DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: Henny on October 09, 2007, 07:49:00 AM
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US Considered Poisons for Assassinations
AP IMPACT: US Explored Potential for Using Radioactive Poisons to Kill 'Important Individuals'
By ROBERT BURNS
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON
In one of the longest-held secrets of the Cold War, the U.S. Army explored the potential for using radioactive poisons to assassinate "important individuals" such as military or civilian leaders, according to newly declassified documents obtained by The Associated Press.
Approved at the highest levels of the Army in 1948, the effort was a well-hidden part of the military's pursuit of a "new concept of warfare" using radioactive materials from atomic bombmaking to contaminate swaths of enemy land or to target military bases, factories or troop formations.
Military historians who have researched the broader radiological warfare program said in interviews that they had never before seen evidence that it included pursuit of an assassination weapon. Targeting public figures in such attacks is not unheard of; just last year an unknown assailant used a tiny amount of radioactive polonium-210 to kill Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London.
No targeted individuals are mentioned in references to the assassination weapon in the government documents declassified in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the AP in 1995.
The decades-old records were released recently to the AP, heavily censored by the government to remove specifics about radiological warfare agents and other details. The censorship reflects concern that the potential for using radioactive poisons as a weapon is more than a historic footnote; it is believed to be sought by present-day terrorists bent on attacking U.S. targets.
The documents give no indication whether a radiological weapon for targeting high-ranking individuals was ever used or even developed by the United States. They leave unclear how far the Army project went. One memo from December 1948 outlined the project and another memo that month indicated it was under way. The main sections of several subsequent progress reports in 1949 were removed by censors before release to the AP.
The broader effort on offensive uses of radiological warfare apparently died by about 1954, at least in part because of the Defense Department's conviction that nuclear weapons were a better bet.
Whether the work migrated to another agency such as the CIA is unclear. The project was given final approval in November 1948 and began the following month, just one year after the CIA's creation in 1947.
It was a turbulent time on the international scene. In August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb, and two months later Mao Zedong's communists triumphed in China's civil war.
As U.S. scientists developed the atomic bomb during World War II, it was recognized that radioactive agents used or created in the manufacturing process had lethal potential. The government's first public report on the bomb project, published in 1945, noted that radioactive fission products from a uranium-fueled reactor could be extracted and used "like a particularly vicious form of poison gas."
Among the documents released to the AP an Army memo dated Dec. 16, 1948, and labeled secret described a crash program to develop a variety of military uses for radioactive materials. Work on a "subversive weapon for attack of individuals or small groups" was listed as a secondary priority, to be confined to feasibility studies and experiments.
The top priorities listed were:
1 Weapons to contaminate "populated or otherwise critical areas for long periods of time."
2 Munitions combining high explosives with radioactive material "to accomplish physical damage and radioactive contamination simultaneously."
3 Air and-or surface weapons that would spread contamination across an area to be evacuated, thereby rendering it unusable by enemy forces.
The stated goal was to produce a prototype for the No. 1 and No. 2 priority weapons by Dec. 31, 1950.
The 4th ranked priority was "munitions for attack on individuals" using radioactive agents for which there is "no means of therapy."
"This class of munitions is proposed for use by secret agents or subversive units for lethal attacks against small groups of important individuals, e.g., during meetings of civilian or military leaders," it said.
Assassination of foreign figures by agents of the U.S. government was not explicitly outlawed until President Gerald R. Ford signed an executive order in 1976 in response to revelations that the CIA had plotted in the 1960s to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro, including by poisoning.
The Dec. 16, 1948, memo said a lethal attack against individuals using radiological material should be done in a way that makes it impossible to trace the U.S. government's involvement, a concept known as "plausible deniability" that is central to U.S. covert actions.
"The source of the munition, the fact that an attack has been made, and the kind of attack should not be determinable, if possible," it said. "The munition should be inconspicuous and readily transportable."
Radioactive agents were thought to be ideal for this use, the document said, because of their high toxicity and the fact that the targeted individuals could not smell, taste or otherwise sense the attack.
