Senator John Glenn tried to replace the Nuremburg Protocols with his own Senate bill S.193, which died due to inaction after his being given a space shuttle ride and retiring. There are at present NO public oversight agencies monitoring CLASSIFIED (secret) human experimentation and this posting is to trumpet the need for this type of protection most urgently.
Eleanor White
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CHILD TORTURE QUICK CLICKS:
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MKULTRA VICTIM QUICK CLICKS:
These MKULTRA survivors are all from New Orleans LA, USA.
Christine DeNicola
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MKULTRA PERPETRATOR QUICK CLICKS:
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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS
(PUBLIC MEETING)
Executive Chambers
The Madison Hotel
15th and M Streets, NW
Washington, D.C.
Wednesday,
March 15, 1995
1:00 p.m.
Advisory Committee Members:
RUTH R. FADEN, PH.D., M.P.H. - CHAIR
KENNETH R. FEINBERG, J.D.
ELI GLATSTEIN, M.D.
DR. JAY KATZ
PATRICIA A. KING, J.D.
SUSAN E. LEDERER, PH.D.
RUTH MACKLIN, PH.D.
LOIS L. NORRIS
NANCY L. OLEINICK, PH.D.
HENRY D. ROYAL, M.D.
DUNCAN C. THOMAS, PH.D.
REED V. TUCKSON, M.D.
Staff Members:
DAN GUTTMAN
ANNA MASTROIANNI
A G E N D A
AGENDA ITEM: PAGE:
Opening Remarks 3
Ruth Faden, Chair
Approval of Minutes of February 15-17, 7
1995 Meeting
Public Comment 9
Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass 9
University of Pittsburgh
Elmerine Whitfield Bell 25
Dallas, Texas
Steve Schwartz 113
Washington, D.C.
Cooper Brown 36
National Association of Radiation Victims
Dr. Oscar Rosen 46
National Association of Atomic Veterans
Glenn Alcalay 61
New York, New York
Denise Nelson 70
Bethesda, Maryland
Chris DeNicola, Valerie Wolf 77
Claudia Mullen, New Orleans, Louisiana
Suzzanne Starr 102
Chimayo, New Mexico
Update on Knoxville Small Panel Meeting 124
Nancy Oleinick
Approach to the Final Report 133
Dan Guttman
Meeting Adjourned
P R O C E E D I N G S
1:00 p.m.
Opening Remarks
DR. FADEN: Good morning. Excuse me. I'm used to the
meeting starting in the morning. Good afternoon.
We have Phil Caplan from the White House to open the
meeting, please, officially.
MR. CAPLAN: Good afternoon. As the designated federal
official for the Advisory Committee, I declare this meeting open.
DR. FADEN: Thank you. Thank you, Phil.
I can't decide if we're happier to see him in the beginning, when
the meeting starts, or at the end when he closes it. When is he
more welcomed.
Well, welcome to everyone here. This is the 12th
meeting. Is it the 12th meeting? Yes, the 12th meeting. Okay.
Scary thought. This is the 12th meeting of the Advisory
Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Welcome, everyone
here. We've had a change of venue. So, I trust everybody could
find The Madison. We were almost getting to feel at home in the
last hotel we were in, and we're now here.
We have a very packed agenda. The meeting begins this
afternoon and goes through all day Thursday and all day Friday.
It's been typical for me to start the meetings with a kind of
quick overview of what we were hoping to accomplish in this
particular meeting, and let me just do that, run down and go
straight to our important subject for today, which is Public
Comment.
One objective of today's meeting, as is true for all
our meetings and for our small panel meetings throughout the
country, is to hear from members of the public, anyone who wishes
to tell us things that they think we need to hear. This is very
important to us, always has been very important to us.
We will hear later this afternoon a report from Nancy
Oleinick, and Henry represented the committee at a small panel
meeting at Knoxville, and we'll hear the results of that later
this afternoon, and, in addition, we have given over the bulk of
this afternoon to a public comment period, and we have a
substantial list of people who have taken time out of their lives
to come and talk to us, and we are grateful that they have done
that, and we are looking forward to hearing from all of you.
So, this afternoon is pretty much given over to our
hearing what members of the public want us to hear. We will have
a public comment period, and Nancy and Henry will give us a
report of what was heard at the Knoxville meeting, and then we
will begin a discussion of how we're going to tackle the actual
processing and thinking, committee writing or responding to
drafts of the final report as they're emerging.
So, we're going to do some housekeeping basically this
afternoon, if we have time, and clearly there's a possibility
that we may run short.
We will also hear tomorrow afternoon -- tomorrow
morning, excuse me, from Senator Wellstone, who will be making
some comments to us based on some events that have occurred in
his state that he thinks bear on the work of the committee.
After that, the rest of the meeting, Thursday and
Friday, is given over to this committee's deliberations. We have
a real shortage of time left, and we have some very tough things
that as a committee we need to deliberate together.
We will have two reports from the Contemporary Projects
that are on-going, and they will occur Friday morning. So, we
will be updated on the progress of the subject interview study
and the research proposal review project, but -- and we will also
hear on Thursday afternoon from the chair of a committee being
sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, looking at
radiation-related research in the state of Alaska in the '50s.
We heard a little bit about it from some public
representatives of the North Slope Borough in Alaska, and we will
be hearing more about that Thursday afternoon, but with the
exception of the items that I just mentioned, we're going to
spend the bulk of tomorrow and Friday deliberating about possible
recommendations that this committee may wish to make, and I want
to signal to our members of the public that are here and to
ourselves that we should realize that these are discussions.
We are not going to reach any conclusions about
recommendations yet. That would be premature. It would clearly
be inappropriate or imprudent, I'm not sure what the right term
is, for us to be finalizing recommendations when we haven't yet
completed our analyses.
So, the idea here is that these are recommendations,
drafts of recommendations, both forward-looking and backward-
looking recommendations, for the committee to begin to -- we have
been -- for the committee to continue to debate and discuss and
examine, so we can see what recommendations look promising, what
recommendations should be further developed, what additional
information we might want to review before we can conclude as to
whether we want to have this be a recommendation of the committee
or not.
So, we will not be calling for closure, that is, will
the committee recommend this, yes or no, but for debate and
discussion and deliberation by committee members about the
recommendations, and we will obviously hold off and finalize our
recommendations only after we've deliberated as much as we can
our analyses of the task before us.
So, that said, we have one piece of business before we
move immediately into the Public Comment period, and that is
approval of the minutes of the February 15th to 17th meeting.
Approval of Minutes of February 15-17, 1995, Meeting
DR. FADEN: Are there any comments or questions or
corrections for the record of the minutes of the February
meeting?
(No response)
DR. FADEN: Thank you. Is there a second to the
approval?
COMMITTEE MEMBER: Second.
DR. FADEN: All in favor.
(Chorus of ayes)
DR. FADEN: Any opposed?
(No response)
DR. FADEN: Thank you. The minutes of the February
15th to 17th, 1995, meeting then have been approved. I just do
that a little bit out of order to get it out of the way. I know
that's one thing that was done.
Public Comment
DR. FADEN: With that, we're going to move to Public
Comment period. It looks as if we have nine people who are here.
We have asked that our public presenters try to keep their
comments, if they possibly can, to 10 minutes. That leaves the
committee opportunity to ask the presenter questions, and this
has always turned out to be very important to the committee. It
allows us to learn more from the person than we might otherwise.
We appreciate that sometimes it's extremely difficult
to keep important comments to 10 minutes, but we would express
our appreciation for those of you who are able to do so and also
as a courtesy to the public commenters who come after you. So,
as much as possible, if you can keep it to 10 minutes, that would
be terrific.
I guess I should just start. Our first public
presenter is Dr. Ernest Sternglass. Is Dr. Sternglass here?
Thank you for coming. Would you please come to the table? And
we would ask you to speak into the microphone so that your
comments can be recorded for the record.
DR. STERNGLASS: Might I be permitted to stand over
there, because I have a few overheads to show?
DR. FADEN: Can we -- we need you to speak into the
mike. So, if you can lift the mike up, that would be fine.
(Pause)
Statement of Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass
University of Pittsburgh
DR. STERNGLASS: Dr. Faden and distinguished members of
the committee, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you
today. My remarks will address primarily the question of
radiation doses and health effects of the radiation exposures
documented in your work so far, which is the area in which I've
earned -- carried out extensive research during the past three
decades as indicated in my vitae.
In fact, I spent essentially the last 30 years of my
life trying to reduce doses in medical procedures, including
radioisotope and x-ray procedures, at the University of
Pittsburgh, School of Medicine.
This subject is relevant to the question of
compensation for both individuals who were exposed in individual
experiments as well as for large groups of people living near the
facilities from which experimental releases took place.
My testimony also bears on the policy recommendations
your committee has been asked to make with regard to future
actions by our government involving both individual human
experiments and releases of radioactivity into the environment,
since there's evidence, as I will present, that government
agencies have continued to cover up the three -- the actual true
doses from environmental releases, and the serious effects of
such low-dose exposures. I will not try to read the entire
testimony.
DR. FADEN: We have it as part of the record.
DR. STERNGLASS: Right. And I will just simply
summarize the essential points for you, using a few overhead
projections to do this in a few minutes.
Basically, the argument that I'll be presenting is that
we have grossly under-estimated without realizing it how chronic
exposure over long periods of time due to internal doses from
long-lived Radium class, not the ones we use in medicine, which
are extremely short-lived and mainly give off penetrating
radiation, but beta emitters that stay in the bone like Strontium
90 for a long, long time, have an enormously greater effect than
we were led to believe on the basis of our experience with
Radium, which was the only material for which we had any human
data from the Dial workers that you know about back in the early
'20s and '30s.
The trouble is that Alpha particles have a very short
range of bone, and therefore stick in the bone and do not reach
the bone marrow to the same degree as has been experimentally
observed as a beta rate from fusion products, and these did not
exist on earth before the bomb, and this is really the basic
reason why we under-estimated the effect.
We thought we knew what Radium was doing. We thought
we knew what Cosmic rays were doing. We thought we knew what x-
rays were doing, and we even thought we knew what the short flash
of the bomb at Hiroshima had done.
All those studies, including hundreds of studies on
animals, all those studies have to be done at high enough doses
to be able to see an effect. You cannot have a million mice and
give them a hundredth of a rad and expect to see anything.
So, of necessity, all work had to be done at high doses
and high dose rates, and not until 1972 was it discovered quite
by accident, by a Canadian physician and researcher by the name
of Dr. Abraham Petgow, working in Penowa, Manitoba, for the
Atomic Energy establishment of Canada, working on radio-
protection, and he discovered that cell membranes, fatty cell
membranes of all types, break at much lower doses when the dose
is prolonged over a long period of time given in a short x-ray,
and that is only in 1972, 30 years after the first fusion process
and long after the bomb testing had begun, in fact ended,
atmospheric tests and long after all the nuclear facilities in
the world had constructed, and then only did we learn that the
chronic exposures to membranes dominate at low doses whereas the
DNA damage to the cell nuclei and to the genetic information
dominates at high doses, and therefore the repair mechanism of
DNA, which are very efficient, led us to believe mistakenly that
doses, if you extrapolate them down linearly, you would expect to
have practically no detectable effects from environmental
releases or tiny doses given in the course of diagnostic
procedures and so on, and that has in fact, if it hadn't been for
the fact that x-rays and gamma rays given in short intense bursts
have little effect, we could never have used radiology as a
diagnostic tool in medicine or could we have used radiation as a
way of treating tumors, because we would have killed everybody
whom we gave x-rays at these high doses.
It is fortunate, however, that cell membranes are very
strongly protected by enzymes in the body and the fact that the
free radicals, which are created, bump into each other and de-
activate each other at high doses, and therefore we can use
medical x-rays. We can use and we're tricked into believing that
the same thing is true for environmental and tiny doses given
over very long periods of time.
I want to emphasize this because I myself have worked
in the field of diagnostic medicine for 40 years and helped to
develop instruments that expose people deliberately to radiation,
but, of course, there was a very clear benefit to the individual
involved, and this, I think, is the important point; that when
you do individual, you know, treatment or diagnosis of an ill
person, then this individual receives both the risk and the
benefit.
