Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/20/23 Patrick MacFarlane on the Truth About Oppenheimer

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

Patrick MacFarlane joins the show to discuss his new docuseries, The Truth About Oppenheimer. MacFarlane talks about the project and some of his sources. They then compare the version of Oppenheimer, and the Manhattan Project, with the portrayal in Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster.  Discussed on the show: The Truth About Oppenheimer / Part One Behind the Fog by Lisa Martino-Taylor Oppenheimer (IMDb) The Plutonium Files by Eileen Welsome Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. Follow him on Twitter @patmacfarlane_ This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan. And the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terror. and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4.

You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, on the line, I got Patrick McFarlane, and he is our Justin Romando Fellow at the Libertarian Institute, and, of course, is the host. of Liberty Weekly and may he's been doing all these great documentaries and all this stuff and boy is he got a good one coming up for you guys welcome back to the show how are you doing

hey doing good scott thanks for having me back very happy to have you here and doing all your great work as you do um so tell me um what is uh what is this new project that you have I guess by the time anybody hears this, it'll be brand new out on YouTube there. Yeah. So if you want to find it, just go to like YouTube.com forward slash at the at symbol vital dissent. And dissent is like D-I-S-S-E-N-T, you know, like a dissent in a court opinion or something. Oh, that's right. I forgot you changed the name of it.

Actually, I knew you did, but I couldn't think of it. So then I thought maybe you changed it to Liberty Weekly. And then I thought, no, that's what it always was. And then I thought, well, I can't think of what the other name. is now, so I'm just going to go with that. I'm sorry. No, no worries, man. I mean, with all those changes, it's hard to keep track of. But no, this project I'm really excited about, it's been about a year and a half in the making. And, you know, things happened in my life, starting a business and having kids and all that stuff. It just was delayed a bit. But it would not have been possible

at all without my excellent producer. He goes by Mesa's Pieces. And so you'll see he has production credits at the end. But essentially, I won't bury the lead. The project is, it's releasing on Friday, July 21st, the same day is the new Christopher Nolan Oppenheimer film. And that was actually kind of serendipity because I meant to release this a year ago. But this new film was coming out, and it's like, well, I have no idea what the message of the new film is going to be. And from the trailers, it seems like it's really kind of saying, well, you know, Oppenheimer, he was this morally conflicted guy and he had to you know he just had the best intentions and this really weighed on his conscience about whether or not he should do this but i guess i'm i'm positing what i think is the

real story and that's why it's called the truth about oppenheimer great okay so i got to already watch it and uh i have a lot of well i don't know a lot i have a few follow-up questions but i think i just want to give you the floor if you want to basically take us through don't do the whole thing you know, because you want everybody to watch it, but give us a real good sense of who are these men that you're talking about and all of this stuff. If I read you right, a lot of the, what you talk about here precedes the Manhattan Project, right? Yeah, so this is actually, it's just part one of a docu series that I'm working on, but I want, you know, I wanted to hit it while the iron was hot. But essentially what it is,

it's not really even about the Manhattan Project as much as it is. about a secret group of scientists that had a sub-program of the Manhattan Project. And this was called the Radiological Weapons Experimentation Group, which is a huge mouthful. But really, this is a book written by Lisa Martino-Taylor called Behind the Fog, documented this in detail about how the medical team was tasked by Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves to create a new weapons program that was. was different than the atom bomb program. And this was the development of offensive radiological weapons. And it was done under the auspices of, oh, hey, you know, there's this new, we're dealing

with plutonium and radiation, and we have no idea, and they didn't. They had no idea how dangerous it was. So we're going to conduct this experimentation to see what its effects will be on our workers and on the public. That was the cover story. But essentially what they were doing, yeah, it'd be useful to get that data to help protect our people. But really what we're doing here, and this was referenced in a letter written by Oppenheimer himself, asking, he said, quote, I think that we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men, since there is not, since there is not doubt that the actual number affected will, because of non-uniform distribution, be much. smaller than this. So in these letters where they're talking about doing these human experimentations involving plutonium, he's talking about using it to kill and poison people offensively. And where it really ties into the Manhattan Project itself is, you know,

there's this age-old adage, Scott, that you've confronted yourself and your work that, well, you know, we had to drop the atom bombs on those people because they never would have surrendered and we needed to destroy Japan's will to resist or else we were going to have to invade the island and lose a million people. So therefore, all of it was justified. Well, I really try to combat that ends justify the means approach by saying, look, I mean, they're not people

who have the best of intentions. I mean, look at here, before the project started, they picked all these scientists who were involved in destroying medical ethics and doing Nazi-style medical experimentation on people, subjecting them to radiation without expectation of medical benefit, without informed consent. Meanwhile, the United States, after the war, was prosecuting war criminals at Nuremberg for doing the same exact thing.

