GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

AMERICA’S SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

“I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked.” — Dr. Hippocrates HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1900

Charleston’s population was estimated at 55,807.

In the early years of the 20th Century physicians in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio would be conducting secret medical experiments, injecting dozens of orphans with syphilis-related materials and tuberculosis. “Here, you little bastards, instead of being a dead weight on society we’re going to give you a chance to be contributors!”

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1931

Under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads infected human subjects with cancer cells (well, but they were only Puerto Ricans). Later this researcher would establish US Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama, and would be named to the US Atomic Energy Commission. While associated with the US Atomic Energy Commission, he would initiate a series of nuclear radiation exposure experiments upon American soldiers and upon civilian hospital patients. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

He would write about it in the following manner: The Porto Ricans are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere... I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE eight and transplanting cancer into several more... All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.

(Later on he would distance himself from the attitude he had expressed, by explaining that at the time he had written that, he happened to have been infuriated by something that had just happened to him.)

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1932

In Tuskegee, Alabama, the United States Public Health Service embarked upon a long-term secret medical experiment to discover and evaluate possible effective treatments for syphilis. Some 600 late stage syphilitic African American men were identified and recruited for the study. Some 200 of the 600 would receive various treatments, while 399 would be misinformed and misled, and provided with no medical care whatever even when safe and effective medical treatments became available in the 1940s. The 399 would be used as human guinea pigs, to trace the course of the complications of this debilitating and fatal disease. (Also affected were 50 wives who had been infected by their husbands and 20 children who had received the disease congenitally.) Of course, this was being done for the good of all, so what’s your problem? Of course, these people had gone out and gotten themselves infected entirely on their own initiative, so what’s your problem? The sacrifice of the 400 black men would transform their useless lives into the lives of unknowing heroes, so what’s your problem? Because they were black, of course, no-one would ever be interested in what happened to them, and thus the PHS would be safe from all inquiry. They all would subsequently die from their untreated syphilis, with their families never informed that they could have been being treated.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1935

After millions had died from Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service acted to stem the disease. The director of the agency acknowledged that it had known for at least that long that Pellagra was a mere niacin deficiency but, because most of the deaths had been occurring within poverty-stricken black populations, there had been no impulse to act officiously — no matter how many of these black Americans died, from the agency’s standpoint there would always be a plenty of them still alive.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1939

In a “Monster Study” on children in the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport that would until 1988 be covered up, researchers attempted to pressure children to begin to be stutterers. Some who spoke fluently before the secret medical experiment would be given lifelong speech problems. The experiment was designed and supervised by Dr. Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa, himself a stutterer, who would become one of our most prominent speech pathologists, and was conducted by Mary Tudor, a graduate student under his supervision. Needing no permission from parents as there were no parents, Tudor subjected half the orphans to constant criticism to make them self-conscious about their speech, while denying them any positive therapy. She thus eventually drove most of them to become stutterers. She has been quoted as commenting that “the pitiful part” had been that she “got them to trust me, and then I did this horrible thing to them.” Afterward, the university made no great effort to reverse the impact of this wicked experiment, and salvage the children who had been induced to begin to stutter.

When news of the Nazi experiments in Europe began to come in, some of Dr. Johnson’s graduate students noticed the similarity and warned him that in the aftermath of world war “observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career.” “This was the kind of stuff you would think they were doing in Auschwitz, and this is why, at that time, people concealed it,” said Franklin Silverman, a student of Johnson’s who became a professor of speech pathology at Marquette University in Milwaukee. “They wanted to block it out of their minds and make believe it didn’t happen.” The experiment had become an embarrassment to Johnson, said Bill Trotter, a retired speech pathology professor at Marquette who also studied under Johnson. “I heard some of the orphans didn’t recover,” he said.

This was not the only nefarious harm done at the orphanage. The researchers of the University of Iowa had also conducted another secret medical experiment, for instance, even before this stuttering study, a study in which they had demonstrated that they were able to lower the general intelligence of a child by deliberately removing stimulation from its environment. In its 1936 biennial report, the Iowa State Board of Control, the panel which oversaw such state institutions, had bragged about the manner in which it was facilitating the University of Iowa in conducting such experiments upon human subjects. The orphans were guinea pigs, period paragraph.

I am terming this a “secret” medical experiment simply because Professor Johnson make a habit in his publications of never referring to it, and instead reinforcing his simplistic theory of stuttering by the use of other, more indirect evidence. His “diagnosogenic theory” was that stuttering was being perpetuated by the reactions of others to it, and so he was reporting, for instance, as indirect evidence, that certain tribes of native Americans were so relaxed about their children’s speech development that they produced no stutterers, and in fact in their native language did not even possess a word for stuttering. (Dr. Johnson’s information about these tribes, we now know, was utterly presumptive: not only did these tribes have a word for stuttering, but also, they did have stutterers.) On many occasions, of course, he could have mentioned the horrible experiment that he had supervised on the children in the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport, in which he had deliberately induced stuttering and deliberately ruined lives — but he most carefully made no mention of this. (In the profession, Dr. Johnson’s theories are now discounted, as his experiments have since the 1970s been regarded as having been tendentious, in that they were aimed only at confirming the value of his a priori HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE theorizing. Speech therapists are no longer endlessly reinforcing stuttering by providing stutterers with unqualified praise and endless reinforcement regardless of what sounds they produce.)

At the age of 84, the former speech therapist Mary Tudor received a letter from one of the orphans she had experimented on, Mary Korlaske Nixon, who had been case number 15. Late in life, after traumatic events, she had relapsed into stuttering and had been again institutionalized. She wrote to Mary Tudor because she had been belatedly informed that as a child in the orphanage she had been experimented upon, not to do her good but to do her harm — to induce her, when she did not stutter, to begin stuttering. She had obtained and had read with great interest Mary Tudor’s unpublished university thesis. The letter called the former speech therapist “monster” and “Nazi”: I remember your face, how kind you were and you looked like my mother. But you were there to destroy my life.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1940

During the 1940s, at a Tennessee prenatal clinic, 829 pregnant women would be being given “nutrition” cocktails but not informed that these free nutritional drinks were being dosed with radioactive iron, or that the doctors doing this, from Vanderbilt University, were intent not upon their health or upon the health of their fetuses but upon a secret medical experiment to measure the amount of the radioactive materials that would be absorbed by their bodies. (In 1983 the newspaper The Tennessean would be made aware of this, and a decade later, in their own sweet time in 1993, that newspaper would get around to publishing an article on the topic. Emma Craft, who had never been aware that she had been fed radioactive iron in the 1940s, would thus become able to read in this newspaper a detailed description of the 1958 death by cancer of an unnamed 11-year-old girl — and recognize that unfortunate girl to have been her daughter.)

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

In a prison near Chicago, 400 prisoners were infected with malaria in order to study the effects of new and experimental drugs to combat the disease (when Nazi doctors later went on trial at Nürnberg they would be able to cite this American secret medical experiment as a precedent in defense of their own conduct during the Holocaust).

During the 1940s the Journal of the American Medical Association was considering “race mixing” to be the greatest threat to our public health, in that it involved the spreading of a black-race inferiority, the susceptibility to sickle cell anemia. Irving Sherman discovered that sickled red blood cells refract light differently than normal cells. Linus Pauling separated normal hemoglobin and sickle-trait hemoglobin with electrophoresis, thus establishing the molecular basis of the sickle cell trait and demonstrating that it was a recessive trait rather than a Mendelian dominant.

It isn’t up to you, who you are. Society will tell you who you are, and you damn well better listen up, boy, if you know what’s good for you. When I was a boy in southern Indiana in the 1940s, and associated with my Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE mother’s family there (the Mattoxes), there was a law against miscegenation and I was on the wrong side of the law. Everybody knew that these Mattoxes were tainted, racially mixed people, on account of the “Buff” Sharpe in our family history.1 So in the public school I was warned to stay away from the little white girls, “they aren’t for you.” It didn’t matter, who I thought I was, I was a nigger. If I had grown up there, and had married, there would have been a riot, for if I had married a white woman, that would have been against the law prohibiting miscegenation, whereas, if I had married a native American woman, that would have been outrageous, for I have blue eyes and my hair when young when sunbleached was quite blond. I was the poster child of Aryan America, which was considered to make me very, very dangerous. But then my mother and my sister and I moved to northern Indiana, where nobody knew us, and lived there under that Smith name, and the business about racial contamination disappeared from the context of our lives.

It was really remarkable, to be considered white in northern Indiana, and then to go down to southern Indiana for a visit to family and to re-enter a context in which one was considered to be a colored person. That was a mind-wrencher. One interesting piece of wisdom I derived from that is the following rule:

What you are does not depend at all on what you suppose you are. What you are is what the white man desires to suppose you to be. If the white man desires to consider you as white, then you are white and you’d better get used to it. if the white man desires to consider you as colored, then you are colored and you’d better get used to it. It is the white man in this society, and only the white man, who entitles himself to specify what the nature of reality is going to be.

None of our “progress” in civil rights during my lifetime has altered that societal rule by one jot or one tittle.

The interesting fact of that situation is that, when we went north, and by concealment corrected the situation for my mother and corrected the situation for my sister, this did nothing to rectify the situation for me. In the north my mother and my sister got along just fine. In the north they treated me, with my twisted spine and obscene ass, exactly the same way I had been treated in the south. The abuse was a constant and the only difference for me was in the excuse that they offered while subjecting me to this abuse. In southern Indiana the excuse for treating me bad was that I was a secret colored boy who had to be watched, guarded against, because otherwise I might trick someone into treating me white. (You know how tricky these colored people can be.) In northern Indiana they continued to treat me bad but without offering that particular excuse. I was just an “asshole,” or a “fatass,” or a “shitass,” or a slob, a jerk, a “Commie queer,” etc. What this taught me was that the nature of stigmatization is that it creates overlapping persecution markers:

A person who is marked for stigmatization acquires any number of overlapping categories of offensiveness. The “real reason” for the stigmatization may never be noticed within the swarm of buzzing overlapping categories of offensiveness which legitimate the abuse.

For instance, a black child might be persecuted not because he or she is black but because blacks are stupid and therefore he or she is stupid — and rightly to be discriminated against since opportunities cannot be taken away from bright people in order to offer them to stupid people who cannot make use of such opportunities. (I’ll limit myself to but one illustration, although there are countless other illustrations available.) ASSLEY 1. “Buff,” as a nickname, indicates a skin color close to beige, thus pointing at his Cherokee or half-Cherokee ancestrage. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

“Everything in life is unusual until you get accustomed to it.” — The Scarecrow, in THE MARVELOUS LAND OF OZ (L. Frank Baum, 1904)

THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO INSTANT HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1942

An American pilot on his first bombing mission over Europe, Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., felt “sick with thoughts of the civilians who might suffer from the bombs dropped by his machine” and, as he watched the black pellets drop away under his aircraft (he later confided), was going “My God, women and children are getting killed!” However, his bombs missed their target on this initial mission and pilot Tibbets was forced to take stock of himself. He came to realize that he had been so “intent on what was going to happen on the ground” that he hadn’t been able to do his “job right.” In the future, as in the “Enola Gay” B29 he would name after his mother, at 32,000 feet over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 , he would be able to behave more responsibly. WORLD WAR II

This war-addled pilot would even develop a posture in regard to the sort of conscientious objection exemplified by Friend John R. Kellam: “Every man ought to pay the price to live in this country. Andthat HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE means helping to defend it.”

Meanwhile, back home, the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Services was beginning mustard gas experiments on approximately 4,000 servicemen. The experiments would continue until 1945 and would make use of Seventh Day Adventist conscientious objectors who had gotten themselves maneuvered, during draft-board persecution, into volunteering as human guinea pigs (in order to prove to the authorities, of course, that they were patriotic, and demonstrate, to the authorities, that they were manly men rather than cowards). GAS WARFARE

Here’s an interesting point in comparison. According to the records, a total of 3,166 civilian prisoners from Dachau and Mauthausen classified as “unfit to work” would be transported during this period to the Hartheim Schloss mental health establishment near Linz in Austria, just over the German border, to be executed by gassing. The centerpiece of the SS’s euthanasia campaign, this would be the only Nazi institution from which there would be zero survivors. Something like 10,000 mentally retarded or crippled German children would be taken there to be executed, with their ashes spread over the waters of the Danube and Traun rivers. The brains of a total of 772 children from Vienna alone would be pickled in individual glass jars. The Hartheim Schloss staff of about 80 persons received extra pay plus a nice alcohol allowance. Today, the grounds of what had been Hartheim Schloss contain apartment buildings.There is a plaque on the wall of an entrance hall, to remind the 22 families who live there of sad events that had transpired.

The point in comparison which I would like to raise is based on the fact that this euthanasia campaign in Austria was directed by Dr. Rudolf Lonauer of Linz, a psychiatrist, and during May 1945 at the end of World War II, while the chickens were coming home to roost so to speak, Dr. Lonauer would euthanize himself. That being the case, why on earth is it, do you suppose, that Colonel Tibbets failed to euthanize himself? –When it comes to matters such as these, is being on the winning side that much different from being on the losing side?

Inquiring minds want to know.

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1943

The University of Chicago was given a US Army contract to study the effects of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T on cereal grains (including rice) and broadleaf crops. These studies would establish the effectiveness of using aerial applications of herbicides as a weapon of total war against civilian populations, to destroy the enemy’s crops and thus cause the starvation of their civilians. (Hey, no more Mr. Nice Guy, total war is total war.) SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

In response to Japan’s full-scale germ warfare program, the U.S. began research on biological weapons at Fort Detrick, Maryland. (It would never have occurred to us to get involved in such a thing, of course, had they not been planning to do it to us.)

During this timeframe the USA was weaponizing anthrax, tularemia, Q fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, botulinum, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B. We were busy busy busy. Because of the short shelflife of such weapons we had stockpiled two and a half million biological bomb casings, empty, available to be filled with the ultimate filth upon our decision. At Vigo near Terre Haute, local officials of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan, on war contract with the US government, began a production facility for the filling of these “N-bombs,” as they were called, to be sent to England because Winston Churchill wanted to drop them on a list of German cities (germ=German, get it?), making the entire areas of these cities and the surrounding countryside unavailable for human use for centuries into the future.2 GERM WARFARE

2. “N” was the military code for the Bacillus anthracis. The plant would be completed in May 1944 on 6,100 acres in Vigo, near Terre Haute, would contain a dozen 20,000-gallon fermentation tanks, and would become contaminated not with Bacillus anthracis but with Bacillus globigii (now considered a strain of Bacillus atrophaeus). Although Churchill would order 500,000 4-pound anthrax bombs during the summer of 1944, the plant would not be able to deliver (the Ku Kluxers of Indiana were chock full of faith and devotion, and they were of course corn-fed prime American stuff, but not many of them were what you’d want to call smart), and after the war the Vigo Ordinance Plant of the Chemical Warfare Service would be sold to a pharmaceutical firm. It’s OK for you to ask me how I know all this. Or, for the general picture, you can take a look at Barton J. Bernstein’s “Churchill’s secret biological weapons” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January-February 1987, page 46-50, based on the partial information that is on the public record as of this point. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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L ! HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE In a series of war posters, Norman Rockwell illustrated the freedoms of which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had spoken in his message of January 6, 19413 — in defense of which we were having the KKK begin to manufacture these anthrax distribution devices:

WORLD WAR II

3. “We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want ... everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear ... anywhere in the world.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1944

The US Navy, in using human subjects to test gas masks and clothing, locked people in a gas chamber and exposed them to mustard gas and lewisite. GAS WARFARE SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

April: The US Army began experimenting with compounds to destroy crops, and within a year would narrow the possibilities down from a long list of more than 1,000 agents to a short list of the 9 most promising ones those containing phenoxyacetic acids. A compound “LN-8” would win out over the other 8 and be put into mass production (LN-8 and another tested compound would later be used to create “Agent Orange”). SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Part of the 4th LCI Flotilla, while on its way to the UK after taking on supplies at Gibraltar, was engaged by 3 German Condor bombers based at Brest. Each plane dropped 6 bombs and the leading Landing Craft– Infantry of the flotilla was hit and broke apart. Aboard this vessel were a bunch of naval officers and ratings who were hitching a ride back to England to prepare for D-Day. The front part of the vessel, where, unfortunately, all 98 passengers and almost all the crew had gathered, went straight down. None of these men would get a chance to die on the bloody sands of the beaches of Normandy! The rear of the vessel would stay at the surface for so long that it would require naval gunfire to remove it as a hazard to navigation. WORLD WAR II

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1945

“Program F” was implemented by the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This would be the most extensive American study of the health effects of fluoride, which was the key chemical component in atomic bomb production. One of the most toxic chemicals known to man, fluoride, it would be found, caused marked adverse effects to the central nervous system. Much of the information would, however, be squelched in the name of national security and because of fear that lawsuits would undermine full-scale production of atomic weaponry. WORLD WAR II SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

4 January: The 1st Plutonium239 reprocessing operation began at Hanford, Washington. The US Army ran tests of various 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T mixtures at the Bushnell Army Airfield in Florida (which is now denominated a “Formerly Used Defense Site”). The USA would begin full-scale production of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T (we would have used these chemicals as weapons of total war against Japanese civilian populations, to destroy the enemy’s crops and thus cause general starvation, in 1946 during Operation Downfall had World War II continued). SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

March 24, Saturday: American naval forces begin a bombardment of the Japanese island of Okinawa as American ground forces land on the Kerama Islands 24 kilometers to the west.

Soviet forces captured Veszprem, southwest of Budapest and Mor, to the west of the capital. The Germans and their Hungarian allies retreat west in disarray.

Provisional President Charles de Gaulle announced that France intends to retain control of Indochina.

Allied (United States-Great Britain-Canada) forces crossed the Rhine on a 32-kilometer front from Rheinberg to Rees near the Dutch border. They took what remained of Wesel. George Smith Patton, Jr. had his driver stop

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

4. Guess what, this is now a Superfund cleanup site! Guess what, the radioactivity on this site is going to be around for awhile! HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE in the middle of the military pontoon bridge across the Rhine — the general, always a showman, needed a photo-op of himself taking a leak into that famous German river.

A group of battleships under the command of Vice Admiral W.A. Lee bombarded the island of Okinawa in the Ryukyu chain. Two small Japanese vessels were sunk, coast defense vessel #68 and the torpedo boat Tomozuru, by US carrier-based aircraft in the South China Sea, 28 degrees 25 minutes North, 124 degrees 32 minutes East. WORLD WAR II

Back stateside, on this eventful day, a 55-year-old black truck driver, Ebb Cade, was involved in a very severe car accident. He was taken comatose to the US Army Manhattan Engineer District Hospital in Oakridge, Tennessee, with injuries apparently so severe that he would not survive. Comatose, severely injured, ignorant, HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE poor and, when all is said and done, black, he would have no way whatever to defend himself against the government doctors of the Atomic Energy Commission. What a wonderful opportunity for them to conduct ghoulish experiments with radiation! TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE MARCH 24TH, 1945 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY, TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY AT BEST).

April 10, Tuesday: Allied troops captured Massa, southeast of La Spezia.

Hanover fell to the Allies.

American pilots shot down 14 German jets over Oranienburg.

Former Chancellor Franz von Papen was captured by American soldiers in the Ruhr.

William Schuman’s ballet Undertow, to a story by Tudor, was performed for the initial time, in the Metropolitan Opera House of New York City.

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Professor Albert Einstein retired and assumed the title Professor Emeritus.

Dr. Robert S. Stone injected his “expected casualty,” the black truckdriver Ebb Cade who had been rendered comatose in a bad highway crash, with 1,030 rems of Plutonium239, which was 41.2 times the total amount of radiation that a typical individual would receive in a lifetime. Cade had become the first patient out of 18 –not all of whom the DOE has completely identified– to be thus injected. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

(Dr. Robert S. Stone would get all upset and concerned when he learned later that his patient had survived both the auto accident injuries and his injection, and had left the hospital without the doctor’s having had the opportunity to conduct follow-up tests on bodily Pt239 levels.) SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

American forces took Mauban, north of Lucena, Luzon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE US Army troops supported by naval bombardment and carrier aircraft land on Tsuken Shima, off east coast of Okinawa.

United States naval vessels damaged in operations against Japanese forces in the Okinawa area: • Motor minesweeper YMS-96, by collision, 26 degrees 3 minutes North, 127 degrees 48 minutes East • Submarine chaser SC-661, by grounding, 26 degrees 11 minutes North, 127 degrees 55 minutes East • LST449, by coastal defense gun, 26 degrees 14 minutes North, 127 degrees 57 minutes East

United States naval vessels damaged, Okinawa area: • Battleship Missouri (BB-63), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 0 minutes North, 130 degrees 0 minutes East • Aircraft carrier Enterprise (CV-6), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 0 minute North, 128 degrees 0 minutes East • Aircraft carrier Essex (CV-9), by dive bomber, 26 degrees 50 minutes North, 130 degrees 30 minutes East • Destroyer Trathen (DD-530), accidentally by United States naval gunfire, 27 degrees 13 minutes North, 130 degrees 15 minutes East • Destroyer Hale (DD-642), by dive bomber, 26 degrees 0 minute North, 120 degrees 0 minutes East • Destroyer Bullard (DD-660), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 0 minute North, 130 degrees 0 minutes East • Destroyer Kidd (DD-661), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 0 minute North, 130 degrees 0 minutes East • Destroyer Hank (DD-702), by aerial strafing, 27 degrees 0 minute North, 130 degrees 0 minutes East • Destroyer escort Manlove (DE-36), by aerial strafing, 26 degrees 12 minutes North, 127 degrees 20 minutes East • Destroyer escort Samuel S. Miles (DE-183), by Japanese Kamikaze, 26 degrees 12 minutes North, 127 degrees 20 minutes East • Attack transport Berrien (APA-61), by collision, 26 degrees 22 minutes North, 127 degrees 43 minutes East • Attack cargo ship Leo (AKA-60), accidentally by United States naval gunfire, 26 degrees 21 minutes North, 127 degrees 43 minutes East • LST399, by grounding, 26 degrees 20 minutes North, 127 degrees 45 minutes East WORLD WAR II

FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.

July: Edward F. Carnahan committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Dropping or spraying the herbicide “LN-8” from the air onto enemy croplands was determined by our government to be the most effective distribution method. In a test using an SPD Mark 2 bomb, one originally crafted to distribute biological weapons such as anthrax or ricin, the shell burst at a prearranged height and sent down a rain of this chemical agent of death. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, World War II Allies including the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union would hold the Potsdam Conference in Germany to plan the post-war world. Vietnam was considered a minor item on the agenda. In order to disarm the Japanese in Vietnam, the Allies divided the country in half at the 16th parallel. Chinese Nationalists would move in and disarm the Japanese north of the parallel while the British would move in and do the same for the south. During the conference, representatives from France requested the return of all French pre-war colonies in Southeast Asia (Indochina). This request was honored, and in the postwar world, following the removal of the Japanese, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia would once again become French colonies.

President Harry S Truman, our naïf, would sail home from the conference exclaiming “I like old Joe! He is a decent fellow.” FOR HE’S A DECENT FELLOW, FOR HE’S ...

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1946

In Wisconsin, Joseph Raymond McCarthy was elected as a Republican to the United States Senate. In the primary election he had defeated fellow Republican Robert M. La Follette, Jr., who was a “coward” who had failed to serve his nation (when the Japanese had struck at Pearl Harbor, La Follette had been 46 years of age), and then in the general election he had defeated Howard McMurray, in part by alleging that this Democratic candidate was being supported by Communists. UNAMERICANISM

In the Senate, McCarthy would achieve an exceedingly bad reputation, with angry colleagues accusing him of lying, and of insulting them — eventually the Republican leadership would exile him from the Banking Committee to the District of Columbia Committee, their doghouse where they considered that he would be able to do little harm. MCCARTHYISM

A reading room set up in Bad Homburg, Germany by the Psychological Warfare Division of the US Army was at this point relocated to Frankfurt am Main and redesignated as the first of what would become 27 Amerika- Häuser.

The US Army issued to General Electric a contract for “Project Vulcan.” GATLING’S MACHINE GUN

The federal government of the USA secretly cut a deal with Dr. Shiro Ishii and other leaders of the Japanese Army’s infamous Unit 731 by which we were to be provided with hands-on germ warfare experience gained largely from human experimentation, in exchange for us forgiving their war crimes (it would take the following couple of years for this deal to be formalized — but while the Tokyo War Crimes Trial of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East would be going on, between April 29, 1946 and April 16, 1948, none of these people would be being suggested as defendants). WORLD WAR II SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Patients in Veterans Administration hospitals, leftover liabilities from the carnage of World War II, had an entitlement to free medical care — so they were of course being used as wards-of-the-state guinea pigs for medical experiments. In order to avoid creating suspicions an order was issued, that in all reports of such medical studies being performed on war veterans the term “experiment” was forbidden. This forbidden word was to be replaced throughout with a word such as “investigation.” Or, perhaps, “observation.”5 SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

5. By a special clause, any medical assistance that is received gratis makes one, for that occasion, a ward of the government, which means that the government, in its benevolence, may make decisions about your welfare — such as, for instance, here, the decision that the “greater good for all” triumphs over your personal need for privacy or for treatment appropriate to your condition. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1947

In the war stories told by Joseph Raymond McCarthy, the number of bombing runs he remembered having flown over enemy territory during World War II had risen from 14 to 17.

UNAMERICANISM Our CIA began its study of LSD as a potential weapon for use by American intelligence. Human subjects (both civilian and military) would be used both with and without their knowledge. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

(Although we do not have any indication that the CIA experimented specifically upon Joe McCarthy with its LSD, it must be noted that although we had no way to predict this at the time, this man’s his memories would in fact keep improving and improving, until he had become perfectly capable of recalling things that had not happened.) MCCARTHYISM

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD.

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE January 8, Wednesday: Colonel E.E. Kirkpatrick of the US Atomic Energy Commission issued a secret document (Control #07075001) laying plans for the agency to administer intravenous doses of radioactive substances to human subjects. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

The British steel industry closed down due to a shortage of coal.

British troops completed the evacuation of Alexandria, Egypt.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1949

The nations’ first daytime TV soap opera, “These Are My Children,” began broadcasting from Chicago’s NBC studios.

