Do Not Ask Questions

Trey Smith

Anytime there is a human-caused event that terrorizes or scandalizes a significant portion of a region or the entire country, the government investigates the situation and then releases its findings. As we have been taught to do since we were very young, most people accept the various government pronouncements without giving them a second thought. The few who do question the findings are labeled "kooky conspiracy theorists." Everybody "knows" the identities of the culprit[s] and the majority of the causes, so why do some nerdy individuals continue to ask questions?

When these "conspiracy nuts" continue to question the official explanation -- like say, for 9/11 -- I continually hear average people say, "Look, if there was any substance to their suppositions, don't you think the truth would have leaked out by now?" Of course, the fact that these suppositions remain suppositions proves to the average person that they are the worked of an unhinged mind. They hold to their position in the belief that the truth cannot be suppressed for long.

It sounds like a reasonable argument. We know in our everyday lives how difficult it is to keep a secret. One person tells a family member, colleague or friend something they don't want broadcast to the public at large. Though sworn to absolute secrecy, the person provided with the secret tells one of their close confidants. That person tells someone else and, before you know, the secret is out of the bag!

So, if the government or some company was involved in highly illegal and nefarious activities, the general thought is that the secret couldn't be kept a secret for very long. Someone would spill the beans and, in time, the truth would be made known to the public.

I used to accept this kind of thinking like most everyone else...until I moved to Pendleton, Oregon. Pendleton is downwind from the Hanford Nuclear Site and, through two regional environmental groups, I began to learn that this typical belief doesn't necessarily match up with the facts.

In 1949, the US government intentionally released radiated gases into the surrounding atmosphere as part of an experiment called The Green Run. Scientists wanted to study the effects of radiation on an unknowing public. They already knew how dangerous and toxic nuclear materials are, but they wanted to study the long-terms impacts.

Though hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of people were in on this secret, the world didn't learn of it for 37 years! In fact, as it turns out, The Green Run was just one of thousands of such experiments that had taken place over the course of 30 years. By 1993, it was discovered that our government had run various experiments on an unknowing public which included:

• Exposing more than 100 Alaskan villagers to radioactive iodine during the 1960s.
• Feeding 49 retarded and institutionalised teenagers radioactive iron and calcium in their cereal during the years 1946-1954.
• Exposing about 800 pregnant women in the late 1940s to radioactive iron to determine the effect on the fetus.
• Injecting 7 newborns (six were Black) with radioactive iodine.
• Exposing the testicles of more than 100 prisoners to cancer-causing doses of radiation. This experimentation continued into the early 1970s.
• Exposing almost 200 cancer patients to high levels of radiation from cesium and cobalt. The AEC finally stopped this experiment in 1974.
• Administering radioactive material to psychiatric patients in San Francisco and to prisoners in San Quentin.
• Administering massive doses of full body radiation to cancer patients hospitalised at the General Hospital in Cincinnati, Baylor College in Houston, Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City, and the US Naval Hospital in Bethesda, during the 1950s and 1960s. The experiment provided data to the military concerning how a nuclear attack might affect its troops.
• Exposing 29 patients, some with rheumatoid arthritis, to total body irradiation (100-300 rad dose) to obtain data for the military. This was conducted at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco.

Think about this for a moment or two. All of these various experiments were run over the course of several decades and the ONLY reason the public became aware of the truth is when two groups filed a Freedom of Information Act request and 19,000 pages of previously classified documents were released. Had these two organizations not filed the request, who knows if we would know about much of this information at all!

The upshot here is that thousands or tens of thousands of individuals were privy to this secret information and yet the truth did not come to light for decades. Consequently, it is not unreasonable at all to think that in the coming years we may find out that the "official" version of what transpired on 9/11 or concerning the Boston Marathon Bombings is far different than what we currently are being told. Some of those kooky conspiracy theorists may be a lot closer to the truth than we think!

If you are interested in reading some of the questions that are being asked in regard to the Boston Marathon Bombings, you should check out the website, WhoWhatWhy. They are asking the sorts of questions you won't find in the mainstream media.