But when you carry out an experiment in which you
release radioactivity into the environment for some experimental
purposes just to satisfy some instrumentalist desire to find out
how well he can read the meter at 50 miles away, then you see
you're exposing people who are not ill. You are exposing women
during pregnancy, and since Dr. Alice Stewart had already shown
in 1958 that the fetus is extremely sensitive, then we were
exposing the most sensitive members of the population for no
benefit to them whatsoever, without their consent and without
their ability to even know what was happening to them or to take
precautions or protect themselves or their children, and that, I
think, is the difference between the medical use on an individual
who is ill and the deliberate or often accidental distribution of
radio-activity in the environment for some purpose other than to
benefit the individual who receives the radiation.
Now, the tragedy is that during the Cold War, and
especially as you have already found with all your
investigations, there was great concern that the fact of fall-out
should not become too well known for all the military security
reasons that you know about. I don't have to go into that, but
it's evident that what happened is that the scientific community
as a whole, people like me, my friends, people who worked on
equipment and designed reactors, worked on the design of nuclear
reactors for space propulsion. I participated in many, you know,
developments of nuclear instrumentation.
We had no idea that early, already in 1945-46-47, at
the Argonne National Lab in Chicago, metallurgical lab, animals
were exposed to small doses of Strontium 90 during pregnancy, and
they knew that the dogs that were being examined were not able to
walk, and they died of pneumonia and cancers and all this in a
very short time. Sometimes it was five or 10 years before it
showed, but because all this was kept secret, we could not
benefit from it, and therefore what I have done here is to
provide you with the documentation that show the history of what
happened now, and now I can just explain to you what the latest
development is, because Dr. Petgow's findings mean that the dose
response curve -- in other words, the shape of the dose response
curve is not a straight line all the way down, and these graphs
are taken mainly from the material I'm showing you, and this is
extremely important because all the data at high doses you see
was on the flat part of the curve. That means a small increase
in dose produced very little extra effect, and as long as you're
way up on this curve, way, way up, then you will never find the
tiny part of the dose where you have very small amounts, and this
is taken from our paper, published in the International Journal
of Health Services, which, by the way, is published in your
department at Johns Hopkins University, and in this paper, you
see that if you go across the nation and take the nine census
regions and use the announced radioactive releases from nuclear
reactors and plot them up, it's not a straight line, and that, in
other words, shows that we grossly under-estimated it by using
that slope rather than this slope.
And the nature of this curve is such that if you
decrease it by 10, the risk per millirad goes up tenfold. If you
go down another 10, the risk keeps going up, and therefore we
have a strange situation that the weaker the radiation intensity
is, the more deadly it is, and nobody anticipated this and
present radiation standards do not believe in this and have not
accepted this because it goes against the existing regulations,
which govern all uses of radiation everywhere, and nobody wants
to touch this, although the BEIR Committee of the National
Academy called attention to it years ago in the earlier report,
BEIR III, and, so, we now find that we have a situation where we
have far greater health effects than we ever thought.
Moreover, we can tie this directly to Strontium 90
specifically because here we have the relationship which shows
the link between low birth weight and Strontium 90, and this is
human data, not extrapolated from high doses. This was gathered
by the AEC during their early years, where they gathered
skeletons from all over the world that you publicized, and then
you see that the number of babies born under-weight in New York
State is perfectly correlated with an extremely incredibly high
correlation coefficient of .96, which is totally unbelievable.
I mean it's just unbelievable that any experiment in
the environment can give such a correlation, and that is the
nature of this enormous tragedy that we're faced because of the
nature of secrecy.
So, the following point I need to make is that we are
in a situation where, unfortunately, our government had to -- had
to deceive the public in order to be able to continue the bomb
testing, and as a result, they did not realize, for instance,
that in Nevada, when the bomb tests went off in 1951, and the
story in today's Times indicates, they did want to find out what
would happen from bomb testing.
Well, they never looked at the low birth weight data
for Nevada. When you see this giant peak here which only comes
back down to the rest of the United States, after the end of
atmospheric surface testing, then you see that we have a far
greater problem from chronic radiation than anyone had expected,
especially since all standards have until now been said
essentially only on cancer and not on other conditions that
involve the immune system because the Strontium 90 goes to the
immune system where the beta rays reach and destroy the
progenitors of all the blood cells, and therefore lead to
children that are born immature, whose future is impaired because
low birth weight is associated with learning difficulties, with
neurological damage, with immune system damage, and we have
created a generation of children that are now born under weight.
We see the first peak that I just showed you in the
previous slide here, and now we see the tragic rise, which in New
York in recent years has exceeded the high point of fall-out from
bomb testing, and that is frightening. It followed some
accidents at the Indian Point plant, which released low levels
perfectly within present guidelines that caused apparently
Strontium 90 damage to the mother's immune system, which causes
her to reject the fetus as a foreign object.
We've only learned about the role of the immune system
in the critical aspect of pregnancy within the last decade or so,
and, so, you can see it was the inadequacy of our knowledge that
was so tragic because so much of it was concealed.
Unfortunately, the concealment still seems to be going
on, and this is one thing that I'm recommending your committee to
investigate; namely, the National Cancer Institute did a study in
1990, which was so arranged and the methodology used in such a
way that it was practically guaranteed to find no effects around
62 nuclear facilities, and this was in 1988 and '90, not in 1945
and 1950.
We are talking about today's deception that is still
going on, and in the material that I supplied you, you will see
what the nature of the deception is, but it's very simple. They
said, well, we'll look at the small population that's irradiated
in this county, and then we'll look to see -- anyway, we'll look
at this -- the facility which had a high dose here, and then
we'll pick some control counties, and it turns out that three-
quarters of the control counties were right adjacent, as if the
radioactivity stopped, but the latest DOE report submitted to you
in February shows that they were able to trace the radioactivity
50 to 200 miles away from a source.
So, the methodology used was guaranteed not to show
anything, and furthermore, and this is frightening, as one of the
criteria they used in order to select control counties, they --
aside from the normal demographic variables, like sex, race,
occupation, poverty status and so on, they used and picked
control counties that had the same infant mortality or low birth
weight, which was essentially guaranteed to show that there would
be no difference in cancer rates later, and, so, this is what I'm
planning to do, namely offering some recommendations to you of
things to do, and they are written down, and they relate to the
need to re-examine and to urge or to request or recommend to the
other departments that the newest data should be re-examined, the
NCI study should be examined by independent people who are not
involved in this cover-up, like this committee is an independent
committee, you can do it, or some subcommittee.
Secondly, I'd urge that a new way be taken to set
radiation standards, not by the users exclusively and the self-
appointed committee, but in a public manner where the public and
lay person can participate, who are the ones who have to run it,
take the brunt of the risk, and therefore the biggest thing that
you can do, I believe, is to recommend that we need to re-examine
the risks that were involved, and above all not to deny
compensation to the victims on the basis of the high dose risk
estimates which clearly, unfortunately, were so low.
The last slide that I wanted to show you is very
important, and I'll just take another minute. This one. It's
rather frightening because what the National Cancer Institute
did, which minimized or practically eliminated the effect of
radiation, is really very, very serious for the nation as a
whole, because of the rising cancer rate, and the continued rise
in low birth weight that nobody knows what's causing it.
But I'll now show you a graph that is really
astounding. This shows how mortality in the United States
unadjusted for age declined steadily from 1900 to 1945-50, okay,
and suddenly, beginning with the -- roughly the time of the Bravo
tests, the first hydrogen bomb test that released thousands of
times as much Strontium as the Hiroshima bombs, suddenly, there
was a rise, an abnormal rise, which stayed high, and a gap
developed between the projection and the actual number of deaths.
Then, after a short time, 10 years or so, it began to
try to come down again, but then there was another rise, and I
have to say the rises have continued in the last two years,
completely counter to what's going on in most other advanced
civilized countries.
Mortality is rising rather than declining, despite all
our medical efforts and all our expenses, and what this means is
that this gap here, which has developed, by 1993, this gap
represents 15.6 million people who died prematurely.
Thank you very much.
DR. FADEN: Thank you, Dr. Sternglass.
We have --
(Applause)
DR. FADEN: -- a limited amount of time. Are there
questions from the committee to Dr. Sternglass? Nancy?
DR. OLEINICK: Well, I think your presentation raises
many questions, and we will undoubtedly not be able to handle
them right now, and perhaps some of us could speak with you
afterwards.
DR. STERNGLASS: Be happy to do that. I'll stay
beyond.
DR. OLEINICK: I guess just one question that
immediately comes to mind is, in general, correlation does not
mean cause and effect.
DR. STERNGLASS: Right.
DR. OLEINICK: Right. And I just wonder, I'm sure this
is not something you can address in a minute, but I'd like to
hear what other cause and effect factors were considered and
ruled out in order to place the blame on Strontium 90.
DR. STERNGLASS: Right. First of all, the cause and
relation of -- cause and effect relationship between Strontium 90
has been established since as early as the early '40s and '50s on
animal studies. There's no question that Strontium 90 produces
leukemia and other types of cancers. So, there is no question
about that.
Secondly, we -- I pointed to the extremely close
correlation between Strontium 90 measured actually in bone and
the low birth weight in New York City.
Furthermore, there are many other studies which are
referenced in there, all of which point to the high toxicity and
the ability of Strontium 90 to affect the immune system, and once
you affect the immune system, you increase the chance of every
type of malignancy being accelerated, if it already exists, or
going out of control, due to the failure of the immune system,
and, so, there are also studies that I referred to which show
that the Strontium 90 in the milk by state-by-state with the
three to four-year lag, which is necessary for the build-up of
Strontium 90 in bone, and that is actually correlated from state-
to-state.
So that states with very low Strontium 90 and otherwise
similar diets and everything else had very low increases, whereas
other states that had high data, and, so, there's an enormous
amount of both human and animal studies that relate Strontium 90
to leukemia and all types of cancers, including also infectious
diseases.
DR. FADEN: Thank you very much, Dr. Sternglass. I'm
sure that we all --
DR. STERNGLASS: I'll be glad to stay after the
meeting.
DR. FADEN: Thank you. Be sure to take your materials
with you. We have -- all the committee members have copies of
your documents. Thank you very much.
Our next presenter from the public is Mrs. Elmerine
Whitfield Bell. Is Mrs. Bell here? Good afternoon, Mrs. Bell.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us.
Statement of Elmerine Whitfield Bell
Dallas, Texas
MS. BELL: Thank you.
I saw him as a depressing sight. Joyless, unanimated,
with a damaged head and a broken spirit. During his lifetime, I
saw him as a burden rather than as an asset to my grandmother, as
she waited on him, pampered him.
My mother, I recall, resented this treatment while she
contended that he didn't do his share for the family. She
recalled a life of living with a father who, when not on an
alcoholic binge, suffered from frequent seizures which had to be
endured by the rest of the family.
My uncle, on the other hand, did not seem resentful,
but I often felt he must have been disappointed in a father
incapable of playing a simple bat and ball game or merely
offering a positive life outlook.
My grandmother said it wasn't always like this. She
said my grandfather was once a vibrant and handsome Pullman
porter, a hard worker who wanted only the best for his family.
When I was younger, I liked to do puzzles from the
newspaper, where you find words hidden among randomly-arranged
letters. Since my grandfather spent most of his time sitting
alone, he would sometimes complete these puzzles -- we would
sometimes complete these puzzles together, and eventually he
began saving them in a neat stack and worked on completing them
himself.
In the springtime, I saw him take brown paper bags and
make kites for the kids down the street. He once made a pen for
my pet rabbit. He often talked of feelings in his missing leg
and would shudder and make comments like "they must be working on
my leg today".
Years later, when I was home on breaks from college,
the sight of my grandfather was horrible. He seemed useless and
frail. He had lost more of life's joy. He seemed angry and sad.
The pain was obvious, and he was sometimes furious and irate,
mean and spiteful.
I often have dreams about my grandfather. Before his
death, I had a dream that he was in his old house in a coffin,
open with the body in full view, dead, but alive somehow. After
his death, another dream revealed him through a doorway, sitting
in his wheelchair, looking feeble, yet in good spirits. He
seemed to have a newfound joy, laughing and joking with male
friends.
When Eileen Welsome presented my family with the fact
that this man was indeed CAL-3, a human nuclear guinea pig, I
wondered, could this be the reason, the origin, the root cause of
this depressed character that I considered all along to be my
grand-father. He lived over 40 years without a zest for life and
with a pain I imagine was without equal.
For I understand that the reality of life for the
African American man of the 1940s was already a pre-determined
bleak one, dictated by the white man's tyrannical power of
economics, politics, and, to a certain degree, basic freedom.
Being born a black male was already a handicap, having a limited
education was a further handicap. Then to add a physical
handicap, due to being basically tricked into donating a body
limb for science.