The US Army initiated a series of secret medical experiments upon the American public, as preparation for the impact of future NBC (Nuclear/Biological/Chemical) warfare. The government’s public Plutonium239 poisoning tests had been dreamed up by the Manhattan Project’s medical director, Dr. Stafford Warren, and cleared with Director J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had stipulated only that such experiments needed to be conducted, not at his project’s Los Alamos facilities, but somewhere else. The reporter Eileen Welsome would eventually manage to identify one of the civilian guinea pigs, who had been referred to in government documentation under the code name “CAL-1,” as Albert Stevens, who had been during the period of the

studies 58 years of age. He had been a house painter and because of his wife’s asthma he had moved his family from Ohio to California in the 1920s. In 1945, when he was diagnosed with cancer, he was injected with Pt239 and then a few days later portions of his liver and spleen were removed. The doctor was collecting his urine and stools to measure, without his awareness, their Pt239 concentrations. Then analysis of his removed tissues showed that the diagnosis of cancer had been in error: he had been suffering from a gastric ulcer. Welsome would manage to identify another of the civilian guinea pigs, who was referred to in government documentation under the code name “CAL-3,” as Elmer Allen, who in 1947 had been 36 years of age. He had been a railroad porter and his leg had been presumed to be cancerous and had been scheduled for amputation. On July 18, 1947, at the University of California Hospital at San Francisco, California three days before his leg was amputated, Allen had received a “hot” injection of Pt238 (considerably more radioactive than Pt239) in the leg muscle so that, after amputation, they could send the limb to a laboratory for Pt238 measurements. (The test showed that about half the Pt238 had remained in the leg. Allen was the last of 18 people to be thus injected during the 1940s.) The institutions participating in this poison project included the University of Rochester, the University of California at San Francisco, California and the University of Chicago, as well as the University of Cincinnati. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE June 27, Monday: Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads graced the cover of TIME Magazine (later his award would be withdrawn as more details of his secret medical experiments would come to light).

Explanation of the above magazine cover: the healing sword of Caduceus is piercing the brain of a Puerto Rican, “dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere.”

HISTORY’S NOT MADE OF WOULD. WHEN SOMEONE REVEALS, FOR INSTANCE, THAT A PARTICULAR INFANT WOULD INVENT THE SEWING MACHINE, S/HE DISCLOSES THAT WHAT IS BEING CRAFTED IS NOT REALITY BUT PREDESTINARIANISM. THE RULE OF REALITY IS THAT THE HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE FUTURE HASN’T EVER HAPPENED, YET.

1 September 1949-Summer 1955 (age 12 to 17 /2): Austin Meredith’s 7th and 8th Grades at the Junior High School that has now been demolished, while we lived at 429 West Main Street in Wabash, Indiana, and then 9th through 12th Grades at the Wabash High School, while we lived at 723 Spring Street. ASSLEY

Foot fluoroscopes had been in every shoestore in America for several decades at least. The New England Journal of Medicine had published a couple of papers about these devices. One, by a Dr. Williams, reported that per measurements done on the fluoroscopes in about a dozen stores, the individual dose amounted to approximately 200 rad, and the other, by Louis Hempelmann, suggested that for safety reasons the use of such fluoroscopes ought to be restricted.

But I didn’t know this, and I had seen advertisements for Buster Brown shoes and the cartoon kid in the advertisements looked so lively and healthy that I desperately wanted a pair of those, which of course I would never get because they were expensive and we were poor. The shoestore downtown had this neat platform thing whatever it was, that you could stand on and wiggle your toes, to watch the bones inside your feet move around. I’d stop into this shoe store every time I went by there on my way home from school, to punch the big white button and wiggle my toes, punch the button and wiggle my toes, punch the button and wiggle my toes. And I’d sneak a peak at the Buster Browns in the window. None of the shoe salesmen ever said boo to me about this. Of course, I now wonder how much radiation my feet were absorbing (but I’m now also aware, from my seven years in the nuclear industry, that for some unknown reason one’s extremities, one’s hands and feet, can absorb a whole heck of a lot more radiation, without damage, than one’s head, neck, or torso): Dr. John W. Gofman: “I know when I was a kid in the ‘30s, I visited the shoe store and got fluoroscoped. The first scientific paper on the shoe-store fluoroscope was written in 1949. Why was it then? Because every goddamn hamlet in the United States, anywhere, had a fluoroscope in the shoe store. And nobody studied [it], nobody had the vaguest idea of what kind of dose you got to feet or anywhere else. And so in the New England Journal of Medicine, back-to-back in 1949, are two papers: one, [Dr. Williams] on measurements he did on the fluoroscope in [about] a dozen shoe stores; and, the second paper was by Louis Hempelmann, and Louis, as you know, came up from the Rochester group of radiology. Louis Hempelmann said, “Well, we really don’t know much about 200 R but we really [should] probably restrict the use of the fluoroscope.” Here, they’ve been in every hamlet for 20 years, at least. They had great solutions for how to handle this problem: Put a sign on the shoe-store fluoroscope, “Do not do more than 3 examinations per day nor 12 per year to you, as a customer.” What did you have to do to look into your feet, the bones in your feet? You press the button. That was the only control of this thing. So, 20 years after these things had been all over the country [they comment on safety]. Why [the long delay]? Because they didn’t think any of these things mattered. And Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE they’re the people who came in to lead the atomic energy scene. Shields Warren was doing pathology, Robert Stone, radiologist, Stafford Warren, radiologist, Stafford became a dean at UCLA. He’s one of the early publishers on various methods of doing pelvimetry and other examinations when he was a radiologist. I have to tell one thing: Stafford Warren was Robert’s Stone’s right hand in the Manhattan Project Medical Division. When we did that job for Oppenheimer of isolating that one milligram of plutonium from uranium, Stafford Warren announced he was coming to inspect our operations there and in Gilman Hall. He and a couple of others from the Biology and Medicine Project of the Manhattan Project came. Here we were getting irradiated with lead in front of these big vats to try to give us some shielding. We were using up chemicals like crazy to process a ton of uranium nitrate. We had to use a lot of sodium acetate and sodium nitrate and [it] came in 5-pound cardboard casks. We emptied out a cardboard cask; we’d set it over the corner of the room. Stafford Warren’s report on our operation to the Manhattan Project [included] nothing about radiation hazard. They said, “They have these boxes stacked in one corner of room. Somebody could have one of these boxes fall on them.” It would be like a cardboard hatbox falling; could not hurt you. That was his report!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1950

Our federal government established its 1st program to develop human mind control techniques, conducting 149 separate experiments using electroshock, hypnosis and drugs on unsuspecting inmates, mental patients, minorities and others. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

When 74 retarded and troubled boys at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts sat down to their morning oatmeal during the 1940s and 1950s, they did not know they were ingesting radioactive materials or that they were being used as guinea pigs in a secret medical experiment devised by Professor of Nutrition Robert S. Harris of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). All the boys knew was that the kind people were offering them gifts, and trips to Red Sox games — if they would eat all their breakfast. (Eventually, after a scandal, MIT and the Quaker Oats Company would pay $1,850,000 in settlements. It is not clear that any of the children were actually harmed by the radiation, and we guess that probably they were not.)

After three generations of strife between the lobbyists representing the dairy industry and the lobbyists representing oleomargarine producers, Congress removed its discriminatory tax against margarine. Also,

Secret Medical Experiments “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE oleomargarines made out of partly-hydrogenated oils became more prevalent in the US as it became possible to use a dye to color this unappealing stark-white lard-like stuff a pretty dairy yellow, so it looked a little bit more appetizing as you spread it on your sandwich. At first the dairy industry lobbyists were able to prevent the oleo from being sold with the yellow color built in, and so when you purchased a white stick of oleomargarine there was a little plastic capsule of dye, that you needed to squeeze over the stick, and mess with this stuff until it appeared more or less like butter. –Then the dairy industry lobbyists were overcome by the oleomargarine lobbyists and it became possible to purchase oleo that already looked like butter. The 1950s and 1960s would be an era of medical ignorance in which the benefits of monounsaturated fats (such as those found in olive oil) and omega-3 fats (such as those found in cold-water fish, flaxseed, and walnut oils) in preventing heart attacks were simply unrecognized. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE During the decade of the 1950s, CIA researchers into mind-altering substances would be slipping stuff into people’s drinks to figure out how to control their behavior. Psychotic episodes would sometimes be produced (that would be, of course, an accident, although entirely predictable, and deeply regretted, although considered necessary). During this year the US Army continued biological warfare tests that it had initiated in the previous year, using a Serratia bacteria microorganism which its weapons specialists deemed harmless for a secret medical experiment in San Francisco. Three days after the city had been blanketed, people began to come to a local hospital with Serratia infections. Eleven citizens had serious infections and one of those eleven died. (That was, of course, an accident, although entirely predictable, and deeply regretted, although considered necessary. Army scientists would continue to spray unsuspecting American civilians with these so-called harmless bacteria for the following 19 years.) GERM WARFARE

Joseph Hamilton, the scientist in charge of radiation experiments at the University of California, sent a memo to Shields Warren, director of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Division of Biology and Medicine, suggesting that they ought to use large primates such as chimpanzees instead of human test subjects in a secret medical experiment that was being planned on the cognitive impact of high doses of radiation. The use of humans might leave the AEC open “to considerable criticism” since the experiments as proposed had “a little of the Buchenwald touch.” (When a copy of this incriminating memo would in a later timeframe be uncovered in the library archives, the response of the university administration would be to make Hamilton’s papers off-limits to researchers.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1951

During this year Charlie Maddox escaped from the Indiana Boys School at Pendleton just southwest of Indianapolis and came hitchhiking down Old National Highway US40 past my grandfather Charlie Mattox’s farm behind the clay factory outside Brazil, Indiana. I’m sure the similarity in name must have been intriguing, because Charlie Maddox (better known as Charles Manson) was a young orphan and my grandfather Charlie Mattox had been a “home boy” — an orphan who had been allowed to live in someone’s barn and eat their food while growing up, as a sort of child farm laborer. I’m sure also that although my grandfather might have given this lad some food, he wouldn’t have offered any money or other help — he having been an exceedingly harsh and bitter person whose motto was “Nobody ever did nothin’ for me” (an early Libertarian, so to speak). ASSLEY

As a secret medical experiment testing our preparedness for Nuclear/Biological/Chemical warfare, the US Army contaminated the Norfolk Naval Supply Center and a ship docked there with infectious bacteria. Tests would continue through 1969 and there is concern that civilians in the surrounding areas have been exposed. One of the bacteria types that had been used had been chosen because it was known that blacks were more susceptible to it than whites. –In an integrated armed forces, we evidently needed to verify the “preparedness” of our black sailors, in particular. GERM WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1953

At the John Gaston Hospital of Memphis, Tennessee, a charity institution, during this year and the following one, Lester Van Middlesworth of the University of Tennessee’s College of Medicine would be injecting radioactive iodine into six black newborns and one white newborn. The intent of the ghoulish procedure is now unknown, but it could have been no local accident because we do know that similar secret medical experiments with the effect of radioactive iodine upon newborns were meanwhile being carried out at hospitals in Detroit, Omaha, Little Rock, and Iowa City and that a total of 235 such test subjects were being injected. There having been no followup whatever, to determine what the health impact might have been, Professor John Gofman, emeritus at the University of California–Berkeley and an expert on radiation effects, has commented that in such a case “To do nothing is criminal....”

The US military released clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide gas over Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia. Their intent was to determine how efficiently they would be able to disperse chemical agents. CHEMICAL WARFARE

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initiated Project MKULTRA, an 11-year research program designed to produce and test drugs and biological agents that might prove useful for mind control and behavior modification. Six of the subprojects of Project MKULTRA would involve testing such agents on unwitting human beings. GERM WARFARE

Joint Army-Navy-CIA experiments were conducted in which tens of thousands of unwitting citizens in New York and San Francisco were exposed to airborne Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii — considered harmless. GERM WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1955

When American spy Richard Helms dug a tunnel beneath East Berlin that would for 11 months be used to tap into Soviet phone lines, he could surely expect that at least some useful intelligence would be obtained. However, the Soviets knew about this effort from its initiation and were merely toying with us.

The CIA, in an experiment to test its ability to infect human populations with biological agents, released a bacterium from the US Army’s biological warfare arsenal, a bacterium which, it had been assured by the Army, was relatively benign, into the air above Tampa Bay, Florida. GERM WARFARE

The US Army Chemical Corps continued its LSD research, studying this chemical for potential use as an incapacitating agent. More than 1,000 lucky Americans got to participate in these tests, which would be continuing until 1958. Some of these lucky Americans were not made aware that anything was being tried out on them. There are rumors that some suicides resulted from this as people became alarmed at changes in their mentation, changes which they had no way to comprehend — we don’t know yet, because when the President ordered public disclosure of such activities, his order only applied to past radiological experimentation upon the American public and did not require the public disclosure of past chemical or biological experimentation upon the American public. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

May 5, Thursday: An internal CIA memo documents that they considered that they needed to develop a drug that would create a state of “pure euphoria,” without aftereffects. This would give rise to a project “Operation Midnight Climax” as part of which the CIA would install oneway mirror-windows at a San Francisco house of prostitution. The operative George Hunter White was one of those stationed behind a mirror-window, to observe Johns to whom prostitute operatives had surreptitiously slipped doses of LSD. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1956

There had not been a major outbreak of the yellow fever in the US since 1905. The US military therefore released mosquitoes carefully pre-infected with the yellow fever over Savannah, Georgia and over Avon Park, Florida, reasoning that if a major outbreak of the yellow fever were to occur, it would clearly have been caused by these treated war mosquitoes, and this would demonstrate their effectiveness as a weapon of combat.

Following each test, Army agents posing as public health officials cruised around looking for impact among the various populations of unsuspecting civilian test subjects. GERM WARFARE SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1957

It is commonly asserted that the contamination of Agent Orange with the type of dioxin known as TCDD, the most dangerous and environmentally disruptive chemical known to humankind, is something that was discovered only belatedly. However, prior to Operation Ranch Hand in Vietnam, health risks had already become apparent because there had been several accidents in the industrial synthesis of 2,4,5-T not only in the US but also in Europe. This information was published during this year: “tetrachlordibenzodioxine proved very active.” The chemical company known as Boehringer, which began in this year to produce pesticides, relied upon a relatively safer low-temperature process and warned other producers of 2,4,5-TCP that they needed to discontinue the high-temperature process that they were using. The differences in manufacturing cost, between employing the relatively safer low-temperature process used by Boehringer, and employing the relatively more risky high-temperature process used by Dow and Monsanto during the Vietnam War, were not large differences in cost of production. To the contrary, these were relatively low costs that could easily have been absorbed within the profit margin of the product. The entire planet was about to be contaminated, without any significant benefit either to these government contractors or to the governments they served.

The American Medical Association had in 1847 promulgated a code of ethics, one item of which called for physicians to care for infectious patients “even at the jeopardy of their own lives.” The code of ethics of course had no teeth, and there were never any studies to discover whether it was having an impact upon the conduct of doctors. In this year this item of the physician’s code of ethics was stricken. (Something that may have escaped your notice might very well be relevant in this context: a physician is not in general a person suffering from a martyr complex, but instead in general is a fee professional. This item of the code of ethics would be reinstated in 1989 — yet no studies have given us reason to believe that American physicians were behaving in any unusual manner in the period between the striking and the reinstatement. For instance, while working at the Kansas City plant run for the AEC by Bendix, in this year, Dotte Troxell was involved in a serious radiation accident. When symptoms of acute radiation syndrome such as hair loss, nausea, purpura, and hemorrhaging began to appear, she was sent to the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico, a clinic established by the AEC for developing treatments for radiation injury. Because she was thought to be near death, and presumably because she had been exposed to a Cobalt60 calibration source that allowed the dose to her organs to be precisely determined, what the doctors at Lovelace did was perform exploratory surgery, taking tissue biopsies from her internal organs. Probably, they did this not to help her live but so that when she died they would be able to know exactly how much radiation it had taken to kill her in exactly that number of days. When she awoke after this surgery the doctors told her that for reasons of “national security” they would not be able to say what they had done inside her body. She would suffer radiogenic cataracts in both eyes and, for related or unrelated reasons, would give birth to a son with congenital diabetes. There is no reason to believe, however, that the manner in which she was treated was in any way influenced by the American Medical Association’s code of ethics. Had she been injured and treated in the previous year, 1956, while the full code of ethics was still in place, there is no reason to believe that she would have received any better treatment than she did receive in 1957!) SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1958

The Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment at Porton Down, Britain, developed the binary nerve agent VX. This agent was more stable in storage than Sarin and Soman and would soon become the mainstay of North American and Western European chemical warfare stockpiles. The patents for the agent would be published in 1974. The Soviets, meanwhile, would continue to prefer using thickened forms of the older German agents until the early 1990s, when they would begin replacing their aging Sarin stocks with the vastly more stable (and lethal) Novichok (“Newcomer”) series of binary biotoxins. To date, none of these military agents have proven to be as lethal or persistent as the 4,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange we dumped on Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. GAS WARFARE

The federal Congress brought a “GRAS” rule into effect with a Food Additives Amendment to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Henceforward the food industry would not be obligated under sections 201(s) and 409 to spend any money on any safety testing whatever, on a substance “generally recognized, among qualified experts, as having been adequately shown to be safe under the conditions of its intended use.” Under FDA regulations 21 CFR 170.3 and 21 CFR 170.30, all that was needed was to certify that the substance had already as of 1958 commonly been consumed by a significant number of customers — the way ersatz saturated fats had, for instance, been being consumed for very many years by very many people as a perfectly safe but affordable source of necessary nutrition. “Testing for healthfulness? –Let’s not, and say we did.”

Liberalization of the Bratt system in Sweden had been followed by increased consumption of alcohol. At this point the price control system, by raising prices, managed finally to decrease consumption.

At the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Laboratories, LSD was tried out for its effect on intelligence, with 95 volunteers. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1959

A new testing organization was formed, American College Testing (ACT), which would become the leading rival of the Educational Testing Service (ETS).The Louisiana supreme court upheld the state’s miscegenation THE MERITOCRACY

law, arguing that the state could protect the children from such marriages from “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”6 (In this year, California, Idaho, and Nevada were repealing their bans on interracial marriage.)

Someone contributing to a discussion group on the Internet once made the mistake of suggesting that there was a trail of secret medical experimentation on humans in the 20th Century. Of course, with this sort of provocation, some righteous patriot on that discussion list immediately and with vast indignation challenged this: “Other than that carried out by Nazis, can anyone produce any documentation of the secret use of humans as experimental subjects in medical research?”

I contributed as follows: Secret? There has never been any need for secrecy. When I was a student in the Department of Philosophy (316 Waggener Hall) at the University of Texas in the late 1950s, I had a bad reaction to a medication tried out on me by the duty physician at the Student Health Clinic. I then found out that the medicine he had given me was not approved for human use. But, I found out, that had been quite all right. Had he charged me for this medication? No! Was I a student in a public institution of education? Yes! Therefore, according to them, I had no recourse, as no wrong had

6. Note here the sarcastic echoing of the language of the US Supreme Court’s 1954 school integration ruling in Brown v. Board of Education). HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE been done and no law had been violated.

This would have been rendered illegal had the physician on duty charged me for the medication; however, the medication he administered to me was a free sample distributed by a drug company to him for such free experimental use. This would likewise have been rendered illegal had I not been an inmate in a public institution, to wit, a student at the University of Texas taking advantage of free public education. I was, from the standpoint of the law, as a student receiving the benefit of a public education, an institutionalized person. I was a beneficiary. The state was my parent, my provider. Legally, I found out, I was in precisely the same category as if I had been a prisoner in the state prison. My consent to being experimented upon was constructive, that is, by being a recipient of the public largesse I had already in point of law tacitly given my consent to being thus experimented upon. Well, at least, this is the way in which the situation was explicated to me at the time, while I was recovering from the adverse impact of this untested medication upon my health. How much of what I was told was truthful, versus how much was institutional self-protection, I simply have never had any way to know. I had merely had a severe case of athlete’s foot and, as I had no resources at all and was supporting myself by working nights as a janitor while in school, had presumed that going to the Student Health Clinic was better than spending food money for a bottle of itch powder at the drug store. The unfortunate side reaction I had was that all the skin lifted off the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet in great thick gray sheets. I put my feet in plastic sacks of Vaseline under my socks, and learned HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE to hold my pen between my 2d and 3d fingers in such a way that it did not touch the undersides of my fingers, and went on with my study of philosophy. By the time I had become a graduate student, the skin had grown back and the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet were no longer a bright pink color. I learned a lot in college. Did I, during my public education, acquire “a feeling of inferiority as to [my] status in the community that may affect [my heart and mind] in a way unlikely ever to be undone”? Well, I’m now 75 years of age, and this you’re-just-a-ward-of-the-state-on-whom-we-can-experiment Texas episode in my personal trajectory still festers for me. Maybe I should ask the State of Texas for an apology — an apology might help, maybe? ASSLEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1960

From this year until 1972, researchers at the University of Cincinnati would be conducting a total-body irradiation study sponsored by the Defense Atomic Support Agency. The project would be led by Dr. Eugene Saenger, a former military doctor who had become the father of the University of Cincinnati’s department of nuclear medicine and had made himself a world-class authority on the health effects of radiation. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

The Federal Radiation Council recommended an annual limit of 0.5 rem/year for members of the general public and 5.0 rem/year for nuclear workers like me (subsequently, it has been determined that the amount of radiation to which I was subjected while working at night as a “jumper” at the General Electric Test Reactor in 1975 and 1976 was five times too high to be safe for me to have absorbed — that is, that looking at the thing in retrospect, I should never as a “jumper” have been subjected to more than 1.0 rem/year). HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1961

May: Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson visited President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and hailed the embattled leader as the “Winston Churchill of Asia.”

This Winston Churchill of Asia asked the United States of America to provide aerial herbicide spraying in his nation. There no problems around there that a little poison could not cure, selectively applied. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy sent 400 American Green Beret “special advisors” to South Vietnam to train South Vietnamese soldiers in methods of “counter-insurgency.” For awhile the war was going to consist not of soldiers killing soldiers but of US advisers killing Soviet specialists and Soviet specialists killing US advisers — or at least, that was the joke of the time. The role of these Green Berets “special advisers” would

soon expand to include the establishment of Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG) made up of mountain tribesmen known as Montagnards. To thwart infiltration by the North Vietnamese, these groups would establish a series of fortified camps strung out along the mountains. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Fall: The conflict in Vietnam was widening as 26,000 Viet Cong launched several successful attacks on South Vietnamese troops, and President Ngo Dinh Diem urgently appealed for more military aid from the Kennedy administration.

With US help, the South Vietnamese Air Force initiated herbicide operations. President Ngo Dinh Diem’s request for this sort of “help” initiated a policy debate in the White House and the State and Defense Departments, a policy debate during which we learned that such poisons were not unprecedented as weapons of war: the British had already employed such herbicides and defoliants during the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s. Gosh, so actually, we may be doing something evil — but we are not doing anything that has not been done before. How utterly reassuring! SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

My petition for Conscientious Objector status was denied on the basis that it was a federal crime of Selective Service fraud, punishable by years in prison, to attempt to transit from a 2S Student Deferred status to a CO status. I (Austin Meredith) was classified as ready for my obligatory military service. Despite my twisted spine, which had been categorized by the Selective Service physician as “pes planus, asymptomatic,” I was ordered to report for induction processing as an Army private — so I started moving from town to town one jump ahead of the sheriff.

Each time they caught up with me, I would simply get on a bus and go to some different town. Meanwhile I sought out a Marine recruiter and inquired as to whether I would be acceptable as a Marine Officer, on the basis of my college education and test scores. It is so simple to explain why I needed to do this! During the course of my 24 years, from birth in 1937 to 1961, I had been bashed a number of times by other males my own age or slightly older. I had been beaten once in 1st grade at Brown Military Academy north of San Diego, with sticks made to resemble rifles for training and marching purposes, and my left forearm was cracked and my upper jaw crushed and one of my front baby teeth knocked out. Then during my Junior High years the other boys purchased #1 hard-lead pencils, sharpened them to needle points, and made a practice of jabbing these pencils into my thighs and buttocks in the halls of the school (I still bear inside my muscle tissue the marks of pencil lead from pencils that had their sharp points snapped off against the long bones of my legs). Then during High School years I was bashed during a gym class and my nose was utterly crushed, filling my nasal passages with bone fragments and making me an obligate mouth-breather. –I had gone into public education deformed and physically very ill due to my bout with bovine tuberculosis, and had come out of public education no longer physically ill, but not only deformed any longer, having become as well disfigured. All these attacks had occurred because of my personal appearance, which others found disgusting, the other students calling me “Commie Queer” since I looked something like a centaur. (My upper torso and my lower torso, during my adolescence, appeared to be from two different bodies that had somehow gotten pasted together at the beltline, with the bottom half hugely muscular but the top half puny.)

This being my appearance and my consequent history, I expected that were I put into a prison, or into an army barracks as a private, I would again find himself being physically abused on the basis of my bodily appearance, HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE and might even possibly be called “Commie Queer” again as I had been in public school, and be ganged up on again and stomped again. So my attitude at the time was that this application for Marine Officer Candidate School, using my higher education to my advantage, might be what it would take to preserve my life and health if in fact I were to be inducted into the Armed Forces of the United States of America.

I scored very highly on the Marine Officer written test. The recruiting sergeant at Navy Yard in Boston told me that I had scored quite a bit higher than the highest that this recruiter had personally ever previously seen, in his 14 years experience. So he sent me over to the doctors at the Navy Yard, and I had the first real rigorous physical examination that I had in his 24 years of my life ever received. They classified my Potts Disease physical defects, due to my past bovine tuberculosis, again as “asymptomatic,” the same way they had originally been classified when I turned 18 years of age — as it was clear to them not only that I was no longer infectious but also that I could readily accomplish any physical requirements that military service places upon its young recruits. That is, it was easy for me to pass and even to excel, at the standard military “Physical Readiness Test,” since this merely required a certain number of push-ups, a run of a certain distance (two or three miles in a quite generous period of time under a rather light load, as I recall), etc.

