Category Archives: Germ Warfare

By John Shoemaker/Local Columnist

Around the world, the body count continues to climb.

In the first five months of 2017, Islamic terrorists made over 500 attacks and killed more than 3,500 civilians.

Mass murder of hundreds, thousands and even hundreds of thousands continues.

How can anyone justify or ignore it?

Back in the '60s, during the Vietnam War, a song by Buffalo Springfield had these lyrics: I think its time we stop, children, whats that sound, everybody look whats going down

Over 460,000 - mostly civilians - have died so far in Syria, with many having horrific deaths. Nothing seems to stop the insanity and it gets worse. Sarin gas is only the latest episode. Deliberate bombing of men, women and children not in anyones army are dying hourly.

The atrocities of ISIS are well known and include barbaric practices that go back hundreds of years. Crucifixions, beheadings, mass graves with victims shot, knifed, blown up, burned or buried alive. Lucky ones are raped and sold as slaves. Another tactic: suicide bombers.

Renegade terrorists running rampant around the world include Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, Hamas, Hezbollah, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Taliban, Muslim Brotherhood, Ansar al-Islam, Al-Nusra Front and a dozen others.

Combined, their death toll exceeds well over one million people in the past decade.

A lyric from another song, by Credence Clearwater Survival, said, Dont walk slow, the Devil is on the loose.

The black ISIS flag has a white circle emblazoned with black writing reading Mohammed is the messenger of God.

Incredibly disconcerting is that these religious armies are the ones that have unleashed the Devil as if he was the messenger of God.

After all, religions have a basic belief in love, respect and value for one another under the Lord, God or Supreme Being. Yet, religious extremists show no mercy to gain global control.

Muslim terrorists kill infidels or non-believers. Whether they hijack the religion or not, the result is the same. Death rains down upon those who cannot defend themselves.

In Syria, we have seen over 14 million people flee for their lives. They are slaughtered as they try to escape. The refugee onslaught has caused huge problems across Europe and hundreds are dying trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea.

In a recent conversation with a Hindu who grew up in Kashmir on the India/Pakistan border, which has a long history of strife, he stated what others say, that violence-oriented Muslims have as many problems getting along with other Muslims as with non-Muslims.

Most know that people killed in the last few years by Muslim terrorists are mostly other Muslims. Even a recent atrocity in Syria involved a Muslim, Abdul-Hamid Alyousef, who suffered his twin babies being gassed along with 26 members of his family.

Pope Francis calls it an endless horror.

Fortunately, the sordid history of Christianity was also the cause of millions of deaths but at least these religious organizations moved to civility and ended that practice centuries ago.

Today, the killing goes on in all the Middle East, much of Africa and the subcontinent. Religion is still embedded in the conflicts that include Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other sects.

Such carnage recalls the one man who is responsible for killing more people in history than anyone, including Hitler and Chinas Mao-Tse-tung. Historians generally agree Stalin takes the honor with more than 60 million deaths; other estimates go as high as 100 million.

Incredibly, Stalin killed more than a million of his own soldiers returning from German POW camps after WW II. He considered them treasonous.

It was Stalin who said, The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

We are numbed by such statistics.

Still, many believe the U.S. should stay out of the fight. Let them kill themselves, they say. Others have this self-righteous notion that we should just show love, respect and pray for change.

Fat chance that will do anything to solve the problem.

Look at what a few men can do if left unchecked.

While we cannot be the worlds policeman, we can and must drive the world to enforce international law and to stop use of inhumane weapons like sarin gas or other deadly gases, biological or germ warfare and such.

Worse, there are threatening countries like North Korea and soon, Iran, with nuclear weapons.

It is unfortunate that few countries are willing and able to stand up for justice and for the lives of others.

We cannot allow all of humanity to become a statistic.

John Shoemaker lives in Natick.

See the rest here:

Shoemaker: Seeing a tragedy or a mere statistic? - MetroWest Daily News

Former US President Richard Nixon. After Nixon's first briefing on the use of nuclear weapons there were only five possible retaliatory or first-strike plans, and none involved launching fewer than 1000 warheads national security adviser Henry Kissinger said: "If that's all there is, he won't do it."

Garrett Graff says that his new book, Raven Rock, a detailed exploration of the United States' doomsday prepping during the Cold War, provides a history of "how nuclear war would have actually worked the nuts and bolts of war plans, communication networks, weapons, and bunkers and how imagining and planning for the impact of nuclear war actually changed ... as leaders realised the horrors ahead."

But if there is anything that Raven Rock proves with grim certitude, it is that we have little idea how events would have unfolded in a superpower nuclear conflict, and that technological limits, human emotion and enemy tactics can render the most painstaking and complex arrangements irrelevant, obsolete or simply obscene.

These contradictions are evident with each commander in chief Graff considers. During an apparent attack that proved to be a false alarm, Harry Truman refused to follow protocol and instead remained working in the Oval Office. Same with Jimmy Carter, who after a 1977 drill wrote in his diary that "my intention is to stay here at the White House as long as I live to administer the affairs of government, and to get Fritz Mondale into a safe place" to ensure the survival of the presidency.

And after Richard Nixon's first briefing on the use of nuclear weapons there were only five possible retaliatory or first-strike plans, and none involved launching fewer than 1000 warheads national security adviser Henry Kissinger was blunt about the president's dismay with his alternatives: "If that's all there is, he won't do it."

Graff, a former editor of Washingtonian and Politico magazines, covers every technicality of the construction of underground bunkers and secret command posts, every war game and exercise, every debate over presidential succession planning and continuity of government, every accident that left us verging on nuclear war. It is a thorough account, and excessively so; the detail is such that it becomes hard to distinguish consequential moments from things that simply happened. He describes one presidential briefing on nuclear tactics as "a blur of acronyms and charts, minimising the horror and reducing the death of hundreds of millions to bureaucratic gobbledygook", and at times this book commits the same offence.

Its power, however, lies in the author's eye for paradox. The plans for continuity of government and nuclear war are cumulative, developed in doctrines, directives and studies piling up over decades; yet it is up to short-lived and distracted administrations to deploy or reform them. War planning hinges on technology that constantly evolves, so plans invariably lag behind. More specifically, continuity of government depends on keeping top officials alive, yet "the precise moment when evacuating would be most important also was precisely when it was most important to remain at the reins of government", Graff writes.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proved the point on September 11, 2001, when he stayed at the Pentagon and dispatched Paul Wolfowitz to Raven Rock, the Pennsylvania mountain hideaway north of Camp David that serves as the namesake for this book. "That's what deputies are for," the Pentagon chief explained, in a beautifully Rumsfeldian line.

