Alex > Recent Status Updates

"And if through my intercession I could play a part in getting a soul to love and praise God more, even if it be for just a short time, I think that would matter more to me than being in glory."

"He [Olson] was one of several Special Operations Division scientists who were in France on August 16, 1951, when an entire French village, Pont-St.-Esprit, was mysteriously seized by mass hysteria and violent delirium that afflicted more than two hundred residents and caused seven deaths; the cause was later determined to have been poisoning by ergot, the fungus from which LSD was derived."

"In his laboratory at Camp Detrick, Olson directed experiments that involved gassing or poisoning laboratory animals. These experiences disturbed him. “He’d come to work in the morning and see piles of dead monkeys,” his son Eric later recalled. “That messes with you. He wasn’t the right guy for that.”"
Olson sounds like a poor devil more than anything, although of course that's the narrative Kinzer goes for.

Margaret Gottliebs views on religion and morality are interesting, coming from a woman who slept with a man that gave LSD to strangers to test whether it could break their mind.

"He [Abramson] closely monitored experiments, including one in which twelve “pre-puberty” boys were fed psilocybin, and another in which fourteen children between the ages of six and eleven, diagnosed as schizophrenic, were given 100 micrograms of LSD each day for six weeks."

My only serious criticism so far is that the author does not seem to consider the possibility that the communists were as bad as the CIA. They may not have had MKULTRA, sure, but I don't believe that the Chinese treated American POW's very well.

Camp Detricks spraying of the "harmless" bacterium Serratia marcescens in San Francisco caused eleven hospitalizations and one death.

"Evidence later emerged suggesting that both the Soviet and Chinese governments used the expertise of Unit 731 veterans to advance their own bio-weapons programs."

I really like this book so far.

On Churchills request for anthrax to use against Germany:
"Roosevelt’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, wrote to his boss that using anthrax as a weapon “would violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard of, and all of the known laws of war.”"

The British and Americans considered using biological weapons againat Germany in WW2.

"Once while thinking of the distress it caused me to eat meat and not do penance, I understood that sometimes my distress was more a matter of self-love than a desire for penance."