Why is the Department of Homeland Security secretly experimenting on the American public?
It’s Boston. Late summer of 2010. Pedestrians weave across the streets, descending stairwells into the tunnels of the MBTA subway system—America’s oldest subway. They pay for the tickets, slide past the turnstiles that click behind them: a chorus of metal percussion and footsteps. Groups flood in and off the cars.
There is a beep, then the robotic voice of the intercom system. The train hisses and lurches forward. Outside the train there is a subsonic hiss. And the hiss is coming from invisible and non-toxic fluorescent particles that float and surge through the tunnels. The moving train pulls some of this mixture along its path, while pushing other portions into the faces of waiting commuters. Other trains thunder through the subway, repeating the process.
The particles and gases wind their way through the tunnels, up the stairs, through vents and pipes and onto street level where they mingle with the air and are inhaled by pedestrians. In-take vents of surrounding buildings pull the gases and fluorescent particles into air-conditioned cubicles and offices. All the while, men inside the tunnels and on the surface are taking measurements.
This may sound like storytelling: the opening scene of a screenplay perhaps, or the first paragraph of a speculative fiction novel. But this is not fiction. What was just described actually happened in Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) this past Friday. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ran a simulation on unsuspecting Boston citizens. Granted, officials stood around and looked, well, official, while various instruments released and studied airflow perturbations on the gases and particles; but this was, for all intents and purposes, unannounced.
It seems the fine folks at DHS, presumably on the order of the president (who else could authorize the directive?), were simulating a terror attack on a major metropolitan transportation system. The official story is that this simulation was the government’s study of how invisible contaminants and pathogens might float through enclosures, and will aid in developing methods of containment in the event of a terror attack. DHS states, “Though the study focuses on the deliberate release of chemical or biological agents, it also will help researchers understand airflow characteristics for smoke or unintentional spills of chemicals or fuels.”
Does it not seem problematic that a government agency is gathering information on airflow of vapors? That officials will have full knowledge of how invisible gases and particles work on populations? And nobody seems to be talking about the parallels of these experiments with the 1950 Army program that released vaporized LSD into the New York Subway System.
All of this is strikingly similar to the CIA’s MK Ultra program and Project Artichoke, which, amongst other things, involved unknowingly dosing subjects with mind-altering drugs and observing the effects. Prostitutes administered it to their clients while Agency officials watched through double mirrors. One subject, Frank Olson, was so effected by the drug that he leaped through a window to his death. Some subjects were given LSD for 77 days, which is excessive by any definition of the word.
4.4 million people live and commute in Boston
Yes, there is a logical jump involved here from the DHS’s terror simulations to MK Ultra-style covert operations. DHS isn’t attempting to alter minds but protect the citizenry—to test response measures in the event of a biological terror attack.
The government has deemed Homeland Security’s program safe for public dissemination, which makes one wonder what secret programs are currently underway that might overstep ethical boundaries? The MK Ultra and Artichoke programs surely began with the best intentions, assuming governments have the best intentions, but they descended rather quickly into perverse anti-worlds, the province of fictional paranoia.
To what ends will Homeland Security go to ensure a safe and secure homeland? Is it harmonious with the average American’s conception of safety and security? And, if this sort of activity is allowed, at what point does the terror become self-inflicted?
This is not to suggest that the DHS will release harmful vapors like the Army did in 1950, but surely a degree of terror had its genesis this past Friday in the mere sight of strange instruments in Boston’s subway. In police standing guard while scientists took readings like Egon, Ray and Venkman.
As invisible vapors wound through subway tunnels and into the atmosphere above, and building vents took in the particles and spit them into a matrix of cubicles where mothers and fathers work to keep the economic daydream in perpetual motion. Is that not terror? The more insidious sort that aims to herd people like cattle with the call of fear as in an Orwellian nightmare?
This is the realm of fiction. Yet, the best of fiction has always played second fiddle to the unfolding of historical events, which undergo perceptual filtration and informational control. To put it more simply, there is that which is fit for a public revelation and that which is not.
Author Stanislaw Lem seems to have foreseen this scenario in his wonderful novella, “The Futurological Congress,” which may one day be seen as the work of a prophet. In it, humanity—in an effort to save itself—takes to releasing invisible vapors onto an unwitting citizenry. Like Homeland Security’s experiments in major subways, Lem’s government agents carry out their initial efforts in the tunnels of a hotel. And before the characters know what has hit them, a new reality has been constructed—all for the greater good.
As Lem’s classic satirical creation Ijon Tichy exhorts in “The Futurological Congress” when this constructed world is laid bare to him, “A nightmare!… But even so, pax orbi et urbi has been established, so perhaps it’s worth it.”
But is it worth it?