"It should be possible, for example, to develop a very small munition which could function unnoticeably and which would set up an invisible, yet highly lethal concentration in a room, with the effects noticeable only well after the time of attack," it said.
"The time for lethal effects could, it is believed, be controlled within limits by the amount of radioactive agent dispersed. The toxicities are such that should relatively high concentrations be required for early lethal effects, on a weight basis, even such concentrations may be found practicable."
Tom Bielefeld, a Harvard physicist who has studied radiological weapons issues, said that while he had never heard of this project, its technical aims sounded feasible.
Bielefeld noted that polonium, the radioactive agent used to kill Litvinenko in November 2006, has just the kind of features that would be suitable for the lethal mission described in the Dec. 16 memo.
Barton Bernstein, a Stanford history professor who has done extensive research on the U.S. military's radiological warfare efforts, said he did not believe this aspect had previously come to light.
"This is one of those items that surprises us but should not shock us, because in the Cold War all kinds of ways of killing people, in all kinds of manners inhumane, barbaric and even worse were periodically contemplated at high levels in the American government in what was seen as a just war against a hated and hateful enemy," Bernstein said.
The project was run by the Army Chemical Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. Alden H. Waitt, and supervised by a now-defunct agency called the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. The project's first chief was Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the Army's head of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs. The radiological project was approved by Groves' successor, Maj. Gen. Kenneth D. Nichols.
The released documents were in files of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project held by the National Archives.
Among the officials copied in on the Dec. 16 memo were Herbert Scoville, Jr., then the technical director of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and later the CIA's deputy director for research, and Samuel T. Cohen, a physicist with RAND Corp. who had worked on the Manhattan Project.
The initial go-ahead for the Army to pursue its radiological weapons project was given in May 1948, a point in U.S. history, following the successful use of two atomic bombs against Japan to end World War II, when the military was eager to explore the implications of atomic science for the future of warfare.
In a July 1948 memo outlining the program's intent, before specifics had received final approval, a key focus was on long-lasting contamination of large land areas where residents would be told that unless the areas were abandoned they probably would die from radiation within one to 10 years.
"It is thought that this is a new concept of warfare, with results that cannot be predicted," it said.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=3704329
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No surprise.
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No surprise.
No, but interesting. I love it when things like this are declassified.
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I think people tend to forget that when they say things like, "we won the Cold War!" - the United States and Soviet Union destroyed countless lives across the globe and ruined many nations.
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Kind of hard to walk across a lawn without bending grass blades.
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Kind of hard to walk across a lawn without bending grass blades.
No. I think it would be more appropriate to say that instead of a world with one gallant knight fighting one dark knight. We had a block with two big bullies who beat the hell out of all the little kids on the block to prove how tough they were.
It was all short-term thinking. Almost always you find short-term "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" callous thinking. There was almost no regard for the people killed and countries destroyed in between.
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It was all short-term thinking. Almost always you find short-term "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" callous thinking. There was almost no regard for the people killed and countries destroyed in between.
Are you saying this is a new phenomena? Or is this the way it has always been?
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Personally, knowing that the Russians have already been caught doing this only points to the probability that the US government has been doing it for many more years.
We lead the world in innovation most times and torture and murder are some of our top exports. If the Russkies have done it of late, we did it in the '50s.
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We lead the world in innovation most times and torture and murder are some of our top exports. If the Russkies have done it of late, we did it in the '50s.
Like i said, no surprise.
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It was all short-term thinking. Almost always you find short-term "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" callous thinking. There was almost no regard for the people killed and countries destroyed in between.
Are you saying this is a new phenomena? Or is this the way it has always been?
I'm not sure I understand the questions, in this context.
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Are you saying in the history of rivalries between nations there have never been collaterally damaged bystander nations?
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Never to the degree of the Cold War. Also, never has contemporary history glossed over the dubious aspects that our own nation played in that "collateral damage" so easily and willfully.
