27.03.2016
Human Experimentation Rampant in the United States
"...The willingness of courts to interfere
with parental rights when the children in question can be used for drug
trials reveals a systemic imperative wherein science will trump the
welfare of individual children. At the center of such experimental
imperatives lies organizations such as TGen.
Translational Genomics Research
Institute (TGen) is situated in a modern, multi-story building in
Phoenix Arizona. It was established in 2002 by Dr. Jeffrey Trent, who
served for 10 years as the Scientific Director of the National Human
Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health
at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, prior
to founding TGen...."
"...Using children as lab rats is not the
only human experimentation issue that has reared its head in recent
years. Following the Congressional Church Hearings of the 1970’s, the US
government’s program to create the “perfect spy,” dubbed MKULTRA, was
allegedly disbanded.
However, mind control experiments have
continued, apparently unabated. After hearing testimony from a number of
individuals alleging that they are being electronically harassed with
mind-invasive technologies, the President’s Bioethics Commission issued a
letter stating that it would not investigate such allegations. The letter states
that “We would like to clarify for your information that the Commission
is not investigating or reviewing any concerns or complaints concerning
complaints about…..MKULTRA; COINTELPRO; electromagnetic torture or
attacks; organized stalking; remove influencing; microwave harassment;
covert harassment and surveillance; human tracking; psychotromic (sic)
or psychotropic weapons and radio frequency or military weapons or other
claims.”
http://journal-neo.org/2016/03/27/human-experimentation-rampant-in-the-united-states/
http://journal-neo.org/2016/03/27/human-experimentation-rampant-in-the-united-states/
In
an article in the New Republic in December, 1998, former UNSCOM leader
Scott Ritter decried Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons experiments
on human subjects. Wrote Ritter,
“We had received
credible intelligence that 95 political prisoners had been transferred
from the Abu Ghraib Prison to a site in western Iraq, where they had
been subjected to lethal testing under the supervision of a special unit
from the Military Industrial Commission, under Saddam’s personal authority.”
The stance of the United States and her
allies has always been that such experiments bear the watermark of a
brutal dictatorship and are never engaged in by the free world.
So when Abu Ghraib again hit the news in 2004, concerning the ongoing torture of prisoners by US forces, the US was swift to act in condemning the reports as constituting isolated incidents and not reflective of US policy.
And then the floodgates opened, with
more revelations of torture, CIA “black sites” waterboarding and
prisoner rape. And torture became a topic of heated debate.
Those who torture would like you to
think that they do not, or that torture is necessary for reasons of
“National Security.” However, any first year medical student can tell
you that torture is unnecessary to gain confessions, which is the fall-
back used by government officials to explain its necessity. All that is
needed to obtain such ostensibly highly valued confessions is a good
dose of sodium pentothal or another such chemical in the array of truth
serum drugs.
What one gains by the use of torture is false confessions.
False confessions would be highly valued in the continuing “war on
terrorism,” to provide proof that acts of terror are being perpetrated
by those who are detained.
Abu Ghraib may or may not have been the
locus of experiments by the Iraqi leadership. What is certain is that
the US is engaged in experiments on its own people, without informed
consent, some of which achieve the definition of torture.
The US Continues to Evade the Mandates of Informed Consent
The issue of informed consent was
central to the The Doctors Trials at Nuremberg, where twenty German
doctors who experimented on Jews and others, often fatally, were tried
and sentenced.
What emerged from the Trials was the Nuremberg Code, which mandates
that experimental subjects be given information about the nature of the
experiment and the right to refuse.
The Nuremberg Code, however, remains a recommendation, not a law.
Some of these current experiments run by
the United States are taking place within the borders of the US and
some are taking place in foreign countries, with pharmaceutical and
defense agencies as primary perpetrators.
As an act of apparent damage control
following the 1994 disclosures of US radiation experiments during the
Cold War, President Bill Clinton produced a memo, lodged in the Federal
Register, calling for strengthened protections for human subjects.
These radiation experiments exposed US
citizens to high levels of radiation, without informing them of the
risks. According to reports, the radiation caused the deaths of a number
of the experimental subjects.
Clinton subsequently established an Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments to review reports and recommend ways to prevent
further unethical research from taking place in the future.
The Advisory Committee’s recommendations
included mandating informed consent of all human subjects, among other
recommendations. However, the Committee´s recommendations were
never acted upon. And informed consent, which constitutes the core of
the Nuremberg Code, was never codified into law.
Obama Perpetuates the Myth of Legal Protections for Test Subjects
Fast forward to 2010, when another
embarrassing experimental project, this time launched by the US Public
Health Service in Guatemala, hit the front pages of newspapers. US
researchers were reported as deliberately infecting over 1500 human
subjects in Guatemala with sexually transmitted diseases. This study
took place back in the 1940’s and was effectively covered up for over
sixty years.
