El siguiente tema es una continuación de la primera parte que se encuentra en:
Evidencias de experimentos sin ética que atentan contra la raza humana por parte de los gobiernos (PARTE II)
Psychological and torture experiments
U.S. government research
The United States government funded and performed numerous psychological experiments, especially during the Cold War era. Many of these experiments were performed to help develop more effective torture and interrogation techniques for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, and to develop techniques for resisting torture at the hands of enemy nations and organizations.
In studies running from 1947 to 1953, which were known as Project Chatter, the U.S. Navy began identifying and testing truth serums, which they hoped could be used during interrogations of Soviet spies. Some of the chemicals tested on human subjects included mescaline and the anticholinergic drug scopolamine.
Shortly thereafter, in 1950, the CIA initiated Project Bluebird, later renamed project Artichoke, whose stated purpose was to develop "the means to control individuals through special interrogation techniques", "way[s] to prevent the extraction of information from CIA agents", and "offensive uses of unconventional techniques, such as hypnosis and drugs". The purpose of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that stated, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self preservation?" The project studied the use of hypnosis, forced morphine addiction and subsequent forced withdrawal, and the use of other chemicals, among other methods, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects. In order to "perfect techniques for the abstraction of information from individuals, whether willing or not", Project Bluebird researchers experimented with a wide variety of psychoactive substances, including LSD, heroin, marijuana, cocaine, PCP, mescaline and ether. Project Bluebird researchers dosed over 7,000 U.S. military personnel with LSD, without their knowledge or consent, at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. More than 1,000 of these soldiers suffered from several psychiatric illnesses, including depression and epilepsy, as a result of the tests. Many of them tried to commit suicide.
In 1952, professional tennis player Harold Blauer died when injected with a fatal dose of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute of Columbia University by Dr. James Cattell. The United State Department of Defense which sponsored the injection, worked in collusion with the Department of Justice, and the New York State Attorney General to conceal evidence of its involvement for 23 years. Cattell claimed that he did not know what the army had given him to inject into Blauer, saying: "We didn't know whether it was dog piss or what we were giving him".
In 1953, the CIA placed several of its interrogation and mind-control programs under the direction of a single program, known by the code name MKULTRA, after CIA director Allen Dulles complained about not having enough "human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques". The MKULTRA project was under the direct command of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of the Technical Services Division. The project received over $25 million, and involved hundreds of experiments on human subjects at eighty different institutions.
In a memo describing the purpose of one MKULTRA program subprogram, Richard Helms said:
We intend to investigate the development of a chemical material which causes a reversible, nontoxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well predicted for each individual. This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, and implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control.
—Richard Helms, internal CIA memo
In 1954, the CIA's Project QKHILLTOP was created to study Chinese brainwashing techniques, and to develop effective methods of interrogation. Most of the early studies are believed to have been performed by the Cornell University Medical School's human ecology study programs, under the direction of Dr. Harold Wolff. Wolff requested that the CIA provide him any information they could find regarding "threats, coercion, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, 'brainwashing', 'black psychiatry', and hypnosis, or any combination of these, with or without chemical agents". According to Wolff, the research team would then:
...assemble, collate, analyze and assimilate this information and will then undertake experimental investigations designed to develop new techniques of offensive/defensive intelligence use ... Potentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures) will be similarly tested in order to ascertain the fundamental effect upon human brain function and upon the subject's mood ... Where any of the studies involve potential harm of the subject, we expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of the necessary experiments.
—Dr. Harold Wolff, Cornell University Medical School
Another of the MKULTRA subprojects, Operation Midnight Climax, consisted of a web of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco, Marin, and New York which were established in order to study the effects of LSD on unconsenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass. Several significant operational techniques were developed in this theater, including extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations.
