83 Died in U.S.-Guatemala Syphilis Experiments: "We’re talking about intentional deception."

It made headlines when historian Susan M. Reverby of Wellesley College discovered a decades-old program run from by the U.S. Public Health Service’s studies in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. That's because the researchers deliberately inoculated subjects with syphilis in order to study sexually transmitted disease, and they did so without informed consent for the procedure.

Subjects were "not told what the purpose of the research was nor were they warned of its potentially fatal consequences." Furthermore, "U.S. government researchers must have known they were contravening ethical standards by deliberately infecting mental patients with syphilis."

The researchers, led by U.S. doctor John Cutler, who had also been involved in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments on African-American men that ran from 1932 to 1972, utilized mental patients, prostitutes, prisoners and soldiers as their guinea pigs. Today, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues issued their findings of a study undertaken in the aftermath of the scandal.

According to news reports, at least 83 Guatemalans died after being infected with both spyhilis and gonorrhea. Over 1,300 were exposed to the venereal diseases.

AFP reports:

Commission president Amy Gutmann called it an "historic injustice," and said the inquiry aimed to "honor the victims and make sure it never happens again."

"It was not an accident that this happened in Guatemala," Gutmann said. "Some of the people involved said we could not do this in our own country."

The U.S. researchers "systematically failed to act in accordance with minimal respect for human rights and morality in the conduct of research," she said, citing "substantial evidence" of an attempted cover-up.

John Donnelly at the official blog for the Presidential Commission, tells the story of one of these victims, a Guatemalan woman.

Berta, said Dr. John Arras, the Porterfield Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, was a patient on a psychiatric ward who was injected with syphilis and not given treatment for three months after her initial exposure.

Arras noted the observations of the principal investigator for the study, Dr. John Charles Cutler, of Berta on one summer’s day. Arras said that Cutler wrote that it appeared Berta “was going to die. He did not specify why.”

That same day, Arras said that Dr. Cutler “put gonorrhea puss [sic] on her eyes, urethra and rectrum.”

Soon after, Berta died....

Arras said he brought up this single case because he was wrestling with the “distinction between blame and wrongdoing for some time...."

“I, for one, have been extremely reluctant to bring the moral hammer down with full force on the question of moral blame,” he said. “However, the issue of informed consent is not the only question. I’m not talking about just the failure to inform. We’re talking about intentional deception. … I really do believe that a very rigorous judgment of moral blame can be lodged against some of these people.”

“The most powerful argument,’’ he said, “is to repeat a story."

As I wrote on this subject last October, "These revelations are only the latest in an ongoing series of scandals regarding government illegal and unethical experimentation.... There are plenty of other underreported and important stories out there on the terrible scandal that has been U.S. illegal experimentation."

The list of such illegal experiments is quite long (government radiation experiments, Navy experiments with chemical agents on sailors, the Edgewood Arsenal experiments with LSD and other drugs (with the help literally of ex-Nazi scientists), the MKULTRA experiments, and allegedly, but awaiting fuller documentation, CIA and DoD experiments on "enemy combatants" in the "war on terror." I don't know if the current commission intends to discuss this history, giving context to the Guatemala atrocity, or not. But if not, they should be.

Only total transparency and an end to secrecy on these issue will bring an end to this kind of illegal experimentation and the human tragedies that result. "National security" for too long has been a shibboleth to justify the worst violations of human rights. If that finally hits home as a result of the Guatemalan scandal, then those people will not have died in vain. But I'm afraid it will take much more before we get to where we need to be.

Albarelli Interview: CIA Drug Experiments, Pont-Saint-Esprit, and the Murder of Frank Olson

Author Hank Albarelli is interviewed by RTAmerica, talking about the murder of Frank Olson, and CIA drug experiments of the 1950s. He describes how the experiments of the MKULTRA program were made operational by the CIA's Project Artichoke. Albarelli discusses the CIA LSD experiment on the French village Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951. This experiment was only one of hundreds of such experiments carried out by the CIA and U.S. military on unwitting human subjects, including thousands of U.S. servicemen at the Edgewood Arsensal.

