QuoteFort Detrick is the U.S. Army's biowarfare facility, founded in 1943. Frank Olson was one of the first scientists to work there. From the final years of World War II through the Korean War and up to the present time scientists at Fort Detrick developed biological weapons including anthrax....In November 1953 Olson attended a meeting of a group of CIA agents at a country retreat where they discussed their work. Olson was suspected by the CIA of being a security risk. He was given a drink laced with LSD and when well under the influence of the drug he was subjected to interrogation using Artichoke techniques, probably a very unpleasant experience.
A week later Olson was staying in Room 1018A at the Hotel Statler in New York City under the supervision of a CIA doctor, Richard Lashbrook. The manager of the hotel, Armond Pastore, heard a thump outside and went out to find Olson dying on the pavement, having fallen from the 13th floor. The manager later found that a phone call had been made from Room 1018A to a number in Long Island and the caller had said only, "Olson's gone."
....A California history professor, Kathryn Olmstead, has discovered documents at the Gerald Ford library which were written by Cheney and Rumsfeld.
They show how far the White House went to conceal information about Olson's death — and his role in preparing anthrax and other biological weapons. ...
Cheney and Rumsfeld were given the task of covering up the details of Frank Olson's death. At the time, Rumsfeld was White House Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford. Dick Cheney was a senior White House assistant.
The documents uncovered by Professor Olmstead include one that states "Dr Olson's job was so sensitive that it is highly unlikely that we would submit relevant evidence".
QuoteThe four-month analysis suggests that The CIA purchased supplies for experiments that included the dissemmation of unknown substances for aerosol devices mounted in suitcases and in the exhaust of a specially modified 1953 Mercury, according to the church's report.
....analysts said they examined about 600 pages of CIA financial records that were part of the agency's MK-ULTRA mind control experiments. The documents have been made public by the CIA during the last 2 1/2 years.
QuoteThe CIA had never acknowledged any involvement with open air tests of biological agents. Much of the intelligence agency's biological testing during the 1950s was conducted for the agency by the Army.
Previously released documents and congressional hearings showed the Army's "Special Operations Division" at Fort Detrich, Md., carried out a series of tests between 1949 and 1968 apparently designed to gauge the vulnerability of American metropolitan areas to possible Soviet chemical and bacteriological warfare.
Quote1978 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques is an international treaty ratified by 75 states, and signed by a further 17, that prohibits use of environmental modification techniques to cause earthquakes and tsunamis, amongst other phenomena
QuoteBy November 1943 the biological weapons facility at Detrick was completed, in addition, the United States constructed three other facilities - a biological agent production plant at Vigo County near Terre Haute, Indiana, a field-testing site on Horn Island in Mississippi, and another field site near Granite Peak in Utah.[7] According to an official history of the period, "the elaborate security precautions taken [at Camp Detrick] were so effective that it was not until January 1946, 4 months after VJ Day, that the public learned of the wartime research in biological weapons".[9]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biological_weapons_program
QuoteAnother bacterium, Bacillus globigii, never shown to be harmful to people, was released in San Francisco, while still others were tested on unwitting residents in New York, Washington, D.C., and along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, among other places, according to Army reports released during the 1977 hearings.
In New York, military researchers in 1966 spread Bacillus subtilis variant Niger, also believed to be harmless, in the subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto tracks in stations in midtown Manhattan. The bacteria were carried for miles throughout the subway system, leading Army officials to conclude in a January 1968 report: "Similar covert attacks with a pathogenic [disease-causing] agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death."
Army officials also found widespread dispersal of bacteria in a May 1965 secret release of Bacillus globigii at Washington's National Airport and its Greyhound bus terminal, according to military reports released a few years after the Senate hearings. More than 130 passengers who had been exposed to the bacteria traveling to 39 cities in seven states in the two weeks following the mock attack.
Quote
Fifty-one years ago, Edward J. Nevin checked into a San Francisco hospital, complaining of chills, fever and general malaise. Three weeks later, the 75-year-old retired pipe fitter was dead, the victim of what doctors said was an infection of the bacterium Serratia marcescens.
Decades later, Mr. Nevin's family learned what they believe was the cause of the infection, linked at the time to the hospitalizations of 10 other patients. In Senate subcommittee hearings in 1977, the U.S. Army revealed that weeks before Mr. Nevin sickened and died, the Army had staged a mock biological attack on San Francisco, secretly spraying the city with Serratia and other agents thought to be harmless.
The goal: to see what might happen in a real germ-warfare attack. The experiment, which involved blasting a bacterial fog over the entire 49-square-mile city from a Navy vessel offshore, was recorded with clinical nonchalance: "It was noted that a successful BW [biological warfare] attack on this area can be launched from the sea, and that effective dosages can be produced over relatively large areas," the Army wrote in its 1951 classified report on the experiment.
QuotePaul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Despite the fact that the U.S. government has a history of dangerous biological testing against the American people, the Department of Homeland Security claims that a bacteria it plans to release in the Boston subway later this year to test biological sensors is harmless to healthy people.
Quote"Federal officials say they test the subway sensors by releasing dead bacteria called B-subtilis. They say it is used in food supplements, has been rigorously tested and has no adverse health effects for low exposure in healthy people," reports CBS News.
What effect the tests will have on unhealthy people or those exposed to higher doses is unknown.
The tests will be held in Cambridge and Somerville during off peak hours this summer, but not before a hearing on May 16, from 5:30-7:30pm at the Cambridge YMCA in Central Square, during which the public will voice concerns and ask questions about the experiment.
The bacteria will be released as a means of testing biological sensors that guard against the threat of a bio-terror attack. The DHS has released a 28-page summary entitled 'Environmental Assessment for Bacillus subtilis Particles to Challenge Bio-Detection Sensors in Subway Stations' (PDF).
Given the federal government's ominous record in releasing biological agents into subway systems and other transport hubs, it's no surprise that this latest example is sure to cause consternation, which is probably why the feds are being so open about it.
During a Senate hearing in 1977, it was revealed that the Pentagon had conducted numerous secret germ "attacks" on cities without public knowledge in an effort to test the threat posed by biological agents. These tests "may have caused outbreaks of disease which occurred in some of the test areas," writes Leonard A. Cole, citing the Senate inquiry.
These "attacks" included a 1964-65 program carried out by the U.S. Army which involved unsuspecting travelers being sprayed with bacteria-laden mist at Washington's National Airport.
Another example involved light bulbs containing Bacillus globigii that were dropped in the New York Subway by government scientists and allowed to contaminate the air. Similar tests were also conducted in the Chicago subway system, but when people started falling ill the connection with the tests was fudged because the government refused to keep track of the health effects of the released substance.
The hidden U.S. history of germ testing in general also serves as a warning that allowing the government to experiment with biological agents in public which it claims are perfectly safe has not always been a wise choice.
Project SHAD, a Cold War-era Department of Defense program in which veterans were exposed to deadly chemical weapons without their knowledge or consent, also represents a dark chapter in the U.S. government's use of dangerous biological agents against its own people.
Since the 1940?s, the military and the CIA have conducted numerous "tests" on the American people, including the release of dengue fever carrying mosquitoes in Georgia and Florida, biological warfare tests on the civilian population in Puerto Rico, the release of bacillus globigii from a submarine on the port of Oahu, Hawaii, and dozens of other incidents, most of them classified.
The history of U.S. government and military experimentation on American citizens and the innumerable deaths and illnesses that occurred as a result underscore the fact that trusting the Department of Homeland Security, which has proven itself to be one of the most corrupt and secretive federal agencies in existence, to carry out such tests in public, no matter how "safe" the DHS claims them to be, is the height of stupidity.
Indeed, the DHS also claims its naked body scanning machines are "safe" despite being linked with cancer by numerous health authorities, and refuses to allow them to be independently tested, so why on earth should the federal agency be believed when it claims the bacteria it plans to release is harmless?
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.
Quote Project SHAD, an acronym for Shipboard Hazard and Defense, was part of the joint service chemical and biological warfare test program conducted during the 1960s. Project SHAD encompassed tests designed to identify US warships' vulnerabilities to attacks with chemical or biological warfare agents and to develop procedures to respond to such attacks while maintaining a war-fighting capability. Although classified, the Department of Defense has been actively pursuing declassification of relevant medical information. To date twelve SHAD projects have been evaluated and released for your review.
The SHAD program planned as many as a hundred individual tests and was part of the larger Deseret Test Center program. Many tests were never actually executed. DoD investigators plan to look at all Deseret Test Center's chemical and biological tests conducted between 1963 and 1970
Of the 4,300 sailors known to be involved, to our knowledge, only 622 have been notified.
QuoteProject 112 Fact Sheets to be Released Assistant Secretary of Defense (Health Affairs) William Winkenwerder, Jr., will hold a news conference to release 28 detailed fact sheets on 27 Cold War-era chemical and biological warfare tests identified as Project 112.
The briefing will take place tomorrow, Oct. 9, 2002, at 1 p.m. EDT in the DoD Briefing Room, Pentagon 2E781. These documents will supplement information already posted on the World Wide Web at click here (http://deploymentlink.osd.mil/current_issues/shad/shad_chart/shad_chart_2_2.shtml.) if not working Click Here (http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Oct2002/b10092002_bt515-02.html). The Conference was to be televised on CNN and was pre-empted for the Robert Blake hearing.
Project 112 Fact Sheets adobe .pdf format web based--here (http://www.defense.gov/news/Oct2002/d20021009112.pdf) download to your computer here (http://www.projectshad.org/docs/project-shad-112.pdf)
QuoteABOUT: Jim Druckemiller
Jim Druckemiller was a medical corpsman on the USS Power when it was sprayed nine times.
"We did have an upsurge of upper respiratory tract infections, colds, sore throats, that sort of thing," says Druckemiller.
He's been hospitalized with pneumonia several times and has chronic respiratory illnesses.
He says, "The seed of doubt is there."
He and others have a range of health conditions -- chronic pneumonia, sterility, skin rashes, allergies, kidney problems -- and wonder if they are tied to the tests.
QuoteIMPORTANT: PLEASE NOTE:
contributed by a reliable source. 7/30/02 anonymity requested by contributor
"The word "simulant" is BS! You shouldn't use it .. (we can't edit articles we didn't write)
>>> BG = Bacillus globigii is a LIVING BACTERIUM
>>> ZINC CADMIUM SULFIDE is a CHEMICAL compound
The DOD doesn't like to tell the public or the sailors involved that for a reason. And by using the term you assist them in their continuing spin campaign to in lying about what really took place in this still secret program."
Quotecontributed by a reliable source. 8/01/02 anonymity requested by contributor
If you want your readers/viewers to get ACCURATE information about PROJECT SHAD
some of the info on your SHAD.ORG site is NOT accurate.
It is very important that you get accurate info on SHAD -- the DOD spin on this story
(more importantly the US Army -- who is the keeper of the classified secrets on SHAD)
is still false and misleading -- although mostly successful to date with most of the "mainstream" media
including many of the links you list ( some of them have serious factual errors)
So please be aware of this when reading any articles about ProjectShad. We know there is misinformation, so don't be afraid to point out the misinformation to the webmaster. thanks
QuoteProject 112 was a biological and chemical weapons experimentation project conducted by the US Department of Defense and handled by the United States Army Chemical Materials Agency from 1962 to 1973. The project started under John F. Kennedy's administration, and was authorized by his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, as part of a total review of the US military. The name of the project refers to its number in the review process. Every branch of the armed services and CIA contributed funding and staff to the project.
It is believed that the the chain of command for project 112 experiments reported directly to the US Cabinet consisting of Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State Secretary of Agriculture and bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff and standard Defense Department channels. Experiments were planned and conducted by the Deseret Test Center and Deseret Chemical Depot at Fort Douglas, Utah. They were designed to test the effects of biological weapons and chemical weapons on service personnel. They involved unknowing test subjects, and took place on land and at sea via tests conducted upon unwitting US Naval vessels.
The existence of the project (along with the related Project SHAD) was categorically denied by the military until May 2000, when a CBS Evening News investigative report produced dramatic revelations about the tests. This report caused the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs to launch an extensive investigation of the experiments, and reveal to the affected personnel their exposure to toxins. See Deseret Chemical Depot.
QuoteOrigin
In 1962, the U.S. Army counterinsurgency school in Vietnam moved to Okinawa. USNS Schuyler Otis Bland (T-AK-277) was known to have brought highly classified "agriculture products" under armed guard to southeast Asia, Okinawa, and Panama. The ship's logbook was found by Michelle Gatz and shows the ship was carrying classified cargo that was offloaded under armed guard at White Beach a U.S. Navy port on Okinawa's east coast on April 25, 1962. After departing Okinawa in spring 1962, the Bland sailed to the Panama Canal Zone where, the Panamanian government asserts, the U.S. tested herbicides in the early 1960s.
The late author Sheldon H. Harris in his book "Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American cover up" wrote that, The test program, [this could be part of Project AGILE, Project OCONUS or Project SHAD ] which began in fall 1962 and which was funded at least through fiscal year 1963, was considered by the Chemical Corps to be "an ambitious one." The tests were designed to cover "not only trials at sea, but Arctic and tropical environmental tests as well." The tests, presumably, were conducted at what research officers designated, but did not name, "satellite sites." These sites were located both in the continental United States and in foreign countries. The tests conducted there were aimed at both human, animal, and plant reaction to BW. It is known that tests were undertaken in Cairo, Egypt, Liberia, in South Korea, and in Japan's satellite province of Okinawa in 1961, or earlier.(Harris, 2002)
Sheldon H. Harris continued that, The Okinawa anti-crop research project may lend some insight to the larger projects 112 sponsored. BW experts in Okinawa and "at several sites in the Midwest and south:"conducted in 1961 "field tests" for wheat rust and rice blast disease. These tests met with "partial success" in the gathering of data, and led, therefore, to a significant increase in research dollars in fiscal year 1962 to conduct additional research in these areas. The money was devoted largely to developing "technical advice on the conduct of defoliation and anti-crop activities in Southeast Asia." By the end of fiscal year 1962, the Chemical Corps had let or were negotiating contracts for over one thousand chemical defoliants. The Okinawa tests evidently were fruitful.(Harris, 2002)
The report of the General Accountability Office
In a report issued in 2008, the General Accountability Office scolded the military for its lackluster effort to identify and find the victims of Project 112. According to the GAO report, in 2003 the military arbitrarily ended its attempts to find victims, even in the face of some veteran advocates' attempts to find hundreds of other veterans whose illnesses might have been caused or aggravated by their exposure to chemical and biological agent loaded munitions.
Some of the experiments of Project 112 and Project SHAD were not declassified in 2003.
QuoteProject SHAD stands for Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense, a series of Cold War-era tests by the United States Department of Defense of biological weapons and chemical weapons. Exposures of uninformed and unwilling humans during the testing to the test substances, particularly the exposure to United States military personnel then in service, has added controversy to recent revelations of the project.
QuoteHistory
Project SHAD was part of a larger effort by the Department of Defense called Project 112. The Project began in 1962 during John F. Kennedy's administration, and it is largely believed that neither Kennedy nor subsequent Presidents knew of Project 112 or SHAD. However, Robert McNamara, Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, did know of and approved these tests. There is also some evidence that demonstrates local governments were involved with these tests, though it is unclear how exactly they aided with Project SHAD.
The official statement on Project SHAD's purpose was "...to identify U.S. war ships vulnerabilities to attacks with biological or chemical warfare agents and to develop procedures to respond to such attacks while maintaining a warfighting capability." 134 tests were planned initially, but only 46 tests were actually completed. In these tests, chemical and biological agents were introduced to military personnel, who were at the time ignorant that they were involved in such an experiment. Nerve agents and chemicals include, but are not limited to, VX nerve gas, Tabun gas, Sarin, Soman, and the marker chemicals zinc cadmium sulfide, and QNB. Biologics include Bacillus globigii, Coxiella burnetti (which causes Q fever), and Francisella tularensis (which causes tularemia or 'rabbit fever').
Declassification
Revelations concerning Project SHAD were first exposed by independent producer and investigative journalist Eric Longabardi. Longabardi's 6-year investigation into the still secret program began in early 1994. It ultimately resulted in a series of investigative reports produced by him, which were broadcast on the CBS Evening News in May 2000. After the broadcast of these exclusive reports, the Pentagon and Veteran's Administration opened their own ongoing investigations into the long classified program. In 2002, Congressional hearings on Project SHAD, in both the Senate and House, further shed media attention on the program. In 2002, a class action federal lawsuit was filed on behalf of the US sailors exposed in the testing. Additional actions, including a multi-year medical study was conducted by National Academy of Sciences/Institute of Medicine to assess the potential medical harm caused to the thousands of unwitting US Navy sailors, civilians, and others who were exposed in the secret testing. The results of that study were finally released in May 2007.
28 fact sheets have been released, focusing on the Deseret Test Center in Dugway, Utah, which was built entirely for Project SHAD and was closed after the project was finished in 1973.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) has come under great scrutiny[by whom?] because those that were involved with Project 112 and SHAD were unaware of any tests being done. No effort was made to ensure the informed consent of the military personnel. Until 1998, the Department of Defense stated officially that Project SHAD did not exist. Because the DoD refused to acknowledge the program, surviving test subjects have been unable to obtain disability payments for health issues related to the project. US Representative Mike Thompson said of the program and the DoD's effort to conceal it, "They told me – they said, but don't worry about it, we only used simulants. And my first thought was, well, you've lied to these guys for 40 years, you've lied to me for a couple of years. It would be a real leap of faith for me to believe that now you're telling me the truth."
The Department of Veterans Affairs has commenced a three-year study comparing known SHAD-affected veterans to veterans of similar ages who were not involved in any way with SHAD or Project 112. The study cost approximately US$3 million, and results are being compiled for future release.
QuoteThere have been numerous experiments performed on human test subjects in the United States that have been considered unethical, and were often performed illegally, without the knowledge, consent, or informed consent of the test subjects.
