new Republican administration in Washington, led by two other venerable Cold Warriors, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, would be satisfied to have U.S. soldiers die for a tie. Neither could the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans.

Excerpt from:

Korean War - Air warfare | Britannica.com

"; popupImage = window.open('','_blank','width=' + width2 + ',height=' + height + ',toolbar=no,scrollbars=' + scrollb + ',resizable=yes'); popupImage.document.open(); popupImage.document.write(HTML); popupImage.document.close();}//-->

by Harold B. Gill Jr.

Sir Reginald Bacon, The Life of Lord Fisherof Kilverstone, Admiral of the Fleet

British Captain Simeon Ecuyer, portrayed by Ken Treese,second from right, offered blankets infected with smallpox to the Indiansbesieging Fort Pitt. From left, interpreters ChristopherJones, Ted Boscana, Treese, and Patrick Andrews.

When armies get into desperate situations, the usual"civilized" rules of warfare often are thrown out the window. In the 1520sMachiavelli wrote: "When it is absolutely a question of the safety of one'scountry, there must be no consideration of just or unjust, of merciful orcruel, of praiseworthy or disgraceful; instead, setting aside every scruple,one must follow to the utmost any plan that will save her life and keep herliberty."

During Pontiac's uprising in 1763,the Indians besieged Fort Pitt. They burned nearby houses, forcing the inhabitantsto take refuge in the well-protected fort. The British officer in charge,Captain Simeon Ecuyer, reported to Colonel Henry Bouquet in Philadelphia thathe feared the crowded conditions would result in disease. Smallpox had alreadybroken out. On June 24, 1763, William Trent, a local trader, recorded in hisjournal that two Indian chiefs had visited the fort, urging the British toabandon the fight, but the British refused. Instead, when the Indians wereready to leave, Trent wrote: "Out of our regard for them, we gave them twoBlankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will havethe desired effect."

English translation of Grotius on peace and war.

It is not known who conceived theplan, but there's no doubt it met with the approval of the British military inAmerica and may have been common practice. Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander ofBritish forces in North America, wrote July 7, 1763, probably unaware of theevents at Fort Pitt: "Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must,on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them." He orderedthe extirpation of the Indians and said no prisoners should be taken. About aweek later, he wrote to Bouquet: "You will Do well to try to Innoculate theIndians by means of Blanketts as well as to try Every other method that canserve to Extirpate this Execrable Race."

Though a connection cannot beproven, a smallpox epidemic erupted in the Ohio Valley that may have been theresult of the distribution of the infected articles at Fort Pitt. Whatever itsorigins, the outbreak devastated the Indians. Such tactics appear atrocious andbarbaric to modern readers, but at the time anything was alright to use against"savages." Nor was all-out war foreign to the Indians. During Pontiac'sRebellion the Indian warriors killed about 2,000 civilian settlers and about400 soldiers. They, too, tried to "extirpate" the enemy.

The Fort Pitt incident is the best documented case ofdeliberately spreading smallpox among unsuspecting populations, but it likelywas not the first time such a stratagem was employed by military forces. Itappears that Ecuyer and Amherst proposed the same idea independently at aboutthe same time, suggesting that the practice was not unusual.

Attempts to spread sickness anddisease among enemy forces has a long history. The ancient Assyrians poisonedtheir enemy's water supply, and ancient Greeks poisoned the water supply oftheir enemy with the herb hellebore, which caused violent diarrhea. In 1340attackers used a catapult to throw dead animals over the walls of the castle ofThun L'Evque, causing such a stink that the air was so unendurable thedefenders negotiated a truce.

Engraving of Benjamin West's portrait of Henry Bouquet. - Beinecke Library, Yale

Sir Jeffrey Amherst, shown here in Joseph Blackburn's 1758painting, suggested Bouquet infect the Indians with smallpox. -Mead Gallery, Amherst

In Virginia Dr. John Pott, thephysician at Jamestown, was said to have poisoned Indians in 1623, during around of retaliation for a Powhatan uprising in which 350 English died. On May22, Captain William Tucker with twelve men went to the Potomac River to securethe release of English prisoners held by Indians. When the party arrived, itinvited the Indians' leader and his men to conclude a treaty of peace with adrink or two of sack that Pott had prepared for the occasion. The Indiansdemanded that the English interpreter take the first drink, which he did, butout of a different container. Afterward a group of Indians, including twochiefs, were walking with an English interpreter. At a given signal theinterpreter dropped to the ground and the English discharged a volley of shotinto his Indian companions. The English said that about 200 savages died ofpoison and fifty from wounds. The colonists had invited the Indian leaderOpechancanough, the mastermind of the uprising, to attend the party and weredisappointed by not finding him among the dead.

Some people had reservations aboutusing such tactics, even against savages. It was reported that Pott was "verymuch blamed" for his actions.

By the seventeenth century European military leaders werebecoming conscious of ethics in warfare, and rules to follow in "civilized war"were slowly being developed. Hugo Grotius published his codification ofaccepted rules of war in 1625. Grotius departed from the classical view, anddid not regard the entire population of the antagonist state as the enemy andsubject to enslavement or extermination. Other writers were making attempts tobetter define "enemy." Some thought distinction should be made between thosewho were part of the military force and those who were not.

The next significant work on therules of war was Emmerich de Vattel's Law of Nations, published in 1758. De Vattel thought "the enemy maybe deprived of his property and of whatever may add to his strength and put himin a position to make war," and further, "a belligerent lays waste to a countryand destroys food and provender in order that the enemy may not be able tosubsist there...Such measures are taken in order to attain the object ofthe war, but they should be used with moderation and only when necessary."

Grotius and de Vattel thoughtwomen and children, as well as the elderly and infirm, should not be consideredthe "enemy." They thought it was an improper practice to use poison weapons andto contaminate drinking water. Neither specifically condemned the intentionalspread of disease among the enemy, most likely because, with the exception ofsmallpox and syphilis, it was not known how diseases spread. What impact thesewriters and other philosophers made on the military leaders is not known, butit appears that they were aware public opinion regarded it as immoral, and theyattempted to hide evidence that they engaged in spreading disease among theenemy.

There is no proof that anyone attempted to spread diseaseamong the enemy troops during the American Revolutionary War, but there is aplenitude of circumstantial evidence. Almost from the beginning, Americanssuspected the British were trying to infect their army with smallpox. Justbefore Virginia's last royal governor, Lord Dunmore, departed from his base atNorfolk in 1776, the Virginia Gazettereported that his lordship had infected two slaves who had joined his forcesand sent them ashore in order to spread smallpox, "but it was happilyprevented."

The Virginia Gazettereported the failed smallpox plot of Lord Dunmore.

Most British troops had beeninoculated or had had the smallpox and were immune. In Europe smallpox wasendemic, almost always present. Nearly everyone had been exposed to the diseasefrom an early age, so most of the adult population had antibodies thatprotected it.

Most American soldiers, on theother hand, were susceptible. Because of less dense population, Americans oftenreached adulthood without coming into contact with the smallpox virus, and hadno immunity. Some suffered inoculation, a procedure which usually produced amilder infection, but laid low the patient for days. George Washington faced adilemma. If he ordered the general inoculation of the army, that would put mostof his troops in the hospital at the same timea certain disaster if theBritish learned of it.

Washington tried to get around theproblem by ordering all new recruits who had not experienced the disease to beinoculated before they were sent to the main army. Hospitals were set up toundertake the work. Even with his precautions, at one time about one-third ofthe army was incapacitated with either the disease or the inoculation.

When the American siege of Bostonbegan in April 1775, smallpox was epidemic among civilians there. Most Britishsoldiers had been inoculated, and the British were inoculating those troops whohad not had the disease. Washington suspected some of the civilians leaving thecity had been inoculated in hopes of spreading the disease among theContinentals. In December deserters coming to the American lines said that"several persons are to be sent out of Boston, ...that have been inoculated with the small-pox" with the intentionof spreading the infection.

Washington's aide-de-camp thoughtthe report was an "unheard-of and diabolical scheme." Washington heard thestory with disbelief. He wrote that he could "hardly give Credit to" theinformation. A week later he told John Hancock:

Chad Chadwick, as the doctor, inoculates Mike Luzzi whileDan Moore on the ground, Jay Howlett on the bed, and Sonny Tyler against thewall suffer the effects of immunization.

The information I received that theenemy intended Spreading the Small pox amongst us, I coud not Suppose themCapable ofI now must give Some Credit to it, as it has made its appearance onSeverall of those who last came out of Boston.

A Boston physician said "that hehad effectually given the distemper among those people" who were leaving thecity. Rumors and suspicions of British efforts to spread disease in theAmerican troops were persistent throughout the war.

Smallpox played a role in thefailure of American forces to capture Quebec. It was rumored that General GuyCarleton, British commander in Quebec, sent infected people to the Americancamp. Thomas Jefferson was convinced the British were responsible for illnessin the lines. He later wrote: "I have been informed by officers who were on thespot, and whom I believe myself, that this disorder was sent into our armydesignedly by the commanding officer in Quebec." After the defeat at Quebec theAmerican troops gathered at Crown Point, where John Adams found their conditiondeplorable:

Our Army at Crown Point is an objectof wretchedness to fill a humane mind with horrour; disgraced, defeated,discontented, diseased, naked, undisciplined, eaten up with vermin; no clothes,beds, blankets, no medicines; no victuals, but salt pork and flour.

George Washington ordered the inoculation of American troopsto prevent infection by the British.

Inoculation produces a milder form of the disease, makingthe patient ill for several days. Interpreter Dan Moore is the sick soldier.

In most cases the evidence againstthe British is strong, if circumstantial, yet some evidence is quite explicit.When the British sent an expedition to Virginia in 1781, General AlexanderLeslie revealed to Cornwallis his plan to spread disease among the Americans.He said that "above 700 Negroes are come down the River with the Small Pox,"whom he proposed to distribute "about the Rebell Plantations." His motive wasclear, but it is not known if he carried out his plan.