In 1957, with funding from a CIA front organization, Dr. Ewan Cameron of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada began MKULTRA Subproject 68. His experiments were designed to first "depattern" individuals, erasing their minds and memories—reducing them to the mental level of an infant—and then to "rebuild" their personality in a manner of his choosing. To achieve this, Cameron placed patients under his "care" into drug-induced comas for up to 88 days, and applied numerous high voltage electric shocks to them over the course of weeks or months, often administering up to 360 shocks per person. He would then perform what he called "psychic driving" experiments on the subjects, where he would repetitively play recorded statements, such as "You are a good wife and mother and people enjoy your company", through speakers he had implanted into blacked-out football helmets that he bound to the heads of the test subjects (for sensory deprivation purposes). The patients could do nothing but listen to these messages, played for 16–20 hours a day, for weeks at a time. In one case, Cameron forced a person to listen to a message non-stop for 101 days. Using CIA funding, Cameron converted the horse stables behind Allen Memorial into an elaborate isolation and sensory deprivation chamber which he kept patients locked in for weeks at a time. Cameron also induced insulin comas in his subjects by giving them large injections of insulin, twice a day for up to two months at a time. Several of the children who Cameron experimented on were sexually abused, in at least one case by several men. One of the children was filmed numerous times performing sexual acts with high-ranking federal government officials, in a scheme set up by Cameron and other MKULTRA researchers, to blackmail the officials to ensure further funding for the experiments
The CIA leadership had serious concerns about their unethical and illegal behavior, as evidenced in a 1957 Inspector General Report, which stated:
Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repurcussions in political and diplomatic circles ...
—1957 CIA Inspector General Report
In 1957, Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University performed experiments on schizophrenic patients, which were funded by the U.S. Army. In the studies, he dosed them with high levels of LSD, and then implanted "deep electrodes" in their brains to take EEG readings.
MKULTRA activities continued until 1973 when CIA director Richard Helms, fearing that they would be exposed to the public, ordered the project terminated, and all of the files destroyed. However, a clerical error had sent many of the documents to the wrong office, so when CIA workers were destroying the files, some of them remained, and were later released under a Freedom of Information Act request by investigative journalist John Marks. Many people in the American public were outraged when they learned of the experiments, and several congressional investigations took place including the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission.
In 1963, CIA had synthesized many of the findings from its psychological research into what became known as the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook,[which cited the MKULTRA studies, and other secret research programs as the scientific basis for their interrogation methods Cameron regularly traveled around the U.S. teaching military personnel about his techniques (hooding of prisoners for sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, humiliation, etc.), and how they could be used in interrogations. Latin American paramilitary groups working for the CIA and U.S. military received training in these psychological techniques at places like the School of the Americans, and even today, many of the torture techniques developed in the MKULTRA studies and other programs are being used at U.S. military and CIA prisons such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In the aftermath of the Congressional hearings, major news media mainly focused on sensationalistic stories related to LSD, "mind-control", and "brainwashing", and rarely used the word "torture". This put off the image that CIA researchers were, as one author put it "a bunch of bumbling sci-fi buffoons", rather than a rational group of men who had run torture laboratories and medical experiments in major U.S. universities, and who had tortured, raped, and psychologically abused young children, driving many of them permanently insane.
From 1964 to 1968, the U.S. Army paid $386,486 to professors Albert Kligman and Herbert W. Copelan to perform experiments with mind-altering drugs on 320 inmates of Holmesburg, Prison. The goal of the study was to determine the minimum effective dose of each drug needed to disable 50 percent of any given population. Kligman and Copelan initially claimed that they were unaware of any long-term health effects the drugs could have on prisoners, however, documents later revealed that this was not the case.
Medical professionals gathered and collected data on the CIA’s use of torture techniques on detainees, in order to refine those techniques, and to "to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies", according to a report by Physicians for Human Rights. The report stated that: “Research and medical experimentation on detainees was used to measure the effects of large-volume waterboarding and adjust the procedure according to the results.” As a result of the waterboarding experiments, doctors recommended adding saline to the water “to prevent putting detainees in a coma or killing them through over-ingestion of large amounts of plain water.” Sleep deprivation tests were performed on over a dozen prisoners, in 48-, 96- and 180-hour increments. Doctors also collected data intended to help them judge the emotional and physical impact of the techniques so as to “calibrate the level of pain experienced by detainees during interrogation" and to determine if using certain types of techniques would increase a subject's "susceptibility to severe pain.". The CIA denied the allegations, claiming they never performed any experiments, and saying "The report is just wrong"; however, the U.S. government never investigated the claims.
