Educating Media

I've decided that I need a continuing set of articles on educating the media on CBRN defense issues. It's bad enough when the military disregards the need for CBRN defense equipment, but what's really killing us is the damned journalists who insist on sensationalizing any news on this topic. I am so tired of hearing about "deadly nerve agents" and "bioterror germs." But then there's always a journalist who really has to go over the top.

Let me introduce you to my newest member of the Asshat Club: Bloomberg reporter and National Review Online contributer Dave Shiflett, author of "Bio Weapons Spurned by Hitler Were Tested on Adventists." Now this title sounds like an article that ought to be in a rag like the National Inquirer. No, this is a Bloomberg wire release. Why is this coming out now? PBS is releasing a television special on Monday called "The Living Weapon," which is supposed to address the U.S. biological warfare program. Fair enough, and the website even has a very nice Q&A section with two BW experts (Raymond Zilinskas and Martin Furmanski). But somehow, Shiflet decides to equate the testing of non-lethal BW agents on U.S. volunteers as something that even Adolf Hitler, with his record of killing millions of concentration camp inmates with Zyklon B, wouldn't do. Motherless asshat.

But no, it gets worse. I almost want to go paragraph by paragraph to point out the graphic errors of this so-called "journalist." What the hell, why not.

• "While FDR found the weapons 'inhumane,' he went along with their development, the show says. He was certainly right about the nature of the weapon. As the show explains, `a biological weapon is alive. What it wants to do is reproduce itself inside a human body.' "[FDR recognized that he needed a strategic deterrent against what the military feared both Japan and Germany were developing - CB weapons. As for what a biological weapon 'wants to do,' is the show suggesting that the BW agent is sentient? Is it somehow doing something that every other biological organism doesn't do?]
• "Eventually, the guest kills the host, who suffers hideously. Another victim is science itself, which has been used 'not strictly for the benefits it can bring' but for purely destructive purposes, according to Jeanne Guillemin, senior adviser to MIT's Security Studies Program." [This is too easy. Suffers hideously? Some of them work quite quickly, others you can recover from. And as for science being a "victim" because it's not being used for beneficial purposes - oh good God. Tell me ONE WEAPON SYSTEM in use today that was not created and tested using science and engineering. I am so GADDAMN sick of people pointing to CB warfare and saying "oh, the humanity, oh how science has been perverted."] 
• "The U.S. program, headquartered at Fort Detrick, Maryland, also used human subjects [just like the Japanese in China discussed right before this line], though many were volunteers." [Yep, we were as bad as the Japanese in World War II. Except for the part where the human subjects in China died, and all the U.S. volunteers lived on with full, normal lives. ASS.]
• "The end to the U.S. development program may have been partly the result of a 1969 Utah incident in which an 'errant cloud'' of nerve gas was held responsible for killing some 6,000 sheep." [This is the most often-used myth on CB warfare. The U.S. government never admitted to "killing some 6,000 sheep" because they didn't do it. About 4500 sheep got sick eating what was probably an illegal pesticide; the Army was testing chemical weapons 30 miles away behind a mountain; and when the ranchers found out that the government was going to pay them for the loss of their uninsured sheep herds, they pulled out rifles and killed the sick sheep (and many exposed, but not sick, sheep).]
• "Unfortunately, as historian Brian Balmer concludes, the U.S. research "bequeathed on the world this knowledge and we now have to control it and contain it and make sure biological weapons are never used.'' "[Yep, he's right. It's all the fault of the U.S. military that the world is inflicted with the knowledge that some biological organisms can be weaponized to kill lots of people at once. Except for the Japanese in the 1930s, the British in the 1940s, the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the rest of the Warsaw Pact in the 1960s, China in the 1970s, and the Middle East countries in the 1980s. Other than that, yep, all our fault.] 

Dave Shiflett is a member of the White House Writers Group, which specializes in high-stakes communication. "No one can match our experience in shaping corporate strategies and crafting complex messages so that they are readily understood and accepted by the public." Yeah, right. What an asshat.

UPDATE: At the risk of extending a long post, I just want to mention that the 1968 DPG sheep incident had absolutely no relationship to Nixon's decision to unilaterally stop the U.S. offensive BW program, other than perhaps to speed up Congress's approval of said effort. One can reference the National Security Archives to read the documents where the NSC developed decision papers on this topic. Nixon canceled the program with cold, unemotional rationale - his "experts" told him that biological weapons were unnecessary and inefficient, and it made the liberals in Congress look bad if they were to oppose his arms control efforts.

Comments

[J. Clark]

Fantastic insight. Thanks for writing this.

[Manacuda]

I worked at Fort Detrick in 1997. I am looking for a ghost writer and agent to help me finish my book. You would not belive the things I saw, and had done to me. Hint chiped