9 skeletons in the closet of the American government

Surely you have friends who are obsessed with conspiracies. No, not those who just know about them, but real fans — bespectacled people in hats who love secrets and smoke marijuana. Or secretly smoke marijuana. Belief in conspiracy theories gives such people the feeling that they are the keepers of incredibly important knowledge that the most educated people of this world do not possess.

Some American conspiracy theories really do not meet the expectations of "believers": the participation of state structures in the September 11 terrorist attack has not been proven, according to today's data, Armstrong really visited the Moon and it seems that the American government is not aliens at all. But there are theories that have not failed their "fans" and have actually made a contribution to world history.

At the end of World War II, American scientists "bought out" several Nazi scientists to work on CIA projects. Journalist Annie Jacobsen made public some details of the project in her book "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Research Project that Brought the Nazis to America." According to the daily Israeli newspaper Ynet, the Nazis were developing chemical weapons and LSD in American laboratories.

From 1932 to 1972, on the territory of the American state of Alabama, in the city of Tuskegee, a study of all stages of syphilis was conducted. The object of the study was 600 African Americans, 200 of whom were not infected before the experiment. By 1947, penicillin had become the standard medicine for the treatment of syphilitic symptoms, but this information was carefully hidden from the subjects. Over time, the subjects began to suffer from seizures and subsequent dementia, during the experiment most of them died. In 1972, the brutal project was discontinued due to information leaks to the press.

In the 30s of the XX century, the media magnate William Hearst published a number of yellow articles with the aim of demonizing marijuana. The articles caused a real public hysteria, which is not surprising, because their authors claimed that weed clouds the head of African Americans and forces them to rape white women, and in some cases gives them superhuman strength. With such provocative jeans, Hurst tried to stop the growth of marijuana production and thereby save the woodworking industry, protecting not only his own interests, but also the interests of the president. The articles were published around the same time as the release of the film "Shoal Madness", which promoted approximately the same ideas.

The MK-Ultra project is a CIA experiment aimed at developing methods of subjugating human consciousness for recruiting agents and finding out secret information during interrogations. The subjects were pumped with psychotropic substances, put into an artificial coma and subjected to hypnosis. The victims of the experiments were usually people who applied to the Allan Memorial Institute with minor neuroses or suffering from postpartum depression. According to unconfirmed reports, the experiment lasted for 10 years — from 1950 to 1960.

In 1961, the American government attempted to implement a secret military operation, during which 1,400 allegedly extradited Cubans landed on the coast of Cuba. The bottom line was that the "Cubans" had to do everything to make the local population believe in the beginning of the civil war and overthrow Fidel Castro. However, this American idea turned out to be one of the most disastrous: everything did not go according to plan, and Fidel himself knew about the operation in advance and took precautions long before the attack.

A story proving that the armed support of Kuwait by American militants in the war with Iraq was based on falsified data. On October 10, 1990, a Kuwaiti girl named Naira Al-Sabah addressed the US Congress and with tears in her eyes said that while working in one of the Kuwaiti hospitals, she saw "armed Iraqi soldiers burst into the hospital, threw newborn babies out of incubators and left them to die on the cold floor."

Later, Naira's testimony repeatedly became the main argument in support of the actions of the American authorities in relation to Iraq. In fact, Naira Al-Sabah turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and her emotional testimony was orchestrated by the American PR agency Hill & Knowlton, hired by the Government of Kuwait, for the purpose of disinformation and manipulation of public opinion.

Prohibition was in effect in the United States from 1920 to 1933 and was by no means popular with Americans. Many could not deny themselves the pleasure of having a couple of glasses of wine or a few beers. The FBI could not allow the prohibition to be ignored, and therefore the special services came up with an absolutely brutal way to convince ordinary Americans that alcohol is pure evil. Alcohol was poisoned by adding methane, formaldehyde, ammonia and even arsenic with kerosene.

A secret intelligence program of the FBI, the purpose of which was to suppress the activities of a number of US socio-political organizations opposing the Vietnam War and criticizing Martin Luther King. The US intelligence services did not shy away from spreading false information in the press, illegal arrests and traditional wiretapping of telephone conversations.

The sensational scandal caused by the former CIA technical specialist Edward Snowden. Snowden sold The Guardian and Washington Post newspapers information and evidence that the US National Security Agency is conducting surveillance of citizens of America and a number of other countries using publicly available means of communication. The situation caused a wide public outcry, Snowden was accused of espionage, after which the talkative IT specialist fled first to Hong Kong, and then to Russia.