It is evident that the British hadfew qualms about the tactic of infecting the general population as well as theenemy army with smallpox. In 1777 a British officer, Robert Donkin, publishedin New York a little book entitled Military Collections and Remarks. In a footnote he offered a suggestion:

Dip arrows in matter of smallpox,and twang them at the American rebels, in order to inoculate them; This wouldsooner disband these stubborn, ignorant, enthusiastic savages, than any othercompulsive measures. Such is their dread and fear of that disorder!

Elizabeth A. Fenn, professor of history at George WashingtonUniversity, writes in her article "Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-CenturyNorth America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst" that because the Americans were referredto as "savages" Dunkin believed any means was justified to exterminate them.Such attitudes were probably often talked of, but they were not the kind ofsuggestions that should be put in writing. Someone must have believed thatDonkin had gone too far. The footnote survives in three copies of the book. Inall others, it has been removed.

What are considered acceptable military tactics at one timemay not be acceptable to later generations. Eighteenth-century warfare wasincreasingly conducted by relatively compact armies with the result of lessloss and harassment of civilians. "Laws of war" were becoming more concernedwith the protection of noncombatants as well as unnecessary suffering ofmilitary personnel. By the end of the nineteenth century efforts were beingmade to prevent the horrors of chemical warfare.

The First Hague Peace Conferenceof 1899 issued a declaration prohibiting the use of poison and materialscausing unnecessary suffering. The Geneva Protocol adopted in 1925 prohibitedthe use in war of "asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases and of all analogousliquids, materials, and devices," as well as biological methods of warfare. TheGeneva Protocol has been accepted by most countries though not always followed.A German military maxim applies; roughly translated, it says: "To get out of adesperate situation, you have to bend the rules."

Consulting editor Harold Gill contributed to the autumn 2003journal an article on colonial divorce.

More here:

Colonial Germ Warfare : The Colonial Williamsburg Official ...

Biological warfare (BW)also known as germ warfareis the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi with the intent to kill or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war. About the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/068...

Biological weapons (often termed "bio-weapons", "biological threat agents", or "bio-agents") are living organisms or replicating entities (viruses, which are not universally considered "alive") that reproduce or replicate within their host victims. Entomological (insect) warfare is also considered a type of biological weapon. This type of warfare is distinct from nuclear warfare and chemical warfare, which together make up NBC, the military initialism for nuclear, biological, and chemical (warfare or weapons), all of which are considered "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs). None of these fall under the term conventional weapons which are primarily effective due to their destructive potential.

Biological weapons may be employed in various ways to gain a strategic or tactical advantage over the enemy, either by threats or by actual deployments. Like some of the chemical weapons, biological weapons may also be useful as area denial weapons. These agents may be lethal or non-lethal, and may be targeted against a single individual, a group of people, or even an entire population. They may be developed, acquired, stockpiled or deployed by nation states or by non-national groups. In the latter case, or if a nation-state uses it clandestinely, it may also be considered bioterrorism.

There is an overlap between biological warfare and chemical warfare, as the use of toxins produced by living organisms is considered under the provisions of both the Biological Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention. Toxins and psychochemical weapons are often referred to as midspectrum agents. Unlike bioweapons, these midspectrum agents do not reproduce in their host and are typically characterized by shorter incubation periods.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biologic...

The United States biological weapons program officially began in spring 1943 on orders from U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. Research continued following World War II as the U.S. built up a large stockpile of biological agents and weapons. Over the course of its 27 year history, the program weaponized and stockpiled the following seven bio-agents (and pursued basic research on many more): Bacillus anthracis (anthrax) Francisella tularensis (tularemia) Brucella spp (brucellosis) Coxiella burnetii (Q-fever) Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEE) Botulinum toxin (botulism) Staphylococcal enterotoxin B

Throughout its history, the U.S. bioweapons program was secret. It became controversial when it was later revealed that laboratory and field testing (some of the latter using simulants on non-consenting individuals) had been common. The official policy of the United States was first to deter the use of bio-weapons against U.S. forces and secondarily to retaliate if deterrence failed. There exists no evidence that the U.S. ever used biological agents against an enemy in the field (see below for alleged uses).

In 1969, President Richard Nixon ended all offensive (i.e., non-defensive) aspects of the U.S. bio-weapons program. In 1975 the U.S. ratified both the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC)international treaties outlawing biological warfare. Recent U.S. biodefense programs, however, have raised concerns that the U.S. may be pursuing research that is outlawed by the BWC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_S...

Go here to see the original:

America's Secret War: Germs & Biological Weapons - Spies, Scientists (2001)

Germ Warfare is the third part of episode 10 of season 2. In this episode, Dexter's family comes down with the flu, and the boy genius tries his best to avoid becoming ill. However, this becomes a problem when Dee Dee enters his laboratory looking for a tissue.

Dexter has just put the finishing touches on his "greatest creation", which is a sphere that he claims will give him the power to rule the universe. Then, his Mom calls him down for breakfast. However, Mom is revealed to have the flu and sneezes all over his food. After Dexter runs out of the kichen in disgust, he runs into his Dad who is also sick with the flu. When Dexter has ran up the stairs to avoid getting sneezed on by Dad, he runs into Dee Dee, who has the worst case of the flu. Dexter rushes to his lab for refuge from his sick family. Suddenly, Dee Dee comes into his laboratory looking for her "hanky", which is actually a tissue that she accidentally left in the lab, which leads Dexter to put himself in a bubble to avoid catching the flu. However, his plan soon goes awry when Dee Dee sneezes onto Dexter's latest invention seen at the beginning of the episode, which causes Dexter's bubble to explode. The episode ends with Dee Dee finding her tissue, but Dexter, on the other hand, catches the flu that he was trying to avoid. A sick Dexter gives the viewer a sad look of defeat and the episode ends.

Follow this link:

Germ Warfare | Dexter's Laboratory Wiki | FANDOM powered ...

Two other projects completed during the Clinton administration focused on the mechanics of making germ weapons.

In a program code-named Clear Vision, the Central Intelligence Agency built and tested a model of a Soviet-designed germ bomb that agency officials feared was being sold on the international market. The C.I.A. device lacked a fuse and other parts that would make it a working bomb, intelligence officials said.

At about the same time, Pentagon experts assembled a germ factory in the Nevada desert from commercially available materials. Pentagon officials said the project demonstrated the ease with which a terrorist or rogue nation could build a plant that could produce pounds of the deadly germs.

Both the mock bomb and the factory were tested with simulants -- benign substances with characteristics similar to the germs used in weapons, officials said.

A senior Bush administration official said all the projects were ''fully consistent'' with the treaty banning biological weapons and were needed to protect Americans against a growing danger. ''This administration will pursue defenses against the full spectrum of biological threats,'' the official said.

The treaty, another administration official said, allows the United States to conduct research on both microbes and germ munitions for ''protective or defensive purposes.''

Some Clinton administration officials worried, however, that the project violated the pact. And others expressed concern that the experiments, if disclosed, might be misunderstood as a clandestine effort to resume work on a class of weapons that President Nixon had relinquished in 1969.

Simultaneous experiments involving a model of a germ bomb, a factory to make biological agents and the developoment of more potent anthrax, these officials said, would draw vociferous protests from Washington if conducted by a country the United States viewed as suspect.

Administration officials said the need to keep such projects secret was a significant reason behind President Bush's recent rejection of a draft agreement to strengthen the germ-weapons treaty, which has been signed by 143 nations.

The draft would require those countries to disclose where they are conducting defensive research involving gene-splicing or germs likely to be used in weapons. The sites would then be subject to international inspections.

Many national security officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations opposed the draft, arguing that it would give potential adversaries a road map to what the United States considers its most serious vulnerabilities.

Among the facilities likely to be open to inspection under the draft agreement would be the West Jefferson, Ohio, laboratory of the Battelle Memorial Institute, a military contractor that has been selected to create the genetically altered anthrax.

Several officials who served in senior posts in the Clinton administration acknowledged that the secretive efforts were so poorly coordinated that even the White House was unaware of their full scope.

The Pentagon's project to build a germ factory was not reported to the White House, they said. President Clinton, who developed an intense interest in germ weapons, was never briefed on the programs under way or contemplated, the officials said.

A former senior official in the Clinton White House conceded that in retrospect, someone should have been responsible for reviewing the projects to ensure that they were not only effective in defending the United States, but consistent with the nation's arms-control pledges.

The C.I.A.'s tests on the bomb model touched off a dispute among government experts after the tests were concluded in 2000, with some officials arguing that they violated the germ treaty's prohibition against developing weapons.

Intelligence officials said lawyers at the agency and the White House concluded that the work was defensive, and therefore allowed. But even officials who supported the effort acknowledged that it brought the United States closer to what was forbidden.

''It was pressing how far you go before you do something illegal or immoral,'' recalled one senior official who was briefed on the program.

Public disclosure of the research is likely to complicate the position of the United States, which has long been in the forefront of efforts to enforce the ban on germ weapons.

The Bush administration's willingness to abandon the 1972 Antiballistic Missile treaty has already drawn criticism around the world. And the administration's stance on the draft agreement for the germ treaty has put Washington at odds with many of its allies, including Japan and Britain.

The Original Treaty

During the cold war, both the United States and the Soviet Union produced vast quantities of germ weapons, enough to kill everyone on earth.

Eager to halt the spread of what many called the poor man's atom bomb, the United States unilaterally gave up germ arms and helped lead the global campaign to abolish them. By 1975, most of the world's nations had signed the convention.

In doing so, they agreed not to develop, produce, acquire or stockpile quantities or types of germs that had no ''prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.'' They also pledged not to develop or obtain weapons or other equipment ''designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.''

There were at least two significant loopholes: The pact did not define ''defensive'' research or say what studies might be prohibited, if any. And it provided no means of catching cheaters.

In the following decades, several countries did cheat, some on a huge scale. The Soviet Union built entire cities devoted to developing germ weapons, employing tens of thousands of people and turning anthrax, smallpox and bubonic plague into weapons of war. In the late 1980's, Iraq began a crash program to produce its own germ arsenal.

Both countries insisted that their programs were for defensive purposes.

