As the US
President continues to attack World Health Organization accusing them as
‘China-Centric’ and is eager to put the blame on China for the COVID-19
pandemic, even with some quarters going to the extent of accusing China of
starting it all, if not deliberately at least inadvertently, it may be worth to
remind the American President some of the bitter truths on how America has been
using its own people as guinea pigs, both knowingly and unknowingly,
voluntarily and coercively to develop and fine-tune a whole array of
biological, chemical and nuclear warfare in the past. It is also a grim
refresher for those who have suddenly woken up to the ‘enlightenment’ that the
current pandemic is all due to ‘communist evil’ in China and the answer to all
the problems lies in ‘capitalist messiah’. The new-found fans of ‘capitalist democracy’
mustn’t hide behind selective amnesia forgetting how the so called ‘democracy’
had let down its own people, subjecting them to horrific and most inhuman biological,
chemical, nuclear and genetic warfare experiments under the pretext of various
secret missions spearheaded by CIA,
US Army and other governmental agencies. There isn’t much love lost even in
America for these agencies due to their past sins.
Before
getting under the hood of those chilling stories, let us look at how the US Government,
under the so called ‘democracy’, responded to the Corona outbreak. This is only
to remind those who are quick to put the onus on the ‘communist rule’ for China
ignoring the early warning and shunting out the doctor who had raised the early
alarm on the corona virus (which certainly has been a miss for which the Chinese
government had apologised later. But the point is, such overlooks are neither
new nor unique to any country and have been happening across the world
irrespective of which political side they adhere to). As per an article
published in the Washington Post, the US President downplayed for months the
corona warning from his own senior advisers and has been avoiding taking any
action that could have controlled the virus spread in the country. An official
in the government is quoted as saying “Donald Trump may not have been expecting
this, but a lot of other people in the government were – they just couldn’t get
him to do anything about it. The system was blinking red”. The story has
clearly documented how Mr.Trump was dragging his feet for the whole of January
and February even though “a majority of the intelligence reporting included in
daily briefing papers was about COVID-19”. Whenever the administration
officials tried to bring the topic to Mr.Trump’s attention, seems he had
changed the subject. The experience of the Health and Human Services Secretary
Mr.Alex Azar sums it up well. As per the Washington Post, Mr.Alex got Mr.Trump
on phone on 18 January (as he couldn’t get through to Trump until then), a full
three weeks after US administration officials became aware of the Corona
outbreak in China, and when he tried to impress upon Mr.Trump about the Corona
virus situation, the article says, “the president interjected to ask about
vaping and when flavoured vaping products would be back on the market”. Even in
early February, Trump showed minimum interest though it was becoming
increasingly clear that virus will severely impact US health and safety. As per
the post, “he even predicted the virus would go away by April and even praised
the Chinese President’s response as ‘strong, sharp and powerfully focused’”. Mr.Trump,
as of course as a true capitalist, was more concerned about the adverse impact
a ‘wide-spread panic’ would create on the stock market. When Nancy Messonnier,
an official from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told the
press on 25 February that “disruption to everyday life might be severe”, Trump complained
that “Messonnier is scaring the stock markets”. So, if anyone is under the
illusion that the initial response to the outbreak of the pandemic would have
been better or quicker if it had been in the ‘Capitalist Democracy’, they are
living in a fool’s heaven.
Coming
back to the conspiracy theories doing rounds that the virus is an offshoot of a
bio-warfare project that the ‘Communist China’ has been indulging in, the conspirators
once again want us to believe that the corona is an ‘evil’ and the ‘evil
designs’ are the hallmark of ‘Communists’. For the sake of these lovers of the ‘capitalist
democracy’, let us revisit some of the
scariest and most inhuman instances of state-sponsored
experiments in the fields of biological, chemical and nuclear warfare which
sacrificed tens of thousands of unsuspecting innocent souls living in those
very ‘democracies’. Jonathan Moreno, who
led the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, has recounted some
of these evil experiments and the horrifying experiences of the victims in
vivid detail in his book ‘Undue Risk – Secret State Experiments on Humans’. Huge
heaps of de-classified documents of yesteryears will tell us terrible stories
of how citizens were coerced and ferried into secret places where they would be
disposed off after being used as ‘guinea pigs’ without leaving any trace of
their existence, experience or disappearance, all with the active connivance and
under the complete control of the so called ‘democratic government’ and its
agencies.
