From: Magnu96196@aol.com

Source:
http://www.worldmedia.com/caq/articles/radiation.html
========================================================

DUCK AND COVER(UP): U.S. RADIATION TESTING ON HUMANS

If you have any lingering thoughts that the government's failure to disclose
radiation experimentation on humans was driven by misguided national security
concerns, throw them in the nearest nuclear waste dump. At least some
officials knew what they were doing was unconscionable and were ducking the
consequences and covering their tails. A recently leaked Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC) document lays out in the most bare-knuckled manner the policy of coverup. It is desired that no document be released which refers to
experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or
result in legal suits. Documents covering such work field should be classified
`secret,' wrote Colonel O.G. Haywood of the AEC. *1 This letter confirms a
policy of complete secrecy where human radiation experiments were concerned.
The Haywood letter may help explain a recently discovered 1953 Pentagon
document, declassified in 1975. The two-page order from the secretary of
defense ostensibly brought U.S. guidelines for human experimentation. in line
with the Nuremberg Code, making adherence to a universal standard official
U.S. policy. Ironically, however, the Pentagon document was classified and
thus was probably not seen by many military researchers until its
declassification in 1975.2 As these and a steady stream of similar reports
confirm, for decades, the U.S. government had not only used human guinea pigs
in radiation experiments, but had also followed a policy of deliberate
deception and cover up of its misuse of both civilians and military personnel
in nuclear weapons development and radiation research. While the Department of
Energy (DoE) has made some belated moves toward greater openness, there are
clear indications that other federal agencies and the White House have not yet
deviated from the time-honored tradition of deceit and self-serving secrecy.
 

CRACKS IN THE WALL OF SILENCE

The Clinton administration's first halting step toward taking responsibility
for past government misdeeds occurred on Pearl Harbor Day 1993, when DoE
Secretary Hazel O'Leary confirmed that the AEC, her agency's predecessor, had
sponsored experiments in which hundreds of Americans were exposed to
radioactive material, often without their consent. That O'Leary had decided to
break with her agency's long tradition of secrecy and deception was something
of a surprise. After all, she came to the job after a career in the nuclear
power industry. But, confronted by a media firestorm over the government's
Cold War nuclear experiments, O'Leary was left with few options. Her decision
to confirm some government abuses and reveal others was precipitated by a
series of reports by journalist Eileen Welsome in the Albuquerque Tribune last
November and the nearly simultaneous release of a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report on radiation releases. *3 Following a six-year investigation,
Welsome uncovered details of five experiments in which plutonium was injected
into 18 people without their informed consent. The GAO report, meanwhile, is
an important finding that government scientists deliberately released
radioactive material into populated areas so that they could study fallout
patterns and the rate at which radioactivity decayed. It profiles 13 different
releases of radiation from 1948-52. All were part of the U.S. nuclear weapons
development program. The report concludes that other planned radioactive
releases not documented here may have occurred at ... U.S. nuclear sites
during these years. *4 The disclaimer suggests that a good deal of information
about radiation experiments remains locked away in government files. Top DoE
aide Dan Reicher pulled O'Leary out of a meeting last November just before the
story broke to warn her that People were injected with plutonium back in the
1940s, and there's a newspaper in New Mexico that's about to lay out the whole
thing. *5 O'Leary provided information about experiments at major
universities, including MIT, the University of Chicago, California, and
Vanderbilt. Experimenters exposed about 2,000 Americans to varying degrees of
radiation. These numbers may grow as more information about experiments is
released.
 