There are more personal reasons people would choose not to leave Washington in the case of looming nuclear war. For years, evacuation plans excluded the families of senior officials. Apparently the wives of President Dwight Eisenhower's Cabinet members were less than pleased to learn that they had not made the list, even while their husbands' secretaries had. And when an administration representative handed Earl Warren the ID card that would grant him access to a secure facility in an emergency, the chief justice replied, "I don't see the pass for Mrs Warren." Told that he was among the country's 2000 most important people, Warren handed the card back. "Well, here," he said, "you'll have room for one more important official."

Perhaps the presence of the Supreme Court would prove inconvenient, anyway, because a post-nuclear America could easily become "an executive branch dictatorship", Graff explains. Eisenhower worried about this, though it did not stop him from establishing a secret system of private-sector czars who would step in to run massive sectors of the US economy and government, with the power to ration raw materials, control prices and distribute food.

When President John Kennedy discovered this system, he quickly dismantled it, even if his younger brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, carried around a set of pre-written, unsigned documents providing the FBI and other agencies sweeping powers to detain thousands of people who could be deemed security threats in wartime. And the Eisenhower-era Emergency Government Censorship Board, rechristened the Wartime Information Security Program under Nixon, was finally defunded after Watergate. However, as Graff notes, "the executive orders all still remained drafted ready for an emergency when it arrived".

For all the ominous directives and war scenarios, there is something random and even comical about planning for Armageddon. How many Export-Import Bank staffers rate rescuing? How many from the Department of Agriculture? A Justice Department public affairs official was once even tasked with compiling a lineup of Washington journalists who should be saved. "I remember painfully going over a list of people and wondering how do you balance a columnist I didn't think very much of as opposed to a reporter who I thought really did work," he said.

And then, what should the chosen few take along? The congressional bunker at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, for instance, included a stash of bourbon and wine; staffers "swore that the stockpile was to be used only to aid a hypothetical alcoholic congressmen who might need to be weaned off".

Raven Rock revels in the expensive machinery and elaborate contingency formulas presidents had at their disposal to command the nuclear arsenal. High-tech ships known as the National Emergency Command Post Afloat (nicknamed the "Floating White House") were ready for use from 1962 into the Nixon years, while a string of EC-135 aircraft flights (codenamed "Looking Glass") began continuous shifts on February 3, 1961, ensuring that one senior military leader with the proper authority would always be available to order a nuclear strike. Not "breaking the chain" of these overlapping flights became a US military obsession, and it remained unbroken until the end of the Cold War.

Some efforts were low-tech, too: In 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order decreeing that the Postal Service would be responsible for delivering "medical countermeasures" to homes across America in case of biological attacks, because it had a unique capacity for "rapid residential delivery". (Neither snow nor rain, nor germ warfare.)

Technology meant to defend can prove risky. In November 1979, NORAD computers detected a massive Soviet assault, targeting nuclear forces, cities and command centres. Turns out someone had mistakenly inserted a training tape into the system. Six months later, a faulty 46-cent computer chip briefly made it seem like 2200 Soviet missiles were soaring toward US targets. And in September 1983, Soviet satellites identified five US missiles heading toward the USSR except the satellites had mistaken the sun reflecting off cloud cover as the heat of a missile launch. "The Soviet early-warning system was a dangerous mess," Graff writes. Ours wasn't that great, either.

Over the decades, shifts in nuclear policy reflected presidents' views on what was possible, technologically and strategically. Eisenhower planned for "massive retaliation" attacks, Kennedy relied on the notion of mutually assured destruction, and Carter imagined a drawn-out war, in which an initial nuclear exchange could produce weeks of inaction before follow-up strikes. Ronald Reagan issued a presidential directive suggesting for the first time that the United States should "prevail" in a nuclear war, even if the 1983 television movie The Day After later left him feeling "greatly depressed", as he wrote in his diary.

For all the horrors it contemplates, Raven Rock proves most depressing for those of us left outside the bunkers. Though early on, Cold War administrations regarded civil defence as a priority, officials quickly realised how hard it would be to protect the American population from nuclear attack, especially as the shift from bombers to missiles reduced response times from hours to minutes. "Rather than remake the entire society," Graff writes, "the government would protect itself and let the rest of us die."

But every mushroom cloud has a silver lining: Graff reports that the IRS considered how it would collect taxes in the post-nuclear wasteland and concluded that "it seemed unfair to assess homeowners and business owners on the pre-attack tax assessments of their property".

Leave it to a nation founded in opposition to unfair levies to study the tax implications of the end of the world.

Washington Post

Raven Rock: The Story of the US Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of Us Die, by Garrett Graff, published by Simon & Schuster. Lozada is the non-fiction book critic of The Washington Post.

Washington Post Book World

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Nuclear war: the US took a highly bureaucratic response to preparing for it - The Australian Financial Review

Like the old Soviet Communist Party airbrushing Leon Trotsky from photographs of Joseph Stalin, the Law Society of B.C. is erasing the provinces first chief justice from its image.

It has condemned Sir Matthew Begbies statue in the foyer of its Vancouver building, eliminated the little bronze Begbies that honour the lifetime contribution of the truly exceptional in the legal profession and changed the code word used to trigger safety procedures in its headquarters from Begbie to something more appropriate.

Orwell?

The Begbie icon outside the New Westminster courthouse may go, too, and across B.C. three mountains, two lakes, a creek, an elementary school, streets and other sites bearing his moniker should consider it notice.

The law societys renovations and search for a new emblem are a politically correct response to the desire of First Nations leaders, especially Grand Chief Ed John, to see the Hanging Judge stripped of standing.

In a 10-page memo, the law societys truth and reconciliation advisory committee, co-chaired by Chief John, urged the cultural sea-change.

The benchers who govern the profession unanimously endorsed the recommendation without consulting the membership, though they recognized many lawyers would disagree.

Some lawyers may have the view that because lawyers governed by the Law Society of B.C. practise colonial law, it is logical to commemorate a figure who was integral to bringing colonial law to this province, noted the memo, drafted by LSBC staff.

Only last month, my Postmedia colleague Stephen Hume celebrated Begbie as among 150 of the most noteworthy British Columbians progressive, lenient, (he) championed the rights of indigenous and other minorities exposed to racism, and didnt hesitate to speak truth to power in his case, colonial authorities.

Begbies sin, the Law Society decided, was his key role in the unilateral assertion of colonial law to the detriment of Indigenous people in B.C.

Hmmm, Queen Victoria? Father of Confederation Prime Minister John A. Macdonald? The Father of B.C. Sir James Douglas? It was Begbies fault?