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Was this program still going on after Nixon nixed chemical warfare?
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So, does the ends justify the means?
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Never to the degree of the Cold War. Also, never has contemporary history glossed over the dubious aspects that our own nation played in that "collateral damage" so easily and willfully.
Are you surprised that the research was done? Should it have been?
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Never to the degree of the Cold War. Also, never has contemporary history glossed over the dubious aspects that our own nation played in that "collateral damage" so easily and willfully.
Are you surprised that the research was done? Should it have been?
Surprised? No.
Should it have been done? Meh, ethics was just an obstacle in the Cold War, wasn't it?
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Should it have been done? Meh, ethics was just an obstacle in the Cold War, wasn't it?
Weapons development is unethical?
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>> ... the United States and Soviet Union destroyed countless lives across the globe and ruined many nations.<<
Name one.
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>> ... the United States and Soviet Union destroyed countless lives across the globe and ruined many nations.<<
Name one.
East Timor
(I can name many, many more...but we can start with one)
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>> ... the United States and Soviet Union destroyed countless lives across the globe and ruined many nations.<<
Name one.
Are you kidding? Remember, it's not just an issue about the U.S. Surely you can think of damage done by the Soviet Union?
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So the people of East Timor would be better off as a Soviet satellite rather than a Republic?
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>>Are you kidding? Remember, it's not just an issue about the U.S. Surely you can think of damage done by the Soviet Union?<<
You aren't to bright are you. Perhaps the burka is too tight?
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>>Are you kidding? Remember, it's not just an issue about the U.S. Surely you can think of damage done by the Soviet Union?<<
You aren't to bright are you. Perhaps the burka is too tight?
So you're saying you don't have an answer to that question?
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No, I'm saying you're stupid. Is that clear enough?
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No, I'm saying you're stupid. Is that clear enough?
That remark would bother me coming from some people.
You, Rich, are not one of those people. You have yet to demonstrate enough intelligence of your own to be taken seriously on any level.
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So the people of East Timor would be better off as a Soviet satellite rather than a Republic?
The people of East Timor were slaughtered by the Indonesians after Suharto asked permission to do so from President Ford in 1976. I'm guessing they didn't give a damn about the egos of two superpowers at the time.
That is of course, the United States giving permission for the Muslim Indonesian brutal dictator (but avid anti-communist ::) ) Suharto, to murder somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 to 300,000 East Timorese Christians. There was no Soviet threat anywhere in East Timor.
They became a Republic in 1996, with the help of Australia and New Zealand, and mostly Portugal (and a number of priests from the latter country). We had very little to do with it and it was much to the chagrin of our allies in Indonesia.
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So Gerald Ford gave permission for the whole sale slaughter of 200,000 people.
Your evidence for this?
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Careful Henny, you're getting awful uppity for a Muslim woman.
(http://www.terrorismawareness.org/images/43tt.jpg)
Do you really think I give a damn what some Muslim trollop thinks of me?
See if you can find another woman to back you up. After all you're not worth as much as a man in court.
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Department of State Telegram (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf)
Especially look at page 8 #39 and all of page 9. Especially interesting is Kissenger's comment on page 9 #43, which shows that he knew it was going to be an unpopular affair and was afraid of US involvement (via arms trade with Indonesia) coming to light.
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Careful Henny, you're getting awful uppity for a Muslim woman.
(http://www.terrorismawareness.org/images/43tt.jpg)
Do you really think I give a damn what some Muslim trollop thinks of me?
See if you can find another woman to back you up. After all you're not worth as much as a man in court.
Wow, officially the dumbest post ever.
And obviously you care, or you wouldn't have bothered responding with this filth.
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Careful Henny, you're getting awful uppity for a Muslim woman.
(http://www.terrorismawareness.org/images/43tt.jpg)
Do you really think I give a damn what some Muslim trollop thinks of me?
See if you can find another woman to back you up. After all you're not worth as much as a man in court.
