In 2005, a reporter with the Baltimore Sun newspaper, Scott Shane, who now writes for the New York Times, wrote, “The [U.S.] Army has no records on MKNAOMI or on the [Fort Detrick] Special Operations Division.” When Scott, and then this writer, asked the Army for records on both, the Army replied that it “could find none.” In 1973, the CIA destroyed all of its records on MKNAOMI and its work with Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division. One of the stated reasons for this destruction, explained the CIA, was that “people would not understand or misconstrue the reasons for many of the projects the Agency carried out.” When reporter Shane asked a former top ranking Special Operations Division officer to speak about the division’s past projects, Andrew M. Cowan, Jr., said, “I just don’t give interviews on that subject. It should still be classified—if nothing else, to keep information the division developed out of the hands of some nut.”
Earlier in the article, I wrote that I found the Pont St. Esprit experiment initially shocking. In many ways, I still do. But perhaps not for all those reasons many readers would imagine. Firstly, I find it shocking, when I read internet reactions to it, as contained in my book, over the past month like, “So what, at least they didn’t do it in a small town in America!” Or worse yet, “Why didn’t they pick a town in Mexico—it’s closer by?” I’m saddened to find that some Americans have become both numb and immune to the arrogant and horrible past actions of the CIA. Torture is now supported in the United States by a large segment of the population. Some well-thinking Americans say that they pray for a return “to the America where their government honored, respected, and observed human rights and the international laws and treaties” that protected prisoners of war, enemy combatants, and detainees, but the real truth of the matter is that any objective and serious examination of Cold War history in America produces numerous instances of the horrific abuse of foreign detainees and prisoners.
The CIA’s Project ARTICHOKE, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, subjected multiple foreign prisoners and suspected double agents to barbaric treatment, including electroshock therapy, lobotomies, and drug-induced insulin shock. Countless numbers of Americans were yanked off the streets of New York and San Francisco for secret experiments only because they were members of minority groups, poor, transient, perceived criminals, or prostitutes. Many of these people were permanently damaged physically and mentally because of these experiments. Nearly 6,500 U.S. servicemen were unwittingly subjected to LSD in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these men never fully recovered from these experiments. Many committed suicide as a result of the experiments. In 1953, one foreign national was imprisoned and tortured for over eight months in Panama by the CIA only because he was suspected of cooperating with French intelligence officials. Later, the CIA may well have murdered the same man because he confidently told a news reporter that he knew who had murdered President John F. Kennedy.
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Peter Levenda’s revue of the book A Terrible Mistake
I don’t want to give away the story that Hank Albarelli has uncovered, or any of the juicy details or important discoveries that will change the way you look at this case. You need to read this book carefully, cover to cover, to understand the enormity of what transpired that autumn evening in midtown Manhattan. The number of interconnected links between people, places and events is astounding. Familiar names like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld turn up, as well as Warren Burger and Rudolph Giuliani, Howard Hughes and Robert Maheu; less familiar names like John Rousselot, an American congressman, and John Bircher, accused of being involved in the assassination plot against President Kennedy, also make an appearance.
A walk through Hank Albarelli’s masterful presentation of the Frank Olson case is like a tour of American political and cultural life during the last sixty years or more… And, at the same time, it is a descent into a very particular hell. (Is there such a thing as negative nostalgia?) Here we read of CIA’s interest in the occult, in Edgar Cayce, UFOs, parapsychology, and in the strange visions of the Book of Ezekiel… I am not making this up.
Here we read of so many other victims of the mind control programs that we are forced to accept that Frank Olson represents only the tip of a Satanic iceberg. Innocent people were falling like flies all over America in the 1950s, like the textile plant workers in New Hampshire who were infected with anthrax without their knowledge, because their mill was doing work on the side in chemical and biological weapons research. Or the detective in Houston, Texas, who committed “suicide” by shooting himself in the heart … twice.
If anyone has any doubts that Congress should investigate cases of torture and human rights abuses allegedly carried out by members of the intelligence community during the Iraq conflict, one only needs to review the Frank Olson case.
Our failure to fully investigate this scientist’s death in 1953 contributed to further and ongoing abuses throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The very people—Cheney and Rumsfeld—who defended CIA’s actions in those cases, when news of the CIA and military programs were exposed in 1975, would be defending them again decades later in a different guise and a different arena.