The experiments include: the deliberate infection of people with deadly or debilitating diseases, exposure of people to biological and chemical weapons, human radiation experiments, injection of people with toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation/torture experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of others. Many of these tests were performed on children, the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of "medical treatment". In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities or prisoners.
Funding for many of the experiments was provided by United States government, especially the Central Intelligence Agency, United States military and federal or military corporations. The human research programs were usually highly secretive, and in many cases information about them was not released until many years after the studies had been performed.
The ethical, professional, and legal implications of this in the United States medical and scientific community were quite significant, and led to many institutions and policies that attempted to ensure that future human subject research in the United States would be ethical and legal. Public outcry over the discovery of government experiments on human subjects led to numerous congressional investigations and hearings, including the Church Committee, Rockefeller Commission, and Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, amongst others.
QuoteThroughout the 1840s, J. Marion Sims, who is often referred to as "the father of gynecology", performed surgical experiments on enslaved African women, without anaesthesia. The women—one of whom was operated on 30 times—regularly died from infections resulting from the experiments. In order to test one of his theories about the causes of trismus in infants, Sims performed experiments where he used a shoemaker's awl to move around the skull bones of the babies of enslaved women.
In 1874, Mary Rafferty, an Irish servant woman, came to Dr. Roberts Bartholow of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati for treatment of her cancer. Seeing a research opportunity, he cut open her head, and inserted needle electrodes into her exposed brain matter. He described the experiment as follows:
When the needle entered the brain substance, she complained of acute pain in the neck. In order to develop more decided reactions, the strength of the current was increased ... her countenance exhibited great distress, and she began to cry. Very soon, the left hand was extended as if in the act of taking hold of some object in front of her; the arm presently was agitated with clonic spasm; her eyes became fixed, with pupils widely dilated; lips were blue, and she frothed at the mouth; her breathing became stertorous; she lost consciousness and was violently convulsed on the left side. The convulsion lasted five minutes, and was succeeded by a coma. She returned to consciousness in twenty minutes from the beginning of the attack, and complained of some weakness and vertigo.
—Dr. Bartholow's research report
In 1896, Dr. Arthur Wentworth performed spinal taps on 29 young children, without the knowledge or consent of their parents, at the Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts to discover if doing so would be harmful.
From 1913 to 1951, Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at the San Quentin Prison, performed a wide variety of experiments on hundreds of prisoners at San Quentin. Many of the experiments involved testicular implants, where Stanley would take the testicles out of executed prisoners and surgically implant them into living prisoners. In other experiments, he attempted to implant the testicles of rams, goats, and boars into living prisoners. Stanley also performed various eugenics experiments, and forced sterilizations on San Quentin prisoners. Stanley believed that his experiments would rejuvenate old men, control crime (which he believed had biological causes), and prevent the "unfit" from reproducing.
QuoteIn the 1880s, in Hawaii, a Californian physician working at a hospital for lepers injected twelve young girls under the age of 12 with syphilis.
In 1895, the New York pediatrician Henry Heiman intentionally infected two "idiots" (mentally disabled boys)—one four-year-old and one sixteen-year old—with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment. A review of the medical literature of the late 19th and early 20th century found that there were more than 40 reports of experimental infections with gonorrheal culture, including some where gonorrheal organisms were applied to the eyes of sick children.
In 1900, U.S Army doctors in the Philippines infected five prisoners with bubonic plague and induced beriberi in 29 prisoners; four of the test subjects died as a result. In 1906, Professor Richard Strong of Harvard University intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with cholera, which had somehow become contaminated with plague. He did this without the consent of the patients, and without informing them of what he was doing. All of the subjects became sick and 13 died.
In 1908, three Philadelphia researchers infected dozens of children with tuberculin at the St. Vincent's House orphanage in Philadelphia, causing permanent blindness in some of the children and painful lesions and inflammation of the eyes in many of the others. In the study they refer to the children as "material used".
In 1909, F. C. Knowles released a study describing how he had deliberately infected two children in an orphanage with Molluscum contagiosum after an outbreak in the orphanage, in order to study the disease.
In 1911, Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research injected 146 hospital patients (some of whom were children) with syphilis. He was later sued by the parents of some of the child subjects, who allegedly contracted syphilis as a result of his experiments.
Between 1932 and 1972. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, by the U.S. Public Health Service. In the experiment, 400 impoverished black males who had syphilis were offered "treatment" by the researchers, who did not tell the test subjects that they had syphilis and did not give them treatment for the disease. By 1947, penicillin became available as treatment, but those running the study prevented study participants from receiving treatment elsewhere, lying to them about their true condition, so that they could observe the effects of syphilis on the human body. By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were alive. 28 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis. The study was not shut down until 1972, when its existence was leaked to the press, forcing the researchers to stop in the face of a public outcry.
In 1941, at the University of Michigan, doctors Francis and Jonas Salk and other researchers deliberately infected patients at several Michigan mental institutions with the influenza virus by spraying the virus into their nasal passages. Francis Rous, editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine wrote the following to Francis regarding the experiments:
"It may save you much trouble if you publish your paper ... elsewhere than in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The Journal is under constant scrutiny by the anti-vivisectionists who would not hesitate to play up the fact that you used for your tests human beings of a state institution. That the tests were wholly justified goes without saying."
In 1941 Dr. William C. Black inoculated a twelve month old baby "offered as a volunteer" with herpes. He submitted his research to The Journal of Experimental Medicine and it was rejected on ethical grounds. The editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Francis Payton Rous, called the experiment "an abuse of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excusable because the illness which followed had implications for science." It was later published in the Journal of Pediatrics.
In 1944 to 1946, the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study was the site of a controlled study of the effects of malaria on the prisoners of Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois beginning in the 1940s. The study was conducted by the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the United States Army and the State Department. At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors cited the malaria experiments as part of their defense. The study continued at Stateville Penitentiary for 29 years. In related studies from 1944 to 1946, Dr. Alf Alving, a professor at the University of Chicago Medical School, purposely infected psychiatric patients at the Illinois State Hospital with malaria, so that he could test experimental malaria treatments on them.
In a 1946 to 1948 study in Guatemala, U.S. researchers used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin in treating sexually transmitted diseases. They later tried infecting people with "direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men's penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded . . . or in a few cases through spinal punctures". Approximately 700 people were infected as part of the study (including orphan children). The study was sponsored by the Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health and the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the World Health Organization's Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government. The team was led by John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Cutler chose to do the study in Guatemala because he would not have been permitted to do it in the United States.
In 1950, in order to conduct a simulation of a biological warfare attack, the US Navy used airplanes to spray large quantities of the bacteria Serratia marcescens - considered harmless at this time - over the city of San Francisco, California, which caused numerous citizens to contract pneumonia-like illnesses, and killed at least one person. The family of the man who was killed sued for gross negligence, but a federal judge ruled in favor of the government in 1981.[36] Serratia tests were continued until at least 1969.
Also in 1950, Dr. Joseph Stokes of the University of Pennsylvania deliberately infected 200 female prisoners with viral hepatitis.
From the 1950s to 1972, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis, in research whose purpose was to help discover a vaccine. From 1963 to 1966, Saul Krugman of New York University promised the parents of mentally disabled children that their children would be enrolled into Willowbrook in exchange for signing a consent form for procedures that he claimed were "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involved deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of patients infected with the disease.
In 1952, Sloan-Kettering Institute researcher Chester M. Southam injected live cancer cells into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison. Half of the prisoners in this NIH-sponsored study were black - the other half weren't. Also at Sloan-Kettering, 300 healthy women were injected with live cancer cells without being told. The doctors stated that they knew at the time that it might cause cancer.
In 1955, the CIA conducted a biological warfare experiment where they released whooping cough bacteria from boats outside of Tampa Bay, Florida, causing a whooping cough epidemic in the city, and killing at least 12 people.
In 1956 and 1957, several U.S. Army biological warfare experiments were conducted on the cities of Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida. In the experiments, Army bio-warfare researchers released millions of infected mosquitoes on the two towns, in order to see if the insects could potentially spread yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents contracted a wide array of illnesses, including fevers, respiratory problems, stillbirths, encephalitis, and typhoid. Army researchers pretended to be public health workers, so that they could photograph and perform medical tests on the victims. Several people died as a result of the experiments.
In 1962, twenty-two elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York were injected with live cancer cells by Chester M. Southam, who in 1952 had done the same to prisoners at the Ohio State Prison, in order to "discover the secret of how healthy bodies fight the invasion of malignant cells". The administration of the hospital attempted to cover the study up, but the New York State medical licensing board ultimately placed Southam on probation for one year. Two years later, the American Cancer Society elected him as their Vice President.
In 1966, the U.S. Army released the harmless Bacillus globigii into the tunnels of the New York subway system as part of a field study called A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents. The Chicago subway system was also subject to a similar experiment by the Army.
QuoteResearchers in the United States have performed thousands of human radiation experiments to determine the effects of atomic radiation and radioactive contamination on the human body, generally on people who were poor, sick, or powerless. Most of these tests were performed, funded, or supervised by the United States military, Atomic Energy Commission, or various other US federal government agencies.
The experiments included a wide array of studies, involving things like feeding radioactive food to mentally disabled children or conscientious objectors, inserting radium rods into the noses of schoolchildren, deliberately releasing radioactive chemicals over U.S. and Canadian cities, measuring the health effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests, injecting pregnant women and babies with radioactive chemicals, and irradiating the testicles of prison inmates, amongst other things.
Ultimately, public outcry over the experiments led to the 1994 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.
QuoteIn 1953, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ran several studies on the health effects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant women at the University of Iowa. In one study, researchers gave pregnant women from 100 to 200 microcuries (3.7 to 7.4 MBq) of iodine-131, in order to study the women's aborted embryos in an attempt to discover at what stage, and to what extent, radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In another study, they gave 25 newborn babies (who were under 36 hours old and weighed from 5.5 to 8.5 pounds (2.5 to 3.9 kg)) iodine-131, either by oral administration or through an injection, so that they could measure the amount of iodine in their thyroid glands.
In another AEC study, researchers at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine fed iodine-131 to 28 healthy infants through a gastric tube to test the concentration of iodine in the infants' thyroid glands.
In a 1949 operation called the "Green Run," the AEC released iodine-131 and xenon-133 to the atmosphere which contaminated a 500,000-acre (2,000 km2) area containing three small towns near the Hanford site in Washington.
In 1953, the AEC sponsored a study to discover if radioactive iodine affected premature babies differently from full-term babies. In the experiment, researchers from Harper Hospital in Detroit orally administered iodine-131 to 65 premature and full-term infants who weighed from 2.1 to 5.5 pounds (0.95 to 2.5 kg).
From 1955 to 1960 Sonoma State Hospital in northern California served as a permanent drop off location for mentally handicapped children diagnosed with cerebral palsy or lessor disorders. The children subsequently underwent painful experimentation without adult consent. Many were given irradiated milk, some spinal taps "for which they received no direct benefit." 60 Minutes Wednesday learned that in these fifteen years, the brain of every cerebral palsy child who died at Sonoma State was removed and studied without parental consent. According to the CBS story, over 1,400 patients died at the clinic.
In 1962, the Hanford site again released I-131, stationing test subjects along its path to record its effect on them. The AEC also recruited Hanford volunteers to ingest milk contaminated with I-131 during this time.
QuoteBetween 1946 and 1947, researchers at the University of Rochester injected uranium-234 and uranium-235 in dosages ranging from 6.4 to 70.7 micrograms per kilogram of body weight into six people to study how much uranium their kidneys could tolerate before becoming damaged.[57]
Between 1953 and 1957, at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. William Sweet injected eleven terminally ill, comatose and semi-comatose patients with uranium in an experiment to determine, among other things, its viability as a chemotherapy treatment against brain tumors, which all but one of the patients had (one being a mis-diagnosis). Dr. Sweet, who died in 2001, maintained that consent had been obtained from the patients and next of kin.
QuoteIn 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project, three patients at Billings Hospital at the University of Chicago were injected with plutonium.
In 1946, six employees of a Chicago metallurgical lab were given water that was contaminated with plutonium-239, so that researchers could study how plutonium is absorbed into the digestive tract.
QuoteImmediately after World War II, researchers at Vanderbilt University gave 829 pregnant mothers in Tennessee what they were told were "vitamin drinks" that would improve the health of their babies, but were, in fact, mixtures containing radioactive iron, to determine how fast the radioisotope crossed into the placenta. At least three children are known to have died from the experiments, from cancers and leukemias.[61][62] Four of the women's babies died from cancers as a result of the experiments, and the women experienced rashes, bruises, anemia, hair/tooth loss, and cancer.
From 1946 to 1953, at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts, in an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the Quaker Oats corporation, 73 mentally disabled children were fed oatmeal containing radioactive calcium and other radioisotopes, in order to track "how nutrients were digested". The children were not told that they were being fed radioactive chemicals and were told by hospital staff and researchers that they were joining a "science club".
In the 1950s, researchers at the Medical College of Virginia performed experiments on severe burn victims, most of them poor and black, without their knowledge or consent, with funding from the Army and in collaboration with the AEC. In the experiments, the subjects were exposed to additional burning, experimental antibiotic treatment, and injections of radioactive isotopes. The amount of radioactive phosphorus-32 injected into some of the patients, 500 microcuries (19 MBq), was 50 times the "acceptable" dose for a healthy individual; for people with severe burns, this likely led to significantly increased death rates.
Between 1948 and 1954, funded by the federal government, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Hospital inserted radium rods into the noses of 582 Baltimore, Maryland schoolchildren as an alternative to adenoidectomy. Similar experiments were performed on over 7,000 U.S. Army and Navy personnel during World War II. Nasal Radium Irradiation went on to become a standard medical treatment and was used in over two and a half million Americans.
1956. In another study at the Walter E. Fernald State School, in 1956, researchers gave mentally disabled children radioactive calcium orally and intravenously. They also injected radioactive chemicals into malnourished babies and then pushed needles through their skulls, into their brains, through their necks, and into their spines to collect cerebrospinal fluid for analysis.
An eighteen-year-old woman at an upstate New York hospital, expecting to be treated for a pituitary gland disorder, was injected with plutonium.
In 1961 and 1962, ten Utah State Prison inmates had blood samples taken which were then mixed with radioactive chemicals and reinjected back into their bodies.
In a 1967 study that was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, pregnant women were injected with radioactive cortisol to see if it would cross the placental barrier and affect the fetuses.
QuoteIn 1954, American scientists conducted fallout exposure research on the citizens of the Marshall Islands after they were inadvertently irradiated[75] by the Castle Bravo nuclear test in Project 4.1. The Bravo test was detonated upwind of Rongelap Atoll and the residents were exposed to serious radiation levels, up to 180 rads (1.8 Gy). Of the 236 Marshallese exposed, some developed severe radiation sickness and one died, and long term effects included birth defects, "jellyfish" babies, and thyroid problems.
In 1957, atmospheric nuclear explosions in Nevada, which were part of Operation Plumbbob were later determined to have released enough radiation to have caused from 11,000 to 212,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer amongst U.S. citizens who were exposed to fallout from the explosions, leading to between 1,100 and 21,000 deaths.
Early in the Cold War, in studies known as Project GABRIEL and Project SUNSHINE, researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia attempted to determine just how much nuclear fallout would be required to make the Earth uninhabitable.[78][79] They realized that atmospheric nuclear testing had provided them an opportunity to investigate this. Such tests had dispersed radioactive contamination worldwide, and examination of human bodies could reveal how readily it was taken up and hence how much damage it caused. Of particular interest was strontium-90 in the bones. Infants were the primary focus, as they would have had a full opportunity to absorb the new contaminants.
As a result of this conclusion, researchers began a program to collect human bodies and bones from all over the world, with a particular focus on infants. The bones were cremated and the ashes analyzed for radioisotopes. This project was kept secret primarily because it would be a public relations disaster; as a result parents and family were not told what was being done with the body parts of their relatives.
QuoteBetween 1960 and 1971, the Department of Defense funded non-consensual whole body radiation experiments on poor, black cancer patients, who were not told what was being done to them. Patients were told that they were receiving a "treatment" that might cure their cancer, but in reality the Pentagon was attempting to determine the effects of high levels of radiation on the human body. One of the doctors involved in the experiments, Robert Stone, was worried about litigation by the patients, so he only referred to them by their initials on the medical reports. He did this so that, in his words, "there will be no means by which the patients can ever connect themselves up with the report", in order to prevent "either adverse publicity or litigation".
From 1960 to 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, funded by the Defense Atomic Support Agency, performed whole body radiation experiments on more than 90 poor, black, terminally ill cancer patients with inoperable tumors at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. He forged consent forms, and did not inform them of the risks of irradiation. The patients were given 100 or more rads (1 Gy) of whole-body radiation, which in many caused intense pain and vomiting. Critics have questioned the medical rationale for this study, and contend that the main purpose of the research was to study the acute effects of radiation exposure.
From 1963 to 1973, a leading endocrinologist, Dr. Carl Heller, irradiated the testicles of Oregon and Washington prisoners. In return for their participation, he gave them $5 a month, and $100 when they had to receive a vasectomy upon conclusion of the trial. The surgeon who sterilized the men said that it was necessary to "keep from contaminating the general population with radiation-induced mutants". One of the researchers who had worked with Heller on the experiments, Dr. Joseph Hamilton, said that the experiments "had a little of the Buchenwald touch".
In 1963, University of Washington researchers irradiated the testes of 232 prisoners to determine the effects of radiation on testicular function. When these inmates later left prison and had children, at least four of them had offspring born with birth defects. The exact number is unknown because researchers never followed up on the status of the subjects.
QuoteFrom 1942 to 1944, the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service conducted experiments which exposed thousands of U.S. military personnel to mustard gas, in order to test the effectiveness of gas masks and protective clothing.