American intelligence officials had suspected that Baghdad and Moscow were clandestinely producing germ weapons. But the full picture of their efforts did not become clear until the 1990's, after several Iraqi and Soviet officials defected.

Fears about the spread of biological weapons were deepened by the rise of terrorism against Americans, the great strides in genetic engineering and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left thousands of scientists skilled in biological warfare unemployed, penniless and vulnerable to recruitment.

The threat disclosed a quandary: While the United States spent billions of dollars a year to assess enemy military forces and to defend against bullets, tanks, bombs and jet fighters, it knew relatively little about the working of exotic arms it had relinquished long ago.

Designing a Delivery System

In the mid-1990's, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies stepped up their search for information about other nations' biological research programs, focusing on the former Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq and Libya, among others. Much of the initial emphasis was on the germs that enemies might use in an attack, officials said.

But in 1997, the agency embarked on Clear Vision, which focused on weapons systems that would deliver the germs.

Intelligence officials said the project was led by Gene Johnson, a senior C.I.A. scientist who had long worked with some of the world's deadliest viruses. Dr. Johnson was eager to understand the damage that Soviet miniature bombs -- bomblets, in military parlance -- might inflict.

The agency asked its spies to find or buy a Soviet bomblet, which releases germs in a fine mist. That search proved unsuccessful, and the agency approved a proposal to build a replica and study how well it could disperse its lethal cargo.

The agency's lawyers concluded that such a project was permitted by the treaty because the intent was defensive. Intelligence officials said the C.I.A. had reports that at least one nation was trying to buy the Soviet-made bomblets.

A model was constructed and the agency conducted two sets of tests at Battelle, the military contractor. The experiments measured dissemination characteristics and how the model performed under different atmospheric conditions, intelligence officials said. They emphasized that the device was a ''portion'' of a bomb that could not have been used as a weapon.

The experiments caused concern at the White House, which learned about the project after it was under way. Some aides to President Clinton worried that the benefits did not justify the risks. But a White House lawyer led a joint assessment by several departments that concluded that the program did not violate the treaty, and it went ahead.

The questions were debated anew after the project was completed, this time without consensus. A State Department official argued for a strict reading of the treaty: the ban on acquiring or developing ''weapons'' barred states from building even a partial model of a germ bomb, no matter what the rationale.

''A bomb is a bomb is a bomb,'' another official said at the time.

The C.I.A. continued to insist that it had the legal authority to conduct such tests and, intelligence officials said, the agency was prepared to reopen the fight over how to interpret the treaty. But even so, the agency ended the Clear Vision project in the last year of the Clinton administration, intelligence officials said.

Bill Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, acknowledged that the agency had conducted ''laboratory or experimental'' work to assess the intelligence it had gathered about biological warfare.

''Everything we have done in this respect was entirely appropriate, necessary, consistent with U.S. treaty obligations and was briefed to the National Security Council staff and appropriate Congressional oversight committees,'' Mr. Harlow said.

Breeding More Potent Anthrax

In the 1990's, government officials also grew increasingly worried about the possibility that scientists could use the widely available techniques of gene-splicing to create even more deadly weapons.

Those concerns deepened in 1995, when Russian scientists disclosed at a scientific conference in Britain that they had implanted genes from Bacillus cereus, an organism that causes food poisoning, into the anthrax microbe.

The scientists said later that the experiments were peaceful; the two microbes can be found side-by-side in nature and, the Russians said, they wanted to see what happened if they cross-bred.

A published account of the experiment, which appeared in a scientific journal in late 1997, alarmed the Pentagon, which had just decided to require that American soldiers be vaccinated against anthrax. According to the article, the new strain was resistant to Russia's anthrax vaccine, at least in hamsters.

American officials tried to obtain a sample from Russia through a scientific exchange program to see whether the Russians had really created such a hybrid. The Americans also wanted to test whether the microbe could defeat the American vaccine, which is different from that used by Russia.

Despite repeated promises, the bacteria were never provided.

Eventually the C.I.A. drew up plans to replicate the strain, but intelligence officials said the agency hesitated because there was no specific report that an adversary was attempting to turn the superbug into a weapon.

This year, officials said, the project was taken over by the Pentagon's intelligence arm, the Defense Intelligence Agency. Pentagon lawyers reviewed the proposal and said it complied with the treaty. Officials said the research would be part of Project Jefferson, yet another government effort to track the dangers posed by germ weapons.

A spokesman for Defense Intelligence, Lt. Cmdr. James Brooks, declined comment. Asked about the precautions at Battelle, which is to create the enhanced anthrax, Commander Brooks said security was ''entirely suitable for all work already conducted and planned for Project Jefferson.''

The Question of Secrecy

While several officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations called this and other research long overdue, they expressed concern about the lack of a central system for vetting such proposals.

And a former American diplomat questioned the wisdom of keeping them secret.

James F. Leonard, head of the delegation that negotiated the germ treaty, said research on microbes or munitions could be justified, depending on the specifics.

But he said such experiments should be done openly, exposed to the scrutiny of scientists and the public. Public disclosure, he said, is important evidence that the United States is proceeding with a ''clean heart.''

''It's very important to be open,'' he said. ''If we're not open, who's going to be open?''

Mr. Leonard said the fine distinctions drawn by government lawyers were frequently ignored when a secret program was exposed. Then, he said, others offer the harshest possible interpretations -- a ''vulgarization of what has been done.''

But he concluded that the secret germ research, as described to him, was ''foolish, but not illegal.''

The authors have reported on biological weapons for The New York Times and based this article on material gathered for their book, ''Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War,'' which is being published this month by Simon & Schuster Inc.

View post:

U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits - The New ...

Recess (TV Series 19972001) full episodes watch cartoons online.

Synopsis: Six brave fourth-graders at Third Street School make it their mission to protect the other kids on the playground. Despite the rule of King Bob and his minions, who enforce his unwritten laws, T.J, Ashley, Vince, Gus, Gretchen and Mikey seek a rational balance between conformity and individuality.

Creators: Paul Germain, Joe Ansolabehere

Stars: Andrew Lawrence, Ashley Johnson, Jason Davis

-------------------------------------

Subscribe for all cartoon updates: https://bit.ly/2uS0wFM

-------------------------------------

Recess Season 1: https://bit.ly/2LfEsQD

Recess Season 2: https://bit.ly/2uJrdNB

Recess Season 3: https://bit.ly/2uISJuJ

Recess Season 4: https://bit.ly/2uIjLlJ

Recess Season 5: https://bit.ly/2mDtdTk

Recess Season 6: https://bit.ly/2NAyiqM

Recess All Episodes: https://bit.ly/2uG672u

-------------------------------------

Go here to see the original:

Recess Season 4 Episode 38 | Germ Warfare | Recess Full Episodes TV Series

The era of cancer chemotherapy began in the 1940s with the first use of nitrogen mustards and folic acid antagonist drugs. The targeted therapy revolution had arrived, but many of the principles and limitations of chemotherapy discovered by the early researchers still apply.

The beginnings of the modern era of cancer chemotherapy can be traced directly to the German introduction of chemical warfare during World War I. Among the chemical agents used, mustard gas was particularly devastating. Although banned by the Geneva Protocol in 1925, the advent of World War II caused concerns over the possible re-introduction of chemical warfare. Such concerns led to the discovery of nitrogen mustard, a chemical warfare agent, as an effective treatment for cancer. Two pharmacologists from the Yale School of Medicine, Louis S. Goodman and Alfred Gilman, were recruited by the US Department of Defense to investigate potential therapeutic applications of chemical warfare agents. Goodman and Gilman observed that mustard gas was too volatile an agent to be suitable for laboratory experiments. They exchanged a nitrogen molecule for sulfur and had a more stable compound in nitrogen mustard.[1] A year into the start of their research, a German air raid in Bari, Italy led to the exposure of more than 1000 people to the SS John Harvey's secret cargo composed of mustard gas bombs. Dr. Stewart Francis Alexander, a lieutenant colonel who was an expert in chemical warfare, was subsequently deployed to investigate the aftermath. Autopsies of the victims suggested that profound lymphoid and myeloid suppression had occurred after exposure. In his report, Dr. Alexander theorized that since mustard gas all but ceased the division of certain types of somatic cells whose nature was to divide fast, it could also potentially be put to use in helping to suppress the division of certain types of cancerous cells.[2]

Using that information, Goodman and Gilman reasoned that this agent could be used to treat lymphoma, a tumor of lymphoid cells. They first set up an animal model by establishing lymphomas in mice and demonstrated they could treat them with mustard agents. Next, in collaboration with a thoracic surgeon, Gustaf Lindskog, they injected a related agent, mustine (the prototype nitrogen mustard anticancer chemotherapeutic), into a patient with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.[3] They observed a dramatic reduction in the patient's tumor masses.[4][5] Although the effect lasted only a few weeks, and the patient had to return for another set of treatment, that was the first step to the realization that cancer could be treated by pharmacological agents.[3] Publication of the first clinical trials was reported in the New York Times.[6]

Shortly after World War II, a second approach to drug therapy of cancer began. Sidney Farber, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School, studied the effects of folic acid on leukemia patients. Folic acid, a vitamin crucial for DNA metabolism (he did not know the significance of DNA at that time), had been discovered by Lucy Wills, when she was working in India, in 1937. It seemed to stimulate the proliferation of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) cells when administered to children with this cancer. In one of the first examples of rational drug design (rather than accidental discovery), Farber used folate analogues synthesized by Harriett Kiltie and Yellapragada Subbarow of Lederle Laboratories. These analogues first aminopterin and then amethopterin (now methotrexate) were antagonistic to folic acid, and blocked the function of folate-requiring enzymes. When administered to children with ALL in 1948, these agents became the first drugs to induce remission in children with ALL. Remissions were brief, but the principle was clear antifolates could suppress proliferation of malignant cells, and could thereby re-establish normal bone-marrow function. Farber met resistance to conducting his studies at a time when the commonly held medical belief was that leukemia was incurable, and that the children should be allowed to die in peace.[citation needed] Afterwards, Farber's 1948 report in the New England Journal of Medicine was met with incredulity and ridicule.[citation needed]

In 1947, Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Babe Ruth, who was battling Nasopharynx cancer, became one of the first human subjects of teropterin (similar to aminopterin) treatment. Dr. Richard Lewisohn of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York administered the drug, and over the course of several months, Ruth's condition began to improve. However, Ruth died the following year.[7]

In 1951, Jane C. Wright demonstrated the use of methotrexate in solid tumors, showing remission in breast cancer.[8] Wright's group were the first to demonstrate use of the drug in solid tumors, as opposed to leukemias, which are a cancer of the marrow. Several years later at the National Cancer Institute, Roy Hertz and Min Chiu Li then demonstrated complete remission in women with choriocarcinoma and chorioadenoma in 1956,[9] discovering that methotrexate alone could cure choriocarcinoma (1958), a germ-cell malignancy that originates in trophoblastic cells of the placenta. In 1960 Wright et al. produced remissions in mycosis fungoides.[10][11]

Joseph Burchenal, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, with Farber's help, started his own methotrexate study and found the same effects. He then decided to try to develop anti-metabolites in the same way as Farber, by making small changes in a metabolite needed by a cell to divide. With the help of George Hitchings and Gertrude Elion, two pharmaceutical chemists who were working at the Burroughs Wellcome Co. in Tuckahoe, many purine analogues were tested, culminating in the discovery of 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP), which was subsequently shown to be a highly active antileukemic drug.