In those days, it was MKULTRA, MKNAOMI, MKOFTEN, MKCHICKWIT, and of course Operations BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE. These are legendary names today; the stuff of pulp fiction and celluloid fantasy. But real people were drugged in those programs without their knowledge or consent. Men. Women. Children. Prisoners. Psychopaths. Prostitutes. Foreigners. Many of them were never the same again. Some went insane. Some died as a result. And no one was held accountable.
We have had Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, waterboarding. Our excuse today—as it was then—is “national security.” Hank Albarelli very helpfully reminds us of what Bella Abzug—the New York Congresswoman in the funny hats that the right wing loved to hate—said during the 1975 investigation of the CIA’s mind control programs. She said:
You cannot be strong outside if you are weak inside. You have to defend your own principles in order to be able to fight for acceptance of your principles in other places in the world… The question of the protection of our liberties and our freedom is the basis upon which this country remains strong.
That was in 1975. Forty years ago. What Hank Albarelli reminds us in this invaluable record of a “terrible mistake” is that we have yet to learn from those terrible mistakes. Or, more likely, not enough of us really care.
Hank Albarelli cares. And his concern is our gain. Part mystery story, part history, thoroughly documented and completely compelling, A Terrible Mistake is required reading for anyone interested in the lengths we have gone to defend the nation against all enemies (foreign, domestic, and the purely imaginary) … and, incredibly, against our own loyal and patriotic citizens.
Published in issue 9 of The Dot Connector Magazine
(May-June 2010).
[1] H. P. Albarelli, Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder Of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments. TrineDay, January 2010. 960 pages.
The Shocking True History
of human medical experimentation in the U.S.
The United States claims to be the world leader in medicine. But there’s a dark side to Western medicine that few want to acknowledge: the horrifying medical experiments performed on impoverished people and their children all in the name of scientific progress. Many of these medical experiments were conducted on people without their knowledge, and most were conducted as part of an effort to seek profits from newly approved drugs or medical technologies. Today, the medical experiments continue on the U.S. population. Nearly 50% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and nearly 20% of schoolchildren are on mind-altering amphetamines like Ritalin or antidepressants like Prozac. This mass medication of the entire nation is, in every way, a grand medical experiment taking place right now. To truly understand how this mass experimentation on modern Americans came into being, you have to take a close look at the horrifying history of conventional medicine’s exploitation of people for cruel
medical experiments.
Warning: What you are about to read is truly shocking. You have never been told this information by the American Medical Association, nor drug companies, nor the evening news. This is the dark secret of the U.S. system of medicine, and once you read the true accounts reported here, you may never trust drug companies again. This information is deeply disturbing. We publish it here not as a form of entertainment, but as a stern warning against what might happen to us and our children if we do not rein in the horrifying, inhumane actions of Big Pharma and modern-day psychiatry. Read at your own risk. —Mike Adams, The Health Ranger, NaturalNews.com.
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The True U.S. History of Human Medical Experimentation
By Dani Veracity
Human experimentation—that is, subjecting live human beings to science experiments that are sometimes cruel, sometimes painful, sometimes deadly and always a risk—is a major part of U.S. history that you won’t find in most history or science books. The United States is undoubtedly responsible for some of the most amazing scientific breakthroughs. These advancements, especially in the field of medicine, have changed the lives of billions of people around the world—sometimes for the better, as in the case of finding a cure for malaria and other epidemic diseases, and sometimes for the worse (consider modern “psychiatry” and the drugging of schoolchildren).
However, these breakthroughs come with a hefty price tag: the human beings used in the experiments that made these advancements possible. Over the last two centuries, some of these test subjects have been compensated for the damage done to their emotional and physical health, but most have not. Many have lost their lives because of the experiments they often unwillingly and sometimes even unwittingly participated in, and they of course can never be compensated for losing their most precious possession of all: their health.
As you read through these science experiments, you’ll learn the stories of newborns injected with radioactive substances, mentally ill people placed in giant refrigerators, military personnel exposed to chemical weapons by the very government they served, and mentally challenged children being purposely infected with hepatitis. These stories are facts, not fiction: each account, no matter how horrifying, is backed up with a reputable source.
These stories must be heard, because human experimentation is still going on today. The reasons behind the experiments may be different, but the usual human guinea pigs are still the same—members of minority groups, the poor, and the disadvantaged. These are the lives that were put on the line in the name of “scientific” medicine.