From 1950 through 1953, the US Army sprayed toxic chemicals over six cities in the United States and Canada, in order to test dispersal patterns of chemical weapons. Army records stated that the chemicals which were sprayed on the city of Winnipeg, Canada, included zinc cadmium sulfide.
To test whether or not sulfuric acid, which is used in making molasses, was harmful as a food additive, the Louisiana State Board of Health commissioned a study to feed "Negro prisoners" nothing but molasses for five weeks. One report stated that prisoners didn't "object to submitting themselves to the test, because it would not do any good if they did".
A 1953 article in the medical/scientific journal Clinical Science described a medical experiment in which researchers intentionally blistered the skin on the abdomens of 41 children, who ranged in age from 8 to 14, using cantharide. The study was performed to determine how severely the substance injures/irritates the skin of children. After the studies, the children's blistered skin was removed with scissors and swabbed with peroxide.
Chloracne resulting from exposure to dioxins, such as those that Albert Kligman injected into prisoners at the Holmesburg Prison
From approximately 1951 to 1974, the Holmesburg State Prison in Pennsylvania was the site of extensive dermatological research operations, using prisoners as subjects. Led by Dr. Albert M. Kligman of the University of Pennsylvania, the studies were performed on behalf of Dow Chemical Company, the U.S. Army, and Johnson & Johnson. In one of the studies, for which Dow Chemical paid Kligman $10,000, Kligman injected dioxin—a highly toxic, carcinogenic component of Agent Orange, which Dow was manufacturing for use in Vietnam at the time—into 70 prisoners (most of them black). The prisoners developed severe lesions which went untreated for seven months. Dow Chemical wanted to study the health effects of dioxin and other herbicides, and how they affect human skin, because workers at their chemical plants were developing chloracne. In the study, Kligman applied roughly the amount of dioxin Dow employees were being exposed to. In 1980 and 1981, some of the people who were used in this study sued Professor Kligman for a variety of health problems, including lupus and psychological damage.
Kligman later continued his dioxin studies, increasing the dosage of dioxin he applied to 10 prisoners' skin to 7,500 micrograms of dioxin, which is 468 times the dosage that the Dow Chemical official Gerald K. Rowe had authorized him to administer. As a result, the prisoners developed inflammatory pustules and papules.
The Holmesburg program also paid hundreds of inmates a nominal stipend to test a wide range of cosmetic products and chemical compounds, whose health effects were unknown at the time. Upon his arrival at Holmesberg, Kligman is claimed to have said "All I saw before me were acres of skin ... It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time". It was reported in a 1964 issue of Medical News that 9 out of 10 prisoners at Holmesburg Prison were medical test subjects.
In 1967, the U.S. Army paid Kligman to apply skin-blistering chemicals to the faces and backs of inmates at Holmesburg to, in Kligman's words, "learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process."
QuoteThe United States government funded and performed numerous psychological experiments, especially during the Cold War era. Many of these experiments were performed to help develop more effective torture and interrogation techniques for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, and to develop techniques for resisting torture at the hands of enemy nations and organizations.
In studies running from 1947 to 1953, which were known as Project Chatter, the U.S. Navy began identifying and testing truth serums, which they hoped could be used during interrogations of Soviet spies. Some of the chemicals tested on human subjects included mescaline and the anticholinergic drug scopolamine.
Shortly thereafter, in 1950, the CIA initiated Project Bluebird, later renamed Project Artichoke, whose stated purpose was to develop "the means to control individuals through special interrogation techniques", "ways to prevent the extraction of information from CIA agents", and "offensive uses of unconventional techniques, such as hypnosis and drugs". The purpose of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that stated, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self preservation?" The project studied the use of hypnosis, forced morphine addiction and subsequent forced withdrawal, and the use of other chemicals, among other methods, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects. In order to "perfect techniques for the abstraction of information from individuals, whether willing or not", Project Bluebird researchers experimented with a wide variety of psychoactive substances, including LSD, heroin, marijuana, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, and ether.[109] Project Bluebird researchers dosed over 7,000 U.S. military personnel with LSD, without their knowledge or consent, at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. More than 1,000 of these soldiers suffered from several psychiatric illnesses, including depression and epilepsy, as a result of the tests. Many of them tried to commit suicide.
In 1952, professional tennis player Harold Blauer died when injected with a fatal dose of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute of Columbia University, by Dr. James Cattell. The United States Department of Defense, which sponsored the injection, worked in collusion with the Department of Justice, and the New York State Attorney General to conceal evidence of its involvement for 23 years. Cattell claimed that he did not know what the army had given him to inject into Blauer, saying: "We didn't know whether it was dog piss or what we were giving him."
In 1953, the CIA placed several of its interrogation and mind-control programs under the direction of a single program, known by the code name MKULTRA, after CIA director Allen Dulles complained about not having enough "human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques". The MKULTRA project was under the direct command of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of the Technical Services Division. The project received over $25 million, and involved hundreds of experiments on human subjects at eighty different institutions.
In a memo describing the purpose of one MKULTRA program subprogram, Richard Helms said:
We intend to investigate the development of a chemical material which causes a reversible, nontoxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well predicted for each individual. This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, and implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control.
—Richard Helms, internal CIA memo
In 1954, the CIA's Project QKHILLTOP was created to study Chinese brainwashing techniques, and to develop effective methods of interrogation. Most of the early studies are believed to have been performed by the Cornell University Medical School's human ecology study programs, under the direction of Dr. Harold Wolff. Wolff requested that the CIA provide him any information they could find regarding "threats, coercion, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, 'brainwashing', 'black psychiatry', and hypnosis, or any combination of these, with or without chemical agents". According to Wolff, the research team would then:
...assemble, collate, analyze and assimilate this information and will then undertake experimental investigations designed to develop new techniques of offensive/defensive intelligence use ... Potentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures) will be similarly tested in order to ascertain the fundamental effect upon human brain function and upon the subject's mood ... Where any of the studies involve potential harm of the subject, we expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of the necessary experiments.
—Dr. Harold Wolff, Cornell University Medical School
Another of the MKULTRA subprojects, Operation Midnight Climax, consisted of a web of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco, Marin, and New York which were established in order to study the effects of LSD on unconsenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass. Several significant operational techniques were developed in this theater, including extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations.
In 1957, with funding from a CIA front organization, Dr. Ewan Cameron of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada began MKULTRA Subproject 68. His experiments were designed to first "depattern" individuals, erasing their minds and memories—reducing them to the mental level of an infant—and then to "rebuild" their personality in a manner of his choosing.[119] To achieve this, Cameron placed patients under his "care" into drug-induced comas for up to 88 days, and applied numerous high voltage electric shocks to them over the course of weeks or months, often administering up to 360 shocks per person. He would then perform what he called "psychic driving" experiments on the subjects, where he would repetitively play recorded statements, such as "You are a good wife and mother and people enjoy your company", through speakers he had implanted into blacked-out football helmets that he bound to the heads of the test subjects (for sensory deprivation purposes). The patients could do nothing but listen to these messages, played for 16–20 hours a day, for weeks at a time. In one case, Cameron forced a person to listen to a message non-stop for 101 days. Using CIA funding, Cameron converted the horse stables behind Allen Memorial into an elaborate isolation and sensory deprivation chamber which he kept patients locked in for weeks at a time. Cameron also induced insulin comas in his subjects by giving them large injections of insulin, twice a day for up to two months at a time. Several of the children who Cameron experimented on were sexually abused, in at least one case by several men. One of the children was filmed numerous times performing sexual acts with high-ranking federal government officials, in a scheme set up by Cameron and other MKULTRA researchers, to blackmail the officials to ensure further funding for the experiments.
QuoteThe CIA leadership had serious concerns about 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
In 1957, Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University performed experiments on schizophrenic patients, which were funded by the U.S. Army. In the studies, he dosed them with high levels of LSD, and then implanted "deep electrodes" in their brains to take EEG readings.
MKULTRA 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 of the 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. Many people in the American public were outraged when they learned of the experiments, and several congressional investigations took place including the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission.
On 26 April 1976, the Church Committee of the United States Senate issued a report, "Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities", In Book I, Chapter XVII, p 389 this report states:
LSD was one the materials tested in the MKULTRA program. The final phase of LSD testing involved surreptitious administration to unwitting non-volunteer subjects in normal life settings by undercover officers of the Bureau of Narcotics acting for the CIA.
A special procedure, designated MKDELTA, was established to govern the use of MKULTRA materials abroad. Such materials were used on a number of occasions. Because MKULTRA records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the operational use of MKULTRA materials by the CIA overseas; it has been determined that the use of these materials abroad began in 1953, and possibly as early as 1950.
Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKULTRA/MKDELTA materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.
In 1963, CIA had synthesized many of the findings from its psychological research into what became known as the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook, which cited the MKULTRA studies, and other secret research programs as the scientific basis for their interrogation methods Cameron regularly traveled around the U.S. teaching military personnel about his techniques (hooding of prisoners for sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, humiliation, etc.), and how they could be used in interrogations. Latin American paramilitary groups working for the CIA and U.S. military received training in these psychological techniques at places like the School of the Americas, and even today, many of the torture techniques developed in the MKULTRA studies and other programs are being used at U.S. military and CIA prisons such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In the aftermath of the Congressional hearings, major news media mainly focused on sensationalistic stories related to LSD, "mind-control", and "brainwashing", and rarely used the word "torture". This put off the image that CIA researchers were, as one author put it "a bunch of bumbling sci-fi buffoons", rather than a rational group of men who had run torture laboratories and medical experiments in major U.S. universities, and who had tortured, raped, and psychologically abused young children, driving many of them permanently insane.
From 1964 to 1968, the U.S. Army paid $386,486 to professors Albert Kligman and Herbert W. Copelan to perform experiments with mind-altering drugs on 320 inmates of Holmesburg Prison. The goal of the study was to determine the minimum effective dose of each drug needed to disable 50 percent of any given population. Kligman and Copelan initially claimed that they were unaware of any long-term health effects the drugs could have on prisoners, however, documents later revealed that this was not the case.
Medical professionals gathered and collected data on the CIA's use of torture techniques on detainees, in order to refine those techniques, and to "to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies", according to a report by Physicians for Human Rights. The report stated that: "Research and medical experimentation on detainees was used to measure the effects of large-volume waterboarding and adjust the procedure according to the results." As a result of the waterboarding experiments, doctors recommended adding saline to the water "to prevent putting detainees in a coma or killing them through over-ingestion of large amounts of plain water." Sleep deprivation tests were performed on over a dozen prisoners, in 48-, 96- and 180-hour increments. Doctors also collected data intended to help them judge the emotional and physical impact of the techniques so as to "calibrate the level of pain experienced by detainees during interrogation" and to determine if using certain types of techniques would increase a subject's "susceptibility to severe pain.". The CIA denied the allegations, claiming they never performed any experiments, and saying "The report is just wrong"; however, the U.S. government never investigated the claims.
In August 2010, the U.S. weapons manufacturer Raytheon announced that it had partnered with a jail in Castaic, California in order to use prisoners as test subjects for a new non-lethal weapon system that "fires an invisible heat beam capable of causing unbearable pain."
QuoteIn 1939, at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa, twenty-two children were the subjects of the so-called "monster" experiment. This experiment attempted to use psychological abuse to induce children who spoke normally to stutter. The experiment was designed by Dr. Wendell Johnson, one of the nation's most prominent speech pathologists, for the purpose of testing one of his theories on the cause of stuttering.
In 1961, in response to the Nuremberg Trials, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram performed his study "Obedience to Authority Study", also known as the Milgram Experiment, in order to determine if it was possible that the Nazi genocide could have resulted from millions of people who were "just following orders". The Milgram Experiment raised questions about the ethics of scientific experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants, who were told, as part of the experiment, to apply electric shocks to test subjects (who were actually actors not really receiving electric shocks).
QuoteAt Harvard University, in the late 1940s, researchers began performing experiments where they tested diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen, on pregnant women at the Lying-In Hospital of the University of Chicago. The women experienced an abnormally high number of miscarriages and babies with low birth weight. None of the women were told that they were being experimented on.
Researchers at the Laurel Children's Center in Maryland tested experimental acne medications on children, and continued their tests even after half of the children developed severe liver damage from the medications.
From 1988 to 2008, the number of overseas clinical trials for drugs intended for American consumption increased by 2,000%, to approximately 6,500 trials. These trials are often conducted in areas with large numbers of poor and illiterate people who grant their consent by signing an "X" or making a thumb print on a form. These tests are rarely monitored by the FDA, and have in some cases proved deadly, such as a case where 49 babies died in New Delhi, India during a 30-month trial. The cost of testing in countries without safety regulations is much lower; and, due to lax or nonexistent oversight, pharmaceutical corporations (or research companies they've contracted out to) are able to more easily suppress research that demonstrates harmful effects and only report positive results.
QuoteThe 1846 journals of Dr. Walter F. Jones of Petersburg, Virginia, describe how he poured boiling water onto the backs of naked slaves afflicted with typhoid pneumonia, at four-hour intervals, because he thought that this might "cure" the disease by "stimulating the capillaries".
In 1914, Joseph Goldberger restricted prisoner diets to induce pellagra, which he suspected were caused by vitamin deficiencies, not infectious diseases, as was believed at the time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for his work.
From early 1940 until 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected pediatric neuropsychiatrist who practiced at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, performed electroshock experiments on at least 100 children. The children's ages ranged from 3–12 years. Some reports indicate that she may have performed such experiments on more than 200. Electroconvulsive treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from 1942 to 1956, including Bender's experiments, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children's Service from 1956 to 1969. Publicly, Bender claimed that the results of the "therapy" were positive, but in private memos, she expressed frustration over mental health issues caused by the treatments. Bender would sometimes shock schizophrenic children (some less than 3 years old) twice per day, for 20 consecutive days. Several of the children became violent and suicidal as a result of the treatments.
At Willowbrook State School for the mentally retarded in Staten Island, NY, a highly controversial medical study was carried out there between 1963 and 1966 by medical researchers Saul Krugman and Robert W. McCollum. Healthy children who were mentally retarded, were secretly intentionally inoculated, orally and by injection, with a virus that causes the hepatitis, then monitored to gauge the effects of gamma globulin in combating the resultant disease. A public outcry forced the study to be discontinued after it was exposed and condemnend by Senator Robert F. Kennedy. New York Senator Robert Kennedy and a television crew visit Willowbrook State school in Staten Island NY. "He likens the conditions at Willowbrook to that of a "snake pit," and states that the residents of these institutions were "denied access to education and are deprived of their civil liberties." Later that same year, he addressed a joint session of the NYS Legislature on the "dehumanizing conditions" of the State's institutions.
In 1942, the Harvard University biochemist Edward Cohn injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow blood, as part of an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Navy.
In 1950, researchers at the Cleveland City Hospital ran experiments to study changes in cerebral blood flow where they injected people with spinal anesthesia, and inserted needles into their jugular veins and brachial arteries to extract large quantities of blood, and after massive blood loss which caused paralysis and fainting, measured their blood pressure. The experiment was often performed multiple times on the same subject.
In a series of studies which were published in the medical journal Pediatrics, researchers from the University of California Department of Pediatrics performed experiments on 113 newborns ranging in age from 1 hour to 3 days, where they studied changes in blood pressure and blood flow. In one of the studies, researchers forced a catheter through the babies' umbilical arteries and into their aortas, and then submerged their feet in ice water. In another of the studies, they strapped 50 newborn babies to a circumcision board, and then turned them upside down so that all of their blood rushed into their heads.
From 1963 to 1969 as part of Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), the U.S. Army performed tests which involved spraying several U.S. ships with various biological and chemical warfare agents, while thousands of U.S. military personnel were aboard the ships. The personnel were not notified of the tests, and were not given any protective clothing. Chemicals tested on the U.S. military personnel included the nerve gases VX and Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, and a variety of biological agents.
1971. The San Antonio Contraceptive Study was a clinical research study about the side effects of oral contraceptives published in 1971. Women came to a clinic in San Antonio for preventing pregnancies and were not told they were participating in a research study or receiving placebos. 10 of the women became pregnant while on placebos.
In the 2000s, artificial blood was transfused into research subjects across the United States without their consent by Northfield Labs. Later studies showed the artificial blood caused a significant increase in the risk of heart attacks and death
QuoteDuring the Nuremberg trials, several of the Nazi doctors and scientists who were being tried for their human experiments claimed that the inspiration for their studies had come from studies that they had seen performed in the United States. In 1945, as part of Operation Paperclip, the United States government recruited 1,600 Nazi scientists, many of whom had performed human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps. The scientists were offered immunity from any war crimes they had committed during the course of their work for the Nazi government, in return for doing research for the United States government. Many of the Nazi scientists continued their human experimentation when they arrived in the United States.
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".
In 1964, the World Medical Association passed the Declaration of Helsinki, a set of ethical principles for the medical community regarding human experimentation.
In 1966, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office for Protection of Research Subjects (OPRR) was created, and issued its Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects which recommended establishing independent review bodies, which were later called institutional review boards.
In 1969, Kentucky Court of Appeals Judge Samuel Steinfeld dissented in Strunk v. Strunk, 445 S.W.2d 145, and made the first judicial suggestion that the Nuremberg Code should be applied to American jurisprudence.
In 1974 the National Research Act established the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects, and mandated that the Public Health Service to come up with regulations that would protect the rights of human research subjects.
Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission.
In 1975, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW) created regulation which included the recommendations laid out in the NIH's 1966 Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects. Title 45 of the Code of Federal Regulations, known as "The Common Rule," requires the appointment and utilization of institutional review boards (IRBs) in experiments using human subjects.
On April 18, 1979, prompted by an investigative journalist's public disclosure of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (later renamed to Health and Human Services) released a report entitled "Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research," authored by Dan Harms, which laid out many modern guidelines for ethical medical research.
In 1987 the United States Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669, 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.
