A brief history of DARPA…(an ongoing🧵)

DARPA was created to prevent Nuclear World War III.

To create “the vast weapons systems of the future,” SecDef Neil McElroy told Congress in November 1957, one month after the Russians beat America into space. Congress liked the idea. Eisenhower sent a memo to Congress authorizing $10 million “for expenses necessary." Ever since, DARPA has functioned as the central R&D organization for the Pentagon. It is the most powerful, most productive—and one of the most secret—military science agencies in the world.

A brief history of OPERATION PAPERCLIP...(ongoing🧵)

Operation Paperclip was created to prevent (or win) Nuclear, Biological, Chemical World War III.

Starting in May 1945, more than 1,600 Nazi scientists were brought to America to continue their weapons work for the U.S. government. The Joint Chiefs endorsed Paperclip as the lesser of two evils—that if we didn’t recruit these Nazis, the Soviets would.

They developed rockets, aviation & space medicine, chemical & biological weapons, and many others at a feverish and paranoid pace that defined the Cold War

In FIRST PLATOON, I chronicle the Pentagon's Panopticon-like biometrics program.

The one designed to capture BIOMETRIC data from 80% of all Afghan citizens.

Here's what capturing DNA from a random citizen (no probable cause, not suspected of a crime) looks like👇. Here's what DoD's biometric capturing of iris scans — by a US army solider, from a random village elder (no probable cause, not suspected of a crime) — looked like in Afghanistan.

From FIRST PLATOON 👇

I miss travel.

From a reporting trip to Nevada: with Col. Slater, TD Barnes and Jim Freedman — discussing A-12 Oxcart @CIA Project 57, Area 25, Area 51, Area 52, UFO false flags, disinformation, and secrets. So many secrets.

AREA 51 Freedman, who worked at AREA 51 on Special Projects, and who was also an EG&G nuclear weapons engineer, kept records of things locked away in blue boxes.

I fact-checked names and dates and *other* things this way.

Excerpt from FIRST PLATOON in @WIRED today.

"“The military application of Palantir is awesome,” Kevin says. Palantir is capable of mining and aggregating data on individual people in a manner that would astonish almost anyone..."

wired.com/story/palantir… from SME Patrick Biltgen (in @WIRED piece) on why this matter now 👇💥

"...blog post about the leaked Parler location data that shows all the capitol breachers and who they are and where they were and the crime they committed. Ooops. Digital panopticon."

whitespace-solutions.com/blog/2021/1/19…

TEAR GAS for use against demonstrators was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in a highly classified, highly controversial [D]ARPA program during the Vietnam War.

This thread provides that history...

Global use of tear gas fuels police abuses amnestyusa.org/press-releases… To keep [D]ARPA’s research into tear gas and other nonlethal, crowd-control weapons secret, labs were set up overseas.

The program was overseen by defense contractor Battelle Memorial Institute and was considered part of Project Agile’s Remote Area Conflict program.

For readers interested in historical and factual (not political) information about Executive Order 12333—and why it is accurate to say assassination is prohibited and has also been legally authorized by almost every President since Eisenhower, here 👇 is a thread. Presidents do not refer to such covert action programs as assassination. As per docs @USNatArchives, they call it:

Eisenhower: "Health Alteration"
Kennedy: "Executive Action"
Reagan: "Pre-emptive Neutralization"
George W. Bush: "Lethal Direct Action"
Obama: "Targeted Killing"

Some history👇on the modern resurgence of presidential power (from SKV):

"During the Church Committee investigations President Ford met with Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Chief of Staff Dick Cheney to discuss how to keep secrets and restore presidential power..." ...As the committees prepared to release their reports, there was a stunning move from the White House. President Ford met with Rumsfeld and Cheney, who told him the reports had to be suppressed. Rumsfeld said, “We are better off with a political confrontation than a legal one.”

Russia's #Nuclear Agency now confirms 7 dead from its nuclear accident.

Fascinating declassified b/g on Severodvinsk: #CIA, #NRO, National Archive docs to follow here.

The announcement brings the number of deaths caused by the blast to seven wsj.com/articles/russi… via @WSJ @WSJ For starters, where #Severodvinsk is:

"The information about the increased radiation, first published on Thursday at 14.23, was removed from the city authorities’ portal Friday afternoon and is now just a dead-link." — @NilsenThomas, The Barents Observer