With all of this in mind, I now understand how alcohol
could relieve his reality, how depression and schizophrenia could
take control of his life, how his feelings of hopelessness
shattered such a promising future.
In my most recent dream, I saw my grandfather with both
legs, standing with confidence and strength of character I never
saw in real life. He had a young appearance. He had a look of
joy on his face, and he seemed content.
This statement is signed April D. Whitfield,
granddaughter of Elmer Allen, March 15th, 1995.
Good afternoon. My daughter, April Whitfield, and the
other survivors of Elmer Allen are determined that the truth
about his plutonium injection and subsequent leg amputation be
made a part of the public record.
We continue to be appalled by the apparent attempts at
cover-ups, the inferences that the nature of the times, the
1940s, allowed scientists to conduct experiments without getting
a patient's consent or without mentioning risks. We contend that
my father was not an informed participant in the plutonium
experiment.
He was asked to sign his name several times while a
patient at the University of California hospital in San
Francisco. Why was he not asked to sign his name permitting
scientists to inject him with plutonium? Why was his wife, who
was college trained, not consulted in this matter?
It is my hope that history will not be rewritten in
committees who claim that they do not understand the actions of
the scientists of the 1940s, those who claim that poor and
disenfranchised African American men could not be hoodwinked by
his doctors.
I hope you will understand that just as Jewish fathers
were placed in the ovens at Auschwitz, my father, Elmer Allen,
was placed in his own private oven here in the United States of
America. He was left there for 44 years, and the scientists
occasionally took a peek inside to see if he was still alive.
His survivors are pledged to tell the truth about this
experiment for the next 50 or even 100 years, if necessary, so
that future generations will have more than lies, half truths,
and inconclusive reports, when attempting to recount this real-
life horror story.
Thank you. I didn't know I had 10 minutes because I
would have a lot more to say, but I thank you.
DR. FADEN: Thank you very much, Mrs. Bell. Please
don't leave us. I'm sure there are questions of committee
members, or if you have a few more comments that you would like
to make, please feel free to make them.
MS. BELL: I just wanted to address the report of the
UCSF ad hoc fact-finding committee. There are so many
inconsistencies in here, I hope you all will look at them and
look at them again and again, and pay attention to the
biographies of the scientists involved and how they seemed to all
have some type of connection.
I believe I know what happened, and I hope, hopefully,
all of you will come to some conclusion that these folk were
wrong.
DR. FADEN: Lois?
MS. NORRIS: Thank you for your testimony. Did your
father ever express knowledge of the fact that he was an
experimental subject, and, more importantly, did he tell you then
what he was told before this was done or after it was done?
MS. BELL: It is my feeling that my father had no idea
that he was being used as an experimental subject in something
this important.
It's really hard to explain because of the things that
my father said, nobody paid attention to. It was known, and my
mother explained to us, about his initial accident, when he was
thrown from the train, and it was always our contention that the
leg had to be amputated because surgery would not permit it to be
healed properly.
So, we grew up, my brother and I grew up thinking that
the leg was amputated because it could not be repaired.
My father often said things that didn't make sense and
usually was when he was inebriated. He would say things like
that he knew that the doctors that were working on him didn't
know what they were doing. It was his contention that they were
young people, and knowing that UCSF was a teaching hospital, we
always thought he was talking about the interns that didn't know
what they were doing. But he said, you know, when you find
somebody that starts right in, and he would recall that they were
running in and out of his room on certain times, that perhaps
they didn't know what they were doing and made some type of
mistake.
But to go on with it, after reading my father's medical
records, the graphic charts that were written down during the
time that he was in the hospital, first of all, I took offense at
the fact that the doctors made most of his comments as to my
father's joviality, happy man, amiable, and that's spelled
incorrectly in his statement, and I can show it, also.
But he was like he was setting him up, but after the
biopsy on my father's leg, they put the leg in a full cast and
suspended it, and to me, living even in the '90s, if something --
if I had an injury to my leg and someone put it in a full cast
and suspended it, I would think that it was in the process of
healing, and I can just imagine if they came in three days later
and told he they need to split the cast, and they did something
to the leg, and then a couple of days later cut it off, I would
feel that someone made a mistake.
So, this is what I attribute his statements to mean.
DR. FADEN: Ruth?
DR. MACKLIN: Yes. Ms. Bell, you said that
-- you just told us now that you saw some of these hospital
records?
MS. BELL: Yes.
DR. MACKLIN: Your father's records, and in your
written testimony, you say he was asked to sign his name several
times while a patient at UCSF.
Do you know what -- did you see documents that he
signed, and were those consent to treatment, consent to surgery,
consent to research? What were they? What did he sign?
MS. BELL: I've seen two documents. One was the first
day he was admitted to the hospital, which was five days before
the injection. They wanted to do a biopsy on the leg, and he had
to be put to sleep by the anesthetic. There was a consent form,
and he did sign that.
After the injection, before they amputated the leg, he
had to sign a consent form for the leg to be amputated, and he
signed that. So, since there was no -- nothing wrong with his
hands between that time, this is why the family is concerned that
he was not asked to sign for something this important.
DR. MACKLIN: Hm-hmm.
DR. FADEN: Mrs. Bell, you were speaking about your
brother and you believing that your father had had the amputation
because the leg couldn't heal properly, and that -- was your --
what was your mother's understanding of why the leg had been
amputated? Was that the same --
MS. BELL: We got our information from our mother.
DR. FADEN: You thought that was what she thought?
MS. BELL: Yes, that's what she thought.
DR. FADEN: Okay.
MS. BELL: And another thing I wanted to mention, also,
and I'm not trying to be a doctor or a scientist or anything like
this, but one of the concerns that my mother had was the -- and I
do understand this is the '40s. I just said that. I know folk
didn't talk to folk, especially an African American, but at the
time, my father had had a viable job, but he had run out of
money. This is why his doctor, his private doctor, referred him
to UCSF, and you know and I know that the times did not offer
African Americans a chance to ask a lot of questions, especially
if you needed someone's assistance.
But my mother claims to this day that she does not
recall anyone even showing her a document or saying that my
father had cancer, and in all the documents here say that -- and
we've subsequently read that he's supposed to have had cancer,
but -- and I've also talked to experts who said that if he had
this type of cancer that they said he had, that he should have
been dead within 10 years, which was following the guidelines,
but he lived for 44 years.
So, actually, it had to be a mis-diagnosis. My mother
recalls hearing the word "cancer" for the first time when she was
-- when they were contacted by the scientists from Argonne in
1972 about coming in for the follow-up studies, and she offered
surprise at that diagnosis because that was the first time she
had heard, from 1947 to 1972.
DR. FADEN: So, the statements that are in the chart in
UCSF, your father's medical record, the two physician signatures,
your mother has no recollection of anyone ever talking to her
about any experiment or anything?
MS. BELL: She did not. She never heard of it, and I
know I'm not here to speak to my mother's health, but just --
you'd have to know my mother to know what I'm saying. This has
like really devastated her. She went from a person with -- that
was very viable, somebody who could come here and express herself
much better than I can today, to a person who's virtually an
invalid, who's a recluse now. She's really ashamed that
something like this could have happened, and she was not sharp
enough to catch it. She really thought she was a pretty bright
lady.
DR. FADEN: It's a terrible burden for her. Are there
other questions for Mrs. Bell? Yes, Lois?
MS. NORRIS: Just a very quick one. Did the medical
records show cancer that you received recently?
MS. BELL: There was -- I'm not a medical expert. So,
I'm not saying it said cancer. It said the sarcoma. So, that's
the cancer.
MS. NORRIS: Okay. Thank you.
DR. FADEN: Well, we thank you very much for your
taking the time to come and talk to us, and for your daughter's
testimony as well. Thank you.
MS. BELL: Thank you.
(Applause)
DR. FADEN: Our next presenter is Mr. Steve Schwartz.
Mr. Schwartz here?
(No response)
DR. FADEN: We'll reserve his place in case he stepped
out of the room.
Mr. Brown, Mr. Cooper Brown? Next on the list then.
Good afternoon.
Statement of Cooper Brown
National Association of Radiation Victims
MR. BROWN: Good afternoon.
Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you
once again for inviting me to testify or allowing me to testify.
What I have done, and I hope everybody's now seen this,
is I've provided recommendations that come not from myself but
from the task force in the leadership at the Radiation Victims
Survivors community, primarily focused on the issue of remedies,
and I think rather than read that, I'm going to leave that for
your digestion at a later point.
I'd just summarize briefly what -- where the task force
is coming from, and that is, when we look at the issue of rights
and remedies, we realized that at this stage in the game, perhaps
the best thing -- certainly it proves the best thing for us, and
perhaps it will prove the best thing for the advisory committee,
is rather than trying to deal with a lot of the detail that comes
up when you start talking about remedies, you focus on the issue
at the level of principles, and that's what we've attempted to do
in the presentation that has now been submitted to the advisory
committee.
I just want to stress, too, and I will come back to
them in a minute, but one fundamental principle revolves around
the issue of outreach, and I've stated our concerns before, and
I'll probably state them again.
The second fundamental principle revolves around the
issue of protecting the individuals' rights to remedy within the
justice system, and with that, what I want to try and do is
wrestle with four questions that I understand from Dan the
committee is particularly concerned about.
I hope that I -- that I articulate the questions
properly, and then I'm going to try to give you very quick answer
to each one of these. The questions as I understand them that
are of particular concern to the committee.
Are there special considerations when you address the
issue of remedies because of, for lack of a better word, the
cover-up that took place here? That's Question Number 1.
Secondly, where in -- here, I may be inarticulately
recharacterizing this question, but where -- I think what the
second concern is that if you have reason to believe that -- or,
you know, that there's some evidence to suggest an increased risk
of bodily injury, personal injury, because of the radiation
exposure, how do you define that? Who does it? You know, what -
- how do you assess damages in a situation like that?
The third, issues arising around the question of
notification, not the least of which is who do you notify, and
how, and fourth, what -- what do you do with people yet to be
discovered? You know, experiments have taken place, but nobody's
stepped forward.
The short answers to those questions are yes, it
depends, make a good faith effort, and government gets pro-
active.
More -- more to -- more to the point, special
considerations because of the cover-up, yes. I think that -- and
we make the point in our prepared testimony, this is the
importance of restoring the rights of individuals, and that
necessarily would require an act of Congress in a situation like
that, but I mean what -- what was going on here, we see from some
of the early documents, that there was a conscious -- there was a
concern and a conscious effort as a result to suppress
information about what was really going on in order to avoid not
only the adverse publicity but liability, and because of that,
the issue of restoration of rights becomes, we think, very
important.
The second issue about risk and how you define injury
and how do you define damages, it's very problematic, as you
know, but perhaps -- well, not perhaps. The -- we feel that the
question, and I think that Elmerine Whitfield's testimony perhaps
underscores this point better than anything I can ever say, but
looking at radiation health risks is simply -- is but only one
element of the question of what was the harm, what are the
damages?
What Elmerine Whitfield, Mrs. Whitfield was speaking to
was a fundamental notion under common law, and that's the
dignitary interests. Deprivation of rights. That has to be
taken seriously. It can't be dismissed because the dose due to
the radiation was "inconsequential" or the risk from such a dose
was minimal.
There's something far more egregious going on here, and
I think Mrs. Whitfield most eloquently spoke to that point, and,
finally, you cannot ignore the issue of exemplary damages, and
when we were wrestling with this among ourselves down in
Knoxville, and trying to figure out, well, what happens when
you've got the situation, you know, how do you -- how do you deal
with this issue of the -- there's no injury, but yet there's been
an unethical, unlawful experiment, an experiment without the
individual's consent.
Somebody pointed out that it's much like the situation
of you're gone for the week, somebody comes into your house, uses
the house, doesn't destroy anything, doesn't use any of the food
in the refrigerator, if they do, they put the same food back.
The house is clean, everything. You come back. Nothing's amiss.
Nothing's -- all right.
But this individual while he was there took a lot of
pictures, turned around, went out and sold the pictures and made
a lot of money and became famous. Now, what does he -- you know,
are there damages here? You know, what are you entitled to? Are
you entitled to the profit that this fellow made off of your --
the pictures he took of your -- he stole from your house?
I mean that's -- when this person crystallized it in
that fashion, then we felt that that made sense, and if you can
put that perspective into this issue, perhaps it will help in
wrestling that particular matter to the ground.
