The military has long exposed soldiers to toxic fumes and carcinogens. The most recent case, of massive open-air "burn pits" in Iraq and Afghanistan—where human waste was burned along with medicine, batteries, and car parts—was treated by the government much in the same way as previous cases: Denial via obfuscation of data and faulty science.

It was US military and State Department human testing that was cited as an "ethical example" of such testing by prosecutors at the Nuremberg Doctors' trial. Specifically, a case in which government and University of Chicago researchers infected mostly black inmates at the maximum-security Stateville Penitentiary in the Chicago suburbs with malaria, killing one.

UofC law professor Bernard Harcourt wrote in 2011 of the experiments and the state's ability to "manufacture consent": 

If consent can be achieved within Stateville prison, surely it can be achieved anywhere. If we can convince ourselves that these inmates volunteered and that their consent was legitimate—despite the fact that they were in formally coercive conditions— then it must not be hard to manufacture consent elsewhere. And not surprisingly, we do.