CERDIFIED - Lisa Martino-Taylor, a sociologist and researcher, is finally making her research public, detailing the Army’s ultra-secret military experiments carried out on the unsuspecting citizens of St. Louis and other cities. Her life’s work began by requesting hundreds of documents under the Freedom of Information Act. It focused on military-sponsored tests conducted during the 1950s and 60s.
Her doctoral thesis, "Behind the Fog of the Cold War — Military tests on vulnerable populations without consent in St. Louis" details how the US Army sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide powder mixed with fluorescent particles on "a densely populated slum district." The fluorescent particles helped trace the dispersal patterns and the aerosol particles were milled for easy absorption into lungs.
Martino-Taylor sets the stage in her thesis, "Under the sparkling stars and clear bright moon, as children, their parents, and grandparents, slept on their porches or beneath an open window to escape the blazing heat of a St. Louis summer, toxins drifted silently inside through open windows and settled into their lungs. The particulates were designed to be optimal size for deep inhalation by the sleeping, unsuspecting victims. It was the Cold War, and this was America."
As a sociology professor at St. Louis Community College, Lisa Martino-Taylor delves right into the subject matter, astonished at the “Violation of medical ethics and international codes and the militaries own policy at that time.”
In, 1994, Rep. Richard Gephard asked the Army to open their classified records in order to clarify the nature of their experiments. By 1997, the National Research Council, had minimized the health impacts of the 35 separate releases of zinc cadmium sulfide in St. Louis.
Government officials had been duped by the Army. They were told that the Army was testing a 'smoke screen" that may be beneficial if they were under aerial attack. These military sponsored tests had remained secret for decades. The Army had confirmed later that the tests were part of a biological weapons program.
Martino-Taylor identifies participants in the St. Louis testing and connects them to atomic bomb scientists. She suggests that the connection raises suspicions as to whether the dispersants contained radioactive isotopes. Martino-Taylor noted, "There's an awful lot of evidence that there were radiological components to the study." However she does not have absolute proof.
“The study was secretive for reason. They didn’t have volunteers stepping up and saying yeah, I’ll breathe zinc cadmium sulfide with radioactive particles,” Lisa Martino-Taylor suggested in a television interview. So they sprayed 10,000 low income people in the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, just northwest of downtown St. Louis, of which 70 percent were estimated to be children under the age of 12.
According to Army archive pictures, tests were done by plane in Corpus Christi, Texas in the 1960s. In St. Louis, the Army sprayed chemicals from building tops and even station wagons. “It was pretty shocking. The level of duplicity and secrecy. Clearly they went to great lengths to deceive people,” she said.
Martino-Taylor concludes that, "Even if there are laws in place which appear to protect people, without transparency, governments may be able to violate rights without their victims even knowing it. This case is an example of that."
But there are other cases as well. According to GlobalSecurity.org, “A series of field tests took place under the auspices of the Biological Laboratories from 1943 to the mid-1960s:”
● In one such test, travelers at Washington National Airport were subjected to a harmless bacterium. Traps were placed throughout the facility to capture the bacterium as it flowed in the air. Laboratory personnel, dressed as travelers carrying brief cases, walked the corridors and without detection sprayed the bacterium into the atmosphere.
● In the New York Subway, a light bulb filled with the same harmless bacterium was dropped on the tracks. The organism spread throughout the system within 20 minutes. Traps and monitoring devices showed the amount of organism-if it were one of the predictable, dangerous organisms, could have killed thousands of persons. No one was injured or became ill as a result of the test.
● In San Francisco, a US Navy ship, equipped with spray devices operated by Fort Detrick personnel, sprayed serratia marcescens, a non-pathogenic microorganism that is easily detected, while the ship plied the San Francisco Bay. It spread more than 30 miles to monitoring stations.
● A jet aircraft equipped with spray devices, flew a course near Victoria, Texas, and the harmless particles were monitored in the Florida Keys.
"There has to be a sense of betrayal here, of people being deceived and targeted by their own government," Martino-Taylor said.
For the last decade the global community has become accustomed to the white billowy dispersants streaking across our skies. Conspiracy theories abound about these chem.-trails, but none seems too far-fetched when one considers how poorly our governments collaborate for the collective good.
Case in point, Fukishima. Certainly if ever a joint government intervention should occur, it would be handling this global nuclear impact. But alas, Japan has been left to resolve the issue and has been unable to since March 11, 2011 when the tsunami and earthquake hit.
Global governments measured radiation levels and asked their citizenry to vacate Japan, they create Ad Hoc Committees to ponder future solutions, but for the most part Japan has handled the level 7 nuclear disaster by corporate leaders not world leaders. (International Nuclear Event Scale)
Keeping local governments in the dark for over a decade as to the true nature of the dispersants, and the reasoning behind them, is par for the government course. But I, for one, can not trust a government who fails to address a nuclear disaster while at the same time is spraying our citizens with chem.-trails.
I would have believed that our country was a far gentler beast in the 1950’s when they experimented on St. Louis slums, than today when corporate malfeasance matches government malfeasance.
I am grateful though, for the Lisa Martino-Taylor’s of the world, who continue to pull back the curtains on the great and powerful Oz, and expose the truth for what it is.
(Lisa Cerda is a contributor to CityWatch, a community activist, Chair of Tarzana Residents Against Poorly Planned Development, and former Tarzana Neighborhood Council board member.) –cw
CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 82
Pub: Oct 12, 2012