Frank Olson, The Original Faller From A Great Height

Anyone wondering if Timothy Hampton or David Kelly were murdered, and it seems very likely that Dr Hampton was, should consider the case of Colonel Frank Olson, who very probably was murdered, although that only became known following a second post-mortem more than twenty years after his death.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Frank Olson, many of them, to Medawar's knowledge, wrong to a greater or lesser extent. So here goes with what Medawar believes to be the true story, as briefly as possible.

Frank Olson was a US Army researcher, whose main career goal was to improve the protection of American soldiers against unconventional weapons on the battlefield. Anyone who has studied the history of unconventional warfare, including chemical and biological warfare, knows that it is military suicide to deploy, let alone use, unconventional weapons unless you first have some form of defence against them for your own soldiers. Failing to do this, with poison gas, was one of the mechanisms by which Imperial Germany helped defeat itself during the First World War, and it's also how the US Army Chemical Corps came dangerously close to inflicting similar disaster on American soldiers and particularly the US Marine Corps, in the same conflict. (The Americans were hastily loaned effective British and French gas masks until the Chemical Corps caught up with reality and started to produce adequate protective gear and training as well as huge amounts of offensive gas munitions.)

Imperial Germany, after lobbying at the highest levels by the Nobel Laureate Fritz Harbur, was the first to use poison gas in the First World War. British troops somehow held on, had improvised protection within about a day, and then later counter-attacked with hastily-produced gas weapons of their own, against which German troops still had no effective protection of any kind. Because the British devised a more effective method of delivering poison gas accurately onto enemy positions, Germany always suffered more than it gained from gas warfare, throughout the war. Some historians describe Hitler's reluctance to use the "vastly superior" nerve poisons available to Nazi Germany in the second world war as "irrational" but Medawar sees it more as a case of a madman having a very lucid moment, based on his own nightmare experiences.

Olson, therefore, for the most grounded, objective and rational of reasons, believed that there was no military advantage in novel means of warfare unless you possessed the means to stop the enemy using them to greater effect than your own side could. He was also active as a researcher during the early cold war period, when the US Army Chemical Corps set about repeating its mistakes of the first world war, on a scale terrifying not just because of the physical dangers of vast poison gas stockpiles, far outstripping progress in protective equipment, but also in the huge sums of taxpayer's money being wasted in the process. Atomic bombs, each costing about what it took to build, man and deploy a single B-29 bomber, seemed cost-effective compared to achieving the same results through carpet-bombing with a thousand or so bombers at a time, many of which might be lost to enemy defences or pure accident in crowded skies. What the chemical corps was doing in the late forties and early fifties, looked cost-effective only when compared to Caligula's palace construction programme.

Against this background, Frank Olson was seconded to work on project "MK Naomi" a sort of sister project to (but quite not the same thing as) the CIA's "MK Ultra". MK Naomi was intended to produce drugs and psychoactive chemical weapons, for battlefield use and for interrogation of enemy spies who might have time-sensitive information of the highest importance. Those at the top of both projects followed Chemical Corps tradition and massively oversold their projects to the newly-built Pentagon and to the White House. Almost from the outset, there was an unbridgeable gulf between what they were capable of achieving and what those voting the funds had been led to expect, and those funds were, by the standards of the day, very substantial. (The Truman and Eisenhower Administrations desperately hoped that throwing money at miracle weapons would save them from having to do a proper job of post-war re-armament with up-to-date tanks and jet fighters. A small legion of charlatans, including several German scientists who'd successfully conned the Third Reich into giving them carte-blanche and millions of Marks, promptly set up shop. American Intelligence Officers were baffled as to why their British counterparts had been so slow and unwilling to snap up all the hundreds of ex-Nazi scientists that were on the market in 1945-47, but there was a reason. The sole genuinely-competent aerodynamicist amongst them suddenly found himself working for Handley Page, the rest were mostly passed over in favour of home-grown British and Commonwealth talent.)

Once at MK Naomi, Olson quickly found that he was in a scientific bunko booth and that most of the work being done was either scientifically impossible, being falsely presented as successful when this was far from clear, or was a personal hobby-horse of one senior "scientist" (most of them were actually psychiatrists and not rigorously scientific at all) and thus perhaps of interest, but not at all obviously of military value. Olson could see enough unmet need for better chemical and biological warfare protection for American soldiers, to greatly resent the diversion of money and effort away from that need. He was not a subversive or a troublemaker, nor a faint-hearted pinko: he was a patriot who wanted the US Army and Marines to be properly, preferably superbly, equipped for the perils of modern warfare.

