There is Nothing Worse than a Reformed Drunk
We stated in an earlier article that America’s ‘human rights’ calculus excludes any atrocities committed outside its own borders and focuses only on what happens at home. That’s true today, but it wasn’t always like this.
In fact, all of the strident and self-righteous moralising about human rights emanating from the US today, is a relatively recent development that began only in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Prior to that time, the CIA, every branch of the US military, many Departments of the US government, and even some UN agencies like the WHO, were all very busy committing countless atrocities against the domestic US population.
It was only after evidence of many of these events escaped confinement and became public knowledge, that the US relocated its human-rights atrocities offshore.
And it was only then that Americans “got religion”, and began not only preaching their newly-assumed sanctity, but condemning other nations for what were often much smaller transgressions than these same Americans had practiced at home for so long.
A Series of Unfortunate Events
We have briefly reviewed Black Slavery and the genocide of the Native population, but there is much more. Throughout the 20th century, and especially after World War 2, the US government initiated extensive programs of human experimentation that created an almost unbelievable litany of domestic human rights violations and atrocities.
Virtually all of these appear to have escaped the notice of most Americans – and also that of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose human-rights chastity and amnesia are almost legendary.
Few Americans seem aware of the many and long-lived CIA and US military programs of human experimentation on innocent and uninformed citizens, always without consent and most often with tragic results.
These included an extensive program of mind-control experiments, deliberate infection with live cancer cells, syphillis, gonorrhea and hepatitis, deliberate exposure to severe radioactivity and to many forms of biological, bacteriological and chemical pathogens.
The experiments encompassed brainwashing, torture, electroshock, nerve agents, drugs and exotic hypnosis experiments, surgical experiments, and a wide range of pharmacological “research”, all conducted on innocent, uninformed and helpless civilian victims ranging from newborn babies to adults.
The Dirtiest Secrets in the US
For more than 100 years, there have been countless unethical experiments illegally performed on human test subjects in the US that were performed without the knowledge, consent, or informed consent of the test subjects.
These experiments included the deliberate infection of people with deadly or debilitating diseases, exposure to biological and chemical pathogens, human radiation experiments, injection with toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, interrogation/torture experiments, and a wide variety of others.
Many of these tests were performed on children and mentally disabled individuals. In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were deliberately selected from poor racial minorities. Many were prisoners, who were given no choice in participation.
Often, subjects were sick or disabled people, whose doctors told them they were receiving medical treatment, but instead were used as the subjects of harmful and deadly experiments. We will never know the total number who died.
Most of these human research programs were funded by the US government, especially the CIA, and the US military and federal or military corporations. They were highly secretive, and in most cases their existence was not discovered until they had been in operation for many years.
It would be many more years before court orders under the Freedom of Information Act would cause records to be released, but by then the CIA and the US military had destroyed most of the documents.
As noted elsewhere, it was only by filing and communication errors that records of some of these projects survived. We can therefore assume the available evidence covers only a minuscule portion of the violations and atrocities committed.
Many of these experiments continued until the late 1990s and beyond, and many people claim – and provide evidence – that they still continue today.
American Nazis – Eugenics and Euthanasia
Few people are aware that the US conducted a long-running eugenics program designed to create a perfect (white) race, that resulted in countless thousands of forced sterilisations, and even deaths, of those considered racially or otherwise inferior.
Not only that, euthanasia reared its head – in polite company, too. A 1911 Carnegie Institute report recommended euthanasia as one of its “solutions” to the problem of cleansing society of unfit genetic attributes. The most commonly suggested method was to set up local gas chambers.
For the past 60 years, the world has been eager to condemn Germany for its master-race eugenics program and the various human experiments performed, but no one, least of all Americans, seems aware that Germany patterned both its eugenics program and those experiments on what it had seen in the US, and in fact directly copied many of them.
The Initiators and “Sponsors” of these Atrocities
Support and funding for, and participation in, US eugenics programs and these secret and illegal human experiments, cut a very wide swath through American government and society.