The Eli Lilly natural products group found that alkaloids of the Madagascar periwinkle (Vinca rosea), originally discovered in a screen for anti-diabetic drugs, blocked proliferation of tumour cells. The antitumour effect of the vinca alkaloids (e.g. vincristine) was later shown to be due to their ability to inhibit microtubule polymerization alkaloys, and therefore cell division.

The NCI, headed by Dr. John R. Heller Jr., lobbied the United States Congress for financial support for second-generation chemotherapy research. In response, Congress created a National Cancer Chemotherapy Service Center (NCCSC) at the NCI in 1955. This was the first federal programme to promote drug discovery for cancer unlike now, most pharmaceutical companies were not yet interested in developing anticancer drugs. The NCCSC developed the methodologies and crucial tools (like cell lines and animal models) for chemotherapeutic development.

In 1965, a major breakthrough in cancer therapy occurred. James F. Holland, Emil Freireich, and Emil Frei hypothesized that cancer chemotherapy should follow the strategy of antibiotic therapy for tuberculosis with combinations of drugs, each with a different mechanism of action. Cancer cells could conceivably mutate to become resistant to a single agent, but by using different drugs concurrently it would be more difficult for the tumor to develop resistance to the combination. Holland, Freireich, and Frei simultaneously administered methotrexate (an antifolate), vincristine (a Vinca alkaloid), 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP) and prednisone together referred to as the POMP regimen and induced long-term remissions in children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). With incremental refinements of original regimens, using randomized clinical studies by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, the Medical Research Council in the UK (UKALL protocols) and German Berlin-Frankfurt-Mnster clinical trials group (ALL-BFM protocols), ALL in children has become a largely curable disease.

This approach was extended to the lymphomas in 1963 by Vincent T. DeVita and George Canellos at the NCI, who ultimately proved in the late 1960s that nitrogen mustard, vincristine, procarbazine and prednisone known as the MOPP regimen could cure patients with Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Currently, nearly all successful cancer chemotherapy regimens use this paradigm of multiple drugs given simultaneously, called combination chemotherapy or polychemotherapy.

As predicted by studies in animal models, drugs were most effective when used in patients with tumours of smaller volume. Another important strategy developed from this if the tumour burden could be reduced first by surgery, then chemotherapy may be able to clear away any remaining malignant cells, even if it would not have been potent enough to destroy the tumor in its entirety. This approach was termed "adjuvant therapy".

Emil Frei first demonstrated this effect high doses of methotrexate prevented recurrence of osteosarcoma following surgical removal of the primary tumour. 5-fluorouracil, which inhibits thymidylate synthase, was later shown to improve survival when used as an adjuvant to surgery in treating patients with colon cancer. Similarly, the landmark trials of Bernard Fisher, chair of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project, and of Gianni Bonadonna, working in the Istituto Nazionale Tumori di Milano, Italy, proved that adjuvant chemotherapy after complete surgical resection of breast tumours significantly extended survival particularly in more advanced cancer.

In 1956, C. Gordon Zubrod, who had formerly led the development of antimalarial agents for the United States Army, took over the Division of Cancer Treatment of the NCI and guided development of new drugs. In the two decades that followed the establishment of the NCCSC, a large network of cooperative clinical trial groups evolved under the auspices of the NCI to test anticancer agents. Zubrod had a particular interest in natural products, and established a broad programme for collecting and testing plant and marine sources, a controversial programme that led to the discovery of taxanes (in 1964) and camptothecins (in 1966). Both classes of drug were isolated and characterized by the laboratory of Monroe Wall at the Research Triangle Institute.

Paclitaxel (Taxol) was a novel antimitotic agent that promoted microtubule assembly. This agent proved difficult to synthesize and could only be obtained from the bark of the Pacific Yew tree, which forced the NCI into the costly business of harvesting substantial quantities of yew trees from public lands. After 4 years of clinical testing in solid tumours, it was found in 1987 (23 years after its initial discovery) to be effective in ovarian cancer therapy. Notably, this agent, although developed by the NCI in partnership with Bristol-Myers Squibb, was exclusively marketed by BMS (who had utilized the synthetic methodology developed by Robert Holton at Florida State University) who went on to make over a billion dollars profit from Taxol.[citation needed]

Another drug class originating from the NCI was the camptothecins. Camptothecin, derived from a Chinese ornamental tree, inhibits topoisomerase I, an enzyme that allows DNA unwinding. Despite showing promise in preclinical studies, the agent had little antitumour activity in early clinical trials, and dosing was limited by kidney toxicity: its lactone ring is unstable at neutral pH, so while in the acidic environment of the kidneys it becomes active, damaging the renal tubules. In 1996 a more stable analogue, irinotecan, won Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for the treatment of colon cancer. Later, this agent would also be used to treat lung and ovarian cancers.

Cisplatin, a platinum-based compound, was discovered by a Michigan State University researcher, Barnett Rosenberg, working under an NCI contract. This was yet another serendipitous discovery: Rosenberg had initially wanted to explore the possible effects of an electric field on the growth of bacteria. He observed that the bacteria unexpectedly ceased to divide when placed in an electric field. Excited, he spent months of testing to try to explain this phenomenon. He was disappointed to find that the cause was an experimental artifact the inhibition of bacterial division was pinpointed to an electrolysis product of the platinum electrode rather than the electrical field. This accidental discovery, however, soon initiated a series of investigations and studies into the effects of platinum compounds on cell division, culminating in the synthesis of cisplatin. This drug was pivotal in the cure of testicular cancer. Subsequently, Eve Wiltshaw and others at the Institute of Cancer Research in the United Kingdom extended the clinical usefulness of the platinum compounds with their development of carboplatin, a cisplatin derivative with broad antitumour activity and comparatively less nephrotoxicity.

A second group with an NCI contract, led by John Montgomery at the Southern Research Institute, synthesized nitrosoureas, an alkylating agent which cross-links DNA. Fludarabine phosphate, a purine analogue which has become a mainstay in treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, was another similar development by Montgomery.

Other effective molecules also came from industry during the period of 1970 to 1990, including anthracyclines[12] and epipodophyllotoxins both of which inhibited the action of topoisomerase II, an enzyme crucial for DNA synthesis.

As is obvious from their origins, the above cancer chemotherapies are essentially poisons. Patients receiving these agents experienced severe side-effects that limited the doses which could be administered, and hence limited the beneficial effects. Clinical investigators realized that the ability to manage these toxicities was crucial to the success of cancer chemotherapy.

Several examples are noteworthy. Many chemotherapeutic agents cause profound suppression of the bone marrow. This is reversible, but takes time to recover. Support with platelet and red-cell transfusions as well as broad-spectrum antibiotics in case of infection during this period is crucial to allow the patient to recover.

Several practical factors are also worth mentioning. Most of these agents caused very severe nausea (termed chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting (CINV) in the literature) which, while not directly causing patient deaths, was unbearable at higher doses. The development of new drugs to prevent nausea (the prototype of which was ondansetron) was of great practical use, as was the design of indwelling intravenous catheters (e.g. Hickman lines and PICC lines) which allowed safe administration of chemotherapy as well as supportive therapy.

One important contribution during this period[when?] was the discovery of a means that allowed the administration of previously lethal doses of chemotherapy. The patient's bone marrow was first harvested, the chemotherapy administered, and the harvested marrow then returned to patient a few days later. This approach, termed autologous bone marrow transplantation, was initially thought to be of benefit to a wide group of patients, including those with advanced breast cancer. However, rigorous studies have failed to confirm this benefit, and autologous transplantation is no longer widely used for solid tumors. The proven curative benefits of high doses of chemotherapy afforded by autologous bone marrow rescue are limited to both Hodgkin's and selected non-Hodgkin's lymphoma patients who have failed therapy with conventional combination chemotherapy. Autologous transplantation continues to be used as a component of therapy for a number of other hematologic malignancies.

The hormonal contribution to several categories of breast cancer subtypes was recognized during this time[when?], leading to the development of pharmacological modulators (e.g. of oestrogen) such as tamoxifen.

Molecular genetics has uncovered signalling networks that regulate cellular activities such as proliferation and survival. In a particular cancer, such a network may be radically altered, due to a chance somatic mutation. Targeted therapy inhibits the metabolic pathway that underlies that type of cancer's cell division.

