Remembering Astronauts and Nonconsensual Human Subjects
Allen Barker, Feb. 11, 2003
As I write this, it has been a few days since the shuttle Columbia was lost on re-entry to the atmosphere. This is a good time to remember back when the shuttle Challenger exploded, in 1986. As Geoffrey Sea wrote in a Columbia Journalism Review article, he was close to getting a New York Times reporter to investigate the human radiation experiments (which finally came out in 1993). The explosion, though presumably completely unrelated, took the attention of the reporter away from the human radiation experiments:
The Radiation Story No One Would TouchThe reports of the radiation experiments finally got accurate and appropriately outraged press coverage in late 1993, almost a decade after a congressional committee had released a report detailing most of those shocking abuses. But those were only one small group of many research programs which had used US citizens as nonconsensual guinea pigs. These other, known abuses have never been fully reported or the victims notified. At a time when we are thinking of the lost astronauts and their families, perhaps we should remember these citizens and their families as well:
http://www.cjr.org/year/94/2/radiation.aspOn January 28, 1986, the date of Diamond's intended arrival, I am working at my desk with the television turned on but the sound off, as I often do. I am distracted at one point by a striking picture on the TV screen: a beautiful white plume of smoke unfurling against the azure sky. It is the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Within the hour Diamond calls to say that he will be investigating the Challenger disaster -- and thus won't becoming to Ohio any time soon. He tells me to wait until he's done with the Challenger story. I wait for three months.
The Cold War Experiments:Continuing with the astronaut theme, Senator John Glenn introduced a "Human Subjects Protection Act" in 1997. The bill was killed in committee. Below are some excerpts from his introductory remarks. Such a bill is still needed, for the reasons Glenn outlined.
Radiation tests were only one small part of a vast research program
that used thousands of Americans as guinea pigs.
U.S News and World Report, January 24, 1994.
http://www.datafilter.com/mc/coldWarExperiments.html...the government has long ignored thousands of other cold war victims, rebuffing their requests for compensation and refusing to admit its responsibility for injuries they suffered.
Continued secrecy and legal roadblocks erected by the government have made it virtually impossible for victims of these cold war human experiments to sue the government successfully, legal experts say.
Many of the stories of people whose lives were destroyed by mind-altering drugs, electroshock "treatments" and other military and CIA experiments involving toxic chemicals or behavior modification have been known for almost 20 years. But U.S. News has discovered that only a handful were ever compensated -- or even told what was done to them.
Admiral Turner, in his 1983 deposition, conceded that "a disappointingly small number" were notified but defended the agency's continuing refusal to declassify the names of the researchers and universities involved. "I don't think that would have been necessarily the best way," Turner said. "Not in the litigious society we live in."
Human Subjects Protection Act, Glenn's IntroductionFinally, this is a good time to remember that back in 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff came up with plans to deliberately create a pretext for war with Cuba. Among the many shocking ideas they considered, one plan called for blaming the Cubans should John Glenn's rocket explode. This is not to suggest anything about the recent shuttle explosion, but is a good reminder that eternal vigilance must be eternally maintained.
http://www.datafilter.com/uva/glennIntro.htmlYou just think about your own family, your own son, your own daughter, or grandchildren who might be, the next time they go to a doctor, the subject of some medical experiment that they are not even told about. I do not think there can be many things more un-American than that.
[...]
Well, is there really a problem out there? Is this just a paper loophole that I am trying to close?
Unfortunately, Mr. President, there are ongoing problems with inappropriate, ethically suspect research on human subjects. It is difficult to know the extent of such problems because information is not collected in any formal manner on human research. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer in my home State of Ohio has recently reported in a whole series of articles, after much investigation of this issue. And I quote from them:
What the government lacks in hard data about humans, it more than makes up for with volumes of statistics about laboratory animals. Wonder how many guinea pigs were used in U.S. research? The Agriculture Department knows: 333,379. How many hamsters in Ohio? 2,782.
So we have all this data on animals and little on human beings. I would hasten to add that the guinea pigs the Plain-Dealer refers to are the four-legged kind too and not the guinea pigs that are humans being used for research. The reason we know so much about the use of animals in research is that we have laws governing the handling and treatment of them. For example, the Animal Welfare Act requires that certain minimum standards be maintained when using animals in research.
Let me give you some recent examples which indicate why, notwithstanding the common rule and the other protections that are in place, I think additional protections are needed in statute...
Friendly Fire Book: U.S. Military Drafted Plans to Terrorize U.S. Cities to Provoke War With Cuba http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.htmlThe actual Northwoods report, in pdf format, is available online at the National Security Archive:The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show. Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof ... that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba [sic]."
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/