1833. Dr. William Beaumont, an army surgeon physician, pioneers gastric medicine with his study of a patient with a permanently open gunshot wound to the abdomen and writes a human medical experimentation code that asserts the importance of experimental treatments, but also lists requirements stipulating that human subjects must give voluntary, informed consent and be able to end the experiment when they want. Beaumont’s Code lists verbal, rather than just written, consent as permissible.
1845–1849. J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the “father of gynecology,” performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns’ skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker’s awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers.
1895. New York pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy, whom he calls “an idiot with chronic epilepsy,” with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment.
1896. Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29 children at Boston’s Children’s Hospital into human guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful.
1900. U.S. Army doctors working in the Philippines infect five Filipino prisoners with plague and withhold proper nutrition to create beriberi in 29 prisoners. Four test subjects die.
Under commission from the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Walter Reed goes to Cuba and uses 22 Spanish immigrant workers to prove that yellow fever is contracted through mosquito bites. Doing so, he introduces the practice of using healthy test subjects, and also the concept of a written contract to confirm informed consent of these subjects. While doing this study, Dr. Reed clearly tells the subjects that, though he will do everything he can to help them, they may die as a result of the experiment. He pays them $100 in gold for their participation, plus $100 extra if they contract yellow fever.
1906. Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. (During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cited this study to justify their own medical experiments.)
1911. Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research publishes data on injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis. Later, in 1913, several of these children’s parents sue Dr. Noguchi for allegedly infecting their children with syphilis.
1913. Medical experimenters “test” 15 children at the children’s home St. Vincent’s House in Philadelphia with tuberculin, resulting in permanent blindness in some of the children. Though the Pennsylvania House of Representatives records the incident, the researchers are not punished for the experiments.
1915. Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One test subject later says that he had been through “a thousand hells.” In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the Public Health Office would admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. (During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical experiments on concentration camp inmates.)
1918. In response to the Germans’ use of chemical weapons during World War I, President Wilson creates the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) as a branch of the U.S. Army. Twenty-four years later, in 1942, the CWS would begin performing mustard gas and lewisite experiments on over 4,000 members of the armed forces.
1919–1922. Researchers perform testicular transplant experiments on inmates at San Quentin State Prison in California, inserting the testicles of recently executed inmates and goats into the abdomens and scrotums of living prisoners.
1931. Cornelius Rhoads, a pathologist from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, purposely infects human test subjects in Puerto Rico with cancer cells; 13 of them die. Though a Puerto Rican doctor later discovers that Rhoads purposely covered up some of details of his experiment and Rhoads himself gives a written testimony stating he believes that all Puerto Ricans should be killed, he later goes on to establish the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama, and is named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, where he begins a series of radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients.
1931–1933. Mental patients at Elgin State Hospital in Illinois are injected with radium-266 as an experimental therapy for mental illness.
1932–1972. The U.S. Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Alabama, diagnoses 400 poor, black sharecroppers with syphilis but never tells them of their illness nor treats them. Instead researchers use the men as human guinea pigs to follow the symptoms and progression of the disease. They all eventually die from syphilis and their families are never told that they could have been treated.
1937. Scientists at Cornell University Medical School publish an angina drug study that uses both placebo and blind assessment techniques on human test subjects. They discover that the subjects given the placebo experienced more of an improvement in symptoms than those who
were given the actual drug. This is the first account of the placebo effect published in the United States.
1939. In order to test his theory on the roots of stuttering, prominent speech pathologist Dr. Wendell Johnson performs his famous “Monster Experiment” on 22 children at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport. Dr. Johnson and his graduate students put the children under intense psychological pressure, causing them to switch from speaking normally to stuttering heavily. At the time, some of the students reportedly warn Dr. Johnson that, “in the aftermath of World War II, observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career.”
1941. Dr. William C. Black infects a 12-month-old baby with herpes as part of a medical experiment.
An article in a 1941 issue of Archives of Pediatrics describes medical studies of the severe gum disease Vincent’s angina, in which doctors transmit the disease from sick children to healthy children with oral swabs.
Drs. Francis and Salk and other researchers at the University of Michigan spray large amounts of wild influenza virus directly into the nasal passages of “volunteers” from mental institutions in Michigan. The test subjects develop influenza within a very short period of time.
Consensus Trance Page 18