Scientists Identified a Poisonous Gas Used by Fed Agents on Portland Protesters
futurehuman.medium.com
futurehuman.medium.com
Using illegal weapons, refusing to follow the law, illegally blocking the collection of evidence, all in the name of Law and Order. What are the odds anyone who injured someone with this illegally-used toxin will face any repercussions?
Justifying this really requires psychopathic cynicism or some serious doublethink.
"Another method is when the federal government activates the Guard in what is called Title 10 status—that is what is meant by “federalizing” the Guard. The federal government pays, and activated Guard units are placed under the control of the secretary of defense and the president, with an active-duty military officer in the chain of command."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/right-way-...
Who's part of the next layer? State police?
This was blocked by a court order, which was skirted by the local police department soliciting the irregular fed squad to do so instead. The feds were overstepping their jurisdiction in doing this outside of the very narrow perimeter of the ICE facility and fed court house, but in the current environment the proper legal channels to address this are willfully deaf.
One of the more reprehensible tactics the police bureau used was to deliberately kettle and push protestors down residential streets, delivering massive amounts of gas as they did so. This resulted in children trapped in their homes unable to escape the gas as well.
What happened in my town this summer should alarm everyone, no matter your political creed.
"HC is a highly regulated toxin, labeled as a “likely carcinogen” and skin irritant by the Environmental Protection Agency. Eye masks and gloves are recommended for people who handle the chemical. Defense Technologies, an imprint of Pennsylvania-based security equipment manufacturer Safariland, markets the HC canisters as “military-style” smokers, even though the U.S. military actually stopped using HC in grenades in the 1990s due to its extreme toxicity.
Activists are more concerned about the chemicals that leave the canister than those packed inside it. Firing an HC grenade triggers a two-stage reaction in which the chlorine in HC rapidly combines with metallic zinc, resulting in zinc chloride, a toxic metal fume that appears as a greenish-white smoke. “It’s a chemical reaction in a can,” says Simonis. “The zinc chloride is an intentional product of the grenade’s design.” The Material Safety Data Sheet supplied by Safariland, however, doesn’t mention zinc chloride at all.
Gaseous zinc chloride, also known as hexite, is more than an alternative type of tear gas. Because it contains the super-hot gaseous forms of both chloride ions and zinc, a heavy metal, hexite plumes are highly mobile and extremely dangerous to most forms of life. The chloride ions increase the uptake of zinc particles by exposed cells on the skin or mucous membranes. Zinc can accumulate in tissues and organs, then mobilize later and cause a new set of symptoms. The most striking effects of zinc chloride toxicity in the street — vomiting, burning skin, coughing — are only the first onslaught of a chronic, unpredictable respiratory condition that can cause severe liver damage, fatigue, weight loss, and anorexia, in addition to difficulty breathing.
Zinc toxicity sharply contrasts with the effects of tear gas, which tend to be excruciating but short-lived, with dangerous exceptions. “[Conventional tear gas] causes pain through a specific mechanism,” says B. Zane Horowitz, PhD, an emergency toxicologist in the Portland area and author of a recent op-ed decrying the city’s use of tear gas on protesters in the journal Toxicology Communications. Tear gas shorts the nervous system’s pain response, essentially creating the experience of pain without doing lasting damage — most of the time. Still, says Horowitz, “There’s no reason to have pain inflicted on you if you haven’t done anything wrong.”
Seems like some war crime style agent orange kinda stuff to me. Why not just spray asbestos into the air instead.
The military can't use tear gas on the battlefield; military police can use tear gas against rioting soldiers and sailors. Soldiers can't use hollow point bullets even in those calibers, like 7.62x51mm, where that is by far the most common type of bullet used by civilians because of its effectiveness in hunting; but police use hollow point bullets all the time, in part because they are more effective against unarmored targets (though less effective against armored ones) and in part because they are much less likely to pass through a wall and strike someone the officer can't see.
These differences are not due to governments deciding that tear gas is not a chemical weapon or that hollow point bullets are not hollow point bullets, but rather because the laws of war apply in war and not elsewhere.
If you were serious about the war crimes thing, you'd have to acknowledge the Antifa and BLM committed war crimes by not having uniforms and clear insignia and by not distinguishing between civilians and non-civilian property when destroying things during their raids. There is no such thing as a body of law that applies to only one side. Talking about war crimes in this context really is disinformation: it confuses what those laws are about as well as the difference between international and domestic jurisdiction.
It is probably this very general language that lead to the restriction of riot agents. Although they do not kill by poisoning or kill by asphyxiation, their method of operation certainly involves some combination of poisoning and asphyxiation.
The USA has tended to hold that riot agents are not what is technically called a method of warfare because they produce "...merely transient effects...", and thus do not technically fall under the terms of the protocol, but has also long held that they are not authorized for general use, either. Per a field manual from 1956:
It is the position of the United States that the Geneva [Gas] Protocol of 1925 does not prohibit the use in war of … riot control agents, which are those agents of a type widely used by governments for law enforcement purposes because they produce, in all but the most unusual circumstances, merely transient effects that disappear within minutes after exposure to the agent has terminated. In this connection, however, the United States has unilaterally renounced, as a matter of national policy, certain uses in war of … riot control agents. The policy and provisions of Executive Order No. 11850 do not, however, prohibit or restrict the use of … riot control agents by US armed forces either (1) as retaliation in kind during armed conflict or (2) in situations when the United States is not engaged in armed conflict. Any use in armed conflict of … riot control agents, however, requires Presidential approval in advance.
In Vietnam, riot agents nevertheless saw very wide application.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul...