Dissenting the verdict in U.S. v. Stanley, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stated:
No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the 'voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential ... to satisfy moral, ethical, and legal concepts.' If this principle is violated, the very least that society can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can be, by the perpetrators.
On January 15, 1994, President Bill Clinton formed the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE). This committee was created to investigate and report the use of human beings as test subjects in experiments involving the effects of ionizing radiation in federally funded research. The committee attempted to determine the causes of the experiments, and reasons why the proper oversight did not exist, and made several recommendations to help prevent future occurrences of similar events.
As of 2007, not a single U.S. government researcher had been prosecuted for human experimentation, and many of the victims of U.S. government experiments have not received compensation, or in many cases, acknowledgment of what was done to them.
QuoteOperation May Day was a series of entomological warfare (EW) tests conducted by the U.S. military in Savannah, Georgia in 1956. Operation May Day involved a series of EW tests from April to November 1956. The tests were designed to reveal information about the dispersal of yellow fever mosquitoes in an urban area. The mosquitoes were released from ground level in Savannah, Georgia and then recovered using traps baited with dry ice. The operation was detailed in partially declassified U.S. Army report in 1981.
QuoteOperation Big Buzz was a U.S. military entomological warfare field test conducted in the U.S. state of Georgia in 1955. The tests involved dispersing over 300,000 yellow fever mosquitoes from aircraft and through ground dispersal methods.
Operation Big Buzz occurred in May 1955 in the U.S. State of Georgia. The operation was a field test designed to determine the feasibility of producing, storing, loading into munitions, and dispersing from aircraft the yellow fever mosquito (though these were not infected for the test) (Aedes aegypti). The second goal of the operation was to determine whether the mosquitoes would survive their dispersion and seek meals on the ground. Around 330,000 uninfected mosquitoes were dropped from aircraft in E14 bombs and dispersed from the ground. In total about one million female mosquitoes were bred for the testing; remaining mosquitoes were used in munitions loading and storage tests. Those mosquitoes that were air-dispersed were dropped from airplanes 300 feet (91 m) above the ground, spreading out on their own and due to the wind.
Results
Mosquitoes were collected as far away as 2,000 feet (610 m) from the release site. They were also active in seeking blood meals from humans and guinea pigs
QuoteOperation Big Itch was a U.S. entomological warfare field test using uninfected fleas to determine their coverage and survivability as a vector for biological agents. The tests were conducted at Dugway Proving Ground in 1954.
Operation
Operation Big Itch was a September 1954 series of tests at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The tests were designed to determine coverage patterns and survivability of the tropical rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) for use in biological warfare as disease vector. The fleas used in these trials were not infected by any biological agent. The fleas were loaded into two types of munitions and dropped from the air. The E14 bomb and E23 bomb, which could be clustered into the E86 cluster bomb and E77 bomb, respectively. When the cluster bombs reached 2,000 or 1,000 feet (600 or 300 m) the bomblets would drop via parachute, disseminating their vector.
The E14 was designed to hold 100,000 fleas and the E23 was designed to hold 200,000 fleas but the E23 failed in over half of the preliminary Big Itch tests. E23s malfunctioned during testing and the fleas were released into the aircraft where they bit the pilot, bombadier and an observer. As a result, the remaining Big Itch tests were conducted using only the smaller capacity E14. Guinea pigs were used as test subjects and placed around a 660-yard (600 m) circular grid.
Results
Big Itch proved successful, the tests showed that not only could the fleas survive the drop from an airplane but they also soon attached themselves to hosts.[6] The weapon proved able to cover a battalion-sized target area and disrupt operations for up to one day. The one-day limit was due to the activity of the fleas; the air dropped fleas were only active for about 24 hours.
QuoteOperation Dark Winter was the code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted from June 22–23, 2001. It was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. Tara O'Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) / Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services were the principal designers, authors, and controllers of the Dark Winter project.
Dark Winter was focused on evaluating the inadequacies of a national emergency response during the use of a biological weapon against the American populace. The exercise was solely intended to establish preventive measures and response strategies by increasing governmental and public awareness of the magnitude and potential of such a threat posed by biological weapons.
Dark Winter's simulated scenario involved a localized smallpox attack on Oklahoma City. The simulation was then designed to spiral out of control. This would create a contingency in which the National Security Council struggles to determine both the origin of the attack as well as deal with containing the spreading virus. By not being able to keep pace with the disease's rate of spread, a new catastrophic contingency emerges in which massive civilian casualties would overwhelm America's emergency response capabilities.
The disastrous contingencies that would result in the massive loss of civilian life were used to exploit the weaknesses of the U.S. health care infrastructure and its inability to handle such a threat. The contingencies were also meant to address the widespread panic that would emerge and which would result in mass social breakdown and mob violence. Exploits would also include the many difficulties that the media would face when providing American citizens with the necessary information regarding safety procedures.
Quoten June 22-23, 2001, just under 3 months before 9/11, the U.S. military held a senior-level war game at Andrews Air Force Base called Dark Winter. The scenario of this bio-terrorism drill was designed to simulate a smallpox attack in three states in which one of these states would be Pennsylvania.
As a part of this war game, scripted TV news clips were made to help make this drill as realistic as possible. In one of these clips (clip 3), the TV anchorwoman actor mentions that no groups have claimed responsibility yet (just like with 9/11) and then goes on to blame two groups for the attack. Get a load of which two groups this war game blames for their simulated attack:
QuoteOperation Drop Kick was a 1956 U.S. entomological warfare field testing program that deployed Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to carry a biological warfare agent. Operation Drop Kick apparently included a 1956 test in Savannah, Georgia, where uninfected mosquitoes were released in a residential neighborhood and another 1956 test in Avon Park Bombing Range, Florida, where 600,000 mosquitoes were released by plane.
The 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove also refers to an Operation Drop Kick.
QuoteOperation Dew refers to two separate field trials conducted by the United States in the 1950s. The tests were designed to study the behavior of aerosol-released biological agents.
General description
Operation Dew took place from 1951-1952 off the southeast coast of the United States, including near Georgia, and North and South Carolina.[1][2] Operation Dew consisted of two sets of trials, Dew I and Dew II. The tests involved the release of 250 pounds (110 kg) of fluorescent particles from a minesweeper off the coast.[1] Operation Dew I was described in a U.S. Army report known as "Dugway Special Report 162", dated August 1, 1952. The purpose of Operation Dew was to study the behavior of aerosol-released biological agents.
Dew I
Operation Dew I consisted of five separate trials from March 26, 1952 until April 21, 1952 that were designed to test the feasibility of maintaining a large aerosol cloud released offshore until it drifted over land, achieving a large area coverage. The tests released zinc cadmium sulfide along a 100-to-150-nautical-mile (190 to 280 km) line approximately 5 to 10 nautical miles (10 to 20 km) off the coast of Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Two of the trials dispersed clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide over large areas of all three U.S. states. The tests affected over 60,000 square miles (150,000 km²) of populated coastal region in the U.S. southeast. The Dew I releases were from a Navy minesweeper, the USS Tercel.
Dew II
Dew II involved the release of fluorescent particles (zinc cadmium sulfide) and plant spores (Lycopodium) from an aircraft. Dew II was described in a 1953 Army report which remained classified at the time of a 1997 report by the U.S. National Research Council concerning the U.S. Army's zinc cadmium sulfide dispersion program of the 1950s
QuoteOperation LAC (Large Area Coverage), was a U.S. Army Chemical Corps operation which dispersed microscopic zinc cadmium sulfide (ZnCdS) particles over much of the United States. The purpose was to determine the dispersion and geographic range of biological or chemical agents.
QuoteEarlier tests
There were tests that occurred prior to the first spraying affiliated with Operation LAC. The Army admitted to spraying in Minnesota locations from 1953 into the mid-1960s.
Operation
Operation LAC was undertaken in 1957 and 1958 by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. Principally, the operation involved spraying large areas with zinc cadmium sulfide. The U.S. Air Force loaned the Army a C-119, "Flying Boxcar", and it was used to disperse zinc cadmium sulfide by the ton in the atmosphere over the United States. The first test occurred on December 2, 1957 along a path from South Dakota to International Falls, Minnesota.
The tests were designed to determine the dispersion and geographic range of biological or chemical agents. Stations on the ground tracked the fluorescent zinc cadmium sulfide particles. During the first test and subsequently, much of the material dispersed ended up being carried by winds into Canada. However, as was the case in the first test, particles were detected up to 1,200 miles away from their drop point. A typical flight line covering 400 miles would release 5,000 pounds of zinc cadmium sulfide and in fiscal year 1958 around 100 hours were spent in flight for LAC. That flight time included four runs of various lengths, one of which was 1,400 miles.
Specific tests
The December 2, 1957 test was incomplete due to a mass of cold air coming down from Canada. It carried the particles from their drop point and then took a turn northeast, taking most of the particles into Canada with it. Military operators considered the test a partial success because some of the particles were detected 1,200 miles away, at a station in New York state. A February 1958 test at Dugway Proving Ground ended similarly. Another Canadian air mass swept through and carried the particles into the Gulf of Mexico. Two other tests, one along a path from Toledo, Ohio to Abilene, Texas, and another from Detroit, to Springfield, Illinois, to Goodland, Kansas, showed that agents dispersed through this aerial method could achieve widespread coverage when particles were detected on both sides of the flight paths.
Scope
According to Leonard A. Cole, an Army Chemical Corps document titled "Summary of Major Events and Problems" (1958) described the scope of Operation LAC. Cole stated that the document outlined that the tests were the largest ever undertaken by the Chemical Corps and that the test area stretched from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean, and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Other sources describe the scope of LAC varyingly, examples include, "Midwestern United States", and "the states east of the Rockies". Specific locations are mentioned as well. Some of those include: a path from South Dakota to Minneapolis, Minnesota, Dugway Proving Ground, Corpus Christi, Texas, north-central Texas, and the San Francisco Bay area.
Risks and issues
Anecdotal evidence exists of ZnCdS having adverse health effects as a result of LAC. However, a U.S. government study, done by the U.S. National Research Council stated, in part, "After an exhaustive, independent review requested by Congress, we have found no evidence that exposure to zinc cadmium sulfide at these levels could cause people to become sick." Still, the use of ZnCdS remains controversial and one critic accused the Army of "literally using the country as an experimental laboratory".
QuoteThe spraying of a potentially toxic chemical in several cities in Army tests in the 1950's and 60's apparently had no adverse health effects, a National Research Council committee said today.
The 15-member committee said in a report that the compound, zinc cadmium sulfide, which was secretly sprayed from airplanes, rooftops and moving vehicles in 33 urban and rural areas of the United States and Canada, did not expose residents to chemical levels considered harmful.
The panel, which looked at the toxicity of the compound and its components as well as exposure data collected by the military, said it was highly unlikely that people were exposed to significant levels of the most dangerous component, cadmium. In occupational studies and studies on animals, cadmium inhaled in high doses has been found to be a cause of lung cancer.
In most of the Army tests, people were exposed to such small amounts of the compound that they would have been likely to get higher doses of cadmium from environmental and industrial sources, the report said.
QuoteOperation Magic Sword was a 1965 U.S. military operation designed to test the effectiveness of the sea-borne release of insect vectors for biological agents.
Operation
Operation Magic Sword was U.S. military operation undertaken in 1965. It was designed to ascertain the effectiveness of releasing mosquito vectors for biological agents at sea. It took place off the southeastern coast of the United States and employed yellow fever mosquitoes with the hope of assessing their biting habits following an ocean-borne release.
Results
Magic Sword showed that when coupled with ocean winds that the mosquitoes could travel up to three and one-half miles to shore. The operation also showed that if needed the mosquitoes could be kept alive for cross-ocean journeys.
QuoteOperation Polka Dot was a U.S. Army test of a biological cluster bomb during the early 1950s.
Operation
Operation Polka Dot was a field test of the E133 cluster bomb undertaken at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah during the early 1950s. The operation was detailed in a July 18, 1955 U.S. Army report that also detailed Operation Trouble Maker. The operation was classified "secret" and involved filling the munitions with the biological agent simulant, Bacillus globigii.
See also
QuoteOperation Whitecoat was a biodefense medical research program carried out by the United States Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland between 1954 and 1973. The program pursued medical research using volunteer enlisted personnel who were eventually nicknamed "Whitecoats". These volunteers, all conscientious objectors including many members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, were apprised of the purpose and goals of each project before providing consent to participate in any project. The stated purpose of the research was to defend troops and civilians against biological weapons and it was believed that the Soviet Union was engaged in similar activities. Although the program was discontinued in 1973, similar medical research for biodefense purposes is still conducted at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick and at other government and civilian research institutes. However, these modern studies are rarely, if ever, human use challenge studies, in which a person is inoculated with a known pathogen to determine how effective an investigational treatment will be.
QuoteExperiments
Over 2,300 U.S. Army soldiers, most of whom were trained medics, contributed to the experiments by allowing themselves to be infected with viruses and bacteria that were considered likely choices for a biological attack. Whitecoat volunteers were exposed to Q fever, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever, hepatitis A, Yersinia pestis (plague), tularemia (rabbit fever), and Venezuelan equine encephalitis and other diseases. The volunteers were then treated for the illnesses to determine the effectiveness of antibiotics and vaccines. Some soldiers were given two weeks of leave in exchange for being used as a test subject. These experiments took place at Fort Detrick which is a US Army research center located outside Washington, D.C.
The volunteers were allowed to consult with outside sources, such as family and clergy members, before deciding to participate. The participants were required to sign consent forms after discussing the risks and treatments with a medical officer. Of the soldiers who were approached about participating, 20% declined.
Results
Many of the vaccines that protect against biowarfare agents were first tested on humans in Operation Whitecoat.
According to USAMRIID, the Whitecoat operation contributed to vaccines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for yellow fever and hepatitis, and investigational drugs for Q fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, and tularemia. USAMRIID also states that Operation Whitecoat helped develop biological safety equipment, including hooded safety cabinets, decontamination procedures, fermentors, incubators, centrifuges, and particle sizers.
US GAO report
The United States Government Accountability Office issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, the United States Department of Defense and other national security agencies studied hundreds of thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances.
A quotation from the study:
Many experiments that tested various biological agents on human subjects, referred to as Operation Whitecoat, were carried out at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in the 1950s. The human subjects originally consisted of volunteer enlisted men. However, after the enlisted men staged a sitdown strike to obtain more information about the dangers of the biological tests, Seventh-day Adventists who were conscientious objectors were recruited for the studies.
Possible long-term health effects
No Whitecoats died during the test period. The Army has addresses for only 1000 of the 2300 people known to have volunteered. Only about 500 (23%) of the Whitecoats have been surveyed, and the military chose not to fund blood tests. A handful of respondents claim to have lingering health effects, and at least one subject claims to have serious health problems as a result of the experiments.
In 2005, an assessment of health status among the Project Whitecoat research volunteers was published. It reflected the self-reported, current health status among 358 "exposed" individuals and 164 unexposed "control" subjects and found no conclusive evidence that receipt of investigational agents was related to any adverse health outcomes. No differences in current overall health, current exercise levels, self-reported symptoms, and self-reported medical conditions were seen between the study groups. However, possible associations were seen between exposure to antibiotics or other biological agents and self-reported asthma, as well as between receipt of tularemia vaccine(s) and self-reported asthma and increased frequency/severity of headaches. The size of the study population was judged to be insufficient to assert with confidence that the statistical associations with asthma and headaches were real.
Adventists and Operation Whitecoat
Adventist view of military service
The Seventh-day Adventist Church's relationship to government military activity has been supportive but noncombative. In 1936, the SDA Church established the Medical Cadet Corps Training Program. This allowed Adventists to remain noncombatant but positive toward the war effort. Sabbath observance remained a concern for the drafted members of the church. Adventist Conscientious Objector perspective differed from the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, (NISBCO). In 1967, Adventists withdrew from NISBCO because that organization opposed conscription. According to Bull and Lockhart, Operation Whitecoat, and the earlier established Medical Corps, enabled Adventists to participate in the armed services without violating their Sabbath principles.
QuoteThe Dugway sheep incident, also known as the Skull Valley sheep kill, was a 1968 sheep kill that has been connected to United States Army chemical and biological warfare programs at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Six thousand sheep were killed on ranches near the base, and the popular explanation blamed Army testing of chemical weapons for the incident, though alternative explanations have been offered. A report, commissioned by Air Force Press Officer Jesse Stay first made public in 1998 was called the "first documented admission" from the Army that a nerve agent killed the sheep at Skull Valley.
QuoteBackground
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/45jack_files/04images/Biology/0313.1968_Dugway-warning-si.jpg)
Sign near Dugway: Warning Hazardous Area: This area may contain Chemical, Biological and Radiological contaminated material and explosives . . .
Since its founding in 1941, much of the activity at Dugway Proving Ground is a closely guarded secret. Activities at Dugway included aerial nerve agent testing. According to reports from New Scientist, Dugway was still producing small quantities of anthrax as late as 1998, 30 years after the United States renounced biological weapons. There were at least 1,100 other chemical tests at Dugway during the time period of the Dugway sheep incident. In total, almost 500,000 lb (230,000 kg) of nerve agent were dispersed during open-air tests. There were also tests at Dugway with other weapons of mass destruction, including 328 open-air tests of biological weapons, 74 dirty bomb tests, and the equivalent of eight intentional meltdowns of nuclear reactors.
Incident
In the days preceding the Dugway sheep incident the United States Army at Dugway Proving Ground conducted at least three separate operations involving nerve agents. All three operations occurred on March 13, 1968. One involved the test firing of a chemical artillery shell, another the burning of 160 U.S. gallons (600 L) of nerve agent in an open air pit and in the third a jet aircraft sprayed nerve agent in a target area about 27 mi (43 km) west of Skull Valley. It is the third event that is usually connected to the Skull Valley sheep kill.