It has been stated that Olson was working with Porton Down to test psychoactive weapons. This is a serious misrepresentation:

He was ordered to work with some UK experimental psychiatrists, from the University of Sussex, not Porton Down, who had already been refused a licence by the Medical Research Council (in 1947) to experiment on mentally-ill patients with such mind-altering drugs as LSD. The independent experts (then at University College, London) who evaluated the toxicity of LSD in a report for the MRC, which led to the licence being emphatically refused, had worked at Porton during the war and subsequently returned there. They had, in fact, also recommended to the Home Secretary that possession and manufacture of LSD should be banned before anyone popularised its recreational use! They described it as a toxin rather than a drug.

The University of Sussex Psychiatrists got wind of MK Ultra and MK Naomi and realized, like all the CIA's ex-Nazis, that this was an opportunity to obtain funds and experiment at their whim, outside the control of the boring old Medical Research Council. In effect, they went to the Pentagon and the CIA over the heads of the UK's own research watchdogs and sought to use the secret military programme to recreate their own purely medical (but not very rational) research project, despite this having been banned by the proper authority as unethical, dangerous and unlikely to yield any medically useful result. The probability that it was equally unlikely to yield a militarily useful result, was ignored.

Because it was now a "secret" and "military" project, and because the farm that the University of Sussex had been using had no safe facilities for storing, let alone experimentally dispersing, potentially toxic gas, the team was granted access to facilities at Porton Down. This does not make their project a Porton Project, it's just that this was the only safe place for certain of their experiments to happen. (The same is true of most of the controversial tests of nerve agents on army volunteers. They happened at Porton, but were done by army doctors from elsewhere, who were often alarmingly inexpert and reckless. Porton's indigenous population had too much respect for nerve gas to be reckless with it.)

So, in the middle of a nightmare where he was surrounding by charlatans doing dangerous, unethical and, to his way of thinking, militarily useless, experiments, Olson had to make trips to Porton to use facilities that didn't exist elsewhere. In the process, he met genuine scientists who were doing precisely the work that he wanted to do, that would one day actually protect soldiers from all the nightmares that his erstwhile colleagues were cooking up in figurative, if not literal, witch's cauldrons. Now, Porton Down isn't a holiday resort, anyone who saw it as an escape route has to have been in a pretty desperate place! But Olson did see it as a way out of MK Naomi, and he asked the President to allow him to leave direct US Army employment and go to work there, on protective measures for soldiers, against everything from nerve gas and biological weapons, to, perhaps, the mind control and psychoactive chemical warfare of MK Ultra and MK Naomi.

Medawar knows for certain that in the months immediately before his death, Frank Olson was shown around the actual research laboratories at both sides of "Porton Down" that is The "Chemical Defence Establishment (Salisbury)" and the "Microbiological Research Department" which is what starred in Alistair Maclean's novel "The Satan Bug." He was introduced to researchers as "Frank, he is going to be working with us now" and he seemed very pleased to have found a new career home. At Porton, he was neither depressed nor in any way unbalanced, just relieved and optimistic. He was the first American ever to have been into some parts of the facility, perhaps the only one to this day. This would not have happened if his employment was not sought by the director and endorsed by the responsible minister, Duncan Sands. It's unlikely that the UK Cabinet would have let Sands employ a top American scientist from a highly classified project, unless the US President had approved Olson's request to leave MK Naomi and move to Wiltshire, outside nominal US jurisdiction. (Which is the legal reason why he had to ask, as a serving officer and not a private citizen.)

The rats (and their friends) must have objected to the cat jumping ship.
The charlatans running MK Ultra and MK Naomi, appear to have even had groupies, fascinated by the idea of mind control and forcing people to do things against their will. This is an inherently sadistic aspiration, simply not holdable by a normal, sane person. Faced by someone who was not only calling their bluff and blowing the gaffe, but was determined to demonstrate an alternative direction for the Pentagon's chemical and biological warfare research funding to take, the charlatans, and perhaps even more so their groupies, may have acted vengefully and murderously.

In New York, Colonel Olson was struck on the head, a high window was broken, and then he was pushed through it afterwards, with no glass lacerations to his body.

Blair's Mantra

Whenever Tony Blair wanted to justify some erosion or outright demolition of liberty, he and the party members who used to be organised to write letters to newspapers, local and national, on his behalf, all used to chant variations on "if you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide."

So why are they hiding all the medical evidence about the death of Doctor David Kelly, then?

It behoves us all to be jolly careful whilst taking walks in the woods, or working in the UN buildings in Vienna for that matter.