INCIDENTAL FALLOUT

When O'Leary confirmed the human experiments, she also revealed two other
important activities. First, she admitted her agency had secretly conducted
204 underground nuclear tests in Nevada from 1963-1990. These clandestine
blasts were in addition to the 800-plus nuclear tests publicly announced
during that period. DoE's secrecy may have deceived only Congress and the U.S.
public. In 1990, the Soviet Union's minister for atomic energy produced an
estimate of U.S. detonations that was very close to the actual number
including the secret ones. O'Leary's other significant disclosure concerned
DoE's massive stock of weapons-grade plutonium: 33.5 metric tons of stockpiled
plutonium and another 55.5 metric tons deployed in nuclear warheads and for
similar uses. *6 This admission calls into question DoE's past claims that
national security required the continued operation of unsafe plutonium
processing plants to produce unnecessary stockpiles of plutonium. O'Leary's
disclosures about the human experiments have produced a torrent of publicity.
Much less attention has been paid to her admissions about secret nuclear tests
and plutonium stocks, which have much greater long-term implications for
nuclear weapons policy.
 

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE

O'Leary's promises of full disclosure by DoE aside, *7 one well-placed source
within the agency suggested that the Pentagon, NASA and the CIA were just
going through the motions. *8 For example, the CIA announced in January 1994
that after searching its files it could locate only one reference to human
experimentation with radiation. Former CIA official Scott Breckenridge charged
that in 1973, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the chemical division of the CIA's
Technical Services Division, may have destroyed many secret files, including
those on human radiation experiments. *9 The history of partial revelation and
near complete inaction is long. In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission first
revealed that the CIA may have conducted radiation experiments, *10 but the
records if not destroyed have yet to be uncovered. William Colby, CIA director
from 1973 to 1975, recently said, I recall the various drug tests, which were
scandalous, but nothing about radiation. *11 So far, the institutional
memories of the implicated agencies appear to be as conveniently spotty as
Colby's.
 

SECRET EXPERIMENTS

While officials have dallied, dedicated reporters, angry victims, and a
handful of government whistleblowers have exposed a pattern of secrecy and
deception. A brief sampling of some of the macabre, secret human experiments
uncovered by Welsome and others is chilling.
• * In 1945, Albert Stevens, a 58-year old California house painter suffering
from a huge stomach ulcer, was injected with doses of plutonium 238 and 239
equivalent to 446 times the average lifetime exposure.
*12 Doctors recommended an operation and told his children he had only six months to live. For the next year, scientists collected plutonium-laden urine and fecal samples from Stevens and used that data in a classified scientific report, A Comparison of the Metabolism of Plutonium in Man and the Rat. There is little doubt scientists knew of the danger: The problem of chronic plutonium poisoning is a matter of serious concern for those who come in contact with this material,
the report concluded.
13 AEC officials in 1947 refused to release the information because it contains material, which in the opinion of the [AEC], might adversely affect the national interest.
14• * In 1947, doctors injected plutonium into the left leg of Elmer Allen, a
36-year-old African American railroad porter. Three days later, the leg was
amputated for a supposed pre-existing bone cancer. Researchers analyzed tissue
samples to determine the physiology of plutonium dispersion.
*15 In 1973,scientists summoned Allen to the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago,where he was subjected to a follow-up whole body radiation scan, and his urine was analyzed to ascertain lingering levels of plutonium from the 1947
injection.
*16• * Beginning in 1949, the Quaker Oats Company, the National Institutes of
Health, and the AEC fed minute doses of radioactive materials to boys at the
Fernald School for the mentally retarded in Waltham, Massachusetts, to
determine if chemicals used in breakfast cereal prevented the body from
absorbing iron and calcium. The unwitting subjects were told that they were
joining a science club. The consent form sent to the boys' parents made no
mention of the radiation experiment.
*17• In 1963, 131 prison inmates in Oregon and Washington state were paid about $200 each to be exposed to 600 roentgens of radiation (100 times the allowable annual dose for nuclear workers). They signed consent forms agreeing to submit to X-ray radiation of my scrotum and testes, but were not warned about the possibility of contracting testicular cancer. Doctors later performed
vasectomies on the inmates to avoid the possibility of contaminating the
general population with irradiation-induced mutants.
*18
• * From 1960-71, in experiments which may have caused the most deaths and
spanned the most years, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of
Cincinnati, exposed 88 cancer patients to whole body radiation. *19
Many of the guinea pigs were poor African-Americans at Cincinnati General Hospital with inoperable tumors. All but one of the 88 patients have since died. *20
There is evidence that scientists forged signatures on the consent forms for
the Cincinnati experiments. Gloria Nelson testified before the House that her
grandmother, Amelia Jackson, had been strong and still working before she was
treated by Dr. Saenger. Following exposure to 100 rads of whole body radiation
(about 7,500 chest X-rays), Amelia Jackson bled and vomited for days and
became permanently disabled. Jackson testified that the signa- ture on her
grandmother's consent form was forged.21
 

