CIA’s Project ARTICHOKE involved extreme methods of interrogation — “enhanced interrogation” — these included hypnosis, forced morphine addiction, drug withdrawal, the use of chemicals and electroshock aimed at inducing amnesia. The experiments induced paranoia and hallucinations in U.S. soldiers who were the unwitting guinea pigs. As Linda Hunt states, the…
James Stanley, a career soldier was one of these unwitting subjects who was given LSD in 1958. He suffered hallucinations, memory loss incoherence, and severe personality changes and exhibited uncontrollable violence. It destroyed his family, impeded his working ability, and he never knew why until the Army asked him to…
December, 1990: FDA issued a waiver from informed consent to permit the Department of Defense to use unapproved, experimental drugs and vaccines – e.g. anthrax vaccine on soldiers. This violated the foremost “absolutely essential” mandatory ethical principle defined by the Nuremberg Code which was promulgated by U.S. judges under the…
Following the compelling testimonies of the soldiers who had been subjected to poison gas experiments, Jay Katz, MD the distinguished Yale professor of law and medical ethics wrote a letter to the IOM Committee, strongly criticizing the IOM for severely limiting the Committee’s task to an evaluation of “cold scientific knowledge” without…
Following public hearings by the Committee of the IOM (1991) and by the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, the IOM Committee issued a seminal report, Veterans at Risk: The Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite (1993) which revealed that by the time WW II ended approximately 60,000 U.S. servicemen…
On May 6, 1994, the Senate Committee on Veterans held a hearing titled: “Is Military Research Hazardous to Veterans’ Health? Lessons from World War II, the Persian Gulf and Today.” Rudolph R. Mills had been in a gas chamber experiment when he was 18 years old. He testified: “I had…
In 2009, Gordon Erspamer, a San Francisco lawyer filed suit against the CIA and the US Army on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans of America and six former American soldiers who claim they are survivors of classified government tests conducted at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland between 1950 and…
The Veterans Affairs website demonstrates that the agency is a source for disinformation about unethical medical experiments conducted on military personnel. It states: From 1955 to 1975, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps conducted classified medical studies at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. The purpose was to evaluate the impact of low-dose chemical…
In 2012, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in California ruled that a class action lawsuit on behalf of 100,000 veterans, who were used as guinea pigs to test hundreds of drugs, can proceed. The suit seeks to lift the oath of secrecy soldiers say they swore about what they went…
NPR’s six month investigation shows the continued utter disregard the Veterans Affairs Department has for it suffering veterans who had been abused as human guinea pigs in mustard gas experiments. NPR created the first publicly searchable database including 3,900 names Charlie Cavell was 19 when he volunteered for the program…
Japan began to explore research on both biological and chemical weapons in the late 1920s. Even before he became emperor, Hirohito showed an interest in this line of research. In 1925, during his regency, Hirohito had a biological laboratory constructed within the Akasaka Palace, and in 1928, during the second…
An estimated 20 million people died and millions more were subjugated and oppressed during Japan’s half-century of war and colonial expansion, which ended in 1945. Throughout its military campaign the Japanese army carried out an infamous “Three All” extermination policy “loot all, kill all, burn all.” The policy led to…