In August 2010, the U.S. weapons manufacturer Raytheon announced that it had partnered with a jail in Castaic, California in order to use prisoners as test subjects for a new non-lethal weapon system that "fires an invisible heat beam capable of causing unbearable pain."
Academic research
In 1939, at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa, twenty-two children were the subjects of the so-called "monster" experiment. This experiment attempted to use psychological abuse to induce children who spoke normally to stutter. The experiment was designed by Dr. Wendell Johnson, one of the nation's most prominent speech pathologists, for the purpose of testing one of his theories on the cause of stuttering.
In 1961, in response to the Nuremberg Trials, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram performed his study "Obedience to Authority Study", also known as the Milgram Experiment, in order to determine if it was possible that the Nazi genocide could have resulted from millions of people who were "just following orders". The Milgram Experiment raised questions about the ethics of scientific experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants, who were told, as part of the experiment, to apply electric shocks to test subjects (who were actually actors not really receiving electric shocks).
Pharmacological research
At Harvard University, in the late 1940s, researchers began performing experiments where they tested diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen , on pregnant women at the Lying-In Hospital of the University of Chicago. The women experienced an abnormally high number of miscarriages and babies with low birth weight. None of the women were told that they were being experimented on.
Researchers at the Laurel Children's Center in Maryland tested experimental acne medications on children, and continued their tests even after half of the children developed severe liver damage from the medications.
From 1988 to 2008, the number of overseas clinical trials for drugs intended for American consumption increased by 2,000%, to approximately 6,500 trials. These trials are often conducted in areas with large numbers of poor and illiterate people who grant their consent by signing an "X" or making a thumb print on a form. These tests are rarely monitored by the FDA, and have in some cases proved deadly, such as a case where 49 babies died in New Delhi, India during a 30-month trial. The cost of testing in countries without safety regulations is much lower; and, due to lax or nonexistent oversight, pharmaceutical corporations (or research companies they've contracted out to) are able to more easily suppress research that demonstrates harmful effects and only report positive results.
Other experiments
The 1846 journals of Dr. Walter F. Jones of Petersburg, Virginia describe how he poured boiling water onto the backs of naked slaves afflicted with typhoid pneumonia, at four-hour intervals, because he thought that this might "cure" the disease by "stimulating the capillaries".
From early 1940 until 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected pediatric neuropsychiatrist who practiced at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, performed electroshock experiments on at least 100 children. The children's ages ranged from 3–12 years. Some reports indicate that she may have performed such experiments on more than 200. Electroconvulsive treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from 1942 to 1956, including Bender's experiments, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children's Service from 1956 to 1969. Publicly, Bender claimed that the results of the "therapy" were positive, but in private memos, she expressed frustration over mental health issues caused by the treatments. Bender would sometimes shock schizophrenic children (some less than 3 years old) twice per day, for 20 consecutive days. Several of the children became violent and suicidal as a result of the treatments. At Willowbrook State School for the mentally retarded in Staten Island, NY, a hightly controversial medical study was carried out there between 1963 and 1966 by medical researchers Saul Krugman and Robert W. McCollum. Healthy children who were mentally retarded, were secretly intentionally inoculated, orally and by injection, with the virus that causes the Hepatitis disease, then monitored to gauge the effects of gamma globulin in combating it.[3] A public outcry forced the study to be discontinued after it was exposed and condemnend by Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
NYS Senator Robert Kennedy and a television crew visit Willowbrook State school in Staten Island NY. "He likens the conditions at Willowbrook to that of a “snake pit,” and states that the residents of these institutions were “denied access to education and are deprived of their civil liberties.” Later that same year, he addressed a joint session of the NYS Legislature on the “dehumanizing conditions” of the State’s institutions."
In 1942, the Harvard University biochemist Edward Cohn injected 64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow blood, as part of an experiment sponsored by the U.S. NAvy.
In 1950, researchers at the Cleveland City Hospital ran experiments to study changes in cerebral blood flow where they injected people with spinal anesthesia, and inserted needles into their jugular veins and brachial arteries to extract large quantities of blood, and after massive blood loss which caused paralysis and fainting, measured their blood pressure. The experiment was often performed multiple times on the same subject.