Then the question, who decides? What are the
standards? Who's the judge? Who's the jury? Well, we would
submit that absent clear evidence that the court system won't
accommodate the victims' claims, leave it to the existing civil
justice system, but now if there are persuasive arguments that
exist for establishing an administrative claims process, then
there are some fundamental principles that cannot be ignored.
One is it should be limited to the issue of damages,
bodily injury, damages related to the radiation health risk. It
should be based on presumptions. It should be a non-exclusive
remedy, and when we say that, we mean a number of things.
One is it would be limited to the radiation-related
claims only, but the victim or the family member would not be
required to give up his or her or their rights to pursue that
same cause of action in the courts initially.
They would also not be required to give up the right to
sue in court on the dignitary claims, constitutional rights
deprivation claims, privacy claims, and, finally, they should not
be forced to relinquish, as has happened to some of the radiation
victims, their claims against the private parties.
To the extent that private parties were merely acting
as agents of the Federal Government, there are court-created
defenses that they already have available to them. They do not
need a legislatively-imposed Warner amendment.
Now, so, that's a brief summary to the concerns as I
understand them to be for the committee.
I want to back up and just visit a couple of things.
One is the importance of one's day in court. I have been trying
for several years, and it's only become really apparent to me
over this last six or eight months, to figure out why it is that
the radiation victims survivors community, in particular groups
like the Atomic Veterans, are still angry.
There's been an administrative remedy. There have been
congressional hearings. There's been a lot done. Health care
provided. Yes, the system doesn't work well. Yes, there are
problems. But I think that what goes to the core of it for the
veterans as well as for others is the feeling that they were
robbed of their day in court.
I know that is particularly so for many of the atomic
veterans that I worked with, and the other concern, and this is
from the perspective of society, is that when you impose an
administrative remedy, what I've observed is what dies on the
vine almost immediately is the truth, because you don't have
access to it anymore, and that's the other concern.
Now, finally, what is -- when we talk about restoring
rights, restoring people's rights to their day in court, we're
talking essentially about removing procedural and hyper-technical
impediments to that day in court.
What's -- what are the merits of that? Because what
we're asking -- we're asking a lot when we ask that. Well, I'd
submit that the merits are similar to the -- how you are
assessing the issue with ethics and what standards apply.
I think the committee has agreed that the ethics
standards to be applied are the ethics standards that were in
existence at the time the experiments took place.
If you look, you will find that many of the procedural
and what I would call hyper-technical sovereign immunity defenses
that bar access for many to the courts, particularly against the
government, did not arise until the late -- until the mid to late
1970s. That had these people had knowledge of what happened, had
they not been deprived of the day in court back when the
experiments took place, many of those lawsuits would have been
able to go to trial because these defenses did not exist, and
it's those -- we submit that when you're evaluating this from a
legal perspective, the same standards should be applied as are
being applied when you're judging this from an ethical
perspective.
And, finally, and I mention this as an attorney, I know
that there are members of the committee that are concerned that
these issues and the victims not become another public trial for
avaricious plaintiffs' attorneys.
I have to tell you that since my first day in law
school, I've never been particularly enamored of the legal
profession. I actually may end up being a plaintiffs' attorney
in some of these cases as it now stands, but the point is that if
you get into that debate, you're essentially -- you're taking
sides then. You're taking sides against the plaintiffs'
attorneys and for the defendants' attorneys.
We discovered in doing some research there's a case
called Barrett v. United States in which the government's -- the
government attorneys were implicated in a cover-up of an
experiment that took place using not radiation but some form of
drug, and, anyway, the attorneys advised -- the Justice
Department attorneys advised on the cover-up.
They were held accountable under Bivens for a violation
of the constitutional rights. The claims against the attorneys
were allowed to go forward. I would submit that what we're going
to find as we dig into this further is that there were attorneys
at the Department of Energy and other agencies as well as in the
Justice Department that were advising with regard to the cover-
up.
So, if this -- and they should be held accountable, if
that is the case. So, you see, if you start taking sides against
raising concerns about plaintiffs' attorneys, you're ignoring
something here.
My personal feeling is that if you want to, you know,
keep the plaintiffs' attorneys at bay, limit the amount that they
can collect on any judgment or award. That would be how I'd do
it.
Anyway, thank you very much for your leniency. I know
I'm way over my time. I appreciate it very much, and if you have
any questions, you know where to reach me.
DR. FADEN: Thank you, Mr. Brown, and thank you for the
written document. Written documents are very helpful for us to
work with.
Mr. Brown has already left the podium, but are there
any questions for Mr. Brown before we go on?
(No response)
DR. FADEN: All right. Our next presenter is Dr. Oscar
Rosen. Dr. Rosen? Good to see you. Thank you for coming.
Statement of Dr. Oscar Rosen
National Association of Atomic Veterans
DR. ROSEN: Thank you. Thank you very much for
inviting me to speak.
I've been attending as many of these conferences as I
can, and I've learned an awful lot, and as you can see from the
cover of the newsletter, the Atomic Veterans newsletter that was
distributed to all of you, my thinking as the editor of this
newsletter has been enormously influenced by what I've learned
from attending these conferences and from the documents that you
have -- you have distributed to the public.
That's the greatest thing you could possibly have done
for us because with your resources, you have accomplished more in
a year and a half than we could have accomplished in a million
years, and you still have more time to do this.
The -- the Buchenwald touch article, I learned from a
document that I received from this committee, and I think it's
very appropriate, and I -- when I heard Mrs. Bell mention that
her father was, you know, figuratively put in an oven, just like
the, you know, millions of Jews at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and
other places, I felt a great, great compassion and empathy, and
then the article on the sterilization experiments on prisoners,
and the fact that they had to consent to have vasectomies after
the experiments because of the damage to their chromosomes, that
was -- that really hit home.
And then the -- the Atomic Veterans and Widows
testimony to this President's Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments, the thousands of test participants may
have been used as guinea pigs after all.
I know that when the committee first began its work, it
wasn't -- didn't seem to be particularly interested in the atomic
veterans and so on, just in the -- just in the human radiation
experiments, like the one that Mrs. Bell's father was subjected
to.
But because of the testimony, especially of Pat Broudy
and Cooper Brown and, you know, others, Charlie McKay, and the
Atomic Veterans and Widows, who have testified at Santa Fe, San
Francisco and elsewhere, I think this committee has finally
started moving in our direction.
Last -- at the last conference, I learned that only --
only Part 1 of the Pacific -- part of one of the test series was
deemed experimental by this committee, and that was Operation Red
Wing, but -- and I wrote a little bit about that in this -- in my
testimony, but then, when I came here, the first thing I did was
to get a set of the latest documents, and in it, I was amazed to
see all the material you have on Operation Buster Jangle, and
that you have -- that there is evidence now that Buster Jangle
was also experimental.
So, that's another big step in the direction that we
were hoping you would take.
I'll read through my written testimony as quickly as I
can, although I can talk forever on this subject.
The charge of this committee is analogous to that given
to the Manhattan Engineer Project. It took about five years to
develop the bomb under a crash program to which unlimited
resources were allocated. The best minds in nuclear science and
ancillary fields were brought together to accomplish the project.
This advisory committee was allowed little more than a
year or a year and a half in which to accomplish the daunting and
laborious task of illuminating all the shameful experiments
conceived to provide the planners of nuclear war and its
consequences with defenses against lawsuits and the other
negative results of their policies.
How can this committee be expected to clean up the
mega-tons of experimental garbage that took the years of the
Manhattan project, the human radiation experiments, the years of
atomic bomb testing, and deliberate exposure to ionizing
radiation of several hundred thousand servicemen to create?
And I might add because of Dr. Sternglass' talk, and
also the leakage from nuclear power plants, it might interest you
to know that when I told Dr. Sternglass, who by the way is the
scientific advisor to the National Association of Atomic
Veterans, that my mother died of bladder cancer in 1962 at age
62, you know, when I thought she was an old woman, and because
her hair was white and so forth, he told me that it had to have
been from the fall-out from the, you know, from the nuclear bomb
testing from 1945 to 1962, and he knows, and others know and have
written that fall-out from the tests came down in many parts of
the U.S., including Massachusetts, and she may also have been
affected by the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant, for all we know.
We know that there have been lots of health problems
surrounding the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant. Like the civilian
guinea pigs, we, including military personnel and civilian test
site workers and down-winders, were the subjects of bio-medical
experiments, should call them homicidal experiments, to see how
we would be affected by ionizing radiation under every
conceivable aspect of military service in war and peace.
We were a captive population like a group of prisoners
who were deliberately exposed to gamma radiation to determine how
much it would take to make them sterile. In the consent form,
they had to agree to have vasectomies because of possible damage
to their chromosomes.
Then there were the Fernald children who were fed
Quaker Oats laced or flavored with radiation, take your pick.
What about the radiation experiments on the pregnant women at
Vanderbilt University Hospital or the 18 innocents, including
Mrs. Bell's father, who were injected with plutonium without
their knowledge or consent or the children who were experimented
upon by NASA at Oak Ridge or the children of the down-winders who
were badged to see how much radiation they were exposed to or the
children of the Los Alamos scientists we learned about at the
last conference and the thousands of military personnel, male and
female, who were stationed at Camp Hanford to guard the plutonium
production facilities?
As for military personnel at the Pacific and Nevada
Proving Grounds, some were badged but most were not. Even
Stafford Warren's so-called radiation safety monitors were
experimental subjects. Some of the men claimed that -- some of
the test participants, not particularly the safety monitors,
claim that when they went to sick bay after the test to complain
about illnesses, their illnesses were deliberately mis-diagnosed
as conventional ones, just as the DOD is doing about the Persian
Gulf illnesses, and some of them were given quickie medical
discharges.
How many men may have been court-martialed or otherwise
punished for refusing to be exposed to radiation during the
atomic bomb testing? Probably not many because not many knew
what the real dangers were.
Why were so many medical records lost, quote unquote?
Why were so many young men sent on temporary duty assignments,
TDY, to be guinea pigs in atomic bomb tests, and why were their -
- their assignments deliberately left out of their service
records, so that when they filed claims, they would be denied for
lack of proof of participation?
Why did the military and nuclear power industries adopt
the threshold of harmless exposure below a certain specified
amount of radiation? Again, when Dr. Sternglass was talking
about the, you know, the linear principle and so on.
Why did they also accept the linear hypothesis whereby
the more radiation one was exposed to, the more harm would result
as a strategy to deny the insidious long-range effect of low-
level ionizing radiation?
Why was Stafford Warren concerned about the large
number of lawsuits that might occur? Why was the Defense Nuclear
Agency created? Was it to help the veterans obtain justice or to
prevent them from obtaining justice? Why were less than adequate
radiation compensation laws passed?
Why were so many competent scientists like Dr.
Sternglass drummed out of government or denied funding for their
legitimate research or prevented from publishing their findings
when they sought to tell the truth?
Why is a veteran's only recourse for justice the VA?
Why can't he sue his government for damages? Why is he denied
his constitutional rights of due process? It's because of a
Supreme Court decision reached just after World War II called the
Ferris doctrine. When a serviceman tried to sue the government
for injuries he suffered while in the service, and he was turned
down because of the principle of sovereign immunity for the
government, which immunized it against suits, a suit by a
serviceman.
Why was the Price-Anderson Act passed in 1957, to
protect the utility companies from full financial liability for
nuclear disasters? Why was the Warner Amendment enacted to
immunize government contractors involved in the nuclear bomb
testing from being sued by injured servicemen?
My over-riding concern already mentioned before this
committee by Cooper Brown, Cliff Honicker, Pat Broudy, and
others, is that this committee's findings may fall short of
producing the evidence that will support the claims of the
thousands of atomic veterans who believe that they were
experimental subjects in the same context as all the other
subjects, who were injected with radioactive substances in order
to prepare this country for nuclear warfare.
It is clear that every test was designed to test the
succession of nuclear devices on the military personnel involved.
I'll give you an example. After Operation Crossroads, it was
determined that on the ships, the target ships, that objects that
were painted lighter in color showed less radioactivity than
objects that were painted darker in color.
I happened to meet a Navy veteran of Operation Hard
Tack One, when I lived back in Pennsylvania, and he had served on
the USS Boxer as an enlisted man in Operation Hard Tack One, and
he told me that in preparation for one of the bomb tests, the
enlisted men of the Boxer were told to line up on the flight deck
and cover themselves with their mattress covers, which were
white, and turn their backs in the direction of the detonation,
and while the officers were in the enclosed bridge.
