Saturday, June 27, 2015

Tru'merica: Gassing Your Own

This rare military film shows the testing of the chemical weapon known as CS on military personnel. Testing did not stop at volunteer soldiers. The Pentagon has admitted that it tested mustard gas and other chemicals on 60,000 African Americans during WWII. Other 'lesser humans' including Japanese-Americans and Puerto-Ricans were used as test subjects. In one testing situation, subject were locked inside a gas chamber and mustard gas pumped in to see the effects. Apparently the use of distinct racial types was to determine if the non-white subjects had a distinct reaction to the chemical agents A Canadian researcher was the first to expose the program details in 2008. Since then program records have been declassified.  Some participants still suffer physical effects from their chemical exposure seventy years later.