Except you know I'm not Muslim. If I were Muslim, however, I would not be ashamed to say so. And if I ever choose to convert, I promise you'll be the first to know.
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>>Especially look at page 8 #39 and all of page 9.<<
Officially the biggest lie ever.
Look you moron, you claimed President Gerald Ford essentially ordered the death of 300, 000 people. Nothing in the link you produced backs up such an outrageous lie.
Seek help moron.
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>>Especially look at page 8 #39 and all of page 9.<<
Officially the biggest lie ever.
Look you moron, you claimed President Gerald Ford essentially ordered the death of 300, 000 people. Nothing in the link you produced backs up such an outrageous lie.
Seek help moron.
That's not what I said. I said that Ford gave the OK to Suharto to invade Timor. Clearly Kissenger knew what the outcome would be, hence his asking Suharto to not allow US arms to be used. It was no surprise what Suharto did to ethnicities he disliked - just ask the Chinese in Indonesia.
We gave the OK for the Muslim nation of Indonesia to invade the Christian nation of Timor. Nice, huh? And it is right there in a State Department telegram.
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>>Clearly Kissenger (sic) knew what the outcome would be ... <<
I see. So you've found Ford guilty (based on these documents which don't even mention it) of mass murder because he authorized an invasion, but the murder was carried out by someone else's army. Right.
So you hold Ford responsible. I wonder if you'll hold Mrs. Clinton responsible for the mass murder in Iraq that will certainly occur because of her actions?
No need to answer. Of course you won't. You're too dishonest to even consider it.
Also ... East Timor? this is the best you can come up with? Of all the millions of people America liberated from Communism, you hate America enough to use East Timor as your best example? You're pathetic.
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>>Clearly Kissenger (sic) knew what the outcome would be ... <<
I see. So you've found Ford guilty (based on these documents which don't even mention it) of mass murder because he authorized an invasion, but the murder was carried out by someone else's army. Right.
I don't recall saying that Ford was guilty of mass murder. Nope, I think Rich is lying again, as always.
Yet, Ford and his buddy knew what Suharto would do to the Timorese, and accepted the invasion anyway. It is right there in black and white. Obviously they knew it would be a nasty event, hence the request that American arms not be used (if it were legitimate, why would they care?).
Carried out by someone else's army? Proxy wars were the nature of the Cold War. ::)
And no, I don't expect that you'd give a damn about 200,000 Christians being slaughtered by the Indonesian dictatorship of Suharto. I mean, you only claim to care about Christians anyway, right?
Typical Rich...
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Look you idiot, here's what you said:
>>That is of course, the United States giving permission for the Muslim Indonesian brutal dictator (but avid anti-communist ) Suharto, to murder somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 to 300,000 East Timorese Christians.<<
Who's lying? You disingenuous piece of filth. You're to stupid to remember the lies you told only yesterday? I guess when you tell so many it's tough to keep them all straight, but damn, you POSTED IT brainiac!
What a mental midget.
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And you said:
So you've found Ford guilty of mass murder...
Huh...I don't see that anywhere.
Liar.
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>>Huh...I don't see that anywhere.<<
Good lord. You really are a reprobate.
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Richpo64
Ever watch Dragnet?
Remember Friday saying " Just the facts ' ma'm'"?
If you have the facts you have the argument , if you have no facts invective is always availible .
So why, when you have the facts on your side, would you act as if you didn't?
Save the table pounding for times when the facts are against you , and don't do it so often that everyone expects it of you every day , it robs it of all it 's effectiveness to make it the usual fare.
I seriously doubt that anyone in Washington was going to stop Suharto from being mean to his people , but you can look wrong by acting wrong reguardless.
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>>I seriously doubt that anyone in Washington was going to stop Suharto from being mean to his people , but you can look wrong by acting wrong reguardless.<<
<chuckle>
Well, it's amazing how this sort of thing only goes one way. But then it's always been that way around here.
Call a Republican a sadistic fascist and nobody blinks an eye.
Go figure.