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For over two decades, military researchers at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland—which is still operational—tested everything from sarin gas to LSD and MDMA on US troops, many of whom were coerced into participating or lied to altogether.
A disturbing 2012 New Yorker profile of a doctor who worked there—and defends his work—should be paired with this report about veterans fighting the VA tooth-and-nail to get any benefits at all for their service.
Jan 31, 2017My lieutenant said the masks were on back order so use a T-shirt.
↩︎ The New York Times
Dec 20, 2016I probably wouldn’t have had kids had I known that there would be an impact on them.
↩︎ ProPublica/The Virginian-Pilot
The military has long exposed soldiers to toxic fumes and carcinogens. The most recent case, of massive open-air "burn pits" in Iraq and Afghanistan—where human waste was burned along with medicine, batteries, and car parts—was treated by the government much in the same way as previous cases: Denial via obfuscation of data and faulty science.
Dec 6, 2016He’s been paid a hell of a lot of money by the VA over the years, and I think they don’t want to admit that maybe he [isn’t] the end all and be all.
↩︎ ProPublica/The Virginian-Pilot
During World War II, anticipating another "chemical war" like WWI, the military tested substances such as mustard gas and lewisite on tens of thousands of soldiers.
This was first revealed in the early '90s, after afflicted veterans made enough noise to begin an inquiry. But it wasn't until last year, revealed by an NPR investigation, that the military tested out a theory that black and Puerto Rican people might be more "resilient" to chemical agents, and therefore better-suited to the front lines of a chemical war. So it tested American troops by race, and often by coercion.
Naturally, though promises were made in the '90s that the VA would find and treat the soldiers who'd been tested, NPR discovered that it had reached out to just 610 of the victims, and treated even fewer.
This line is perhaps the most damning in the whole report: "Yet in just two months, an NPR research librarian located more than 1,200 of them, using the VA's own list of test subjects and public records."
It was US military and State Department human testing that was cited as an "ethical example" of such testing by prosecutors at the Nuremberg Doctors' trial. Specifically, a case in which government and University of Chicago researchers infected mostly black inmates at the maximum-security Stateville Penitentiary in the Chicago suburbs with malaria, killing one.
UofC law professor Bernard Harcourt wrote in 2011 of the experiments and the state's ability to "manufacture consent":
If consent can be achieved within Stateville prison, surely it can be achieved anywhere. If we can convince ourselves that these inmates volunteered and that their consent was legitimate—despite the fact that they were in formally coercive conditions— then it must not be hard to manufacture consent elsewhere. And not surprisingly, we do.
