Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

The men in the theater at Fort Lewis Washington that May day were told we would be doing tests to help the Army field new chemical resistant uniforms, new gas masks, etc, stuff that would help us on the battle fields of the future. We got the "your country needs you" speech. We were also told the program was so safe that they would not even medically follow us after we left the TDY Program at Edgewood.

Ten of us were selected out of the approximate 100 volunteers from the 9th Infantry Division. We left Ft Lewis for Edgewood on June 18th arriving at Edgewood on 25 June 1974, we were there for 60 days of TDY (temporary duty) thru August 1974, we actually left to return to Ft Lewis on 22 August 1974. We were never told what they were exposing us to, we worked 4 hour days  4 days a week, Monday thru Thursday, one of the perks for volunteering.

It was a short time later that Vice President Nelson Rockefeller held the first hearings on CIA involvement inside the US. Part of what was uncovered was a Project named MKULTRA, a CIA financed and controlled program in coordination with DOD at Edgewood Arsenal.

This then led to the creation of the Church Commission which dug deeper into the mysterious world of the CIA and DOD.

In all of this the enlisted soldier who had been used in these tests were being ignored, despite the noted violations of the Nuremberg Codes of 1947 as noted in the 1975 Department of the Army Innspector Generals Report.

Over the decades a few court cases were brought against the government only to be met by stonewalling by the CIA and DOD, the only case to make it to the Supreme Court was the case of Master Sergeant James Stanley, who was one of the soldiers slipped LSD unknowningly in 1958, in the 1987  5-4 dissent Justice Sandra Day O'Conner wrote a seperate dissent. Her quotes are here "* Justice O'Connor's separate dissent - Nuremberg revisited

Justice O'Connor dissented in part: "No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as JUSTICE BRENNAN observes, the United States military played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, ante, at 687, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the "voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential . . . to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts." United States v. Brandt (The Medical Case), 2 Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10, p. 181 (1949). If this principle is violated the very least that society can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can be, by the perpetrators. I am prepared to say that our Constitution's promise of due process of law guarantees this much. Accordingly, I would permit James Stanley's Bivens action to go forward, and I therefore dissent".

Even in 1987 Justice O'Conner a staunch darling of the republicans sided with the veterans abused in this program and stated they should be compensated. Sadly to say in June 2006 this still has not been accomplished why?

It is hard to understand, the inability of government to deal with ugly situations, they have studied it to death, the 1985 IOM health survey, then they did the NAS/IOM 1993 report called Veterans at Risk, then they had the 1994 John D Rockefeller Commisssion.

There is the 1994 GAO report which shows the Human experimentation during the Cold War Programs.

On March 10, 1993 a Doctor Susan Mathers of the VA had testified to a congressional committee that the VA would locate the "test veterans" and get them medical care and compensation, this never happened.

Then in 2000 the next obstacle to getting these veterans their benefits and medical care happened, George W Bush ran for President and won, he then named Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, only this time the right hand man to Rumsfeld was now the elected right hand man to Bush, none other than Dick Cheney.

Then the next piece of this puzzle had been set in motion by Bush 41, remember the Gulf War and all those sick veterans? They decided to find all the Cold War test subjects who had been exposed to Sarin so they could do a health study, so they could show the Gulf War vets what to expect.

This was done despite previous studies done by other agencies on chemical weapons injuries one by our own National Institute of Health (NIH) in January 1994 and then there is this health study from 1975 based on Wermacht soldiers from 1945 thru 1975 published by SIPRI by a DR Lohs work of the past 30 years.

Both of these studies found medical problems that developed over the long term that were related to the exposures, cardiac, gastrointestinal, nuerological and pulmonary. The March 2003 IOM study compiled by DR William Page found none of these problems, it may be because they never looked at them, he chose to focus on brain cancer and sleep disorders, he found that veterans of the Gulf War would likely develop brain tumors at the rate of 25 per 100,000. Does anyone know what the rate is for the normal civilian population? But hey at 25 per 100,000 the Federal government can afford it, those other problems get expensive, heart problems, lung problems, gastrointestinal and neuorological, however this may explain the "Gulf War Illness" everyone claims does not exist, it seems as if all the symptoms of Gulf War Illness match the symptoms of all these known medical problems from chemical weapons exposure. Expensive sure, but well documented except by Dr Page and the one study the DOD uses for the VA to service connect medical issues for veterans.

The report is here. What it does not explain is why 40% of the men are prematurely dead 2098 of them, it also does not explain why of the 4022 men they found, why 54% of them are disabled, this report just ignores those statistics. They didn't seem important that men aged 45 to 65 in FY 2000 would have a death and disability rate of 74.43%. The only thing they had in common was being healthy, intelligent young men when selected for the "medical research unit" at Edgewood and three decades later most are dead or disabled.

This report was turned over to DOD no later than March 2003 when it was made public, although I suspect it was sent to DOD before it became public, since they funded it. In October 2003 the VA published this manual to explain the CBR tests from WW2 thru 1975 to VA doctors and nurses, 28 years after the program was made public, it failed to mention the problems found with the March 2003 IOM report.

In 2004 the GAO issued this report about Project SHAD/112 veterans and other veterans exposed to hazardous materials while in service to this nation. Despite knowing the IOM report had been made public the previous year, DOD told the GAO on page 20 of the report that they would not be able to find the 7120 men of Edgewood Arsenal before 2009 nor the 2300 men of Fort Detrick, or the unknown men exposed at Dugway Utah, Deseret Utah and any other places.

Now I can not think of any reason other than political that DOD does not want these veterans or their widows found before 2009. Let's see what happens in 2009, oh yea the Bush Administration leaves office and then the questions about Cheney and Rumsfelds involvement in the illegal human experiments using chemical weapons and drugs on America's enlisted soldier's won't be asked about.

It seems a little hypocritical to me that these men took this nation to war, over WMD's and then when all else failed the excuse became he "Saddam" used chemical weapons on his own people the Kurds. Well he was fighting with the Kurds, he used mustard gas that President Reagan and Mid East Envoy Donald Rumsfeld arranged for the sale of to Saddam in 1983 and 1984, when he was our friend.

One other pertinent point the IOM's Rick Erdtman has said that as soon as DOD calls him at 202-334-1925 and tells him to release the names and addresses of the veterans collected in FY 2000 that he will send them to the VA so they can get them the medical help and compensation they deserve. Why won't Rumsfeld allow it?

The sad part is they used chemical weapons and illegal drugs on their own enlisted soldiers 30 years ago, and now are depriving them and their widows of their deserved veteran benefits, until after this administration leaves office, and no one is asking them why?  Can any of you answer it?