A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People (25 page)

“Here are the pictures, right here. These pictures-these photographs-were taken in the basement. Here is what we have. Oh. Boy Scouts. I am in these pictures. Here are some of them. Here is a machine; it is called a counting machine. Of course, to count the machine they have got to put something in you to count, am I right? I mean, if you have a bank, there are no pennies in it, you don’t count it. You have got to put pennies in it to count it. So they had other machines there. These are radiation machines. One of them was a round cylinder. It had a radiation symbol on it. They
stick you in it. Your head is sticking out of it. They shoot the radiation through you. They can stick you in a counter; see how much the body absorbs. I do believe though, that was the first experimental CAT scan. It is wrong. But kids, you don’t experiment on kids. You don’t even
experiment with kids in an experimental machine. You don’t even know if the machine is
going to
work right. And you definitely don’t shoot radiation through a child. This government here is the counter this government bombed Hiroshima. Nagasaki. My goodness! Those are the two biggest test labs I have ever seen! Why do we need any more test labs on radiation? We know what radiation does. Can’t get no records. That is a shame. Too bad, huh? Look what I got, a record. This is a record book that was kept in the bottom of the pathology record. Let me read it.

‘Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Division of Nuclear Medicine.’ Now we have a start.
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We have a record. I asked, “Sir, ma’am, here is a record, a picture of it. Can we dig it up?
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My name is on it. Unfortunately my name was put into a number. In other words, they changed the names and numbers and stuck that on here. Let’s dig up these records, okay? I would appreciate it.

After this I went into another building about a year later. It is called the Isolation Ward. That was an experience. I had an entire ward a little bit bigger than this to myself. Well, that was fun for a kid. The first day in there, I took off. You know how kids are. I was about maybe, ten or twelve. Went next door. A bunch of soldiers over there were playing chess. Well I got in there and I played chess with a guy. He did not pay much mind to me. I beat him. So of course all the other soldiers, they start teasing him about it and it got serious. A crowd came around. I played him
a second game. Well he started beating me, but I was saved by a nurse. She came. She saw me. She said, ‘Hey, you ain’t allowed in here!’ Away I went back to the ward by myself again. This time they kept a guard, a 24-hour guard there, so I could not take off. I was not allowed to get any soda pop. I could not have any other foods. They fed me my foods. They took my stool, my urine. Boy, did they really poke holes in me both ankles, both sides, knees, all over my hips, the back of my head! I believe they are called bone biopsies. I get visions; they have got this sharp thing. You stick it in like a corkscrew and take your flesh, your skin, your bone, and ffft! Got it! I don’t know how they do it but that is just the way I figure. But I have got a lot of them, all over me. I even got stuff left in my arm that they forgot to take out, whatever it is.

Now, I don’t, I am not angry at today’s government for what yesterday’s government did. Let’s get this clear right now. Today’s government did not do these atrocities, not at all. That was yesterday’s government. However I am frustrated because today’s government will not release the records. That is bad. I mean they did not do it, what have they got to lose? Yesterday’s
government did it. They are the ones who should hang their head in shame. For the record, we do have some people here from the government that we hope they help. They want
to help. I think they
will help. So my question is, will you please get my records? The one I was in that laboratory. Oh, in the ward that I was in? They would knock me out and take me into a laboratory and I was totally out. This took place for about six days. I have no idea what they did to me in that laboratory, except when I would come out I had Band-aids all over me. I am asking. Can we get the records, please? I will give you the dates. I will make it easy for you, okay? I will make it very easy. And then I am done.”

In response to Ms. Melamed from the Department of Energy, after stating the agencies support insofar as possible to find his records; Peter says,

“The radiation, whatever it was? I was perfectly healthy. There was nothing wrong with me. Maybe I looked a little crazy. Okay. That was, let’s see, that would have been September 20, 1958. Is anybody going to write that down please? Okay. There should be records on that day. One week later on a Thursday, that is when me and my sister went in. That is when we went in to the machine that had the radiation symbol on it. Boy, do I wish she was here today to testify with me! She has got three feet of dirt on her now in Lebanon, Tennessee. She died about four years ago. The doctor found like a crust, I guess, over her entire brain. Cancer. And he said, ‘You had that 20, 25 years.’ So it is easy to figure out where it came from.”

Colleen Gentilcore quotes Peter in a story she wrote in 1996.
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“My understanding is the sole purpose of adoption of me was for experiments. We have documents and hospital papers for much of this to back this up…Since my dad died, we were able to go through all the papers and find documents, papers, and photographs. These are military photographs he was ordered to destroy, but he brought some home and didn’t destroy everything.”

Miss Gentilcore wrote an additional article for the Herald Standard later that month. In it she reports Peter saying that his adoptive mother told him he was bought for $1000 and that the army owned him. It is not hard to understand how devastating it would be to learn that you had been adopted for the sole purpose of being a human guinea pig.

Karen Coleman Wiltshire, another survivor helped Peter with some of his FOIA requests to the government. She attended several public forums with the Department of Defense as a representative of ACHES and was outspoken on behalf of survivors on each occasion.
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She too, was one of the very few who was able to obtain her medical files from John Hopkins proving her experimentation.