In a series of studies which were published in the medical journal Pediatrics, researchers from the University of California Department of Pediatrics performed experiments on 113 newborns ranging in age from 1 hour to 3 days, where they studied changes in blood pressure and blood flow. In one of the studies, researchers forced a catheter through the babies' umbilical arteries and into their aortas, and then submerged their feet in ice water. In another of the studies, they strapped 50 newborn babies to a circumcision board, and then turned them upside down so that all of their blood rushed into their heads.
From 1963 to 1969 as part of Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), the U.S. Army performed tests which involved spraying several U.S. ships with various biological and chemical warfare agents, while thousands of U.S. military personnel were aboard the ships. The personnel were not notified of the tests, and were not given any protective clothing. Chemicals tested on the U.S. military personnel included the nerve gases VX and Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, and a variety of biological agents.
The San Antonio Contraceptive Study was a clinical research study about the side effects of oral contraceptives published in 1971. Women came to a clinic in San Antonio for preventing pregnancies and were not told they were participating in a research study or receiving placebos. 10 of the women became pregnant while on placebos.
In the 2000s, artificial blood was transfused into research subjects across the United States without their consent by Northfield Labs. Later studies showed the artificial blood caused a significant increase in the risk of heart attacks and death.
Legal, academic and professional policy
During the Muremberg trials, several of the Nazi doctors and scientists who were being tried for their human experiments claimed that the inspiration for their studies had come from studies that they had seen performed in the United States. In 1945, as part of Operation Paperclip, the United States government recruited 1,600 Nazi scientists, many of whom had performed horrific human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps. The scientists were offered immunity from any war crimes they had committed during the course of their work for the Nazi government, in return for doing research for the United States government. Many of the Nazi scientists continued their human experimentation when they arrived in the United States.
A secret AEC document dated April 17, 1947, titled Medical Experiments in Humans stated: "It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such fieldwork should be classified Secret."
At the same time, the Public Health Service was instructed to tell citizens downwind from bomb tests that the increases in cancers were due to neurosis, and that women with radiation sickness, hair loss, and burned skin were suffering from "housewife syndrome".
In 1964, the Worls Medical Association passed the Declaration of Helsinki, a set of ethical principles for the medical community regarding human experimentation.
In 1966, the National Institute of Health (NIH) Office for Protection of Research Subjects (OPRR) was created, and issued its Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects which recommended establishing independent review bodies, which were later called institutional reviews boards.
In 1969, Kentucky Court of Appeals Judge Samuel Steinfeld dissented in Strunk v. Strunk, 445 S.W.2d 145, and made the first judicial suggestion that the Nuremberg Code should be applied to American jurisprudence.
In 1974 the National Research Act established the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects, and mandated that the Public Health Service to come up with regulations that would protect the rights of human research subjects.
Project MK- ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission.
In 1975, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW) created regulation which included the recommendations laid out in the NIH's 1966 Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects. Title 45 of the Code of Federal Regulations, known as "The Common Rule," requires the appointment and utilization of institutional review boards (IRBs) in experiments using human subjects.
On April 18, 1979, prompted by an investigative journalist's public disclosure of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the United States Department of health, Education and Welfare (later renamed to Health and HUman Services) released a report entitled "Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research," authored by Dan Harms, which laid out many modern guidelines for ethical medical research.
In 1987 the United States Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669, that a U.S. serviceman who was given LSD without his consent, as part of military experiments, could not sue the U.S. Army for damages.
Dissenting the verdict in U.S. v. Stanley, Justice Sandra Day O' Connor stated:
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 played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimentes with human subjects during the Second World War, 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.' 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.
On January 15, 1994, President Bill Clinton formed the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE). This committee was created to investigate and report the use of human beings as test subjects in experiments involving the effects of ionizing radiation in federally funded research. The committee attempted to determine the causes of the experiments, and reasons why the proper oversight did not exist, and made several recommendations to help prevent future occurrences of similar events.
As of 2007, not a single U.S. government researcher had been prosecuted for human experimentation, and many of the victims of U.S. government experiments have not received compensation, or in many cases, acknowledgment of what was done to them.
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