USA offers apologies for infecting Guatemalans with STDs

[E.O.T.]

[Cain]

English language, non-American newsource here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11457552

US testing that infected hundreds of Guatemalans with gonorrhoea and syphilis more than 60 years ago was a "crime against humanity", Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has said.

President Barack Obama has apologised for the medical tests, in which mentally ill patients and prisoners were infected without their consent.

Mr Obama told Mr Colom the 1940s-era experiments ran contrary to American values, Guatemala said.

The US has promised an investigation.

Syphilis can cause heart problems, blindness, mental illness and even death, and although the patients were treated it is not known how many recovered.

Evidence of the programme was unearthed by Prof Susan Reverby at Wellesley College. She says the Guatemalan government gave permission for the tests.

No offer of compensation has yet been made, but an investigation will be launched into the specifics of the study, which took place between 1946 and 1948.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Friday the news was "shocking, it's tragic, it's reprehensible".

In an interview with the BBC, Mr Colom said the test subjects were "victims of rights abuses".

"There's been a very strong reaction in the Guatemalan media and by my compatriots," he said.

"Of course, there may have been similar incidents in other countries around the world, but speaking as the president and a Guatemalan, I would have preferred that these events had never happened on this soil."

The joint statement from Mrs Clinton and Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said: "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 apologise to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices."

In his phone call to President Colom, Barack Obama reaffirmed the United States' unwavering commitment to ensure that all human medical studies conducted today meet exacting US and international legal and ethical standards, the White House.

President Obama also "underscored the United States' deep respect for the people of Guatemala and the importance of our bilateral relationship".

The study by Prof Reverby shows that US government medical researchers infected almost 700 people in Guatemala with two sexually transmitted diseases.

The patients - prisoners and people suffering mental health problems - were unaware they were being experimented upon.

The doctors used prostitutes with syphilis to infect them, or inoculation, as they tried to determine whether penicillin could prevent syphilis, not just cure it.

The patients were then treated for the disease, but it is unclear whether everyone was cured.

Prof Reverby has previously done research on the Tuskegee experiment, where the US authorities measured the progress of syphilis in African-American sharecroppers without telling them they had the disease or adequately treating it.

The experiment ran from 1932 to 1972, with President Bill Clinton eventually apologising for it.

It should be noted that from 1940-1944 Jorge Ubico was the dictator of Guatemala, and was heavily supported by the United Fruit Company, of latter "can we haz coup by CIA nao plz" fame.  His sucessor, Juan José Arévalo, however, started the land reforms which eventually led to the 1954 coup (though he was also, at heart, an authoritarian, but of a more socialist bent than the liberal Ubico).  Yet he was the one who apparently ran the country when the tests were being carried out.  I know Ubico placed a lot of supporters in various powerful civil service positions,  so it would be interesting to know which government office and officials actually green-lighted the experiments, given Arévalo was not popular in the USA and aligned his country away from the stance of Ubico, which was one of closest alliances in the Western Hemisphere previously.  Did Arévalo allow the tests in order to show the USA he was still willing to "do business" or as part of a deal which allowed him to go ahead with his land reform, or was his government always secretly more aligned to the US than it claimed (Arévalo cracked down on Communist groups harder than almost anyone else, in spite of his socialist leanings).

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Nobody gives a shit.  It happened somewhere else to brown people.  It could fucking happen tomorrow and nobody would fucking care. 

It's probably happening right now.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

All an apology means is that they'll hide it better next time.

[Cain]

Nobody gives a shit.  It happened somewhere else to brown people.  It could fucking happen tomorrow and nobody would fucking care.  

It's probably happening right now.

Well, we know for sure that one program of human experimentation was running only a few years ago:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/06/bush-administration-experimented-detainees-phr-report

In the course of trying to prove that its "enhanced" interrogation program was legal, the Bush administration may have broken the law, according to a new report (PDF) by Physicians for Human Rights. The watchdog group claims that in an attempt to establish that brutal interrogation tactics did not constitute torture, the administration ended up effectively experimenting on terrorism detainees. This research, PHR alleges, violated an array of regulations and treaties, including international guidelines on human testing put in place after the Holocaust.

According to the report, which draws on numerous declassified government documents, "medical professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA" frequently monitored detainee interrogations, gathering data on the effectiveness of various interrogation techniques and the pain threshholds of detainees. This information was then used to "enhance" future interrogations, PHR contends.