In response to this disclosure,
President Obama directed the Presidential Commission for the Study of
Bioethical Issues to “determine if Federal regulations and international
standards adequately guard the health and well-being of participants in
scientific studies supported by the Federal Government.”
The Commission reported back in December
of 2011 with their conclusions that the current US rules would deter
such abuses from taking place again.
The Commission failed to take note that
research protocols, classified and otherwise, are lacking an informed
consent requirement. What this means is that if, for example, an
intelligence agency decides to run an experiment using human subjects,
that intelligence agency can waive any necessity to inform the subjects
and to gain their consent.
The Commission’s report is largely a
whitewash. In light of the following facts, it is clear that US
nonconsensual human experimentation is rampant. Some of these
experiments appear to be classified and some not. In many cases, neither
the classified research nor non classified protocols appear to be
abiding by the stated need for informed consent.
Children as Lab Rats
On January 4, 2002, President Bush
signed into law the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act, which
provides incentives for using children in drug trials. The Act offered
pharmaceutical companies a six-month exclusivity term in return for
their agreement to conduct pediatric tests on drugs. This Act was
quickly followed in 2003 by the Pediatric Research Equity Act (PREA).
PREA authorizes FDA to require manufacturers of new drug and biologics
products to conduct pediatric studies in certain circumstances.
As a result, drug trials on children have gone through the roof.
An article at medicalkidnap.com states
that: “In 2006, they found that there were approximately 45,000 children
participating in experiments.”
According to Victor Yeung, who is with the Centre for Paediatric Pharmacy Research, The School of Pharmacy, at the University of London, over 50% of medicines used on children are not licensed for use either for the stated disease or for the age group.
As it eventuates, the US government is
playing fast and hard with informed consent where children are involved.
On the surface, it appears that parents must provide consent for
children to be enrolled in drug trials. As it plays out in the real
world, however, this is not always the case. Parents are often not given
adequate information as to the nature of the drug experiments. And in
other cases, when the parents raise questions about their children’s
medical care, they may find the children taken from them by Department
of Children Services. In some cases, they may even have their parental
rights terminated by a court.
In 2013, Justina Pelletier was removed
from her parents after an emergency trip to the hospital. Justina, who
suffers from a rare mitochondrial disease, was re-diagnosed by a new
intern at Boston Hospital with “somatoform disorder,” after her parents
took her to the Emergency Room with what appeared to be a bad case of
the flu. The diagnosis of “somatoform disorder” is a psychiatric
diagnosis, which essentially stated that Justina’s disease was “all in
her head.” Her parents were unhappy with Boston Hospital’s treatment
plan and also with their failure to even consult with her regular
doctors and refused to sign off on BH’s treatment plan.
At that point, the hospital notified DCF
(aka Child Protective Services) and the Pelletiers were effectively
blocked from further unsupervised contact with their daughter. Justina
was placed in a locked psychiatric unit and Lou Pelletier was charged
with contempt of court for speaking about her circumstances to a Boston
Globe reporter.
After an extended court battle and after
her plight made national news, Justina was finally returned to her
parents’ care. Concerns that she may have been used in experimental drug
trials continue.
The Pelletiers are suing Boston Children’s Hospital.
A similar playbook was used against
Melissa Diegel, an Arizona mother of two daughters also diagnosed with a
rare mitochondrial disease. Diegel has now lost her parental rights
after she questioned the treatment plan for her daughters, which was put
into place by Phoenix Children’s Hospital and Translational Genomics
Research Institute.
In court proceedings fraught with
secrecy, removal of witnesses from the courtroom, sealed records and
attempts to cast Diegel as someone who had “overmedicalized” her two
daughters, Judge Kristin Hoffman severed all parental rights of Melissa
Diegel and ordered the two girls to be put up for adoption.
As in the case of Justina Pelletier,
where her parents were deemed unfit for following the recommendations of
the primary physician and not honoring the diagnosis of a new doctor,
the Diegel case reveals efforts by Child Protective Services to demonize
Melissa Diegel for following one doctor’s recommendations for treatment
for her two daughters, rather than following the recommendations of
another doctor.
Melissa Diegel states that Hanna and Kayla were enrolled in TGen drug trials.
The willingness of courts to interfere
with parental rights when the children in question can be used for drug
trials reveals a systemic imperative wherein science will trump the
welfare of individual children. At the center of such experimental
imperatives lies organizations such as TGen.
Translational Genomics Research
Institute (TGen) is situated in a modern, multi-story building in
Phoenix Arizona. It was established in 2002 by Dr. Jeffrey Trent, who
served for 10 years as the Scientific Director of the National Human
Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health
at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, prior
to founding TGen.
