Here are the lyrics from a song by The Police, as managed by the IRS (Miles Copeland III) alongside the FBI booking agency (Ian Copeland), and as played by Stewart Copeland — the third son of a CIA founding member.

Don’t think me unkind
Words are hard to find
They’re only checks I’ve left unsigned
From banks of chaos in my mind

De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
Their innocence will pull me through
De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
They’re meaningless and all that’s true

Poets, priests, and politicians
Have words to thank for their positions
Words that scream for your submission
And no one’s jamming their transmission

At the peak of the band success in 1986, the three brothers’ father gave this interview.

It’s not unethical to give the press false information. We do have a kind of adversary relationship with the press. There’s nothing we should try to do to shut them up, but it is absolutely permissible to tell the press whatever is in the interests of the American people to have the press know or think.

…the CIA isn’t overthrowing enough anti-American governments or assassinating enough anti-American leaders, but I guess I’m getting old.

[…]

With modern communications being what they are, we’re supposed to be the best informed people in history, but we’re not. We’re the most informed, which is hardly the same thing.

The man who helped develop and apply the Allied disinformation tactics of WWII and called himself a terrorist ended the interview by unironically suggesting “you can make up your own mind”.

Earlier in a 1974 interview (PDF), a year before his three sons conspired to run The Police and dominate pop music charts, he had said something similar.

First of all, [in terms of the CIA toppling foreign governments by using] dirty tricks, I don’t think [we are doing it] nearly enough under the present circumstances, given the kind of world we didn’t create, we just happen to be living in.

Just another industrial ugly morning, the factory belches filth into the sky, he walks unhindered through the picket lines today, and doesn’t think to wonder why…

The U.S. government has a notable detail in their new sanctions press release.

The Department of State is concurrently delivering to Congress a determination pursuant to the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act) regarding Russia’s use of the chemical weapon chloropicrin against Ukrainian troops.

Germany is said to have been the first to use the “pesticide” chloropicrin (tear gas) in WWI on the battlefield, despite being outlawed in the the 1899 Hague Convention. The gas was denoted by a blue cross on artillery warheads.

[It is the] particular horror of gas that is captured in Wilfred Owen’s poem Dulce et Decorum Est, arguably the most widely read description of the horrors of war in the English language.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

The Soviet Union then was known to use cloropicrin in 1989 to control crowds in Georgia, so that soldiers could rush in and hack people to death with shovels.

Working with Georgian scientists, the delegation has identified that agent to be chloropicrin… Twenty persons died and 4,000 sought hospital treatment when Soviet troops, using gases and wielding shovels, broke up an all-night demonstration by 8,000 to 10,000 Georgians… the majority of the deaths were due to the use of “sharpened shovels” by the troops who charged into the demonstration “hacking people to death”…

Shovels? Did someone say Soviet anti-democratic shock troops swung bladed shovels as a psychological and physical weapon in the past? Fast forward to Russian leadership today:

Russian Soldiers Are Attacking Ukrainians With Shovels… “The lethality of the standard-issue MPL-50 entrenching tool is particularly mythologised in Russia,” the U.K. MoD said. Indeed, the MPL-50 has become an iconic weapon of the Spetsnaz, Russia’s special operations forces. In his 1987 book about the origins of Spetsnaz, former Soviet intelligence agent Viktor Suvorov begins by explaining how the soldiers made the shovel into a deadly weapon.

It begs the question how toxic is the tear gas itself, used to illegally immobilize military targets, relative to the bladed-shovel attack that follows like a WWI trench charge.

In humans, a concentration of 2.4 g/m³ can cause death from acute pulmonary oedema in one minute (Hanslian, 1921). concentration us low as I ppm of Chloropicrin in air produces an intense smarting pain in the eyes, and the immediate reaction of any person is to leave the vicinity in haste. If exposure is continued, it may cause serious lung injury. […] As stated above, because of the tear gas effect, a person would be unable to remain in a dangerous concentration of chloropicrin for more than a few seconds. Great care should be taken to prevent unauthorized persons from approaching a fumigation site because the tear gas effect is so powerful that they may become temporarily blinded and panic-stricken, which, in turn, may lead to accidents.

Related:

• 1993 Russian-backed Chemical Weapons Convention outlawed use of tear gas “as a method of warfare”
• 2022 September 23, Russian K-51 grenades with chlorine dropped on Ukraine
• 2022 October 12, Russian K-51 grenade with CS tear gas dropped on Ukraine
• 2023 December 22, Russia drops “K-51 aerosol grenades filled with irritant CS gas (2-Chlorobenzalmalononitrile)”. (Also observed in November and “new type of special RG-VO gas grenades containing an unknown chemical substance was used by the Russians on Dec. 14″)
• 2024 March 11, Russia attacks 50 times a week with tear gas grenades dropped by UAVs