US Government’s Human Experimentation Apology: They’re Only Sorry They Were Caught

Countless examples prove atrocious experiments are routine

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Friday, Oct 1st, 2010

The US government has today apologised for intentionally infecting almost 700 people in Guatemala with sexually transmitted diseases in the 1940s, however, it has not apologised for countless other similar atrocious experiments and programs that it has engaged in and continues to engage in, amounting to an all out biological and chemical warfare attack on humanity.

NBC News today carries the story that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have offered extensive apologies for actions taken by the U.S. Public Health Service between the years of 1946-48.

During this time, US medical researchers, along with the Guatemalan government, intentionally infected 696 Guatemalan men and women with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge or permission.

Subjects, who were hand picked from groups of soldiers, prisoners and institutionalized mental patients, were infected through direct inoculation and visits from infected prostitutes.

They were then encouraged to spread the disease around and, by all accounts, hundreds were never offered treatment.

Nothing of any use was ever gleaned from the study, the purpose of which the government maintains was to determine whether syphilis could be prevented by penicillin.

Records of the program were hidden, but recently discovered by Professor Susan M Reverby of Wellesley College, upon researching and writing about the similarly horrific Tuskegee experiment, in which hundreds of working class African American in Alabama, were diagnosed with syphilis but never told and instead allowed to die as part of a government experiment to study the disease.

Treatment was actively withheld from the men, yet they were told they were being treated for “bad blood”. The experiment ran from 1932 until it was exposed in 1972.

In her article titled “Normal Exposure’ and Inoculation Syphilis: A PHS ‘Tuskegee’ Doctor in Guatemala, 1946-48″, Professor Reverby explains how a Public Health Service
physician called Dr. John C. Cutler was recruited to take part in Tuskegee in the 1960s after being involved in the earlier Guatemala experiment.

The article states:

Cutler and the other physicians chose men in the Guatemala National Penitentiary, then in an army barracks, and men and women in the National Mental Health Hospital for a total of 696 subjects. Permissions were gained from the authorities but not individuals, not an uncommon practice at the time, and supplies were offered to the institutions in exchange for access. The doctors used prostitutes with the disease to pass it to the prisoners (since sexual visits were allowed by law in Guatemalan prisons) and then did direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured onto the men’s penises or on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded
when the “normal exposure” produced little disease, or in a few cases through spinal punctures. Unlike in Alabama, the subjects were then given penicillin after they contracted the illness. However, whether everyone was then cured is not clear and not everyone received what was even then considered adequate treatment.

Yet the PHS was aware then that this was a study that would raise ethical questions. For as Surgeon General Thomas Parran made clear “’You know, we couldn’t do such an experiment in this country.” Deception was the key here as it had been in Tuskegee. Much of this was kept hushed even from some of the Guatemalan officials and information about the project only circulated in selected syphilology circles. When it proved difficult to transfer the disease and other priorities at home seemed more important, Cutler was told to pack up and come back to the States.

Reverby also uncovered similar experiments carried out on American prisoners:

In 1944 the PHS had done experiments on prophylaxis in gonorrhea at the Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary in the United States. In this prison, the “volunteers” were deliberately injected with gonorrhea (which can be cultured), but the PHS had found it difficult to get the men to exhibit infection and the study was abandoned.

Her article also refers to research that details how experimentation on American prisoners became institutionalized, with inmates being exposed to everything from viruses causing warts and herpes to Malaria, and even agents of chemical warfare.

In 1997 Reverby was a member of the group that lobbied President Bill Clinton to offer a public apology to those who survived the Tuskegee experiment and their families.

Now there comes a similar apology regarding the Guatemala project:

“The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical,” today’s US government statement reads. “Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”

There is a pattern here – the government only apologizes when the facts are exposed. They are not sorry for carrying out the experiments, rather they are merely sorry for getting caught.

There are countless other examples of the US government having illegally tested and used bio-weapons on its own citizens.

Declassified documentation of the Program F fluoride study, for example, has revealed that atomic researchers secretly gathered and analyzed blood and tissue samples from citizens of Newburgh, New York from 1945 to 1956, with the cooperation of State Health Department personnel, in order to study of the health effects of fluoridating public drinking water.

The documents show that much of the original proof that fluoride is safe for humans in low doses was generated by A-bomb program scientists, who had been secretly ordered to provide “evidence useful in litigation” against defense contractors for fluoride injury to citizens. The first lawsuits against the U.S. A-bomb program were not over radiation, but over fluoride damage, the documents show, because fluoride, one of the most toxic substances known to man, was the key chemical in atomic bomb production.

Now more than two thirds of U.S. public drinking water is fluoridated.

Where is the apology for this experiment on unwitting Americans?

Another example comes in the form of Project SHAD, in which live toxins and chemical poisons were knowingly used on American servicemen on American soil.

The Pentagon’s biowarfare program has long been in operation and US citizens have never been spared from experimentation.

Other cases involve spraying clouds of bacteria over San Francisco, releasing toxic gases into the New York subway, holding open-air biological and chemical weapons tests in at least four states in the 1960s, the list goes on, and these are only the declassified known examples.

Where are the apologies for these experiments on unwitting Americans?

Must Read: The Population Reduction Agenda For Dummies

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor at Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and regular contributor to Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.