Conspiracy theorists are often criticized for being a bit too far “out there” in the claims that they make on the United States government. After all, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the attacks of September 11, 2001, were most certainly not an inside job. Right? Maybe, maybe not. But there is a vast collection of cruel and inhumane experiments that have been documented and, in some cases, declassified by the CIA, which make some Hollywood enactments of government conspiracies look like child’s play.
Amelia Phillips Hale for NPR
1. Mustard Gas Tests on African-American Soldiers
Before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, there was World War II. And World War II meant the rise of chemical weapons. To understand how the threats of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan might affect soldiers, the United States military came up with a brilliant plan: expose soldiers unwittingly to mustard gas to see how what it does. But seeing as this was the age of eugenics and race theory, it wasn’t enough to test mustard gas. The military had to prove how mustard gas affected people of different races.
African-American soldiers, who knew better than to turn down an assignment, would be hoarded unknowingly into closed rooms that were then filled with mustard gas, turning the rooms into veritable gas chambers. The soldiers were sworn to secrecy, so even after the war, they were unable to tell doctors what they had been exposed to and were therefore unable to obtain medical treatment. Many of these human test subjects went their entire lives without receiving any compensation or medicine for their injuries.
In the 1990s, the government acknowledged that it had performed tests on soldiers who did not know what they were being exposed to mustard gas. Only later, in congressional hearings, did it come to light that the subjects in many of these experiments were grouped by race.