TGen’s promotional literature states
that: “TGen is on the cutting edge of translational research where
investigators are able to unravel the genetic components of common and
complex diseases. Working with collaborators in the scientific and
medical communities, TGen believes it can make a substantial
contribution to the efficiency and effectiveness of the translational
process. TGen’s vision is of a world where an understanding of genomic
variation can be rapidly translated to the diagnosis and treatment of
disease in a manner tailored to individual patients.”
However, TGen may also be involved in
nonconsensual human experimentation. This reporter has uncovered
documentation that the Institute maintains agreements with Phoenix
Children’s Hospital to refer sick children to the Institute. According
to a grant proposal from TGen researcher Dr. Justin Hunter, “Dr. Saunder
Bernes, senior pediatric neurologist at Phoenix Children’s Hospital
(PCH), has agreed to refer Arizona residents with NMD for these studies
(see attached letter of support).” The grant was awarded to Dr. Hunter
on October 23, 2014.
As at least two sick children, Hanna and
Kayla Diegel, were “referred” to TGen with disastrous results for their
family unit, one might question whether or not TGen’s research programs
regularly result in terminating family rights.
PCH has continued to deny any such relationship with TGen, even in light of the documents which have surfaced.
TGen maintains numerous contracts with
the federal government, including defense contracts. One of these
contracts involves sequencing the genome of Burkholderia pseudomallei,
which constitutes a Class B bioterror threat.
One of the problems with terminating the
parental rights of experimental subjects is that reliable information
as to what sorts of experiments are taking place becomes difficult to
obtain.
Officials at TGen did not respond to calls from this reporter.
Creating the “Perfect Spy”
Using children as lab rats is not the
only human experimentation issue that has reared its head in recent
years. Following the Congressional Church Hearings of the 1970’s, the US
government’s program to create the “perfect spy,” dubbed MKULTRA, was
allegedly disbanded.
However, mind control experiments have
continued, apparently unabated. After hearing testimony from a number of
individuals alleging that they are being electronically harassed with
mind-invasive technologies, the President’s Bioethics Commission issued a
letter stating that it would not investigate such allegations. The letter states
that “We would like to clarify for your information that the Commission
is not investigating or reviewing any concerns or complaints concerning
complaints about…..MKULTRA; COINTELPRO; electromagnetic torture or
attacks; organized stalking; remove influencing; microwave harassment;
covert harassment and surveillance; human tracking; psychotromic (sic)
or psychotropic weapons and radio frequency or military weapons or other
claims.”
Recent articles at such mainstream media sources as businessinsider.com have confirmed the existence of such electromagnetic weaponry.
Project Censored, which operates out of Sonoma State University in
California, has published a report confirming the existence of
neurobiological weapons, directed acoustic weapons, electromagnetic
crowd control weapons, pulsed energy projectiles and neural implants,
all of which mirror the concerns and testimony of thousands of US
citizens who are now alleging that these weapons have been covertly and
nonconsensually tested on them.
Justice is Elusive for Test Subjects
The US continues to hold itself up as
the leader of the “free world,” even in the face of such abuses of its
own citizenry. As the US refuses to honor what one spokesperson called
“an ´unaccountable´ World Court,” chances for those used as test
subjects and denied their stated rights to informed consent in
experiments to obtain justice remain slim. A lawsuit launched in 2009 on
the behalf of military personnel used as chemical and biological test
subjects by the US Army at Edgewood and Ft. Detrick military bases has
resulted in a decision by a federal court judge that the Army should
keep the subjects informed about “health information relating to their
participation in chemical and biological tests spanning five decades.”
No monetary damages were sought in the lawsuit. In light of the damage
to the health of individuals who took part in the experiments– without
adequate information as to what the experiments constituted–one might
wonder if the best that can be obtained after a seven year court battle
is an agreement to share such “health information” with the victims.
Tellingly, Bill Clinton’s memo of 1997 states the following: “This memorandum is not intended to create
any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law by a
party against the United States, its agencies, its officers, or any
other persons.·
Writing for mindjustice.org, attorney Cheryl Welsh states that
“…until a federal statute that secures the right of informed consent for anyone subjected to classified human experimentation is passed by the legislature and signed into law by the president, the U.S. government has the power to carry out research projects without his consent and without informing the participants of the dangers or future complications.”
Any questions? Sadly, the US government won’t be answering them…for the time being, anyway.
Janet
C. Phelan, investigative journalist and human rights defender that has
traveled pretty extensively over the Asian region, an author of
a tell-all book EXILE, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
http://journal-neo.org/2016/03/27/human-experimentation-rampant-in-the-united-states/
http://journal-neo.org/2016/03/27/human-experimentation-rampant-in-the-united-states/