No one with even a passing knowledge about the history of
chemical and biological warfare in the United States should be in the least
surprised about recent disclosures regarding the testing of nerve gas upon
unsuspecting members of the U.S. military back in the 1960s. (If you're
looking for these historical data, best not look under the file marked "war
on terror.") In the late 1970s, the CIA made the mistake of responding to a
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Scientologists by
contemptuously sending them a railroad car of shredded documents.
The Scientologists patiently pieced enough of the millions of
scraps of paper together to figure out that in 1951, the U.S. Army had
secretly contaminated the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia with
infectious bacteria. One type of bacterium was chosen because blacks were
believed to be more susceptible than whites.
The towns of Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., were targets of
repeated army bio-weapons experiments in 1956 and 1957. Army Chemical and
Biological Warfare (CBW) researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the
two towns in order to test the ability of insects to carry and deliver
dengue and yellow fever. Hundreds fell ill with fevers, respiratory
distress, still births and encephalitis. Several died.
This was the high tide of secret experiments by government
agencies on unsuspecting or coerced human guinea pigs, otherwise known as
citizens of the United States. As Jeffrey St. Clair and I described in our
book "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press," CIA director Allen Dulles
gave the late Sydney Gottlieb (boss of the Agency's Chemical Division)
$300,000 to test LSD and other potions, some of them lethal. Gottlieb passed
some of the money on to Dr. Harris Isbell, who ran the Center for Addiction
Research in Lexington, Ky., thriving on the CIA subventions (funneled
through the National Institutes of Health) and acting as middleman for the
Agency for its supplies of narcotics and hallucinogens from the drug
companies.
Isbell fed morphine and heroin to prisoners remanded to the
Center, among them black heroin addicts into whom he also injected
staggering amounts of LSD for 77 straight days, measuring their reactions as
he did so.
Recently, St. Clair and I heard from John Williams, who'd read
our "Whiteout." He had worked at the Center and sent along these
reminiscences:
"I worked at the Addiction Research Center (ARC) about 30 years
ago. It was located in one of Lexington's white-picket fenced rural areas,
600 Leestown Pike. The head of the Center then was Dr. William Martin, MD
(he replaced Isbell).
"My immediate supervisor was Harold Flanary. I worked there as a
health physicist. My primary duties were the design, modification, repair
and maintenance of laboratory equipment -- primarily automatic injectors,
stimulus generators and recording devices. I never worked directly with the
prisoners, and in the two years I worked there, ran into perhaps three
prisoners in ARC custody being "tested." The ARC was located in a complex
that had a minimum-security federal prison that housed both male and female
prisoners (while I was there, a famous Illinois governor was incarcerated. I
don't recall his name).
"Part of the prison also included a Clinical Research Center,
with which I was not too familiar. The ARC prisoners were lifers bused in,
and were not derived from the prison population there, which primarily
consisted of frauds, embezzlers, forgers, other mostly white and
white-collar criminals. The prison had a major problem with female prisoners
constantly turning up pregnant. The prison cafeteria food was some of the
best I've ever eaten anywhere.
"Some things of possible interest to you:
1. While at that time I did not realize that the ARC was a CIA
operation, I suspected somebody big was behind us. The psychiatrists there
talked about the development of a drug called "M-cubed." It was 1,000 times
more potent than LSD, and it was designed to be used against Castro and
other communist leaders. I used to eat lunch regularly with about a dozen
psychiatrists, psychologists, pharmacologists and neurologists, and we all
talked a lot about our work.
2. While I was there, there were at least three ARC prison
riots, from what I was told, each apparently effectively repressed.
3. On the upper floor of the prison were housed about 50 World
War II veterans who were among the thousands on whom the VA performed
lobotomies to treat "shell shock" (PTSD). Essentially, they were walking
vegetables. This saddened me greatly, as I am a disabled veteran myself.
4. Much of the equipment I maintained was used to periodically
inject beagle dogs, chimps and monkeys. There were about a dozen chimps and
monkeys, and close to 50 dogs. To keep the dogs in place, their spines were
surgically broken. After a short time of what appeared to me to be great
suffering, they died and were systematically replaced. Some were autopsied.
"Had enough?
"Sincerely, John J. Williams"
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