WATCHING THE BOMB

While researchers were running tests on relatively small numbers of hapless
civilians, the military was conducting a series of potentially lethal
experiments on a massive scale. From 1946-63, the military ordered more than
200,000 active-duty GIs to observe one or more nuclear bomb tests either in
the Pacific or at the Nevada Test Site. The 195,000 GIs who served as part of
the occupation force in Hiroshima and Nagasaki may also have suffered the
effects of radiation. A vast body of information about nuclear bomb testing
and its effects on humans has yet to see the light of day, but some individual
accounts are harrowing. One atomic veteran, Jim O'Connor, provided a detailed
account of the Turk blast at the Nevada test site in March 1955. O'Connor
reported seeing someone crawling from a bunker near ground-zero after the
blast:

"There was a guy with a mannequin look who had apparently crawled behind
the bunker. Something like wires were attached to his arms and his face was
bloody. I smelled an odor like burning flesh. The rotary camera I'd seen [earlier] was going `zoom, zoom, zoom' and the guy kept trying to get up." *22 At this point, O'Connor fled and was picked up by AEC rad-safety monitors who took him to a hospital where he was treated for radiation overdose. The Defense Nuclear Agency refused to confirm or deny O'Connor's account, although there are reports which refer to a volunteer officer program at several of the test
blasts. Navy officer R.A. Hinners was another nuclear guinea pig. *23 Only a
mile from ground zero, he and seven other volunteers witnessed the detonation
of a 55-kiloton bomb (four times the Hiroshima blast) on April 25, 1953. While
the Army's report, Exercise Desert Rock VII and VIII, covers the 1957 test
series and notes that the observers suffered no adverse effects, the Pentagon
has not released any material relating to the use of volunteers at any other
tests. *24
 

DELIBERATE ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION RELEASES

Nuclear researchers did not limit themselves to small groups of selected
guinea pigs or large groups of soldiers under orders. The U.S. government also
deliberately released radioactive materials into the atmosphere, endangering
military personnel and untold numbers of civilians. Unsurprisingly, the people
exposed during these tests were not informed. In four of these tests at the
AEC's facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, bomb-testers set off conventional
explosives to send aloft clouds of radioactive material, including strontium
and uranium. When the AEC tracked the clouds across northern New Mexico, it
detected some radioactivity 70 miles away. According to a Los Alamos press
officer, there may have been as many as 250 other such tests during the same
period.25 Nor was this intentional release the largest. During the December
1949 Green Run test at the Hanford (Washington) Nuclear Reservation, the AEC
loosed thousands of curies of radioactive iodine-131 several times the amount
released from the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster into the atmosphere simply
to test its recently installed radiological monitoring equipment. Passing over
Spokane and reaching as far as the California-Oregon border, Green Run
irradiated thousands of downwinders, as civilians exposed to the effects of
airborne radiation tests are known, and contaminated an enormous swath of
cattle grazing and dairy land. *26 A team of epidemiologists is now looking
into an epidemic of late-occurring thyroid tumors and other radiogenic
disorders among the downwind residents in eastern Washington state. The
plant's emissions control systems were turned off during the experiment,
releasing into the atmosphere almost twice as much radioactive iodine-131 as
originally planned. The GAO report notes that the off-site population was not
forewarned [nor] made aware of the [test] for several decades. It also notes
that although adverse weather patterns kept the radiation from spreading as
far as expected, monitoring Air Force planes detected hot clouds over 100
miles northeast of the site. *27
 

