Military-"Medical" Madpractice (ddjango)
Physicians at Guantanamo violate medical ethics: study
(AFP) – July 24, 2009
WASHINGTON — The use of physicians at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay has forced medical professionals to violate their ethics codes, according to findings published Thursday in the UK journal Lancet.
The roles that medical professionals have been called on to play at the controversial detention facility "has damaged the integrity of the physicians working for the military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)," the study said.
"These physicians had a conflict of loyalty because of their ethical obligations to their imprisoned patients and the Bush administration's demands to further the goals and interests of military commanders and intelligence officials." [...]
Most Americans, I imagine, remain under the impression that torture of prisoners and their use as subjects of human experimentation was the province of evil Japanese and Nazi military scientists and doctors during WWII. Many may also assume that such practices have occurred within the extended Soviet Union and, perhaps, by the governments of China, North Korea, and the like. But the "It Can't Happen Here" syndrome is widespread. Never would this happen in and by the United States. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.
We all now know that our military and "intelligence" forces have used scientific techniques, monitored and/or administered by doctors to torture captives in the "war on terror" since 9/11/2001. They did this in the name of "national security", that malodorous phrase which they use to justify any and all conceivable war crimes and other crimes against humanity perpetrated by themselves and their operatives. It is likely that these techniques are still used.
What is not widely known is that the military-medical-scientific complex has been and still is guilty of these crimes, not just against perceived "enemies", but indeed against our own citizens and members of our military forces.
Let me make it clear that I do not condone such experimentation, conducted with any goal in mind on any humans, foe or friend. The fact that they have been and continue to be foisted on Americans by Americans is simply testament to the arrogant and cynical disregard for human safety and life that are supposed to be the very basis of our society. Further, their ubiquitous occurances belie any attempt to characterize such experiments as isolated instances of unethical behavior on the part of a few rogue scientists.
After WWII, as the result of the unveiling of Nazi atrocities, the Nuremberg Code was put in place. The rules governing human experimentation are clear:
- Informed consent is essential.
- Research should be based on prior animal work.
- The risks should be justified by the anticipated benefits.
- Research must be conducted by qualified scientists.
- Physical and mental suffering must be avoided.
- Research in which death or disabling injury is expected should not be conducted.
I've just finished reading two books on the subject of human experimentation conducted in the United States since WWII and the present. The first is In the Name of Science: A History of Secret Programs, Medical Research, and Human Experimentation by Andrew Goliszek (St Martin's Press, New York: 2003); the second, by Jonathan D. Moreno, is Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans (Routledge, New York: 2001). Together, these two volumes catalog hundreds of experiments since the late 1940s conducted on both military personnel and civilians. All of the experiments documented in the books were conducted either in secret and/or under a cover of disception, exposing unwitting subjects to radiation, biochemicals, and other agents. Few, if any, of these experiments fulfilled the rules set out by the Nuremberg Code and, in many cases, subjects have been made critically and chronically ill or have died from the effects of these experiments.
I have neither the resources nor the wish to recount these betrayals here - they are too numerous - but one personal perspective is in order . . .
Richard Perlman is a founder of Healthy Citizens, an organization of indispensable value to citizens who have been victimized by such experiments. He has spent many years researching these crimes and has himself also been victimized. He currently lives outside of the United States. He continues to fight for the exposition and, in recent communications with this writer, reports ongoing injury and threats to his health and safety. His blog is here.
He describes his situation . . .
I approach these issues wearing two hats: guinea pig and researcher. In the mid 1970s while being vaccinated by an immunologist I developed symptoms similar to the Gulf War Illness. In the 1980s a physician placed a powder in the back of my throat and it seemed as if my brain imploded. Soon my waist distended 15 inches and I was told by another physician I had six years to live. He refused me treatment. It was not the first time nor would it be the last time I would be refused treatment. Both my 1975 and 1980 health experiences could be attributed to the vagus nerve. In 1992 I visited Washington and naively thought there would be interest in my medical history and the research conducted by physicians who had treated me.