The classic example of targeted development is imatinib mesylate (Gleevec), a small molecule which inhibits a signaling molecule kinase. The genetic abnormality causing chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) has been known for a long time to be a chromosomal translocation creating an abnormal fusion protein, kinase BCR-ABL, which signals aberrantly, leading to uncontrolled proliferation of the leukemia cells. Imatinib precisely inhibits this kinase. Unlike so many other anti-cancer agents, this pharmaceutical was no accident. Brian Druker, working in Oregon Health & Science University, had extensively researched the abnormal enzyme kinase in CML. He reasoned that precisely inhibiting this kinase with a drug would control the disease and have little effect on normal cells. Druker collaborated with Novartis chemist Nicholas Lydon, who developed several candidate inhibitors. From these, imatinib was found to have the most promise in laboratory experiments. First Druker and then other groups worldwide demonstrated that when this small molecule is used to treat patients with chronic-phase CML, 90% achieve complete haematological remission. It is hoped that molecular targeting of similar defects in other cancers will have the same effect.

Another branch in targeted therapy is the increasing use of monoclonal antibodies in cancer therapy. Although monoclonal antibodies (immune proteins which can be selected to precisely bind to almost any target) have been around for decades, they were derived from mice and did not function particularly well when administered to humans, causing allergic reactions and being rapidly removed from circulation. "Humanization" of these antibodies (genetically transforming them to be as similar to a human antibody as possible) has allowed the creation of a new family of highly effective humanized monoclonal antibodies. Trastuzumab, a drug used to treat breast cancer, is a prime example.

The discovery that certain toxic chemicals administered in combination can cure certain cancers ranks as one of the greatest in modern medicine. Childhood ALL, testicular cancer, and Hodgkins disease, previously universally fatal, are now generally curable diseases. Conventional cytotoxic chemotherapy has shown the ability to cure some cancers, including testicular cancer, Hodgkin disease, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and some leukemias. It has also proved effective in the adjuvant setting, in reducing the risk of recurrence after surgery for high-risk breast cancer, colon cancer, and lung cancer, among others.[when?]

The overall impact of chemotherapy on cancer survival can be difficult to estimate, since improved cancer screening, prevention (e.g. anti-smoking campaigns), and detection all influence statistics on cancer incidence and mortality. In the United States, overall cancer incidence rates were stable from 1995 through 1999, while cancer death rates decreased steadily from 1993 through 1999.[13] Again, this likely reflects the combined impact of improved screening, prevention, and treatment. Nonetheless, cancer remains a major cause of illness and death, and conventional cytotoxic chemotherapy has proved unable to cure most cancers after they have metastasized.

Follow this link:

History of cancer chemotherapy - Wikipedia

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo Trial or the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, was a military trial convened on April 29, 1946, to try the leaders of the Empire of Japan for joint conspiracy to start and wage war (categorized as "Class A" crimes), conventional war crimes ("Class B") and crimes against humanity ("Class C").[1]

Ten countries (Australia, Canada, China, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States) provided judges and prosecutors for the court. The defense comprised Japanese and American lawyers.

Twenty-eight Japanese military and political leaders were charged with 55 separate counts encompassing the waging of aggressive war, murder and conventional war crimes committed against prisoners-of-war, civilian internees and the inhabitants of occupied territories. The defendants included former prime ministers, former foreign ministers and former military commanders. In the course of the proceedings, the court ruled that 45 of the counts, including all the murder charges, were either redundant or not authorized under the IMTFE Charter.

Two defendants died during the proceedings and one was ruled unfit to stand trial. All remaining defendants were found guilty of at least one count. Sentences ranged from seven years imprisonment to execution.

The tribunal was adjourned on November 12, 1948.

The Tribunal was established to implement the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Declaration, the Instrument of Surrender, and the Moscow Conference. The Potsdam Declaration (July 1945) had stated, "stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners", though it did not specifically foreshadow trials.[2] The terms of reference for the Tribunal were set out in the IMTFE Charter, issued on January 19, 1946.[3] There was major disagreement, both among the Allies and within their administrations, about whom to try and how to try them. Despite the lack of consensus, General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, decided to initiate arrests. On September 11, a week after the surrender, he ordered the arrest of 39 suspectsmost of them members of General Hideki Tj's war cabinet. Tj tried to commit suicide, but was resuscitated with the help of U.S. doctors.

On January 19, 1946, MacArthur issued a special proclamation ordering the establishment of an International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). On the same day, he also approved the Charter of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (CIMTFE), which prescribed how it was to be formed, the crimes that it was to consider, and how the tribunal was to function. The charter generally followed the model set by the Nuremberg Trials. On April 25, in accordance with the provisions of Article 7 of the CIMTFE, the original Rules of Procedure of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East with amendments were promulgated.[4][5][6]

Following months of preparation, the IMTFE convened on April 29, 1946. The trials were held in the War Ministry office in Tokyo.

On May 3 the prosecution opened its case, charging the defendants with crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The trial continued for more than two and a half years, hearing testimony from 419 witnesses and admitting 4,336 exhibits of evidence, including depositions and affidavits from 779 other individuals.

Following the model used at the Nuremberg Trials in Germany, the Allies established three broad categories. "Class A" charges, alleging crimes against peace, were to be brought against Japan's top leaders who had planned and directed the war. Class B and C charges, which could be leveled at Japanese of any rank, covered conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity, respectively. Unlike the Nuremberg Trials, the charge of crimes against peace was a prerequisite to prosecutiononly those individuals whose crimes included crimes against peace could be prosecuted by the Tribunal. In the event, no Class C charges were heard in Tokyo.

The indictment accused the defendants of promoting a scheme of conquest that "contemplated and carried out...murdering, maiming and ill-treating prisoners of war (and) civilian internees...forcing them to labor under inhumane conditions...plundering public and private property, wantonly destroying cities, towns and villages beyond any justification of military necessity; (perpetrating) mass murder, rape, pillage, brigandage, torture and other barbaric cruelties upon the helpless civilian population of the over-run countries."

Keenan issued a press statement along with the indictment: "War and treaty-breakers should be stripped of the glamour of national heroes and exposed as what they really areplain, ordinary murderers".

The prosecution began opening statements on May 3, 1946, and took 192 days to present its case, finishing on January 24, 1947. It submitted its evidence in fifteen phases.

The Charter provided that evidence against the accused could include any document "without proof of its issuance or signature" as well as diaries, letters, press reports, and sworn or unsworn out-of-court statements relating to the charges. Article 13 of the Charter read, in part: "The tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence...and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value".

Wartime press releases of the Allies were admitted as evidence by the prosecution, while those sought to be entered by the defense were excluded. The recollection of a conversation with a long-dead man was admitted. Letters allegedly written by Japanese citizens were admitted with no proof of authenticity and no opportunity for cross examination by the defense.

The Tribunal embraced the best evidence rule once the Prosecution had rested. The best evidence rule dictates that the "best" or most authentic evidence must be produced (for example, a map instead of a description of the map; an original instead of a copy; and a witness instead of a description of what the witness may have said). Justice Pal, one of two justices to vote for acquittal on all counts, observed, "in a proceeding where we had to allow the prosecution to bring in any amount of hearsay evidence, it was somewhat misplaced caution to introduce this best evidence rule particularly when it operated practically against the defense only".

To prove their case, the prosecution team relied on the doctrine of "command responsibility". This doctrine was that it did not require proof of criminal orders. The prosecution had to prove three things: that war crimes were systematic or widespread; the accused knew that troops were committing atrocities; and the accused had power or authority to stop the crimes.

The prosecution argued that a 1927 document known as the Tanaka Memorial showed that a "common plan or conspiracy" to commit "crimes against peace" bound the accused together. Thus, the prosecution argued that the conspiracy had begun in 1927 and continued through to the end of the war in 1945. The Tanaka Memorial is now considered by most historians to have been a forgery; however, it was not regarded as such at the time.[citation needed]

The defendants were represented by over a hundred attorneys, three-quarters of them Japanese and one-quarter American, plus a support staff. The defense opened its case on January 27, 1947, and finished its presentation 225 days later on September 9, 1947.

The defense argued that the trial could never be free from substantial doubt as to its "legality, fairness and impartiality".[11]

The defense challenged the indictment, arguing that crimes against peace, and more specifically, the undefined concepts of conspiracy and aggressive war, had yet to be established as crimes in international law; in effect, the IMTFE was contradicting accepted legal procedure by trying the defendants retroactively for violating laws which had not existed when the alleged crimes had been committed. The defense insisted that there was no basis in international law for holding individuals responsible for acts of state, as the Tokyo Trial proposed to do. The defense attacked the notion of negative criminality, by which the defendants were to be tried for failing to prevent breaches of law and war crimes by others, as likewise having no basis in international law.

The defense argued that Allied Powers' violations of international law should be examined.

Former Foreign Minister Shigenori Tg maintained that Japan had had no choice but to enter the war for self-defense purposes. He asserted that "[because of the Hull Note] we felt at the time that Japan was being driven either to war or suicide".

After the defense had finished its presentation on September 9, 1947 the IMT spent fifteen months reaching judgment and drafting its 1,781-page opinion. The reading of the judgment and the sentences lasted from December 4 to 12, 1948. Five of the eleven justices released separate opinions outside the court.

In his concurring opinion Justice William Webb of Australia took issue with Emperor Hirohito's legal status, writing, "The suggestion that the Emperor was bound to act on advice is contrary to the evidence". While refraining from personal indictment of Hirohito, Webb indicated that Hirohito bore responsibility as a constitutional monarch who accepted "ministerial and other advice for war" and that "no ruler can commit the crime of launching aggressive war and then validly claim to be excused for doing so because his life would otherwise have been in danger.... It will remain that the men who advised the commission of a crime, if it be one, are in no worse position than the man who directs the crime be committed".

Justice Delfin Jaranilla of the Philippines disagreed with the penalties imposed by the tribunal as being "too lenient, not exemplary and deterrent, and not commensurate with the gravity of the offence or offences committed".

Justice Henri Bernard of France argued that the tribunal's course of action was flawed due to Hirohito's absence and the lack of sufficient deliberation by the judges. He concluded that Japan's declaration of war "had a principal author who escaped all prosecution and of whom in any case the present Defendants could only be considered as accomplices", and that a "verdict reached by a Tribunal after a defective procedure cannot be a valid one".