Nevertheless the Marines then rejected me as physically unfit. The ruling was in effect that although I was physically fit to be a private in the US Army –that being a position of appropriately low status– I was not physically fit to be a 2d Lieutenant in the USMC — that being a position of a status incompatible with such a personal bodily configuration. I couldn’t look good in the uniform. So I appealed this ruling, alleging that it was not actually a medical response to my physical condition but was, rather, a prejudiced rejection on grounds of personal appearance alone. I cited various remarks they had made to me about the importance that a Marine Officer look like a Marine Officer, that the standard uniform fit properly, etc. I pointed out that I had scored very highly on his written examination, and pointed out that despite my twisted spine I had easily been able to accomplish each and every task required in the standard military Physical Readiness Test. I pointed out that I had been working on a Texas road surveying crew as a sledgehammer-man, and that for sure no “disabled” person would have been able to work all day on caliche roads in that hot sun swinging a sledgehammer. I pointed out that as a youth I had made myself a set of weights out of cement poured over scrap metal in buckets, and had developed a series of exercises which I had rigidly followed daily in order to strengthen myself to cope with my nonstandard physical configuration. I pointed out that I could raise my left shoulder, at least in appearance if that was what counted, simply by using extra padding in the uniform blouse for that shoulder. Etc.

Did I exactly want to become a Marine Officer, was that what I had decided to do with my life? –Well, no, but the alternative seemed to be for me to be made an Army Private and get myself stomped by other enlisted men in an abusive barracks setting. I was simply struggling to limit my risks.

My medical dossier went on appeal and made its way up through the offices, while I was moving from town to town evading the sheriff and ignoring letters and telegrams demanding that I report for induction into the US Army as a private.

Every once in awhile I would fire off a letter asking the status of my appeal. Finally I received a response directly from the Surgeon General of the Navy. The Surgeon General concurred that to reject such a candidate on appearance grounds alone would be to reject him prejudicially. The Surgeon General required that the USMC send me to their Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia, to determine there, by actual candidacy, whether I would be physically and mentally qualified to be a Marine Officer. My appearance at the Marine Officer Candidate School and subsequently at the Marine Officer Training Course, in Quantico during Fall 1961, was obviously distressing to the officers in charge there. One of the very first things that happened was that they discovered that I was embarrassed to be seen in the nude, or in my HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “skivvies” — and had brought pajamas with me to the enlisted Marine barracks used by these Officer Candidates. In the barracks I was quickly and forcibly stripped of these nighttime modesty garments so that my platoon mates could get the full impact of my physical deformity. (They even put a tape measure to me, and to themselves, marveling at how much more huge the muscles in my legs were than their own muscles.) The officers there quickly professed to have discovered my political attitudes and to have found these attitudes treasonous, and threatened to award me a general court martial. They put a great deal of time and attention into the fact that in college I had been a student of philosophy, and my “DI,” an Apache Indian named Sergeant Wolf Mule, posed questions such as “How could we possibly trust you? How would we know what you were thinking?”

Her is how this “treason” gambit was developed. At an Effective Presentation class, DI Mule assigned to me the topic “Better Red Than Dead — Bertrand Russell.” He gave me precisely the standard 3 minutes to prepare, and then had me deliver a standard standup 3-minute speech on this topic before the other officer candidates of the class. At the conclusion of this speech I was marched to the office of the Company Commander and processing began for a General Courts Martial for treason, in that allegedly by virtue of this classroom effective presentation (whatever it was I had blurted out on the occasion) I had been attempting to convert other military personnel, having the temporary status of enlisted men, to Professor Bertrand Russell’s pacifism.

My response, delivered to the Commanding Officer – Marine Officer Candidate School in the presence of the base attorney, was that I hoped they would provide me the opportunity of being guilty of such a crime, a crime of having obeyed an order to deliver the speech –that I would be eager to plead guilty– since this would be to establish, as a principle of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Nürnberg Principle which the US military had always up to that point evaded — that to obey an order to commit a crime could constitute a punishable offense. I mentioned something that I had had no chance to mention during the 3 minutes of my Effective Presentation, that the slogan “Better Red Than Dead” was not something that had been originated by philosopher Bertie but was merely a repudiation of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s slogan “Lieber tot als rot” — and therefore it would be possible for the popular media to construe the Commanding Officer’s disagreement with Bertie as being in sympathy with the Nazis. I told the two that I would be ready and willing to devote myself to prison, in order finally to be able to introduce “said Nürnberg Principle” into American military law. The Commanding Officer, and the base attorney, then purported to feel relieved, when they discovered through further questioning that actually I did not agree with Russell, that actually I considered Bertie’s “better Red than dead” polemic to have been a stupid self-defeating one, and that I had delivered my 3-minute Effective Presentation as being in favor of such a posture only because in standard debate mode one HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE is supposed to adopt the “pro” or the “con” position that one has been assigned to represent, and that I had considered that it had been intended that I was to deliver the difficult “pro” argument rather than the easy “con” argument. The two of them expressed themselves as so relieved, that actually I didn’t believe any of that “better Red than dead” stuff! This had all been the most dreadful mistake! Of course, after that point nothing more would be heard of the matter and I was allowed to graduate and mount my bright goldplate 2d-Lieutenant bar on my uniform shoulder-strap.

(I am omitting here a description of the mandatory cosmetic surgery to which I would be subjected at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, since that is covered in a section of this database dated early in 1962.)

During the entire period of my military obligation, three and a half years, the Office of Naval Intelligence and HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the FBI would be conducting a full-scale Background Investigation on my entire life, from the point of birth on September 17, 1937 onward, attempting to discover any factoid on the basis of which they could demand that I resign this officer’s commission.

I would be interrogated with regularity, in rooms with one-way mirrors and a lie-detector machine, on Navy Pier in San Diego. They would manage to get a few things on me, basically various fringe political attitudes that I had taken, plus the fact that during my college education the Communist Manifesto had been assigned reading in one of my classes, plus the fact that my mother would tell the nice men who came to visit her on the farm, in suits, that when I had been a teenager I had masturbated. They would manage to establish that I had an unsatisfactory attitude, one proof of that being that on a security form I had been required to fill out, stating my exact address at every point since January 1, 1937, my first entry on the form had been: January 1, 1937 — September 17, 1937: in utero HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE This they would evaluate as my “trying to make a joke out of the national security of the United States of America,” thus placing our national security at risk. However, they never would get enough on me that I felt I had to accept their demands that I resign my commission. To the best of the information I have available to me at this point, I was the first deformed person to serve as an officer in the USMC, and seem in addition to be the sole such person — even to this day. I would manage despite them all to complete his period of military obligation, and without being sent to prison. –And then starting in 1965, my “military obligation” completed, I would be freed to dispose of my uniforms and struggle to get on with my life. ASSLEY

November: President John F. Kennedy authorized Operation Ranch Hand, the US Air Force’s herbicide program in Vietnam. The motto of this project would be “Only you can prevent a forest.” SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

J.C.R. Licklider was commissioned by the Council on Library Resources to explore what computers might be able to do for the library, as of the year 2000. (The result of this would be his LIBRARIES OF THE FUTURE, to be published in 1965.)

A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: There was a demonstration of the CTSS Compatible Time Sharing System, on four terminals. MIT began to use “time-sharing” computers which would enable several users to access the same machine simultaneously. Initially, this would be a cost- sharing and availability technology, but it was also a necessary step toward a brave new world in which different members of a project, sitting at different terminals, could collaborate on their common project, accessing the same databases and employing the same software tools.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” — Carl Sagan HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1962

January 9, Tuesday: An initial shipment of herbicides arrived at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in South Vietnam (over the course of Operation Ranch Hand there would be at least 6,542 spraying missions). SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

The published goal of this “Ranch Hand” would be to clear vegetation alongside highways, thus making it somewhat more difficult for the Vietcong to conceal themselves for ambushes. As the war would continue and continue, the mission of Ranch Hand would creepingly increase. Vast tracts of forest would be sprayed with “Agent Orange,” an herbicide inadvertently, because of the cheap manner in which it was being manufactured by a higher-temperature process, containing as a contaminant the supremely deadly chemical TCDD dioxin. Guerrilla trails and base areas would be exposed, plus, as a fringe benefit, crops that might feed Vietcong units would be destroyed (all a ranch hand does, you know, is lend a helping hand).

January 18, Thursday: Edward Lansdale outlined a scheme under OPERATION MONGOOSE aimed at the overthrow of the Fidel Castro government of Cuba. 32 planning tasks, ranging from sabotage actions to intelligence activities, were assigned to the federal government agencies that would be entangled in such a buccaneering scheme. The program was designed to develop a “strongly motivated political action movement” within Cuba capable of generating a revolt eventually leading to the downfall of the Castro government. Lansdale imagined that in the final stages of an uprising the support of the United States of America would become overt, including, if necessary, the use of direct military force.

The United States military began using herbicides such as “Agent Orange” on the jungles of Vietnam. We weren’t much concerned, at the time, with the known fact that the manufacturing process contaminated the chemical product with TCDD dioxin, one of the very most highly toxic and persistent environmental organic pollutants.

Over the next week, 35 bombs set by conservative extremists would be going off in and around Paris (these folks were opposing President de Gaulle’s insufficiently hard-line policies in Algeria).

A group of air force officers overthrew the junta that had taken power 2 days earlier in Dominica, restoring the Council of State led by Rafael Filiberto Bonnelly.

October: The US military began targeting Vietnamese croplands, primarily using Agent Blue (the American public would not become aware of such Operation Ranch Hand crop destruction programs until 1965 and then they would be led to believe that the program had begun that spring). SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS “The Month That We Lived Most Dangerously” Interview with Cuban leader Jorge Risquet on 1962 “missile” crisis from the Militant, vol.62/no.37 October 19, 1998 HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Below we reprint an interview with Jorge Risquet, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, on the October 1962 “missile” crisis. At that time, the U.S. administration of President John Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and threatened the annihilation of the entire Cuban people over the issue of Soviet missiles that were installed in Cuba in an act of sovereign self-defense. Kennedy intended to mount an invasion of Cuba, as he had been planning to do for more than a year. His hand was stayed when the Pentagon informed him that, in face of an armed and ready Cuban population, he could expect an estimated 18,000 U.S. troop casualties during the first 10 days of an invasion. The interview, headlined, “The month that we lived most dangerously,” appeared originally in issue no. 308 in 1997 of the magazine Cuba Internacional, published in Havana. The translation from Spanish is by the Militant. Reprinted by permission. BY MOISE’S SAAB Thirty-five years ago, in October 1962, the world was on the brink of nuclear holocaust because of the so-called Missile Crisis. So close, in fact, that former U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara does not even want to think about the subject because, to this day, it makes him shudder. Jorge Risquet is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and a specialist on the causes and effects of that wild spiraling of tensions between Cuba and the two great superpowers of the time, the Soviet Union and the United States, over the placement on the island of intermediate- range ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads. Three and a half decades later, he remembers that episode and its consequences, which could have ended in an unprecedented tragedy for humanity. How was defense organized for the very likely possibility of direct U.S. military intervention in Cuba? In the capital, Fidel [Castro], working directly with the General Staff, was responsible for the provinces of Havana and Matanzas; Che [Ernesto “Che” Guevara] was in Pinar del Ri’o with a command post in Cueva de los Portales; in Las Villas and Camaguey, that is, the center of the country, the command was entrusted to Commander of the Revolution Juan Almeida; while Rau’l [Castro] was on the eastern front. Looking back 35 years later, would you say that this was the month that we lived most dangerously? Well, we were within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war. What or who avoided this confrontation? One would have to be crazy to want nuclear war, because although the response capability of the Soviet Union was inferior to that of the United States - we didn’t know it at the time, but we later found out that the United States held a 17-to-1 edge over the USSR - and Nikita Khrushchev [the former first secretary of HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the Communist Party of the USSR] bluffed a lot with the missiles. The millions of human lives, the devastation, and the radioactive consequences for everyone involved would have been unimaginable, irrecoverable. Did the October, or Missile, Crisis simply break out or had it been prepared? First we must look at the reasons why nuclear weapons were installed in Cuba, and then at the development of events. In the first place, we were convinced - and secret documents released later proved us right - that the United States was preparing a direct military attack on Cuba. Later, when it was declassified, we would learn about the “Mongoose” plan, which in fact was to culminate in October, when, after creating a civil war situation in Cuba - according to the fevered imagination of the CIA officials in charge of the plan - U.S. troops would intervene. We saw this coming, although we didn’t know about the entire plan, which was controlled personally by Robert Kennedy. So we asked the Soviets to accelerate the schedule for the delivery of armaments. On May 29, 1962, they sent us a high-level delegation, led by Rachidov, alternate member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of the USSR and first secretary of one of the Asian republics; Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, chief of Soviet missile forces; and Aleksandr Alexeev, who had recently been named Soviet ambassador to Cuba, a tremendous man. He had excellent relations with Cuba; he was here as a journalist during the first days of the revolutionary triumph, and he thought like a Cuban. He thought we were right throughout the crisis. This commission explained that the Soviet leadership had analyzed our point of view and had come to the same conclusion as we had with respect to the probable direct military attack, and that the only thing that could deter this attack was the installation of a number of nuclear warheads on medium- and intermediate-range missiles. The Cuban leadership studied the issue and approached it in this way: if it were solely for the defense of Cuba, we would have preferred another solution over this one - for example, a military pact between the USSR and Cuba and a public statement that an attack on Cuba would be considered an attack on the USSR. Such a formulation would also have been a deterrent and, furthermore, would have been backed up by the shipment of more conventional arms and the corresponding advisers. But we told them we accepted the option of the nuclear missiles, considering that this would improve the East-West relationship of forces in favor of the socialist camp, to which we belonged, and subsequently would strengthen our defense against the plans being developed by the Pentagon to invade us. We had no idea of the nuclear imbalance between the United States and the USSR. Fidel [Castro] would say years later that if he had known that the imbalance at the time was so great, he would have recommended to the Soviet leadership that they be more HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE cautious and reject the idea of installing the missiles here, because we could not be so imprudent when the gap was so great. The Cuban leadership thought we should not approach the question solely from the point of view of defending Cuba. Since we belonged to the socialist camp and were asking it to make sacrifices for us, then it was also incumbent upon us to assume responsibilities involving risks and danger. From the standpoint of international law, Cuba is a sovereign country, as was the USSR, and we adopted an agreement covered by Article 51 of the UN Charter. It was for all these reasons that the Cuban leadership agreed to respond positively to the Soviet proposal. The Soviets sent a draft accord that was a sloppy, tactless document. The agreement was rewritten in Cuba, in Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro’s own handwriting, and was taken to Moscow by Rau’l [Castro, Cuban armed forces minister] to be translated and studied. The translation turned out to be very difficult, because the discussions were with then-Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, with no one else present besides Ambassador Alexeev. We didn’t speak Russian and they didn’t speak Spanish, and our knowledge of diplomatic language was weak, so we often had to resort to dictionaries to get the right terms. Nikita Khrushchev’s autobiography gives an account of the events according to which the Cuban authorities did not agree, for example, on the question of the secret or public character of the military treaty. How did it really happen? Cuba was not in favor of nondisclosure of the accord, given the missile question. We were convinced that not making the Cuba- USSR military accord public would lend a dubious character to a legal and sovereign act, which the United States would use in its favor. And we let the Soviets know this very frankly. Khrushchev did not want to make it public in the middle of the U.S. congressional election campaign, because he did not want to harm Kennedy’s chances of winning. He proposed making the announcement in November, during a visit he was planning to Cuba, after the U.S. elections. This is the historical reality. Then the question arose: What would the USSR do if, in the middle of the operation, the United States discovered it? How would the two superpowers react? The delegation that came in late May had no answer to this. When Rau’l was in Moscow in July, he asked the Soviet prime minister the same question, on Fidel’s behalf. And? And Nikita’s answer was, “We will send the Baltic Fleet.” We were pleased with the promised action, as it meant the Soviets had decided not to retreat in case the crisis eventually broke out. In late August, another Cuban delegation, headed by Che [Guevara], went to the USSR. He asked Khrushchev the same question, this time less hypothetically, as the United States was creating an atmosphere of hysteria over the arrival of a large quantity of armaments in Cuba. Nikita, who was a short man with short limbs, raised his right arm and reiterated, “We will send the Baltic Fleet.” Che proposed signing the military accord HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE on behalf of Cuba and making it public immediately. The Soviet leadership did not agree to announce it at that time, but rather in November, after the U.S. elections; also, Nikita and Fidel were to sign it in Havana. Later, when the crisis broke out over the installation of missiles with nuclear warheads, how do you evaluate the course of events? My impression is that Nikita arrived at a time when he was flustered by the crisis. And also that the senior Soviet leadership made several errors, including the discussion on the offensive or defensive character of those weapons. The correct thing would have been to proclaim the sovereign right of Cuba to acquire the arms it considered necessary for its defense. All Cuban statements were based on this right and we never fell into the trap of labeling the type of weapons. It was a long and pointless discussion, but for the U.S. government, a weapon capable of reaching its territory was considered “offensive.” Another error was not announcing the accord. If, as soon as the pact was adopted, it was announced that Cuba had the weapons necessary to confront any foreign attack, it would have accomplished its political and military objective. On the other hand, however, it must be said that, in general, the Soviet operation of transferring weapons as well as personnel, and their deployment, was flawless, considering the magnitude and distance. As is known, this situation was settled between Moscow and Washington, without taking into account the Cuban position. Did this bilateral resolution damage relations between Cuba and the USSR? Of course it damaged them. But rather than pour vinegar and salt in the wound, we used balm, and we worked to put that episode behind us, which we did. Given the fact that the Cubans were excluded from the negotiations to resolve this problem, the outlook for relations between Havana and Washington was tense. Would the situation have been different if Cuba had participated in the discussions? The discussion of the problem should always have been between the three of us - the USSR, the United States, and Cuba. The crisis was handled the wrong way; Cuba should have been heard. There was no justification for keeping us out of the negotiations. We believe our participation in the discussions could have extracted guarantees to halt the preparations for an attack, the spy flights, the economic and financial blockade - which had been decreed in early 1962 - the acts of sabotage, and the return of the land holding the U.S. naval base on Cuban territory, which is important to the United States for purely political reasons since, militarily speaking, it is obsolete and constitutes a death trap. The Soviets, nevertheless, achieved the dismantling of the U.S. missile bases in Turkey.... For the United States, these bases had become a liability more than an advantage. We now know that they had raised withdrawing them with the Turks a year earlier. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE They feared that in a confrontation with the USSR, Soviet troops would occupy them. But the Turkish government was opposed, since it considered them important for its defense, and the United States did not insist. If you think about it, they were more considerate of their Turkish allies than the Soviets were with us. What impact did this situation, its development and outcome, have in Cuba? Since then we have known for certain that, in the event of an attack, we can count only on ourselves. Che described it very well when he called them “the brilliant, but sad days of the October Crisis.” Brilliant, because the people knew that they were risking the very existence of the country and confronted the situation with dedication and courage. There was not a hint of panic either in the country’s leadership or among the people. More than 400,000 people mobilized and formed the regular forces, the reserves, and the militia units. The United States, as McNamara confessed to me at the first “Tripartite Meeting on the Crisis” in Moscow, did not know about this enormous deployment capacity of Cuba. Sad, because Cuba continued to be subjected to the danger of an attack. There are those who say that we succeeded in winning the pledge that a military attack would not be launched, but this is a fallacy. If the United States didn’t attack, it was due to their growing involvement in the Vietnam War and the steady strengthening of Cuban military power. Experience showed that they could not fight two wars at the same time. Does this mean that the situation has radically changed? During all those years Cuba grew stronger, and we have more weapons and are better armed. The doctrine of war of all the people was conceived and put into practice, by which millions of people have weapons and a means of combat, are organized, and know what their post is in the event of war. The great hero, the protagonist of that crisis, is the same as today: the people. They are resisting, not a short-term tense situation, but rather daily challenges of every kind. And, among the people, the heroes are the women, who every day face the problems of feeding the family, caring for the kids - basically everything necessary to survive. And together with the people, we have a leadership capable of finding solutions to these everyday problems, of resisting the special period and the blockade, which has been intensified to inconceivable lengths by the Helms-Burton law, of defending the country’s independence, and leading the gradual recovery of the economy. ASSLEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1963

The GE test reactor (GETR) at which I would be a “jumper” during the 1970s had up to this point been generating electricity for the local commercial grid. In this year this power generation was discontinued.

The USA, the USSR, and several other countries agreed to ban aboveground nuclear testing because radiation poisons had been traveling far beyond the borders of the test sites. Before the ban more than 500 bombs had been exploded at ground level and in the atmosphere, primarily by the two superpowers. Millions of civilians had been being exposed to enough radioactivity to increase their risk of developing cancers. People who lived downwind from such sites had been particularly vulnerable. Thousands of American troops had in the 1950s been ordered to drill in radiation-filled environments after nuclear explosions, and since then had been persistently lied to about the health consequences of these secret medical experiments. (My “Uncle Red,” Charles Virgilee Mattox, who took part in these tests, was marching directly over Ground Zero minutes after a nuclear blast in the desert, eventually had to have the rims of his ears removed, and when this operation became necessary of course the doctors assured him that it was all his fault, the reason being that he had chosen to be out in the sun too much — which may very well, of course, have been the sole cause of all his skin lesions.) ASSLEY

From this year until 1971, in the prisons of Oregon and Washington, the testicles of a grand total of 131 prisoners would be being irradiated in an Atomic Energy Commission experiment to find out how much radiation it takes to permanently damage human sperm. The men would be being paid $5 a month for submitting to this, plus up to $25 for then submitting to testicular biopsy, and at the end of the program, $100 for submitting to vasectomy. These prisoners were being considered to have “volunteered” their services. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1965

The US federal government designated Eastern State Penitentiary a National Historic Landmark (yes, that does sound desperate).

George Evelyn Hutchinson’s THE ECOLOGICAL THEATER AND THE EVOLUTIONARY PLAY.

In Britain, the 2d Brain Committee recommended increased control over opiates, including a system of addict notification, the establishment of special treatment centers which would seek to rehabilitate and not just maintain drug users, and the restriction of heroin supplies to these centers. These recommendations would be put into effect with the Dangerous Drug Act of 1968.

Prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia were subjected to dioxin, a highly toxic chemical component found in the Agent Orange used in Vietnam. The prisoners would later be checked to see if they had gotten cancer as a result of these secret medical experiments — which would seem to indicate that we have been suspecting all along, that Agent Orange might well prove to be carcinogenic.

Anyway, 42% of all this “herbicide” being spread across the countryside by Operation Ranch Hand would be dedicated to croplands and intended to produce famine, so if it’s famine we’re after, why should we draw the line at a few cancers? SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense began Project MKSEARCH, a series of secret medical experiments intended to develop a capability to manipulate human behavior through the use of mind-altering drugs. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Kenzaburo Oe visited Hiroshima, and has truly learned its lesson:

This was the year in which I was working at P&G in Ohio and in which I would be fathering my first child, Cara María Meredith — who would be born with multiple allergies and with a highly unusual big red semicircular mark outside the hairline, squarely in the middle of her forehead. When I saw my baby for the first time, at the hospital through the glass window, I sought out and interrogated the obstetrician, to be assured HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE that no “spoon” had been used during Cara’s delivery. ASSLEY

Mr. Proctor Mr. Gamble

Then I wrote off to Fort Wayne, Indiana, to inquire about some radiation treatments I had received as a child. At one point during my high school years I had had a severe case of crotch itch, due to an “athletes-feet” infection that had gotten into the raw area where, because of my twisted spine, my legs were rubbing together as I walked. The radiologist, I remembered, had not placed a lead cup over my testicles, but instead had had me cup my testicles in my hand and pull them to the side while he probed here and there between my legs with his blunt-nosed X-ray head. By return mail I received a most reassuring response from this radiologist. There was no possibility that my genetic material had been harmed by his radiation treatments during the early 1950s, because his records showed that he had placed an aluminum plate of a certain thickness over the radiation head. Any radiation that had passed through that metal plate and reached the skin between my legs had stopped right at the surface, in the inflamed target skin layer that was infected with this organism. I need have no worry that I had harmed my infant daughter through having these childhood X-ray treatments. The unusual birthmark outside the hairline was not genetic, or if it was genetic, it was not due to radiation damage.

Now I need to get ahead of my story, by taking into consideration some US Army secret medical experiments that would not be disclosed until 1969 and 1976 and 1987 that I would not myself figure out until 1995. Was it damaging to me or to my baby, for me to be sitting for eight hours a day five days a week at the Cincinnati Toilet Goods Plant of Proctor & Gamble hunched over the shoulder of a time study engineer who was at the time being murdered by our government, with internal doses of highly radioactive Plutonium that were being administered to him by a radiologist under government military contract at the University of Cincinnati? Did my daughter receive her highly unusual outside-the-hairline birthmark due to radiation damage to my sperm? I simply don’t know, not being myself able to calculate with any assuredness how much the high-energy neutron bullets emitted by Pu238 are dissipated at the square of the distance in an average distance of two or three feet, passing through another person’s body before entering my own gonads. –And, we can be assured, nobody in the US government is ever going to be eager to tell us even if we could ever be prepared to trust the word of such an agent. This was the year in which, after having received my honorable discharge as an officer from active duty with the USMC, I had on a bitter cold day interviewed in Cincinnati, heavily dressed, at the Toilet Goods Plant of the Proctor & Gamble Corporation, and had been hired as a job study engineer, my first post-college civilian career employment. That spring it got warmer and warmer, until I was the only one in the plant who was still working in my suit jacket. Finally, after it had been announced that we might all switch to short-sleeved shirts for the summer, and after being asked a number of times why I did not shed my suit jacket in this heat in this building entirely without air conditioning, I felt that too much attention was being paid, and so I shed my jacket. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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They of course had not recognized that they had hired a man with a deformity. I had been too heavily dressed during my employment interviews, for this to have been noticeable. I could tell that there was shock.

I tried to bull it out. I said nothing, and of course, they said nothing whatever. But the way this twisted spine worked out was that idle rumors began to circulate around the factory floor, about my presumed lack of a sex life. A man with a twisted spine obviously wasn’t getting any action out of the local babes, such as the various young ladies on the assembly lines who had a local reputation for possessing round heels. (The fact that I had been married for 4 years and the fact that my wife had an infant in the oven didn’t figure in this at all, as the personnel who were indulging in these randy speculations had no interest in me as a real person.) The rumors about my lack of a sex life then, however, morphed into a series of inventive jokes about me as a masturbator. One of these jokes had it that I was sneaking out to my car during working hours to indulge in my masturbation habit.

After awhile my job title and training was unexpectedly and unilaterally changed and I was sent out from the plant to the warehouse, as their new “warehouse manager.”

Then one day the plant manager summoned his new “warehouse manager” to his office. He took me to a window from which I could look out over a parking area, and asked me if this view gave me any ideas. I was of course baffled, not yet having heard of the masturbation jokes that were making the rounds. Then he told me that my “one-year conditional employment,” my “trial period,” had not worked out and was coming to an end, and that at the end of the month my services would no longer be needed, so my first and only job obligation from that time forward was to find myself another position, outside the Proctor & Gamble Corporation. (This was of course the first I had heard of any such thing as conditional employment, or a trial period.)