The incident log at Dugway Proving Ground indicated that the sheep incident began with a phone call on March 17, 1968 at 12:30 a.m. The director of the University of Utah's ecological and epidemiological contract with Dugway, a Dr. Bode, phoned Keith Smart, the chief of the ecology and epidemiology branch at Dugway to report that 3,000 sheep were dead in the Skull Valley area. The initial report of the incident came to Bode from the manager of a Skull Valley livestock company. The sheep were grazing in an area about 27 mi (43 km) from the proving ground; total sheep deaths of 6,000-6,400 were reported over the next several days as a result of the incident. The Dugway Safety Office's attempt to count the dead sheep compiled a total of 3,843.
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/45jack_files/04images/Biology/7120527287_493edb9b0e.jpg)
DUGWAY SHEEP INCIDENT 6000 sheep killed due to chemical war tests. The Dugway sheep incident aka Skull Valley sheep kill was a 1968 sheep kill that has been connected to United States Army chemical and biological warfare programs at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. 6,000 sheep were killed on ranches near the base.
Possible causes
Previously obtained documents said one such demonstration also occurred the day before the mysterious sheep deaths in 1968. On 13 March 1968, an F-4 Phantom strike aircraft flew a test mission over the Dugway Proving Ground with chemical dispensers containing VX. One of the dispensers wasn't completely emptied during the test, and as the F-4 gained altitude after its bombing run, VX trickled out in a trail behind the aircraft, drifted into Skull Valley, north of the proving ground, and settled over a huge flock of sheep.
One explanation in the aftermath of the incident was that a chemical or biological agent had escaped from the Dugway Proving Ground. Circumstantial evidence seemed to support this assertion, the United States Army admitted to conducting open-air tests with the nerve agent VX in the days preceding the sheep kill. The Army intimated that a spray nozzle had malfunctioned during the test causing an aircraft to continue spraying VX as it climbed to higher altitudes. It was reported that a small amount of VX was found in the tissue of the dead sheep.
Other information contradicted the initial assumptions about the cause of the incident. One contradiction to nerve agent exposure as a cause came in the symptoms of some of the sheep following the incident. Several sheep, still alive, sat unmoving on the ground. The sheep refused to eat, but exhibited normal breathing patterns and showed signs of internal hemorrhaging. Regular breathing and internal hemorrhaging are inconsistent with nerve agent exposure. In addition, no other animals in the area, some much more susceptible to nerve agent poisoning, were affected.
Aftermath
The incident had an impact on the Army, and U.S. military policy within a year. The international infamy of the incident contributed to President Richard Nixon's decision to ban all open-air chemical weapon testing in 1969. The sheep incident was one of the events which helped contribute to a rise in public sentiment against the U.S. Army Chemical Corps during and after the Vietnam War. Ultimately, the Chemical Corps was almost disbanded as a result.
Following the incident, the Army and other state and federal agencies compiled reports, some of which were later characterized as "studies". A report which remained classified until 1978 and unreleased to the public until nearly 30 years after the incident was called the "first documented admission" by the Army that VX killed the sheep. In 1998, Jim Woolf, reporting for The Salt Lake Tribune, made the content of the report public for the first time. The report described the evidence that nerve agent was the cause of the sheep kill as "incontrovertible." The 1970 report, compiled by researchers at the U.S. Army's Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, stated that VX was found in both snow and grass samples recovered from the area three weeks after the sheep incident.
The report concluded that the "quantity of VX originally present was sufficient to account for the death of the sheep." Even after the report surfaced the Army maintained that it did not accept responsibility for the incident nor did they admit negligence. As late as 1997, one year before the report went public, U.S. Department of Defense officials stated that "the reason it (the report) was never published is because it wasn't particularly revealing." Lee Davidson, Correspondent for Deseret News wrote in June 1994 that Ray Peck, who owned the sheep that were killed was outside working during the May 13, 1968, incident, and members of his family developed nervous-system illnesses for years afterwards, similar to ills reported by people exposed to low levels of VX in lab experiments. Also, the probe showed that medical tests the Army had used to claim humans were not affected are now considered inconclusive, and the Pecks had shown other signs of low-level VX exposure.
QuoteOleta Nelson of Cedar City was among the thousands of unwitting civilian casualties in Utah.
Fallout from atomic bomb tests in Nevada — conducted by design of federal officials only when the wind was blowing toward Utah — killed her after 12 years of agony from brain cancer. The fallout hit not only southern Utah, but also the heavily populated Wasatch Front — a fact few suspect.
Another casualty was Ray Peck's family in Skull Valley. They were likely hit with low doses of the nerve gas from a Dugway Proving Ground test that accidentally killed 6,000 sheep near their home in 1968. The Pecks lived but haven't been the same since.
QuoteOne can often get an indication of what the US government is up to by what it spends money on.
A large percentage of govt. spending is secret. In addition to the tens of Billions in black budget money each year, there is also over a trillion dollars of military spending to date that is simply unaccounted for - which has been the subject of Congressional investigations. However, a significant portion of government spending is relatively transparent. Solicitations are published online at www.fedbidopps.gov. The more sensitive solicitation details are on shielded behind a low level of security at www.fedteds.gov.
Spending by federal, state and county agencies has grown increasingly ominous since 9/11 with purchases of mass casuality decontamination trailers, biological warfare command vehicles, silencers for military assualt rifles by city and county law enforcement, large orders of ammunition, construction of 'camps', etc.
The purchasing done at the Army's Dugway proving grounds west of Salt Lake City in Utah is no exception and paints a picture that everyone should pay heed to. With its facilities expanded and security increased, something more sinister may be going on at the huge facility. In recent years the facility has undertaken a rapid program to produce large amounts of biological and chemical weapons it has no legitimate use for.
Ssolicitations have been issued for:
fermentors to produce very large batches of bacteria
mobile cremation units
frozen sheep to test the cremation units
technical assistance for creating a wide range of lethal biological and chemical agents
Recent solicitations include upgrades to the Chemical Cloud Tracking equipment they use to detect chemical cloud composition through infrared light.
QuoteDugway's official mission is to test US and Allied biological & chemical defense systems, perform nuclear, biological, chemical survivable testing of defense material and provide support to chemical and biological weapons conventions. It is located just east of the Nevada border approximately 80 miles west-southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah in Tooele County on 798,855 acres of desert between three mountain ranges.
With a long history of corruption, deceit and deliberate release of biological and chemical weapons, the facility needs close monitoring. Former Dugway biological safety officer, Dr. Gerhard Bienek, claims that supervisors disregarded security protocols, lied in reports or presented conflicting information about anthrax and other weapons-grade germs and chemicals during his tenure at Dugway. Yet, in 2005 a Republican Senate committee turned down a proposal that would have provided oversight to operations at Dugway Proving Ground.
It wasn't until 2002 that the military admitted to deliberately and secretly exposing 5,842 members of the armed services to active biological and chemical agents during 21 tests during the 60's which were conducted at sea. The victims of the tests were denied any medical compensation until recently, well after most of them had already died from the military's deliberate assault on them.
Investigations have revealed that up to 1969 Dugway conducted at least 1,174 open-air tests of chemical agents spreading nearly a half million pounds of nerve agent to the winds. 328 open-air germ warfare tests were conducted, plus 74 radiological "dirty bomb" tests and the equivalent of eight intentional meltdowns of small nuclear reactors. In 1968 a release of VX nerve gas killed 6,400 sheep in Utah's Skull Valley.
QuoteOpen air testing was supposed to have been halted in 1969. The fact that the facility has greatly expanded its capabilities to produce biological and chemical agents raises concern because only small amounts of the material could possibly be required for developing protective measures. After 60 years of testing more than enough is now known for protection against bio & chemical agents. Computer simulations can be used for new applications not covered in previous decades of research.
One of the deadly agents housed at Dugway is anthrax, described in the Bible as one of God's plagues. It has the ability to survive as a spore for decades before finding its way into a host. As a skin infection, anthrax forms black, bacteria-oozing patches that can cover an entire limb, but it's most deadly in the lungs. Infections from inhaling spores begin like a mild case of the flu that continues until the sudden onset of troubled breathing, when it's often too late to stop. The skin turns bluish and a victim's chest swells as anthrax spores, activated in the warmth of the lungs, begin to reproduce, widening a gap behind the breastbone and causing massive bleeding inside the chest cavity. Ultimately, the bacteria spread through the blood to the rest of the body, resulting in shock and death in two to three days.
"There is a very blurry line between offense and defense when it comes to germ warfare," said Salt Lake City Dugway watchdog Steve Erickson, director of the Citizens Education Project.
The Army has no legitimate or legal use for thousands of liters of anthranx. Therefore, it must plan to use the agents in open-air testing or is ramping up to produce actual weapons.
QuoteThe activities at Dugway are only part of a massive increase in spending on biological and chemical warfare research. A cursory review of Bush's 2007 budget request shows $7 billion in bioterror funding. That compares with about $750 million spent before 9/11. If "black budget" spending is included, the US is already spending up to $8 billion per year on bio & chemical weapons.
The bioterrorism build-up began one month after the 9/11 attacks, when envelopes containing anthrax were mailed to Congress and Bush requested $1.5 billion in counter-bioterrorism funding. The envelopes contained not anthrax created by some foreign power or terrorist cell but bacteria from US labs. It was determined that the anthrax was a militarized anthrax strain developed at Fort Deitrick, Maryland. The US defense industry had become America's new worst enemy and was using terrorism to extort billions of dollars in taxpayers money. Instead of cutting funding to the enemy or investigating the case the military was simply given a massive increase in funding as demanded.
The international Biological Weapons Convention bans development of biological weapon agents and methods of delivery. The US has started construction on new National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center within the National Interagency Biodefense Campus at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The new facility will "acquire, grow, modify, store, stabilize, package [and] disperse" biological weapons. Other official plans include development of genetically-modified versions of deadly bacteria.
James Leonard, former chief American negotiator of the Biological Weapons Convention, has warned that US actions could be interpreted as "development" of biological weapons in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. Scientific groups opposed to portions of the biodefense effort include Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Council for Responsible Genetics. Even the conservative National Academy of Sciences calls the US efforts to make more deadly germs "concerning" - because they might give terrorists ideas.
As a rogue state which has violated international law to invade other countries and imprisons and tortures people it doesn't like, it is not unthinkable that the US would also engage in the illegal manufacture and use of biological and chemical weapons. It is also not unthinkable that the US would stage biological attacks against its own population as a pretext to wage war on another country. The US no longer observes or abides by many international laws or even its own laws. When one considers the fact that the US government has consistently lied about its weapons programs and has shown itself willing to test weapons on its own people, the present activities at Dugway and other locations become even more frightful.
Overtly expanding a bio-chem weapons program will only cause other countries to do the same in a new deadly arms race and create the very threat that the US claims that it is defending against.
Disposing of previously manufactured bio & chemical weapons has cost US taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars that could have instead gone to schools, roads, healthcare & jobs. Millions of pounds of chemical weapons were simply dumped into the ocean and still pose a grave risk. Just as the current generation is paying for the mistakes of previous ones, future generations will have to pay for the new round of insanity.
It is well past the time that Americans should wake up and realize that the greatest threat to their life and liberty is their own government, not some non-existent foreign threat. Failure to gain control over the government can only result in the utlimate demise of everything that Americans hold dear.
QuoteHILL AIR FORCE BASE — New Jersey native Edward G. Bartling can't shake a few nagging questions when something vaults his memory back to the summer of 1960 and the shadowy military tests he observed then in a remote area of Utah.
Standing next to a B-29 bomber parked behind the Hill Air Force Base museum recently took him back to that time.
It was 48 years ago when Bartling, now 73, was a corporal stationed at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground. Back then, he watched soldiers take part in tests that exposed them to potentially dangerous materials being sprayed from a plane.
Exactly what those materials were, he still can't say for sure. But he is hopeful a new government Web site will provide some answers.
"At that time, we really didn't have an idea of what the heck was going on, nor did we have enough sense to question it," he said. "When you're in the service, you follow orders."
Bartling was drafted into the Army on Feb. 9, 1959. On Feb. 8, 1961, he got out, leaving behind the Army he knew to begin his life with Renee Johanson, with whom he raised six children.
For 30 years, Bartling worked for Alliant Techsystems (formerly Hercules), in the end as a supervisor over workers manufacturing rocket motors in West Valley City. Now, he makes wooden toys for children in his shop at home.
At Dugway, the Army transformed him from a Jersey boy raised on a poultry farm into a young man who would don a gas mask in the middle of the Utah desert. He would record on a clipboard what was happening to fellow soldiers during three tests.
Bartling was assigned to the 45th Chemical Company, 2nd Chemical Battalion. His unit's job was to make smoke, like the kind that covers miles of terrain to mask troop movements. That wouldn't be his only job.
He can remember using a B-29 at Dugway in decontamination exercises, but he's certain the materials used on the plane were inert. That B-29 was eventually disassembled and taken to Hill.
He had heard about all types of animals being used to test protective gear in what he knew as the "dog area" of Dugway's 1,300 square miles.
"Anything you can think of besides elephants and giraffes," Bartling laughed. He didn't see the animal tests nor did he wonder what happened to them afterward.
For the human tests, military officials who ranked higher than Bartling would ask for volunteers. If there weren't enough volunteers, he said, they would simply pick the lower-ranking grunts. Bartling was a corporal at the time, which meant he got to be an observer, with at least some protection.
Bartling said if the winds, air pressure and temperature were just right, everyone would be up by 4 a.m. and assemble on a test grid by dawn. Then a jet would fly in close to the ground and make a run while spraying something over the volunteers.
"We were always told it would never hurt us, that this stuff won't hurt you," Bartling said.
QuoteHe watched the planes bank left or right and then up after their runs, noticing that the spray valves did not shut off right away. Bartling still wonders who or what was downwind — and what the damage might have been — in areas where the spray was released after the planes exited.
After the planes left, observers would wait and then approach men stationed at least about 30, 50 or 150 yards apart.
"I would talk to them and say, 'Hey, how you feeling? Can you see alright? Are you feeling any pain?"' Bartling said.
He only recorded station numbers, never any names. Their answers weren't always friendly.
"They might tell you, 'Kiss my butt' or 'Give me your damn gas mask' or 'Get the hell out of here, I'm not doing this anymore,"' Bartling said. "That wasn't a fun time."
Bartling can recall one distinct smell out on the test grid after one of the tests: freshly mowed hay. But there were no hay fields. What that smell was, Bartling isn't sure.
Bartling's long-smoldering questions relate to those tests and an infamous incident in 1968, after he was out of the Army, when a nerve-gas accident killed 6,000 sheep in nearby Skull Valley. Some of the more than 2,700 pounds of nerve agent sprayed from a plane in March of that year drifted off base, killing sheep and reportedly harming humans who said that they experienced nervous-system related illnesses.
Bartling wants to know what the test was for that killed the sheep, how many humans might have been harmed and what else, or who, was downwind.
"They didn't do them just for fun," Bartling said about open-air tests at Dugway. As for the dead sheep, he added, "My big question is this: Who was in the test grid or what was in the test grid to do the test spray? They're not going to spray (nerve) agent just for nothing."
QuoteProject Bacchus was a covert investigation by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency US Defense Department to determine whether it is possible to construct a bioweapons production facility with off-the-shelf equipment.
Revelation to the public
The secret Project Bacchus was revealed to the public in a September 2001 article in The New York Times. Reporters Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad collaborated to write the article. It is presumed that the reporters had knowledge of the program for at least several months; shortly after the article appeared they published a book that detailed the story further. The book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and the article are the only publicly available sources concerning Project Bacchus and its sister projects, Clear Vision and Jefferson.
Project
Bacchus ran from 1999-2000 and investigated whether "would-be" terrorists could build an anthrax production facility and remain undetected. In the two-year simulation, the facility was constructed, and production of anthrax-like bacterium was successfully completed. The participating scientists were able to produce about one kilogram of highly-refined bacterial particles.
QuoteThe anthrax sent to media offices in New York and Florida was the same strain, US health authorities have announced. It was also milled to fine particles - a process thought to be technically challenging, leading to charges that whoever made it has the backing of a state.
Forty-five people in the US and three in Kenya have so far tested positive to exposure to anthrax. Offices in New York, Washington and Boca Raton, Florida have been hit. On Wednesday, David Fleming, deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, said laboratory analysis showed strains sent to the American Media office in Florida and to NBC's headquarters in New York were the same.
This suggests a single attacker in both incidents. There were also similarities between the letters that carried anthrax to NBC and to Senator Tom Daschle's office in Washington on Monday. But information is not yet available on the strain used in that incident.
QuoteProject Clear Vision was a covert investigation of Soviet-built biological bomblets conducted by the Battelle Memorial Institute under contract with the CIA. The legality of this project under the Biological Weapons Convention is highly disputed.
Revelation to the public
The secret Project Clear Vision was revealed to the public in a September 2001 article in The New York Times. Reporters Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad collaborated to write the article. It is presumed that the reporters had knowledge of the program for at least several months; shortly after the article appeared they published a book that detailed the story further. The book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and the article are the only publicly available sources concerning Project Clear Vision and its sister projects, Bacchus and Jefferson.
Project
The project was completed from 1997–2000, during the Clinton Administration. The project's stated goal was to assess agent dissemination characteristics of the bomblets. However, program has received criticism due to the suspicions of its findings possibly being used in a covert bioweapons program.
Legality
As part of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the United States committed not to develop bioweapons. Moreover, the United States had not reported the secret projects in its annual confidence-building measure (CBM) declarations. The United States maintained that the program was fully consistent with the BWC and that the projects were defensive in nature.
QuoteProject Jefferson was a covert U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency program designed to determine if the current anthrax vaccine was effective against genetically-modified bacteria. The program's legal status under the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention is disputed.
Revelation to the public
The secret Project Jefferson was revealed to the public in a September 4, 2001 article in The New York Times. Reporters Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad collaborated to write the article. It is presumed that the reporters had knowledge of the program for at least several months; shortly after the article appeared they published a book that detailed the story further. The book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and the article are the only publicly available sources detailing Project Jefferson and its sister projects, Bacchus and Clear Vision.