"It is well-nigh impossible to define the concept of initiating or waging a war of aggression both accurately and comprehensively", wrote Justice Bert Rling of the Netherlands in his dissent. He stated, "I think that not only should there have been neutrals in the court, but there should have been Japanese also." He argued that they would always have been a minority and therefore would not have been able to sway the balance of the trial. However, "they could have convincingly argued issues of government policy which were unfamiliar to the Allied justices". Pointing out the difficulties and limitations in holding individuals responsible for an act of state and making omission of responsibility a crime, Rling called for the acquittal of several defendants, including Hirota.

Justice Radhabinod Pal of the British empire produced a 1,235-page judgment[14] in which he dismissed the legitimacy of the IMTFE as victor's justice: "I would hold that each and every one of the accused must be found not guilty of each and every one of the charges in the indictment and should be acquitted on all those charges". While taking into account the influence of wartime propaganda, exaggerations, and distortions of facts in the evidence, and "over-zealous" and "hostile" witnesses, Pal concluded, "The evidence is still overwhelming that atrocities were perpetrated by the members of the Japanese armed forces against the civilian population of some of the territories occupied by them as also against the prisoners of war".

One defendant, Shmei kawa, was found mentally unfit for trial and the charges were dropped.

Two defendants, Matsuoka Yosuke and Nagano Osami, died of natural causes during the trial.

Six defendants were sentenced to death by hanging for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace (Class A, Class B and Class C):

One defendant was sentenced to death by hanging for war crimes and crimes against humanity (Class B and Class C):

They were executed at Sugamo Prison in Ikebukuro on December 23, 1948. MacArthur, afraid of embarrassing and antagonizing the Japanese people, defied the wishes of President Truman and barred photography of any kind, instead bringing in four members of the Allied Council to act as official witnesses.

Sixteen defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment. Three (Koiso, Shiratori, and Umezu) died in prison, while the other thirteen were paroled between 1954 and 1956:

Foreign minister Shigenori Tg was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment and died in prison in 1949. Foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu was sentenced to 7 years. He later served as Foreign Minister and as Deputy Prime Minister of post-war Japan.

The verdict and sentences of the tribunal were confirmed by MacArthur on November 24, 1948, two days after a perfunctory meeting with members of the Allied Control Commission for Japan, who acted as the local representatives of the nations of the Far Eastern Commission. Six of those representatives made no recommendations for clemency. Australia, Canada, India, and the Netherlands were willing to see the general make some reductions in sentences. He chose not to do so. The issue of clemency was thereafter to disturb Japanese relations with the Allied powers until the late 1950s, when a majority of the Allied powers agreed to release the last of the convicted major war criminals from captivity.[15]

More than 5,700 lower-ranking personnel were charged with conventional war crimes in separate trials convened by Australia, China, France, the Netherlands Indies, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States. The charges covered a wide range of crimes including prisoner abuse, rape, sexual slavery, torture, ill-treatment of labourers, execution without trial and inhumane medical experiments. The trials took place in around fifty locations in Asia and the Pacific. Most trials were completed by 1949, but Australia held some trials in 1951.[16] China held 13 tribunals, resulting in 504 convictions and 149 executions.

Of the 5,700 Japanese individuals indicted for Class B war crimes, 984 were sentenced to death; 475 received life sentences; 2,944 were given more limited prison terms; 1,018 were acquitted; and 279 were never brought to trial or not sentenced. The number of death sentences by country is as follows: the Netherlands 236, Great Britain 223, Australia 153, China 149, United States 140, France 26, and Philippines 17.

The Soviet Union and Chinese Communist forces also held trials of Japanese war criminals. The Khabarovsk War Crime Trials held by the Soviets tried and found guilty some members of Japan's bacteriological and chemical warfare unit, also known as Unit 731. However, those who surrendered to the Americans were never brought to trial. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, MacArthur gave immunity to Shiro Ishii and all members of the bacteriological research units in exchange for germ warfare data based on human experimentation. On May 6, 1947, he wrote to Washington that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'War Crimes' evidence". The deal was concluded in 1948.[19]

The United States had provided the funds and staff necessary for running the Tribunal and also held the function of Chief Prosecutor. The argument was made that it was difficult, if not impossible, to uphold the requirement of impartiality with which such an organ should be invested. This apparent conflict gave the impression that the tribunal was no more than a means for the dispensation of victor's justice. Solis Horowitz argues that IMTFE had an American bias: unlike the Nuremberg Trials, there was only a single prosecution team, led by an American, although the members of the tribunal represented eleven different Allied countries. The IMTFE had less official support than the Nuremberg Trials. Keenan, a former U.S. assistant attorney general, had a much lower position than Nuremberg's Robert H. Jackson, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Delfin had been captured by the Japanese and walked the Bataan Death March.[21] The defense sought to remove him from the bench claiming he would be unable to maintain objectivity. The request was rejected but Delfin did excuse himself from presentation of evidence for atrocities in his native country of the Philippines.[22]

Justice Radhabinod Pal argued that the exclusion of Western colonialism and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the list of crimes and the lack of judges from the vanquished nations on the bench signified the "failure of the Tribunal to provide anything other than the opportunity for the victors to retaliate".[23] In this he was not alone among Indian jurists, with one prominent Calcutta barrister writing that the Tribunal was little more than "a sword in a [judge's] wig".

Justice Rling stated, "[o]f course, in Japan we were all aware of the bombings and the burnings of Tokyo and Yokohama and other big cities. It was horrible that we went there for the purpose of vindicating the laws of war, and yet saw every day how the Allies had violated them dreadfully".

However, in respect to Pal and Rling's statement about the conduct of air attacks, there was no positive or specific customary international humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare before and during World War II. Ben Bruce Blakeney, an American defense counsel for Japanese defendants, argued that "[i]f the killing of Admiral Kidd by the bombing of Pearl Harbor is murder, we know the name of the very man who[se] hands loosed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima", even though Pearl Harbor was classified as a war crime under the 1907 Hague Convention, as it happened without a declaration of war and without a just cause for self-defense. Similarly, the indiscriminate bombing of Chinese cities by Japanese Imperial Forces was never raised in the Tokyo Trials in fear of America being accused the same thing for its air attacks on Japanese cities. As a result, Japanese pilots and officers escaped prosecution for their aerial raids on Pearl Harbor and cities in China and other Asian countries.[24]

Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal raised substantive objections in a dissenting opinion: he found the entire prosecution case to be weak regarding the conspiracy to commit an act of aggressive war, which would include the brutalization and subjugation of conquered nations. About the Nanking Massacrewhile acknowledging the brutality of the incidenthe said that there was nothing to show that it was the "product of government policy" or that Japanese government officials were directly responsible. There is "no evidence, testimonial or circumstantial, concomitant, prospectant, restrospectant, that would in any way lead to the inference that the government in any way permitted the commission of such offenses", he said.[23] In any case, he added, conspiracy to wage aggressive war was not illegal in 1937, or at any point since.[23] Pal was the only judge to argue for the acquittal of all of the defendants.[14]

The Japanese Emperor Hirohito and other members of The Imperial Family might have been regarded as potential suspects. They included career officer Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, Prince Higashikuni and Prince Takeda. Herbert Bix explained, "The Truman Administration and General MacArthur both believed the occupation reforms would be implemented smoothly if they used Hirohito to legitimise their changes".[27]

As early as November 26, 1945, MacArthur confirmed to Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai that the emperor's abdication would not be necessary. Before the war crimes trials actually convened, SCAP, the IPS, and court officials worked behind the scenes not only to prevent the imperial family from being indicted, but also to slant the testimony of the defendants to ensure that no one implicated the emperor. High officials in court circles and the Japanese government collaborated with Allied GHQ in compiling lists of prospective war criminals. People arrested as Class A suspects and incarcerated in the Sugamo Prison solemnly vowed to protect their sovereign against any possible taint of war responsibility.

According to historian Herbert Bix, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers "immediately on landing in Japan went to work to protect Hirohito from the role he had played during and at the end of the war" and "allowed the major criminal suspects to coordinate their stories so that the emperor would be spared from indictment".

Bix also argues that "MacArthur's truly extraordinary measures to save Hirohito from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war" and "months before the Tokyo tribunal commenced, MacArthur's highest subordinates were working to attribute ultimate responsibility for Pearl Harbor to Hideki Tj". According to a written report by Shichi Mizota, Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai's interpreter, Fellers met the two men at his office on March 6, 1946, and told Yonai, "it would be most convenient if the Japanese side could prove to us that the emperor is completely blameless. I think the forthcoming trials offer the best opportunity to do that. Tj, in particular, should be made to bear all responsibility at this trial".[31]

Historian John W. Dower wrote that the campaign to absolve Emperor Hirohito of responsibility "knew no bounds". He argued that with MacArthur's full approval, the prosecution effectively acted as "a defense team for the emperor", who was presented as "an almost saintly figure" let alone someone culpable of war crimes. He stated, "Even Japanese activists who endorse the ideals of the Nuremberg and Tokyo charters, and who have labored to document and publicize the atrocities of the Shwa regime, cannot defend the American decision to exonerate the emperor of war responsibility and then, in the chill of the Cold War, release and soon afterwards openly embrace accused right-winged war criminals like the later prime minister Nobusuke Kishi".

Three justices wrote an obiter dictum about the criminal responsibility of Hirohito. Judge-in-Chief Webb declared, "no ruler can commit the crime of launching aggressive war and then validly claim to be excused for doing so because his life would otherwise have been in danger...It will remain that the men who advised the commission of a crime, if it be one, are in no worse position than the man who directs the crime be committed".

Justice Henri Bernard of France concluded that Japan's declaration of war "had a principal author who escaped all prosecution and of whom in any case the present Defendants could only be considered as accomplices".

Justice Rling did not find the emperor's immunity objectionable and further argued that five defendants (Kido, Hata, Hirota, Shigemitsu, and Tg) should have been acquitted.