As I left his office after thus being summarily fired, I stopped and spoke with the secretary at the desk, an aging lady whom I knew. She joked “AM, how are you in the PM?” –something which had been her standard remark for a number of months– and then she told me a story about some person who had masturbated in a car outside the plant. I asked “Was this a visiting salesman or something?” and she said, mysteriously, “No, this was a P&G employee.”

After I got home, Plant Personnel called me and told me to meet them the next morning in the parking lot, for a conference in a parked car. I was not to attempt to enter the facility. They came out to my car and invited me into their car and advised me that during the last month of my employment, the plant guards had been given copies of my resume photograph and instructed to refuse me entrance. They asked me to scribble a list of the personal items from my desk that they should put in a box and bring out to me.

Some time later, after I had secured other employment with General Electric (as a contract administrator for the purchase of fuel nozzles for jet engines), while shopping in a tropical fish store in a suburb of Cincinnati, I met one of the warehouse employees whom I had supervised at P&G (this was a chunky short young man whom I had always been wary of, because I had noticed how he had a real chip on his shoulder against any authority and did a slow burn whenever I had given him a work assignment). He wanted to talk to me about what a bum deal I had gotten, and to create common cause with me he proceeded to provide me in some detail with the masturbation jokes that had been circulating about me, that had continued to circulate through the P&G culture even after my termination. He then told me how much he admired me, for being able to cope with this stress without actually going berserk and starting to kill people (the conversation, I think, was more about his own mental climate than about mine, since I had already had a lifetime to become accustomed to receiving such abuse, and he was the participant with the obvious smoldering fuse). HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

I have a general remark to make here, about something I had learned, that I had occasion to relearn during this particular episode of my life, and would be given occasion to relearn again in other subsequent episodes of my life prior to the eventual rightward rotation of the curvature of my spine. It is a general remark that may be of some use to someone. Here it is: if there is something very unfortunate about your life, that you simply cannot righteously be criticized for (such as, in my own case, a spine unfortunately twisted by a childhood illness, something for which no-one could ever –righteously– abuse me), people will proceed to find something else unfortunate about your life, something that indeed they can –righteously– criticize you for (such as, in my own case, the general concept that since a deformed man obviously cannot get chicks, I as a deformed man must be a solitary and a masturbator) — and they will proceed to condemn you for the latter as a way to express their discomfort with the former. That is to say, the negative affect will find a way to express itself in their relationship with you, but will of course express itself only in a manner which makes you indecent and them decent (and never in any manner, it follows, which would show them as indecent and you as decent). Since these people at Proctor & Gamble had of course not been able righteously to reproach me for my unanticipated deformity, they made up out of whole cloth something for which they could righteously condemn me and expel me.

Beware. Ignore the particulars of this and learn the generalities, as this general sort of thing could someday be happening to you or someone you love.

New topic. Again I need to get ahead of my story, and tell you about something I found out about only much afterward. In a later timeframe I found out that there had been a government production facility for the fabrication of uranium A-bomb cores just upwind of our home on Wyscarver Road in Sharonville, Ohio. The plant was at Fernald, Ohio and was operating under a cover story and was a heavy source of nuclear contamination. It is now a superfund site and cancer maps are being made of the impact of the radiological contamination on long-term residents of the area. The GE test reactor (GETR) at which I would be a “jumper” during the 1970s had not been generating electricity for the local commercial grid for several years. The spent fuel had been removed from the site. In this year General Electric obtained renewal of its license. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1966

The US Army dispensed Bacillus subtilis variant niger throughout the New York City subway system by army scientists dropping lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto ventilation grates. More than a million unsuspecting civilians were exposed. GERM WARFARE

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initiated Project MKOFTEN, a program of secret medical experiments to test the toxicological effects of certain drugs on humans and animals.

Theodore John Kaczynski was having such difficulty getting close to women that he briefly fantasized about having a sex change operation so that he would be able to touch a female. He went as far as making an appointment to see a psychiatrist at the University Health Center, planning to ask whether a sex change would be the right thing for him. However, while in the waiting room he lost his nerve, and wound up telling the psychiatrist that he was depressed about the possibility of getting drafted. Later, he was able to manage his shame through fantasizing the murder of this psychiatrist: Why not really kill that psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate.... I suddenly felt that I really could break out of my rut in life and do things that were daring, irresponsible or criminal. He schemed to save up some money and buy land in the wilderness. He would live there with a rifle, managing his life by occasionally killing someone. In his coded journal of the time he wrote: “If it doesn’t work and if I can get back to civilization before I starve then I will come back here and kill someone I hate.” Later he would add this comment: Because I found modern life absolutely unacceptable, I grew increasingly hopeless until, at the age of 24, I arrived at a kind of crisis: I felt so miserable that I didn’t care whether I lived or died. But when I reached that point, a sudden change took place: I realized that if I didn’t care whether I lived or died, then I didn’t need to fear the consequences of anything I might do. Therefore I could do anything I wanted. I was free! That was the great turning-point in my life because it was then that I acquired courage, which has remained with me ever since. It was at that time, too, that I became certain that I would soon go to live in the wild, no matter what the consequences. I spent two years teaching at the University of California in order to save some money, then I resigned my position and went to look for a place to live in the forest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1968

The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act provided for the use of court-ordered electronic surveillance in the investigation of specified violations. FBI HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1969

During this year Dr. Louis A. Gottschalk, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of California–Irvine, was conducting a study of “Total and HalfBody Irradiation” by looking into government records for 16 American citizens, 13 of which were black, who had been administered high doses of Plutonium239 in order to calibrate its lethal impact. When he would be asked, later, whether his 1969 study had included any attempt to follow up on the test subjects –to find out for instance whether any of them might still be alive– he responded that he had been “interested in just cognitive aspects — there were no follow-ups.” His presumption had been that anyone administered a dose of Pt239 under this program would eventually have been administered a lethal dose, and sacrificed for the cause. “These were terminal cancer patients,” he offered. The work of Dr. Eugene L. Saenger, Cincinnati radiologist under contract to the Department of Defense, was brought before the American College of Radiology at some point during the late 1960s. Dr. Saenger was cleared of unethical conduct for having irradiated cancer patients without informed consent for military and space science, rather than for personal medical, objectives. It wasn’t that he hadn’t murdered these poor people, but that murdering people in such a manner did not constitute, in the eyes of medical ethical experts, murder. They died earlier than they would otherwise have died, that is all. –And, of course, it wasn’t as if Dr. Saenger had been enjoying what he was doing. He was doing it because he was getting paid to do it, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE anyway, it was for the good of the nation.

Dr. Eugene L. Saenger of the University of Cincinnati?

“If anything bad can happen, it probably will.”

— Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss in the Chicago Daily Tribune, February 12, 1955) HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE In this year Ammon Hennacy had been chosen as the designated recipient of the War Resisters League Peace Award, but as it turned out, things got too busy for them to hold their annual dinner.

Dr. Robert MacMahan of the Department of Defense (DOD) requested that the US Congress provide $10,000,000 for a program to cause to evolve, within 5 to 10 years, a new sort of biological agent against which human beings would be entirely defenseless.

GERM WARFARE

The US military was celebrating the success of a massive biowarfare field test in the Pacific. Our wargame involved not only the release of lethal agents but also the use of caged animals to demonstrate the effectiveness of these agents. Soviet observers lurked in nearby waters to collect samples of the biological agents we were testing. President Richard Milhous Nixon decided to discontinue our biowarfare program, at least with regard to biological agents which are used as weapons, as opposed to toxins which were theoretically for researching methods of immunization and therapy. He said he had 2 reasons for discontinuing this weapons program, but actually he had 3: (a) it was militarily counterproductive as such weapons are difficult to use, (b) it was unnecessary due to the massive superiority of the US in nuclear weapons, and (c), although he did not say so, these biological weapons of mass destruction were equally available to 3d-World nations that could not afford an A-bomb program — and we did not want to encourage such nations to develop weapons of mass destruction.

This evidently was therefore the final year of the series of secret US Army biological warfare tests that had been going on since 1949 (evidently, since it is the last year that we have to this point been told about). The tests had been conducted in American cities and states by releasing bacteria and chemicals from sprayers, automobiles, and airplanes. Millions of citizens had unwittingly been breathing in the US Army’s test agents. The intent had been to discover by the use of un-lethal germs, whether microorganisms would spread and survive and how vulnerable the country might be to an attack with lethal germs. To the Army’s knowledge, only a single innocent civilian had been killed in the course of these tests. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Of course I had to wonder, when I learned about the existence of these tests, since in my childhood my spine had collapsed due to a microbial infection contracted while I was living outside of Clay City, Indiana, only a few miles downwind from the biological warfare facility in Vigo, Indiana. Probably, my microbial infection HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE and the germ war plant a few miles upwind were entirely unrelated! There would have been no point to infecting me, as I was not the enemy! It is a fact, however, that the plant had become totally contaminated, so contaminated that production was interrupted, so contaminated that it could never be decontaminated, and therefore had been able to deliver only a few palletloads of test germ bombs to England before the collapse and surrender of Germany, and it is a fact, also, that a few miles away, at that same time, my spine collapsed as the muscles in the small of my back became paralyzed. ASSLEY

You don’t suppose — no, no, that’s too far-fetched. This entire starry universe is not entirely about me and my own little personal tribulations. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1970

In 1969, Dr. Robert MacMahan of the Department of Defense (DOD) had requested that the US Congress provide $10,000,000 for a program to cause to evolve, within 5 to 10 years, a new sort of biological agent against which human beings would be entirely defenseless.

GERM WARFARE In this year, funding for the development of such a synthetic biological agent was obtained under H.R. 15090. The project, under the supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), would be carried out by the US Army Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, our nation’s top-secret biological weapons facility. (There has been speculation that we are using the techniques of molecular biology to develop new AIDS-like retroviruses against which our bodies have no native immune defense.) SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1971

During the Vietnam War the United States military had sprayed nearly 20,000,000 gallons of chemical herbicides and defoliants in Vietnam, eastern Laos, and parts of Cambodia as part of a chemical-weapon program known as Operation Ranch Hand (the peak years for this craziness had been from 1967 to 1969).

Under the chemical-warfare program known as Operation Ranch Hand, 12% of the total area of South Vietnam had been sprayed with defoliating poisons at an average concentration of 13 times the recommended US Department of Agriculture application rate for domestic use. In South Vietnam alone an estimated 10,000,000 hectares of agricultural land became poisoned. In some areas TCDD dioxin concentrations in soil and water were hundreds of times greater than levels considered safe by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

The Washington Post revealed that a research team at the University of Cincinnati, under the leadership of Dr. Eugene L. Saenger and under contract to the Department of Defense, had since 1960 been knowingly irradiating “mentally enfeebled” patients –all poor and mostly black– with doses known to do harm, in order to discover whether and under what conditions soldiers on an atomic battlefield would be cognitively impaired. Despite disclosure, the program with human guinea pigs at the University of Cincinnati would continue, albeit with a greater effort to do all the paperwork and secure official “informed consent” signatures from these patients selected for “low-educational level ... low-functioning intelligence quotient ... and strong evidence of cerebral organic deficit”! — Continue, despite the fact that in Dr. Saenger’s own estimation eight HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE patient deaths could possibly be attributed to his radioactive “treatments.” SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Dr. Eugene L. Saenger of the University of Cincinnati? Incidentally, the work of this Dr. Saenger, Cincinnati radiologist under contract to the Department of Defense, had already been brought before the American College of Radiology, at some point during the late 1960s, and the good Dr. had already been cleared of accusations of his unethical conduct for having irradiated his cancer “patients” without informed consent for military and space science, rather than for personal medical, objectives. It wasn’t that he hadn’t murdered these poor people, but that murdering people in such a manner had not constituted, in the eyes of these medical ethical experts, murder. They had merely died earlier than they would otherwise have died. –And, of course, it hadn’t been as if Dr. Saenger had been enjoying what he was doing. He had been doing it only because he was getting paid to do it, and anyway, all this was for the good of our nation. His poor “patients” had unknowingly given a few weeks or months at the end of their lives, for their country. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) would conduct a Congressional investigation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

I, Austin Meredith, was a systems analyst for General Electric, employed at the GE Armament Systems Department in Burlington, Vermont. Toward the end of the Vietnam war due to the decline in contracts for our Minigun, there was a layoff and my family and I were relocated from Burlington to San Jose, California where I would work at the GE Nuclear Energy Division.7 As an employee in the embattled industry of the nuclear generation of civilian electrical power –beset as it was by protesters and green freaks and peaceniks and, in general, terrified traumatized citizens– I needed to receive the most careful schooling (after business hours in employee classes) in the utterance of recitations such as “A nuclear power plant for the peaceful production of useful electricity cannot go off like an atomic bomb. No member of the general public has ever been injured in an atomic accident at any nuclear power plant.” The whole point was to burnish this deceptiveness until it had the sheen and gloss of truthtelling. I was instructed, in these night classes in safe power and studied deception, that as a General Electric employee I must never deviate in the slightest from this officiously chosen wording, because we needed to make certain that none of us would ever be accused of telling lies on behalf of the Company. However, the truth of such recitations depended entirely upon the most careful predefinition of all of the terms employed, such as “an atomic bomb” and “member of the general public” and “injured” and “atomic accident” and “nuclear power plant.” Whenever any green intervener offered a true and accurate instance of an accident or death, we needed to be able to dismiss this instance as outside the parameters of our nuclear safety concerns. If a member of the armed forces is injured, for instance, that does not count because such a person is most assuredly not a “member of the general public.” Likewise, if a plant employee is injured, that does not court because such a person is not a “member of the general public,” and if an act of sabotage takes place, not only is that classified information but also it would not qualify as any “accident,” and if a suicidal act took place, that likewise would not amount to an “accident.” The initial test at Alamogordo, Mexico did not count because that had been a stationary device at the top of a tower, rather than something that dropped like a bomb, and therefore had not amounted to “an atomic bomb.” The bombs we dropped upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki did of course count as bombs, but they did not count in this calculation as atomic bombs because the explosions produced unfortunately due to defects in the firing devices had amounted to mere singularities, converting only a few incidental ounces of their warheads from matter into energy. These devices that had been intended to go off “like atomic bombs” had in point of fact not gone off “like atomic bombs,” and therefore these explosions did not count (they were mere singularities of the sort that can easily happen when a peaceful nuclear power plant melts through the reactor pressure vessel and the resultant mass of liquid “corium” heads in the direction of China). The device dropped on Hiroshima merely produced a flash- bang singularity that was equivalent to between 13 and 18 kilotons of TNT, and although it ignited many structure fires it produced no hole in the ground (efficiency ~1.38%). Then the device dropped on Nagasaki merely produced a flash-bang singularity equivalent to between 20 and 22 kilotons of TNT, only slightly better, and likewise did not produce a hole in the ground, but anyway we had dropped it through clouds and it had missed our industrial port aiming point entirely, falling directly onto a Catholic cathedral and a camp full

7. At first the Personnel Department was obviously stiffing me, pretending to look for in-corporation interviews for me, but I persuaded my section manager Larry Moylan, who had a walleye, to intercede. He demanded that they actually help me find another job. One Personnel type then frankly explained to me, privately, that at first they had misunderstood and had just been ignoring my plight, until this section manager had interceded with “No, we actually do want you to help him.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE of American POWs.8 Similarly, if a person is merely dangerously exposed to radiation, that would not count as an “injury.” And if the facility that explodes is a mere test reactor not hooked to the commercial power grid, that facility does not count as a “nuclear power plant” and if it should happen to explode, this would have no bearing on the truthfulness of the recitations we were being so carefully trained to utter. When India would test its atomic device on Siddhartha Gautama Buddha’s birthday in 1974, for instance, the word would be passed around the corridors in my place of employment that this “Smiling Buddha” test although it might well have been enabled by fissile materials the Indian military had surreptitiously removed from our Tarapur reactors was not to be described as having been “an atomic bomb,” but rather had amounted merely to a “peaceful nuclear explosion,” releasing only an approximate 12 kilotons. (Besides, no-one could be certain that they had stolen these fissile materials from us rather than from some other local source of such low-hanging fruit.) Oh! What a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive! — Walter Scott, MARMION: A TALE OF FLODDEN FIELD, 1808

“Because of the kind of fuel used (ie the concentration of U- 235, see below), if there is a major uncorrected malfunction in a reactor the fuel may overheat and melt, but it cannot explode like a bomb.” THAT CANNOT HAPPEN! “Q. Can a nuclear plant blow up like a bomb? “A. No. A bomb converts a large part of its U-235 or plutonium into fission fragments in about 10^-8 seconds and then flies apart. This depends on the fact that a bomb is a very compact object, so the neutrons don’t have far to go to hit another fissionable atom. A power plant is much too big to convert an important part of its fissionable material before it has generated enough heat to fly apart. This fact is based on the fundamental physics of how fast fission neutrons travel. Therefore, it doesn’t depend on the particular design of the plant.” YOU CAN TRUST ME! “It is impossible for a commercial nuclear reactor to explode like a nuclear bomb since the fuel is never sufficiently enriched for this to occur.” THAT CANNOT HAPPEN! “Though both reactors and nuclear weapons rely on nuclear chain- reactions, the rate of reactions in a reactor occurs much more slowly than in a bomb.” YOU CAN TRUST ME!

8. These WWII devices more or less resembled the sort of blast effect that North Korea would be able to generate in 2006, a blast that our newspapers would mock as a “fizzle.” By way of comparison, one of our B53 warheads can produce an explosion equivalent to some 9,000 kilotons of TNT. In 1984 I would attend a lecture by Professor Freeman J. Dyson at Stanford University, and listen to him opinion that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not done the job that needed to be done, because we now misappreciate how very destructive a modern A-bomb is. We need for a third city to be nuked now, he would assert, in order to tune up our appreciation of such weaponry. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “It should be emphasised that a commercial-type power reactor simply cannot under any circumstances explode like a nuclear bomb. The fuel in a nuclear reactor is not enriched beyond about 5% and a bomb require a much high level of enrichment.” THAT CANNOT HAPPEN! “One concern about nuclear power plants, of course, is the memory of the world’s first exposure to nuclear power: the atomic bomb blasts. Many people fear that a nuclear power plant may go out of control and explode like a nuclear weapon. Most experts insist that such an event is impossible.” YOU CAN TRUST ME!

In our after-hours classes at the General Electric Nuclear Energy Division in San Jose, California, practice made perfect. We divided up into teams of one inquisitive reporter and one obliging interviewee and bantered back and forth as our instructor carefully observed. One of our inquisitive reporters went “What you’re saying is that nuclear power hasn’t ever hurt anyone” to which an obliging interviewee responded “No, I said no member of the general public has ever been injured in an atomic accident at any nuclear power plant.” At this the instructor broke in, to forbid the introduction of words such as “No, I said ....” We must not add anything such as this, he pointed out, because to do so would reveal that what the reporter had said had contained a different information content from what the obliging interviewee had provided. So our inquisitive-reporter roleplayer tried again, “What you’re saying is that there’s just no way that a power plant can go off like an bomb,” to which our obliging-interviewee roleplayer responded “Yes, a nuclear power plant for the peaceful production of useful electricity cannot go off like an atomic bomb.” The instructor frowned and pointed out that the addition of a word such as “Yes” implied falsely that what the reporter had said was the same as what the interviewee had said. “It’s not the same,” he pointed out, “because although we don’t want to point this out there are various ways that a power plant can go off like a non-atomic bomb. For instance, a runaway nuclear reaction can produce hydrogen which can create a very serious explosion, blowing the entire plant into the sky and creating all sorts of nuclear contamination over a large area, although such an explosion would be classified as a mere chemical explosion rather than an atomic one.” And we kept on and on like this until we had satisfied our instructor that we could recite exactly “A nuclear power plant for the peaceful production of useful electricity cannot go off like an atomic bomb. No member of the general public has ever been injured in an atomic accident at any nuclear power plant” — without adding or subtracting any jot or any tittle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1972

The US and 143 other nations ratified a Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the world’s first treaty to ban an entire class of weapons. The treaty bars possession of deadly biological agents except for defensive research. With no mechanism for its enforcement and no program for its verification, the treaty is a toothless tiger. Signing the treaty provided some propaganda cover for the Soviet Union — which just at that point, we now know from the testimony of defectors, was radically expanding its program of offensive biowarfare.

(The US’s role would prove to be somewhat less than leaderly: In July 2001 our representatives would stand up and walk out of a London conference, since a 1994 protocol designed to strengthen the Convention by providing for on-site inspections was to be discussed — and we were opposed to any such strengthening.) GERM WARFARE

In this year, as evidence began to mount of harm done to a seemingly endless series of University of Cincinnati patients who had been being used since 1960 as human guinea pigs in secret medical experiments conducted for the US military into the effects of plutonium, a Junior Faculty Report, co-authored by Professor Martha Stephens of the University of Cincinnati with others, questioned the ethics of the radiation study. Later, a blue ribbon panel would allege that it had cleared the project personnel of any wrongdoing; nevertheless the University of Cincinnati would refuse to accept any more military funding for such experimentation and no other sponsors for such experimentation would come forward. The radiation researchers would make no attempt to obtain funding to monitor the health of their surviving experimental subjects. Requests to release the names of the patients they had murdered by this mistreatment would be routinely refused.

In this year it was disclosed by Jean Heller of the Associated Press that for four decades, the US Public Health Service had been systematically studying 600 syphilitic black men who lived in and around Tuskegee, Alabama, and that the study had involved an utter denial of medical treatment to 399 of this 600 ill men so that the PHS doctors could observe the full course of their debilitation. Several died, never having been informed that they were serving as guinea pigs or that the medical treatment they had supposed they had been being granted amounted to an utter denial of all medical treatment. — That this amounts to government biological warfare against a group of American black men is something that goes without saying. Of course, everyone connected with these secret medical experiments had the best of intentions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1974

The information came out that during the 1950s researchers into mind-altering substances at the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) had been slipping stuff into people’s drinks in order to study the impact upon their behavior. Psychotic episodes had sometimes been produced and in at least one case such a secret medical experiment on an American being used as a guinea pig had produced death. The coordinator for this Project MKULTRA had been the Office of Scientific Intelligence, and this official government program had begun in the early 1950s and had continued at least through the late 1960s. In 1973 CIA Director Richard Helms had ordered that all files relating to this project were to be destroyed; however, in 1977 a Freedom of Information Request would uncover a cache of some 20,000 documents relating to the project, and so in 1977 there would be hearings in the US Senate. Senator Ted Kennedy would report on the senate floor that: 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,9 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.

9. Frank Olson, a US Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in November 1953 as part of a CIA experiment, and then died under suspicious circumstances, allegedly by jumping from a window. His family suggested that he had been murdered because, a few days before his death, in a moral crisis, he had resigned as Acting Chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick, Maryland (later Fort Detrick). 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. Olson’s body was exhumed in 1994 and the medical examiner re-categorized the death as a homicide rather than a suicide because the body was found to have cranial injuries consistent with his having been knocked unconscious and then pitched out of the window. In 1975 Olson’s family would receive a $750,000 settlement from the US government and formal apologies from President Gerald Rudolph Ford and CIA Director William Colby (these apologies were merely in regard to the government’s failure to secure informed consent before having Olson ingest LSD). HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1975

Following press reports of Army-sponsored LSD experiments, Senator Edward Kennedy chaired hearings on the human experimentation being funded by the Department of Defense (DOD) and by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Neither in the congressional hearings nor in the media coverage would the US Army’s secret medical experiments into nuclear radiation effects receive so much as a mention. ASSLEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1976

The General Electric Nuclear Power Division in San Jose, California scheduled me an interview for a position at their liquid-sodium cooled, weapons-grade plutonium fast breeder nuclear power reactor on the Clinch River. This was definitely not something that I had requested or suggested — no way did I desire to get involved in the manufacture of bomb material (what I was already doing was already quite bad enough thank you). I was not able to let on that this was the case with me –because to let slip even a hint of this would have been to destroy my cover story that I was just a regular guy who loved the atom every bit as much as everybody around me who was also sucking at this teat– so although I needed under the situation to prepare materials for presentation and then show up for the interview, in the course of my self-presentation I deliberately pushed competence to the very margin of insolence. I knew very well that were these visiting GE managers to “offer” their position to me, then there could be ways that my current managers could hand me off, obliging me to “accept” this sort of work assignment and relocate to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

It was at this point that the American public, or, at least, the segment of the American public that cares to know about such things, learned from Science Trends, a newsletter published in the National Press Building in Washington DC, about the US Army secret medical experiments that had been going on from 1949 to 1969 in San Francisco, Chicago, and Rochester as part of the Manhattan Project, that had “involved the injection of relatively massive quantities of bomb-grade plutonium into the veins of 18 men, women, and children.” The article in Science Trends implied falsely, however, that this had been an isolated incident and was past history, concluding that: Whether injecting the key ingredient of the atomic bomb into unsuspecting patients can be equated with Nazi wartime experiments is a matter which is today considered moot.

Biological warfare tests had also been being conducted in American cities and states by releasing bacteria and chemicals from sprayers, automobiles, and airplanes. Millions of citizens had unwittingly been breathing in the US Army’s test agents. The intent had been to discover whether infectious microorganisms would spread and survive and how vulnerable the country might be to an attack with lethal germs. Army spokesmen began to point out that the test bacteria they had been utilizing, which included Serratia marcescens, had been considered harmless. But evidently they had determinedly ignored reports that had been appearing in the medical literature for years prior to those tests, indicating that even these bacteria were dangerous for people who already were in a weakened condition. They had even ignored their own evidence that in one of their tests in 1950 they had killed an unsuspecting San Francisco civilian.

Of course I had to wonder, learning belatedly about the existence of these tests, since in my childhood my spine HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE had collapsed due to a microbial infection contracted while I was living outside of Clay City, Indiana, only a few miles downwind from the biological warfare facility in Vigo, Indiana. Probably, I concluded, my microbial infection and the germ war plant a few miles upwind were entirely unrelated. There would have been no point to infecting me, I told myself, as I was not the enemy.

It remains a fact, however, that the Vigo facility had become totally contaminated, so contaminated that production was interrupted, and therefore had been able to deliver only a few palletloads of test germ bombs to England before the collapse and surrender of Germany, and it is a fact, also, that a few miles away, at that same time, my spine had collapsed as the muscles in the small of my back had become paralyzed.You don’t ASSLEY

suppose — no, it’s too far-fetched.