In the 19th century, Canada was a white, male-only-voting nation that believed in assimilating native peoples by confining them on unsustainable reserves, settling their land and indoctrinating their children. Begbie was to blame?

He appears among the more enlightened of his time.

The six-foot-four judge arrived in 1858 from Britain when B.C. was a chaotic frontier in the throes of a gold rush. He was named chief justice of the colony in 1869, and two years later became the first provincial chief justice with B.C. joiningConfederation in 1871.

Renowned for his fluency in indigenous languages, Begbie supported aboriginal title, opposed settlers efforts to displace First Nations, prompted legislation ensuring that First Nations women received a share of the estates of white partners and defended the underdog.

In 1864, however, Begbie sentenced six Indian leaders to hang for killing 20 people in the Chilcotin.

The chiefs claimed they were driven to violence because road-building was bringing settlers and the fear of disease.

Or, as the committee report refers to it, the threat of germ warfare via the intentional infection of smallpox. Hmmm.

Begbie wrote to the governor on Sept. 30, 1864: It seems horrible to hang five men at once, especially under the circumstances of the capitulation.

The chiefs were seemingly duped into surrendering by false promises.

Nevertheless, five chiefs were hanged as murderers the following month.

Begbie told Douglas: These fellows are cruel, murdering pirates taking life and making slaves in the same spirit in which you and I would go out after partridges or rabbit-shooting.

A sixth chief was executed in New Westminster in July 1865.

The causes of the conflict, dubbed the Chilcotin War, have been variously described but historians cant ascribe it to any one factor.

Today, the chiefs are celebrated as land-claims saints and Victoria has twice issued an apology first in 1993 and again in 2014 reiterating that they should be considered heroes in their peoples struggle for autonomy.

The law society committee insisted Begbies banishment was required in the interest of truth and we are not trying to erase or rewrite the history but to enrich our understanding of history by adding the Indigenous perspective.

It sounded to me like the benchers were scapegoating Begbie for the collective guilt of a profession that helped sustain racist governments until well into the 20th century.

This decision was based on a spurious argument and feel-good intentions that belittled Begbies true historic contribution.

Just as we must understand First Nations perspectives and their heroes, so they must understand the values and champions of the nations Euro-North American founders.

Begbie has been a symbol for so long for good reason.

He was no Tom Berger, but there would have been no Berger without the tradition begun by Begbie.

imulgrew@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/ianmulgrew

CLICK HERE to report a typo.

Is there more to this story? Wed like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com

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Ian Mulgrew: B.C. Law Society boosters of the Begbie brush-off - The Province

Since her untimely death in 2004, the legacy of world-renowned Chinese-American author Iris Chang has lived on in the pages of her bestseller, The Rape of Nanking. But now that legacy has also found a home in a museum in China dedicated to her work.

The elegant memorial hall honoring Chang opened last month in her ancestral home of Huaian, Jiangsu province. Construction took two years, according to her mother, Ying-Ying Chang, a retired microbiology researcher who lives in San Jose.

Chang remembers her daughter as a diligent and passionate person who never gave up in her quest for the truth and the pursuit ofsocial justice.

That really inspired me, the authors mothersaid. And these are the things I hope inspire other people.

Through the museum, she added, I hope people will know who Iris was and why we memorialize her and what she did.

Ying-Ying Changand her husband, Shau-Jin, a retired physics professor, donated more than 100 pieces for the museum everything from their daughters old books and letters to her clothing. The memorial is divided into six parts, each depicting a different aspect of Changs life. Designed by architect Qi Kang, the buildings exterior follows the style of Chinas ancient Han Dynasty, according to her mother. Its the first memorial to honor the late author and the second to commemorate the Nanking massacre.

Though Iris Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey, she was deeply curious about Chinese history, according to her mother. She made trips to China to do research for her book and to interview elderly survivors of the massacre.

She also spent a significant portion of her careereducating others about what took place during the Rape of Nanking and defiantly called on the Japanese to acknowledge the attack.

I want the Rape of Nanking to penetrate into public consciousness, Iris Chang said in a 1998 radio interview during a national book tour.Unless we truly understand how these atrocities can happen, we cant be certain that it wont happen again.

During the massacre dubbed the Forgotten Holocaust an estimated 300,000 Chinese civilians were bayoneted, machine-gunned or burned alive. Japanese troops raped tens of thousands of women and girls.

But the horrors did not begin and end there, scholars say. From the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 until their surrender in 1945, Japan engaged in germ warfare, slave labor, mass rapes and dissection of live bodies for medical research. Some scholars say 15 million Chinese died as the direct result of Japans invasion.

A significant movement among the Chinese to get Japan to apologize for World War II and the Nanking massacre has centered around Silicon Valley for decades. Chinese immigrantsin the valley in the early 1990s founded the Cupertino-based Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War, sparking a first-of-its kind campaign to make the world aware of what happened during Japans 14-year occupation of China.

The Japanese government has never formally apologized for the war.

During a joint visit to Pearl Harbor with President Barack Obama in December, JapanesePrime Minister Shinzo Abe offered sincere and everlasting condolences to the victims but did not apologize.

The issue has been an uncomfortable one for some Japanese-Americans. As a state assemblyman in 1999, Mike Honda, a San Jose Democrat and former congressman who had spent the war years as a child in a U.S. internment camp for people of Japanese ancestry, won approval of a resolution calling on the Japanese government to say it was sorry for wartime atrocities.

But although Honda drew careful distinctions between modern-day Japan and the aggressor of the 1930s and 1940s, his resolution was opposed by fellow Democrat George Nakano, an assemblyman from Torrance who felt it was divisive and would foster ill will toward Japanese-Americans.

Ignatius Ding, a close friend of Iris Chang and a founder of the Cupertino-based Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII in Asia, worked with Chinese officials to design the museum.

Chang, he said, inspired the Chinese to become more open-minded, helping to create the more open society that exists in the country today.

Thats a major, major thing, he said. The fact that they createda memorial for her, in her name that never happens.

Go here to see the original:

Museum honoring San Jose author of 'Rape of Nanking' Iris Chang opens in China - The Mercury News

Like the old Soviet Communist Party airbrushing Leon Trotsky from photographs of Joseph Stalin, the Law Society of B.C. is erasing the provinces first chief justice from its image.

It has condemned Sir Matthew Begbies statue in the foyer of its Vancouver building, eliminated the little bronze Begbies that honour the lifetime contribution of the truly exceptional in the legal profession and changed the code word used to trigger safety procedures in its headquarters from Begbie to something more appropriate.

Orwell?