By monitoring post-9/11 interrogations and keeping records on the effectiveness of various techniques, medical professionals could also provide Bush administration lawyers with the information they needed to set guidelines for the use of so-called "enhanced" interrogation tactics. For instance, attorneys in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) who were devising the legal rationale for the interrogation program could use the research to determine how many times a detainee could be waterboarded. Or, based on the observations of the medical personnel monitoring the interrogation sessions, they could assess whether it was legally justifiable to administer techniques like stress positions or water dousing in combination or whether these methods needed to be applied separately.

Physicians for Human Rights makes the case that since human subject research is defined as the "systematic collection of data and/or identifiable personal information for the purpose of drawing generalizable inferences," what the Bush administration was doing amounted to human experimentation:

   Human experimentation without the consent of the subject is a violation of international human rights law to which the United States is subject; federal statutes; the Common Rule, which comprises the federal regulations for research on human subjects and applies to 17 federal agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense; and universally accepted health professional ethics, including the Nuremberg Code... Human experimentation on detainees also can constitute a war crime and a crime against humanity in certain circumstances.

Ironically, one goal of the "experimentation" seems to have been to immunize Bush administration officials and CIA interrogators from potential prosecution for torture. In the series of legal papers that are now popularly known as the "torture memos," Justice Department lawyers argued that medical monitoring would demonstrate that interrogators didn't intend to harm detainees; that "lack of intent to cause harm" could then serve as the cornerstone of a legal defense should an interrogator be targeted for prosecution. In 2003, in an internal CIA memo cited in the PHR report, the CIA's general counsel, Scott Muller, argued that medical monitoring of interrogations and "reviewing evidence gained from past experience where available (including experience gained in the course of U.S. interrogations of detainees)" would allow interrogators to inoculate themselves against claims of torture because it "established" they didn't intend to cause harm to the detainees.

[Cain]

According to Wikipedia, no US citizen has ever been successfully prosecuted for human experimentation without consent.  So I wouldn't expect anything to change anytime soon.  It's only actually a law when it's, you know, enforced and stuff.

Trying to find stuff on human experimentation in other countries.  I know there were tons of experiments in the 50s and 60s like this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments

The Vipeholm experiments were a series of human experiments where patients of Vipeholm Mental Hospital in Lund, Sweden were fed large amounts of sweets to provoke dental caries (1945-1955). The experiments were sponsored both by the sugar industry and dentist community, in an effort to determine whether carbohydrates affected the formation of cavities.

The experiments provided extensive knowledge about dental health and resulted in enough empirical data to link the intake of sugar to dental caries. However, today they are considered to have violated the principles of medical ethics.

and this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Maddison

Leading Aircraftman Ronald George Maddison (c.1933 – 6 May 1953) was a twenty-year-old Royal Air Force engineer who died while acting as a volunteer human "guinea pig" while testing nerve agents at Porton Down, in Wiltshire, England. After substantial controversy, his death was the subject of an inquest 51 years after the event.

Maddison, from Consett, County Durham, died within 45 minutes of having twenty drops (200 mg) of sarin placed onto a cloth draped on his arm during an experiment at Porton Down. Five subjects entered a sealed gas chamber at 10:17 a.m. All were fitted with respirators. Within twenty minutes, Maddison began to complain that he did not feel well. Three minutes later, Maddison collapsed and began gasping for breath, at which point the scientists removed him from the chamber and took off his gas mask. They injected him with atropine after they witnessed an asthma-like attack and convulsions. Maddison also complained of going deaf. An ambulance took him to a local medical facility. The sarin's effects blocked the flow of air into Maddison's lungs, ultimately starving his brain and tissues of oxygen. On 16 May, at an inquest ordered by the British Home Office, his death was declared accidental.

Maddison's death, along with allegations that other British chemical-weapons test volunteers (who were used as subjects between 1939 and 1989) were not properly informed and may have been misled about the experiments and their risks, was the subject of a police investigation, Operation Antler, in 1999–2004.

Servicemen were offered about 15 shillings and a three-day leave pass for taking part in the experiments. Ronald had planned to use the money to purchase an engagement ring for his girlfriend, Mary Pyle. On 8 and 16 May 1953, an inquest was held in secret before the Wiltshire Coroner, Harold Dale, who returned a verdict of misadventure. The Ministry of Defence apparently paid Maddison's father £40 for funeral expenses.

(incidentally, I don't live too far from Porton Down, and the rumours are highly wierd shit continues on being done there to this day.  Evidence is slim on the ground, naturally, since British secrecy laws are amongst the tightest in the world, and the MoD denies everything, but that's what I hear)

And there is this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negev_Nuclear_Research_Center

According to a lawsuit filed in Be'er Sheva Labor Tribunal, workers at the center were subjected to human experimentation in 1998. According to Julius Malick, the worker who submitted the lawsuit, they were given drinks with uranium without medical supervision and without obtaining written consent or warning them about risks of side effects.