July 10, Saturday, 12:37PM: An industrial accident occurred near Seveso, Italy, in a small chemical plant just to the north of Milan. It would result in nearby residential populations being subjected to the highest known exposure to 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD dioxin). Neighboring communities were also affected: Meda, Desio, Cesano Maderno, and to a lesser extent Barlassina and Bovisio-Masciago. The plant was owned by Industrie Chimiche Meda Società Azionaria (ICMESA), a subsidiary of Givaudan, which was a subsidiary of Hoffmann-La Roche (The Roche Group). The accident happened there in building B. A nucleophilic aromatic substitution reaction with sodium hydroxide was transforming 1,2,4,5-tetrachlorobenzene into 2,4,5- trichlorophenol. Since the operators needed to utilize a higher temperature than could be achieved using the normal process utilities available at the plant, they decided to use exhaust steam from the onsite electricity generation turbine, passing that around an external heating coil installed on their chemical reactor vessel. The exhaust steam pressure would normally produce a reaction mixture temperature of 158 °C, very close to the mixture’s boiling point of 160 °C. However, the operators lacked any equipment that to take readings of this steam temperature. Now, Italian law required that manufacturing shut down over the weekend, so at a certain intermediate point in the chemical reaction all the workers turned off their equipment and went home. At that point reduced power consumption caused a dramatic drop in the load on the plant’s turbine and a consequent increase in the temperature of the exhaust steam. This much hotter steam overheated the metal wall of the chemical reactor vessel and a chemical decomposition began. Eventually a relief valve popped open –at 12:37PM that Saturday– and 6 tons of chemicals wafted into the ambient environment to settle over almost 7 square miles. Among the chemical substances released into this lovely world was approximately one kilogram of TCDD dioxin, the most dangerous and damaging chemical of which we are presently aware. Even µgrams of this substance are deadly. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1977

Fred Sanger and collaborators provided the initial complete DNA sequence of an organism (a bacteriophage, or virus infecting bacteria). THE SCIENCE OF 1977

US Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research confirmed that, between 1949 and 1969, the United States military had contaminated 239 populated areas with biological agents. These areas included, among other locations, Key West, Florida, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Panama City, Panama, St. Louis, Missouri, San Francisco, California, and the District of Columbia.

GERM WARFARE When the submersible Alvin photographed deep sea vents on the ocean floor, discovering that they give rise to an ecosystem owing nothing whatever to photosynthesis, we were prompted to ask whether life on earth might not have arisen first in deep-sea, rather than in shallow-water, ecosystems. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1978

Experimental Hepatitis B vaccine trials, conducted by the Center for Disease Control, began in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. These were not secret medical experiments. Ads for research subjects specifically asked for promiscuous homosexual men. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1981

John Powell (a former publisher of a Shanghai magazine who had unsuccessfully been prosecuted for sedition in the early 1950s for accusing the United States of having resorted to germ warfare in Korea) courageously did his duty as an American citizen by exposing in the pages of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the immunity deal transacted at the end of World War II between General Douglas MacArthur and Japanese germ- warfare officers.10 SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS KOREAN WAR

The case of Dwayne Sexton, who as a child had been irradiated as part of NASA-sponsored research aimed at discovering the potential effects of radiation exposure on astronauts, gained fleeting attention when the mother of the child attempted to link the death of her son to these experiments. Mother Jones ran a cover story on this Sexton case. Albert Gore, a Democratic congressman of Tennessee where the experiments had taken place, followed up with hearings on the Oak Ridge Total Body Irradiation Program. Neither Mother Jones nor the Gore hearings attempted to make any link between this Sexton case and the experiments conducted by Dr. Eugene L. Saenger at the University of Cincinnati or with the broader program of secret medical experiments with radiation upon human subjects.

10. Lest anyone barf at my including this on the list of the USA’s involvement in secret medical experiments, allow me to point out that 1.) under our criminal code someone who makes himself an “accessory after the fact” to a crime or who knowingly benefits from the proceeds of a crime is as guilty of that offense as was the original perpetrator and that 2.) among the victims of this series of atrocities committed in the name of science had been American soldiers who at the time were defenseless prisoners of war. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1982

Dorothy Legarreta, who had worked for the Manhattan Project as a laboratory technician, was at the library of the University of California – Berkeley examining the papers of Joseph Hamilton, the scientist in charge of nuclear radiation experiments at the University of California, when she chanced across the memo that had been addressed in 1950 to Shields Warren, then director of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Division of Biology and Medicine. The memo had counseled the substitution of large primates such as chimpanzees for human test subjects in studies that were being planned on the cognitive impact of high doses of radiation. The use of humans might leave the AEC open “to considerable criticism” since the experiments as proposed had “a little of the Buchenwald touch.” To prevent the discovery of any more such incriminating “Buchenwald” memos, University of California administrators then put Joseph Hamilton’s papers off-limits to researchers. Legarreta responded by filing a Freedom of Information Act petition with the Department of Energy, asking for copies of all documents concerning experiments in which humans were intentionally exposed to radioactive materials through injection or ingestion — and was sent a 2-foot-high carton of documents that, for the first time, would expose the widespread human experimentation program that had been being conducted in secret by the US government. ASSLEY

July 12, Saturday: New York State studies showed dioxin levels in the Love Canal area that were dangerously high.11

11. A “dioxin” would be any chemical that includes a heterocyclic 6-member ring in which 2 of the carbon atoms have been replaced by oxygen, the most toxic of such compounds being 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin or “TCDD” which has a “toxicity index” of 1 meaning of course that no chemical more toxic to life on earth than this has at yet come to our attention. Chemicals of this sort have no known use and are never intentionally produced, so even when they were an ingredient in Agent Orange during the Vietnam War they were merely a contaminant, a by-product, rather than one of the intentionally manufactured herbicides. Dioxin is simply one of the things we are forced to put up with in order to live the death-defying life we choose to live (it concentrates up the food chain and never goes away, la de dah — on the plus side, it means we will never again be able to survive as cannibals). HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1983

February: News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: Microsoft established a subsidiary company in West Germany.

Following the sudden death of 62 horses in Times Beach, Missouri in 1971, owners had suspected the waste oil used to tamp down dust in their stable and had brought their suspicion to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had begun investigating the area. Then, from 1971 to 1976, the same waste oil had been used on the area’s gravel roads to hold down dust. In 1979 a company had confessed that it was mixing dioxin- laden waste oil with its conventional waste oil. In 1982 the Environmental Protection Agency had identified levels of dioxin in Times Beach soil about 300 more than considered safe. During this month the US government therefore bought out the town for $33,000,000, and began to relocate its 2,200 residents. The subsequent clean-up would cost the US government $110,000,000, of which $10,000,000 was paid by the company that had sold the contaminated oil product. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

June: In response to the Times Beach, Missouri dioxin contamination, the American Medical Association called for a public information campaign on dioxin that would “prevent irrational reaction and unjustified public fright.” It reported reassuringly that while dioxin “may well be one of the most toxic substances known to man,” there is “still very little substantive evidence for many of the alleged claims made against the compound.” Get on SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

with your lives, folks, there’s no known problem here. News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: • Microsoft quote: “We have a long-term relationship with IBM and have solid plans involving PC- DOS.” • The 1,000,000th Apple II was made. • Intel quote: “Accessing memory using a segmented architecture holds many advantages over the earlier linear-addressing method.” • Mattel announced the scrapping of plans for the Intellivision III. • Mattel announced the Entertainment Computer System. • Coleco announced the Adam, a Z80-based computer with SmartWriter daisy wheel printer, 80KB RAM (64KB user RAM, 16KB video RAM), 3 sound channels, 16 color graphics, 4 MC6801 microprocessors controlling operation of peripherals, and 512KB tape-cartridge device, for US$600. • Shipments of Apple computers reach 1,000,000. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1984

May: During October 1983 a consortium of attorneys for American Vietnam veterans, headed by Victor Yannacone, had been unable to continue to fund its litigation and had appealed to Judge Jack Weinstein to appoint a Plaintiff’s Management Committee. Yannacone was deprived of decision-making authority and 3 new law firms took control within this new committee. During this month, on the morning of the opening day of trial, they settled the Vietnam Veterans’ Agent Orange lawsuit out of court. Under the terms of the settlement the veterans who claimed exposure to the war chemical would receive $180,000,000 from the chemical companies without the companies admitting any culpability from exposure to their product. The US government was not a party to this litigation. The settlement would lead to roughly 50,000 sickened people receiving compensations of $5,000 or less. The 3 law firms asked Judge Weinstein to award them a legal fee of $40,000,000 and were granted $9,200,000. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: • Apple Computer named Kay Power as a research fellow of Apple. • Apple Computer introduced the DuoDisk dual 5.25-inch floppy disk drive unit for the Apple II line. • Apple Computer released the AppleMouse II with MousePaint and a peripheral card for the Apple IIe or Apple II Plus (or directly in the Apple IIc). • Quarterdeck Office Systems officially launched DESQ, a text-based windowing environment for running DOS programs.

October 24, Wednesday: The federal Congress enacted Public Law 98-542 designed to compensate Vietnam veterans for soft tissue sarcoma, and ordering the Veterans’ Administration to establish standards for Agent Orange and atomic radiation compensation. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE November: At a meeting in Cincinnati, information was provided to the press as to the US government’s secret long- term Plutonium239 testing on unsuspecting human subjects.

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1985

Michael Meyer placed articles on “Henry Thoreau” and “Henry C. Wright” in THE BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF MODERN PEACE LEADERS (Ed. Harold Josephson. Greenwood Press. Pages 544-45 and 1035- 37).

At the Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League the League Peace Award was presented to Barbara Reynolds. No secret medical experiments were performed in the course of this meal.

Dr. Murray Sanders, a former lieutenant colonel who was a US adviser on biological warfare, claimed that it had been he who had brokered the sweetheart deal between General Douglas MacArthur –a man to whom the concept of insisting upon personal principles and standards must have seemed truly weird– and the World War II-era Japanese germ warfare perps, during Fall 1945, promising them immunity in return for their teaching us how to use bugs to off civilians en masse. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

The South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. Multilateral agreement among the nations of the South Pacific.

My mother Mildred Geraldine Mattox Smith Turner was by this point living in a doublewide during the winters, with her husband Wilson Turner the fisherman, at a pond in Kissimmee, Florida near Orlando and Disney World. The pond was about a third the size of Walden Pond. She had had a number of ministrokes, and had had the operation that cleans the goop out of one’s artery into the brain and leaves a long scar up the side of the neck. I visited her, and come Sunday she put the arm on me to attend her church there. This was one of those megachurches that have what looks like a Broadway stage, with a state of the art sound and light system, instead of an altar or pulpit. Their “worship” was entertaining, but I had had a swiftie pulled on me. In his sermon, the blow-dry preacher told a joke about the USMC and then asked if there were any ex-Marines in the pews, “Would you please stand,” and allova sudden Mom starts to give me the elbow, I was supposed to stand up. A bunch of guys stood up, in this huge audience in this huge auditorium, and the preacher honored them and called for a round of applause. I was mortified. If there is anything in my life that I am ashamed of, it is that when given the choice of USMC or prison, I caved and put on that uniform. –But my mom, bless her pointy head, had set this up with her pastor in advance.

On the way back toward the doublewide on the pond, we passed through beautiful downtown Kissimmee and I viewed their town monument, which was an erection made up of a rock from every state in the US of A. We passed a high-rise office building (well, high-rise for Kissimmee), and Mother announced that that was where the atheists had their office. From the back seat, I went “Huh?” and she explained that there was this bunch of atheists, who were always trying to cause trouble, and agitate, and prevent people from praying, and mock God, and they had an office with a lot of initials in the name of it. But she couldn’t remember the initials. So I suggested “Maybe you mean the ACLU?” and she went “That’s it, the ACLU.”

One of my more horrible memories, which I will insert here because I don’t remember exactly in what year it happened, is of sitting at the kitchen table there in that doublewide, staring out at the necks and heads of the cormorants cruising around in that pond and listening idly to her tell me about a recent neighborhood happening. “See that raft over on the other side,” she pointed out, “there were some niggers, lived over there. One day one of them drowned,” and on like that. I gradually began to pay attention, and learned that my mother HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE and her fisherman husband had recently sat at that kitchen table, right next to a telephone, and watched a preadolescent black child drown about a hundred yards away — and learned that it had not occurred to either her or her husband to reach out and pick up the telephone and dial 911. They had witnessed a drowning as if it had been a TV drama. Now, my mother was a warm and affectionate and sensitive person who cared deeply about other people and I don’t believe that would have been possible, had the child in question been white. Understand, also, that my mother was not entirely white (in public school I had repeatedly been warned to stay away from the white girls). Understand, also, that my family of origin was not Southern, but was from Brazil, Indiana and Olney, Illinois. White righteousness was precious to them, and for that reason, among other reasons, my family of origin was intensely religious. –Being religious was our way of being righteous. –Being righteous was our way of being white. –Being white was our way of being safe. Being safe, and white, and righteous, and religious, meant condemning other people to Hell for their wickedness. Being safe, and white, and righteous, and religious, is a strange animal: In my case, my family of origin’s being safely white and righteous and religious had on the day after my high school graduation meant taking me and my twisted spine to the edge of town with a suitcase and dumping me by the side of the road as a so-called atheist.

Well, back from this general reminiscing about undated events, to things that for sure did happen during this particular year of 1985: During contract talks this year, extending into the following year, the labor council representing workers at the Department of Energy’s Fernald, Ohio production facility for the fabrication of uranium atomic cores demanded disclosure of all human studies involving Uranium and Plutonium, as well as information about toxic releases to the environment, use of atomic workers as experimental subjects, and the confiscation and destruction of human bodies. (This is the plant that I didn’t know about because it was operating under a cover story, that was only a few miles downwind of where my family and I had lived on Wyscarver Road in Sharonville, Ohio in the 1965-1968 timeframe.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The response of the DOE officials was to contact AFL-CIO leadership and threaten to close the plant if labor there would refuse to honor its “national security obligations.” The unions complied, backing off on their demands for information and, eventually, abruptly terminating their legal council that had been communicating these disloyal demands to the government. After being thus summarily fired, the legal council presented a copy of the smoking-gun “Buchenwald” memo that had been written in 1950 by Joseph Hamilton, the scientist in charge of radiation experiments at the University of California, to reporter Matthew Wald of the New York Times. (The New York Times would, however, do nothing whatever with this smoking-gun information. It was simply unthinkable, that our government had in secret been conducting harmful tests upon us, using us as expendable guinea pigs! Who would be willing to believe such a thing?) SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS ASSLEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE May: At a Knoxville press conference, the “Buchenwald” memo written in 1950 by Joseph Hamilton, the scientist in charge of nuclear radiation experiments at the University of California, was handed out to the press. No mainstream paper would make any mention of this smoking-gun memorandum.

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SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE September 13, Friday: Because of the openhanded manner in which the Reagan administration had been passing around money to any and all scientists willing to do research into new biological weapons, the Council for Responsible Genetics staged a Congressional Briefing on Capitol Hill. The Council for Responsible Genetics would be helping to create draft legislation for the Congress, to counter the manner in which administration officials were abusing research into genetic engineering technology, by persistently tweaking it in the direction of use for purposes of biological warfare. Please, just say no! SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Neither the biotech industry as a whole nor the US Congress as a whole had any desire to be tainted in such a manner by the mad scientists of the Pentagon, and the result would be, overcoming the determined opposition of the Administration, the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.

GERM WARFARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1986

When Shigechiyo Izumi died at the age of 120, he was the oldest man in the world. When he had been born, in 1866, feudal Japan had been under the rule of the shogun Yoshinobu of the Tokugawa dynasty and each lord had needed his own private army. Although there were firearms, samurai warriors were still ambling through the alleys with long and short swords tucked into their waistbands. There was as yet no religious freedom whatever and there were as yet no railroads — and the Gregorian calendar was quite unknown.

A total of 676 new Japanese cherry trees would be planted in Washington DC from this year into 1988 at a cost of over $101,000 in private funds donated to the National Park Service, to restore the number of trees to what they were at the time of the original gift.

A Congressional subcommittee held a one-day hearing in Washington DC, called by Representative Pat Williams of Montana, aimed at determining whether US World War II prisoners of war in Manchuria had been victims of germ warfare experimentation. The evidence offered at this brief hearing was inconclusive (no-one was eager to go there). Among the interesting details were that a Unit 731 doctor had vivisected a girl whom he had raped, after she had been delivered of his baby. “I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.” Sheldon Harris, a historian at California State University in Northridge, estimates that more than 200,000 Chinese died in these Japanese germ warfare field experiments. That wasn’t what this hearing was about, however, this hearing being about whether, horror of horrors, any white people had been treated in such a manner. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

May 5, Monday: At a Kansas City press conference, the smoking-gun “Buchenwald” memo that had been written in 1950 by Joseph Hamilton, the scientist in charge of radiation experiments at the University of California, was again handed out to the press. Again, no mainstream paper would make any mention of this smoking-gun memorandum. (Eventually, it would be The Daily Californian, the student newspaper at the University of California – Berkeley, that would break this Buchenwald memo in a piece titled “At Buchenwald and Berkeley” by editor-in-chief Howard Levine quoting from the November 28, 1950, memo by Dr. Hamilton and incisively criticizing reporting on the Markey report by the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times. Both papers, he wrote, “minimized the gross inhumanity of these tests by downplaying their scope and ignoring the fact that most of the experiments were conducted without the ‘informed consent’ demanded by the Nuremberg protocols of 1946-47.”) SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE July: At a Berkeley press conference, the “Buchenwald” memo written in 1950 by Joseph Hamilton, the scientist in charge of radiation experiments at the University of California, was yet again handed out to the press. Yet again, no mainstream paper would make any mention of this smoking-gun memorandum.

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Who would want to know of such a thing? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1987

The curators of the National Anthropological Archives of the National Museum of Natural History acquired the remains of Professor W.H. Sheldon’s life work, which had been gathering dust in “dead storage” in a Goodwill warehouse in Boston. Among the erectness program photographic negatives now stored in Suitland, Maryland are the Yale University classes of 1950, 1963, 1964, 1966 and 1971; the Princeton University class of 1952; the Smith College classes of 1950 and 1952; the Vassar College classes of 1942 and 1952; the Mount Holyoke College classes of 1950 and 1953; the Swarthmore College class of 1951; the University of California classes of 1961 and 1967; the Hotchkiss College class of 1971; the Syracuse University class of 1950; the University of Wisconsin class of 1953; the Purdue University class of 1953; the University of Pennsylvania class of 1951, and the Brooklyn College classes of 1951 and 1952. Sample index entries are: BOX 90 YALE UNIVERSITY CLASS OF 1971 Negatives. Full length views of nude freshmen men, front, back and rear. Includes weight, height, previous or maximum weight, with age, name, or initials. BOX 95 MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE PHOTOGRAPHS Negatives. Made in 1950. Full length views of nude women, front, back and rear. Includes height, weight, date and age. Includes some photographs marked S.P.C. ASSLEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1989

May 11, Thursday: Administrator of Veterans Affairs Edward J. Derwinski announced his Department’s response to a recent US District Court decision invalidating a portion of the regulations which govern the payment of compensation for specific diseases relating to exposure to Agent Orange. He explained that “an appeal would not be in the best interests of the Administration or the veterans community served by this Department,” but offered that the agency would take a “fresh look” at the issue, rewriting regulations as soon as possible and reconsidering Vietnam veteran claims that had been denied. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

In response to General Manuel Noriega’s disregard of the results of the Panamanian election, President George Herbert Walker Bush ordered a brigade-sized force of approximately 1,900 troops to augment the estimated 11,000 US forces already in the area. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE November 19, Sunday: As protests continued in Czechoslovakia, an anti-government umbrella organization called Civic Forum was formed. Vaclav Havel was chosen as leader.

An article in the New York Times Magazine by Cliff Honicker, titled “The Hidden Files,” was subtitled “In 1946, a Nuclear Accident Killed One Scientist and Injured Several Others. The Government Response to That Tragedy Established a Pattern of Secrecy That Still Exists.” The article did not take into consideration in any way the US government’s years-long human experimentation program with Plutonium injections. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1990

More than 1,500 six-month old black and hispanic babies in Los Angeles, California were given an experimental measles vaccine that had not been licensed for use in the United States of America. CDC would later acknowledge that none of the parents were ever informed that the vaccine being injected into their children was an experimental one that had not been licensed for use. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1991

January: Public Law 102-4, the Agent Orange Act, gave the Department of Veterans Affairs the authority to declare certain conditions “presumptive” to exposure to the war poison dioxin. This law made Vietnam veterans eligible to receive treatment and compensation for their Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Porphyria cutanea tarda, respiratory cancers, soft-tissue sarcoma, or Chloracne without needing to demonstrate in court that they had been exposed. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: • Apple Computer discontinued the Mac Portable. • RDI announced the availability of Mac emulation software for SPARC systems. • A judge rules that Mosaic Software infringed on Lotus Development’s copyrights on Lotus 1-2-3. • Sun Microsystems began shipping the SPARCstation 2. • Compaq Computer reported its 1st billion dollar quarter. • Microsoft released Microsoft Excel for Windows 3.0. • After a year of delays due to technical difficulties, Motorola’s 68040 microprocessor became available.

January 13, Sunday: The TV newsmagazine program “60 Minutes” aired a segment on the US government’s confiscation and destruction of the bodies of people who had been killed by nuclear radiation. Harry Reasoner went “In the case of the men and women who have worked in this country’s nuclear-weapons industry, the government is apparently wiling to go to any lengths to defeat workers’ claims that they were injured or killed by exposure to radiation — any lengths, including falsifying records, concealing evidence, even trying to steal human remains....” According to the segment’s producer, one of the most powerful interviews that had been intended for this program, one with a courier who arranged for the shipment of body parts to Los Alamos and who had been present at a secret autopsy at which body parts had been removed without the knowledge or consent of the family, had been deleted from the program. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1993

December: Eileen Welsome’s articles in the Albuquerque Tribune about secret medical experiments with plutonium motivated Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary to announce that she was “appalled and shocked” about the injections that were being discovered. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE US President William Jefferson Clinton then ordered federal agencies to open all records on human radiation experiments (but not chemical or biological experiments), and appointed an Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. The committee would learn of hundreds of tests. The government released mounds of classified documents about long-ago radiation tests. That pile included information about experimentation that had been done under the Department of Energy’s predecessor agencies, the Atomic Energy Commission and before that the “Manhattan Project” which had in 1945 produced our 1st uranium and plutonium weaponry. Thousands of documents and interviews later, the committee would report in 1995 about the many American civilians whose lives had been molested due to “arrogance and paternalism on the part of government officials and the biomedical community.”

Late December: During the 1940s, 829 pregnant women at a Tennessee prenatal clinic had been given “nutrition” cocktails but were not informed that their free drinks had been dosed with radioactive iron, or that the doctors doing this, from Vanderbilt University, were intent upon a secret medical experiment to measure the amount of the radioactive materials that was being absorbed by their bodies. In 1983 the newspaper The Tennessean had been made aware of this. At this point, a decade later, the newspaper finally published an article on the topic. Emma Craft, who had never known that she had been fed this radioactive iron in the 1940s, was thus able to read in this newspaper a detailed description of the 1958 death by cancer of an unnamed 11-year-old girl — whom she recognized to have been her daughter. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1994

A Cincinnati Enquirer investigation identified 32 of the University of Cincinnati patients who had been used as guinea pigs in military research into the effects of plutonium. The newspaper’s researchers were able to do this primarily by matching initials and other details found in the research reports with the names provided by relatives who were contacting the newspaper’s radiation hotline. Several families hired lawyers to sue the University of Cincinnati, the researchers, and the city of Cincinnati, which at the time owned General Hospital. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Elaine Morgan supported the “aquatic ape” hypothesis that modern humans evolved from semiaquatic apes, as suggested by our hairless bodies and subcutaneous layers of fat. PALEONTOLOGY

In what will later be named Chauvet cave, French cavers discovered 32,000-year-old paintings showing 400 animal images.

Ron Clark noticed some previously overlooked foot bones, showing both ape and human qualities, from Sterkfontein. Future finds would associate these bones with a skeleton nicknamed “Little Foot.” THE SCIENCE OF 1994

Several attempts to smuggle nuclear material from C.I.S. were stopped. Secret nuclear testing on humans was revealed by both the U.S. and C.I.S. The Strategic Defense Initiative program was scaled back. Emphasis began to be placed upon a SCUD-like missile defense. North Korea, suspected to be building nuclear weapons, threatened to withdraw from the IAEA, but global pressure resolved –or seemed to resolve– the crisis. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS ATOM BOMB

“If anything bad can happen, it probably will.”

— Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss in the Chicago Daily Tribune, February 12, 1955) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1995

I learned during this year something it would have been important for me to have known in 1965, when I left active duty with the USMC and went to work for Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati. What happened was, in this year President Bill Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments released to the general public (anyone who could bear to read and mentally retain such news) the information it had obtained about hundreds of secret medical experiments the government had had conducted upon its citizens with Plutonium.

We learned from documentation about experimentation that had been done under the Department of Energy’s predecessor agencies, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and before that the “Manhattan Project” which had in 1945 produced the 1st atomic bomb, about many American civilians whose lives had been molested due to “arrogance and paternalism on the part of government officials and the biomedical community.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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What I learned was that in all likelihood the man whom I had replaced at the Cincinnati Toilet Goods Plant had been volunteered by P&G for secret experiments in the guise of medical treatment, resulting in his death from radiation effects — resulting, that is, in his official murder. ASSLEY

Mr. Procter Mr. Gamble

He had been a middle-aged mulatto man who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer of the throat (unfortunately, my memory has not retained his name), and when I showed up to learn to replace him as the newby “Job Study Engineer” in the Pack Bottles Department on the second floor of the plant, he told me that because his health care plan could not take care of the entire cost of such a treatment for cancer, the company had offered to send him on company time for free radiation treatments they had arranged with a kind doctor at the University of Cincinnati. He told me that this doctor had commented that he might as well go on and continue to smoke during the radiation treatment if he liked. It was all hell, learning about his job from him, because he was constantly blowing his Camel smoke in my face, and the rising columns of smoke from his ever-present cigarettes were making my eyes smart as I leaned over his shoulder to learn from him what he was doing. –Then one day he stopped coming to work. I didn’t suspect anything at that time, 1965,12 and only learned three decades later, during this year 1995, that the medical center he was being sent to at the University of Cincinnati had been one of the prime contractors with the US government in its experiments with the lethality of massive doses of Pt, and that people of color, like him, had been its prime targets of opportunity.