The Begbie icon outside the New Westminster courthouse may go, too, and across B.C. three mountains, two lakes, a creek, an elementary school, streets and other sites bearing his moniker should consider it notice.

The law societys renovations and search for a new emblem are a politically correct response to the desire of First Nations leaders, especially Grand Chief Ed John, to see the Hanging Judge stripped of standing.

In a 10-page memo, the law societys truth and reconciliation advisory committee, co-chaired by Chief John, urged the cultural sea-change.

The benchers who govern the profession unanimously endorsed the recommendation without consulting the membership, though they recognized many lawyers would disagree.

Some lawyers may have the view that because lawyers governed by the Law Society of B.C. practise colonial law, it is logical to commemorate a figure who was integral to bringing colonial law to this province, noted the memo, drafted by LSBC staff.

Only last month, my Postmedia colleague Stephen Hume celebrated Begbie as among 150 of the most noteworthy British Columbians progressive, lenient, (he) championed the rights of indigenous and other minorities exposed to racism, and didnt hesitate to speak truth to power in his case, colonial authorities.

Begbies sin, the Law Society decided, was his key role in the unilateral assertion of colonial law to the detriment of Indigenous people in B.C.

Hmmm, Queen Victoria? Father of Confederation Prime Minister John A. Macdonald? The Father of B.C. Sir James Douglas? It was Begbies fault?

In the 19th century, Canada was a white, male-only-voting nation that believed in assimilating native peoples by confining them on unsustainable reserves, settling their land and indoctrinating their children. Begbie was to blame?

He appears among the more enlightened of his time.

The six-foot-four judge arrived in 1858 from Britain when B.C. was a chaotic frontier in the throes of a gold rush. He was named chief justice of the colony in 1869, and two years later became the first provincial chief justice with B.C. joiningConfederation in 1871.

Renowned for his fluency in indigenous languages, Begbie supported aboriginal title, opposed settlers efforts to displace First Nations, prompted legislation ensuring that First Nations women received a share of the estates of white partners and defended the underdog.

In 1864, however, Begbie sentenced six Indian leaders to hang for killing 20 people in the Chilcotin.

The chiefs claimed they were driven to violence because road-building was bringing settlers and the fear of disease.

Or, as the committee report refers to it, the threat of germ warfare via the intentional infection of smallpox. Hmmm.

Begbie wrote to the governor on Sept. 30, 1864: It seems horrible to hang five men at once, especially under the circumstances of the capitulation.

The chiefs were seemingly duped into surrendering by false promises.

Nevertheless, five chiefs were hanged as murderers the following month.

Begbie told Douglas: These fellows are cruel, murdering pirates taking life and making slaves in the same spirit in which you and I would go out after partridges or rabbit-shooting.

A sixth chief was executed in New Westminster in July 1865.

The causes of the conflict, dubbed the Chilcotin War, have been variously described but historians cant ascribe it to any one factor.

Today, the chiefs are celebrated as land-claims saints and Victoria has twice issued an apology first in 1993 and again in 2014 reiterating that they should be considered heroes in their peoples struggle for autonomy.

The law society committee insisted Begbies banishment was required in the interest of truth and we are not trying to erase or rewrite the history but to enrich our understanding of history by adding the Indigenous perspective.

It sounded to me like the benchers were scapegoating Begbie for the collective guilt of a profession that helped sustain racist governments until well into the 20th century.

This decision was based on a spurious argument and feel-good intentions that belittled Begbies true historic contribution.

Just as we must understand First Nations perspectives and their heroes, so they must understand the values and champions of the nations Euro-North American founders.

Begbie has been a symbol for so long for good reason.

He was no Tom Berger, but there would have been no Berger without the tradition begun by Begbie.

imulgrew@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/ianmulgrew

CLICK HERE to report a typo.

Is there more to this story? Wed like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com

Continue reading here:

Ian Mulgrew: B.C. Law Society boosters of the Begbie brush-off - Edmonton Journal

Badrya Darwish

The recent cyber-attacks that affected many countries around the globe made me think about the future of cybercrime, cyber war and our vulnerabilities. How serious can it reach in the future? One of the worst affected by the recent attacks was the NHS system in the UK. The ransomware caused a lot of chaos for doctors, hospitals and patients. Thank God no one died, but it was chaos for a few days. Of course, other firms worldwide were affected too.

Now comes the serious point. First of all, who are these hackers? No one knows. Do they belong to one group? Who commands them? Accusations were thrown left, right and center at certain governments and certain countries, but there was no full proof of who was behind it and I dont buy it. Its easy to cast aspersions without proof, and if they had proof, we would know it.

Could the cyber attackers be a bunch of super intelligent kids hacking the system for fun or profit? Or could it be spy agencies working for certain governments? If these super hackers can invade the US security system and the NSA, how safe should we feel? Maybe this time, it was only certain targets. But this could lead in the future to bigger issues.

How safe are nuclear weapons around the world? And not only nuclear there are many types of weaponry like biological weapons (germ warfare) owned by different governments and sold to troubled places that could be really vulnerable to attacks by cyber hackers. This time it seemed to be focused on criminals making money. But what if politics enters it? What if groups like Daesh start trying to engage in cyber-attacks?

Everything nowadays is computerized from airplanes to ships to power plants to hospitals, electricity grids, gas plants, LNG facilities you name it, its online. How scary and terrifying it is when you feel that there is no security left in any place in the world, except an African forest. We are entering a new era of global insecurity, unfortunately.

Have a safe week.

By Badrya Darwish badrya_d@kuwaittimes.net

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Cyber-attacks - Kuwait Times | Kuwait Times - Kuwait Times

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Its the greatest thing since sliced bread.

How and why did that expression become the benchmark against which greatness is measured? Even if it once had relevance, its now old and worn out.

There are far better standards we could use.

Tom Walton

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Sliced bread is a swell convenience, but if I had to gnaw on an unsliced loaf, life would still be fulfilling and I wouldnt like bread any less.

Here are my own nominees for sayings we could turn to that might make the point better:

Its the greatest thing since the internal combustion engine. So its a little wordy. Where would we all be without our cars? Sitting at home gnawing on a loaf of bread, most likely.

Its the greatest thing since three-day weekends. This ones pretty tough to beat. Most Americans might not actually pause to remember our fallen heroes on this long Memorial Day weekend, but standing over burgers on a grill at the park or on the back patio is how millions of us welcome summer in style.

Its the greatest thing since the Emancipation Proclamation. Again, this ones a mouthful, but freedom from involuntary servitude is a whole lot better than bread, sliced or not.

Its the greatest thing since elasticized waistbands. If youre over 40, no explanation is necessary.