Using non-lethal weapons like tear gas is not a lower standard of morality. Nor is using bullets that are less likely to pass through the intended target or the surroundings.
Military personnel are not actually held to a very low standard -- much lower than police -- when they are fighting unlawful combatants like citizens, because people who are not fighting as military personnel enjoy no or almost no protections under the laws of war.
Trying to draw a parallel here with the laws of war is silly.
But since many people share your view - that they're non-lethal and thus morally superior - these less lethal means are used frequently, and often inappropriately, when the use of force is not justified.
The parallel is clear: government funded and backed forces equipped with military gear, using military-developed weapons (chemical, sound, light, physical); some of which are restricted by international convention during war.
And there will be no trials to hold people accountable for mis-using these weapons; as pointed out in the article, the government is actively blocking such attempts.
It's not because there is tear gas that police are sent to disperse crowds. Without tear gas, they'd use some other non-lethal implement authorized for that purpose. Authorizing non-lethal force to disperse crowds is not holding police to a lower moral standard than that to which the military is held.
In fact, the military has the same kind of authorizations for dealing with (a) rebellious troops in its own ranks, (b) prisoners of war and (c) civilians in occupied territory. That is why the DoD does research on these incapacitating weapons. It's military forces that are held to police standards when these weapons are used, not the other way around.
But this is an acceptable answer.
I don't see any acceptable reason to introduce new agents here unless they are properly studied and considered less harmful than the existing ones.
>[...] whose pronouns are they/them, [...] Simonis, who is also [...]
I guess my brain had trained me to expect "who are" rather than "who is". But apparently "they is" is acceptable? Or was this a mistake in the article?
For my part, I think it's fine to say "they are" for a singular person, but "who" should stay singular.
This is not helpful for racial equality. It's not helpful for anybody except the psychopathic industry of military oppression of civilian populations. Of course they're walking all over our social contracts, the continued protests have opened the door for them.
Disruption of systematic inequality is needed, but this ain't the way it's going to happen. As a privileged work-from-homer, white person, whatever, our first obligation is to listen to what racial minorities are saying to understand the nature their struggles. Otherwise you can tell yourself you're a virtuous champion of wokeness, but you're really just a part of the same problem.
Meanwhile I haven't given anything up, so it's very easy for people like us to sit here while earning our full income from home and say, "Yes, this makes sense. It is totally worth it." It's worth it to us because we aren't paying the cost. These stay at home orders and quarantines have overwhelmingly and profoundly impacted people who were already struggling without offering them a path forward. Rest assured the economic uncertainty from shut down was a catalyst behind the BLM protests. The people impacted by shut down are predominantly poor and minorities, and the fact we haven't considered how to share that burden before stabbing in the dark is what makes them racist.
At the global level, malaria kills almost a million people every single year, mostly children under 4. There's no herd immunity and it has and will continue to happen for decades. The WHO anticipates due to new covid travel restrictions on malaria relief workers an additional 3 to 4 hundred thousand deaths due to malaria will occur in Sub Sahara Africa alone. Surely malaria is a pandemic that shadows covid by any measure, except the measure where it overwhelmingly affects poor black people. Meanwhile the second our society is faced with something which mostly kills old white people, the average age of which exceeds the average human lifespan, we're cancelling school and creating a generation of illiterate 2nd grade children while their parents are left with no way to feed them.
So yeah the reaction to covid has been first and foremost selfish, and given the government is a historic institution of race, these orders are themselves the children of our racism.
Every analysis shows that however much restrictions hurt the economy, letting the disease just run rampant and overwhelm the medical system of every country in the world at once would hurt it much more. If every government had taken decisive action and forced (yes, forced) people to self-isolate for three weeks, this would have been over in March and poor people could have gone back to sending their kids to school and health workers could have gone back to helping stop malaria in Africa. But we didn't, because of our all-important freedom to harm others, and because of people like you who dare to call us racist for even trying.
You're right that it sucks being poor. It's awful. It's unconscionable how we treat our poor. I hoped that COVID would come with a silver lining where we could start really trying Basic Income on a country scale and seeing how it (almost certainly) works wonders. Maybe it still will help people understand that governments are actually capable of helping people.
Regardless of that, what percentage of the gas canisters where HC?
To say that the protesters where completely peaceful and didn't deserve anything is really dishonest. I am not saying that the officers were completely peaceful either.
Straw man from the article made me question the intent of the study.
“The degree to which law enforcement believes Black lives do not matter is shown by their willingness to use known toxic hazardous waste chemicals indiscriminately,” Simonis says. “Now I don’t go around the feds without a gas mask.”
0:https://pamplinmedia.com/scc/103-news/485705-390928-highly-t...
This is like (spoiler / 37 year old movie) in Superman 3 when he defeats the AI baddie because it determined the can of acid he was holding was harmless.
...until he heat-activated it.
Does the state ever have justification to do this to the people it's supposed to be representing?
At what point are you going to realize tomorrow it might be you at the receiving end for this?
This isn't a Trump or Biden issue either. This was authorized by a Democrat. Biden winning the election doesn't mean this won't happen again. It only means this will happen but there will be more diversity in the officials that authorize it.
- April 1993. When the three letter agencies killed a bunch of white christian kids with CS gas then killed their parents with fire on live TV.
The senate hearings when they were scolded for it, should of been the end of these practices. Many people watched that on HBO.
There's been a lot of tomorrows since then.
The point is, people are supposed to be terrified. When the Justice employees say move and they have weapons, they mean move. We should all know what happens when you don't at this point.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.