12. What kind of idiot am I, that I suspected nothing at the time? Well, to defend myself, I had a lot of things on my mind at the time, such as how to handle the situation when I first was forced to shed my suit coat in the summer heat of Cincinnati, and they noticed with shock that this guy they had hired had a deformed spine. Looking back, however — how could I possibly have failed to notice there was something very fishy about this whole deal — that a patient with a cancer pronounced to be terminal, a patient who has been given but a few months to live, who is told that he needs to get his affairs in order and say his good-byes, is never ever subjected to damaging radiological or chemical procedures? –That a patient who is undergoing therapy for throat cancer is never ever told that it is OK for him to continue to smoke? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The doctor he mentioned was probably, we now know, Dr. Eugene L. Saenger, who has been characterized by expert witnesses before Congress as “dirty as Mengele.” Dr. Saenger was not doing this sort of dirty business on his own initiative, of course, but was like the original Dr. Josef Mengele on government contract — and he was not deviating one iota from the instructions that our government had given to him, which had been to find out for our weapons effectiveness program exactly how much Pu it takes to kill a person and how long it takes.

Dr. Eugene L. Saenger of the University of Cincinnati?

Here is a partial transcript of testimony before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Power which had been provided on January 18, 1994 by Dr. David Egilman of Braintree MA, a professor at Brown University: My name is David Egilman. I’m a practicing physician in Braintree, Massachusetts. I practice internal medicine and occupational medicine. I’m also on the Faculty of Brown University and a member of the Center for Community Responsive HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Care in Boston.... The worst experiments that were conducted, in my opinion, were those that resulted in the deaths of their participants. Those were conducted at the University of Cincinnati between 1961 and 1972. They defined the purpose of their experiments in their first report to the funding agency, the Defense Department. “These studies are designed to obtain new information about the metabolic effects of total body and partial body irradiation, so as to have a better understanding of the acute and sub-acute effects of irradiation in the human.” In another report they went on “The humans they wanted to know about the effects in were military personnel who might be irradiated during a war.” They went on to describe the doses they were going to give — doses of 100 to 300 rads, eventually doses up to 600 rads were anticipated. 600 rads is lethal to almost everyone who would have received it under the conditions of this experiment. It would have killed everyone who would have received it. The doses that they did give to some of the individuals were enough, in anticipation by the researchers, to kill half of the people, the LD 50 was the dose. Now the selection of subjects is very important. They were uneducated, average education 4th grade. Low intelligence. They had brain dysfunction, because of their underlying disease. They could not follow simple instructions. They were specifically selected because they had tumors, cancers, that were resistant to therapy. They picked patients whose cancers were not going to be treatable with the radiation. For, you see, in the 30s and 40s this had been tried for cancer therapy. And they knew by 1960 which cancers would respond and which would not. They wanted patients with cancers that would not respond, because then it wouldn’t confuse the purpose of the experiment, which was to find out what effects the radiation would have on soldiers. If it actually treated the cancer, you would have some confusion between the cell necrosis, the cell death from the treatment and the effects of the radiation. 62 of 88 patients were black. If this was a cancer study, it is the first one that excluded affluent white people at its inception. Now the methods: Because they were studying the effects of radiation to predict them on soldiers, the effects were known, nausea and vomiting. Treatment for nausea and vomiting was specifically denied these patients. This is just inhumane. Some of these patients had stage 4 severe nausea and vomiting, that went on for days and longer. And treatment for vomiting was available. Despite the fact that they specifically selected those whose cancers would not be treated, the patient was told he was to receive treatment to help his disease. Other effective treatments that were available for some of the cancers at the time, not cures, but palliative treatments were available, for the gastro-intestinal cancers, 5FU, which is still used today for that same tumor, were denied the patients with that type of cancer. And what were the results. Radiation sickness and death. The study participants, the researchers themselves, in 1973, said HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE that 8 of the victims died as a result of the radiation. I have reviewed the data of the individual patient records, the summaries provided by the researchers, I’ve only reviewed a few of the actual charts, as did the junior faculty committee. at the University of Cincinnati, which should get credit for having first discovered this and stopped it in 1971, and, in our opinion, more than 20 of the patients died as a results of the experiments. Now let me turn to plutonium injections, and make just a few comments, since you’ve heard a lot already. First, plutonium is not just a substance [which] causes cancer, it is an acute toxin. It can make you suffer, just from having it injected. Acutely, right away. The doses injected were potentially lethal, and I’ve reviewed the summary of the diagnoses. In my opinion, there is no way that physicians at that time could have thought that those patients were terminal. 12 of 18, in my opinion, were clearly not terminal. Maybe 3 of those are questionable, 9 of 18 were definitely not terminal. And they were not terminal by what physicians knew was terminal then — injured knee is not a terminal disease. Unfortunately I must say that the research was meaningless from a scientific standpoint. This is ICRP, [referring to slide] the radiation standard for protection developed in 1972. They knew about the experiments and referenced them. And they said because they were so poorly done and full of errors that the data from these 18 people were not meaningful in developing the radiation protection standard. So while these people may be heroes [reference to earlier testimony], because this won’t happen, again, unfortunately, the science in, it was not science, that it didn’t provide us meaningful information. As you heard no medical follow-up care was planned and none was performed. The injection of lethal plutonium into healthy individuals, showed a reckless disregard for human life, by physicians, unfortunately, and others....

When is a serial killer not a serial killer? Suppose some dude is in the habit of asking people to go fishing with him, and when he gets them out on his boat, he spits in their faces and tells them that he is about to kill them and shoots them in the back of the head, chortling gleefully, and dumps their bodies in the water. He’s a serial killer, right? When we catch this dude, he’s a goner, right? • Suppose, however, that he’s wearing a white lab coat while he spits in their faces and tells them that he is about to kill them and shoots his victims in the back of the head, chortling gleefully, and dumps their bodies in the water. Is he still a serial killer? Is he still a goner when we catch up with him? • OK, suppose not only that he’s got a white lab coat on, but that he actually is a licensed physician. Is he still a serial killer? Is he still a goner, when we catch up with him? • Suppose not only that he’s a licensed physician wearing a white lab coat, but also, that he’s under contract with the US government. Is he still a serial killer? Is he still a goner if we can catch up with him? • Suppose that, instead of inviting people out on his boat, he invites people into his lab at the University of Cincinnati, and invites them to sit in a special chair, and shoots them in the back of the head with one lead bullet of varying sizes and energies, in order to find out for our government HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the exact size and velocity of lead bullet to the back of the head, that it requires to produce assured death. Is he still a serial killer? Is he still a goner if we can catch up with him? • Suppose that, instead of shooting them in the back of the head with one lead bullet, he administers just millions and millions of little tiny neutron bullets all over their bodies, in order to find out for our government the exact dose and energy of neutron bullets, that it requires to produce assured death. Suppose that instead of spitting in their face and telling them that he’s going to kill them, he pats their hands gently and tells them that he is going to try to cure them of life. Is he still a serial killer? Is he still a goner if we can catch up with him? • Suppose that, before administering just millions and millions of little tiny neutron bullets all over their bodies, he assures them that he is their health care provider, concerned to enhance their lives. Then, instead of dumping their bodies in the river, he has them incinerated and their ashes destroyed, so there could be no evidence of the levels of radiation to which they had been subjected, which had hastened their deaths. Is he still a serial killer? Is he still a goner if we can catch up with him? • Suppose that, in killing people with his radiation experiments, he carefully selects only geriatrics who have only short lives remaining anyway, such as people maybe in their 70s, will likely be dead within a decade or so. Is he still a serial killer? Is he still a goner if we can catch up with him? • Suppose that, in killing people with his radiation experiments, he carefully selects only people who supposedly would have only short lives remaining anyway, such as people who have been diagnosed with inoperable cancer who although they will not die right away, will likely be dead in six months or so. Is he still a serial killer? Is he still a goner if we can catch up with him? • Suppose that, instead of shortening the lives of people with his radiation experiments as the US government desires, he cheats the federals out of their nickel, by attempting to select people who will benefit from radiation therapy, and suppose he tells these patients that he abides by the Hippocratic Oath “first, do no harm,” and is going to try to prolong their lives and improve their quality of life, but suppose his judgment is not very good and inadvertently he actually is shortening these people’s lives from a few months to a few weeks. Is he still a serial killer? Is he still a goner if we can catch up with him? • Suppose that, instead of shortening the lives of people with his radiation experiments, he actually succeeds in selecting the right patients and the right dosages of radiation therapy, so that he somewhat lengthens these people’s lives from a few months to a year or more. Is he still a serial killer, just because the government was paying him to be a serial killer and supposing that he was acting as a serial killer? Is he still a goner if we can ever catch up with him and hold him up to scrutiny — or is it our government that is a goner if we can ever catch up with it and hold it up to scrutiny? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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At some point, I guess we can all agree, this dude has transited from being a serial killer to being a benefactor of humankind. At what step in the above analysis would this transition from serial killer to benefactor of humankind take place, between situation #1 and situation #2, or between situation #5 and situation #6, or between situation #9 and situation #10? At what point do we give him a gold medal rather than send him to the gas chamber? –In the case of Dr. Eugene L. Saenger, his records of experimentation have subsequently been examined by a board of radiologists and oncologists and maybe even proctologists, for ethical 44 irregularities, and he has been pronounced to be like Ivory Soap, 99 /100% pure. After killing 88 people, mostly poor and of color, he was allowed to retain his standing as an honored emeritus.13

(I don’t know whether this ethical board of radiologists and oncologists and maybe even proctologists took the Oath of Hippocrates, “first do no harm,” into account. I am reminded instead of those letters that the king of France used to put out to his secret operatives, that could be produced to the local police upon reason to so, which declared in advance –in effect– that “It is for the good of the kingdom that this man has done what he has done.”)

Yeah, right, 88 cancer patients died quickly rather than slowly — so that we all could enjoy life abundant in a squeaky-clean world free of the threat of war.

The year in which I had sat hunched over the shoulder of this job study engineer receiving secondhand his lethal dose of Pu238 was the year in which I had been fathering my first child, Cara María Meredith, who was born with multiple allergies and with a highly unusual big red semicircular mark on her forehead outside the hairline. When I saw my baby for the first time, at the hospital through the glass window, I sought out and interrogated the obstetrician, to be assured that no “spoon” had been used during Cara’s delivery. Had it been damaging for me or for my baby, for me to have been sitting in that way for eight hours a day five days a week at the Cincinnati Toilet Goods Plant of Procter & Gamble hunched over the shoulder of someone who was at the time being murdered with radiation by our government? Did my daughter receive her highly unusual outside-the-hairline birthmark due to radiation damage to my sperm? I simply don’t know, because I do not know with any level of assurance that the dose that Dr. Saenger was administering was given through exposure in his office, or was given by having the test subject ingest radioactive materials. Whether it was the one or the other would of course make a tremendous difference in the levels of radiation to which I in addition, by sitting close to this Job Study Engineer, was being exposed — was his body rendered radioactive, or was it not? Also, I am not myself able to calculate with any assuredness how much the high-energy neutron bullets emitted by Pu238 are dissipated at the square of the distance in an average distance of two or three feet, passing through another person’s body before entering my own gonads. –And, we can be assured, nobody in the US government is ever going to be eager to tell us, even if we could ever be prepared to trust the word of such an agent. If somebody were to assure me that the dose Dr. Saenger was administering was given through exposure in his office, rather than by having the test subject ingest radioactive materials, how would I be able to know after they have destroyed all the evidence by disposing of the body, that they are telling me the truth?

After all, we do know that at least 18 US citizens have been experimented upon by the US government by injecting their bodies with radioactive Pt. We learned from Science Trends newsletter about some US Army secret medical experiments that had gone on from 1949 to 1969 in San Francisco, Chicago, and Rochester as part of the Manhattan Project, involving “injection of relatively massive quantities of bomb-grade plutonium into the veins of 18 men, women, and children.” So, despite assurances that all Dr. Saenger was doing was subjecting his “patients” (experimental subjects) to irradiation — how can I know for sure that Dr. Saenger had not also been up to this testing by injection of radioactive materials? 13. Not so the real Dr. Josef Mengele, who in 1964 was retroactively stripped of his 1935/1938 accreditations by the Universities of München and Frankfurt. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January 11, Wednesday: In the case of the poor University of Cincinnati patients who had been used as guinea pigs in military secret medical experiments into the effects of Plutonium, US District Judge Sandra Beckwith issued a key order denying a defense motion seeking immunity for the University of Cincinnati researchers, on the grounds that since they had been working for the US federal government, they lacked all responsibility for their conduct. Her decision asserted a constitutional right to “bodily integrity.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1996

May: President Clinton ordered that Veterans’ Administration disability benefits be expanded to cover veterans who served in Vietnam who were suffering from prostate cancer or a nerve disease. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: Microsoft shipped version 3.0 of the Internet Explorer.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” — Carl Sagan

October: The Veterans’ Health Care Eligibility Reform Act of 1996 ordered the Veterans’ Administration to provide its Medical Benefits Package –including outpatient and inpatient medical care at VA facilities, prescription medications and home health and hospice care– to veterans with disorders associated with herbicide exposure in Vietnam. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

News items relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: • USRobotics shattered modem speed barrier, delivering 56Kbps over standard telephone lines. • Microsoft and Intel launch NetPC with industry leaders.

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1997

In the case of the poor University of Cincinnati patients who had been used as guinea pigs in military research into the effects of Plutonium, several families were objecting to an initial settlement proposal that precluded any individual families from pursuing their own cases, and this would necessitate intervention by a federal mediator and then by US District Judge Sandra Beckwith herself. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

At the Nevada Test Site, more 2,000 people turned out for a civil disobedience event and 700 were arrested.

The GE test reactor (GETR) at which I had been a “jumper” during the 1970s had been a closed facility for more than a decade when, at this point, our Department of Energy attempted a cleanup effort, after which the facility was to be turned over to General Electric. Agreement was not, however, as yet reached with General Electric as to the portion of the cost burden which they would need to sustain.

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines received the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to eliminate these weapons that kill and injure. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1998

July: In Rome a treaty was being signed by 120 nations, to set up an International Criminal Court. This court would be created at The Hague, Netherlands to try political leaders and military personnel charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. 7 nations intransigently opposed the setting up of any such court one of those 7 nations intransigently opposed to the setting up of any such court was, and if you are surprised at this you are one of the several varieties of fool, the United States of America).

The Vietnam Red Cross established a Vietnam Agent Orange Victims Fund to provide direct assistance to impacted families. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

September 15, Tuesday: A headline in the Cincinnati Enquirer was “Settlement collapses in UC radiation case / Families may face more years in court.” SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS After six months of fruitless “last-minute” settlement talks, lawyers in the University of Cincinnati Cold War radiation case declared an impasse Monday. That means a proposed $4.26 million settlement that might have ended a bitter, four-year battle for families who claim their relatives were guinea pigs in a 1960s military experiment appears dead. The case now seems destined for several more years of litigation and appeals. “The plaintiffs are greatly disappointed that we have not been able to settle this case,” said attorney Robert Newman, who represents most of the families in the case. “Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll have to go back to litigating all the issues, which will be an expensive and time-consuming process.” The proposed class-action lawsuit involves the families of 89 cancer patients who claim their relatives were unwitting subjects in military-sponsored radiation experiments conducted at the former General Hospital (now University Hospital). Defendants, including lead researcher Dr. Eugene Saenger, the University of Cincinnati and the federal government, have insisted that the experimental treatments were meant to help patients. The proposed settlement would pay families roughly $50,000 each, a figure that depends on how many families make a claim. It also calls for placing a memorial plaque at University Hospital, an apology from the federal government, and promises meetings with Dr. Saenger. The settlement battle has focused on whether the deal should be mandatory for all the families. A dozen families have hired their own team of lawyers to fight the settlement, in part because they think their individual cases are strong enough to win more than $1 million from a jury. However, the defense lawyers insist the deal is off for everybody if any families are allowed to “opt out.” They also contend the plaintiffs cannot prove their case if it ever goes to trial. These issues –and more– were raised in March at a hearing to determine whether the proposed settlement is fair and meets HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE legal requirements. After raising her own concerns about the settlement, US District Judge Sandra Beckwith asked the warring factions to try again to make a deal that could satisfy all sides. Despite repeated meetings with a federal mediator, and then with Judge Beckwith, the lawyers could not agree. That means Judge Beckwith will rule on the original settlement proposal by Sept. 25 — a ruling that is almost certain to be appealed. “This is a difficult case, with lots of considerations on all sides that apparently are insurmountable,” Judge Beckwith said Monday. “If the class is not certified or if the settlement is not approved, you’ll be back in the (US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit). Or if I approve the settlement, you’ll be back arguing whether the settlement should have been approved. Either way, whatever I decide won’t be final.” Mr. Newman said he still hopes a deal can be cut by Sept. 25. But there seemed to be little interest in further talks. “Our clients value their loved ones very highly. We’re not opposed to a settlement for Mr. Newman’s clients, but our clients have a right to pursue their cases,” said attorney John Metz, who represents the objecting families. But the defense gains nothing from a settlement that allows individual families to continue pursuing their cases, said R. Joseph Parker, the lead attorney for Dr. Saenger and the other doctors. The only interest the defendants have in settling would be to avoid the time and expense of defending themselves in case after case. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

1999

February: During this month, William Patrick, the specialist who had devised the US anthrax weaponization process, wrote under contract with the CIA a classified report on possible responses to an anthrax attack conducted through the US Mail. This report had been commissioned by Steven Hatfill due to a series of hoax anthrax mailings. The report described what a terrorist might hope to accomplish and what the US military might be able to do about it (refer to the New York Times for December 3, 2001). The BBC would ask on March 14, 2002 whether there might have been a secret CIA project to investigate methods of sending anthrax through the mail which had gone madly out of control, and suggest that the anthrax attacker might have known of this study or have taken part in it. The CIA and Patrick in particular denied the existence of such a report even though copies were in the possession of the media (refer to the Baltimore Sun for June 27, 2002). During this month, Steven Hatfill was leaving his position at Fort Detrick, Maryland (USAMRIID) for another full-time job elsewhere. During this month, also, a handful of envelopes with almost identical messages were being sent via the US Mail to a combination of media and government targets including the Washington Post, the Atlanta office of the NBC, a post office in Columbus, Georgia that is next to the US Army base of Fort Benning, and the Old Executive Office Building in Washington. The letters contained an imitation of the sort of powdered anthrax with which US bio-defense scientists had begun to experiment. The New York Times would suggest on July 12, 2002 that Steven Hatfill could have been the culprit not only in this mailing but also in the similar earlier mailing of April 24, 1997. However, while Hatfill had been working on virology at Fort Detrick, Maryland (USAMRIID), he had not been stationed in the building in which anthrax was being studied (Weekly Standard for September 16, 2002). BIOTERRORISM

March: In the case of the series of poor, usually black, University of Cincinnati patients who had been used as human guinea pigs in military research into the psychotropic effects of radiation damage, an offer of more money, plus a limited right to opt out, persuaded the objecting families to sign. Settlement talks then boiled down to a single relative who wouldn’t agree to the deal. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

April 3, Saturday: A headline in the Cincinnati Enquirer was “UC radiation suit deal likely / Last holdout OKs $5M settlement.” SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS A federal lawsuit involving military-sponsored radiation experiments in Cincinnati will likely be settled for about $5 million Monday. The class-action lawsuit, which has raged on for five years, involved 73 families who say their loved ones were used as guinea pigs to see what effect radiation would have on their bodies. On Friday, the settlement won the agreement of the case’s lone holdout, the only surviving patient from the experiments conducted from 1960 to 1971 in the basement of General Hospital (now University Hospital). The lawsuit claims many of the 89 deaths were hastened by the radiation doses. Robert Newman, attorney for about 50 of the plaintiffs, said the settlement will amount to about $50,000 for each family. “It’s not a perfect settlement, for sure,” Mr. Newman said. “But it’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE a good settlement, and this is the point that all the parties involved have wanted to reach.” The lawsuit claimed that terminally ill cancer patients —most of them poor, black people— were given full-body and partial-body doses of radiation when they came to the hospital for treatment. The study measured the physical and psychological effects of radiation on humans. It was supported by $651,000 from the Department of Defense. The military wanted to know what would happen to soldiers exposed to radiation during a nuclear war. Dr. Eugene Saenger, a world expert on radiation, headed the 11-year study. His lawyer says the radiation treatments were given in an attempt to cure the patients or to rid them of pain. The settlement requires no statement of wrongdoing from Dr. Saenger, but an apology from the federal government is part of the deal. R. Joseph Parker, attorney for Dr. Saenger, said the case could have dragged on for 10 more years if a settlement was not reached now. “It was just a question of looking at the ages of all the parties and the amount of time that would have been consumed by further litigation,” Mr. Parker said, explaining why his side agreed to the settlement. In addition to the $5 million and the apology, the settlement also calls for placing a memorial plaque on the University of Cincinnati campus identifying each of the 90 patients. Donna White Christy, Patient 087 in the experiments, was the last person to agree to the settlement. One of four children involved in the study, Ms. Christy suffered from bone cancer in 1969 when she went to the hospital for treatment. She has declined to comment publicly and could not be reached Friday. But Mr. Newman said she did not hold out over money. “All three sides have come to the middle to settle this very long and very ancient case,” Mr. Newman said. “(Ms. Christy) had some final concerns — mainly informational concerns — that had to be addressed.” Ms. Christy, a few of her friends and a radiation oncologist met with the mediator in the case Friday to iron out the final details, Mr. Newman said. Judge Sandra Beckwith will be asked to sign a preliminary agreement Monday. After that, the judge will schedule a final hearing, between 30 and 45 days later, for the final approval. The probate court will distribute the money sometime after that, Mr. Newman said. “Most of my clients were in this to set their family history straight and to get an apology from the federal government,” he said.

May 4, Tuesday: In the case of the long series of poor, usually black University of Cincinnati patients who had been being used by a doctor there as human guinea pigs for his secret military research into the psychotropic effects of radiation damage, for which the Department of Defense had provided $651,000 in funding, all parties finally came to agreement and US District Judge Sandra Beckwith gave final approval for a $5,000,000 settlement — which was to include the hospital erecting a memorial plaque listing the names of its victims. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE October 9, Saturday: In Ohio, the University of Cincinnati Hospital had finally complied, minimally, with the $5,000,000 1999 settlement of the court case between its medical school hospital and the surviving families of 13 of the 79 radiation-experiment victims who had been used as guinea pigs in military research into the effects of Plutonium, hastening their deaths, but it had located this plaque in a courtyard near which the