Its the greatest thing since God made little green apples. Just channeling my inner Bobby Goldsboro here.

Its the greatest thing since the smoking ban. Clean air in public places? Whats not to like?

Its the greatest thing since buy one, get one free. Who doesnt like a nice BOGO every now and then? Come to think of it, how does that car dealer do it? Buy a car and get a second one free? Whats the catch? Theres gotta be one.

Its the greatest thing since hand sanitizer. Germ warfare got a whole lot easier for us and tougher for germs when this stuff came along.

Its the greatest thing since GPS. There really isnt any excuse for getting lost anymore, although occasionally I still manage to do it. Thats because asking for directions runs counter to everything Ive been taught as a male. But I concede the value of global positioning satellites to mankind and defer to the wisdom of the masses and women everywhere.

Its the greatest thing since the ATM. This one has to be a strong candidate to replace sliced bread as the standard by which we gauge progress and convenience.

A machine that spits out money whenever you need it. Is this a great country or what? Of course, like most computers, the automated teller machine is pretty smart. It figures out quickly if you dont have any Benjamins in there to begin with.

Its the greatest thing since wine in a box. No longer do you have to struggle to put the cork back in the bottle. Why is that so difficult in the first place? Why does a cork swell to twice its size after its freed from the bottles clutches?

Its the greatest thing since Cleveland won the World Series. Now that the Indians have supplanted the Chicago Cubs as the longest-suffering losers in baseball, this one sets the bar pretty high. Or low.

Its the greatest thing since high-definition television. High-def TV is indeed a wonderful step forward, although to be honest, nothing will ever match the excitement I felt the first time I saw color television as a child through an appliance store window in Tiffin.

Its the greatest thing since the digital camera. No more loading film. No more paying at the drug store for pictures you screwed up. Nephew Billy is making that goofy face again? Eliminate Nephew Billy. Well, not literally. You know what I mean: delete and retake.

Its the greatest thing since the light bulb. Why this one never took off is a mystery. Giving light to the world seems infinitely more important than cutting the worlds bread into small pieces.

Its the greatest thing since the self-cleaning oven. Dont ask, because I wont tell you how this came to be important to me. I will only say that I am glad the chicken was already dead.

Its the greatest thing since the flu vaccine. Id say flu shot, but the appeal would be diminished and the expression would never catch on. One word: needles.

Yet how many lives have been saved, how much misery has been avoided, how much productivity has not been lost, because of this annual ritual? Sliced bread might feel better, especially wrapped around a thick piece of fried balogna, but the flu shot is significantly better for you.

Its the greatest thing since the self-propelled lawnmower. Like the snow blower, the self-propelled lawnmower is a lifesaver. Go ahead. Get one. Your back and your heart will thank you. Youll get a lot of low impact exercise and the mower does the hard part.

So there we are. If you saw one you like, use it. Lets get it out there. Itll be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Thomas Walton is the retired editor and vice president of The Blade. His column appears every other Sunday. His feature, Life As We Know It, can be heard every Monday at 5:44 p.m. during All Things Considered on WGTE-FM 91.Contact him at:walton@theblade.com.

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Greatness and sliced bread: a match gone stale - Toledo Blade

The deck of USS Hornet (CV 8), code named "Shangri-la," pitched and rolled in the swells of the Western Pacific Ocean. Sixteen B-25B Mitchell medium bombers were preparing for a historic takeoff 467 feet and no room for error.

The morning of April 18, 1942, Army Air Corps Lt. Col. James "Jimmy" Doolittle and his 80 "Raiders" were already wide awake. They had trained for this day for months: It was time to bring the battle to the Rising Sun's doorstep.

The planning for the raid was the fruition of a Dec. 21, 1941 meeting, just two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, between then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"The Japanese people had been told they were invulnerable." wrote Doolittle in his autobiography "I Could Never Be So Lucky Again." "An attack on the Japanese homeland would cause confusion in the minds of the Japanese people and sow doubt about the reliability of their leaders."

Military strategists gathered intel and calculated aircraft fuel consumption how could their warplanes make the flight to the Japanese homeland? Carriers could only get so close without being spotted and taking off from Japanese controlled Korea was out of the question. It seemed like impossibility.

In January 1942 while in Norfolk, Virginia, Navy Captain Francis Low looked at the painted outline of the deck of an aircraft carrier used for training pilots to make the 300-foot takeoff and landing and was struck with a brilliant, yet crazy idea. A medium bomber (named for size of bombloads it carried and distance) could make that!

Low was the assistant chief of staff for anti-submarine warfare Adm. Ernest King, and proposed his idea.

The aircraft would need to have a range of 2,400 nautical miles (more than 2,700 miles) and be capable of carrying a 2,000-pound bomb load.

Armed with a list of possible aircraft, bomber after bomber was tested and retested again and again. The B-26 Marauder's wingspan was too long and would have collided with the carrier's super structure and the wingspan of the B-23 Dragon was 50% greater than that of the B-25. It came down to two aircraft, the B-25B Mitchell and the B-18 Bolo for Doolittle to choose from. Due to B-18 longer wingspan, the B-25B was chosen to carry out the raid.

Two B-25s were loaded onto USS Hornet in Norfolk and on February 3, 1942 they successfully took off from the flight deck without difficulty. Next Doolittle needed the most experienced men, pilots and enlisted alike. He scoured the medium Bomb Groups (BG) for men fitting this description. The 17th Bomb Group was stationed in Pendleton, Oregon and had already been on submarine patrols along the coast. The 17th had four active squadrons before 1942, and commanders hand-picked 20 five-man crews from a group of volunteers.

The plan was coming together; however, the B-25 was initially only capable of traveling a maximum of 1,350 nautical miles, it needed to go nearly twice the distance. Engineers, mechanics and pilots worked together and heavily modified 24 aircraft for the flight.

From Modification to Departure

The removal of the lower gun turret as well as the heavy liaison radio set helped lighten the aircraft. Mechanics installed de-icers and anti-icers to combat the cold at high altitude, a 160-gallon collapsible neoprene auxiliary fuel tank in the bomb bay and additional fuel cells in crawlways and the lower gun turret. This increased the planes' fuel capacity from 646 to 1,141 gallons. Mock gun barrels were installed in the tail cone to make the B-25 appear more intimidating and deadly as they made their bomb runs.

Another modification was a new bomb sight. These bombers would be dropping their payloads at a much lower altitude than was normal. The more expensive and precise Norden bomb sight, used for higher altitude bombing runs, would be replaced with what the press would later call "the 20-cent bombsight." Developed by pilot Capt. Charles Ross Greening specifically for the raid, the bombsight was proven more accurate at low altitude than the Norden. Two bombers would also be outfitted with motion cameras to record the bombing.