Incidentally: anyone covering up a crime they were not responsible for, perhaps out of fear of uncontrollable political consequences, becomes an accessory to that crime, even if they do not share the original criminal's purpose and intent. They also commit the fresh offence of "perverting the course of justice" or "conduct tending to pervert the course of justice" if charged in their native Scotland.

Identifiable Nutters Behind Organized Stalking

A Canadian lady suggests that a millionaire (and pathological liar) with intelligence and police contacts, has been in the organized stalking game for thirty five years. This, incidentally, makes her the first blogger on the subject ever to posit a timeframe that accorded with Medawar's experience of stalking. (Since in the early seventies, extreme right wing and animal rights groups tended to have many members in common, it's still hard to say exactly where it was all coming from.)

That would fit, in a way, because very often stalking involves the use of police and intelligence resources, but it is turned to such a destructive and destabilizing end as to be completely at odds with the reason and purpose of any institution of state security.

Intelligence and Security services are, if anything, reactionary. Now, Liberals have made the word "reactionary" a shorthand for all evil, but it does what it says on the tin, and persecuting people who do not break the law is not a reactionary act: it is subversive.

See also Medawar's Comment on Terri Hansen's Article.

It would be very nice to know if "Cyril R." has anything to do with animal rights groups, some of which have a great deal of power in Canada, although they are currently in retreat in the UK due to universal revulsion at campaigns including grave-robbing and arson as well as an awful lot of stalking. Medawar wonders if "Cyril R." has ever given money to SHAC, PETA or IFAW, for instance?

Medawar's Extremist Linkages.

Medawar2 has now fixed the problem that caused readers of Medawar's Extremist Linkages to spend their precious time writing comments, only to have them obliterated by the (not-working) blogger default option comments page.

Please accept his apologies and please try again!

By the Strength of Their Character

(Readers may know what a Liberal is, especially if they've ever been bitten by one, but a Transnational Progressivist (or "Tranzi") may require some explanation. So click here, although Medawar doesn't endorse every analysis and sentiment therein. Apply your own judgement to the new ideas, and see below for why that is good.)

It is nearly fifty years since a Southern Baptist minister stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and made a speech, listened to by something like three hundred thousand people in the flesh and millions more on radio and television, that set out a simple recipe for peace and justice.

Nearly always, the Liberal and “Transnational Progressivist” political elite and their media homeboys will refer to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King as a “civil rights leader” and pay some kind of patronising, creeping lip-service before attempting to append his legacy to what is effectively the opposite of what he recommended.

Because Doctor King had a dream, (dreaming a dream is a very Baptist experience), and that dream was that everyone, regardless of their race, should be judged on the strength of their character and not the colour of their skin. In a single sentence, Doctor King destroys the basis of racial politics. But he doesn’t merely destroy racism, or neo-nazism, or nationalism. He destroys the other side of racial politics -and most of liberalism, too.

Firstly, Doctor King did not say, and most definitely did not mean, that black people or any other “oppressed” ethnic group should avoid being judged on their colour, whilst members of the supposed “oppressor” races should still be condemned as oppressors by virtue of their whiteness, or anglo-saxon-ness. He meant that no individual should be judged by the colour of their skin, for either good or bad.

Secondly, he very carefully used words such as “every” and “each” and not “all”. It was very much the individual who should never be judged by the colour of their skin, and it was the individual who should be judged by the strength of their character.

There are two concepts here which Liberals and “Tranzis” will recoil from like a vampire in a crucifix factory: individuals, and strength of character as a measure of worth.

Doctor King’s speech was not just an “anti-racist” soundbite, nor was it merely a generic “Christian” platitude. It was a Baptist sermon of great passion and power and this means that there was far more to it than “anti-racism” or civil rights.

Doctor King wanted to set his people free, but “his people” are, potentially, everyone. And he didn’t just want to set them free from racism: he wanted to set them FREE!

Every and each, embracing the whole human race as individuals. In deciding to judge us by our strength of character, Doctor King requires each of us to have a character. We have to be our own person, form our own view, decide for ourselves what we believe. Ohhhh! That man was a Baptist alright! Being judged, fairly, is freedom. If we are truly slaves, we do nothing by choice, we cannot be judged.

But everything we can be judged on, is a choice we were free to make. If we are to be judged, we have to be free. There is more in that than race: race is the least of it!

We do not, and can not, make the world better by labelling some communities as “oppressed” and, by political machination, moving them around the world until they are living amongst an “oppressor” community who can be made to suffer by way of reparation. Bear-baiting is as deadly to the hounds as to the bear: yet the essentials of the “Transnational Progressivist” concept of racial justice amounts to bear-baiting with whole communities. Always communities, groups, races; Transnational Progressivists cannot see individuals, only masses. Yet they currently “own” (anti-) racism and social justice as issues, which is like Herod the Great owning childcare as a political issue.

