Military experiments on civilians?

[icewhale]

And answer came there none...

...once again Jazzroc sidesteps the awkward fact that he got caught out telling half-truths. :D

Quote:The UK's MOD needed to know how the material dispersed. The tests, and the results, bear this out.

Porton's extensive public area BW field trials were done for many reasons, Jazzroc, not just to simply see 'how the material dispersed'. :rolleyes:

In fact by 1958, minutes from meetings of the Biological Research Advisory Board reveal that they knew perfectly well how 'it dispersed', but that didn't stop them from continuing to repeatedly expose the population of England and Wales to material which they knew was hazardous.

Sometimes they conducted 'massive croswind line-releases' of live bacteria over populated areas, just to show off their research to the Chiefs of Staff - at the time MRE Porton Down were still engaged in 'empire-building' and keen to influence the CoS thinking, re BW.

On occasion they conducted 'offensive' orientated BW research in public areas, such as: The Westwood Trials, The Railway Coach Trials, the Lyme Bay 'S3' Trials in which bacteria were coated with a protective substance, to enable the survivability of bacterial aerosols sprayed in daylight.

Quote:They also DID test the materials on people and animals. This they did at Porton Down. The people were volunteers, the animals of course weren't.

Some, not all, test subjects were so-called 'volunteers'. Porton never gave them any such title - CDEE used the term 'observers'.

'Volunteers' only became used as a term when doubts surfaced in the media, about the ethics of using National Service personnel as test subjects in some very dodgy human experiments.

The term 'Volunteers' wrongly implies that the test subjects were treated under the rules developed after the Nurenberg Trials, or the Helsinki Agreement. As has been proved within recent years, true 'Informed Consent' procedures were not the norm at Porton Down; even as late as the mid-sixties servicemen were being 'officially spiked' with acid with no prior informed consent.

Quote:Only a feeble mind would construe the open-air MOD tests as tests "on people". Do please shape up.

While its true to say that the general public were not the target of Porton Down's public area BW field trials, the MOD must have possessed a large amount of feeble minds themselves, not to have considered that their BW experiments might cause adverse health efects among those exposed to Porton's massive chemical/biological aerosols. After all these weren't just aerosols of 'wild' bacteria - these were massive aerosols of bacteria which had been specially produced by Porton to be of a size which would by-pass the body's natural defences.

Personally, I find it quite understandable that confusion exists as to the 'targets' of these tests, given Porton's extremely close collaboration with their Tripartite/Quadripartite partner, the USA - who possess a very unethical past history of human experimentation.

Some feel that as we're British, we would never conduct any experiments such as those previously committed by the USA. Unfortunately, they seem to either forget, or are unaware of, the fact that as members of the respective Tripartite/Quadripartite Agreements, Porton Down is quite prepared to use research gathered by the USA's unethical human experimentation.

In fact I was informed by a member of Operation ANTLER, that he had evidence that the USA had, in the past, conducted human experimentation for Porton Down.

Which, of course enables MOD/Porton Down apologists to legitimately claim that the UK never did any similar unethical human experimentation Porton Down ('cos they get someone else to actually conduct them, or do them outside of the UK).



icewhale