Shiro Ishii, commander of Unit 731 received immunity in exchange for data gathered from his experiments on live prisoners. In 1981 John W. Powell published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists detailing the experiments of Unit 731 and its open-air tests of germ warfare on civilians. It was printed with a statement by Judge Rling, the last surviving member of the Tokyo Tribunal, who wrote, "As one of the judges in the International Military Tribunal, it is a bitter experience for me to be informed now that centrally ordered Japanese war criminality of the most disgusting kind was kept secret from the Court by the U.S. government".[34]

Forty-two suspects, such as Nobusuke Kishi, who later became Prime Minister, and Yoshisuke Aikawa, head of Nissan, were imprisoned in the expectation that they would be prosecuted at a second Tokyo Tribunal but they were never charged. They were released in 1947 and 1948.

The International Prosecution Section of the SCAP decided to try the seventy Japanese apprehended for "Class A" war crimes in three groups. The first group of 28 were major leaders in the military, political, and diplomatic sphere. The second group (23 people) and the third group (nineteen people) were industrial and financial magnates who had been engaged in weapons manufacturing industries or were accused of trafficking in narcotics, as well as a number of lesser known leaders in military, political, and diplomatic spheres. The most notable among these were:

All remaining people apprehended and accused of Class A war crimes who had not yet come to trial were set free by MacArthur in 1947 and 1948.

Under Article 11 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed on September 8, 1951, Japan accepted the jurisdiction of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Article 11 of the treaty reads:

Japan accepts the judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and of other Allied War Crimes Courts both within and outside Japan, and will carry out the sentences imposed thereby upon Japanese nationals imprisoned in Japan. The power to grant clemency, reduce sentences and parole with respect to such prisoners may not be exercised except on the decision of the government or governments which imposed the sentence in each instance, and on the recommendation of Japan. In the case of persons sentenced by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, such power may not be exercised except on the decision of a majority of the governments represented on the Tribunal, and on the recommendation of Japan.[35]

In 1950, after most Allied war crimes trials had ended, thousands of convicted war criminals sat in prisons across Asia and Europe, detained in the countries where they had been convicted. Some executions had not yet been carried out, as Allied courts agreed to reexamine their verdicts. Sentences were reduced in some cases, and a system of parole was instituted, but without relinquishing control over the fate of the imprisoned (even after Japan and Germany had regained their sovereignty).

The focus changed from the top wartime leaders to "ordinary" war criminals (Class B and C in Japan), and an intense and broadly-supported campaign for amnesty for all imprisoned war criminals ensued. The issue of criminal responsibility was reframed as a humanitarian problem.

On March 7, 1950, MacArthur issued a directive that reduced the sentences by one-third for good behavior and authorized the parole after fifteen years of those who had received life sentences. Several of those who were imprisoned were released earlier on parole due to ill health.

Many Japanese reacted to the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal by demanding parole for the detainees or mitigation of their sentences. Shortly after the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect, a movement demanding the release of B- and C-class war criminals began, emphasizing the "unfairness of the war crimes tribunals" and the "misery and hardship of the families of war criminals". The movement quickly garnered the support of more than ten million Japanese. The government commented that "public sentiment in our country is that the war criminals are not criminals. Rather, they gather great sympathy as victims of the war, and the number of people concerned about the war crimes tribunal system itself is steadily increasing".

The parole for war criminals movement was driven by two groups: people who had "a sense of pity" for the prisoners demanded, "just set them free" (tonikaku shakuho o) regardless of how it is done. The war criminals themselves called for their own release as part of an anti-war peace movement.

On September 4, 1952, President Truman issued Executive Order 10393, establishing a Clemency and Parole Board for War Criminals. Its purpose was to advise the President regarding recommendations by the Government of Japan for clemency, reduction of sentence, or parole of Japanese war criminals sentenced by military tribunals.[36]

On May 26, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles rejected a proposed amnesty for the imprisoned war criminals but instead agreed to "change the ground rules" by reducing the period required for eligibility for parole from 15 years to 10 years.[37]

By the end of 1958, all Japanese war criminals were released from prison and politically rehabilitated. Hashimoto Kingor, Hata Shunroku, Minami Jir, and Oka Takazumi were all released on parole in 1954. Araki Sadao, Hiranuma Kiichir, Hoshino Naoki, Kaya Okinori, Kido Kichi, shima Hiroshi, Shimada Shigetar, and Suzuki Teiichi were released on parole in 1955. Sat Kenry, whom manyincluding Judge Rlingregarded as the one least deserving of imprisonment, was not granted parole until March 1956, the last of the Class A Japanese war criminals to be released. With the concurrence of a majority of the powers represented on the tribunal, the Japanese government announced on April 7, 1957, that the last ten major Japanese war criminals who had previously been paroled were granted clemency and were to be regarded henceforth as unconditionally free.

In 1978 the kami of 1,068 convicted war criminals, including 14 convicted Class-A war criminals were secretly enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine.[38] Those enshrined include Hideki Tj, Kenji Doihara, Iwane Matsui, Heitar Kimura, Kki Hirota, Seishir Itagaki, Akira Mut, Yosuke Matsuoka, Osami Nagano, Toshio Shiratori, Kiichir Hiranuma, Kuniaki Koiso and Yoshijir Umezu.[39] Since 1985, visits made by Japanese government officials to the Shrine have aroused protests in China and South Korea.

Arnold Brackman, who had covered the trials for United Press International, wrote The Other Nuremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, a rebuttal to charges that the trial had been "victors' justice"; this rebuttal was published posthumously in 1987.[40]

In a survey of 3,000 Japanese people conducted by Asahi News as the 60th anniversary approached in 2006, 70% of those questioned were unaware of the details of the trials, a figure that rose to 90% for those in the 2029 age group. Some 76% of the people polled recognized a degree of aggression on Japan's part during the war, while only 7% believed it was a war strictly for self-defense.[41]

A South Korean government commission cleared 83 of the 148 Koreans convicted by the Allies of war crimes during World War II. The commission ruled that the Koreans, who were categorized as Class B and Class C war criminals, were in fact victims of Japanese imperialism.[42]

Some time before the situation emerged about his expected accession to the Chrysanthemum Throne at the end of April 2019, some degree of concern was voiced by current Crown Prince Naruhito on the occasion of his 55th birthday in February 2015, about how Japanese history in regards to its World War II involvement would be remembered by his future subjects; as Naruhito put it at that time: that it was "important to look back on the past humbly and correctly", in reference to Japan's role in World War II-era war crimes, and that he was concerned about the ongoing need to, in his own words: "correctly pass down tragic experiences and the history behind Japan to the generations who have no direct knowledge of the war, at the time memories of the war are about to fade".[43]

MacArthur appointed a panel of 11 judges, nine from the nations that signed the Instrument of Surrender.

The famous legal scholar Roscoe Pound was also apparently favourably disposed to replacing John P. Higgins as a judge but an appointment did not eventuate.[45]

The chief prosecutor, Joseph B. Keenan of the United States, was appointed by President Harry S. Truman.

Twenty-eight defendants were charged, mostly military officers and government officials.

Follow this link:

International Military Tribunal for the Far East - Wikipedia

Germ WarfareSeasonEpisode Number0436Air Date

February 29, 2000

"Germ Warfare" is the thirty sixth episode of the fourth season of Recess, which was first broadcast on February 29, 2000.

Gus and Mikey are at war after Gretchen catches a cold.

The Gang is in science class where they witness the binary fission of a bacterium. Gus is horrified when he finds out that bacteria and germs are the same thing, and believes that all germs can cause decay and disease. Mikey begs to differ, saying that bacteria and germs are living creatures and even gives each germ an individual name. As Mikeyis about to release the germs, Gretchen makes the problem worse by informing Gus that germs are everywhere, causing him to run out of the classroom in a panic.

In the boys' room, the paranoid Gus is shown cleaning himself. At Recess, he shows up wearing a biohazard suit protecting him from germs. T.J. now realizes that Gus is overreacting, as Gretchen tries to clear up a few misconceptions, before suddenly starting to feel ill; she has caught a cold. It serves as a big deal to Gus who is convinced that the germs made her sick.

Gus is wandering round the playground in his suit, spreading the word about germs and frightening the Ashleys, when Menlo arrives, agreeing to help Gus in his anti-germ campaign, and putting on his own biohazard suit.

Gus holds a meeting in the playground discussing the dangers of germs, which Mikey observes atopOld Rusty. With nearly all the students joining Gus' campaign, Mikey decides to speak out for germs, but is jeered at by the students. Soon enough, they are cleaning up the playground and donning masks and surgical gloves, and a couple of tanker trucks arrive to disinfect the area of germs. Mikey decides to protest by holding up degermification, and refuses to budge. This only leads to a furious tussle between the two, which results in Mikey dropping his slide and breaking it. Believing that Gus killed the germs, Mikey becomes furious with him and the two start a big fight, which continues for some time until Gretchen arrives, having recovered from her cold.

Gretchen rekindles Gus and Mikey's friendship by saying that germs are neither good nor bad and they are just a part of life. Gus and Mikey both make up for earlier, and Gus happily re-opens the playground.

Excerpt from:

Germ Warfare | Recess Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia

It happened!

There is one particular day I look forward to each year and it went down yesterday.

I woke up, strolled to the kitchen, and found my jar of coconut oil smiling at me.

It was so beautiful, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon to take its first flight. Like a wayward child coming home again.

It happened.

The coconut oil was liquid.

Summer is here.

Not only is the oil of all oils heart-healthy. Not only does it make your skin look dead sexy. Not only does it fight the bugs that attack your body, as we will discuss today.

Coconut oil makes one heck of a weather forecaster, too.

Yesterday brought blue skies with a high of 81 degrees in San Diego. And I didnt need the weather girl to tell me that.

The coconut oil told me.

And best of all, I can drink it from the jar now. I take my coconut oil to the head! Spoons are for wussies.

Anyway, just thought Id share in my summer excitement before dropping some knowledge bombs on you about coconut oil and your immunity. If youre on the East Coast, youve got something to look forward to in the coming weeks. Leave your jar on the counter and tweet me when your butterfly hatches!

**********************************

Tonight, its on like Donkey Kong. Bruce Fife, author of The Coconut Oil Miracle is on the UW Radio Show. Certain to be another hot one. My coconut oil told me so.