SACRIFICIAL LAMBS

Even when the government took steps to create the appearance of openness, it
was less than candid. You are in a very real sense active participants in the
Nation's atomic test program, proclaimed a 1955 AEC propaganda booklet widely
disseminated to downwind neighbors of the Nevada Test Site. Some of you have
been inconvenienced by our test operations, and at times some of you have been
exposed to potential risk from flash, blast, or fallout. You have accepted the
inconvenience or the risk without fuss, without alarm, and without panic. *28
The AEC's concern for inconveniences or honesty, however, did not extend to
the 4,500 Utah and Nevada sheep who died mysteriously in 1953 after exposure
to fallout. The AEC denied any causal connection between the sheep's exposure
to radioactive fallout from the 1953 Upshot-Knothole tests and their deaths.
*29 In a 1956 trial, Utah and Nevada sheep ranchers lost their lawsuit against
the government. But years later, Harold Knapp, a former AEC scientist who
analyzed the 1953 sheep deaths, challenged the AEC's accounts. The simplest
explanation, he told a 1979 congressional committee, of the primary cause of
death in the lambing ewes is irradiation of the ewe's gastrointestinal tract
by beta particles from all the fission products ingested by the sheep along
with open range forage. *30 In a 1982 retrial, A. Sherman Christensen, the
same judge who presided over the 1956 trial, noting that fraud was committed
by the U.S. Government when it lied, pressured witnesses, and manipulated the
processes of the court, ruled for the ranchers. *31
 

PARADISE LOST

U.S. government callousness and deception extended halfway around the world.
Another nuclear experiment was underway in the Marshall Islands a de facto
strategic colony of the U.S. located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Between 1946 and 1958, the U.S. exploded 67 atomic and hydrogen bombs at
Bikini and Enewetok, two Marshall group atolls. Once again, the full impact
and consequences of this experiment would not be disclosed for decades, and
then only reluctantly. The largest and dirtiest of the Marshall Islands blasts
was code-named Bravo. At 15 megatons more than 1,000 times the size of the
Hiroshima bomb Bravo rained lethal radioactive fallout over thousands of
unsuspecting islanders under circumstances which remain mysterious. The people
of Rongelap atoll were especially hard-hit. They were evacuated from their
home islands two days after Bravo, following the absorption of massive doses
of high-level fallout. Following the Rongelap evacuation, the AEC considered
repatriating the islanders to their home atoll in order to gather vital
fallout data. In 1956, Dr. G. Failla, chair of the AEC's Advisory Committee on
Biology and Medicine, wrote to AEC head Lewis Strauss: The Advisory Committee hopes that conditions will permit an early accomplishment of the plan [to return the Rongelap people]. The Committee is also of the opinion that here is
the opportunity for a useful genetic study of the effects on these people. 32
Three years later, Dr. C.L. Dunham, head of the AEC's Division of Biology and
Medicine, reiterated the AEC's interest. Studying the Rongelap victims of the
Bravo blast will, he wrote, ... contribute to estimates of long term hazards
to human beings and to an evaluation of the recovery period following a single
nuclear detonation. *33 Having established the near-perfect longitudinal human
radiation experiment in 1954, DoE continues to compile data from their
Marshallese subjects. It appears that AEC was guilty of both negligently
disregarding the well-being of the Marshallese and then lying about its
actions. On February 24, 1994, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chair of the
House Committee on Natural Resources, convened a hearing on Bravo. Recalling
weather data that demonstrated prior knowledge that islanders would receive
substantial fallout, and that winds had not unexpectedly shifted, *34 Rep.
Miller declared that We have deliberately kept that information from the
Marshallese. That clearly constitutes a cover-up. *35
 

