Army Must Notify its Human Guinea Pigs
(CN) - The Army cannot delay its duty to warn veterans subjected to Cold War-era drug experiments about potential health concerns, a federal judge ruled.
The ruling comes in Vietnam Veterans of America et al. v Central Intelligence Agency et al. , a 2009 class action that claimed at least 7,800 soldiers had been used as guinea pigs in Project Paperclip.
Soldiers were administered at least 250 and perhaps as many as 400 types of drugs, among them Sarin, one of the most deadly drugs known, amphetamines, barbiturates, mustard gas, phosgene gas and LSD.
Using tactics it often attributed to the Soviet enemy, Uncle Sam sought drugs to control human behavior, cause confusion, promote weakness or temporary loss of hearing and vision, induce hypnosis, and enhance a person's ability to withstand torture, according to the complaint.
U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken certified the class in 2012, which could make thousands of veterans eligible for relief.
Though the defendants succeeded in tossing claims against Attorney General Eric Holder and the CIA, the Department of Defense and Department of the Army are still on the hook.
In November 2103, Judge Wilken gave both sides some relief , granting the Defense Department, Army and CIA summary judgment on certain claims, and giving the plaintiffs summary judgment only on one claim against the Army.
"The court concludes that defendants' duty to warn test subjects of possible health effects is not limited to the time that these individuals provide consent to participate in the experiments," Wilken wrote then.
"Instead, defendants have an ongoing duty to warn about newly acquired information that may affect the well-being of test subjects after they completed their participation in research."
In an injunction accompanying the summary judgment order, Wilken directed the Army to provide such test subjects with newly acquired information that may affect their well-being that it has learned since its original notification, now and in the future as it becomes available."
In January, the remaining defendants moved to stay that injunction pending the resolution of the other claims.
The defendants claimed it will cost $8.8 million over 5 years to provide possible test subjects with the kind of notice the court ordered.
In a new order this week, Wilken found the defendants did not show that those costs will cause them irreparable harm - an element needed to stay the injunction.
"On the one hand, there are the expenses that will be incurred by defendants and, on the other, there is the very real possibility that the aging and adversely affected test subjects will not learn about health effects that could be mitigated if known," Wilken wrote in a 7-page order.
"Any expense incurred by defendants doing research and providing information to adversely affected test subjects, even if defendants should not have been required to incur those expenses, would not be wasted.
"However, lost time for the adversely affected test subjects could lead to irreversible health consequences."
Wilken also denied the defendants' request to extend their deadlines, and ordered them to submit a report of their efforts by Feb. 17.
Source http://www.courthousenews.com/2014/02/07/65170.htm
MK-ULTRA
One of many lawless CIA programs
MK-ULTRA: The CIA's Mind Control Program - by Stephen Lendman
MK-ULTRA was the code name for a secret CIA mind control program, begun in 1953, under Director Allen Dulles. Its purpose was multifold, including to perfect a truth drug for interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War. It followed earlier WW II hypnosis, primitive drugs research, and the US Navy's Project Chatter, explained by its Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request as follows:
It began "in the fall of 1947 focusing on the identification and testing of drugs (LSD and others) in interrogations and the recruitment of agents. The research included laboratory experiments on both animal and human subjects. The program ended shortly after the Korean War in 1953."
It was run under the direction of Dr. Charles Savage of the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, MD from 1947 - 1953, after which CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence continued it under the name Project Bluebird, its first mind control program to:
-- learn how to condition subjects to withstand information from being extracted from them by known means;
-- develop interrogation methods to exert control;
-- develop memory enhancement techniques; and
-- establish ways to prevent hostile control of Agency personnel.
In 1951, it was renamed Project Artichoke, then MK-ULTRA under Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms in 1953. It aimed to control human behavior through psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs, electroshock, radiation, graphology, paramilitary techniques, and psychological/sociological/anthropological methods, among others - a vast open-field of mind experimentation trying anything that might work, legal or otherwise on willing and unwitting subjects.
Ongoing at different times were 149 sub-projects in 80 US and Canadian universities, medical centers and three prisons, involving 185 researchers, 15 foundations and numerous drug companies. Everything was top secret, and most records later destroyed, yet FOIA suits salvaged thousands of pages with documented evidence of the horrific experiments and their effects on human subjects.
Read more @ http://www.phillyimc.org/en/mk-ultra