US Government initiation and funding originated from agencies that include the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, the US Army, the US Navy, various branches of the US military, the US Atomic Energy Commission, various federal or military corporations, the US Public Health Service, and the UN World Health Organization.
Involved corporations include the Quaker Oats Company, Johnson & Johnson, the Dow Chemical Company, Raytheon Corporation, the Harriman railroad fortune, Dr. J.H. Kellogg (Kellog’s Foods), and various American pharmaceutical companies.
Other esteemed supporters included the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford foundation, and the Carnegie Institution. A list of famous individual supporters would include Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, and Luther Burbank.
There were also various notable universities such as Harvard, the University of Rochester, the University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, Columbia University, Cornell University Medical School, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, Johns Hopkins University Hospital, as well as the full cooperation of many hospitals, schools, orphanages, prisons, and other health care institutions.
And the Tools of Their Trade
The substances used included LSD, heroin, morphine, Benzedrine, marijuana, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, ether, nerve gases VX and Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, a variety of biological agents, sulfuric acid, scopolamine, mustard gas, radioactive isotopes, and various dioxins from Dow Chemical.
They also included electroshock, synthetic estrogens, cancer cells, animal sexual organs transplanted into humans, cow blood transfusions and much more.
Deliberately-transmitted diseases included syphillis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, cancer, bubonic plague, beriberi, cholera, whooping cough, yellow fever, dengue fever, encephalitis and typhoid.
And, true to their espionage origins, these studies all carried exotic names like Project MK-ULTRA, Project Paperclip, Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke, Operation Midnight Climax, Project Chatter, Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), Operation Plumbbob, among others.
Did They Know it was Wrong? Of Course They Did
The CIA leadership had concerns about discovery of their unethical and illegal behavior, as evidenced in a 1957 Inspector General Report, which stated:
Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repurcussions in political and diplomatic circles … 1957 CIA Inspector General Report
MK-ULTRA activities continued until 1973 when CIA director Richard Helms, fearing that they would be exposed to the public, ordered the project terminated, and all of the files destroyed.
However, a clerical error had sent many documents to the wrong office, so when CIA workers were destroying the files, some of them remained, and were later released under a Freedom of Information Act request by investigative journalist John Marks.
Nevertheless, because the records have almost all been destroyed, the numbers and identities of the victims will never be known.
A secret AEC document dated April 17, 1947, titled Medical Experiments in Humans stated:
“It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such fieldwork should be classified Secret.”
At the same time, the Public Health Service was instructed to tell citizens downwind from bomb tests that the increases in cancers were due to neurosis, and that women with radiation sickness, hair loss, and burned skin were suffering from “housewife syndrome”.
And Let’s All Go Free
In none of the cases above, nor in other similar events, did any of these so-called government researchers face sanction for their crimes. Instead, the Department of Defense colluded with the Department of Justice to ensure no one was ever called to account.
As of 2007, not a single US government researcher had been prosecuted for human experimentation, and few victims of these US government atrocities have received compensation, or in many cases, even an acknowledgment of what was done to them.
In 1987 the United States Supreme Court ruled that a U.S. serviceman who was given LSD without his consent, as part of military experiments, could not sue the U.S. Army for damages.
This is also true for all the US soldiers who fought in the Iraq-Kuwait war, who were exposed to lethal doses of so-called ‘depleted’ uranium and have suffered terribly. The US government denies not only liability, but the existence of the mens’s illnesses.
To add insult to injury, President Obama’s government has declared the following, on the CIA’s deliberate infection with syphillis of thousands in Guatemala:
“The United States is committed to taking appropriate steps to address that wrong,” but a “lawsuit is not the proper vehicle – and this court is not the proper forum – through which the consequences of this shameful conduct may be resolved.”
And, so it doesn’t go unsaid, in none of these cases, was there any concerned discussion of “human rights”.
By 龙信明, www.bearcanada.com