This is what he told me, and he said that when the bomb
went off, they could feel the heat, the blast, see the bones in
their arms, and he said that not long after that, his hair began
to fall out. He was only 18. When he went aboard the Boxer, he
had a full head of bright, you know, flaming red hair. His hair
fell out, then his teeth began to fall out, and now he frequently
has cysts on his body that have to be removed, and we hear this
constantly from veterans, the same story about the teeth, the
hair and the cysts.
So, how will they be affected during the short run
because a nuclear war was not expected to last very long?
National survival was the compelling reason for these tests,
according to the test planners.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, when he was -- when he -- when
he learned that post-war nuclear bomb tests were being planned,
he insisted that the testing could be done with models and could
be done theoretically, but he was overridden.
Long wars were a thing of the past. The Gulf War is a
case in point. If even one of the cruise missiles used was
nuclear tipped, how long would that war have lasted? And what
would the human damage have been? Why isn't the veteran given
the benefit of the doubt when his claim is being adjudicated as
the law stipulates?
It says this in the laws, but he's not given the
benefit of the doubt. Speaking of the Gulf War, did any of you
watch 60 Minutes last Sunday, when Ed Bradley presented all kinds
of evidence, including witnesses, that poisonous chemicals were
used by Iraq during the war, and that many of our personnel
became very ill, that they became very ill as a result of their
exposure?
And John Deutsch, who's the assistant secretary of
Defense now, and who is the appointee designate to head the CIA,
persistently denied that any of the illnesses were caused by
chemical agents to which the servicemen and women might have been
exposed during the Gulf War, and I've heard too much testimony to
the contrary, and I was also both disappointed and shocked that
the use of depleted uranium during the Gulf War was not mentioned
even once, and I have heard testimony at a conference that I went
to in Jonesboro, Tennessee, a few months ago by participants, who
claimed that they were -- that their health was seriously
impaired by depleted uranium, and, so, that I was very
disappointed in that 60 Minutes presentation, but I was not
surprised to hear the testimony of John Deutsch.
And he was obviously lying, and when he was the provost
of MIT, one of his jobs was to get as much money from the
Pentagon as possible to finance MIT defense research. He also
happened to be on the executive board of SAIC, the Science -- the
-- let's see. SAIC, Science Applications International
Corporation, Incorporated, which is a contractor for the Defense
Nuclear Agency, to provide dosage reconstructions, which are
invariably low and used by the VA to shoot down veterans' claims.
This committee has determined that all the nuclear bomb
test series in the Pacific and Nevada -- that of all the nuclear
bomb test series in the Pacific and Nevada only operation was Red
Wing -- only Operation Red Wing was experimental because the
military aircraft that were flown through the mushroom clouds
were not equipped with the filters used to collect air samples.
If they were equipped with filters, I suppose their missions
would not have been regarded as experimental.
As of this moment, this is when I wrote this, to the
best of my knowledge, none of the other tests have been deemed
experimental by this committee. I hope this will change.
Well, as I pointed out at the beginning of my talk, it
does seem to be changing because of what you came up with on
Buster Jangle. Further, the committee relied exclusively on
governmental sources instead of their own faculties to reach this
conclusion considering all the information available about these
tests, which is now apparently being rectified.
Can you imagine the uproar that would ensue when
participants in the other test series learn that the tests that
they were in were not considered experimental?
Well, now you've opened a Pandora's box by coming up
with the evidence about Red Wing. So, documentary material --
that is in our favor. Documentary material has been presented to
this committee stating that urine samples were to be obtained
from all the test participants, which, of course, were not
obtained from the vast majority of the test participants.
Why are urine samples taken? They are taken to see how
much radiation -- how much radiation remains in the body or they
are taken to determine how the ingested radiation affects the
subject's health.
We think the urine samples, if they are taken or have
been taken, were to determine that -- how little was left in the
body, despite the damage, what was excreted previously caused.
I was a test participant in Operation Crossroads at
Bikini in July 1946. One of my crew mates recently informed me,
I hadn't seen him for years, recently informed me that he was
told not to look at the atomic detonation because he might suffer
serious radiation injury. I'm talking about Test Able, the bomb
that shows on the cover of this newsletter.
I, on the contrary, recall being out on the deck of the
same vessel, the floating drydock, which had been towed to a
presumably safe distance when it was announced over the PA system
that if we wanted to see the detonation of Test Able, we should
look at a certain direction and listen to the count down over the
PA system.
We were not issued protective goggles, even though I
later learned that a special directive to that effect had been
issued to all the ships assigned to the test. When the count
down reached zero, I saw the flash on the horizon, and we
immediately reversed course and headed back to Bikini. We
entered the lagoon the next morning, anchored and proceed to work
on damaged target ships.
As before the test, when work was over, we stripped
down and dove into the contaminated lagoon for our usual
refreshing swim. Nobody told us that the lagoon water might be
contaminated with alpha particles. Nobody told the young men who
were sent aboard the target ships to retrieve dead and dying
experimental animals, cameras, and test equipment about the
dangers of radiation.
Why were some of the target ships "decontaminated" and
declared geiger sweet as opposed to geiger sour when they were
really not -- when they were really not, so that the crews could
go back aboard to resume their normal duties? We believe that
this was experimental.
Why did the surviving crew members of some of the
support ships still refer to them as death ships? The bottom
line is that they wanted to see how our ability to engage in
combat operations during a nuclear war would be affected. They
wanted to see how living aboard supposedly decontaminated target
ships would affect our ability to perform our military duties,
and we were also the victims of the insatiable curiosity of Dr.
Strangeloves, like Dr. Edward Teller, who wanted to see what
could be learned from the testing of bombs of many different
designs and yields.
Just as John Deutsch lied on 60 Minutes the other
night, Pentagon spokesmen have been lying for decades about the
real effects of radiation on the hundreds of thousands of
servicemen who were exposed.
I rest my case.
DR. FADEN: Thank you, Mr. Rosen.
DR. ROSEN: Thank you.
DR. FADEN: We're running --
(Applause)
DR. FADEN: -- short on time. Is there anyone who has
a question for Dr. Rosen?
(No response)
DR. FADEN: If not, we have your written testimony, and
we appreciate your taking the time.
DR. ROSEN: Thank you.
DR. FADEN: Our next presenter is Mr. Glenn
-- I'm sorry if I pronounce your last name -- Alcalay, is that
correct?
MR. ALCALAY: Correct.
DR. FADEN: Thank you for coming, Mr. Alcalay.
Statement of Glenn Alcalay
New York, New York
MR. ALCALAY: Thank you, Dr. Faden and members of the
committee, for this opportunity.
I'm going to address my remarks this afternoon to the
women of the Marshall Islands. My name is Glenn Alcalay, and I
have had a 20-year involvement with the people of the Marshall
Islands, beginning 20 years ago as a young Peace Corps volunteer
on Utirik, one of the downwind atolls from Bikini, which was hit
with a very substantial amount of radioactive fall-out from the
U.S.'s largest hydrogen bomb thermo-nuclear weapon at Bikini in
1954.
I learned very early on that all was not well with the
people of Utirik, and it was my experience, after having been on
Utirik for one month as a Peace Corps volunteer, that I
encountered my first foray with East meets West in the form of a
Brookhaven National Laboratory survey done under the auspices of
the Atomic Energy Commission, headed up by Dr. Robert Conard, the
then director of the Brookhaven team assessing the follow-up
program in the aftermath of Bravo from 1954.
In 1975, as a young Peace Corps volunteer, I inquired
to Dr. Conard about the potential harm to women and reproduction
as a consequence of latent effect of radiation, and before the
community-wide village meeting between Brookhaven and the people
of Utirik, I was told in no uncertain terms that that was not my
bailiwick, that I really had no business making such an inquiry,
and that I should stick to my formal Peace Corps duties of
teaching English and setting up an agricultural cooperative.
That is, it was 20 years ago for me that I began to
sense that something was rotten in the state of Denmark.
At the present time, I am a doctoral candidate in
medical anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New
York. I'm also assistant professor of Anthropology at the City
College of the City University of New York, and for the past 20
years, I have made seven return trips to the Marshall Islands.
I've spent a total of four and a half years in the past 20 years,
including the two years as a Peace Corps volunteer, in the
Marshals. I'm a fluent speaker of the language, and it was
always very interesting to me to go back and investigate this
question of women vis-a-vis the latent effects of radiation in
the Marshals.
Now, following 41 years of the follow-up studies of
Brookhaven following Bravo in 1954, it is well documented and
acknowledged that thyroid abnormalities are one of the larger
problems facing the Marshalese.
In addition to a few assorted carcinomas, the
Brookhaven scientists have very narrowly focused on thyroid
abnormality and a few assorted carcinomas. The question of women
and reproduction has always been conspicuously omitted.
It was for that reason when I chose my topic for doing
doctoral research that I decided to focus on women. I'd like to
read a quote from one of my 1200 interviews I've collected over
the past 20 years of Marshalese women, one of the inducements
about how I got involved.
This is a quote from a Mili Latobo on Utirik, and I
quote, she says, "Some women gave birth to creatures like cats,
rats and the insides of turtles, like intestines. Most of the
women had miscarriage, including myself, who gave birth to
something unlike a human being. Some women gave birth to things
resembling grapes and other fruits, and some women even stopped
having children, including myself. Things are not the same now,
and the people are not as active and healthy as before the bomb."
I heard this repeatedly throughout the Marshall Islands
from many women, and it seemed really curious about this chasm
that existed between Brookhaven studies and the perceptions,
indigenous perceptions and observations of the Marshalese women.
For that reason, I spent 13 months in the Marshall
Islands, between 1990 and 1991, conducting a health survey on
women and reproduction, and I would direct your attention in my
statement, I'm sorry I didn't bring overheads, I should have had
foresight to bring overheads, I'm going to share with the
committee some preliminary findings of my 13-month health survey
that I conducted in the Marshall Islands, wherein I interviewed
830 women on 10 different atolls.
In a nutshell, I clustered the Marshall Islands.
Here's a map, by the way, attached to my statement of the . I
clustered the islands under purview in terms of their proximity
to Bikini, the site of the largest thermo-nuclear weapons in the
1950s, and I divided them into Northern and Southern . That
seemed reasonable. And I anticipated there might be confounding
variables with my study.
I anticipated I could hear Dr. Conard saying to me,
well, what about the problem of selective memory, for example.
Moreover, since a nuclear claims tribunal has been established
under the Compact of Free Association Regiment, whereby a $150
million trust fund has been established in the Marshals, the
Marshalese are at present filing claims for health injury and
property damage stemming from the tests, what about the so-called
greed factor or let's call it more diplomatically the
embellishment factor of the selective memory problem?
My sense and my 20-year knowledge of the , if we can
call this the greed factor, that the greed factor amongst all
50,000 Marshall Islanders will be randomly distributed throughout
the . I do not think there is one island with a monopoly on the
greed factor.
Another factor-encountering variable might have to do
with differentials in health care provision; that is, prenatal
care, neonatal care. I can attest to this committee and anybody
who has spent any time in the outer islands of the that health
care, and in particular prenatal and neonatal care, is abysmally
poor universally. That is, there is no one particular island
that stands out in the outer islands as having excellent health
care. So, I don't see that as a compounding variable either.
I direct the committee's attention to Pages 6, 7 and 8
of my statement. On Page 6 is the data, the data tables. Page 7
shows what I call adverse births or congenital anomalies; that
is, I combined miscarriages and still births, and I made a
division between pre-1952 and post-1952 in the Marshals. The
reason being that the thermo-nuclear weapons experiments started
at Eniwetok in 1952. Prior to that, they were atomic weapons in
the kiloton range. Beginning in 1952, the weapons, thermo-nuclear
weapons, the hydrogen bombs, were in the megaton range, and the
fall-out from the megaton range weapons we now know was
distributed pretty uniformly throughout the Marshals more --
obviously higher doses to the northern islands, closer to Bikini,
and less fall-out further away.
So, that's the reason I chose '52 as the cut-off point.
On Page 7, the graph indicates that prior to 1952, before the
onset of the thermo-nuclear weapons, adverse births were randomly
distributed throughout the Marshals. A pattern doesn't really
emerge until you turn the page to Page 8, post-'52. After the
large hydrogen bomb weapons, we see a distinct correlation
between distance from Bikini and that being the independent
variable and the incidence rate of congenital anomalies.