Project
Project Jefferson began in 1997. Jefferson was designed to reproduce a strain of genetically-modified anthrax isolated by Russian scientists during the 1990s. The goal of the secret project was to determine whether or not the strain was resistant to the commercially available U.S. anthrax vaccine.
Legality
Project Jefferson was operated by the Defense Intelligence Agency and reviewed by lawyers at the Pentagon. Those lawyers determined that Project Jefferson was in line with the international treaty banning the production of bio-weapons, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Despite assertions from the Clinton and Bush administrations that the project, and its sisters, were legal, several international legal scholars disagreed.
Troubling was the fact that the clandestine program was omitted from BWC confidence-building measure (CBM) declarations.[ These measures were introduced to the BWC in 1986 and 1991 to strengthen the treaty, the U.S. had long been a proponent of their value and these tests damaged American credibility. U.S. desire to keep such programs secret was, according to Bush administration officials, a "significant reason" that the U.S. President rejected a draft agreement signed by 143 nations to strengthen the BWC.
QuoteProject 4.1 was the designation for a medical study conducted by the United States of those residents of the Marshall Islands exposed to radioactive fallout from the March 1, 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, which had an unexpectedly large yield. Government and mainstream historical sources point to the study being organized on March 6 or March 7, 1954, six days after the Bravo shot.
QuoteProject 4.1
In the wake of the Bravo accident, a new research section was added to the Castle Bravo Weapons Effects research section. Program 4, "Biomedical effects," was to include one project, Project 4.1, titled "Study of Response of Human Beings exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation due to Fall-out from High-Yield Weapons." Eugene P. Cronkite of the National Naval Medical Center was designated as Project Officer. Cronkite's instructions stressed the importance of secrecy surrounding the project:
...the project is classified SECRET RESTRICTED DATA. Due to possible adverse public reaction, you will specifically instruct all personnel in this project to be particularly careful not to discuss the purpose of this project and its background or findings with any except those who have specific "need to know."
The purpose of the project, as a 1982 Defense Nuclear Agency report explained, was both medical as well as for research purposes:
The purposes of Project 4.1 were to (1) evaluate the severity of radiation injury to the human beings exposed, (2) provide for all necessary medical care, and (3) conduct a scientific study of radiation injuries to human beings.
As a Department of Energy Committee writing on the human radiation experiments wrote, "It appears to have been almost immediately apparent to the AEC and the Joint Task Force running the Castle series that research on radiation effects could be done in conjunction with the medical treatment of the exposed populations." The DOE report also concluded that "The dual purpose of what is now a DOE medical program has led to a view by the Marshallese that they were being used as 'guinea pigs' in a 'radiation experiment.'"
Organizations involved in the project included the Naval Medical Research Institute, the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, Patrol Squadron 29, the Naval Air Station, Kwajalein, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Applied Fisheries Laboratory at the University of Washington, and Hanford Atomic Power Operations. Three U.S. Navy ships were used in the project: USS Nicholas, USS Renshaw, and USS Philip. The primary study of the Marshallese was terminated around 75 days after the time of exposure. In July 1954 a meeting at the Division of Biology at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission decided to complete 6- and 12-month followup exposure studies, some of which were later written up as addendums to Project 4.1.
QuoteSome Marshallese have alleged that the exposure of the Marshallese was premeditated. In 1972, Micronesian Representative Ataji Balos charged at the Congress of Micronesia that the exposure during Bravo was purposeful so that the AEC could develop medical capabilities for treating those exposed to fallout during nuclear war, and charged that the Marshallese were chosen because of their marginal status in the world at large. According to a U.S. internal transcription of Balos' talk, Balos alleged that "The U.S. chose to make guinea pigs out of our people because they are not white but some brown natives in some remote Pacific islands. Medical treatment that Rongelapese and Utrikese have been receiving is also highly questionable." The AEC issued a staff comment denying these charges.
In 1994, a 1953 Castle Bravo program prospectus was found which included reference to Project 4.1 apparently written before the Bravo shot had occurred. The U.S. government responded that someone had gone back into the project list after the Bravo test to insert Project 4.1; thus the acts were not premeditated. All other U.S. documents point to Project 4.1 having been established after the Bravo test—most sources point to its having been organized on March 7, 1954. The final Project 4.1 report began in its preface with the statement that "Operation CASTLE did not include a biomedical program" (it mentions this in discussing the ad hoc nature by which the project personnel were assembled). All official and mainstream historical accounts of the Bravo test indicate that its high level of fallout was a result of a miscalculation in relation to its design and was not deliberate (see the Castle Bravo article for more information on the accident).
Barton C. Hacker, the official historian of U.S. nuclear testing exposures (who is, in the end, very critical of the U.S. handling of the Bravo incident), characterized the controversy in the following way:
In March 1954, the AEC had quickly decided that learning how the Marshallese victims of Castle Bravo responded to their accidental exposure could be of immense medical and military value. Immediate action centered on seeing them evacuated and decontaminated, then cared for medically. But studies of their exposures and aftereffects also began. That effort became project 4.1 in the Castle experimental program. This unfortunate choice of terminology may help explain later charges that the AEC had deliberately exposed the Marshallese to observe the effects. Like the American radium dial painters of the 1920s and the Japanese of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Marshallese of 1954 inadvertently were to provide otherwise unobtainable data on the human consequences of high radiation exposures. Findings from project 4.1 soon began to appear in print.
QuoteControversy continues however, fed by the legacy of mistrust sown by American nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, which involved relocating hundreds of people and rendering several atolls uninhabitable. While most sources do not think that the exposure was intentional, there is no dispute that the United States did carefully study the exposed Marshallese, but never obtained informed consent from the study subjects. This study of the Marshallese was in some cases beneficial for their treatment, and in other cases not. In these ways, the study of the exposed Marshallese reflects the same ethical lapses as were undertaken in other aspects of the secret human radiation experiments conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1940s and 1950s, which came to light only after the end of the Cold War.
According to the Final Project 4.1 report, the Bravo test exposed 239 Marshallese on the Utirik, Rongelap, and Ailinginae Atolls to significant level of radiation, and 28 Americans stationed on the Rongerik Atoll were also exposed. Those on the Rongelap Atoll were the most seriously affected, receiving approximately 175 rads of radiation before they were evacuated. Those on Ailinginae received 69 rads, those on Utirik received 14 rads, and the Americans on Rongerik received an average dose of 78 rads. Most of those exposed did not immediately show signs of radiation sickness, though within a few days other effects of significant radiation exposure manifested: loss of hair and significant skin damage, including "raw, weeping lesions", among the Rongelap and Ailinginae groups. The lesions healed quickly, however, consistent with radiation exposure.
The report abstract concluded that "estimates of total body burden indicate that there is no long term hazard." Additional follow-up checks on the Marshallese studied in Project 4.1 were conducted at regular intervals afterwards every year since 1954. Though the Marshallese experienced far milder immediate effects than the Japanese fishermen exposed to Bravo fallout on the fishing boat Daigo Fukury? Maru, the long-term effects were more pronounced. For the first decade after the test, the effects were ambiguous and statistically difficult to correlate to radiation exposure: miscarriages and stillbirths among exposed Rongelap women doubled in the first five years after the accident, but then returned to normal; some developmental difficulties and impaired growth appeared in children, but in no clear-cut pattern. In the decades that followed, though, the effects were undeniable. Children began to suffer disproportionately from thyroid cancer (due to exposure to radioiodines), and almost a third of those exposed developed neoplasms by 1974.
The results of the original Project 4.1 were published by the study's authors in professional medical journals, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association.
QuoteProject CHATTER was a United States Navy program beginning in the fall of 1947 focusing on the identification and testing of drugs in interrogations and the recruitment of agents. Their search included laboratory experiments on both animal and human subjects. The program operated under the direction of Doctor Charles Savage of the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, from 1947 to 1953.
The project was geared to identifying agents both synthetic and natural that were effective during interrogation. The project was centered around, but not restricted to, the use of anabasine (an alkaloid), scopolamine and mescaline. The program ended shortly after the Korean War in 1953, presumably due to limited progress and the success of other projects.
QuoteProject ARTICHOKE (also referred to as Operation ARTICHOKE) was a CIA project that researched interrogation methods and arose from Project BLUEBIRD on August 20, 1951, run by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence. A memorandum by Richard Helms to CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles indicated Artichoke became Project MKULTRA on April 13, 1953.
The project studied hypnosis, forced morphine addiction (and subsequent forced withdrawal), and the use of other chemicals, among other methods, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects.
ARTICHOKE was an offensive program of mind control that gathered information together with the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and FBI. In addition, the scope of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that stated, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?"
QuoteMKDELTA, and its associated program MKULTRA, were mind control and interrogation operations run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Both MKULTRA and MKDELTA involved the surreptitious use of LSD and other biochemicals in clandestine operations; MKULTRA was a domestic program whose subjects were unwitting Canadian and U.S citizens, whereas MKDELTA was established to govern the surreptitious use of LSD and other biochemicals abroad.
On 26 April 1976, the Church Committee of the United States Senate issued a report, "Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities", In Book I, Chapter XVII, p 389 this report states:
LSD was one of the materials tested in the MKULTRA program. The final phase of LSD testing involved surreptitious administration to unwitting non-volunteer subjects in normal life settings by undercover officers of the Bureau of Narcotics acting for the CIA.
A special procedure, designated MKDELTA, was established to govern the use of MKULTRA materials abroad. Such materials were used on a number of occasions. Because MKULTRA records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the operational use of MKULTRA materials by the CIA overseas; it has been determined that the use of these materials abroad began in 1953, and possibly as early as 1950.
Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKULTRA/MKDELTA materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.
In his 2009 book, A Terrible Mistake, researcher H. P. Albarelli Jr. concludes that CIA operative Frank Olson was murdered because a personal crisis of conscience made it likely he would divulge state secrets concerning several CIA programs, chief among them Project ARTICHOKE and an MKDELTA project code-named Project SPAN. Albarelli presents considerable evidence in support of his theory that Project SPAN involved the contamination of food supplies and the aerosolized spraying of a potent LSD mixture in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France in August, 1951. (The French word "pont" translates to "bridge" in English; a synonym is "span".)
The Pont-Saint-Esprit incident resulted in mass psychosis, 32 commitments to mental institutions, and at least seven deaths. In his work as acting chief of the Special Operations Division, Olson was involved in the development of aerosolized delivery systems; he had been present at Pont-Saint-Esprit in August, 1951; and several months before resigning his position he had witnessed a terminal interrogation conducted in Germany under Project ARTICHOKE. Other researchers have reached conclusions similar to Albarelli's, including John Grant Fuller, author of The Day of Saint Anthony's Fire, a landmark book that originally cited ergot poisoning as responsible for the events at Pont-Saint-Esprit.
QuoteA 50-year mystery over the 'cursed bread' of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.
In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.
For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.
The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.
On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.
One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: "I am a plane", before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.
Time magazine wrote at the time: "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead."
Eventually, it was determined that the best-known local baker had unwittingly contaminated his flour with ergot, a hallucinogenic mould that infects rye grain. Another theory was the bread had been poisoned with organic mercury.
However, H P Albarelli Jr., an investigative journalist, claims the outbreak resulted from a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the US Army's top-secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
QuoteMKNAOMI was the code name for a joint Department of Defense/CIA research program lasting from the 1950s through the 1970s. Unclassified information about the MKNAOMI program and the related Special Operations Division is scarce. It is generally reported to be a successor to the MKDELTA project and to have focused on biological projects including biological warfare agents—specifically, to store materials that could either incapacitate or kill a test subject and to develop devices for the diffusion of such materials.
During the first twenty years of its establishment, the CIA engaged in various projects designed to increase U.S. biological and chemical warfare capabilities. Project MKNAOMI was initiated to provide the CIA with a covert support base to meet its top-secret operational requirements. The purpose was to establish a robust arsenal within the CIA's Technical Services Division (TSD) and of which was to consist of various lethal and incapacitating materials. This would enable the TSD to serve as a highly maintained center for the circulation of biological and chemical materials.
Surveillance, testing, upgrading, and the evaluation of special materials and items were also provided by MKNAOMI so as to ensure that no defects and unwanted contingencies emerged during operational conditions. For these purposes the U.S. Army's Special Operations Command (SOC) was assigned to assist the CIA in the development, testing, and maintenance procedures for the biological agents and delivery systems (1952). Both the CIA and SOC also modified guns that fired special darts coated with biological agents and various poisonous pills. The darts would serve to incapacitate guard dogs, infiltrate the area that the dogs were guarding, and then awaken the dogs upon exiting the facility. In addition, the SOC was also designated to research the potentials for using biological agents against other animals and crops.
A 1967 CIA memo which was uncovered by the Church Committee was confirmed to give evidence of at least three covert techniques for attacking and poisoning crops that have been examined under field conditions. On November 25, 1969, President Richard Nixon abolished any military practice involving biological weapons and Project MKNAOMI was dissolved. On February 14, 1970, a presidential order was given to outlaw all stockpiles of bacteriological weapons and nonliving toxins. However, despite this presidential order, a CIA scientist was able to acquire an estimated 11 grams of deadly shellfish toxin from SOC personnel at Fort Detrick. The toxin was then stored in a CIA laboratory where it remained undetected for over five years.
QuoteProject MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973. The program used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy. MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.
The research was undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA would operate through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions would be aware of the CIA's involvement. MKUltra was allocated 6 percent of total CIA funds.
Project MKUltra was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order.
In 1977, a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents relating to project MKUltra, which led to Senate hearings later that same year. In July 2001 most surviving information regarding MKUltra was officially declassified.
QuoteA precursor of the MKUltra program began in 1945 when the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was established and given direct responsibility for Operation Paperclip. The program recruited former Nazi scientists, some of whom studied torture and brainwashing, and several who had been identified and prosecuted as war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials.
Several secret U.S. government projects grew out of Operation Paperclip. These projects included Project CHATTER (established 1947), and Project BLUEBIRD (established 1950), which was renamed Project ARTICHOKE in 1951. Their purpose was to study mind control, interrogation, behavior modification and related topics.
QuoteThe project's intentionally oblique CIA cryptonym is made up of the digraph MK, meaning that the project was sponsored by the agency's Technical Services Staff, followed by the word Ultra (which had previously been used to designate the most secret classification of World War II intelligence). Other related cryptonyms include Project MKNAOMI and Project MKDELTA.
Headed by Sidney Gottlieb, the MKUltra project was started on the order of CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles on April 13, 1953. Its remit was to develop mind-controlling drugs for use against the Soviet bloc, largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea. The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives. The CIA was also interested in being able to manipulate foreign leaders with such techniques, and would later invent several schemes to drug Fidel Castro. Experiments were often conducted without the subjects' knowledge or consent. In some cases, academic researchers being funded through grants from CIA front organizations were unaware that their work was being used for these purposes.
In 1964, the project was renamed MKSEARCH. The project attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and generally to explore any other possibilities of mind control. Another MKUltra effort, Subproject 54, was the Navy's top secret "Perfect Concussion" program, which was supposed to use sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory, however the program was never carried out.
Because most MKUltra records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then CIA director Richard Helms, it has been difficult, if not impossible, for investigators to gain a complete understanding of the more than 150 individually funded research sub-projects sponsored by MKUltra and related CIA programs. A member of the CIA claims that not all of the records/chemicals were destroyed. Some were smuggled out and kept in private properties and organizations.
QuoteThe Agency poured millions of dollars into studies examining methods of influencing and controlling the mind, and of enhancing their ability to extract information from resistant subjects during interrogation.
Some historians have asserted that creating a "Manchurian Candidate" subject through "mind control" techniques was a goal of MKUltra and related CIA projects. Alfred McCoy has claimed that the CIA attempted to focus media attention on these sorts of "ridiculous" programs, so that the public would not look at the primary goal of the research, which was developing effective methods of torture and interrogation. Such authors cite as one example that the CIA's KUBARK interrogation manual refers to "studies at McGill University", and that most of the techniques recommended in KUBARK are exactly those that researcher Donald Ewen Cameron used on his test subjects (sensory deprivation, drugs, isolation, etc.).
One 1955 MKUltra document gives an indication of the size and range of the effort; this document refers to the study of an assortment of mind-altering substances described as follows:
Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.
Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.
Materials which will cause the victim to age faster/slower in maturity.
Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc.
Materials will cause temporary/permanent brain damage and loss of memory.
Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called "brain-washing".
Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.
Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.
Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.
Substances which will produce a chemical that can cause blisters.
Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.
A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.
Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.
A knockout pill which can surreptitiously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.
A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a person to perform physical activity.
QuoteCIA documents suggest that "chemical, biological and radiological" means were investigated for the purpose of mind control as part of MKUltra. A secretive arrangement granted the MKUltra program a percentage of the CIA budget. The MKUltra director was granted six percent of the CIA operating budget in 1953, without oversight or accounting. An estimated $10 million USD ($80 million adjusted for inflation) or more was spent.
QuoteEarly CIA efforts focused on LSD, which later came to dominate many of MKUltra's programs. Technical Services Staff officials understood that LSD distorted a person's sense of reality, and they felt compelled to learn whether it could alter someone's basic loyalties. The CIA wanted to know if they could make Russian spies defect against their will and whether the Russians could do the same to their own operatives.
Once Project MKUltra officially got underway in April, 1953, experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes, "people who could not fight back", as one agency officer put it. In one case LSD was administered to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days. LSD was also administered to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S. agreed to follow after World War II. The aim of this was to find drugs which would irresistibly bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program him or her as "a robot agent".