The Edgewood Arsenal experiments remain controversial. For more information see this selection from the book, Acid Dreams, or this essay, with plenty of links; in addition, photos of Edgewood Arsenal experiments are available here. While the media remains mostly silent on these topics -- Albarelli's book on the death of Frank Olson has yet to be reviewed by a major U.S. news source -- charges of unethical and illegal experiments conducted by U.S. intelligence and military agencies remains at the forefront of the torture scandal surrounding the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the U.S. government.

While some of the world press has picked up the Pont-Saint-Esprit story (see this UK Telegraph article), most of the press has remained mum, or tried to debunk Albarelli's work. Last January, Hank Albarelli took reader questions at a lively Book Salon at Firedoglake, which I hosted.

There is much that goes without reporting by the vaunted "free" U.S. press. Assigned to "conspiracy" status, the truth about the CIA's mind control and human experimentation programs remains largely off the public's radar. Not that there haven't been important articles over the years (see this New York Times article and this section of a U.S. government report). The Rockefeller and Church committee investigations of the 1970s opened up much of what we know about these governmental crimes, but they are not taught in history classes, and the population remains mostly unaware.

Albarelli's interview concludes that CIA experiments on new drugs are certainly ongoing. It will take a significantly awakened country to make the efforts to open up the government to full transparency.

Unit 731: Biological Warfare & Human Medical Experimentation

The story of United States research into and use of biological weapons remains a huge blank spot in the known history of this country. There have been attempts to document this history, but much remains classified or has been destroyed. The use of biological weapons dovetails with U.S. research into drugs and mind control against prisoners, as the revelations about MKULTRA or the Edgewood Arsenal experiments make clear (see this fascinating story by Michael Ignatieff in the New York Times Magazine, April 2001).

This posting is the first in a series I hope to publish over time looking at the controversial question of U.S. use of biological weapons, and its links to MKULTRA and other covert CIA or military programs. It examines the origins of the U.S. program in biological weapons research, as it grew out of the ashes of the horrific program in the same, started by the Japanese Imperial government in the 1930s. It is best known by its bureaucratic moniker: Unit 731.

As I will explain further on, I intend to write more in the future about this subject. But first watch this fascinating documentary on a terrifying subject. We need to know about this.

Warning: the embedded videos below have some extremely disturbing footage.





The final three parts of the documentary on Unit 731 can be accessed by clicking on the proper links: Part Three, Part Four, Part Five.

Unit 731... was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel. Officially known by the Imperial Japanese Army as the Kempeitai Political Department and Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory, it was initially set up under the Kempeitai military police of the Empire of Japan to develop weapons of mass destruction for potential use against Chinese, and possibly Soviet forces....

After Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, Douglas MacArthur became the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupation. MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America with their research on biological warfare. The United States believed that the research data was valuable because the allies had never publicly conducted or condoned such experiments on humans due to moral and political revulsion. The United States also did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons, not to mention the military benefits of such research. [Emphasis added]

Japanese experiments in biological weapons utilized barbaric research, including the use of vivisection on human subjects, amputations, the use of human targets, radiation exposure, starvation, and the deliberate inoculation of diseases such as plague, anthrax, cholera and botulism. From a complex of approximately six square kilometers, and a number of satellite facilities, Unit 731 is thought to have produced almost a quarter million casualties. Captured by the Soviets, many of those involved in Unit 731 were put on trial as war criminals. But as noted above, some of the primary leaders surrendered to the U.S. and were protected in exchange for information on biological experimentation.

The link between U.S./Japanese collaboration on biological weaponry after World War II and charges of United States use of biological weapons in the Korean War (denied by the U.S.) is something I've covered before. Here's the conclusions of a researcher from Baylor University Medical Center, Stefan Riedel, MD, PhD, published in 2004 (numbers in parentheses are footnotes in the original -- please refer to linked article for the references to these footnotes):

During the years immediately after World War II, newspapers were filled with articles about disease outbreaks caused by foreign agents armed with biological weapons (2, 18). During the Korean War, the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea accused the USA of using agents of biological warfare against North Korea (1, 18). In later years the USA admitted that it had the capability of producing such weapons, although it denied having used them. However, the credibility of the USA was undermined by its failure to ratify the Geneva Protocol of 1925, by public acknowledgment of its own offensive biological warfare program, and by suspicions of collaboration with former Unit 731 scientists (1, 18).

