"Because of its power and global interests U.S. leaders have committed crimes as a matter of course and structural necessity. A strict application of international law would ... have given every U.S. president of the past 50 years Nuremberg treatment." --Edward Herman

The United States ended World War II by using the most horrific weapon in the history of warfare-the atomic bomb-on the Japanese civilian population. This doomsday weapon had been developed in total secrecy as part of a massive research program employing a small army of world-class scientists. After the war, the United States scrambled through the rubble and chaos to determine what progress its enemies had made in their secret weapons development programs. It turned out that the Germans' atom bomb effort was primitive compared to the Manhattan Project. However, the Germans and the Japanese had made progress in other areas - and we were obsessed over finding out just how much.

Two of the "weapons'' we sought information on had nothing to do with the traditional field of battle, but their ramifications would be enormous. Using volumes of information gained from German and Japanese experiments conducted on concentration camp prisoners, POWs and entire civilian populations, the U.S. continued its enemies' research programs in mind control[i] and biological warfare.[ii] It even employed some of the war criminals that managed these programs as consultants at Fort Detrick[iii],[iv] for experiments using U.S. citizens and soldiers as guinea pigs.

The Manhattan Project infrastructure itself was employed in this regard.[v] Under this umbrella, the U.S. hoped to duplicate its success in creating devastating weapons by perfecting the mind-control technology developed by the Germans[vi] and the biological warfare technology developed and tested by the Japanese.

The postwar effort to develop novel weapons was substantially different, however, from that which produced a super-bomb capable of leveling an entire city. Instead of using physics and chemistry to harness the fundamental forces of nature, these new weapons would exploit the fields of psychology and biology to manipulate the fundamental processes required for mental[vii] and physical health in humans. By unlocking the keys to the brain and the body, the United States would be able to induce diseases at will for psychological or biological warfare. These weapons ultimately had the potential to be more devastating than the atom bomb since they could not only control both mental and physical health on an unprecedented scale but, more importantly, could be tested and used in complete secrecy.

To refine the weapons developed by its enemies in WWII, the Central Intelligence Agency launched an immense program of clandestine research and international experimentation on human subjects. By covertly leveraging the U.S. medical infrastructure, the CIA was able to orchestrate this experimentation under the pretense of legitimate research by doctors who often didn't realize the sinister ends to which their research would be used.[viii]

The initial mind-control research was conducted toward nominally noble ends-even if the means to achieve them were abominable. Like their counterparts in other fields, the nation's elite psychologists and psychiatrists attempted to create human diseases on-demand so that cures could be tested under laboratory conditions. For example, research geared toward selectively inducing hypnotic amnesia and drug-induced schizophrenic states would provide doctors with a way of testing theories on the causes of neurosis and mental illness. Medical research with biological agents had similarly stated goals. Human experiments with "anticancer viruses" such as West Nile Virus and with "cancer transplants" in subjects with impaired immune systems would allow scientists to test their theories of how the immune system controlled the growth of diseases. Such information would assist in manipulating the human immune system toward the development of cancer vaccines.

But of course these experiments toward inducing laboratory models of mental and physical diseases were not conducted purely for medical purposes. Much of this research was conducted for psychological and biological warfare applications, and even then under the pretext of developing defensive measures against enemy use of such technology. For example, learning how to destroy memory and manipulate personality through stress, drugs and hypnosis might allow researchers to counteract these processes and "inoculate" their men against enemy use of such techniques in hostile interrogations. (Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber," was the victim of exactly this type of research as a student at Harvard.) Likewise, knowledge of how immunity could be destroyed by chemicals and viruses to cause disease would provide clues critical to counteract these processes in the development of vaccines. Such vaccines would allow the government to inoculate its own troops against bioweapons used by national security threats.[ix]

Toward even more sinister ends, this research also provided an offensive capability. Supposedly defensive mind-control research[x] would give the CIA the ability to create agents and operatives who would carry out their assignments in the midst of danger without risk of their becoming security threats.[xi] Through mental conditioning and the creation of synthetic, multiple personalities, interrogation-proof double agents could be produced who would not only safely transfer information as human couriers (to a friendly hypnotist) but obediently commit acts such as assassinations that were contrary to their personal morality and safety. Agents with enhanced or selectively depleted memories could even be sent into the field to accomplish tasks they would have no conscious recollection of completing.[xii]

Work on vaccines had dual uses as well. By developing the technology to selectively deplete the immune system, researchers could develop an understanding of how immune system defects caused disease. This information could then be used to counteract such processes and selectively enhance the immune system in the form of vaccines.[xiii] But the ability to controllably destroy the immune system was in itself a biological weapon that could be used as part of an offensive capability.[xiv] And these offensive and defensive tools could be used synergistically. Defensive vaccines could be developed that would allow U.S. forces to be inoculated against offensive bioweapons to be used on enemy forces.[xv]

Theory is one thing, implementation quite another. Has the U.S. government, through its agencies, transformed "could" and "would" into "can" and "will"? Did it actually bring research in psychological and biological warfare to the next level? Years of study have convinced me that this has happened and is happening to this very day. Consider:

* The technology developed to control the immune system-selectively depleting immune cells with viruses in animal cancer-transplant experiments-was exploited to induce the epidemic of AIDS and cancer in humans. This latter epidemic is highly