Karen’s father worked for the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. She obtained her files through sheer persistence, help from the almighty, and a mistake by a clerk who was not supposed to give the information out. Karen said they transported her to Washington, Maryland and Virginia, to military and government labs by private ambulances, military cars, and yellow school buses. She alleged her experiments took place from 1961 through 1970. Karen related to me that she was kept in the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children at John Hopkins where there were wards of children. Her parents had been told she was being treated for a heart defect. She said when they would come to visit, she would be put in a private room with her belongings in order for it to appear as though she had been there all along. When her parents left, they returned her to the ward where she said they did LSD, ECT, and other strange experiments. One of these she explained was to be trained to eliminate emotions and feelings by using assorted torture and other techniques. This sounds very much like the mind control technique used on me by the CIA and other branches of the government.

Karen was responsible for spurring me on to obtain information through FOIA requests that would help me validate my memories. She was always banging on doors, persistent to get the truth out, especially when she found out there were so many other kids who were used as human guinea pigs.
The Department of Energy had told her she was the only one, but she said that Pentagon sources had personally told her they “didn’t want our stories out at any cost. The plan was to pay off a few token victims and blow the rest off.” Karen did not live to see any of us receive validation or vindication.

On April 5, 1999 Karen made a presentation on behalf of ACHES entitled ETHICS before the National Institute of Health’s’ Bioethics Group. She died on April 23, 1999 after doing exhaustive investigation of DOD experiments on human beings.
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I am sure more child survivors like Karen and Peter will begin coming forward once the public becomes aware of these abuses.

Janet Gordon also spoke before the IWG
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Staff Stakeholder Workshop before the Department of Energy on February 26, 1996. She belonged to Citizens Call, a downwind victim organization from Utah and the National Committee for Radiation Victims. Ms. Gordon made what I would call, a valiant attempt to underscore the importance of notification. She said,

“Why is there a question about notification? Are we dealing with people? Are we dealing with human beings? Are we dealing with citizens? How can there possibly even be a question of whether these people are entitled to be notified? I don’t understand that. I work in grassroots politics. I’m the Vice Chair of my party in my county. I believe in the democratic process. I believe I’m a citizen. I thought I was a full-fledged honest citizen. You have made us non-citizens with non-rights, invisible. I’m obviously not invisible. I’m quite substantial. But as far as
the government is concerned, I’m invisible. I have no rights to notification. I have no rights to honesty. I have no rights to follow-up. You can conduct experiments on my people without telling us? In fact by lying to us and telling us that what you’re doing to us, isn’t what you’re doing to us. And then you have no obligation to provide any health care for people when they suffer...Determine what category you’re putting us in and either treat us as human beings and full-fledged citizens, or let us know that we’re not so that we can take some action in the World Court.”

She continued by saying, “Secondly, I would like to address the political reality check here. There are budget constraints and there are difficulties with contacting so many people. I want to know how you could conduct experiments on that many people, and you could afford to do those experiments if you can’t afford to follow them up. If they were difficult to follow up, how were they not complicated enough to do in the first place. If they were doable, how can that make any kind of sense? And finally, I would like to like to beg the Interagency Working Group to not follow an established professional pattern, which says major deity is the meaning of MD, or that Ph.D. is powerful major deity. We’re all human beings, and just because you have an MD after your name; does not mean that you’re in charge of whether I’m a human being or not.”

Infants, Children and Pregnant Women

Eileen Welsome reports on a study of 829 pregnant women at Vanderbilt University Hospital Prenatal Clinic from 1945 through 1949. The women were given a “cocktail “laced with radioactive iron. Many, Welsome says were “led to believe that the drinks contained something nutritious that would benefit them and their babies. The drinks actually contained varying amounts of radioactive iron. Within an hour, the material crossed the placenta and began circulating in the blood of their unborn fetuses.”
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In a study done in the sixties, scientists discovered four fatal malignancies among the children who exposed to prenatal radiation and no cancers in the non-exposed group.

Ron Hamm, spoke eloquently before the IWG staff stakeholder workshop in 1986 for the Vanderbilt Experiment Victims. He said,

“My mother and I were drafted by my country to serve as study specimens. My mother was 22 years old and my father had just returned from military service with the United States Navy. She was very trusting and excitedly cautious about having her next child. She chose Vanderbilt Prenatal Clinic because of their reputation. She trustingly took what they gave her. Consequently, when they handed her a cup laced with radiation and said ‘Drink this. It will be good for your baby,’ she asked no questions. There was no consent sought and there was no consent given. As you have
already heard by Geoff Sea, and we have documents to prove it, harm was done. Cultural ethics is not a foreign term to most of us. It was used as the foremost defense of the Nazi high command at Nuremberg.

In 1947, a new science appeared. It actually started before that but it really flowered and flourished in 1947. Young aggressive doctors and researchers drove hard looking for the front seats in this new science. I understand that. It’s understandable. However, accountability comes with privilege. Cultural ethics do not work when they jeopardize people’s lives. More importantly, each level of authority must be held accountable to its next level. For example, I believe doctors are accountable to their patients, not vice versa. I believe lawyers are accountable to their clients, not the reverse. And I believe public servants are not the government. I believe this government is still of the people, by the people and for the people. And public servants are accountable to us, who are the government. I believe the Advisory Committee should be held accountable to its government, us. I believe the President is accountable to its government, we the people.

For 48 years my mother did not know she had been used and abused. She had her body violated and my body was violated. But then of course, I was just a fetus so I’m not sure I qualified as a human being at that point. We do know that a majority of the radiation that was given to my mother went
immediately to the fetus. I believe some 90 percent, something of that nature. She was in fact, in my opinion raped by the medical profession and the research community. Her body was violated, invaded by something she did not know, something she did not understand, nor something that she agreed to accept. And I believe if you looked up the definition of rape, that’s pretty well covered.