Even
before the first atomic bomb fell on Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of
civilians, unsuspecting 4,00,000 American soldiers were made to watch nuclear
explosion from a distance of as close as a mile or two from the ground zero.
This moment of horror was part of the ‘field experiment’ to ‘study’ the effect
of a nuclear bomb explosion on humans. None of them knew what they were being
subjected to. Worse still, all of the soldiers who were already traumatized by
the experience and radiation exposure were made to take an ‘oath of secrecy’
that they would not talk to anyone about it. Breaking this oath of secrecy, even
talking among themselves, was considered as nothing less than ‘treason’ and was
punishable by 10,000 dollar fine and 10 or more years of imprisonment. Silence was forced on the victims, own
citizens and soldiers, by the very ‘democracy’ that some people want us to hail
now. Many have died due to leukaemia and other radiation related diseases and
had to live the rest of their lives, those unfortunate ones who were left to
live, haunted by scariest nightmares. These victims are referred as ‘Atomic
Veterans’. They were not even eligible for any compensation as the government
refused to even acknowledge that there was any radiation exposure at all. By
the time the oath of secrecy was lifted finally in 1994, many veterans have had
already taken their secrets with them to their graves. Some of them who had
survived long enough to break their forced silence had described how the blast
had knocked them down to the ground and how they could see the blood vessels
and bones in their body like viewing under an X-ray. The account of terror they
had to go through was unimaginable and horribly painful. The documentary ‘The
Atomic Soldiers’ by Morgan Knibbe had relived the horror through the
experiences of hundreds of victims who lived to tell their painful tales. One
of them says in the documentary, “It haunts me to think of what I had witnessed
and not realised at the time the importance of what we were doing… serving as
guinea pigs”. The book ‘Undue Risk’ quotes a Navy veteran as saying “The
government has lied to us for 50 years over and over again. If I would have
been shot on the front lines at least I would have had it on my record and
would have received medical treatment”. It
is a grim reminder to all those who think the ‘capitalist democracy’ offer them
a democratic heaven. They must be under no false illusion about its
transparency and commitment to its own people. Between 1946 and 1992, US
government must have conducted more than 1000+ nuclear tests during which
unsuspecting soldiers were exposed to nuclear radiations, says the book. Report
of the Committee on Human Radiation Experiments describes in detail how American
citizens were injected with plutonium as part of radiation experiments. One of
the chilling stories narrated in there is a classic tale of deception and
horror of state sponsored terror that thousands of innocents men and women were
subjected to go through in the name of ‘medical research’. The victim, named
Ebb Cade, a 53 year old cement worker, was met with a car accident and had a
broken bone when he was admitted to a local facility. He was later taken to the
Manhattan project (Atomic project headquarters) Army hospital for operation,
but was fated to become the first of the 17 victims who got injected with the
nuclear fissile material called Plutonium. He never knew he was being exposed
to one of the most lethal radioactive material and what consequences awaited
him. A women from Tennessee filed suit alleging many pregnant women and their
foetuses were used as guinea pigs exposing them to radiation. Radiation
experiments on human didn’t spare even children. The news, released in the late
90s, about Quaker Oats Cereal Company and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) settling a lawsuit brought by a group of unwitting test victims
shocked many and raised a huge public outrage. The victims were young boys at
the Fernald School in Waltham, Massachusetts, where they “were fed cereal
containing trace amounts of radiation to identify the pathway of nutrients in
the human digestive system”.
Chemical and Biological weapon experiments had even
larger shares of guinea pigs. National Academy of Sciences in one of its
reports released in 1993 has estimated that during Second World War alone
around 60,000 army men were used in the research with chemical weapons like
Mustard Gas and other toxic agents. Many were locked in gas chambers filled
with Mustard Gad during the infamous Mustard Gas experiments. The objective of
the experiment was to find out at what point the toxic gas agents would ‘break
a man’. As part of a study on venery diseases, US Public Health Services worked
with Federal Bureau of Prisons and arranged for two hundred “volunteer
prisoners” who were deliberately infected with gonorrhoea disease forcing them
to have sex with infected females or by injecting them with pus taken from the
urethra of the infected females. One wouldn’t even dare to imagine, even in
dreams, the pain, sufferings and horror the victims might have endured during
these blatant crime on humanity. The widely reported Yellow-Fever experiments
in Cuba used innocent Spanish migrant workers, apart from the soldiers
themselves, as guinea pigs. Camp
American University was used as Army’s Chemical Warfare Center where all sort
of experiments with toxic chemical warfare agents were conducted on humans.