research subjects had received their radiation doses, a place very much out of the way and very much out of the public eye and very unmaintained, where very few people would ever view it. The plaque is in a courtyard between Pavilions H and J near Burnet and Elland avenues on the University of Cincinnati campus that once had been designated a “therapeutic garden” although now there’s not a flower to be seen and although the sign that calls the place a garden has rusted and broken in half. This spot, which includes one tree, two picnic tables, three park benches, and a crumpled and broken asphalt walkway, amidst ventilation units and a Dumpster, is between the kitchen and the parking garage and hadn’t been used by patients in years, although hospital employees were using it as a place where they could grab a smoke. The Cincinnati Enquirer headlined an article “Plaque doesn’t end pain of UC radiation case”: ASSLEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE After years of legal wrangling, the University of Cincinnati this week erected a plaque memorializing cancer patients who unknowingly participated in an 11-year military-sponsored study designed to gauge the effects of a nuclear attack. Although the location of the plaque was part of a settlement in May that ended a five-year legal dispute, its placement has angered family members such as Doris Baker, great-granddaughter of research subject Gertrude Newell. The plaque is in a courtyard near Burnet and Elland avenues on the University of Cincinnati campus. The courtyard, between Pavilions H and J, includes ventilation units and a tree. “If I had known about the location, I never would have signed the settlement papers,” Ms. Baker said Friday. “This was about them doing the right thing by my great-grandmother. I didn’t go this far for them to put her in somebody’s back yard. I wanted everybody to see what they did to her and these other people.” UC has agreed to spruce up the area, according to John H. Metz, an attorney who represents a group of 12 families who called for the plaque. A UC spokeswoman said the area has been “prettied up a little bit but that doesn’t mean they’re finished.” The plaque contains about 70 names of research subjects. More than 90 people were tested from 1960 to 1972. Some of the families involved did not want their relatives’ names included on the plaque. The settlement split more than $3.5 million among the families and their lawyers. Most of the families will wind up receiving about $50,000 each. In another article published in the same issue of the newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer observed that the “Radiation controversy outlasts lawsuit”: Nestled in an old corner of the University Hospital grounds stands a sad little courtyard with a single tree, three park benches and two picnic tables that once was called a “therapeutic garden.” Patients haven’t used this place in years. An oval asphalt walkway is crumbled and broken. The sign that calls this spot a garden is rusted and broken in half. There isn’t a flower to be seen. These days, employees use the courtyard as a place to catch a smoke or sometimes eat their lunch. Yet this out-of-the-way place plays a central role in a controversial chapter of Cincinnati’s medical history that was a big part of a national re-examination of the things America did to its own people during the Cold War. This is the place where a decades-long trail of investigations, hearings and lawsuits about the University of Cincinnati’s total-body irradiation (TBI) experiments comes to a widely unsatisfying end. This week, University Hospital crews completed a concrete pedestal to display a 26-inch square bronze memorial plaque bearing the names of 70 people under the following words: “In Memoriam, Cancer Patients Radiation Effects Study, 1960- HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1972.” This plaque was a hard-fought outcome of a bitter court fight that started in 1994 and was settled five years later, in May. This is a plaque that UC never wanted to install, yet it fails to satisfy the families involved. Despite the poor condition of the courtyard, the location is significant. The patients in the experiments got their radiation doses in a building next to this courtyard, a building now called Pavilion H. There, in the basement of the old General Hospital, is where University of Cincinnati researchers conducted an 11- year Cold War radiation experiment involving more than 90 cancer patients. The patients were told that the whole-body and partial-body radiation doses they got from the cobalt-60 machine would help relieve their pain. It was years later that their families learned their loved ones were part of military-sponsored study designed to gather information on how an atomic attack might affect battlefield troops. Documents made public even before the lawsuit was filed show that patients in the study stayed in wards separated from other cancer patients. They were watched for nausea after treatment. They were given an array of mental functioning tests intended to predict how radiation exposure would affect the combat readiness of military troops. Many reports and studies were produced about the research team’s largely unsuccessful hunt for a “biological dosimeter,” a way of using blood or urine samples to measure the amount of radiation a person might have received. But the effects of the radiation on cancer tumors and pain were detailed primarily in one study, issued in 1973 after the project was shut down. The lawsuit was filed after the identities of many of the research subjects were made public. Many of those names were revealed by an Enquirer investigation. Beyond the lawsuit, the total body irradiation project became the subject of a congressional subcommittee hearing in Cincinnati. Both sides agreed that the fight would have taken as many as 10 years to reach trial, and nobody wanted that. Even so, the settlement details took more than a year to work out. The final deal split $3,594,440 among the families and their lawyers. Most of the families will receive about $50,000 each. Several families that played various leading roles in pursuing the case also will share about $66,000 in special recognition awards. But some of the families feel no sense of closure. Herbert Varin, whose mother Nina Cline was a research subject, was in his early 20s when he watched his mother come home from treatments that doctors said would soothe the pain she felt from ovarian cancer. “I remember how she said for weeks it seemed like her body was on fire,” Mr. Varin said. To him, the plaque was a way to honor the people who became HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE unwitting casualties of the Cold War — except that isn’t what the plaque says. Mr. Varin was annoyed that the original proposal called for listing the patients only by their initials. He remains annoyed that the plaque says extremely little about the experiments and will be placed in a spot few people will ever see. The location angered some relatives. “If I had known about the location, I never would have signed the settlement papers,” said Doris Baker, great-granddaughter of research subject Gertrude Newell. “This was about them doing the right thing by my great- grandmother. I didn’t go this far for them to put her in somebody’s back yard. I wanted everybody to see what they did to her and these other people.” Even though they agreed to the settlement terms, the researchers and institutions involved do not admit any wrongdoing. All along, they have been concerned that the plaque would be misinterpreted as an admission of guilt. In the Cincinnati experiments, Dr. Eugene Saenger was the lead researcher. A dozen other UC researchers involved in the experiments were named as defendants, along with two military project officers, the city of Cincinnati and UC. To the defendants, vast amounts of dispute remain about the lawsuit’s allegations, including how much, if any, harm was caused. In fact, they argued throughout the case that the radiation was intended to help reduce pain. They contend that beneficial effects were achieved, even though research papers detail how several patients suffered life- threatening declines in their white blood cell counts. At higher doses, this effect was so strong that some patients required bone marrow transplants, a highly experimental treatment at the time. Critics claimed that the deaths of at least 20 patients were hastened by the experiments. In one research paper years ago, Dr. Saenger himself wrote that the radiation exposure may have contributed to at least eight deaths. But he recanted that statement at a congressional subcommittee hearing in Cincinnati in April 1994, contending instead that all the patients died as a result of their underlying cancer. The researchers also point out that several patients lived several years after the experiments stopped and that one subject from the experiments survives to this day — Donna White Christy, who was treated as a child for Ewing’s sarcoma, a type of bone cancer. For her, the radiation was considered a cure. Critics claimed her disease was unlike those most of the adults in the experiment had. The level of consent obtained from patients also remained in dispute. According to documents, written consent forms were not used until 1965. Consent forms detailing the risks of bone- marrow transplants were used only in the late years of the study, and none of the forms said the patients faced potentially fatal HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE risks. The families claimed their loved ones never knew they were part of a military-sponsored study. But the doctors argued that the patients in the early years gave proper oral consent in accordance with normal practices of the times, and then signed written consents in later years as rules about medical experiments evolved. The researchers contended that it was unfair to judge a 1960s- era experiment according to 1990s standards. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The plaque in question is inscribed “DEDICATED TO THE PATIENTS OF THE RADIATION EXPERIMENTATION, 1973-1974,” which is almost entirely uninformative. Those dates are, of course, bogus, since the experiments had been begun in 1961 and had been discontinued in 1972 when the Department of Defense had cut off such funding to Cincinnati General Hospital, and the people killed by Dr. Eugene L. Saenger as Director of the Radioisotope Laboratory there should properly have been characterized on this

memorial as “murder victims” rather than as “patients,” due to the straightforward fact that these free administrations of doses of radiation to terminally ill impoverished minority subjects had not been intended, under the terms of that federal government contract, either to protect or to enhance their lives. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November: Armageddon14 to culminate with “wholesale obliteration” as foreseen by Richard Kieninger in his 1963 book The Ultimate Frontier (Abanes, Richard. END-TIME VISIONS. NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998, page 68). MILLENNIALISM

A South Korean organization, The Association of Vietnam War Veterans Suffering from Exposure to Agent Orange, waged a legal battle for compensation for the South Korean veterans who fought in Vietnam and were exposed. The organization sought $4,300,000,000 from Agent Orange manufacturers Dow Chemical and Monsanto, plus another $1,000,000,000 from the US government. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

14. Armageddon = the place (possibly to be identified with Har Megiddo, the Mount of Megiddo, near Tel Aviv, near which many battles were fought) designated in Revelation 16:16 as the scene of the final battle between the kings of the earth at the end of the world. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2000

March: During a trip to Hanoi, Defense Secretary William Cohen had pledged greater US cooperation with Vietnam’s Agent Orange problem. During President Clinton’s 5-day trip to Vietnam 8 months later, the United States and Vietnam had agreed to set up a joint research study on the effects of dioxin/Agent Orange. At this point that study, conducted by the US Air Force, discovered a link between Agent Orange and adult-onset diabetes in its veterans. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

The Rapture was to take place diromg March 2000, 3 1/2 years after the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, according to Marvin Byers. MILLENNIALISM

September: Kurt Vonnegut taught advanced writing at Smith College.

Jerry Grenough foresaw the end of the present age, and perhaps The Rapture, in September of 2000, using various passages from the BIBLE to divine this date.

The Veterans’ Administration recognized that Agent Orange had been used in Korea during the late 1960s and approved Agent Orange examinations for US veterans who had served in Korea during 1968 or 1969. The agency took this action despite reports that Republic of Korea troops, rather than US military personnel, had conducted the actual spraying. The government of South Korea reported that as many as 50,000 South Korean veterans might have been exposed during spray operations there. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2001

May: The nations of the European Union decided to meet to discuss issues of economic espionage, and of the electronic surveillance of phonecalls, Email, and faxes. The US was invited to participate, either at the top level or a lower level of government — and declined.

At the 1st Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, 128 parties and 151 signatories ratified an international environmental treaty that aimed to eliminate or restrict the production and use of persistent organic pollutants such as dioxin. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

2002

The United States and Vietnam signed a memorandum of understanding that specified future collaborative research on the human health and environmental effects of Agent Orange and dioxin, as well as creating a Joint Advisory Committee to oversee such collaboration. Following the conference the US National Institute of Environmental and Health Sciences would begin scientific exchanges between the US and Vietnam and discussions for a joint research project on the human health impacts of Agent Orange.

From this year into 1005, some 400 trees propagated from the surviving trees from the 1912 donation by Japan would be being planted around Washington DC, to ensure that the genetic lineage of the original trees would be preserved.

Eileen Welsome’s THE PLUTONIUM FILES: AMERICA’S SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS IN THE COLD WAR (New York: Dial Press reprint of 1999 publication of 1994 research for which she had received the Pulitzer Prize SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS Looking Back in Anger In the 1970s, Americans might well have wondered if they were captive to a cadre of lunatic research doctors. Throughout the HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE decade, disclosures of strange experiments conducted on unwitting citizens by their own government popped up with unnerving regularity. The initial revelation came in 1972. A press report disclosed that during the previous 40 years, the US Public Health Service had systematically studied 600 syphilitic black men. Centered in Tuskegee, Alabama, the study involved denying treatment to 400 of them so that Public Health Service doctors could observe the course of their illness. Several died from complications of syphilis, clueless that they had been in an experiment concocted by their amiable health care providers. Public anger about the callousness of the study was intensified by its racist overtones. The project and its sponsors were castigated, and institutions around the country that sponsored human subject experiments began to establish panels to review their safety and ethics. Meanwhile, reports about other disquieting experiments began to surface. Two years after the Tuskegee story, the public learned that during the 1950s Central Intelligence Agency researchers had slipped mind-altering substances into the drinks of unsuspecting victims to watch the effects. The drugs sometimes induced psychotic episodes that in at least one case led to a victim’s death. In 1976 came a news story about an odd Army program. From 1949 to 1969, scientists had conducted biological warfare tests by releasing bacteria and chemicals from sprayers, automobiles, and airplanes over American cities and states. During that 20-year period, millions of citizens were unknowingly breathing in the Army’s test agents. The purpose was to see whether the microorganisms would spread and survive and whether the country would be vulnerable to an attack with lethal germs. Army spokesmen contended that the test bacteria, which included Serratia marcescens, were harmless. But they evidently ignored reports that had appeared in the medical literature years before the tests indicating that the bacteria were dangerous to people in weakened conditions. Indeed, a 1950 Army test in San Francisco should by itself have been a show-stopper. Three days after the city was blanketed with Serratia bacteria, patients at a local hospital began coming down with Serratia infections. Eleven patients were infected, one of whom died. Yet Army scientists continued to spray citizens with so-called harmless bacteria for the next 19 years. All these revelations appeared not long after people discovered they may have been at risk from the country’s nuclear weapons programs. The United States, the Soviet Union, and several other countries had agreed in 1963 to ban aboveground nuclear testing because radiation poisons could travel far beyond the test sites. Before the ban, more than 500 bombs had been exploded outdoors, mostly by the two superpowers. In the process, millions of people were exposed to radioactivity that increased their risk of cancer. People who lived downwind from the sites were particularly vulnerable. So were thousands of American troops who in the 1950s were made to drill in radiation-filled HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE environments after nuclear explosions. Eileen Welsome’s THE PLUTONIUM FILES deals with radiation-related experiences and experiments. But her uncompromising brief against government, scientific, and medical officials who ran the radiation programs echoes earlier criticisms by others of Tuskegee, the CIA, and the Army germ warfare tests. Her interest in the subject began in the late 1980s. While reporting for the Albuquerque Tribune, she came upon Army documents indicating that at the dawn of the Atomic Age humans had been injected with plutonium to learn how much their bodies retained. She obtained more documents and tracked down survivors, family members, and officials. Her findings led to a series of Tribune articles in November 1993 about the plutonium experiments. Those articles were something of an epiphany for then-Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary, whose department guarded mounds of classified documents about long-ago radiation tests. That inventory included information about experiments under the department’s predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, and before that the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb in 1945. A month after Welsome’s articles appeared, O’Leary announced that she was “appalled and shocked” about the plutonium injections. President Bill Clinton then ordered federal agencies to open all records on human radiation experiments, and he appointed an Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to review the matter. The committee learned that hundreds of tests had been conducted. Thousands of documents and interviews later, the committee’s 1995 report empathized with the many people who had been victimized by “arrogance and paternalism on the part of government officials and the biomedical community.” Welsome is most effective when describing the poor, often uneducated souls who were unwitting guinea pigs. One subject’s daughter lamented that telling her father that he was injected with plutonium “would be like telling him he was injected with ice cream.” Names and addresses were hard to come by because identities were buried in anonymous aggregates or referred to by code. But her sleuthing identified a subject called “CAL-1” as Albert Stevens, then a 58-year-old house painter who had moved from Ohio to California in the 1920s in search of a better climate for his asthmatic wife. In 1945, diagnosed with cancer, he was injected with plutonium days before portions of his liver and spleen were removed. He had no idea he was part of a radiation experiment even as his urine and stools were collected to measure their plutonium concentrations. The medical insult to Stevens was compounded when analysis of his removed tissues showed no signs of cancer, just inflammation from a gastric ulcer. No less dismaying was what happened to “CAL-3.” That was Elmer Allen, who in 1947 was a 36-year-old railroad porter whose leg was scheduled for amputation. Doctors injected plutonium into his presumably cancerous leg. After surgery the leg was packaged off to a laboratory for plutonium measurements. Neither Stevens HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE nor Allen nor the 16 other subjects injected with plutonium between 1945 and 1947 knew the real purpose of the injections. Nor, a few years later, did the 74 boys at the Fernald school for retarded and troubled children in Massachusetts know they were eating radioactive elements in their oatmeal. Nor did 829 pregnant women know that the “nutrition” cocktails they were drinking at a Tennessee prenatal clinic were laced with radioactive iron. The doctors in charge never let on that the purpose was to measure the amount of radioactive materials absorbed by their bodies. Most of the radiation experiments, though not all, seem to have caused no ill effects. Welsome herself acknowledges that the small amounts of radioactive materials used in the majority of experiments “probably caused no harm.” When she caught up with Elmer Allen’s widow in 1992, she learned that he had died the year before from complications of pneumonia at 80. Still, Mrs. Allen spoke touchingly of how her husband had been exploited. “It just gives me a better view of how people will do you when they feel like you don’t know better,” she said. But Welsome also reviews a horror project in which subjects knew they would suffer radiation injury. Between 1963 and 1971, 131 men in Oregon and Washing-ton prisons underwent radiation of their testicles in experiments sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission. The commissioners wanted to learn how much radiation would permanently damage sperm cells. Volunteers received $5 a month while in the program, up to $25 for a testicular biopsy, and $100 for a vasectomy at the end of the program. The tests were halted when some researchers began to wonder whether prisoners, no matter how well instructed about the experiment, could truly be considered volunteers. So who was doing all these tests, and do the testers deserve Welsome’s unforgiving condemnation? “Beyond everything else,” she writes, “the experiments violated a fundamental right that belongs to all competent adults: the right to control one’s own body.” Doubtless, the experiments commonly ignored the ethical requirement that human subjects be informed about the nature of the experiment and that they participate voluntarily. From today’s perch, the experiments seem indefensible, and their sponsors obtuse if not malicious. Yet there remains a nagging unease about describing the researchers as aberrational or evil. Welsome’s own reporting records the eminence of many of the practitioners and their institutions. Indeed, the idea for the human plutonium experiments came from Manhattan Project physicians, led by the project’s medical director, Dr. Stafford Warren, a respected radiologist. Wanting to know more about the risk of plutonium and other radioactive materials, Warren brought the proposal to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the venerated scientific director of the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer endorsed Warren’s proposal, suggesting only that the experiments not be conducted at the project’s Los Alamos laboratories. This was evidently for practical reasons, since Oppenheimer said that Los Alamos “was not equipped for biological experiments.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The injections subsequently were given to patients being “treated” at many of the country’s finest institutions, including the University of Rochester, the University of California in San Francisco, and the University of Chicago. Similarly, the Fernald boys were part of an experiment devised by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The radioactive iron experiment on the pregnant women was at Vanderbilt University. Welsome dismisses observers who allow that these and other Cold War era experiments were understandable by the standards of the time. She appears perplexed to find that many surviving scientists still do not “accept the idea that they or their peers had committed any wrongs.” Her arguments are not strange to me. In Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ-Warfare Tests over Populated Areas (1990), I expressed similar misgivings about the Army’s biological warfare tests. After all, the well-publicized Nürnberg Code was part of the postwar verdict against Nazi doctors who killed thousands of Jews and others in ghastly experiments. It unambiguously affirmed the ethical requirement of informed consent. Welsome also notes that the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947 and the Defense Department in 1953 had rules “requiring researchers to obtain the consent of sick patients for therapeutic and nontherapeutic experiments.” But the fact that so many reputable researchers were ignoring the standards is puzzling. The likely explanation is that the values of the time were still in transition. The social environment did not yet fully match the newly underscored standards. Moreover, it was a time when authority of many kinds –governmental, scientific, medical– was commonly trusted and deferred to. Citizens had faith in a government that had led them to victory over the Germans and Japanese and now was protecting them against new enemies. Scientific authority commanded respect by virtue of spectacular scientific achievements, most obviously splitting the atom. Medical authority derived from a longstanding deference to the healer. Doctors traditionally were demigods who were not obliged to detail their treatments to patients. The arrangement was not simply an arbitrary imposition by the powerful over the powerless but was largely accepted by a deferential citizenry. By the 1970s, deference to authority had yielded to increasing skepticism. Disclosures about the array of unethical experiments only enhanced a distrust of authority seeded by the Vietnam War and Watergate. Appreciating that shift in values would have helped Welsome’s presentation. Instead, her division between good actors and bad is too neat and appears self-righteous. She condemns the findings of the president’s advisory committee as “disappointing and timid.” She condemns the post-World War II atmosphere that encouraged doctors to publish papers and view “patients as little more than white mice.” She condemns everyone who ran the Energy Department and its predecessor agencies before O’Leary, calling them an unbroken “line of steely-eyed patriots.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Conversely, Welsome glorifies O’Leary, suggesting that her resignation at the end of Clinton’s first term was prompted in part by bureaucrats who resented her shining “the bright light of truth” on the radiation experiments. O’Leary’s infamous trade missions “may have been overstaffed,” concedes Welsome, but she implies that Republicans overreacted with “hostile questions.” Welsome surely understates the magnitude of problems that O’Leary brought on herself. She writes nothing about the $4.5 million that O’Leary spent on foreign trips, including one to India with an entourage of 76 in a plane that had previously been leased by Madonna. O’Leary also was found to have spent $43,000 to find out which reporters were writing favorable articles. And as department records later showed, she routinely manipulated statistics to exaggerate the number of Energy Department contracts with businesses owned by women and minorities. None of this minimizes the service that O’Leary and the administration performed by opening the radiation records or that Welsome performed with her compelling descriptions of the experiments. But the lack of balance in Welsome’s treatment of O’Leary mirrors her insensitivity to the value differences between the postwar decades and the present. Public demands for accountability simply were not the same. The distinction is wonderfully, if inadvertently and grotesquely, demonstrated by a scientist who, at a 1955 Atomic Energy Commission conference, estimated that after all-out atomic war, a few people would survive and “keep the race going.” According to this scientist, “They might not populate the earth with just the descendants we would like to see. They might not be highly civilized like we are. They might not know anything about atomic warfare, for example.” Cold and ludicrous as such a calculus now seems, there is no indication that it put off any of the scientist’s listeners. Unless we believe that he and thousands of other American scientific, medical, and governmental leaders were psychopaths, we must allow that they were acting within the value framework of the time. It would take another generation for values to catch up to the newly codified standards. Welsome’s manner of criticism has implications beyond the radiation and experimentation issues. By using a contemporary template to rigidly judge yesterday’s behavior, she implicitly invites future generations to do the same to us. Who is to say which values that today are embraced by large segments of the population could not be viewed with unforgiving contempt in the future? Frying humans in electric chairs? Killing a fetus, or, conversely, denying choice to a pregnant woman? Refusing same- sex partners the opportunity to marry? Whatever one’s personal views on these issues, fair-minded observers understand that people of good will may be found on all sides. Of course, some behaviors are so egregious as to deserve condemnation in any era: The Nazi medical experiments, for example, in which victims were injected with toxins or placed in high pressure chambers to observe the manner in which they would die. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE To extend a generosity of understanding to earlier generations is not to excuse or defend past reprehensible behavior, but to acknowledge that future generations will almost certainly judge many of our own actions –even and perhaps especially those done for the “greater good”– as harshly as Welsome judges the radiation researchers. Leonard A. Cole teaches political science at Rutgers University and is the author of CLOUDS OF S ECRECY: THE A RMY’S G ERM-WARFARE T ESTS OVER POPULATED A REAS (1990) and of THE E LEVENTH P LAGUE: THE P OLITICS OF BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL WARFARE (W.H. Freeman Company).

Professor Martha Stephens’s THE TREATMENT: THE STORY OF THOSE WHO DIED IN THE CINCINNATI RADIATION TESTS (Durham NC: Duke UP, 2002) SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS During World War II and the Cold War that followed, the US government conducted a comprehensive radiological research program involving many federal agencies and departments. A large number of these studies involved human subjects. Human radiation research during World War II focused on studies to evaluate the behavior and effects of such radioactive materials as uranium and plutonium, which were important in the development of nuclear weapons. After the war, the US government expanded its radiological research efforts to include human research programs sponsored by the Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, and the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy). While some projects sought to chart the behavior of radioactive materials in the body, others examined the biological effects of radiation and the potential for using radioactive materials and external radiation exposure in the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. One such study was conducted at the University of Cincinnati from 1960 to 1972 under the guidance of Dr. Eugene Saenger, a well-known and highly respected radiologist. The study was supported in part by a contract with the University of Cincinnati by the US Department of Defense to obtain further information on the acute effects of whole-body ionizing radiation exposure and to develop a biological dosimeter. Such work was of great interest to the military during the Cold War. The Cincinnati study was the last in a long line of studies supported by the federal government to evaluate radiation effects in humans undergoing total-body irradiation. The 88 subjects had inoperable and disseminated cancer but were considered not near death; their average life expectancy was about 24 months. The subjects, 60% African American, were elderly, poorly educated, and economically disadvantaged. Many patients died within weeks of receiving whole-body radiation. The Treatment is an account of the whole-body radiation studies at the University of Cincinnati. The author, Martha Stephens, is a retired professor of English at the University of HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Cincinnati. As a junior faculty member in 1971, she became interested in the Cincinnati radiation experiments and, under the auspices of the university’s Junior Faculty Association, wrote a report alleging that the patients were not informed of the risks of the study and were given high doses of whole-body radiation without any benefit. However, an internal report commissioned by the university president and an independent report by the American College of Radiology found no substantive wrongdoing by Saenger and his colleagues and disagreed with the findings in the Stephens report. The matter was essentially put to rest after the radiation study was terminated in 1972. Interest in the study resurfaced in 1994 when the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was created by President Clinton to investigate reports of possibly unethical experiments funded by the federal government. The Cincinnati study was among hundreds of human radiation experiments carefully examined by the advisory committee. The author’s stated objective in writing this book “was to recreate the full anatomy of one major medical project gone badly wrong.” Accordingly, I expected a thorough description and analysis of the Cincinnati studies and a balanced presentation of the issues. Sadly the book fails to deliver. For the most part, the book is a recounting of the author’s challenges to bring to light the details of the medical records and to secure some measure of justice for the patients and their families. An antimedical stance is apparent from the beginning. On the first page of chapter 1, Stephens notes that since her work on the Cincinnati radiation study, she has refused medical and dental x-rays and decided that her children should receive no medical radiation except “in a genuine medical crisis.” Such a perspective does not reflect appreciation of the role of radiation in medical diagnosis and therapy and the importance of balancing risks and benefits in medical management. I was particularly disappointed in the lack of any substantive discussion of many key issues in the human radiation experiments, including informed consent and the deliberate withholding of risk information, the impact of the sociopolitical climate of the times and how that environment affected support and conduct of the studies, the importance of distinguishing between experimental research and medical care of the patient, and the use of vulnerable groups as experimental subjects. The author effectively conveys the tragic story of the subjects and their families. Her personal struggle to get the story out and to serve as a patients’ advocate is inspiring and courageous. However, it is unfortunate that the Cincinnati story is not put into the larger context of human experimentation. The lessons learned from the Cincinnati experiments and hundreds of other human studies have served to improve protection of human subjects from research risks so that the human experiments conducted during the Cold War will not happen again. That is the real monument to the Cincinnati radiation subjects. Reviewed by Kenneth L. Mossman, PhD, Arizona State University, Tempe AZ HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

2003

Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange was formed in Vietnam to provide medical care, rehabilitation services, and financial assistance to those impacted by Agent Orange. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Alston Chase’s HARVARD AND THE UNABOMBER: THE EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN TERRORIST (W.W. Norton & Company) connected the dots between Ted Kaczynski’s abusive experiences as an undergraduate under Professor of Clinical Psychology Henry Alexander Murray to his subsequent life trajectory. In fact, however, he was aware that he was being studied and participated in this CIA-sponsored experiment more or less willingly. Although the subjects were lied to, being informed that they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student while actually they were being subjected to a “purposely brutalizing psychological experiment,” Ted could have opted out. During the test he was taken into a room and connected to electrodes that monitored his physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a one-way mirror. Each subject had previously written an essay detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations, and this material had been turned over to an anonymous attorney who entered the room and individually belittled each student based in part on disclosures they had offered. This was filmed and later in the study the subjects’ facial expressions were played back to them several times.

Books intended for little children, such as this one “Henry Climbs a Mountain” by D.B. Johnson published during this year, tend to falsify history by misrepresenting the $1 poll tax that Thoreau had famously refused to pay as having had something to do with human slavery (books intended for grown-ups, to the contrary, tend to falsify history by misrepresenting the poll tax that Thoreau refused to pay as having had something to do with our War on Mexico): “Henry wants to climb a mountain, and nothing is going to stop him. Then Sam, the tax collector, puts him in jail for not paying his taxes. Henry refuses to pay to a state that allows slavery. But being locked up doesn’t stop Henry. He still gets to splash in rivers, swing from trees, and meet a stranger. This bear, HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE modeled on the real Henry David Thoreau, roams free.”

D. B. JOHNSON

There are two dangers here. First, to pretend that this $1-per-year poll tax had something to do with human slavery, or had something to do with our War on Mexico –when those factoids are easily demonstrated to be historically false– leaves the doctrine of civil disobedience open to the disrepute, that it was something founded merely upon historical falsehoods and is therefore something to be sniffed at. Second, to presume that you understand the doctrine of civil disobedience when you presume falsely that it has to do merely with disobeying laws that are evil, that it does not extend beyond the domain of evil law, is to presume that you already fully understand something that you have not yet even begun to comprehend. HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

2004

January: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that the Bush-II administration had “systematically misrepresented” the threat from Iraq’s weapons programs.

The Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange sued the US chemical companies responsible for producing the toxic chemicals used during the war. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE

2005

Lyndon LaRouche opposed President George W. Bush’s plan for the privatization of Social Security (which had it been enacted would have brought utter financial collapse upon an entire generation of retirees during the Great Recession soon to come).

The Environmental Protection Administration began to work with the Vietnamese government to measure the levels of dioxin at the former Da Nang Airbase.