On March 1, 1942, crews picked up the 24 modified bombers in Minneapolis and from there flew them to Eglin Field, Florida. The crews trained in simulated carrier flight deck takeoffs, both low-level and night flying, low-altitude bombing and navigating over water for three weeks.

A Navy flight instructor from Naval Air Station Pensacola, Lt. Henry Miller, supervised their takeoff training and accompanied the crews on the Hornet for the launch. For his instruction and efforts in the raid, Miller is considered an honorary member of the Raiders.

No men were lost during training but some aircraft had been damaged.

Twenty-two were flown to NAS Alameda, California outside of San Francisco. A total of 16 planes made up the mission. April 1 arrived and 71 officers and 130 enlisted men boarded Hornet with their 16 bombers and embarked on a mission that would forever change military aviation. The following morning at 8:48, Hornet departed San Francisco Bay and steamed a path through the Pacific to the Empire of Japan.

There was another hitch in this plan. This would be a one-way trip.

The plan was to make it to China before the fuel tanks ran dry.

SS Hornet (CV 8) steamed out of San Francisco Bay, April 2, 1942, with 16 modified B-25 Mitchell bombers and about 200 men led by Lt. Col. James "Jimmy" Doolittle.

Best known as the "Raiders," their mission was so secret that neither the Hornet nor the base (Alameda Naval Station) was ever mentioned until years later. President Franklin D. Roosevelt only referred to it as "Shangri-la."

Planning the raid had taken months: Finding the right aircraft and the bravest and most skilled pilots and crews had been challenging. Commanders had handpicked 16 five-man crews from a pool of volunteers. Each man knew this was a one-way trip. The danger that they might not come home was very real.

"It was hoped that the damage done would be both material and psychological," Doolittle said in a July 9, 1942 interview. "Material damage was to be the destruction of specific targets with ensuing confusion and retardation of production."

Strength in Numbers

As the Hornet made her way through the Pacific north of Hawaii, she rendezvoused with Task Force 16, commanded by Vice Adm. William "Bull" Halsey Jr. The task force included the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and her escort of cruisers and destroyers.

The ships steamed toward the Japanese homeland in radio silence. As the sun reached its zenith, April 17, the slower oilers refueled the fleet, then withdrew along with the destroyers while the carriers and cruisers dashed west at 20 knots toward the enemy-controlled waters east of Japan.

At 7:38 a.m., April 18, the Japanese patrol craft Nitt Maru spotted the remaining ships. It radioed the attack warning before being sunk by USS Nashville. The Hornet was still about 650 nautical miles away from Japan.

Doolittle and the Hornet's commanding officer, Capt. Marc Mitscher, decided to launch immediately 10 hours early and nearly 170 nautical miles from their intended launch point.

Doolittle would launch first and lead the attack run; his bombs would be markers for the rest of the crews to follow.

At 8:20 a.m., Doolittle, his copilot Lt. Richard Cole, navigator Lt. Henry Potter, bombardier Staff Sgt. Fred Braemer and engineer gunner Staff Sgt. Paul Leonard taxied into position as the flight deck of the Hornet pitched and rolled in the Pacific swells.

The twin cyclone engines powered up and tail rudders and flaps moved through their pre-flight checks. There would be no looking back, no second chances: It was now or never. Doolittle revved the engines and began his take off down the flight deck: He had just 467 feet to get the bird airborne. On a hope and a prayer, he pulled the yoke back, edging the nose of his B-25 up and into the blue skies above.

Although none of the pilots, including Doolittle, had launched from a carrier before that morning, all 16 planes were safely airborne by 9:20 a.m. their noses pointed toward the Rising Sun of the Japanese Empire.

From America with Love

The crews had 10 military and industrial targets in Tokyo, two in Yokohama and one each in Yokosuka, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka. Each aircraft was loaded with four specially constructed 500-pound bombs. Three were high-explosive munitions and one was a bundle of incendiaries. The incendiaries were wrapped together so they could be carried in the bomb bay, but when released, they would separate and scatter over a wider area.

Prior to the war, the Empire of Japan had awarded US service members with "friendship" medals. Five of these were wired to bombs for return to Japan.

The aircraft began arriving over Japan about noon Tokyo time, six hours after launching from the Hornet. They climbed to 1,500 feet and began their bomb runs. Some of the planes encountered light antiaircraft fire and a few enemy fighters. Raiders only had two .50-caliber machine guns in an upper turret and a .30-caliber machine gun in the nose for defense and were able to shoot down three Japanese planes.

When the weapons in the upper turret of one B-25 malfunctioned, the crew dropped their payload early as they came under attack. As the bombers finished their runs, all 16 aircraft were still airborne.

Not All is Lost

After the early launch and longer flight, the planes were running low on fuel. The pilots realized that making it to China might not be possible.

Upon departing Japanese air space, 15 aircraft turned southwest and made their way across the South China Sea. The 16th, piloted by Capt. Edward York, was extremely low on fuel. He did not want to risk his crew by force ditching into the South China Sea. Instead, he made the risky decision to head for the Soviet Union which at the time had a neutrality pact with Japan.

As Doolittle and 14 other bomber crews made their way to China, they ran in many challenges: Not only were they running low on fuel, the weather was taking a turn for the worse and night was fast approaching. If it hadn't been for a strong tail wind increasing their ground speed an extra 25 knots, none of them would have reached the China coastline. As it was, none would reach the intended bases in China, leaving them two options: Either crash land in China or bail out over open water.

Doolittle and his crew parachuted into China, Doolittle landing in a dung heap, which probably saved him from breaking an already injured ankle. Doolittle's crew received assistance from Chinese soldiers and civilians as well as John Birch, an American missionary in China. Other crews received similar assistance at great cost to the local Chinese villagers. During Japanese searches for Doolittle's men, some 10,000 Chinese civilians were murdered for helping the Americans escape.

As Doolittle sat on what was left of his B-25, he felt the raid had been a complete failure: All the aircraft were lost, some of his men were unaccounted for and he expected to be court-martialed when he returned home.

"I was very depressed," Doolittle recalled in a later interview. "Paul Leonard took my picture. He tried to cheer me up. He said, 'What do you think will happen when you go home, Colonel?'

"'Well, I guess they'll send me to Leavenworth,'" Doolittle replied.