In fact, the US program expanded during the Korean War (1950–1953) with the establishment of a new production facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. In addition, a defensive program was launched in 1953 with the objective of developing countermeasures, including vaccines, antisera, and therapeutic agents, to protect troops from possible biological attacks. By the late 1960s, the US military had developed a biological arsenal that included numerous biological pathogens, toxins, and fungal plant pathogens that could be directed against crops to induce crop failure and famine (1).

The U.S. cover-up of the atrocities of Unit 731, and the embrace of its top leadership in the name of anticommunism and military research rivals the scandals that exposed the post-World War II collaboration of Washington, D.C. with fleeing Nazi war criminals (see Operation Paperclip).

The reality behind our country's history is disturbing and horrifying. But if we do not come to terms with where we have been, we will not, even in an Obama-era, be able to go where we need to go -- to a world free of militarism, of imperial conquest-lust, of inequality and injustice and racism. The CIA famously has the words "the truth will set you free" written in the lobby of its headquarters in Langley. They distorted those words in an Orwellian ironic twist that decimates our language and our moral integrity. Still in the end, the truth will set us free, but first, we must reclaim it.

Still Photos from Edgewood Arsenal: Human Experimentation Seen Up Close

Thanks to tigana for the link to this online resource regarding the U.S. Army's decades-long experimentation of biological and chemical agents on human subjects. The site has a number of documentary photographs from the testing at Edgewood itself. The photos include both animal and human exerimentation. They are shocking in their display of cold, clinical, Nazi-like science. I recommend following up by reading the link to the Senate hearings included below. I will have much more to say on this subject in the near future.

Between 1955 and 1975, the U.S. Army used 7,000 enlisted soldiers as human guinea pigs for experiments involving a wide array of biological and chemical warfare agents.

These tests were conducted jointly by the U.S. Army Intelligence Board and the Chemical Warfare Laboratories at Edgewood Arsenal's research facility in Maryland. Approximately 3,500 of these soldiers were given doses of powerful mind-altering psychochemicals, including LSD, PCP, and BZ. These "volunteer" test subjects were not told which drugs they were given, and were not fully informed of the extreme physical and psychological effects these drugs would have on them.

The images presented here are stills from documentary footage of these experiments filmed by the U.S. Army. To learn more, read the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on covert military testing of human subjects; see also the excellent A&E Investigative Reports documentary "Bad Trip to Edgewood."

For more on the history of the Edgewood Arsenal Experiments, see the Wikipedia article, which I had a hand in assembling:

The Edgewood Arsenal experiments (also known as Project 112) are said to be related to or part of CIA mind control programs after World War II, like MKULTRA.... The experiments were performed at the Edgewood Arsenal, northeast of Baltimore, Maryland, and involved the use of neurological agents and heavy hallucinogens like LSD, THC, and BZ, in addition to biological and chemical agents.... In the mid-1970s, in the wake of many health claims made from exposure to such agents, including psychotropic and hallucinogenic drugs administered in later experiments, Congress began investigations of misuse of such experiments, and inadequate informed consent given by the soldiers and civilians involved.

The Edgewood experiments took place from approximately 1952-1974 at the Bio Medical Laboratory, which is now known as the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense. The volunteer would spend the weekend on-site. They would perform tests and procedures (math, navigation, following orders, memory and interview) while sober. The volunteer would then be dosed by a scientist and perform the same tests. These tests occurred in the building/hospital under the care of doctors and nurses. At times the tests would be taken outside to study the effects while in the field. For example the volunteer would have to guard a check point while under the influence to see what effects certain drugs had on the patient.

A pamphlet produced by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Health Effects from Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Weapons (Oct. 2003), discusses the Edgewood Arsenal Experiments in some detail.

This post is dedicated to the victims of white phosphorus at Fallujah.