As you move further away from Bikini, that is the three
atolls furthest away, the southern islands, Rongelap, Anorik and
Mili, we see that they have the lowest incidence rate of
congenital anomalies.
Now, this is a preliminary survey. This is a
pioneering effort in the , and I am here to request one item from
this committee. I did not bring a long laundry list. I brought
one particular item. I tried to crystalize my statement into one
request.
It seems pretty clear to me that 41 years after Bravo
and the very large thermo-nuclear weapons in the , we still have
an uncertain prognosis vis-a-vis women, and I would urge this
committee to recommend initiation of a larger follow-up study to
my study, a larger systematic epidemiological study of the women
and reproduction in the .
DR. FADEN: Thank you, Mr. Alcalay. Thank you for your
material.
Are there questions? Ruth?
DR. MACKLIN: I'd just like to have one clarification
about --
MR. ALCALAY: Yes.
DR. MACKLIN: -- the words you used and the items that
you're measuring. You have miscarriages. You have still births,
and then you have what you call adverse births, which you define
as still births and miscarriages combined, and yet in your --
when you -- in your oral statement, you referred to congenital
anomalies.
Did you look at something other than deaths? I mean
miscarriages and still births are adverse outcomes that did not
result in a live birth. Did you look at anything that would be
called congenital anomalies in births, in live births?
MR. ALCALAY: Yes. Thank you for the question.
In my data collection, and I'm still assessing the
data, I have a ton of data, it's going to take me several more
months to sift through it, I also collected data from all these
women in my survey about children born with serious maladies. I
would include those in congenital anomalies as well.
Also, another facet of this research which will come
out in a few months has to do with resident histories. The
Marshall Islanders, unlike our popular romantic images of island
people, do not stay put. There's a high degree of mobility.
It's important to know where a particular women resided, say, in
1954, did she live in Rongelap, a 120 miles from Bikini, or was
she at Alamonwah Shopping Center in Hawaii several thousand miles
away.
So, I'm also assessing those data, but I hope that
clarifies.
DR. MACKLIN: Yes.
DR. FADEN: Thank you. Are there other questions for
Mr. Alcalay?
(No response)
DR. FADEN: Thank you very much for the material.
MR. ALCALAY: Thank you very much.
DR. FADEN: Good luck with your dissertation.
MR. ALCALAY: Thank you.
(Applause)
DR. FADEN: Our next speaker is Ms. Denise Nelson. Is
Ms. Nelson with us this morning -- this afternoon? Excuse me. I
keep getting my time of day confused. Thank you for taking the
time to come here, Ms. Nelson.
Statement of Denise Nelson
Bethesda, Maryland
MS. NELSON: There was no blame to be assessed, no
responsibility to be assumed. What had happened was somehow
inevitable. Not the doing of man but of circumstances. These
are the words of Adolf
Eichmann. Never, not once did the man convey anything but the
feeling that everything he had done was totally appropriate. If
the conscience stops functioning, even occasionally, one is in
mortal danger of losing one's self.
He was a soldier. In this, he took enormous pride, and
a soldier is never entirely his own man. When decisions were
made by those above and orders issued, they had to be obeyed.
This was duty, and his moral responsibility.
For it is not just about the unspeakable evil
perpetrated by the agents of Nazism, but about the astonishing
capacity of those not wholly unlike ourselves for self-
justification. The ease with which in the interest of an
ideology or simple ambition seemingly normal souls escaped their
better selves.
Evil is most disturbing when it is common place.
Eichmann was the perfect example of the obedient, dedicated
government loyalist who had put the whole before the individual.
Over 400,000 Hungarian Jews found their way to human
experimentation and death solely because of the actions of this
man.
Today, we think only of the Nuremberg Code, but prior
to the Nuremberg Code came the Nuremberg Decrees of 1935, which
stripped Jews of their basic rights, took away their financial
and social liveli-hood, and marked the beginning of a massive
classification of sensitive national security documents.
Almost the same thing happened in this country at the
beginning of the Cold War. Residents of Southern Utah and Nevada
were identified in AEC documents as a low-use segment of the
population. In other words, disposable.
The rights, health and livelihood of these fall-out
victims were torn from them and documents about their health,
exposure levels, medical examinations, and experimentation were
classified.
50 years later, the bodies of these people have been
carefully buried one-by-one in nice little graves with lots of
flowers, but I for one cannot ever look at the graves in St.
George, Utah, without thinking of a mass grave and unjustified
premature deaths. The parallels are undeniable.
When I hear that some children in Southern Utah -- when
I heard that some children in Southern Utah received film badges
and others did not, I could not help but think of the Star of
David, which was so clearly the sign of another low-use segment
of the population.
Was it justified to expose the thousands of children
who lived in a virtually uninhabited area as it was described by
the AEC to radioactive food, air and water? If so, then who are
we to say that to kill by gassing is wrong?
The children of Southern Utah are dead and dying. If
there was no harm in the clouds, why did they always wait until
the clouds blew away from Las Vegas? If there was not enough
radiation to cause harm, why did the government apologize for the
sacrifice the people of Utah have made in the interest of
national security? If there was no harm done, why did the
Congress pass a compensation act which places a $50,000 value on
the life of each man, woman and child who dies of certain
cancers?
The enormous medical costs were not addressed. The
families slid into poverty. Children lost out on education, and
once well-to-do hard-working families were driven apart and
bitter. The compensation act has failed miserably.
Some families have lost several members and because of
the restrictive nature of the bill, no compensation is paid. The
loss of a child is small indeed to this government, but it is
colossal to a mother and father.
Past and present politicians use the words "small
sacrifice" to address the loss of a child, and this attitude
should make us fear for our lives because once it no longer
bothers us to see mangled bodies, it will no longer bother us to
mangle them ourselves.
Evil can simply be defined as the use of political
power to destroy others for the purpose of defending our sick
selves. Just as the Jews had no protection in Nazi Germany, the
Constitution of the United States of America does not protect its
children.
When the AEC was asked, who has the responsibility for
the safety and welfare of persons and property near areas of
possible fall-out, the answer was, it is the responsibility of
the heads of families and the owners of property to protect the
members of their families and their property from possible
radioactive fall-out.
Any group will remain potentially evil and without
conscience until such time when every single individual becomes
directly responsible for their own behavior and deeds.
Eichmann was the only man ever executed in the state of
Israel. Justice prevailed, and it did not heal the wound, but it
satisfied the soul. Heroic action brought him to trial, as it
will take heroic action to reveal the truth about Fall-Out City.
If the fall-out was -- if the fall-out which was
purposefully directed toward a healthy population was not an
experiment, or even one of planned opportunity, then it was just
simply a criminal act of mass genocide.
There was no blame to be assessed. No responsibility
to be assumed. This was Eichmann's view. I hope that this
committee is composed of individuals who respect the right of
each human being to live in safety, in dignity, and with the
understanding that if their life is taken from them prematurely,
for whatever reason, justice under the law must punish the
guilty, so that all souls may rest in peace.
Thank you.
DR. FADEN: Thank you very much, Ms. Nelson. Very
eloquent statement.
Are there --
(Applause)
DR. FADEN: -- Ms. Nelson, Ms. Nelson, excuse me, I
think we have some questions, if you would -- Lois?
MS. NORRIS: Thank you, Ms. Nelson. Could you direct
me to the source of the quote in your written statement? It's
the third paragraph. The AEC's response to the question, saying
that it is the responsibility of the heads of families.
MS. NELSON: That came out of the book "Under the
Cloud" by Richard Miller, and I think I referenced it on the
bottom of the second page.
DR. FADEN: Thank you. Duncan?
DR. THOMAS: Again, thank you for an eloquent
statement.
MS. NELSON: Thank you.
DR. THOMAS: The same question regarding the AEC
document that you quote on the first page about the low-use
segment.
MS. NELSON: Yes.
DR. THOMAS: Where does that come from?
MS. NELSON: That came actually out of the book by
Carole Gallagher. I'm not sure of -- "American Ground Zero".
DR. THOMAS: "American Ground Zero"?
MS. NELSON: Yes.
DR. THOMAS: Have you seen that document itself?
MS. NELSON: It was an internal memo. I have not seen
that myself, but I believe that somebody else that has worked
with some of the radiation victims does have a copy of that memo.
DR. THOMAS: I've heard reference to this document
before, and I haven't seen it either. I don't know whether the
staff has.
I have the vague recollection that --
MS. NELSON: I would like to find it out myself. I'd
like to see the original.
DR. THOMAS: Yes. Me, too, because I --
MS. NELSON: Yes.
DR. THOMAS: -- have heard reference to an earlier
discussion, where someone, and I don't recall whom, was saying
that that statement was referring to the land and not to the
people, and I think it's really important to get to the bottom of
that.
MS. NELSON: Well, there are actually two statements.
One was a low-use segment of the population, and another one was
virtually uninhabited.
DR. THOMAS: Well, if anyone, yourself or any of the
other members of the audience, can point us in the direction of
the original documents, it would --
MS. NELSON: Okay. I will make a note of it.
DR. THOMAS: -- be very important for us.
MS. NELSON: I will make a note of that, to look those
up for you.
DR. FADEN: Thank you very much, Ms. Nelson.
MS. NELSON: Thank you.
DR. FADEN: We appreciate it.
We next have a panel of people who have asked to
present, and again please forgive me if I'm not pronouncing
people's names correctly, but we have Ms. Chris DeNicola, Ms.
Valerie Wolf, and Ms. Claudia Mullen. Are you all of New
Orleans, is that correct?
MS. WOLF: Yes, that is correct.
DR. FADEN: Thank you for making the effort to come up
to speak to us today.
Statement of Chris DeNicola, Valerie Wolf and
Claudia Mullen, New Orleans, Louisiana
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MS. WOLF: Okay. I'm going to start. My name is
Valerie Wolf.
In listening to the testimony today, it all sounds
really familiar. I am here to talk about a possible link between
radiation and mind-control experimentation that began in the late
1940s.
The main reason that mind-control research is being
mentioned is because people are alleging that they were exposed
as children to mind-control radiation drugs and chemical
experimentation, which were administered by the same doctors who
are known to have been involved in conducting both radiation and
mind-control research.
Written documentation has been provided revealing the
names of people and the names of research projects in statements
from people across the country.
It is also important to understand that mind-control
techniques and follow-ups into adulthood may have been used to
intimidate these particular research subjects into not talking
about their victimization in government research.
As a therapist for the past 22 years, I have
specialized in treating victims and perpetrators of trauma and
their families. When word got out that I was appearing at this
hearing, nearly 40 therapists across the country, and I had about
a week and a half to prepare, contacted me to talk about clients
who had reported being subjects in radiation and mind-control
experiments.
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The consistency of people's stories about the purpose
of the mind-control and pain-induction techniques, such as
electric shock, use of hallucinogens, sensory deprivation,
hypnosis, dislocation of limbs and sexual abuse, is remarkable.
There is almost nothing published on this aspect of
mind-control used with children, and these clients come from all
over the country, having had no contact with each other.
What was startlingly was that therapists reported many
of these clients were also physically ill with auto-immune
problems, thyroid problems, multiple sclerosis, and other muscle
and connective tissue diseases as well as mysterious ailments for
which a diagnosis cannot be found.
While somatization disorder is commonly found in these
clients, many of the clients who have been involved in the human
experimentation with the government have multiple medically-
documented physical ailments, and I was really shocked today to
hear one of the speakers talk about the cysts and the teeth
breaking off, because I have a client that that's happening to.
Many people are afraid to tell their doctors their
histories as mind-control subjects for fear of being considered
to be crazy. These clients have named some of the same people,
particularly a Dr. Green, who was associated with clients'
reports of childhood induction of pain, mind-control techniques,
and childhood sexual abuse.
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One of my clients, who had seen him with a name tag,
identified him as Dr. L. Wilson Green. A person with this same
name was the scientific director of the Chemical and Radiological
Laboratories at the Army Chemical Center, and that he was engaged
in doing research for the Army and other intelligence agencies.
Other names that have come to light are Dr. Sidney
Gottlieb and Dr. Martin Orne, who, it is reported, were also
involved in radiation research.
[REPEAT: "...WERE ALSO INVOLVED IN RADIATION RESEARCH"]
It needs to be made clear that people have remembered
these names and events spontaneously with free recall and without
the use of any memory-retrievable techniques, such as hypnosis.
As much as possible, we have tried to verify the memories with
family members, records and experts in the field.