Fate of the Missing Raiders

Captain Edward York, who had flown to the Soviet Union, landed at Vozdvizhenka Air Base near the western coast. His plane was confiscated, York and his crew interned as per the neutrality pact with Japan. York and his crew were well-treated, but diplomatic attempts to return them to the United States fell through as the Soviet Union did not want war with Japan. When the Americans were relocated to Ashgabat, near the Iranian border, York managed to bribe a smuggler, who helped them cross the border and reach a nearby British consulate, May 11, 1943.

The smuggling of York and his crew had actually been staged by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs the predecessor of the KGB according to declassified Soviet archives. Unable to repatriate them legally, helping the Americans escape by smuggler was the only option for the Soviets.

With York and his men held in a Soviet prison and men from the 13 crews that had crash-landed in China accounted for, two crews had bailed out over the South China Sea and were missing. (Corporal Lelan Faktor, assigned to Lt. Robert Gray's crew, was killed during bailout over China.)

The truth of what had happened to the missing Raiders would not be fully known for years.

Bombardier Staff Sgt. William Dieter and flight engineer Sgt. Donald Fitzmaurice, both from Lt. Dean Hallmark's crew, had drowned when their B-25 crashed into the sea.

The Imperial Japanese police captured Hallmark, 1st Lt. Robert Meder, Lt. Chase Nielsen, 1st Lt. William Farrow, Lt. Robert Hite, Lt. George Barr, Cpl. Jacob DeShazer and Sgt. Harold Spatz after they bailed out over the South China Sea.

The United States didn't learn their fate until August 15, 1942, when the Swiss Consulate General in Shanghai sent message that eight crew members were prisoners of the Japanese at the city's police headquarters.

On August 28, 1942, Hallmark, Farrow and Spatz faced a war crimes trial in a Japanese court, alleging they strafed and murdered Japanese civilians. At 4:30 p.m., October 15, 1942, they were taken by truck to Public Cemetery Number 1 and executed by firing squad. The Japanese announced the sentencing four days later. The surviving crewmembers would serve life sentences.

Meder, Nielsen, Hite, Barr and DeShazer were kept in military confinement and put on a starvation diet. Their health deteriorated rapidly. Meder died in Nanking, China, Dec. 1, 1943.

In August 1945, just days after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American troops arrived at the prison camp and freed the men. By the time they were liberated, Barr was near death and remained in China to recuperate until October. He transferred to Letterman General Hospital, a military hospital in Clinton, Iowa. Barr began to experience severe emotional problems, most likely PTSD. Without proper treatment, he became suicidal and was committed. After Doolittle personally intervened in November, convincing doctors to change Barr's treatment, he eventually recovered.

The true fate of the POWs was revealed in a February 1946 war crimes trial in Shanghai. Four Japanese officers were found guilty of mistreating the eight captured Raiders and sentenced to hard labor. Three served five years and one nine years.

One of those POWs would return to Japan years later.

DeShazer graduated from Seattle Pacific University in 1948 and served as a missionary in Japan for more than 30 years.

Aftermath

When Doolittle returned to the States, he was still under the assumption he would face disciplinary action. But the raid was considered a success, for it had provided a much-needed morale boost.

Doolittle received the Medal of Honor from President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House, May 19, 1942, "For conspicuous leadership above and beyond the call of duty, involving personal valor and intrepidity at an extreme hazard to life," his citation read. "With the apparent certainty of being forced to land in enemy territory or to perish at sea, Lt. Col. Doolittle personally led a squadron of Army bombers, manned by volunteer crews, in a highly destructive raid on the Japanese mainland."

Doolittle was also promoted two pay grades to brigadier general.

Sevent-two years after Doolittle received the Medal of Honor, his Raiders were recognized, May 19, 2014, when the United States House of Representatives voted to pass H.R. 1209. The bill would award the Congressional Gold Medal to the Doolittle Raiders for "outstanding heroism, valor, skill, and service to the United States in conducting the bombings of Tokyo."

The award ceremony took place at the Capitol Building, April 15, 2015, with retired Air Force Lt. Gen. John Hudson, the director of the National Museum of the Air Force, accepting the award on behalf of the Doolittle Raiders.

The mission was the first against the Japanese homeland and the longest ever flown in combat by the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, averaging approximately 2,250 nautical miles. And like the B-25s they once flew, these 80 brave men flew onto the pages of history.

After the raid, the Japanese Imperial Army began the Operation Sei-go. Its goal was purely aimed at preventing the eastern coastal provinces of China from being used again for an attack on Japan. Airfields within an area of 20,000 square miles where the Raiders had landed were rendered unusable. Japanese occupiers used germ warfare and committed other atrocities, and anyone found with American items was shot on sight. About 250,000 Chinese were killed during the Sei-go campaign.

From the late 1940s until 2013, the Doolittle Raiders held an annual reunion almost every year. In a private ceremony during each reunion, the surviving Raiders would perform a roll call and toast their fellow Raiders who had died during the previous year.

Each Raider had a special silver goblet, engraved with his name right side up and upside down. The goblets of those who died were inverted.

In 2013, the last public Doolittle Raiders reunion was held at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, not far from where the crews had trained at Eglin Air Force Base. The goblets are maintained at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

Of the 80 Raiders, only Col. Richard Cole remains at 101 years young.

"I was scared," recalled Cole in a 2015 "All Hands" interview. "But I decided there's no sense in trying to second guess and worry about what's going to happen, because it's going to happen anyway.

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Doolittle raid gave America a boost - Nevada Appeal

built upon the idea of brainwashed GIs in Korea.

Journalist Edward Hunter was the first to sound the alarm. Brain-washing Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party, blared his headline in the Miami Daily News in September 1950. In the article, and later in a book, Hunter described how Mao Zedongs Red Army used terrifying ancient techniques to turn the Chinese people into mindless, Communist automatons. He called this hypnotic process brainwashing, a word-for-word translation from xi-nao, the Mandarin words for wash (xi) and brain (nao), and warned about the dangerous applications it could have. The process was meant to change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppeta human robotwithout the atrocity being visible from the outside.

It wasnt the first time fears of Communism and mind control had seeped into the American public. In 1946 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was so worried about the spread of Communism that it proposed removing liberals, socialists and communists from places like schools, libraries, newspapers and entertainment. Hunters inflammatory rhetoric didnt immediately have a huge impactuntil three years into the Korean War, when American prisoners of war began confessing to outlandish crimes.

When he was shot down over Korea and captured in 1952, Colonel Frank Schwable was the highest ranking military officer to meet that fate, and by February 1953, he and other prisoners of war had falsely confessed to using germ warfare against the Koreans, dropping everything from anthrax to the plague on unsuspecting civilians. The American public was shocked, and grew even more so when 5,000 of the 7,200 POWs either petitioned the U.S. government to end the war, or signed confessions of their alleged crimes. The final blow came when 21 American soldiers refused repatriation.