Dont miss it! 5pm PT/8pm ET

A major topic Bruce and I will be covering is the use of coconut oil as a means of fighting nasty bugs like bacteria, viruses, parasites, and yeast. One thing that dawned on me while reading his book is the well-known fact that traveling to tropical climates puts those of us from more moderate temperatures at risk of coming home with a bad case of the gut bugs.

Working with clients, one of the red flags I would see quite often was digestive dysfunction originating during or after a trip to some island paradise. For many, a stool test revealed a parasitic infection that likely lingered for years, even decades.

But what about the natives who have actually lived in these literal breeding grounds for microbes and critters for generations? Why dont they have an epidemic of digestive challenges and parasitic infection?

Its the coconut oil, baby.

When you really think about it, its quite the coincidence that God, Mother Nature, or the aliens (whoever you believe put us here) just so happened to supply one of the most antibacterial, antiviral, anti-parasitic foods on Earth to a people living in a place where such microbes flourish. Even Weston Price was amazed by the low incidence of malaria in tropical people.

Amazingly, science has yet to explain a genetic explanation for such resistance. Why not?

Because its the coconut oil, baby!

Duh!

When we feel a cold coming on, most of us should be reaching for the kitchen cabinet before the medicine cabinet. Actually, we should be taking our coconut oil to the head every day or at least using it for cooking as a means of preventing all types of nasty infections.

In last weeks blog, I typed about the medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs) coconut oil consists of. These MCFAs, which include caprylic acid, capric acid, mystiric acid, and lauric acid, are quite sparse in our food supply. Not only are these fats burned immediately for fuel (as discussed last time), but they also possess incredible antimicrobial properties, with lauric acid having the greatest antiviral activity.

As you know, medical doctor are notorious for prescribing antibiotics for viral infections. This brings about two problems. The first problem is the ever-growing development of superbugs, which are antibiotic resistant (but maybe not MCFA-resistant). And of course, the second problem is the fact that antibiotics do not kill viruses!

But coconut oil and its MCFAs can.

Bacteria and viruses are typically coated with a lipid (fat) membrane (rhinovirus is an exception), which encloses their DNA and other cellular materials. This membrane is very fluid, flexible, and mobile, allowing it to squeeze its way in and out of tight spots.

Due to the fact that the fats making up this membrane are very similar to MCFAs, the medium-chain fatty acids from coconut can sneak past security and become absorbed into the membrane, where they weaken it, split it open, and kill it by pretty much ripping its insides out.

Coconut oil has a violent streak.

So gangsta.

The most intriguing part of this germ warfare is that the MCFAs are selective. Friendly fire isnt a problem. In the case of bacteria, we possess both good and bad bacteria in our guts. The MCFAs actually single out the bad guys and leave the good guys alone.

Its really amazing stuff.

Published research shows that the MCFAs from coconut oil can kill bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites that cause the following illnesses. This is just a short list. More can be found on page 77 of The Coconut Oil Miracle. Of course, MCFAs are no panacea. But they deserve far more attention in the prevention and treatment of many diseases and conditions. Then again, you cant patent coconut oil and sell if for outlandish prices. So dont expect Big Pharma to run any ads for it any time soon.

Bacterial InfectionsThroat and sinus infectionsUrinary tract infectionsDental cavities and gum diseaseHelicobacter PyloriGastric ulcersEar infectionsFood poisoning

Viral InfectionsInfluenzaMeaslesHerpesChronic fatigue syndromeAIDS and HIV

Fungal InfectionsRingwormAthletes footCandidiasisToenail fungus

Parasite InfectionsGiardia

I can go on and on about the benefits of coconut oil. But Im out of time today. Gotta edit Episode 3 of the Underground Wellness Show (guest: Mark Sisson).

Dont forget to tune in to tonights UW Radio show and find out how much coconut oil you should be consuming and MORE!

Its at 5pm PT/8pm ET. Dial 347-237-5608 to ask Bruce your burning coconut questions. Or tweet me at @ugwellness.

UPDATE: Listen to the show with Dr. Fife below!

Peace.

SeanAuthor, The Dark Side of Fat Loss

View post:

Coconut Oil: Germ Warfare! | Underground Wellness

SERVICING THE TREASURE VALLEY SINCE 2009

The team at Germ Warfare Carpet & Upholstery Cleaning LLC, formerly Georges Carpet & Upholstery Cleaning, stands behind the companys founding principles of quality of service, integrity of character, devotion to customers, and trustworthiness. Germ Warfare is a locally owned, family-operated company with over 20 years of experience in the field! Under the name of Georges Carpet & Upholstery Cleaning, the same people have been servicing the Treasure Valley since 2009. Our customers, both current and future, will continue to appreciate the expertise and excellent quality and care that they have come to love under Georges.

We utilize the extremely powerful HydraMaster 4.8 Salsa truck-mount system. This unit specializes in providing powerful, reliable cleaning by capitalizing upon the power produced by a V-8 engine! The Salsa system on our unit is the hottest blower heat exchanger on the market and produces working temperatures as high as 235F. What this means for customerswe are able to provide the deepest cleaning possible and extract efficiently, thoroughly, and effectively.

Those searching for amazing customer service and the absolute highest quality in cleaning should call

Germ Warfare Carpet & Upholstery Cleaning208-463-7722

Excerpt from:

GERM WARFARE - Carpet Cleaning and Upholstery Cleaning

Loading ... The U.S. Army has admitted that it secretly conducted at least 239 germ warfare tests in locations across the country, targeting unsuspecting Americans.

(TFTP) While the United States government claims to be horrified every time there are reports of a chemical attack that was allegedly carried out by the Syrian government, history serves as a reminder that the U.S. is responsible for carrying out a number of chemical attacks on thousands of unsuspecting Americans, and some of the innocent victims are still suffering from the effects today.

In 1977, the U.S. Army admitted that it secretly conducted at least 239 germ warfare tests in the open air in cities across the country between 1949 and 1969. The areas where the lethal germs were simulated on the public were typically in major cities such as Washington D.C., San Francisco, New York City, Key West and Panama City, according to a report the Army submitted to the Senate Health Subcommittee.

In the report, the Army insisted that the purpose of the tests was to study how biological warfare affects the public, in case it needs to defend against it. Calling tests essential, the Army claimed it needed tosubstantiate theories and fill knowledge gaps and to determine vulnerability to attack.

According to areportfrom the Washington Post, the release of the Armys censored report was the most complete official version of this nations biological warfare effort, and it revealed that in addition to public areas, military personnel and their families were also targeted:

The Army listed 27 times that it tested simulated toxins on public property, including releasing spores in two tunnels on a stretch of Pennsylvania Turnpike.In addition to those experiments in public places, the Army secretary used military personnel and their families for open-air experiments by spraying simulated germs into the air at a number of bases, including Fort Detrick, Md.; Fort Belvoir, Va.; and the Marine training school at Quantico, Va. Another 504 workers connected with biological warfare activities at Ft. Detrick, Dugway Proving Ground and the Deseret Test Center in Utah and the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas suffered infections, according to the Armys count.

The Armys report also noted that while the initial tests were carried out 1942, the testing of biological warfare agents increased drastically in 1961 when the Secretary of Defense ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to evaluate the potentialities of biological and chemical warfare, instead of just studying the effects of the agents from a defense standpoint.

While the report from the Army maintained that the live bacteria deployed in tests across the country were deemed harmless at the time, the tests resulted in lifelong illnesses and health problems for many of the innocent victims who were unaware that their quality of life was being compromised by a government experiment.

As The Free Thought Projectreported, the largest experiment was carried out in San Francisco, California, in 1950. The Army sprayed the city with the microbeSerratia marcescensin an attack that was called Operation Sea-Spray. They claimed San Francisco was chosen as the target because it is close to the ocean and because it has a unique geography, tall buildings, and dense population.

For six days in September 1950, military members used giant hoses to spray clouds ofSerratiaalong the San Francisco coastline, which resulted in the citys 800,000 residents receiving heavy doses of the chemical. It is also estimated that residents in the neighboring communities of Albany, Berkeley, Daly City, Colma, Oakland, San Leandro, and Sausalito, were exposed to it.

While the military insisted thatSerratia marcescens is rarely a cause of illness, Discover Magazinenoted that there were a number of serious illnesses and even one tragic death reported as a result of the governments chemical attack:

A week after the spraying, 11 patients were admitted to the now-defunct Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco with severe urinary tract infections, resistantto the limited antibiotics available in that era. One gentleman, recovering from prostate surgery, developed complications of heart infection asSerratiacolonized his heart valves. His would be the only death during the aftermath of the experiment Later, the repeated occurrence of urinary-tract infection by this organism, with bacteremia in two patients and death in one, indicated the potential clinical importance of this group of bacteria.

While the idea that the U.S. government would willingly poison its own citizens may seem shocking to some, it is not unprecedented. Earlier this year, a study found that the Pentagon has contaminatedmore than 40,000 sitesacross the United States, exposing hundreds of thousands of Americans to dangerous chemicals.

The investigation, which was conducted by ProPublica and Vox,revealedthat by testing and disposing of deadly chemical weapons in the United States, the Pentagon haspoisoned drinking water supplies, rendered millions of acres of land unsafe or unusable, and jeopardized the health of often unwitting Americans.

The study noted that while the Pentagon has spentmore than $40 billionin an effort to clean up the contaminated sites over the years, the results have been overwhelmingly inadequate, and many Americans are still at risk, even after the government claims that the sites have been rendered safe for public use.

The Department of Defense and its contractors are also currently using at least 61 active military sites across the country to burn and detonate unused munitions and raw explosives in the open air with no environmental emissions controls,according to a series ofreportsfrom ProPublica.

Ultimately, while the U.S. claims that it must engage in the War on Terror to protect Americans from terrorists, the fact remains that some of the most harmful warfare launched against Americans on U.S. soil has resulted from secret experiments backed by the Pentagon. Yet none of the officials from the government agencies who are responsible have been held accountable for poisoning countless innocent Americans with the attacks.

Related

View post:

US Army Has Admitted To Conducting 100s Of Germ Warfare ...