I came to Washington not to start an organization but to get my life in order. In 2000, for the first time in 30 years, my health returned. Perhaps I should be satisfied but I believe the true evil of these programs is the inability to rehabilitate and make amends to the victims. At 57, I believe I still have a future, possibly a career, possibly a family or both. These programs affect every aspect of a victim's life: ability to retain a lawyer, visit the physician of his choice, and freedom to live where he wants (safehouses). In fact, for the victim the United States becomes one large laboratory maze. One of my Hill advertisements discussed my inability to retain an attorney, even when hit by a car crossing the street or addressing irregularities in my father's will, which was issued the day before he died with his name signed by a third party. Suspected terrorists are not the only ones who can't retain attorneys. At least journalists have made the public conscious of their plight.
Since 9/11, it has been more difficult addressing these programs. Many of my symptoms are returning and increasingly it looks like my return to health was another experiment. My pleas for assistance have been ignored. I have sought toxicologists and physicians and have been refused. During this time some journalists, attorneys and legislative aides have scheduled meetings, which they never appeared or later cancelled and never rescheduled. Four months of intensive attempts at networking and I have had little success. Blacklisting an individual while conducting biological and chemical programs against him is an indescribably evil crime. With assistance, I will prove the existence of these biological and chemical programs ...
In his piece "American Guinea Pig", Perlman concludes:
Americans as well as all other peoples must recognize the importance of protecting each other when confronting natural disaster, terrorism, or crimes against humanity. Governments cover-up for their survival. Citizens for their survival must never blindly aid and abet cover-ups. Yet, this has been the guinea pig's experience. Little has changed in the past thirty years except governments have become emboldened by their citizens' increasing passivity. "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out" is one of the vilest phrases that ever became a mantra for a generation. As long as we think our government will not wire tap and invade privacy in an age of terrorism, when they have invaded privacy for decades constructing these programs, to paraphrase Thomas Wolfe, we cannot go home again.
Yet, human nature, as demonstrated by Stanley Milgram's and Phillp Zimbardo's obedience research at Yale and Stanford Universities, is all too eager to follow orders with a large percentage enjoying being told to torture. How much government programs have consciously taken advantage of our flaws needs also to be researched to determine how intentionally deleterious are government programs to the fabric of the society. The medical researchers who benefit from the Pentagon and C.I.A monitoring should not be naive to think that someday these programs will not be used against them or their relatives and friends. The buck stopped with them. They also can't go home again. They should have spoken out decades ago. When asked to participate in an unethical medical program why wasn't their response, "get out of my office." These programs would not exist in the United States if there were not intimidation and fear.
My happiness will come with the exposure of these programs. My sadness is the effect they have had on American society and as a consequence, much of the world. My sadness is also that I may never enjoy the pleasures that most individuals throughout the world take for granted. There is no way an individual can protect himself from the weapons and technologies governments have at their disposal. In the early years of MKULTRA, there was an interest in utilizing magician tricks to drug their victims. Today the "knockout" technologies have achieved what was only a dream in 1950 (http://www.healthycitizens.com/unwitting.pdf, http://www.healthycitizens.com/east_west.htm#aYourBrain). It doesn't matter if you are in a taxi on Rockville Pike or Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok, Thailand, your apartment in Washington DC or your hotel in London, England, an internet cafe in Hong Kong or a library in Washington DC. As an old time taxi cab driver in 1970 said to me, describing the violence to cabbies in Boston, Massachusetts, "if they're going to get you, they're going to get you." Neither Gandhi nor Dr. King would have succeeded if the climate had been as repressive. The threat of an unchanging sterile society is very real ...
As Richard has reminded me, it takes years of fighting against government secrecy and deception to expose the very existence, not to mention the details of these programs. And by the time the veil is lifted, science and technology have "progressed" exponentially.
Just as the American government has thumbed its nose at the Geneva Convention and the Bill of Rights, there is no reason to believe that such practices have stopped. As elites consolidate their wealth and power, the mechanisms to control the actions and lives of "common" mankind become even more critical to their aims. You may dismiss and ridicule these thoughts as "conspiracy theory" if you wish, but you do so at your peril.
I will leave you with two things to ponder ...
First, I encourage you to read "Curbing Social Protest in America: Microwave "Non-lethal" Weapons to be used for "Crowd Control": Just in Time for the Capitalist Meltdown: Army, Justice Department to Field 'Pain Ray'", by Tom Burghardt at Global Research.
This other one is a 2 1/4 hour video, "The New Phoenix Program". It's a "must watch", I think, so if you can't view it now, you can bookmark it here and watch it at your leisure.
Please be careful, OK?
***
- CreatedWednesday, July 29, 2009
- Last modifiedWednesday, November 06, 2013
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