So how can you sit there and tell me that these people had the best of intentions when they were engaging in this ridiculous human experimentation, like injecting people with plutonium without their knowledge? civilians. So I don't know where you want to take it from there, Scott. Well, so introduce us to some of the characters involved in the story here other than Oppenheimer. And are they, from what you know, featured in the same film, the Nolan film coming out? I mean, I would think that Dr. Lewis Hempelman would be. I haven't looked through like, you know, you can look on IMDB and see who's cast in what role. And I perused it a little bit, but I didn't see that these people were credited.

but Lewis Hempelman, he was the 29-year-old, Scott, I mean, I'm 29 right now. Could you imagine me running, I mean, I'm a lawyer and all that, but could you imagine me running the medical division at the Manhattan Project? And he was a 29-year-old task with running the medical division. Robert Spencer Stone and Wright Haskell Langham and Joseph G. Hamilton were some of the other figures that were involved with this. a lot of it really revolved around the work that Robert S. Stone and Joseph Hamilton were doing it at Berkeley. And Oppenheimer was also, you know, after Cambridge and all that stuff,

getting his education, he accepted a Rockefeller scholarship, which should, you know, light up the interest of every John Bercher who's listening to this. But he took a Rockefeller scholarship at UC Berkeley. Well, meanwhile, this Robert Stone and Joseph Hamilton and, um, and with Lewis Hempelman before the Manhattan Project were engaging in all kinds of crazy out there stunts, as some of their colleagues called it, regarding subjecting people to radioactive materials. I think the most disturbing study was one

that Robert S. Stone conducted, where he was taking people with visible, malignant tumors and basically putting them in the beams of the cyclotron to try to irradiate these tumors, In an effort, I guess to find these biomedical applications for new radiation products and treatment of cancer. And I mean, you can see what we do nowadays with chemotherapy, this kind of being the genesis of it.

But at the time, the risks were not understood at all. And there's no clear indication, and I actually read the research paper published on these. There's no clear indication that informed consent was obtained. And like within six months, months of these, the experiment that Robert S. Stone did, half of his patients died. And this was, I don't remember the number offhand, but I think it was more than 100 people. So, yeah, they did have, you know, malignant tumors, but he even admits in his own research that, you know,

irradiating them had severe adverse effects and resulted in the deaths of at least some of these folks. Hang on just one second for me. You guys know that I consider the defend the guard. movement led by the combat vets at bring our troops home.us and defend the guard.us to be the most important thing happening in American politics today. Simply put, this law would nullify the empire by preventing the state governors from handing their national guard troops over to the president for foreign combat without an official declaration of war from the Congress. We've made great progress getting it out of committee and even past the state senate in

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See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. Man, and then so do you cover, you have a whole section on the Manhattan Project itself and the development of the A-bomb, or you stick to all these kind of side experiments on people? I try to give the background, too, you know, essentially the veil of secrecy that went around the Manhattan Project talking about its development, at least enough to give the background in the context of where these took place. because a lot of people, when they think of the Manhattan Project, they think of Los Alamos itself. But actually, it was a nationwide coordinated project with different facilities around the country. And I think one of the most important parts about that was that this human experimentation was consciously decided by Oppenheimer to conduct the medical experimentation off-site. at Los Alamos to kind of, it wasn't at Los Alamos, it was offsite of Los Alamos at these

different affiliated universities. And so like the University of Rochester, UC Berkeley, were two sites where these programs were coordinated through. But I just thought it was really important, at least in part one, to give that background, but to say like, well, who the hell are these people? You know, why were they selected to be part of the Manhattan Project? And what are their backgrounds. And I think that going through, and Lisa Martino Taylor does this in her book Behind the Fog goes through and really illustrates that these people who were selected weren't necessarily the most qualified people for the job. I mean, Lewis Hempelman, like I said, he was 29 years old. He wasn't a physicist really at all. And he only had, I think, two years

experience working with radiation or radioactive substances at all before he was named to be the medical director of the Manhattan Project itself. And furthermore, Oppenheimer, who of course is the subject of this new blockbuster film that IGN called a 10 out of 10 masterpiece. He was someone who had a checkered past. I mean, he was diagnosed with profound schizophrenia. He was like collapsing to the floor and rolling around at the Cambridge University Labs. He tried to poison his professor with cyanide. He tried to strangle his best friend. He was a communist. And all these other doctors, like I documented in the show, they had all engaged in human experimentation with radioactive substances. Man, it's just amazing. Well, so I kind of want to keep asking you things,

but then I sort of just want to leave it like a nice teaser for people and get them interested to watch the series. So maybe we should stop the interview here and then maybe we'll follow up. How many episodes is it going to be three or four you say? Oh, I don't know. Probably three or four, yeah. Because there's so much here, Scott. I mean, there really is. And I can tell.