No-one will ever find personal freedom in their racial or ethnic identity. Freedom is in their own individual identity. Racial identity is all very well, and perhaps a genetic reality, but unless it is firmly in second place, behind individual identity, it is a barrier to freedom.

If you are a white Liberal, genuinely concerned for the rights and liberties of your black neighbour, the best thing you can do is find out his name and stop thinking of your neighbour as black. If you are a black power activist and very much not a liberal, an equivalent exercise could be very healthy. If you are a Transnational Progressivist, seeing nation states as the source of all evil: you need to see that nations are mostly ideas, not races or geographical entities, and that individuals will stand first with those with whom they can share ideas. If you want an end to nations, it probably is necessary to suppress the individual at every level and in every area of life, and the “Tranzi” movement has set about doing that with a will, but in that case an end to nations means an end to humanity.

What Doctor King set out for us was not “ a way of life” but the way to life. We must see everyone as an individual and not as part of any group, racial or social. We must grant them every freedom as an individual, and we must also hold them to account as individuals. Not on the assumption that all will fail and all are corrupt: Doctor King would not have subscribed to the doctrine of original sin, but because being held to account, being judged for good or bad, is a privilege when it comes with the inherent freedom to be good or bad. And Doctor King spoke in such a godlike way, not because he held any schizophrenic or pathological delusions that he was God, but because he was an obedient servant of God, striving throughout his life to understand God’s will -and then speaking it with an eloquence, simplicity and grace that makes it hard for any but the clinically obtuse to doubt that he spoke as a man inspired.

It wasn’t just the Ku Klux Klan who had reason to be discomforted by Doctor King’s words: the Liberals, Tranzis, Black Power Leaders and almost every known species of extremist would, if they thought about it, find something to hate and fear in that speech from the Lincoln Memorial. Our assumptions, therefore, about what manner of sinister conspiracy must have been behind Doctor King’s cowardly murder several years after that speech, may need to be revisited in the understanding that his words smote a lot more widely than the racist extreme right. In fact, the delay of several years almost certainly means that his killing was commissioned, not by the first and obviously apparent target of his challenge, but by someone who needed to sit and think it through before they understood that here was a man with the power to destroy their movement just by opening his mouth and speaking a single sentence.

New Blog

For those concerned with whether or not one extremist group might be infiltrating and manipulating another, this blog may prove helpful, but it's a long-term proposition as it depends on reader feedback.

Toxic Materials in Stalking.

Medawar invites comments, anonymous ones are probably best, from any reader who knows of instances of stalkers (whether "organized" stalkers or just vanilia-variety nutters) using toxic or noxious chemicals to harass their victims, perhaps to damage their health or simply to enhance the anxiety, stress and associated debilitating effects of being stalked and harassed.

Are there any noxious chemicals that disproportionately affect persons from specific ethnic groups, or are there vulnerabilities in diet and lifestyle (consumption of marine mammal fat?) that would allow an ethnic group to be targeted over time and worn down, without it appearing to any outside observer, or even the victims, that it was being done on purpose?

Medawar would like to be able to post a watch-list, of substances and symptoms, at some point, to allow targeted communities at least a chance of self-defence. However, there's a need to avoid writing a manual on how to do it, when one wants only to put a stop to it.

Medawar has read all the stuff about electromagnetic weapons and knows too much about the subject to believe it can account for all the effects people are complaining of. Something else is happening.

Any reader who doesn't understand what this means: don't worry about it, just move on to the next post.

Mass Extinction and Rolling Back the Human Race

This article in the Science Daily is interesting, once you read the text and find that it's actually giving the opposite impression to the headline!

In short, it finds that the human race caused far more species extinctions, amongst mammals at least, in its pre-civilization phase than it has caused since. This actually makes a lot of sense: a new species has most effect when it first appears, but is the opposite of what most people would assume off the top of their heads.

(This was determined by a study of what happened in the Americas, where humans arrived relatively recently to a clean slate. Uncomfortable reading for those who unthinkingly revere native Americans as wiser custodians of the environment than Europeans. But not actually a reproach to native Americans, who simply did their best to adapt to and survive in, a new environment. Someone is going to post an angry comment about the white men killing all the Bison, or the Passenger Pigeon, but the study is about the disappearance of hundreds and hundreds of species over 2,000 years. In fact, the logic of the situation may be that Native Americans, through managing and changing the environment, helped nature create the remarkable and beautiful prairie system in which bison became so numerous and prevelant, and where one species of pigeon was able to build up to million-strong flocks each autumn. And if they did, that's something to really admire them for, rather than an ignorant supposition that they found everything already perfect, as in Eden, rather than finding a promised land that needed, and would reward, many generations of hard work. The Human race is not an abomination to nature: we are part of nature and our interactions with it are interesting and may, over great spans of time, actually prove constructive.)