A PATTERN OF IGNORED DISCLOSURES

The record of U.S. government lies, misrepresentation, and cover-ups to
support its nuclear research program is incontrovertible, if not yet complete.
From the inception of the U.S. nuclear program, government policy has placed
military and scientific interests above both the well-being of thousands of
people and the truth. And, Secretary O'Leary's evident openness
notwithstanding, the government's record in responding to earlier disclosures
is not reassuring. When faced with damaging disclosures in the past, the
government attempted to stonewall. When that would not suffice, the government only grudgingly responded. A few examples:
• * In 1980, Congress issued a stinging report, The Forgotten Guinea Pigs,
which concluded that the AEC chose to secure, at any cost, the atmospheric
nuclear weapons testing program rather than to protect the health and welfare
of the residents of the area who lived downwind from the site. *36
• * In 1982, the New York Times provided evidence that policy-makers foresaw
dangers and acted to cover them up. The story included a statement by a former
Army medic, Van R. Brandon, of Sacramento, that his medical unit kept two sets
of books of radiation readings at the Nevada Test Site during the 1956-57
tests. One set was to show that no one received an [elevated] exposure,
Brandon told the paper. The other set of books showed ... the actual reading.
That set was brought in a locked briefcase every morning, he recalled. *37 DoE
officials simply denied Brandon's allegations, and no further investigation
was pursued. *38
• * In 1986, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) released a report detailing human
radiation experiments that AEC and its successors conducted between the 1940s
and the 1970s. Many were designed to measure the effects of radiation on
humans, and according to Markey, American citizens thus became nuclear
calibration devices for experimenters run amok. 39 The Markey report, American
Nuclear Guinea Pigs, described 31 grisly experiments involving 695 people who
were captive audiences or populations that some experimenters frighteningly
might have considered `expendable.' 40 When the Reagan administration refused
to investigate the disclosures, the Markey report was quickly forgotten. There
was a massive public relations relationship that existed between the [Reagan]
administration, the defense contractors and experimenters in America, charged
Markey, that worked very effectively throughout the 1980s. I'd say something,
and I'd get attacked, and it would be a one-day story. *41
 

A LONG, HARD ROAD TO JUSTICE

From the beginning of the nuclear age, the federal government not only ignored
or suppressed knowledge of abuses in the nuclear experimental program, it also
fought all attempts to hold it accountable for damages. A series of Supreme
Court decisions dating back to 1950 bars both atomic veterans and downwinders
from suing the federal government. *42 Veterans are denied the right to sue
for injuries suffered while on active duty because the Court believes that
this would interfere with military necessity and national security. *43
Downwinders have also encountered many obstacles in their long struggle for
medical studies and compensation. One group of Utah residents who lived under
the fallout during the 1950s and early 1960s finally succeeded in bringing
their federal lawsuit to trial in 1982. They scored an important victory when
the trial judge found the bomb tests were responsible for their cancers and
awarded them damages. *44 But the appeals court reversed this verdict by re-
defining the discretionary function exception to the Federal Tort Claims Act
to make the government immune from lawsuits of this kind. *45 In essence, the
court held that setting off nuclear bombs was within the discretionary power
of high-ranking officials and could not be questioned in a lawsuit for
damages. After the federal appeals court stripped the downwinders of their
victory, in 1990, Congress finally stepped in and adopted the Radiation
Exposure Compensation Act for downwinders and some groups of uranium miners.
Claimants must document residence in the fallout area and that they suffer
from one of 13 cancers linked to radiation exposure. The program,
administered by the Department of Justice, places a ceiling of $50,000 per
claim, although many awards were smaller. Justice granted 818 claims out of
1,460 which were submitted as of January 1994.46 In 1988, Congress acted on
behalf of atomic veterans, forcing the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to
establish a limited compensation plan with a $75,000 cap. It provides
presumptive disability to veterans who can prove that they suffer from one of
a list of 13 cancers (e.g., bone, breast, skin, stomach, thyroid, leukemia,
etc.), and that they were present during one or more nuclear test blasts. Of
more than 15,000 veterans' claims filed as of January 1994, only 1,401 have
been approved, indicating that most claimants are unable to qualify under the
terms of the program. *47 One problem confronting many veterans is inaccurate
or missing military records that omit service at a nuclear test site. *48
Another is to prepare a radiation dose reconstruction that estimates the
amount of exposure the veteran received. Many vets have challenged the
accuracy of dose estimates prepared by a private contractor, Science
Applications International. This privately held research corporation includes
among its stockholders Defense Department officials including Secretary
William Perry and Deputy Secretary John Deutch, and one-time nominee Bobby Ray Inman. The Defense Department has little to say about potential conflicts of
interest. We're going to decline to comment on this. I don't think we would
have anything that would be meaningful to say, said Pentagon spokesman Capt.
Michael Doubleday. *49 A final obstacle is that just having cancer isn't
enough; veterans must prove they are disabled by it.
 