I mean, this first episode is so thorough. It's incredible, man. You're writing a book with this thing. Yeah, well, thank you. And I have to give credit to references that I use, though. Plutonium Files by Eileen Wellson and Lisa Martino-Taylor, her behind the Fog book. And there's another book called The Atomic Age that I cited heavily. But really the story, and I'll get into this in later parts, but Eileen Wellsome doing some real investigative journalism, came across this.

I can't remember exactly when she came across this, but her expose, the plutonium files, she went and found the people after the fact that the Manhattan project had injected with plutonium and documented their illnesses and published a huge expose piece on it. And in fact, the Clinton administration conducted it like a congressional inquest into this. And people just have no idea that this happened or that it existed. Well, and this kind of thing went on way into the 50s and 60s, too, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Because see, in fact, thinking back on it, this is some of the first stuff, I don't know, some of going back to when I was younger anyway that I was exposed to this kind of thing that you know sort of like when I first learned about how like Wall Street and the rise of Hitler and that kind of thing is in like all the army experiments on Americans including germ weapons and radioactive stuff and whatever after the beginning of the cold war you know post world war two era there and I remember bill Curtis on investigative reports on A&E had done some really good stuff on this And I've read, I don't know, whatever about it now. But that goes to show you who these people are and what they really think of us. You know, I don't want to cite the numbers. I don't know. But there have been studies that show, you know, whatever, however many thousands or more people who got cancer from all of the atomic testing that our government did in Nevada.

You know, I mean, nuke in the Marshall Islands out there in the middle of Pacific Ocean is pretty bad and led to a lot of fallout too. But they nuke Nevada hundreds of times with a bombs. And, you know, people downwind from that got cancer. So this is our security force building up this nuclear stockpile in the name of Stavenoff the Soviet Union as a threat to the American people. They're literally killing people in very large numbers. I think it really was the millions over the decades who were said to have died premature deaths of cancer from that.

And here I said I won't going to cite numbers, but that's the way I remember it. But anyway, it was certainly way too many. And, you know, talking about giving radioactive oatmeal to retarded kids or whatever, that's the ultimate. I don't know specific footnotes on that,

but I remember something like that. Putting germs in army cars, driving around New York City with a fake tailpipe, you know, and then shooting germs out the back to see how effective it would be. And in fact, they're like, well, we've got to test this thing. So they tested it on New York City. This city they're supposedly trying to protect from something like that happening.

They're like, well, we'll just try it on them. Who's the bad guy then? You know? Whole thing is bananas, man. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, there was the way I really discovered this, And what I bought Lisa Martino-Taylor's book for was to do research into the zinc cadmium sulfide experiments done by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. And I think, yeah, this was the mid-50s through the late 1960s.

The U.S. Army Chemical Corps drove through a bunch of cities in North America, spraying zinc-cadmium sulfide out the back with huge blowers to do like a biological agent test. and it's just insane, I mean, that they would do this in trying to, you know, create a situation was a tracer experiment, but try to find comparable cities in the U.S. to Russia, to, you know, USSR, cities in the USSR. And a lot of people were claimed to be sickened and given cancer by this, but there was a lawsuit that happened, but of course it was thrown out under sovereign immunity where like you can't sue the U.S. government unless they consent, the sovereign,

you know, sovereign government. Yep. Even though it says right there in the First Amendment that you can petition for redress of grievances. They go, no, that just means you sign your name on a piece of paper begging, please. When that's not what that meant when they ratified that, but anyway, do whatever

they want. Another one was dropping germs over the San Francisco Bay. Something or other Marcisans, some bacteria. and how like decades later you had infections of that bacteria in the Bay area still higher than anywhere else you know I don't know how long it lasted but for many years after I wrote about this too yeah the they sprayed the coast of Norfolk Virginia and San Francisco with two types of bacteria it was bacillus globgogy and Saratia marcensis but now it

it's considered, like the first one is considered to be a pathogen that causes food poisoning. And people were actually admitted to the hospital when this took place. Or in 1949, the Army Chemical Corps secretly released bacteria into the Pentagon's air conditioning system to see how it spread through the building. Anyways, yeah, there's so much of this, Scott. I mean, it's just you got content for days. Yeah. Well, listen, man, I think it's just great the way you're putting out. all these great documentaries and this kind of thing.

And this one's really great. And let me make sure I pull it up and get the title, right? I have it here. The truth about Oppenheimer, part one. And, you know, I noticed that at the Pirate Bay there's a documentary about him that's trending extremely high on the list just because people mistakenly think that it's the movie. And so, but it just goes to show that there's a lot of interest in this. so I do hope that as you said this is obviously you've been working on this for a long time

and it's a serendipitous thing the timing here but I think that's great and I hope it really gets a lot of eyeballs you deserve it and it's great and everybody check out vital dissent at the libertarian institute thank you Patrick yeah thanks Scott the Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA APSRadio.com com, anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.