George Temple, an electrical engineer with the Army and one of the few
survivors from the Camp University research ‘experiments’, is quoted as saying
“one day, in the pitch black interior of the smoke lab, three men were burned
by a deadly dose of gas. The bodies were hauled away on a cart, the flesh jiggling
off their bones”. They were exposed with deadly chemicals like phosgene and
white phosphorous. Temple recollects “more men were killed by gas on the
experimental side than in actual use”. All were subjected to extreme tortures
by exposing them to series of various poisonous and incendiary gas agents as
part of the experiments in the Camp AU. An investigation report on “CIA
activities” is filled with horror stories of instances of covet operations
executed by CIA to experiment with mind-controlling agents like LSD on
unsuspecting victims. One of the most infamous tragedies of the LSD experiment
was the death of its own scientist Dr.Frank Olson by crashing down from the 10th
floor of a hotel while being under the influence of LSD. He was a specialist in
air-born delivery of diseases used as biological weapon. Sidney Gottlieb, the
one who led LSD experiments and secretly mixed LSD in the drinks, as a key
member of the Technical Service Staff of CIA had helped CIA in planning several
of their assassination plots designing poison handkerchief and other lethal
devices to take out their targets, which included even Fidel Castro. A similar
case where a 42-year old Harold Blauer lost his life in the ‘secret experiment’
performed on him by the Psychiatric Institute (PI) in Newyork in collusion with
the US Army further reveals the uglier underbelly of the so called ‘democratic
messiah’. The experiment, spearheaded by the US Army, was to collect sufficient
data “for the utilization of psycho-chemical agents both for offensive use as
sabotage weapons and for protection against them”, quotes the report.
Accordingly, patients were to be injected with mescaline chemical substance, a
variant that was never tried on humans before. Blauer was coerced into the
experiment by threatening him that he would be sent to mental asylum. He was
injected upon multiple times irrespective of his protest and the experiment
continued for days until he slipped into a coma and died after the fifth
injection he received. Army and New York state authorities conspired to cover
it up in the name of national security. There will be no dearth for even more
chilling stories in the CIA archives.
The Biological warfare program was covered with greater
secrecy than even nuclear weapons programs. Later revelation about the open-air
field testing of biological weapons conducted in Minneapolis in 1960 had
stunned many, including the Congress representative from the constituency as
even he was kept in the dark. The Army had made elaborate arrangements to keep
the public unaware of field tests of biological weapons. Testing of biological
weapons was conducted in the Camp Detrick and the Army was extremely careful of
keeping everything about the tests secret from the public. Body remains of the
People died due to exposure were secretly disposed off. The report describes
the modus operandi, citing army officials involved, as “deceased personnel
might be placed in a hermetically sealed metal casket and interred by military
personnel in the area, without disclosing by certificate, report or statement
the nature or cause of death”. Some of the young male and female soldiers
Mr.Morena interviewed for the book had revealed to him that “they understood
that occasionally they would be invited to serve as subjects in medical
experiments having to do with the Infectious Disease Institute's bio-protection
mission”. Many were used as ‘subjects’ in genetic warfare experiments or
vaccine development studies and were either lured into it offering money or
coerced into it with threats of repercussions.
A few cases referred in here are only a tiny tip of the
mammoth proverbial iceberg as revealed by de-classified secret documents and various
enquiry commission reports. The vast underbelly of one of the biggest ‘democracies’
may stay in the dark for ever as hundreds of thousands of souls sacrificed on
the ‘altar of weapon research’ would never come back to tell their torture
tales. It is anybody’s guess that no
single country on the face of the earth, irrespective of which political spectrum
they belong to, if they have technical and economical wherewithal, would be
shying away from the pursuit of genetic weaponry. With the boundary between biology and chemistry
becoming increasingly blurred with every advance in the field of genetics, the
modern weaponry could be more sophisticated and potent than one could
imagine. Possibilities of biological
weapons that can be ‘managed’ so as not to affect the forces who have released
it (‘return’ effect) is very much a reality today. Many scientific breakthroughs
have found their way to military (mis)use and genetics research wouldn’t be any
exemption. It would be foolhardy to
argue that the ‘Capitalist Democracy’ is the means to guard against such
self-destructive adventures on humanity. Its past history in fact guarantees exactly the
reverse.
- Suresh Kodoor
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