There are some extreme environmentalists and animal rights people out there, who argue that, for the sake of other species, the human race needs to be "rolled back" to its pre-civilization condition. This research implies that might do more harm than good in its own terms, even if the requisite slaughter of the human race could be morally justified, which it cannot.

The "harm" has been done and humans are here. Getting rid of us can only do more harm, it will never restore a cuddly bunny utopia. The fastest way to disrupt and destroy any ecosystem is to remove a dominant species, and humans are now the dominant species. We must take appropriate care with the world, but there is no case whatsoever for getting rid of us!

Suicide with a Small Knife? Mark Weinberger

This article may be of interest to readers who doubt the official line about the death of Dr David Kelly.

A plastic surgeon, wanted for fraud, attempted suicide with a small knife after his arrest. The surgeon botched it and is still alive, even though he was going for a much more major artery in the throat, rather than a minor one in the wrist, as Dr Kelly is supposed to have done.

Suicide by small knife is very, very hard without a hot bath and cuts to several arteries. It is almost always better to put up with being alive.

Tony Blair's Money

This is that rare thing, a Guardian article that everybody should read.

Searching for Alena Gerber

It has crossed Medawar's mind that some people idly google their own names on occasion, to see what comes up. In which case, Miss Gerber is welcome to visit this site, which, unlike some Swiss calender models, has no serious prejudices against comely and buxom young German ladies.

The Persian Caliphate

From time to time, Medawar reads a blog or newspaper column to the effect that, in Iran, "The Revolutionary Guards are increasingly a parallel, separately funded, government."

They observe, but do not understand.

The situation in Iran today is very like that in the earliest stages of the Turkish Republic, where General Mustapha Kemal Attaturk had established a modern, democratic state, but the old Caliphate, which had recently led the Ottoman Empire into tyranny, genocide and disaster, was still levying what amounted to taxes and still passing decrees which were supposed to have the force of law. Parliamentary democracy, which Attaturk was trying to estbalish and stabilize, kept tripping over the remains of the Caliphate at every turn, until Attaturk effectively abolished the shadow government, not in the name of secularism, but with the words "the Caliphate requires Islam, Islam does not require the Caliphate!" In doing so, he not only secured Turkish democracy, but finally set the Arab world free from even theological Turkish rule. This is why, although the Arab league made various resolutions about re-establishing the Caliphate, they've never once been silly enough to actually do it.

But there are two crucial differences between Turkey in the 1920s and Iran in the 2000s -and the first is the direction of travel: Turkey had both a democratic government and a theocracy at the same time, because it was moving from a (awesomely corrupt and venal) theocracy, towards a modern democratic state. Iran has both a constitutional (and almost democratic) government and a theocracy, because it is moving from constitutional government towards an unchecked theocracy. Which leads us to the second difference:

Turkey was the centre of a Sunni Muslim Caliphacy, the Ottoman Empire, which had its cultural and scientific highs, as well as moral lows, such as brutal oppression of Arab nations and the attempted extermination of the Armenian nation: the prototype for Hitler's holocaust.

Iran's theocrats are Shia muslims*, and Caliphacy is, or has been until now, a Sunni Muslim form. The traditions of Sunni Islam and those of the Ottoman Caliphate had evolved together, and for most of the time, those traditions proved a check and a balance on the Caliphacy, which did not otherwise know any explicit limit on its power or freedom of action. Unless Shia Islam invents some appropriate traditions, very smartly, it will find itself with a power structure that it simply doesn't know how to live with -and from which, it simply cannot escape.

A Shia Caliphacy will be a new thing on Earth. Medawar waits to see what it will look like, but not with any sense of eager anticipation!

* Not all Iran's people are Muslims, and not all of the Muslims are Shias. Even if a Caliphacy were the right form of government for Shia muslims, about a third of Iran's population is something other than Shia: there are significant numbers of Sunnis -and a couple of smaller muslim sects and two non-muslim religions were founded in Iran and spread around the world from there. It is very hard to see how a Shia Caliphate can come into being in a country as religiously pluralistic as Iran, unless the pluralism is to go and there is to be genocide, of non-shia muslims as well as non-muslims. And since Hinduism is the offspring of one of the ancient Iranian religions, how far will the theological cleansing go?