Efforts to "recruit" subjects were often illegal, even though actual use of LSD was legal in the United States until October 6, 1966. In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several brothels in San Francisco, California to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events. The men were dosed with LSD, the brothels were equipped with one-way mirrors, and the sessions were filmed for later viewing and study. In other experiments where people were given LSD without their knowledge, they were interrogated under bright lights with doctors in the background taking notes. The subjects were told that their "trips" would be extended indefinitely if they refused to reveal their secrets. The people being interrogated this way were CIA employees, U. S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term debilitation and several deaths resulted from this. Heroin addicts were bribed into taking LSD with offers of more heroin.
The office of Security used LSD in interrogations but Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who directed MKUltra, had other ideas: he thought it could be used in covert operations. Since its effects were temporary, he believed it could be given to high officials and in this way affect the course of important meetings, speeches etc. Since he realized there was a difference in testing the drug in a laboratory and using it in clandestine operations, he initiated a series of experiments where LSD was given to people in "normal" settings without warning. At first, everyone in Technical Services tried it; a typical experiment involved two people in a room where they observed each other for hours and took notes. As the experimentation progressed, a point was reached where outsiders were drugged with no explanation whatsoever and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives.
Adverse reactions often occurred, for example an operative who had received the drug in his morning coffee, became psychotic and ran across Washington, seeing a monster in every car that passed him. Incidents like that reaffirmed that LSD is a dangerous weapon but that only made them more enthusiastic. The experiments continued even after Dr. Frank Olson, an army scientist who had not taken LSD before, went into deep depression after a surprise trip and later fell from a thirteenth story window (it is unclear whether he committed suicide or was murdered before being thrown out of the window).
Some subjects' participation was consensual, and in these cases they appeared to be singled out for even more extreme experiments. In one case, seven volunteers in Kentucky were given LSD for 77 consecutive days.
LSD was eventually dismissed by MKUltra's researchers as too unpredictable in its results.[36] They had given up on the notion that LSD was "the secret that was going to unlock the universe" but it still had a place in the cloak-and-dagger arsenal. However, by 1962, the CIA and the army had developed a series of superhallucinogens such as the highly touted BZ, which was thought to hold greater promise as a mind control weapon. This resulted in the withdrawal of support for many academics and private researchers and LSD research became less of a priority altogether.
QuoteAnother technique investigated was connecting a barbiturate IV into one arm and an amphetamine IV into the other. The barbiturates were released into the person first, and as soon as the person began to fall asleep, the amphetamines were released. The person would then begin babbling incoherently, and it was sometimes possible to ask questions and get useful answers.
Other experiments involved drugs such as temazepam (used under code name MKSEARCH), heroin, morphine, MDMA, mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, marijuana, alcohol, sodium pentothal, and ergine (in Subproject 22).
QuoteDeclassified MKUltra documents indicate hypnosis was studied in the early 1950s. Experimental goals included: the creation of "hypnotically induced anxieties," "hypnotically increasing ability to learn and recall complex written matter," studying hypnosis and polygraph examinations, "hypnotically increasing ability to observe and recall complex arrangements of physical objects," and studying "relationship of personality to susceptibility to hypnosis." Experiments were conducted with drug induced hypnosis and with anterograde and retrograde amnesia while under the influence of such drugs.
QuoteThe experiments were exported to Canada when the CIA recruited Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, creator of the "psychic driving" concept, which the CIA found particularly interesting. Cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the psyche. He commuted from Albany, New York to Montreal every week to work at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 to carry out MKUltra experiments there. In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions.
His treatments resulted in victims' incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents. His work was inspired and paralleled by the British psychiatrist William Sargant at St Thomas' Hospital, London, and Belmont Hospital, Surrey, who was also involved in the Intelligence Services and who experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.
It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. Cameron had also been a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946–47.
Naomi Klein argues in her book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron's research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was actually not about mind control and brainwashing, but about designing "a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.' In other words, torture." Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron's experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method."
Quoten 1973, with the government-wide panic caused by Watergate, the CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed. Pursuant to this order, most CIA documents regarding the project were destroyed, making a full investigation of MKUltra impossible. A cache of some 20,000 documents survived Helms' purge, as they had been incorrectly stored in a financial record building and were discovered following a FOIA request in 1977. These documents were fully investigated during the Senate Hearings of 1977.
In December 1974, The New York Times reported that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. That report prompted investigations by the U.S. Congress, in the form of the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission that looked into domestic activities of the CIA, the FBI, and intelligence-related agencies of the military.
In the summer of 1975, congressional Church Committee reports and the presidential Rockefeller Commission report revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the Department of Defense had conducted experiments on both unwitting and cognizant human subjects as part of an extensive program to influence and control human behavior through the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD and mescaline and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject had died after administration of LSD. Much of what the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission learned about MKUltra was contained in a report, prepared by the Inspector General's office in 1963, that had survived the destruction of records ordered in 1973. However, it contained little detail. Sidney Gottlieb, who had retired from the CIA two years previously, was interviewed by the committee but claimed to have very little recollection of the activities of MKUltra.
The congressional committee investigating the CIA research, chaired by Senator Frank Church, concluded that "[p]rior consent was obviously not obtained from any of the subjects". The committee noted that the "experiments sponsored by these researchers ... call into question the decision by the agencies not to fix guidelines for experiments."
Following the recommendations of the Church Committee, President Gerald Ford in 1976 issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities which, among other things, prohibited "experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject" and in accordance with the guidelines issued by the National Commission. Subsequent orders by Presidents Carter and Reagan expanded the directive to apply to any human experimentation.
QuoteIn 1977, during a hearing held by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to look further into MKUltra, Admiral Stansfield Turner, then Director of Central Intelligence, revealed that the CIA had found a set of records, consisting of about 20,000 pages, that had survived the 1973 destruction orders because they had been stored at a records center not usually used for such documents. These files dealt with the financing of MKUltra projects and contained few project details, however much more was learned from them than from the Inspector General's 1963 report.
On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:
The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.
In Canada, the issue took much longer to surface, becoming widely known in 1984 on a CBC news show, The Fifth Estate. It was learned that not only had the CIA funded Dr. Cameron's efforts, but perhaps even more shockingly, the Canadian government was fully aware of this, and had later provided another $500,000 in funding to continue the experiments. This revelation largely derailed efforts by the victims to sue the CIA as their U.S. counterparts had, and the Canadian government eventually settled out of court for $100,000 to each of the 127 victims. None of Dr. Cameron's personal records of his involvement with MKUltra survive, since his family destroyed them after his death from a heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967.
QuoteThe U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report on September 28, 1984, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, DOD and other national security agencies studied thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances.
The quote from the study:
Working with the CIA, the Department of Defense gave hallucinogenic drugs to thousands of "volunteer" soldiers in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to LSD, the Army also tested quinuclidinyl benzilate, a hallucinogen code-named BZ. (Note 37) Many of these tests were conducted under the so-called MKUltra program, established to counter perceived Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing techniques. Between 1953 and 1964, the program consisted of 149 projects involving drug testing and other studies on unwitting human subjects
QuoteGiven the CIA's purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MKUltra experiments, including deaths, will never be known.
Several known deaths have been associated with Project MKUltra, most notably that of Frank Olson. Olson, a United States Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in November, 1953, as part of a CIA experiment and died under suspicious circumstances a week later. A CIA doctor assigned to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep in another bed in a New York City hotel room when Olson exited the window and fell thirteen stories to his death. In 1953, Olson's death was described as a suicide that had occurred during a severe psychotic episode.
The CIA's own internal investigation concluded that the head of MK ULTRA, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, had conducted the LSD experiment with Olson's prior knowledge, although neither Olson nor the other men taking part in the experiment were informed as to the exact nature of the drug until some 20 minutes after its ingestion. The report further suggested that Gottlieb was nonetheless due a reprimand, as he had failed to take into account Olson's already-diagnosed suicidal tendencies, which might have been exacerbated by the LSD.
The Olson family disputes the official version of events. They maintain that Frank Olson was murdered because, especially in the aftermath of his LSD experience, he had become a security risk who might divulge state secrets associated with highly classified CIA programs, many of which he had direct personal knowledge. A few days before his death, Frank Olson quit his position as acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick, Maryland (later Fort Detrick) because of a severe moral crisis concerning the nature of his biological weapons research.
Among Olson's concerns were the development of assassination materials used by the CIA, the CIA's use of biological warfare materials in covert operations, experimentation with biological weapons in populated areas, collaboration with former Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip, LSD mind-control research, the use of biological weapons (including anthrax) during the Korean War, and the use of psychoactive drugs during "terminal" interrogations under a program code-named Project ARTICHOKE.
Later forensic evidence conflicted with the official version of events; when Olson's body was exhumed in 1994, cranial injuries indicated that Olson had been knocked unconscious before he exited the window. The medical examiner termed Olson's death a "homicide". In 1975, Olson's family received a $750,000 settlement from the U.S. government and formal apologies from President Gerald Ford and CIA Director William Colby, though their apologies were limited to informed consent issues concerning Olson's ingestion of LSD.
In his 2009 book, A Terrible Mistake, researcher H. P. Albarelli Jr. concurs with the Olson family and concludes that Frank Olson was murdered because a personal crisis of conscience made it likely he would divulge state secrets concerning several CIA programs, chief among them Project ARTICHOKE and an MKDELTA project code-named Project SPAN. Albarelli presents considerable evidence in support of his theory that Project SPAN involved the contamination of food supplies and the aerosolized spraying of a potent LSD mixture in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France in August, 1951. The Pont-Saint-Esprit incident resulted in mass psychosis, 32 commitments to mental institutions, and at least seven deaths. In his work as acting chief of the Special Operations Division, Olson was involved in the development of aerosolized delivery systems; he had been present at Pont-Saint-Esprit in August, 1951; and several months before resigning his position he had witnessed a terminal interrogation conducted in Germany under Project ARTICHOKE. Other researchers have reached conclusions similar to Albarelli's, including John Grant Fuller, author of The Day of Saint Anthony's Fire, a landmark book that originally cited ergot poisoning as responsible for the events at Pont-Saint-Esprit.
On April 26, 1976, the Church Committee of the United States Senate issued a report, "Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities", In Book I, Chapter XVII, p 389 this report states:
LSD was one of the materials tested in the MKUltra program. The final phase of LSD testing involved surreptitious administration to unwitting non-volunteer subjects in normal life settings by undercover officers of the Bureau of Narcotics acting for the CIA.
A special procedure, designated MKDELTA, was established to govern the use of MKUltra materials abroad. Such materials were used on a number of occasions. Because MKUltra records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the operational use of MKUltra materials by the CIA overseas; it has been determined that the use of these materials abroad began in 1953, and possibly as early as 1950.
Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKUltra/MKDelta materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.
Another known victim of Project MKUltra was Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player in New York City, who died in January, 1953 as a result of a secret Army experiment involving MDA.
QuoteThe revelations about the CIA and the Army prompted a number of subjects or their survivors to file lawsuits against the federal government for conducting illegal experiments. Although the government aggressively, and sometimes successfully, sought to avoid legal liability, several plaintiffs did receive compensation through court order, out-of-court settlement, or acts of Congress. Frank Olson's family received $750,000 by a special act of Congress, and both President Ford and CIA director William Colby met with Olson's family to publicly apologize.
Previously, the CIA and the Army had actively and successfully sought to withhold incriminating information, even as they secretly provided compensation to the families. One subject of Army drug experimentation, James Stanley, an Army sergeant, brought an important, albeit unsuccessful, suit. The government argued that Stanley was barred from suing under a legal doctrine—known as the Feres doctrine, after a 1950 Supreme Court case, Feres v. United States—that prohibits members of the Armed Forces from suing the government for any harms that were inflicted "incident to service."
In 1987, the Supreme Court affirmed this defense in a 5–4 decision that dismissed Stanley's case: United States v. Stanley.[64] The majority argued that "a test for liability that depends on the extent to which particular suits would call into question military discipline and decision making would itself require judicial inquiry into, and hence intrusion upon, military matters." In dissent, Justice William Brennan argued that the need to preserve military discipline should not protect the government from liability and punishment for serious violations of constitutional rights:
The medical trials at Nuremberg in 1947 deeply impressed upon the world that experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable. The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human subjects... . n defiance of this principle, military intelligence officials ... began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials, including LSD.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing a separate dissent, stated:
No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the 'voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential ... to satisfy moral, ethical, and legal concepts.' If this principle is violated, the very least that society can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can be, by the perpetrators.
This is the only Supreme Court case to address the application of the Nuremberg Code to experimentation sponsored by the U.S. government. Although the suit was unsuccessful, dissenting opinions put the Army—and by association the entire government—on notice that use of individuals without their consent is unacceptable. The limited application of the Nuremberg Code in U.S. courts does not detract from the power of the principles it espouses, especially in light of stories of failure to follow these principles that appeared in the media and professional literature during the 1960s and 1970s and the policies eventually adopted in the mid-1970s.
In another law suit, Wayne Ritchie, a former United States Marshal, after hearing about the project's existence in 1990, alleged the CIA laced his food or drink with LSD at a 1957 Christmas party which resulted in his attempting to commit a robbery at a bar and his subsequent arrest. While the government admitted it was, at that time, drugging people without their consent, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel found Ritchie could not prove he was one of the victims of MKUltra or that LSD caused his robbery attempt and dismissed the case in 2007.
QuoteForty-four American colleges or universities, 15 research foundations or chemical or pharmaceutical companies and the like including Sandoz (now Novartis) and Eli Lilly and Company, 12 hospitals or clinics (in addition to those associated with universities), and three prisons are known to have participated in MKUltra.
QuoteA considerable amount of credible circumstantial evidence suggests that Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, participated in CIA-sponsored MKUltra experiments conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962.[68] During World War II, Henry Murray, the lead researcher in the Harvard experiments, served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was a forerunner of the CIA. Murray applied for a grant funded by the United States Navy, and his Harvard stress experiments strongly resembled those run by the OSS.[68] Beginning at the age of sixteen, Kaczynski participated along with twenty-one other undergraduate students in the Harvard experiments, which have been described as "disturbing" and "ethically indefensible."
Merry Prankster Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, volunteered for MKUltra experiments involving LSD and other psychedelic drugs at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park while he was a student at nearby Stanford University. Kesey's experiences while under the influence of LSD inspired him to promote the drug outside the context of the MKUltra experiments, which influenced the early development of hippie culture.
Robert Hunter is an American lyricist, singer-songwriter, translator, and poet, best known for his association with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. Along with Ken Kesey, Hunter was an early volunteer MKUltra test subject at Stanford University. Stanford test subjects were paid to take LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline, then report on their experiences. These experiences were creatively formative for Hunter:
Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist...and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell like (must I take you by the hand, every so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells....By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane.
Candy Jones, American fashion model and radio host, claimed to have been a victim of mind control in the 1960s.
Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger volunteered for testing while in prison.
QuoteMKUltra plays a part in many conspiracy theories given its nature and the destruction of most records.
Lawrence Teeter, attorney for convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan, believed Sirhan was under the influence of hypnosis when he fired his weapon at Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Teeter linked the CIA's MKUltra program to mind control techniques that he claimed were used to control Sirhan.
Jonestown, the Guyana location of the Jim Jones cult and Peoples Temple mass suicide, was thought to be a test site for MKUltra medical and mind control experiments after the official end of the program. Congressman Leo Ryan, a known critic of the CIA, was murdered by Peoples Temple members after he personally visited Jonestown to investigate various reported irregularities.
QuoteAt his retirement in 1972 Gottlieb was to dismiss his entire effort for the CIA as "useless".
Although the CIA insists that MKUltra-type experiments have been abandoned, many CIA observers say there is little reason to believe it does not continue today under a different set of acronyms. 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti specifically called the CIA claim that MKUltra was abandoned a "cover story."
Quoten 1977, during a hearing held by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to look further into MKUltra, Admiral Stansfield Turner, then Director of Central Intelligence, revealed that the CIA had found a set of records, consisting of about 20,000 pages, that had survived the 1973 destruction orders because they had been stored at a records center not usually used for such documents. These files dealt with the financing of MKUltra projects and contained few project details, however much more was learned from them than from the Inspector General's 1963 report.
On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:
The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.
QuoteStansfield M. Turner (born December 1, 1923) is a retired Admiral and former Director of Central Intelligence and President of the Naval War College. He is currently a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park School of Public Policy.
Military career
Following graduation from Highland Park High School, Turner attended Amherst College, entering it in 1941, and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with the Class of 1947 and attained a commission in the United States Navy in June, 1946 (during World War II classes were graduated in three years). He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University while serving in the navy, earning a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1950. During his naval career he served as commanding officer of the Guided Missile Cruiser USS Horne (DLG-30) as well as commander in chief of NATO Southern Flank, headquartered in Naples.
Central Intelligence Agency
Under Turner's direction, the CIA emphasized Technical intelligence (TECHINT) and Signal intelligence (SIGINT) more than Human intelligence (HUMINT). In 1979, Turner eliminated over 800 operational positions in what was called the Halloween Massacre. In a biography published in 2005, Turner expressed regret for the dismissals stating, "In retrospect, I probably should not have effected the reductions of 820 positions at all, and certainly not the last 17." Turner gave notable testimony to Congress revealing much of the extent of the MKULTRA program, which the CIA ran from the early 1950s to late 1960s. Reform and simplification of the intelligence community's multilayered secrecy system was one of Turner's significant initiatives, but produced no results by the time he left office.
During Turner's term as head of the CIA, he became outraged when former agent Frank Snepp published a book called Decent Interval which exposed incompetence among senior US government personnel during the fall of Saigon. Turner accused Snepp of breaking the secrecy agreement required of all CIA agents, and then later was forced to admit under cross-examination that he had never read the agreement signed by Snepp. Regardless, the CIA ultimately won its case against Snepp at the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court forced Snepp to turn over all his profits from Decent Interval and to seek preclearance of any future writings about intelligence work for the rest of his life. The ultimate irony was that the CIA would later rely on the Snepp legal precedent in forcing Turner to seek preclearance of his own memoirs, which were highly critical of President Ronald Reagan's policies.
