To this day there are no adequate safeguards to protect people from secret government experimentation. Since the mid-1970s we have witnessed the spectacular rise of genetic engineering and molecular biology, as well as the concomitant outbreak of new and mysterious diseases like AIDS, chronic fatigue syndrome, the peculiar "Four Corners" lung disease discovered on Navajo land, and the appearance of unprecedented "emerging" viruses never before seen on the planet.
Investigators linking the possible origin of these diseases to the dangerous engineering of new microbes are often dismissed as paranoids and crackpots. The mysterious Persian Gulf War syndrome is yet another recent illness clouded in military and biologic secrecy, with the origin and cause still debated and the medical records of sick veterans often "lost" or otherwise unavailable. Not surprisingly, the same government institutions that funded the radiation experiments now largely control the research, the funding, and the cover stories pertaining to all these new diseases and viruses.
What is clear from studying the Committee's Final Report is that the medical and scientific professions collaborated with the government and the military to abuse and harm U.S. citizens. In the process, the nuclear establishment literally got away with murder. And there is simply no end to the secrets that still emerge from the Cold War years that began 58 years ago with the Manhattan Project.
In January 2000, the government presented the results of a statistical study showing that atomic workers employed in the nuclear weapons industry during the Cold War were more likely to suffer a higher rate of cancer, due to their exposure to cancer-causing radiation and chemicals.
From the 1940s up to the present time, government lawyers and scientists have repeatedly rejected the claims of workers who became sick as result of nuclear radiation and exposure to deadly uranium, plutonium, and fluorine. As many as 600,000 workers in 14 nuclear weapons plants are now affected by the government's final admission of wrongdoing in exposing these people to cancer and other chronic illnesses.
According to a Los Angeles Times report, "workers told of spending years trying to get compensation payments from the state, of having to hire attorneys to get disability pay, of going to clinics that forced them to sign away rights to a portion of any future disability payment before they could be treated."
Kay Sutherland, a worker at the Hanford plutonium plant in central Washington State, told a hearing that "the people in this area have been forced into poverty because they've had to retire in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, too young to get a retirement, and too young to get Social Security. They fall through the cracks and they die." Sutherland has lost four of her five family members to disease, and has an enlarged liver and multiple tumors. She considers herself "a Holocaust survivor for the American Cold War.
How can we stop these nuclear and biological horrors, which have condemned thousands of innocent people to disease and death? Why must decades of government-sanctioned medical abuse be kept secret and covered-up by scientists and physicians who claim to be concerned about the health of the public?
One way to prevent abuse might be to bring the physician-scientist perpetrators of these experiments to justice in a court of law. However, unless the public is aroused, this is unlikely to happen.
Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Geoffrey Sea notes: "A startling fact about the experiments is that, despite the documentation of hundreds of cases of unethical conduct resulting in lasting damage to thousands of people, not a single physician or nurse, scientist or technician, policy maker or administrator has yet come forward to admit wrongdoing."
For over twenty years the law allowed the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to use Americans as "guinea pigs." This law (the U.S. code annotated Title 50, Chapter 32, Section 1520 , dated July 30, 1977) remained on the books until it was repealed under public pressure in 1998. The new and revised bill prohibits the DoD from conducting tests and experiments on humans, but allows "exceptions."
One of the exceptions is that a test or experiment can be carried out for "any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or research activity." Thus, the 1998 law has obvious loopholes which allow secret testing to continue.
For details on the restrictions (and exceptions) for human testing for chemical and biological agents, consult the Gulf War Vets website at http.//www.gulfwarvets.com/1520a.htm.
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