Trying to find some more modern occurences, as I'm sure there are ongoing human experimentation programs in China, Burma, North Korea and similar places - the problem is because of their status as an international war crime, which makes holidaying in Europe difficult, and the natural secrecy of these states, evidence is thin on the ground.

Ah, here we are

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_North_Korean_human_experimentation

The human rights charity Christian Solidarity Worldwide details on its website allegations of chemical experiments done to political prisoners, and an apparent eyewitnesses report about seven people who died in two gas chambers, including a mother who held her youngest child as she died.

A BBC television programme on February 1, 2004, with the title, Access to Evil in the This World series, detailed other allegations.

In the programme, a former North Korean woman prisoner, Lee Soon Ok tells how 50 healthy women prisoners were selected and given poisoned cabbage leaves, which all the women had to eat despite cries of distress from those who had already eaten. All 50 were dead after 20 minutes of vomiting blood and anal bleeding. Refusing to eat would allegedly have meant reprisals against them and their families.

Kwon Hyok, a former prison Head of Security at Camp 22, described laboratories equipped respectively for poison gas, suffocation gas and blood experiments, in which three or four people, normally a family, are the experimental subjects. After undergoing medical checks, the chambers are sealed and poison is injected through a tube, while scientists observe from above through glass. In a report reminiscent of the earlier account of a family of seven, Kwon Hyok claims to have watched one family of two parents, a son and a daughter die from suffocating gas, with the parents trying to save the children using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for as long as they had the strength.

An interview with Kim Sang Hun, described as a distinguished human rights activist, was also broadcast. Kim Sang Hun showed documents that he says were brought from Camp 22 by an escapee and which he is sure are not forgeries. These documents each say that a certain prisoner is to be transferred for experimentation with chemical weapons. A London based expert on Korea also considers it likely that the documents are genuine and Kwon Hyok stated independently that such documents were used at Camp 22.

North Korea refuses access by any outside observers to Camp 22.

Lee Soon Ok, another North Korean defector, and one of the few to have escaped from life imprisonment in an "Absolute Control Area" through China to South Korea. In her original defector's testimony, her US Senate testimony and her prison memoir Eyes of the Tailless Animals (ISBN 0-88264-335-5) she recounted witnessing two instances of lethal human experimentation. Allegedly, her account is backed by satellite photographs, but how such events were seen has not been disclosed.

Former prison guard Ahn Myung Chul has reported that prisoners were used for "medical operation practice" for young doctors. According to him, these doctors would practice surgery on prisoners, without anesthesia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_laboratory_of_the_Soviet_secret_services

Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services, alternatively called as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12, and Kamera which means "The Chamber" in Russian, was a covert poison research and development facility of the Soviet secret police agencies.

[...]

Mairanovsky and his colleagues tested a number of deadly poisons on prisoners from the Gulag ("enemies of the people"), including mustard gas, ricin, digitoxin and many others. The goal of the experiments was to find a tasteless, odourless chemical that could not be detected post mortem. Candidate poisons were given to the victims, with a meal or drink, as "medication"

Finally, a preparation with the desired properties called C-2 was developed. According to witness testimonies, the victim changed physically, became shorter, weakened quickly, became calm and silent and died within fifteen minutes. Mairanovsky brought to the laboratory people of varied physical condition and ages in order to have a more complete picture about the action of each poison.

"Sudoplatov and Eitingon approved special equipment [poisons] only if it had been tested on humans", according to testimony of Mikhail Filimonov[5]. Vsevolod Merkulov said that these experiments were approved by NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria.. Beria himself testified on August 28, 1953, after his arrest that "I gave orders to Mairanovsky to conduct experiments on people sentenced to the highest measure of punishment, but it was not my idea".

In addition to human experimentation, Mairanovsky personally executed people with poisons, under the supervision of Pavel Sudoplatov.

I'm sure I've read something about Chinese political prisoners, but all I'm turning up are docs from the infamous Japanese Unit 731.

[The Johnny]

But Cain, its obviously the media running its mouth for sensationalist news-stories derived from mere conspiracies! I'm sure you dont really believe our governments could do such a thing!

[Psychonomaly]

But Cain, its obviously the media running its mouth for sensationalist news-stories derived from mere conspiracies! I'm sure you dont really believe our governments could do such a thing!

So you do understand irony.