During his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence in the early 1980s when asked on an NPR interview program about 'domestic spying', he said, "Americans are not a source of much intelligence."
In the documentary Secrets of the CIA Turner commented on the MK ULTRA project:
"It came to my attention early in my tenure as director, and I felt it was a warning sign that if you're not alert, things can go wrong in this organization."
On 12 March 1980, President Jimmy Carter and Turner presented Antonio J. Mendez (also known as Tony Mendez) with the CIA's Intelligence Star for his role in the exfiltration of six US State Department personnel from Iran on 28 January 1980.
QuoteOperation Midnight Climax was an operation initially established by Sidney Gottlieb and placed under the direction of Narcotics Bureau officer George Hunter White under the alias of Morgan Hall for the CIA as a sub-project of Project MKULTRA, the CIA mind-control research program that began in the 1950s.
The project consisted of a web of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco, Marin, and New York. It was established in order to study the effects of LSD on unconsenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass. Several significant operational techniques were developed in this theater, including extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations.
The safehouses were dramatically scaled back in 1962, following a report by CIA Inspector General John Earman that strongly recommended closing the facility. The San Francisco safehouses were closed in 1965, and the New York City safehouse soon followed in 1966.
MKULTRA came to light in the spring of 1963 during a wide-ranging survey of the CIA's technical services division. John K. Vance, a member of the Central Intelligence Agency inspector general's staff, discovered that the agency was running a research project that included administering LSD and other drugs to unwitting human subjects
QuoteIt's been over 50 years, but Wayne Ritchie says he can still remember how it felt to be dosed with acid.
He was drinking bourbon and soda with other federal officers at a holiday party in 1957 at the U.S. Post Office Building on Seventh and Mission streets. They were cracking jokes and swapping stories when, suddenly, the room began to spin. The red and green lights on the Christmas tree in the corner spiraled wildly. Ritchie's body temperature rose. His gaze fixed on the dizzying colors around him.
The deputy U.S. marshal excused himself and went upstairs to his office, where he sat down and drank a glass of water. He needed to compose himself. But instead he came unglued. Ritchie feared the other marshals didn't want him around anymore. Then he obsessed about the probation officers across the hall and how they didn't like him, either. Everyone was out to get him. Ritchie felt he had to escape.
He fled to his apartment and sought comfort from his live-in girlfriend. It didn't go as planned. His girlfriend was there, but an argument erupted. She told him she was growing tired of San Francisco and wanted to return to New York City. Ritchie couldn't handle the situation. Frantic, he ran away again, this time to the Vagabond Bar where he threw back more bourbon and sodas. From there, he hit a few more bars, further cranking up his buzz. As he drank his way back to Seventh and Mission, Ritchie concocted a plan that would change his life.
QuoteNow in his mid-eighties and living in San Jose, Ritchie may be among the last of the living victims of MK-ULTRA, a Central Intelligence Agency operation that covertly tested lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on unwitting Americans in San Francisco and New York City from 1953 to 1964.
"I remember that night very clearly, yes I do," he said in a recent interview. "I was paranoid. I got down to where I thought everyone was against me. The whole world was against me."
After the day had bled into night on Dec. 20, 1957, Ritchie returned to his office in the Post Office Building and retrieved two service revolvers from his locker. He was going rogue.
"I decided if they want to get rid of me, I'll help them. I'll just go out and get my guns from my office and hold up a bar," Ritchie recalls. "I thought, 'I can get enough money to get my girlfriend an airline ticket back to New York, and I'll turn myself in.' But I was unsuccessful."
Out of his skull on a hallucinogen and alcohol, Ritchie rolled into the Shady Grove in the Fillmore District, and ordered one final bourbon and soda. After swallowing down the final drops, he pointed his revolver at the bartender and demanded money. Before joining the marshals, Ritchie served five years in the Marines and spent a year as an Alcatraz prison guard. But the cop had suddenly become the robber.
It was over in a flash. A waitress came up behind him and asked Ritchie what he was doing. When Ritchie turned around, a patron hit him over the head and knocked him unconscious. He awoke to a pair of police officers standing over him.
Ritchie says he had expected to get caught or killed.
The judge went easy on him and Ritchie avoided prison. He resigned from the Marshals Service, pleaded guilty to attempted armed robbery, paid a $500 fine, and was sentenced to five years' probation.
Ritchie's story is certainly peculiar, but not unique. Other San Franciscans were unsuspecting participants in a strange research program in which the government effectively broke the law in an effort to fight the Cold War.
from Brightlighter Productions on Vimeo.
QuoteProject GABRIEL refers to an investigation by the United States Atomic Energy Commission to gauge the impact of radioactive fallout resulting from nuclear warfare. GABRIEL surmised that radioactive isotope Strontium-90 presented the greatest hazard to life globally. This resulted in the commissioning of Project SUNSHINE, which sought to examine the levels of Sr-90 in human tissues and bones (with a special interest in infants) gathered from around the world.
QuoteProject SUNSHINE was a series of research studies to ascertain the impact of radioactive fallout on the world's population. Commissioned jointly by the United States Atomic Energy Commission and USAF Project Rand, SUNSHINE sought to examine the long-term effects of nuclear radiation on the biosphere due to repeated nuclear detonations of increasing yield[.
With the conclusion from Project GABRIEL that radioactive isotope Sr-90 represented the most serious threat to human health from nuclear fallout, Project SUNSHINE sought to measure the global dispersion of Sr-90 by measuring its concentration in the tissues and bones of the dead. Of particular interest was tissue from the young, whose developing bones have the highest propensity to accumulate Sr-90 and thus the highest susceptibility to radiation damage. SUNSHINE elicited a great deal of controversy when it was revealed that many of the remains sampled were utilized without prior permission from the deceased or from relatives of the dead
QuoteProject SUNSHINE definitely takes the prize for "most intentionally-misleading title of a government program." The goal of SUNSHINE (co-sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and RAND) was to figure out what the impact radioactive fallout from American nuclear testing was on the world population. The initial study was started in 1953, and involved checking biological material for the the radioactive fission product Strontium-90, with an attempt to correlate Sr-90 levels with various known nuclear test series. Not exactly what you think of when you hear the term "sunshine," eh?
Quotet actually gets much creepier than just the confusing name. The "biological material" they were studying was, well, dead organic matter. What kind of organic matter, specifically? The dataset for a "pre-pilot" study on Strontium-90 intake, was a real witches brew:
"Wisconsin cheese (1 month old)"
"clam shells (Long Island)"
"Wisconsin cat bone"
"Montana cat (6 months, fed on milk from free-range cows)"
"stillborn, full term baby (Chicago)"
"rib from a Harvard man"
Pardon me while I count my ribs... and cats... and... well... yuck. You can't make this stuff up. Well, I can't, anyway. Here's your creepy meeting transcript of the week, from the planning of SUNSHINE: "Dr. Libby commented on the difficulty of obtaining human samples, and suggested that stillborn babies, which are often turned over to the physician for disposal, might be a practical source."
As an aside to an aside, in the full study, they did use samples from corpses — corpses of children in particular seemed of particular interest — in getting their data. It's a bit gory to read through their data sets as they describe the Sr-90 they found in the ribs or vertebrae of the dead. US scientist Shields Warren in particular seemed to have quite a lot of access to the bones of young children through the Cancer Research Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. Not a job I'd envy.
Anyway — the document I wanted to share had nothing to do with the sample sources, but I got a little distracted while poking around in the SUNSHINE literature, and couldn't not pass that on.
QuoteThe letter in question comes from 1954, after SUNSHINE had been completed. It's a request from December 1954 from the well-coifed Hans Bethe to the aforementioned Willard F. Libby, the physical chemist best known as the inventor of radiocarbon dating (for which he would win a Nobel Prize, in 1960), and in 1954 one of the five Commissioners of the AEC. In the letter, Bethe is arguing in favor of SUNSHINE's declassification — and his justifications are not necessarily what you might expect
QuoteBethe started out by noting that even in the summer of 1953, when SUNSHINE was being finished up, they (it seems that Bethe and Libby were both there) thought that it would "be highly desirable to declassify a large part of project SUNSHINE." Bethe thought the matter has gotten rather urgent:
I still feel the same way about this, and I think the arguments for declassification have become far stronger than they were in 1953. There is real unrest both in this country and abroad concerning the long-range as well as short-range radioactivity, and it would, in my opinion, greatly allay the fears of the public if the truth were published.
There's the kicker: Bethe was convinced that SUNSHINE will show that fallout from testing isn't as big a problem as people thought it was. Releasing SUNSHINE wouldn't be a matter of propaganda (and holding it back wasn't a matter of covering it up), in Bethe's mind — it would simply be getting the facts out.
And why might people suddenly be getting concerned about nuclear fallout?
QuoteNo doubt because of all of the attention that the Castle BRAVO nuclear test had gotten with respects to high amounts of fallout finding its way into all sorts of biological systems far from its source — like the radioactive tuna that was caught for weeks afterwards off the waters of Japan.
Bethe understood, though, that the classification reasons holding back the publication of SUNSHINE were non-trivial. SUNSHINE studies the deposition of fission products following testing, and to make much sense of that, you had to know the fission yields from the tests. If you knew the fission yields, you'd know quite a lot about American nuclear weapons — especially if you knew the fission yield of the Ivy MIKE test, the first H-bomb.
Why? Because knowing the fission component of the first H-bomb test would possibly give away all sorts of information about the Teller-Ulam design. Multi-stage H-bombs have a reasonably large fission trigger that ignites the fusion fuel, which then again induces more fission in a "natural" uranium tamper. In the case of MIKE, 77% of the total 10.4 megaton yield came from the final fission stage. Knowing that would be a good hint as to the composition of the American H-bombs, and was not something they wanted to share with the USSR.
But Bethe thought you could get around this:
I believe the story of SUNSHINE could be published without giving away any information about our H-bombs: it is merely necessary to put the permissible accumulated yield in terms of fission yield rather than total yield.
In other words, if you just talked of fission yield — and didn't give the total yield — you wouldn't be able to figure out how much of the yield was not fission, and thus the high disparity (which would be a big red flag for a weapons designer) would be hidden.
Bethe also thought that they should publish the fallout data from the H-bomb tests (likely including those from the CASTLE series). Bethe didn't think that information would give away any design information, but it was clear that others were suspicious. Bethe put the question to a test: he asked Philip Morrison to try and figure out how an H-bomb worked from just published stories about the Castle BRAVO fallout accident.
QuoteMorrison at that point had no access to classified information. He had been part of the Manhattan Project, and so knew quite a bit about fission weapons, but had been cut out of the classified world by the time the H-bomb had come along. (More on Morrison's security clearance another time — lots of interesting stories there.)
Morrison's conclusions (oddly title "FISSION ENERGY IN IVY," even though it was about BRAVO) are attached to Bethe's letter. In many ways it is an analysis typical of a somewhat cocky physicist: things are described as "easy" and conclusions are lead to "clearly" and everything is stated as if it is pretty obvious and pretty straightforward. Morrison concludes that the total fission yield of BRAVO (again, misidentified as IVY) is between 0.2Mt and 0.6Mt, and that most of the fission must have been from the fission primary that started the reactions. In reality, 10Mt of the 15Mt total yield was from fission, which is why it was such a "dirty" shot.
Bethe took this as evidence that indeed, looking at just the fallout alone, you couldn't figure out how much of the explosion was from fission yield, and thus the design information was safe: "As Morrison's report shows, it seems to be easy to draw entirely wrong conclusions from the fall-out data."
Why Morrison got this wrong is a little mysterious to me. Ralph Lapp had managed to conclude, more or less correctly, that there was a third "dirty" fission stage, and had popularized the idea enough that it trickled into Life magazine in December 1955. But Bethe thought Morrison's analysis was more or less sound, given his lack of detailed information. It's a weird thing to conclude, based on one study, that some piece of information is fundamentally unknowable, when you already know what the piece of information is.
QuoteSpeaking of speculating based on missing information, part of Bethe's letter is redacted, for reasons I do not know. His conclusion makes it pretty clear it has to do with this absolute vs. fission yield/fallout issue, though.
Bethe concludes: "I believe it would greatly improve international feeling about our Pacific tests if we were to publish the correct story of SUNSHINE and of fall-out."
Libby would come around to Bethe's position and push for declassification. In Libby's mind, like Bethe's, SUNSHINE showed that the world wasn't going to become mutated just because of a little testing in the Pacific. Furthermore, he also came to believe that you could shut down a lot of the anti-nuclear testing demands by just showing people that you were paying close attention to this sort of thing — by the time of Operation Redwing (1956), he felt that this sort of disclosure had already made the international community more friendly to US testing.
It wasn't until 1956 that the declassification eventually occurred, however, and even then, a lot of things were removed. (The "Amended*" in the RAND report cover page above is because it was "Amended to remove classified data; otherwise the report remains unchanged and represents the 1953 estimate of the fallout problem.") Of course, by that point it was clear that the Soviets had already figured out how to make an H-bomb work.
QuoteNuclear fallout is an incredible thing. As if the initial, prompt effects of a nuclear bomb weren't bad enough — take that and then spread out a plume of radioactive contamination. The Castle BRAVO accident was the event that really brought this to the public forefront. I mean, the initial effects of 15 megaton explosion are pretty stunning in and of themselves:
(http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/15-Mt-on-Manhattan-500x422.jpg)
But the fallout plume extended for hundreds of miles:
(http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Castle-Bravo-fallout.jpg)
Castle Bravo Fallout
Superimposed on an unfamiliar atoll, it's hard to get a sense of how long that plume is. Put it on the American Northeast, though, and it's pretty, well, awesome, in the original sense of the word:
(http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Cbrvusa2.gif)
Of course, it's all about which direction the wind blows, in the end.
And remember... that's just a single bomb!
Of course, if you're interested in the more diffuse amounts of radioactivity — more than just the stuff that you know is probably bad for you — the fallout maps get even more interesting. Here's what the BRAVO fallout did over the next month or so after the detonation:
(http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Bravo-cloud-35-days.jpg)
Now, you can't see the numbers there, but they aren't high — it's not the same as being immediately downwind of these things. They're low numbers... but they're non-zero. But one of the "special" things about nuclear contaminants is that you can track them for a very long time, and see exactly how one test — or accident — in a remote area is intimately connected to the entire rest of the planet.
And, in fact, nearly everyone born during the era of atmospheric nuclear testing had some tiny bits of fallout in their bones — you can even use it to determine how old a set of teeth are, to a very high degree of accuracy, by measuring their fallout content. (And before you think atmospheric testing is a matter of ancient history, remember that France and China both tested atmospheric nuclear weapons long after the Limited Test Ban Treaty! The last atmospheric test, by China, was in 1980!)
The same sorts of maps are used to show the dispersion of radioactive byproducts of nuclear reactors when accidents occur. I find these things sort of hypnotizing. Here are four "frames" from a simulation run by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on their ARAC computer showing the dispersion of radioactivity after the Chernobyl accident in 1986:
(http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Chernobyl_ARAC_1.jpg)
(http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Chernobyl_ARAC_2.jpg)
(http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Chernobyl_ARAC_3.jpg)
(http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Chernobyl_ARAC_4.jpg)
Pretty incredible, no? Now, the odds are that there are lots of other contaminants that, could we track them, would show similar world-wide effects. Nuclear may not be unique in the fact that it has global reach — though the concentrations of radioactivity are far higher than you'd find anywhere else — but it may be unique that you can always measure it.
Yesterday I saw a new set of plots predicting the dispersion of Caesium-137 after the Fukushima accident from 2011. These are just models, not based on measurements; and all models have their issues, as the modelers at the Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Environnement Atmosphérique (CEREA) who produced these plots acknowledge.
Here is their map for Cs-137 deposition after Fukushima. I'm not sure what the numbers really mean, health-wise, but the long reach of the accident is dramatic:
(http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/CEREA-fukushima.jpg) (http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/CEREA-fukushima.jpg)
ap of ground deposition of caesium-137 for the Fukushima-Daichii accident by Victor Winiarek, Marc Bocquet, Yelva Roustan, Camille Birman, and Pierre Tran at CEREA. (Source (http://cerea.enpc.fr/fr/fukushima.html))
Compare with Chernobyl. (Warning: the scales of these two images are different, so the colors don't map onto the same values. This is kind of annoying and makes it hard to compare them, though it illustrates well the local effects of Chernobyl as compared to Fukushima.)
(http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/CEREA-chernobyl.jpg) (http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/CEREA-chernobyl.jpg)
Map of ground deposition of caesium-137 for the Chernobyl accident, by Victor Winiarek, Marc Bocquet, Yelva Roustan, Camille Birman, and Pierre Tran at CEREA. (Source (http://cerea.enpc.fr/fr/fukushima.html))
Lastly, they have an amazing animated map showing the plume as it expands across the Pacific. It's about 5MB in size, and a Flash SWF, so I'm just going to link to it here. But you must check it out — it's hypnotic, strangely beautiful, and disturbing. Here is a very stop-motion GIF version derived from their map, just to give you an incentive to see the real thing, which is much more impressive:
(http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/CEREA_fukushima_plume_lowres.gif)
There's plenty of fallout for everyone — well enough to go around. No need to be stingy. And nearly seven decades into the nuclear age, there's a little bit of fallout in everyone, too.
QuoteThe NYPD released harmless gases into the subway system during the morning rush beginning Tuesday to study how chemical weapons could be dispersed through the air.
Police, working with Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory, placed air-sampling devices on the street and within the subway system across the five boroughs.
Researchers will track the movement of harmless tracer gases called perfluorocarbons, which mimic how a chemical or biological weapon may react if released. They'll be dispersed in low concentrations for 30 minutes only during the morning, city officials said.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said there was no specific event that led to the study, but that "it is something that is in our overall plan to help protect the city."
The project was announced in April. It will be funded through a $3.4 million federal grant.
View more videos at: http://nbcnewyork.com.