Pentagon Ordered to Tell Congress If It Weaponized Ticks and Released Them | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon Ordered to Tell Congress If It Weaponized Ticks and Released Them

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71 pointsyasp34 comments

Tick researchers have refuted this myth that the military created Lyme disease or were responsible for its spread here: https://elemental.medium.com/what-its-like-to-be-a-creepy-cr...

> What’s the strangest sort of question you have to handle?

> Keesing: The conspiracy theory that the government made the Lyme bacterium, that’s gotta be up there. I mean, really?

> Ostfeld: There was a man at a public event where I was speaking a few years ago who, in the question and answer session, pontificated about how the Lyme disease bacterium was created by the CIA at Plum Island as a biowarfare weapon — which if you know anything about this bacterium is absolutely ludicrous. It would be the stupidest biowarfare weapon you could possibly imagine. In any event, I said that this was actually not true, the DNA of this bacterium has been amplified in museum specimens of mice that were collected around the turn of the 20th century. So that predates Plum Island. And I said, there was a recent discovery of a mummified human corpse in the Swiss Alps in a National Geographic expedition that was 13,000 years old and they amplified Borrelia burgdorferi DNA from this mummified frozen corpse. And this guy responded by saying, "Yeah, so, you think it’s far fetched that the CIA would take this frozen human corpse and dump it out of a helicopter in the Swiss Alps to cover up what they did?" So there’s no correcting the conspiracy theorists.

Good example of people being unwilling to consider the facts.

Minor nitpick: I'd like us to get away from using "conspiracy theorist" as an always-negative term. The truth is, many conspiracy theories have turned out true (people do, after all, conspire in secret to do evil). Additionally, there are conspiracy theorists who are reasonable and who have changed their opinions when corrected.

Yeah, every prosecutor who indicts someone on conspiracy charges is a conspiracy theorist, by the plain meaning of it.

What crosses the line into "truther" territory is generally a fantastically organized coverup as explanation for a lack of corroborating evidence.

It's possible to condition people to actively avoid something. Shock, labels and association with unrelated (often false) information are pretty effective. http://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/prete...

> The truth is, many conspiracy theories have turned out true (people do, after all, conspire in secret to do evil).

How frequently do theories that are widely labeled as "conspiracy theories" turn out to be true?

Here's a few to get you started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_LAC

You have a list of secret tests run on the public in the 50s (and one operation that was rejected and never run) but a surprising lack of proof that there were any 'conspiracy theories' regarding these events prior to the public release of the information about them.

Could you please reference the documented theories proposed by people of this era or soon after regarding the conspiracy? If not then all you have are examples of secret programs that would not pass a modern review board and nothing that suggests modern conspiracy theories are anything more than the ravings of people with rather obvious mental illnesses.

Actually anyone who would have ordered any of those violated the Nuremberg principles.

How precise does the conspiracy theory have to be for you to consider it verifiable? I'm sure if you took a cursory glance at some more eccentric publications from the time, you'd find people saying things like "the CIA is experimenting with mind control technology," "military planes are spraying U.S. cities with toxic materials," and "the Department of Defense uses false flag attacks to manipulate public sentiment."

> Good example of people being unwilling to consider the facts.

Exactly! It's clear that the CIA found the frozen corpse before the expedition and extracted the bacteria to put into the ticks in the first place. [edit]/s[/edit]

I do somewhat appreciate the explanation the person used as it showed conviction versus moving the goalposts when confronted with new evidence; something that most nutty conspiracy theorists seem to do.

"Conspiracy enthusiast" perhaps?

In my experience, the differentiator is the underlying emotion. Facts aren't as clear-cut as we like to think. You can't simply say you'll follow the facts; a certain amount of reasonableness is also required for combining those facts, which is a fuzzy and uncomfortable concept.

Conspiracy theories usually can't be disproven (almost nothing can, when you get down to it). They usually aren't completely fictional, lacking any shred of possible evidence. Their hallmark trait is the fact that they aren't driven by an even-handed search for truth, but by fear, anger, and paranoia. We like to think that truth-seeking is immune to these emotions, but it really isn't. Emotion keeps theories going even when they're wildly unreasonable, because they're still impossible to totally disprove.

The thing is, some of the now known to be true conspiracy theories aren't any saner than the 'crazy' theories. One could easily say that creating the disease could be replaced with modifying the disease. Weaponizing a disease isn't exactly an impossible feat. Banned by international treaty, but since when has they stopped anyone?

One could even say that the conspiracy that it was created by the government is a purposefully leaked theory to discredit the idea they weaponized it.

Is it really any crazier than MKUltra, Tuskegee experiment, Manhattan project, or the planned Operation Northwood?

I dunno but to me a bio weapon in the form of Lyme disease is a pretty lame weapon. I mean, what, hope like a few percent of Soviets would get infected and decades later have a disease develop in the infected people?

Lyme is a terrible disease to have, but what value would it have as a weapon?

Perhaps the hope was to modify it into something worse. Not every weapon conceived and built is of value on the battle field.

I also don't think the current iteration of the theory makes any sense for other reasons (especially the notion of creating a disease). But the idea of investing in germ and virus based biological warfare seems a very reasonable conspiracy theory, so I wonder to what extent the current Lyme disease is a modification of a more realistic one.