WHAT WILL CLINTON DO?

The Clinton administration is about to undergo a test of its own. The key
question will be how it defines who will be considered a nuclear test victim
for purposes of health research and compensation. Given the decades-long
record of coverup and callousness, there is little reason to assume that the
recent revelations concerning human experimentation will produce any lasting
benefit for the tens of thousands of veterans and civilians harmed by nuclear
weapons testing and radiation experiments over the past half century let alone
the estimated five million U.S. citizens exposed to dangerous levels of
radiation during the Cold War. * Early indications are that the White House
will stake out a restrictive position. DoE head O'Leary also appears to be
seeking some remedy short of compensating all categories of victims. So,
apparently, is the GAO. The GAO's report on atmospheric radiation releases
provides a glimpse of the emerging strategy. In assessing the significance of
the Green Run test, the GAO struck a cautious note. The test [was not]
intended to be a radiation experiment or a field test of radiobiological
effects. [After] examining still classified passages [we] found that they
don't refer to any such intentions. *50 This interpretation could provide the
basis for a restrictive reading of who is entitled to compensation and follow-
up health studies.
 

STACKING THE DECK

The Clinton administration may also be moving to head off potentially
monstrous payouts to victims. To deal with the predicted avalanche of claims,
as well as to fend off adverse publicity, the administration has established
an advisory committee and an interagency working group to define policy. The
advisory committee's mission statement, as well as the backgrounds of some of
the people appointed to the panels, give victims cause for skepticism. The
President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments is composed of scientists, medical ethicists, and lawyers and is chaired by Dr. Ruth Faden of
Johns Hopkins University. The White House announcement stated that its mission is to evaluate the ethical and scientific standards of government sponsored human experiments which involved intentional exposure to ionizing radiation.
*51 (emphasis added) When read in conjunction with the GAO report's cautious
conclusion, this language appears to sharply limit possible claimants. And one
of the advisory panel members, Washington, D.C. lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, has
credentials that have raised eyebrows. Feinberg played a controversial role in
forging an 11th-hour settlement of the class action lawsuit against Agent
Orange manufacturers in 1984. Working at the direction of trial judge Jack
Weinstein in Brooklyn, New York, Feinberg helped ram through a $180 million
settlement. Although the figure seems large, it is grossly inadequate in light
of the 250,000 veteran-claimants and the severity of their disabilities. Since
the settlement, Judge Weinstein has blocked every subsequent lawsuit against
the Agent Orange makers even for veterans whose cancer appeared years after
the settlement was reached. * The Interagency Working Group has
representatives from every federal agency involved in radiation research and
also includes a lawyer member whose past clients raise questions about his
impartiality. Joel Klein, recently named White House Deputy Legal Counsel, was
previously a partner in Klein Farr Smith & Taranto, a Washington, D.C. law
firm which represented a number of corporate defendants in cases involving the
due process rights of class action members. In 1985, Klein's firm won a
Supreme Court decision in Phillips Petroleum v. Shutts, which narrowly
interpreted the rights of claimants in class actions. Klein also has a case
pending before the Supreme Court, Ticor Title v. Brown, which experts expect
will further diminish the rights of injured parties in class action suits.
 