Many attempts have been made through Freedom of
Information Act filings to gain access to the mind-control
research documentation. These requests have generally been
slowed down or denied, although some information has been
obtained, which suggests that at least some of the information
supplied by these clients is true.
It is important that we obtain all of the information
contained in the CIA and military files to verify or deny our
clients' memories. Although many of the files for MK Ultra may
have been destroyed, whatever is left, along with the files for
other projects, such as Bluebird and Artichoke, to name only two,
contain valuable information.
Furthermore, if, as the evidence suggests, some of
these people were used in radiation experiments, there might be
information in the mind-control experiment file on radiation
experiments.
We need this information to help in the rehabilitation
and treatment of many people who have severe psychological and
medical problems which interfere with their social, emotional and
financial well-being.
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Finally, I urge you to recommend an investigation into
these matters. Although there was a commission on mind-control,
it did not include experiments on children because most of them
were too young or still involved in the research in the late
1970s to come forward.
The only way to end the harassment and suffering of
these people is to make public what has happened to them in the
mind-control experiments. Please recommend that there be an
investigation and that the files be opened on the mind-control
experiments as they related to children.
Thank you.
DR. FADEN: Thank you.
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MS. DeNICOLA: Good afternoon. I'm Christine DeNicola,
born July 1962, rendering me 32 years of age.
I was a subject in radiation as well as mind-control and drug
experiments performed by a man I knew as Dr. Green.
My parents were divorced around 1966, and Donald
Richard Ebner, my natural father, was involved with Dr. Green in
the experiments. I was a subject from 1966 to 1976. Dr. Green
performed radiation experiments on me in 1970, focusing on my
neck, throat and chest in 1972, focusing on my chest and my
uterus in 1975.
Each time I became dizzy, nauseous and threw up. All
these experiments were performed on me in conjunction with mind-
control techniques and drugs in Tucson, Arizona.
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Dr. Green was using me mostly as a mind-control subject
from 1966 to 1973. His objective was to gain control of my mind
and train me to be a spy assassin. The first significant memory
took place at Kansas City University in 1966. Don Ebner took me
there by plane when my mom was out of town. I was in what looked
like a laboratory, and there seemed to be other children. I was
strapped down, naked, spread-eagle on a table, on my back.
Dr. Green had electrodes on my body, including my head.
He used what looked like an overhead projector and repeatedly
said he was burning different images into my brain while a red
light flashed aimed at my forehead.
In between each sequence, he used electric shock on my
body and told me to go deeper and deeper, while repeating each
image would go deeper into my brain, and I would do whatever he
told me to do.
I felt drugged because he had given me a shot before he
started the procedure. When it was over, he gave me another
shot. The next thing I remember, I was with my grandparents
again in Tucson, Arizona. I was four years old.
You can see from this experiment that Dr. Green used
trauma, drugs, post-hypnotic suggestion and more trauma in an
effort to gain total control of my mind. He used me in radiation
experiments, both for the purposes of determining the effects of
radiation on various parts of my body and to terrorize me as an
additional trauma in the mind-control experiments.
The rest of the experiments took place in Tucson,
Arizona, out in the desert. I was taught how to pick locks, be
secretive, use my photographic memory, and a technique to
withhold information by repeating numbers to myself.
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Dr. Green moved on to wanting me to kill dolls that
looked like real children. I stabbed a doll with a spear once
after being severely traumatized, but the next time, I refused.
He used many pain-induction techniques, but as I got older, I
resisted more and more.
He often tied me down in a cage, which was near his
office. Between 1972 and 1976, he and his assistants were
sometimes careless and left the cage unlocked. Whenever
physically possible, I snuck into his office and found files with
reports and memos addressed to CIA and military personnel.
Included in these files were project, sub-project,
subject and experiment names with some code numbers for radiation
and mind-control experiments, which I have submitted in your
written documentation.
I was caught twice, and Dr. Green ruthlessly used
electric shock, drugs, spun me on a table, put shots in my
stomach and my back, dislocated my joints, and hypnotic
techniques to make me feel crazy and suicidal.
Because of my rebellion and growing lack of
cooperation, they gave up on me as a spy assassin. Consequently,
the last two years, 1974 to 1976, Dr. Green used various mind-
control techniques to reverse the spy assassin messages, to self-
destruct and death messages.
His purpose. He wanted me dead, and I have struggled
to stay alive all of my adult life, all of my adult life. I
believe it is by the grace of God that I am still alive.
These horrible experiments have profoundly affected my
life. I developed multiple personality disorder because Dr.
Green's goal was to split my mind into as many parts as possible
so he could control me totally. He failed. But I've had to
endure years of constant physical, mental and emotional pain even
to this day.
I've been in therapy consistently for 12 years, and it
wasn't until I found my current therapist two and a half years
ago, who had knowledge of the mind-control experiments, that I
finally have been able to make real progress and begin to heal.
In closing, I ask that you keep in mind that the
memories I have described are but a glimpse of the countless
others that took place over the 10 years between 1966 and 1976,
that they weren't just radiation but mind-control and drug
experiments as well.
I have included more detailed information of what I
remember in your written documentation. Please help us by
recommending an investigation and making the information
available so that therapists and other mental health
professionals can help more people like myself.
I know I can get better. I am getting better, and I
know others can, too, with the proper help. Please help us in an
effort to prevent these heinous acts from continuing in the
future.
Thank you very much.
DR. FADEN: Thank you.
(Applause)
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MS. MULLEN: Good afternoon.
Between the years of 1957 and 1974, I became a pawn in
the government's game, whose ultimate goal was mind-control and
to create the perfect spy, all through the use of chemicals,
radiation, drugs, hypnosis, electric shock, isolation in tubs of
water, sleep deprivation, brain-washing, verbal, physical,
emotional and sexual abuse.
I was exploited unwittingly for nearly three decades of
my life, and the only explanations given to me were that "the end
justifies the means", and "I was serving my country in their bold
effort to fight communism".
I can only summarize my circumstances by saying they
took an already-abused seven-year old child and compounded my
suffering beyond belief. The saddest part is I know for a fact
that I was not alone. There were countless other children in my
same situation, and there was no one to help us until now.
I've already submitted as much information as possible,
including conversations overheard of the agencies responsible.
I'm able to report all this to you in such detail because of my
photographic memory and the arrogance of the doctors -- the
arrogance of the people involved. They were certain they would
always control my mind.
Although the process of recalling these atrocities is
not an easy one, nor is it without some danger to myself and my
family, I feel the risk is worth taking.
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Dr. L. Wilson Green, who claimed to have received $50
million from the Edgewood Chemical and Radiology Laboratory as
part of a TSD or technical science division of the CIA, once
described to Dr. Charles Brown that "children were used as
subjects because they were more fun to work and cheaper, too."
They needed lower profile subjects than soldiers or government
people.
So, only young willing females would do. Besides, he
said, "I like scaring them. They and the agency think I'm a god,
creating subjects experiments for whatever deviant purposes Sid
and James could think up." Sid being Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, James,
Dr. James Hamilton.
In 1958, I was to be tested, they told me, by some
important doctors from the society or the Human Ecology Society,
and I was instructed to cooperate. I was told not to look at
anyone's faces, and not -- try hard not to ignore -- to try hard
not to ignore any names as this was a very secret project, but I
was told that all these things would help me forget.
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Naturally, as most children do, I did the opposite, and
I remembered as much as I could, but Dr. John Gittinger tested
me, Dr. Cameron gave me the shots, and Dr. Green the x-rays.
Then I was told by Sid Gottlieb that "I was ripe for
the big A" meaning Artichoke. By the time I left to go home,
just like every time from then on, I would remember only whatever
explanations Dr. Robert G. Heath of Tulane Medical University
gave me for the odd bruises, needle marks, burns on my head,
fingers, and even the genital soreness. I had no reason to
believe otherwise. They had already begun to control my mind.
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The next year, I was sent to a lodge in Maryland called
Deep Creek Cabins to learn how to sexually please men. I was
taught how to coerce them into talking about themselves, and it
was Richard Helms, who was deputy director of the CIA, Dr.
Gottlieb, George White, Morris Allen, were all planning on
filming as many high government agency officials and heads of
academic institutions and foundations as possible, so that later,
when the funding for mind-control and radiation started to
dwindle, projects would continue.
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I was used to entrap many unwitting men, including
themselves, all with the use of a hidden camera. I was only nine
years old when this sexual humiliation began. I overheard
conversations about a part of the agency called Ord, which I
found out was Office of Research and Development. It was run by
Dr. Green, Dr. Steven Aldridge, Martin Orne, and Morris Allen.
Once a crude remark was made by Dr. Gottlieb about a
certain possible leak over New Orleans involving a large group of
retarded children who were being given massive doses of
radiation. He asked why was Wilson so worried about a few
retarded kids, after all, they would be the least likely to spill
the beans.
Another time, I heard Dr. Martin Orne, who was the
director then of the scientific office, and later head of the
Institute for Experimental Research state that, "In order to keep
more funding coming from different sources for radiation and
mind-control projects, he suggested stepping up the amounts of
stressors used and also the blackmail portion of the
experiments". He said it needed to be done faster and to get rid
of the subjects or they were asking for us to come back later and
haunt them with our remembrances.
There's much more I could tell you about government-
sponsored research, including project names, cell project
numbers, people involved, facilities used, tests and other forms
of pain induction, but I think I've given more than enough
information to recommend further investigation of all the mind-
control projects, especially as they involve so much abuse of the
radiation.
I would love nothing more than to say that I had
dreamed the whole thing up and need just to forget it, but that
would be a tragic mistake. It would also be a lie.
All these atrocities did occur to me and to countless
other children, and all under the guise of defending our country.
It is because of the cumulative effects of exposure to radiation,
chemicals, drugs, pain and subsequent mental and physical
distress that I've been robbed of the ability to work and even to
bear any children of my own.
It is blatantly obvious that none of this was needed
nor should it ever have been allowed to take place at all, and
the only means we have to seek out the awful truth and bring it
to light is by opening whatever files remain on all the projects
and through another presidential commission on mind-control.
I believe that every citizen of this nation has the
right to know just what is fact and what is fiction. It is our
greatest protection against the possibility of this ever
happening again.
In conclusion, I can offer you no more than what I've
given you today, the truth, and I thank you for your time.
(Applause)
DR. FADEN: Thank you for your presentations. We
appreciate that this is not an easy thing to do.
Are there comments or questions from the committee?
Duncan?
DR. THOMAS: Could I ask either of you, where were your
parents through all this? Do you have any idea how you were
recruited in the first place? Did they -- do you have parents,
and did your parents know anything about what was going on?
MS. DeNICOLA: I can make a brief statement on that.
It was my father who was involved with Dr. Green. My mother was
not aware because they were divorced when I was four years old.
Well, maybe before that, separated, and what would happen, how he
gained access to me is these experiments took place actually in
the middle of the night, and he would sneak in while my mom was
asleep and take me out, and she had absolutely no knowledge of
what happened.
However, when these memories did surface, and I began
to tell her about them, she -- there was no question in her mind
that he was capable. He had been in the military, in the Air
Force. He had access to meet Dr. Green.
So, in answer to your question, it was my father. He
groomed me from the very beginning, started sexually abusing me
from the very beginning, and it was just something that he wanted
to do, and he was closely involved with Dr. Green, but my mom had
no knowledge.
The only thing she knew was that she wanted to get away
from him. She didn't know why. She just knew she had to get
away from him because of my reaction to him. I'm sorry. I
didn't mean to go on. Thank you.
MS. MULLEN: Do you want an answer from me, also?
DR. THOMAS: It's up to you.
MS. MULLEN: If you want. The way I got involved was I
was adopted when I was two and a half by a woman who sexually
abused me, and then she was a friend of the chairman of the board
of Tulane University at the time, and as a favor to him, she -- I
began to show symptoms of, you know, typical of childhood abuse,
when I was very, very young, and she asked him to recommend a
psychiatrist, and he recommended Dr. Heath, who was involved with
the project already, and, so, when he discovered that I already
had been abused from the time I was practically born, and that I
was -- had the ability to associate and that I had almost perfect
recall, and I passed all the personality tests that they gave me,
he suggested me for the project, and, so, that's how I got
involved into it.
My father had no idea, and he died when I was very
young, but I don't know if my mother knew or not. I don't think
she really cared, to tell you the truth, and then she died when I
was teenager. So, after that, they had access to me.
DR. FADEN: Lois?
MS. NORRIS: You mentioned that there are others across
the country who are coming -- who are recalling similar things.