Kinda like the whole gay frogs rant some conspiracy theorist went on about that has become slightly famous. If you dig into the actual story, there were chemicals causing the frogs to undergo sex change. Turning gay seems a simplified version of this (especially to those not well informed on LGBT specifics). As such, while the actual conspiracy theory was wrong in the same way 'the earth is a sphere' is wrong, the knowledge wasn't that far off the mark.

I agree with you, but just to play devil's advocate for a second as I've run out of JIRA tickets for the day:

If you are a major world superpower, and you want to impede other powers from threatening you, but you want to avoid any kind of overt conflict, you might be interested in developing weapons that would slowly, over time, degrade a rival's ability to aspire towards greatness. Secrecy and plausible deniability would be most important, so something that is slow to take hold would be useful, since nobody would be able to trace it back to you. It doesn't even have to do anything in particular, it doesn't even have to target any specific thing. It just has to degrade their capabilities.

So if, for example, you had a weapon that you could deploy completely undetected, that would, over the course of 20 years, cause widespread low grade health problems which cause the target nation's expenditures on healthcare to rise by 3 percentage points of gdp... well that degrades their ability to spend that money on military or other threats to your hegemony.

That said, I think this particular conspiracy theory is stupid. What one of the above posters said is true: we have too much knowledge of the source and origin of Lyme for this particular one to be true. But, in general, I don't think that _a version_ of conspiracy theories like this are _laughably and obviously_ false

In addition to points by sibling comments, there's also the possibility that Lyme Disease wasn't the intended result, i.e. this was a failed attempt to create something more useful, more lethal, etc.

Notably, the bill requests information about activity in the 1950-1975 timeframe – when there were other risky domestic biowarfare research projects involving the undisclosed release of disease-causing agents. For example, the SF bay area was dosed with military-delivered bacteria in ‘Operation Sea-Spray’:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray

Scary stuff! "Open-air tests" is a nice way of putting it..

> Operation Sea-Spray was a 1950 U.S. Navy secret experiment in which Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria were sprayed over the San Francisco Bay Area in California.

> From September 20 to 27, 1950, the U.S. Navy released the pathogens off the shore of San Francisco. Based on results from monitoring equipment at 43 locations around the city, the Army determined that San Francisco had received enough of a dose for nearly all of the city's 800,000 residents to inhale millions of particles each day during the week of spraying.

> Between 1949 and 1969 open-air tests of biological agents were conducted 239 times.

This seems like a weird conspiracy theory. I mean if you are looking for a bio weapon, one that doesn’t have person to person spread, has a distinctive rash, doesn’t result in immediate death (but can cause chronic conditions) and is treated by fairly common antibiotics seems like a strange choice.

The report does not look to determine if the defense department created Lyme disease. Rather it suggests that the Pentagon weaponized ticks.

What if, for example, they enhanced the Lyme bacteria to make it more contagious as part of an attempt to make it a carrier of a more deadly pathogen?

Or they were just looking at the ticks themselves as a delivery mechanism of 'whatever'.

If you're testing dissemination methods, then having something that would get people to the doctor seems like a reasonable requirement. But something that causes material harm raises the risks of the project significantly. So in that sense, lyme disease is in the Goldie Locks zone.

But if you were modifying a very dangerous disease to weaponize it and wanted to create a conspiracy that would make people look stupid and thus create a guilt by association for more reasonable conspiracies, then those same factors make it a good pick.

Could the return of that conspiracy theory be prompted by the recent spread of this invasive tick species:

https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/longhorned-tick/index.html

https://www.wired.com/story/the-terrifying-unknowns-of-the-a...

This reeks of conspiracy theory, however if one were to weaponize an insect, ticks would make sense. They're small and undetectable, evasive, bite you without you knowing it, and tough as nails.

While we're speculating, I imagine mosquitoes would be a good candidate as well - it's a natural vector of infections, common enough to be dismissed/ignored..

Oh, I see it also happens to be popular among conspiracy theory enthusiasts, and not without basis in some fact.

http://www.hoaxorfact.com/technology/tiny-robot-mosquito-dro...

Sigh. Historical accounts of Lyme disease go back at least to the 1700s, predating the founding of the lab in question by a couple of centuries.

This seems to be an offshoot of the anti-vax hysteria.

Iceman Otzi possibly had lyme disease:

> DNA analysis also showed him at high risk of atherosclerosis and lactose intolerance, with the presence of the DNA sequence of Borrelia burgdorferi, possibly making him the earliest known human with Lyme disease.[48][56] A later analysis suggested the sequence may have been a different Borrelia species.[57]

He lived between approximately 3400 and 3100 BCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi

I certainly know nothing of the motives of this investigation, but a quoted passage in the main article states that the inquiry is about "whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975" rather than the highly implausible and easily discredited characterization that the government may have somehow invented the Lyme bacterium.

I wonder why they limited the inquiry to that date range.

That "If" is doing a lot of work in that title.

Serious question: does the Pentagon actually have to comply? What authority does Congress have to compel the Pentagon to do such?

Withholding funding?

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