Suddenly the threat of brainwashing was very real, and it was everywhere. The U.S. military denied the charges made in the soldiers confessions, but couldnt explain how theyd been coerced to make them. What could explain the behavior of the soldiers besides brainwashing? The idea of mind control flourished in pop culture, with movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Manchurian Candidate showing people whose minds were wiped and controlled by outside forces. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover referred to thought-control repeatedly in his book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. By 1980 even the American Psychiatric Association had given it credence, including brainwashing under dissociative disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III. Had Chinese and Soviet Communists really uncovered a machine or method to rewrite mens minds and supplant their free will?

The short answer is nobut that didnt stop the U.S. from pouring resources into combatting it.

The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question why would anybody become a Communist? says Timothy Melley, professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. [Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we cant otherwise explain.

The term had multiple definitions that changed depending on who used it. For Hunterwho turned out to be an agent in the CIAs propaganda wingit was a mystical, Oriental practice that couldnt be understood or anticipated by the West, Melley says. But for scientists who actually studied the American POWs once they returned from Korea, brainwashing was altogether less mysterious than the readily apparent outcome: The men had been tortured.

Robert Jay Lifton, one of the psychiatrists who worked with the veterans and had previously studied doctors who aided Nazi war crimes, listed eight criteria for thought reform (his more measured term for brainwashing). They included things like milieu control (having absolute power over the individuals surroundings) and confession (in which individuals are forced to confess to crimes repeatedly, even if they arent true). For the American soldiers trapped in the Korean prison camps, brainwashing meant forced standing, deprivation of food and sleep, solitary confinement, and repeated exposure to Communist propaganda.

There was concern on the part of [the American military] about what had actually happened to [the POWs] and whether they had been manipulated to be [what would later be known as] a Manchurian candidate, says Marcia Holmes, a science historian at the University of Londons Hidden Persuaders project. Theyre not sleeper agents, theyre just extremely traumatized.

The early 1950s marked the debut of the militarys studies into psychological torture, and instead of concluding the American soldiers needed rehabilitation, military directors came to a more ominous conclusion: that the men were simply weak. They became less interested in the fantasy of brainwashing and became worried our men couldnt stand up to torture, Holmes says. This resulted in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program (SERE), meant to inoculate men against future attempts at psychological torture by using those same torture techniques in their training.

Meanwhile, the American public was still wrapped up in fantasies of hypnotic brainwashing, in part due to the research of pop psychologists like Joost Meerloo and William Sargant. Unlike Lifton and the other researchers hired by the military, these two men portrayed themselves as public intellectuals and drew parallels between brainwashing and tactics used by both American marketers and Communist propagandists. Meerloo believes that totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or Communist China were in the past, and continue to be, quite successful in their thought-control programs [and] the more recently available techniques of influence and thought control are more securely based on scientific fact, more potent and more subtle, writes psychoanalyst Edgar Schein in a 1959 review of Meerloos book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought ControlMenticide and Brainwashing.

Psychiatrists, as well as writers like Aldous Huxley, were aided by the dominant theory of the human mind at the time, known as behaviorism. Think of Ivan Pavlovs slobbering dogs, trained to salivate upon hearing a bell, even if they werent tempted with food. The basic assumption of behaviorism was that the human mind is a blank slate at birth, and is shaped through social conditioning throughout life. Where Russia had Pavlov, the U.S. had B.F. Skinner, who suggested psychology could help predict and control behavior. Little wonder, then, that the public and the military alike couldnt let go of brainwashing as a concept for social control.

With this fear of a mind-control weapon still haunting the American psyche, CIA director Allen Dulles authorized a series of psychological experiments using hallucinogens (like LSD) and biological manipulation (like sleep deprivation) to see if brainwashing were possible. The research could then, theoretically, be used in both defensive and offensive programs against the Soviet Union. Project MK-ULTRA began in 1953 and continued in various forms for more than 10 years. When the Watergate scandal broke, fear of discovery led the CIA to destroy most of the evidence of the program. But 20,000 documents were recovered through a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977, filed during a Senate investigation into Project MK-ULTRA. The files revealed the experiments tested drugs (like LSD), sensory deprivation, hypnotism and electroshock on everyone from agency operatives to prostitutes, recovering drug addicts and prisonersoften without their consent.

Despite MK-ULTRA violating ethical norms for human experiments, the legacy of brainwashing experiments continued to live on in U.S. policy. The same methods that had once been used to train American soldiers ended up being used to extract information from terrorists in Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

Here, then, is the brief history of brainwashing, Melley writes in a 2011 paper for Grey Room. The concept began as an [O]rientalist propaganda fiction created by the CIA to mobilize domestic support for a massive military build-up. This fiction proved so effective that the CIAs operations directorate believed it and began a furious search for a real mind control weapon. The search resulted not in a miraculous new weapon but a program of simulated brainwashing designed as a prophylactic against enemy mistreatment. This simulation in turn became the real basis for interrogating detainees in the war on terror.

While few people take seriously the notion of hypnosis-like brainwashing (outside Hollywood films like Zoolander), there are still plenty who see danger in certain kinds of control. Consider the conversations about ISIS and radicalization, in which young people are essentially portrayed as being brainwashed. Can You Turn a Terrorist Back Into a Citizen? A controversial new program aims to reform homegrown ISIS recruits back into normal young Americans, proclaims one article in Wired. Or theres the more provocative headline from Vice: Inside the Mind-Control Methods the Islamic State Uses to Recruit Teenagers.

I think a program of isolation and rigorous conversion still does have a life in our concept of radicalization, Melley says. But outside those cases related to terrorism its mostly used facetiously, he adds.

The notion of brainwashing, no less than radicalization, often obscure[s] far more than it reveal[s], write Sarah Marks and Daniel Pick of the Hidden Persuaders project. Both terms could be a lazy way of refusing to inquire further into individual histories, inviting the assumption that the way people act can be known in advance.

For now, the only examples of perfect brainwashing remain in science-fiction rather than fact. At least until researchers find a way to hack into the network of synapses that comprise the brain.

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The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America - Smithsonian

New York Times

When Posters Were the Samizdat of the Lower East Side New York Times One of the most prolific, responsible for jumbo-size posters with tiny print assailing imperialism and racism and spray-painted messages saying AIDS is Germ Warfare by U.S. Government, was arrested in 1986 by undercover officers after a monthlong ...

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When Posters Were the Samizdat of the Lower East Side - New York Times