Do they all cover the same time span, generally, or do you have a
feel for that?
MS. WOLF: Yeah. Generally, they cover the same time
span from about the late 1940s until -- see, one of the things
that we're hearing about is people that were assigned to monitor
them in case they should start to remember because it's so
horrible what was done, so we're not exactly sure when the actual
experimentation took place and when it got into just the
monitoring to make sure that they were still under control, and
not everybody is being monitored.
So, but, yeah, pretty much, I think, from the late '40s
through the 1970s, and maybe even into 1984.
MS. MULLEN: Later than that, I found out, because
after my parents died, then there was no one to protect me, to
monitor that she spoke of. My particular monitor was a physician
at Tulane University, and, so, he was a family friend, also, of
my mother's, and he just kept on making sure that I kept going
back and forgetting.
MS. WOLF: So, it's kind of unclear as to when --
whether it stopped or whether it -- you know, where the --
MS. MULLEN: They still monitor you, though. That's
why I am taking some danger in coming here today, because I'm
still being watched.
MS. WOLF: I know this sounds unbelievable, but I mean
there's actual -- she gets stuff in the mail. She gets phone
calls. People have been writing things on her house, using the
pseudonym that they used when she was at Tulane, and only they
have knowledge of that name.
MS. MULLEN: My real name was never used, ever, in
anything. So.
MS. NORRIS: Were they all children at the time?
MS. WOLF: Yeah. All children. And the thing is, is
as therapists, we are trying really hard to figure this out, and
to get as much information as we can.
Claudia's memories have been verified, a lot of them,
because the way I have approached this is as I don't read in the
field. I don't -- and, so, as people give me information, I send
them to experts, like Alan Scheflin, who has a lot of
information, and then he'll get back to me to confirm or deny.
He has never denied any information that I've sent him.
Some of it can't be because we don't have all the
information, but a lot of Claudia's memories have been validated,
and they're not in any published source. The only way she would
know the things she knows is if she filed Freedom of Information
Act information, and this is what Alan Scheflin is telling me.
So, I have every -- and then I have been very careful
not to know a whole lot, so if someone tells me something, I
don't even cue them that -- because I don't know either.
DR. THOMAS: It seems to me that documentary evidence
is going to be key to establishing the truth of these cases.
MS. WOLF: Yes, absolutely.
DR. THOMAS: It's hard for me to imagine that a program
as large and as complex as you people have described could have
gone on for so long without a great deal of documentation.
The question is where is this documentation now? It
becomes a Catch-22 if it is said that all of the documentation
resides within the CIA files, and all of it's secret, and they
won't give it to us. But what you've described is a pattern of
very complex organization which involves plenty of people outside
of the CIA as well.
Therefore, there must be a substantial amount of
documentation which could be discovered. You just mentioned
about the letters that some of you are still receiving. There is
a lead to documentation.
Can you describe for me what efforts have been made,
either by yourselves or by other people who are working on this
story, to try to track down some of this documentation, and what
you meant a moment ago when you said that some of these memories
have been verified or validated?
MS. WOLF: Okay. Dr. Alan Scheflin, and you have his
resume in the documentation and a statement from him about
Claudia in your documentation, he has been for the past 20 years
filing Freedom of Information Act filings to get this
information, has been piecing it all together.
Other people across the country have been doing the
same, going back to the government files, getting what they can,
and what they've also been doing is writing books, sharing
information. So, he has actual Freedom of Information Act
information.
The problem is that it's -- when the requests are going
in now, they're being slowed down or denied or just kind of lost
in the shuffle, and the information is very difficult to get.
DR. THOMAS: I'm sorry. I don't see the documentation
in the package that was provided to me. Is there something
missing?
MS. MULLEN: I have -- I supplied --
MS. WOLF: I sent a --
MS. MULLEN: -- project numbers, names.
MS. WOLF: -- packet of documentation overnight mail,
should have been here Monday, and some more yesterday. So, maybe
it isn't --
DR. FADEN: If we haven't received it, we'll let you
know.
MS. WOLF: Okay. I sent the first one to Steve
Klaidman, and the second one to Kristen Crotty. You have it?
COMMITTEE MEMBER: Yes, we have some of this material.
MS. WOLF: Okay. And, again, it was, you know, what I
could pull together in about a week and a half from across the
country, but the consistency of the stories, and the thing is, we
want to verify it.
So, Alan has amassed over 20 years from Freedom of
Information Act, from memos other people give him or sharing
information, a lot of information, but we don't have the complete
story. There's still a lot of stuff that we don't know, and
that's what we're trying to find out because --
DR. THOMAS: Does any of this documentation
specifically refer to radiation experiments? Because we are told
by CIA that they never did any radiation experiments. So, what
we need is documentation in order to pursue that.
MS. MULLEN: All you have to do is look up anything on
Ord, the one that I mentioned that I overheard them speaking
about. That was almost strictly radiation, and that was run by
Dr. Steven Aldridge, Martin Orne.
DR. THOMAS: And that's appeared in the package which
you sent Steve Klaidman?
MS. MULLEN: Yes, and I gave you project numbers,
project names, sub-project numbers, even the subjects. We were
given numbers ourselves for each specific experiment, and I
overheard my number because they would -- they would assume that
-- they would use techniques so that you would forget. You know,
when you go home, you wouldn't remember what happened. So, they
just talked freely in front of me. That's why no one ever hid
their face or wore a mask or anything, because they knew that I
would not remember, and I didn't. I didn't remember until two
years ago.
MS. WOLF: And, also, I think you can follow up on Dr.
L. Wilson Green. I don't know if you've come across him, but he
seems to have been involved in both, and I think realistically,
in terms of the mind-controls, some of the subjects were used in
mind-control radiation. Some, as you've been hearing, have been
strictly radiation, and some were strictly mind-control.
I think the reason it's coming up now is because in
some of the stuff people are remembering, they knew that it would
break down. They really worked hard to induce amnesia, and they
knew it would break down, and I think in the last couple of
years, that that's what's been happening, because we're hearing
more and more, and, you know, -- so, we're just trying to find
out what's happening here. That's -- so, we'd appreciate any
help you could give us on that.
DR. FADEN: Thank you. Did you want to make --
MS. DeNICOLA: Yes, I did. I just wanted to address
you for a moment. The question you asked about the documentation
on radiation specifically. Included in my packet, and I don't
know if you have that or not, there is - it's entitled,
"Radiation File Information". There are names of subjects names,
experiment names, and some code numbers that I remembered, and
the problem is we have no way of verifying this without opening
the files.
I mean I --
MS. WOLF: You have them.
MS. DeNICOLA: Yeah.
MS. WOLF: You have what she remembers, and you have
what Claudia remembers.
MS. DeNICOLA: Do you have the documentation?
DR. THOMAS: All I have from you is your three-page --
four-page -- three-page document.
MS. WOLF: There is a whole packet of information.
DR. FADEN: We can clarify that.
DR. THOMAS: I gather the staff has it. So, we can get
that.
DR. FADEN: We can clarify what we don't have, what we
do have, and whatever it is we can put together, and we thank you
very much --
MS. WOLF: Okay. Thank you.
DR. FADEN: -- for your traveling from New Orleans to
present to us.
We have two more presenters. I'm sorry. We have two
more presenters who are waiting, and we owe them the courtesy of
hearing from them.
I understand that Mr. Schwartz is now with us. If you
would wait, and we'll just make sure that you get on, but we have
Ms. Starr. Ms. Suzzanne Starr is here. Thank you, Ms. Starr.
And you're traveling from New Mexico?
MS. STARR: Yes, thank you.
DR. FADEN: Thank you for coming.
Statement of Suzzanne Starr
Chimayo, New Mexico
MS. STARR: This is my husband, and he's sitting here
in case I pass out.
DR. FADEN: Well, we hope that doesn't happen.
MS. STARR: I'm not going to. You know, I just want to
say thank you. Thank you very much for listening to me, for
being here, for sitting in your seats this past hour. Thank you.
A whole part of my life just came together. This is
phenomenal. Here I am, living in a remote area of New Mexico,
and I start remembering this really bizarre stuff. Then I go
back and I find the place where it happened, a place I never
thought I had been in my life, and by gosh, it looks just like my
recall of it, and now I sit here today, and I hear from people I
have never met, never seen. They have been through the same
thing I'm experiencing.
I don't have the names, but you know one thing that
just shocks me is through all of my work, I keep coming up with
this darned Delta code, Delta 5133867. Until today, I didn't
know what that was. It's an experimentation code. I kept
wondering, why do I write Delta 5133867. What's an alpha code?
What's a beta code? Those are things that this nation needs to
find out for the sake of our future, and really and truly,
without mistake, for the sake of the salvation of our planet.
I'm just shocked. I'm surprised. I am a survivor of
secret experimentation conducted by our government on healthy
children. I recalled and began to recall these incidences two
years ago. I have been working for weeks to overcome the terror
program so that I could be here and speak to you with dignity
today.
I know I survived my childhood for this moment. These
horrid secrets undermine the core of our society. They exist
only out of the power of evil. As long as atrocity to human
beings, particularly children, go unbelieved, they can continue.
I have come to realize from my awakening that reality
is a dimension beyond human beings' ability to conceive the
truth. When the truth comes to the light and is believed, there
is an incredible healing for ourselves and our nation. That is
my hope.
I was born in 1949. We were very poor. I lived in the
mountains of Colorado. Both of my parents have died of cancer.
All but two of my aunts and uncles have either died of cancer or
have cancer.
As a child, my parents were victims of a mind-control
organization that permitted me to be inducted into
experimentation. I have early recollections of people coming to
my house. My father was picked up on a false arrest for a
ticket, parking ticket, and put in jail. They came to my house,
and they tortured me, and they held my mother until she signed a
paper.
I believe and I know that if she had not signed that
paper, I would not be here today. I believe that her signing
this paper is related to me being brought into these experiments.
Either she signed or I died.
I believe our family physician, who was retired from
the military, got children from the mountains of Colorado for the
experiments. He was the only doctor I have ever saw until I was
20 years old. The first memory I have of environmental
deprivation was in the basement of this doctor's office.
His office adjoined a meeting hall that was used for
satanic rites. I was astounded when I returned to this city not
that long ago, two years ago, and discovered that his office and
the adjoining chambers and the sub-chambers in that city were
exactly as I had remembered it.
Of course, I would remember my doctor's office, but I
had no knowledge prior to my return and my investigation of the
sub-chambers and of the secret things about his office.
The incidences I have recalled happened to me between
ages of three and 12 years old. I was taken to a college campus
in the summer. We were kept in a locked dorm and taken to the
experiment by way of underground tunnels. I provided the name of
that institution in my narrative. I believe you have my
narrative.
I don't want to say that here in public. One day,
there was a lot of confusion, and a door was left open, and I
slipped out. I went across the campus and entered into another
dorm. I heard some people yelling. I wondered down the hall. I
was a very type of inquisitive kind of a slip-out child, and when
I went into the room and looked around the corner where the
people were yelling, there was a high official from the United
States military. There was the man that the people in the
program called the Nazi doctor. They called him a Nazi. I don't
know who this man is. I believe I could recognize a picture if I
was given the opportunity, and there was one of the technicians
at the head of the program.
I was caught and taken into electro-shock sessions,
something was put up my nose, and I passed out. In recovering
this incident, I had convulsions, which I have. I'm not a
seizure person, but when I am recalling these incidences,
frequently I go into a convulsive type of episode. It's not grand
mal. It's just extreme shaking.
A year and a half ago, on an investigative trip, my
husband and I returned to that campus. I was amazed to find it
exactly as I had recalled it. The two buildings where we were
used for the experiments had been torn down in 1968, but the dorm
that I wondered into was exactly as I remembered it.
I recall being in a classroom with other children. We
were all in institution pajamas. We were told that we were
chosen to help serve our country. A careful record of the
procedures were kept. The technicians were highly-trained
professionals. They were just doing their job.
We were not to be angry at them. An American flag hung
in the room. The experiments are discussed in more detail in my
narrative. One of the doctors, who supervised the experiments,
was called the Nazi when he was out of the room. The experiments
involved environmental deprivation, to the point of forced
psychotic states, and you know why I remember about the forced
psychotic states that had a great impact on me because I realized
something. After they put me in that little cell and treated me
like a dog and kept me there until I went into psychotic states,
they gave me electro-shock and told me we returned you to sanity,
so we can take your sanity away, if you ever speak, and I'm
speaking today, and I'm not going to lose my sanity.