The Joint Advisory Committee on Agent Orange made up of US and Vietnamese government officials and experts held its initial meeting to explore areas of scientific cooperation, technical assistance, and environmental remediation of dioxin hotspots. Additional meetings would be held in 2008 and 2009. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

March: The Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange lawsuit filed during January 2004 was dismissed by Judge Jack Weinstein (he who had settled the American veteran lawsuit in 1984), because he could find no legal basis for the plaintiffs’ claims. He explained that there had been no law between 1961 and 1971 prohibiting wartime use of defoliants. His decision would be appealed. Negotiations between Vietnam and the US, started in 2000 to set up a joint research project studying affects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese population, would break down during 2005 because the sides could not agree on the research protocol. The research project would be canceled. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS Joseph Kip Kosek’s “Richard Gregg, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Strategy of Nonviolence,” The Journal of American History 91. RICHARD GREGG AND GANDHI

Excerpts are presented below: Shortly after the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955/1956 established Martin Luther King Jr. as the nation’s leading practitioner of nonviolent direct action, an official from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) asked him to name the books that had most influenced his thinking. King chose five texts. Four of them seem unsurprising: Mohandas Gandhi’s autobiography, Louis Fischer’s 1950 biography of the Indian leader, Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, and Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel classic, CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS. The fifth book on the list, however, was Richard Bartlett Gregg’s 1934 THE POWER OF NON- VIOLENCE, a text virtually unknown today among historians of modern America. Even major biographies of King, such as those by Taylor Branch and David Garrow, largely ignore Gregg. Yet he was the first American to develop a substantial theory of nonviolent resistance. Militant nonviolence did not emerge in HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the United States as a response to racial segregation in the 1950s. Its central characteristics appeared during the interwar period, amid a worldwide crisis of democracy fomented by industrial conflict, economic instability, an increasingly precarious colonial system, and the ascendant threats of fascism and Communism. In this context, Richard Gregg became part of a small radical pacifist vanguard that went beyond mere opposition to international war to insist that the future of democratic societies depended on their members’ absolute renunciation of violence as a means of social change or conflict resolution. As an alternative, members of pacifist organizations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the War Resisters League (WRL) began to experiment with social and political practices that they came to call nonviolent direct action, nonviolent resistance, militant nonviolence, or simply nonviolence. Then, during World War II, a new generation of pacifists and their allies took the project further, particularly through their work in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). By the time that King read Gregg’s writings in 1956, the method of nonviolence had undergone decades of elaboration, revision, and occasional practical application. The recovery of Richard Bartlett Gregg’s career opens a window on the early trajectory of nonviolent action as an intellectual, theoretical, and political project. ... More than any other single figure, Gregg taught American pacifists and social reformers that nonviolence was more than an ethical or religious principle; it was also a self-conscious method of social action with its own logic and strategy. Specifically, he argued that the method, particularly when it involved suffering, became a dramatic performance that would elicit guilt and shame from opponents and sympathy from onlookers. ... The railway shopmen’s strike of 1922 probably did more to shape Richard Bartlett Gregg’s ideas about violence than did the military slaughter of the Great War. A total of 1.6 million workers went on strike that year, including not only railway shopmen but also miners and textile workers. For many Americans, the labor battles that ensued posed a far more immediate threat to their way of life than the bloodshed across the Atlantic Ocean had. Soldiers had not occupied American cities in 1918, as they had in Europe, but federal troops did march through the streets of many industrial communities in the United States during the summer of 1922. In addition, local marshals and company guards patrolled major railroad shops in Chicago, where Gregg worked, and in cities across the nation. Guards occasionally fired on strikers, who fought back by kidnapping and assaulting replacement workers, sabotaging trains, and dynamiting tracks. In this desperate climate, the Harding administration became increasingly intent on ending the conflict, and in September a federal judge issued an injunction against the rail strike as a conspiracy in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Over the next few months, the shopmen reached separate agreements with HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE the railway companies and returned to work. Federal law had given the railroad owners almost total victory. ... Neither Mohandas Gandhi nor Richard Gregg invented the practice of nonviolent resistance. People lacking power have probably employed what the anthropologist James C. Scott has called “weapons of the weak” as long as social inequalities have existed in human societies. In the American context, black slaves in particular used forms of sabotage and subterfuge short of open revolt to assert their autonomy and improve their material conditions. Yet by its nature such “everyday resistance” renounced any attempt at systematic social change. Closer to Gregg’s own theories was the approach of the nonresistant followers of William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830s and 1840s. Those radical pacifists, while promising to “repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of authority,” placed great faith in the power of public opinion. An 1839 article in one of their journals described the peculiar advantage that nonresistants held over attackers: “The aggressor of a nonresistant will be placed in the wrong; he will be condemned by himself, by byestanders, by the public.” Yet, although Garrison and his associates certainly knew how to deploy public spectacle, they ultimately saw their stance as an inner conviction to do right regardless of political consequences. For Garrison, the strategic advantages of nonviolence were incidental to its religious superiority; Gregg’s writing made nonviolent strategy itself a subject of careful analysis and conscious manipulation. Gregg’s innovations in nonviolent action developed alongside, and later within, the new radical pacifism that revitalized and transformed the Garrisonian tradition in the decades after World War I. The devastating effects of the conflict in Europe and the jingoistic and reactionary climate of the home front led a few Americans, most of them left-leaning ministers and reformers, to embrace absolute pacifism. The most important organization for the dissemination of their views in the interwar period was the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which had been founded in 1914. The FOR’s roots in the Social Gospel showed in its nonsectarian Christian orientation and in its wide-ranging attempts to infuse pacifist principles into diverse arenas of social life, such as industry, education, and race relations. The War Resisters League, begun in 1923 as a secular offshoot of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, focused more narrowly on international war but shared its parent’s radicalism. In the 1930s, Gregg would become a member of the WRL and a leader in the FOR. ... He thought of his books as a way to extricate pacifism “from the profitless atmosphere of emotional adjectives and of vague mysticism, futile protests and sentimentalism combined with confused thinking.” For this project, he cultivated a diffident writing style marked by constant hedging; he frequently acknowledged to his readers that he might be “mistaken” or even HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “wrong.” The reservations were an organic part of his argument, for he believed that a practitioner of nonviolence (like a theorist of it) “recognizes that no matter what his beliefs and convictions are, he may possibly be mistaken or at fault.” In part Gregg borrowed this tone from Gandhi himself, who became both legendary and notorious for his public confessions of uncertainty and his nearly obsessive self-examination. Gregg tried to move pacifists beyond allegiance to moral truisms and toward a more pragmatic politics. ... Earlier religious pacifists (and before the twentieth century, virtually all American pacifism was grounded in religious faith) tended to view their condemnation of violence as an internal conviction. Its effect on others, though sometimes profound, was ultimately irrelevant in comparison with the believer’s own determination to follow the divine will. Gregg, in contrast, said little about the nonviolent resister’s own beliefs, focusing instead on the reactions of both violent attackers and disinterested spectators. By doing so, he helped make nonviolence a technique for social change. “Let us ... try,” Gregg suggested, “to understand first how non-violent resistance works.” In each of the three books, he presented a pair of dramatic scenes. First, he asked readers to imagine two men, one who attacks violently and another who defends himself by the same method. Such combatants, he explained, implicitly consent to a common set of moral values, despite their apparent opposition. Both believe in the efficacy and appropriateness of using physical force to settle disputes. Then Gregg changed the scene, portraying a violent attacker who faces a nonviolent resister. In failing to defend himself, the second person intentionally disrupts the attacker’s value system. He employs “a sort of moral jiu-jitsu” that causes his attacker to “lose his moral balance.” This was a psychological game, and Gregg counted on the violent attacker to cave in from sympathy, pity, or sheer bewilderment. He suggested that the nonviolent conversion of an opponent was “analogous to ... religious conversion, though in this case the change is moral rather than religious.” More often, however, he drew on modern psychological models to explain how it happened. Gregg’s use of psychological theories was opportunistic and eclectic; he was equally likely to employ Freudianism, the early behaviorism of John B. Watson, or the theory of emotion formulated by William James and Carl Georg Lange to make his case. The larger point was that scientific authority could validate the methods that Gandhi explained in moral and spiritual terms. Just as modern economics had shown the unlikely rationality of hand spinning, so modern psychology proved the effectiveness of standing defenseless before an enemy’s assault. The nonviolent method, though a sincere expression of principle, was also a public performance intended to persuade an audience. Gregg’s construction of nonviolent action rested on the power of sympathy. “Undoubtedly,” he wrote, “the sight of another person voluntarily undergoing suffering for a belief or ideal moves the HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE assailant and beholders alike and tends to change their hearts and make them all feel kin-ship with the sufferer.” He proposed two reasons for this phenomenon. One was physiological: humans had evolved to react to one another’s pain. “Hence the sight of suffering, in all probability, causes an involuntary sympathetic response in the nervous system of the beholder, especially in the autonomic nervous system,” Gregg wrote. The other reason stemmed from a psychological desire for vicarious experience. Gregg noted that “everyone wants, in his heart, to be strong and brave.” At the sight of a nonviolent resister, “we wonder if we could do so well, and perhaps we even unconsciously identify ourselves with him.” That potential for identification made “beholders” into a potent force in Gregg’s scheme. Spectators played an important role in the victory of the nonviolent resister. Gregg, who was fundamentally optimistic about human nature, believed that a violent attacker would indeed convert, but he argued that third parties could assist the process. “If there are onlookers,” he wrote, “the assailant soon loses still more poise. Instinctively he dramatizes himself before them and becomes more aware of his position.” The “audience,” Gregg thought, became “a sort of mirror,” reflecting back to the attacker his egregious violation of moral standards. Gregg believed that mass media had created a global audience, for both nonviolent resisters and their violent opponents. Under modern conditions, he explained, “ruthless deeds tend to become known to the world at large.” He acknowledged the existence of state censorship but maintained that the power of mass media would eventually overcome it. “Newspaper reporters are always keen for scenting a ‘story,’” Gregg opined, “and as soon as they learn of a censorship anywhere they are still more eager.” Whatever its moral import, the scene of defenseless men and women voluntarily succumbing to vicious assaults made a fascinating “story.” Nonviolent resistance “makes wonderful news,” Gregg insisted. “It is so unusual and dramatic.” He even compared the power of the nonviolent resister’s appeals to the persuasive effects of “commercial advertising.” He concluded, with both prescience and unwarranted optimism, that the threat of bad publicity would give the practitioners of nonviolence a decisive advantage over their violent opponents. Gregg’s pragmatic theories led him to the daring argument that “non-violent resistance is perhaps ... more like war than we had imagined.” ... Nonviolent resistance became a kind of war without killing, for Gregg thought that killing was unnecessary to achieve war’s goals. “Though war uses violence,” he explained, “the effect it aims at is psychological. Non-violent resistance also aims at and secures psychological effects, though by different means.” If nonviolent action was a kind of conflict and not a retreat from the world, it needed to draw on the “truths and virtues of militarism.” Following Gandhi, Gregg’s work suggested that nonviolent action had many of the characteristics of war: It relied on courage, loyalty, and other martial qualities; it required attention to strategy; and it depended on moral, HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE emotional, and psychological advantages, not solely physical ones. ... THE POWER OF NON-VIOLENCE garnered enthusiastic reviews in radical pacifist and liberal Protestant circles. It became, in the words of one FOR leader, “the ‘Bible’ of non-violence.” It was the first of Gregg’s books to be published in America, rather than India. The FOR promoted it in its journal FELLOWSHIP, while Gregg himself led study groups across the Northeast and promoted his views during a short stint as director of Pendle Hill, a Quaker school. (“Calm yourself,” he wrote a friend, “because I have not become a Quaker.”) ... King came to understand the boycott, in part, as a dramatic spectacle designed to elicit the sympathy of opponents and onlookers, just as Gregg’s theories had posited. “I tell you,” he warned black Montgomerians in a November 1956 speech, “if we hit back ... we will be shamed before the world.” To prevent such humiliation, the MIA adopted the CORE technique of the sociodrama. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional, the prevention of violence between white and black riders remained a daunting task. To smooth the transition, the boycott leaders rehearsed scenarios that they would encounter on the buses. In the churches where MIA meetings were held, King recalled, boycott leaders “lined up chairs in front of the altar to resemble a bus, with a driver’s seat out front.” Then “actors” from the audience came forward to fill the roles of driver and white and black passengers, some pretending to be “hostile” and others “courteous.” These “actors played out a scene of insult or violence,” and a general discussion among the performers and the audience followed. The participants played their parts with the utmost conviction. “Sometimes,” King admitted, “the person playing a white man put so much zeal into his performance that he had to be gently reproved from the sidelines.” In other sessions, an actor playing a black passenger would return insults or blows; “whenever this happened we worked to channel his words and deeds in a nonviolent direction.” The MIA sociodramas brought together the religious and performative elements of nonviolence. In the sacred space of a church, black Montgomerians became “actors” practicing for a real-life show of Christian nonviolence before a world audience. Indeed, the tension in Gregg’s work between the religious principle of nonviolence and its strategic spectacles proved a great resource. Niebuhr had faulted Gregg for refusing to choose between moral idealism and political realism; King too refused to choose. This ambiguity may have made the civil rights movement logically inconsistent, but it also gave that movement a unique potency. The gaps in Gregg’s theories let religious and secular proponents of nonviolence coexist and allowed its moral and strategic elements to reinforce each other. ... Gregg’s relationship to the method of nonviolent direct action was, finally, a paradox. In his wide-ranging studies and HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE interpretations of Gandhi and India, he had aimed to set out the characteristics of a new civilization, not simply to write a handbook for a new political technology. Gregg cared deeply about nonviolent action and racial justice, but his broader goal was to create a countermodernity that would use modern knowledge to foster a more humane, less artificial society. ... Whether he was seeking to mediate industrial disputes during World War I, defending Gandhi’s plans for a decentralized agrarian economy, or farming his way through World War II, Gregg’s life was a long search for spheres of authentic, meaningful work under conditions of modern alienation and regimentation. ... [In a footnote] Civil disobedience against the state, and the anarchist spirit of protest it represented, was also a departure from the Gandhian concept. Civil disobedience as proposed by Thoreau and practiced by anarchists depended on individual acts. Mass action was suspect because participants might not share the same conviction or some might feel coerced into action.... In Gandhian protest, civil disobedience could begin with individual acts, but only for the purpose of mobilizing mass protest. Otherwise, civil disobedience was an ego trip, not a moral action. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2006

January: Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and other US makers of Agent Orange were ordered to pay damages to South Korean veterans of the Vietnam War in a South Korean court. Approximately 7,000 veterans out of the 17,200 who filed would be awarded from $5,000 to $40,000 each. The awards would add up to $63,000,000. However, this court had almost no ability to enforce such awards. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

The US Food and Drug Administration’s labeling law took effect, requiring trans fats to be included on the Nutrient Facts Panel of packaged foods. “Warning: This edible product has cheap stuff in it that may cause you to die early of a heart attack.”

An obituary in Utne Magazine for Thoreau scholar Brad Dean, who just died of a heart attack at the age of 51: Speaking a Word for Success Brad Dean, 1954-2006 By Chris Dodge, Utne.com January 2006 Issue Picture, if you can, a Thoreau scholar riding a motorcycle. In late February 2003, I emailed the editor of the Thoreau Society Bulletin addressing him as “Bradley P. Dean,” saying that I was a new member of the Society and had just enjoyed reading the Fall 2002 Bulletin. Telling him that I’d been finding many Thoreauvian references of late, I quoted Thoreau’s journal entry of November 4, 1858 — “We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, and then we can hardly see anything else” — and then appended a dozen or so bibliographic notes from a variety of contemporary sources. I heard back within minutes: “Hello Chris. Call me Brad.” Dean’s response, thanking me for the notes I’d sent, began a correspondence that grew over time from collegial to friendly, fueled by a shared passion. There are now 476 items in my email folder titled “Brad.” That’s nearly one for every two days since then. The last was sent to him on Friday the 13th, the day before Brad Dean had a heart attack and died at home. He was just 51. When I learned the news I felt shattered. Then a sense of vast personal loss welled up. Brad was not just my closest but my only Thoreauvian correspondent. He encouraged me, gently edited HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE and published my words, and, many times it seemed, was alone in understanding an important part of my world. Brad was generous in sharing his knowledge. Now I’m not sure how to imagine my ecosystem without him. To whom do I go with my questions about Thoreau? Who will continue his work? I always thought we’d meet someday. Now he is gone and his important work remains uncompleted. Brad Dean edited two highly acclaimed works from Thoreau’s unpublished manuscripts, Faith in a Seed and Wild Fruits, as well as Letters to a Spiritual Seeker, a collection of Thoreau’s letters to H.G.O. Blake. As a brief obituary in the Bloomington, Indiana, Herald-Times notes, Brad was working on Thoreau’s unpublished “Indian Notebooks” at the time of his death. I’ve looked forward to reading this book some day. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote on the death of Thoreau at age 44: “The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task which none else can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that he should depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is.” The same words apply now as well. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2007

May: President George W. Bush managed a whole lot of his war expenditures –since he “did not believe in raising taxes”– through the legislative trick known as “earmarks.” He slipped costly details of his pointless wars into otherwise innocuous pieces of legislation, where they would be less likely to raise anybody’s blood pressure. During this month, for instance, he signed into law a supplemental spending bill for his wars that included one of these earmarks of his — $3,000,000 for remediation of dioxin “hotspots” on former US military bases in Vietnam and for public health programs in the surrounding communities. An earmark for a war that was a war no more! It would take his administration more than a year to figure out how to dispose of these newly earmarked funds. First they would budget $500,000 to hire and support a full-time environmental remediation advisor, who was to operate for the next couple of years out of the US Embassy in Hanoi (hire somebody, that’s easy, some loyal Republican always needs a job and an office). Then half the funding would go for environmental containment and remediation planning at the Da Nang airport (keyword “planning,” with everybody sitting around in air-conditioned offices in suits and nothing actually getting accomplished), and then the remaining $1,000,000 would trickle away into 3 nongovernmental organizations providing assistance to people with disabilities, mostly around Da Nang (hey, they had to produce some results with some of this gummint moola, otherwise it woulda looked sorta bad). SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Rebecca Solnit wrote, in Orion magazine during this month and the following one, on “The Thoreau Problem: When the route to paradise threads through prison”: Thoreau was emphatic about the huckleberries. In one of his two most famous pieces of writing, “Civil Disobedience,” he concluded his account of a night in Concord’s jail with, “I was put in jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party.” He told the same story again in Walden, this time saying that he “returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair-Haven Hill.” That he told it twice suggests that he considered the conjunction of prisons and berry parties, of the landscape of incarceration and of pastoral pleasure, significant. But why? The famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay on Emerson’s woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nature, though he went back to town to eat and talk with friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn’t fit into Walden‘s narrative. He went to jail not only because he felt passionately enough about national affairs –slavery and the war on Mexico– to refuse to pay his tax, but also because the town jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended. Says the introduction to my paperback edition of Walden and “Civil Disobedience”: “As much as Thoreau wanted to disentangle himself from other people’s problems so he could get on with his own life, he sometimes found that the issue of black slavery spoiled his country walks. His social conscience impinged on his HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE consciousness, even though he believed that his duty was not to eradicate social evils but to live his life independently.” To believe this is to believe that the woods were far from Concord jail not merely by foot but by thought. To believe that conscience is an imposition upon consciousness is to regard engagement as a hijacker rather than a rudder, interference with one’s true purpose rather than perhaps at least part of that purpose. Thoreau did not believe so or wish that it were so, and he contradicted this isolationist statement explicitly in “Civil Disobedience” (completed, unlike Walden, shortly after those years in the woods), but many who have charge of his reputation do. These scholars and critics permit no conversation, let alone any unity, between Thoreau the rebel, intransigent muse to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and that other Thoreau who wrote about autumnal tints, ice, light, color, grasses, woodchucks, and other natural histories, essays easily and often defanged and diced up into inspiring extracts. But for Thoreau, any subject was a good enough starting point to travel any distance, toward any destination. This compartmentalizing of Thoreau is a microcosm of a larger partition in American thought, a fence built in the belief that places in the imagination can be contained. Those who deny that nature and culture, landscape and politics, the city and the country are inextricably interfused have undermined the connections for all of us (so few have been able to find Thoreau’s short, direct route between them since). This makes politics dreary and landscape trivial, a vacation site. It banishes certain thoughts, including the thought that much of what the environmental movement dubbed wilderness was or is indigenous homeland –a very social and political space indeed, then and now– and especially the thought that Thoreau in jail must have contemplated the following day’s huckleberry party, and Thoreau among the huckleberries must have ruminated on his stay in jail. If “black slavery spoiled his country walks,” it spoiled the slaves’ country walks even more. Thus the unresisting walk to jail. “Eastward, I go only by force; but westward I go free,” Thoreau wrote. His thoughts on the matter might be summed up this way: You head for the hills to enjoy the best of what the world is at this moment; you head for confrontation, for resistance, for picket lines to protect it, to liberate it. Thus it is that the road to paradise often runs through prison, thus it is that Thoreau went to jail to enjoy a better country, and thus it is that one of his greatest students, Martin Luther King Jr., found himself in jail and eventually in the way of a bullet on what got called the long road to freedom, whose goal he spoke of as the mountaintop. Conventional environmental writing has often maintained a strict silence on or even an animosity toward the city, despite its importance as a lower-impact place for the majority to live, its intricate relations to the rural, and the direct routes between the two. Imagining the woods or any untrammeled landscape as an HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE unsocial place, an outside, also depends on erasing those who dwelt and sometimes still dwell there, the original Americans — and one more thing that can be said in favor of Thoreau is that he spent a lot of time imaginatively repopulating with Indians the woods around Concord, and even prepared quantities of notes for a never-attempted history of Native America. Not that those woods were unsocial even after the aboriginal population was driven out. “Visitors” was one of the chapters of Walden, and in it he describes meeting in the woods and guiding farther on the road to freedom runaway slaves. Rather than ruining his country walks, some slaves joined him on them, or perhaps he joined them in the act of becoming free. Some of those he guided were on the Underground Railroad, in which his mother and sisters in Concord were deeply involved, and a few months after that famous night in jail Thoreau hosted a meeting of Concord’s most important abolitionist group, the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, at his Walden Pond hut. What kind of a forest was this, with slaves, rebels, and the ghosts of the original inhabitants all moving through the trees? If he went to jail to demonstrate his commitment to the freedom of others, he went to the berries to exercise his own recovered freedom, the liberty to do whatever he wished, and the evidence in all his writing is that he very often wished to pick berries. There’s a widespread belief, among both activists and those who cluck disapprovingly over insufficiently austere activists, that idealists should not enjoy any pleasure denied to others, that beauty, sensuality, delight all ought to be stalled behind some dam that only the imagined revolution will break. This schism creates, as the alternative to a life of selfless devotion, a life of flight from engagement, which seems to be one way those years at Walden Pond are sometimes portrayed. But change is not always by revolution, the deprived don’t generally wish that the rest of us would join them in deprivation, and a passion for justice and pleasure in small things are not incompatible. That’s part of what the short jaunt from jail to hill says. Perhaps prison is anything that severs and alienates, paradise is the reclaimed commons with the fences thrown down, and so any step toward connection and communion is a step toward paradise, even if the route detours through jail. Thoreau was demonstrating on that one day in Concord in June of 1847 both what dedication to freedom was and what enjoyment of freedom might look like — free association, free roaming, the picking of the fruits of the Earth for free, free choice of commitments. That is the direct route to paradise, the one road worth traveling. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2008

February: A groundbreaking ceremony was held for an additional classroom building, “West House,” at the Princeton Friends School on the grounds of the Quaker monthly meeting at Stony Brook near Princeton, New Jersey. This facility was to feature 2 primary classrooms, 2 science labs, a Learning Center, an art room, and a nurse’s office.

Fidel Castro announced his resignation as President of Cuba.

The 2d US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld the decision by Judge Jack Weinstein that the US chemical companies Dow and Monsanto had not committed war crimes or intentionally caused harm by providing defoliants to the US government for use during the Vietnam war (evidently this judge never became aware that it would have cost these companies like pennies a pound of product to use a low-temp process rather than their high-temp process that generated significant quantities of dioxin as a product contaminant). In a separate opinion, the appellate court also pointed out that such companies are protected from any lawsuits that might happen to be brought by misguided US military veterans or their misguided relatives — because they had been mere government contractors, merely looking the other way while merely doing, as they had been instructed, the necessary work for which they were being so very well rewarded. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2009

February: Conference attendees of the United Nations Development Program agreed on their goals — for now, containment of some more of the dioxin-contaminated soil at the 3 major known “hot spots,” Bien Hoa, Da Nang, and Phu Cat in Vietnam, and (eventually) completely eliminating this supremely poisonous chemical from these barrels of contained soil and sediment. Attending the meeting were representatives of the US State Department, USAID, and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Milk the cash cow, guys and dolls, our motto is doing good and doing well! SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Here is an evaluation of the drop-in traffic at the www.kouroo.info site, as offered by a commercial corporation that makes a very real business in the evaluation of the lucrative possibilities of placing advertisements on various for-profit internet sites: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE March: Raúl Castro removed some of Fidel Castro’s appointees.

The federal Congress appropriated an additional $3,000,000 for dioxin removal and health care facilities in Da Nang, Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was refusing to hear an appeal by the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange case against chemical companies as decided by the Court of Appeals in 2008, as well as some other lawsuits filed by American veterans who had been taken ill after the 1984 class action settlement. Taking the easy way out, the Court of Appeals decision was allowed to stand — is it time for lunch yet? SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

May: The US Department of Veterans Affairs established “AL Amyloidosis” as a presumptive condition on the Agent Orange/herbicide list. The Institute of Medicine concluded that there was suggestive evidence of association between exposures to herbicides and this disease.

September: Frances Crowe and 3 other women were arrested for non-violent civil disobedience at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.

A new scientific study, conducted by Vancouver-based Hatfield Consultants, showed a direct link between dioxin-contaminated hot spots in Vietnam and the blood and breast milk of humans, by tracking dioxin’s chemical fingerprint. They were able to follow its movements through food chains out of the soil and lake sediment, into the fat of fish and ducks, and into the bodies of humans. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

October: The US Department of Veterans Affairs established a service connection for Vietnam veterans with B cell leukemias such as hairy cell leukemia, Parkinson’s disease, and ischemic heart disease, that would make it less difficult in the future for them to obtain care at a vets hospital. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2010

August: Parkinson’s disease, ischemic heart disease, and B cell leukemias (including hairy cell leukemia) were finally added by the federal Congress to a list of “presumptive” Agent Orange conditions. More than 150,000 veterans would be expected to submit claims during the following 12 to 18 months, many of whom would be potentially eligible for retroactive disability payments based on past claims. Additionally, the Veterans’ Administration would review approximately 90,000 previously denied claims by Vietnam veterans. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: June 28, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.