CLOUDED HORIZONS

It is too early to tell what role either Feinberg or Klein will play in
determining compensation for nuclear test victims, but their histories don't
lend cause for optimism. And given the administration's efforts at damage
control, some advocates of radiation victims are dubious that the recent
disclosures will bring any more change than those in the past. Rob Hager, a
public interest lawyer in Washington, has been fighting the DoE for years. He
has waged an 11-year legal battle on behalf of the widow of Joe Harding, who
developed cancer after working at a DoE uranium processing plant in Paducah,
Kentucky. The DoE's approach to compensation is a scorched earth policy;
settle no claims and litigate to the hilt, Hager charges. They've changed
their head, but it doesn't seem to be connected to the body. *52 Eileen
Welsome agrees. The Albuquerque journalist, who recently won a Pulitzer Prize
for her reporting on this issue, was asked what she learned. She responded,
The DoE of today is no different from the DoE of 50 years ago. It's an
obstructionist agency; it doesn't follow the law. I think it's an agency that
bears careful scrutiny and constant scrutiny. 53

 THE BUCHENWALD TOUCH

The still-emerging history of nuclear experimentation raises important issues
of medical ethics and calls into question the scientific community's
sensitivity to and awareness of these issues. It also raises the question of
whether these experimenters, in furthering the Pentagon's military and
security demands, violated international standards on human experimentation.
Even at this late date, it seems that some scientists involved are unable to
see any problems with their behavior. Patricia Durbin, a scientist at the
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California who participated in plutonium
experiments, recently said:
"They were always on the lookout for somebody who had some kind of terminal
disease who was going to undergo an amputation. These things were not done to
plague people or make them sick and miserable. They were not done to kill people. They were done to gain potentially valuable information. The fact that they were injected and provided this valuable data should almost be a sort of memorial rather than something to be ashamed of. It doesn't bother me to talk about the plutonium injectees because of the value of the information they provided. *1" And Dr. Victor Bond, a medical physicist and doctor at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently defended the Fernald
experiments, in which retarded children were deliberately given radioactive
substances in their breakfast cereal. A question arose as to whether chemicals
in breakfast cereals interfered with the uptake of iron or calcium in
children. An answer was needed, declared Bond. In reference to the entire
series of cold war nuclear experiments, Bond offered that It's useful to know
what dose of radiation sterilizes; it's useful to know what different doses of
radiation will do to human beings. *2 While Drs. Bond and Durbin rationalized
such programs, other scientists have spoken out. Referring to the Cincinnati
experiments in which 88 cancer patients were exposed to massive whole body
doses of radiation, Dr. David Egilman, a former Cincinnati faculty member,
said, The study was designed to test the effects of radiation on soldiers. It
was known that whole-body radiation wouldn't treat the patients' cancer. What
happened was one of the worst things this government has done to its citizens.
*3 And Dr. Joseph Hamilton, a neurologist at the University of California
Hospital in San Francisco, referred to his own human radiation experiments in
the 1940s as having a little of the Buchenwald touch.

*4 THE BUCHENWALD TOUCH
is not limited to Cold War-related experiments. In what has come to be known
as the Tuskegee Study, 412 African American sharecroppers suffering from
syphillis were rounded up in Tuskegee, Alabama, in the early 1930s. For forty
years, the men were never told what had stricken them while doctors from the
U.S. Public Health Service observed the ravages of the disease, from blindness
and paralysis to dementia and early death. Even after penicillin proved to be
an effective treatment for syphilis, they were left untreated. *5 Nor are such
experiments a thing of the past. Recent congressional hearings revealed
studies on schizophrenia in the late 1980s where doctors intentionally
worsened patients' symptoms, causing relapses and leading to the death by
suicide of at least one of the patients. Dr. Michael Davidson, who led a study
at the VA Hospital in the Bronx, defended the study, saying, it would not be
advisable to [warn] the patients about psychosis or relapse. *6

      ====================================================

Comments:
       This human experiment theme continues today via the fact that the DOE
prevented the nuclear bomb plant workers from telling doctors what they were
exposed to---- which produced many of the diseases in the workers.    As a
result many workers had lots of symptoms---but never any full diagnosis.
This is just as criminal in nature as the injections of plutonium into these
other folks.   It violates the informed consents and full protection of health
issues and highly impacts the epidemiology of toxic metals and nuclear
exposures beyond the cancer reporting.

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