Against Their Will The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America
Allen M. Hornblum, Judith L. Newman, and Gregory J. Dober
Palgrave Macmillan, June 2013
ISBN: 978-0-230-34171-5, ISBN10: 0-230-34171-3,
During the Cold War, an alliance between American scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and the US military pushed the medical establishment into ethically fraught territory. Doctors and scientists at prestigious institutions were pressured to produce medical advances to compete with the perceived threats coming from the Soviet Union.
In Against Their Will, authors Allen Hornblum, Judith Newman, and Gregory Dober reveal the little-known history of unethical and dangerous medical experimentation on children in the United States. Through rare interviews and the personal correspondence of renowned medical investigators, they document how children—both normal and those termed "feebleminded"—from infants to teenagers, became human research subjects in terrifying experiments. They were drafted as "volunteers" to test vaccines, doused with ringworm, subjected to electric shock, and given lobotomies. They were also fed radioactive isotopes and exposed to chemical warfare agents.
This groundbreaking book shows how institutional superintendents influenced by eugenics often turned these children over to scientific researchers without a second thought. Based on years of archival work and numerous interviews with both scientific researchers and former test subjects, this is a fascinating and disturbing look at the dark underbelly of American medical history.
http://us.macmillan.com/againsttheirwill/AllenHornblum
Showing posts with label medical experimentation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medical experimentation. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Friday, September 14, 2012
The International Common Law Court of Justice
The International Common Law Court of Justice
Convened 15 September, 2012
Under the authority of that Tribunal as well as Common Law and the Natural Land Law Jurisdiction of Sovereign Nations, I declare that as of this day, Saturday, September 15, 2012, a Public International Court of Justice is hereby convened to consider evidence related to charges of crimes against humanity and criminal conspiracy by institutions of church and state, and their fiduciary officers.
The crimes that will be documented and judged in our Court are abominable and almost unimaginable. They span centuries, and range from outright murder to systematic torture, rape, slave labor, germ warfare, medical experimentation, drug testing, involuntary sterilizations, child trafficking, genocide and wars of extermination against peaceful nations. These crimes are all the more heinous by the fact that they were often aimed at children and occurred not randomly by isolated individuals, but historically, systematically, deliberately, and officially, by express command of heads of church and state according to their laws and customs – and by the fact that many of these crimes carry on today against the innocent at the hands of the same authorizing institutions and heads of state.
The enormity of these crimes requires a new approach. For this Court is a unique experiment, in that under existing international law, institutions cannot be brought to trial or account for genocidal or criminal actions, despite the fact that these crimes arise from and are caused by such institutions. There has consequently been no legal recourse for millions of people whose cultures and lives have been destroyed by the deliberate plans and actions of institutions of church and state, such as in the case of the conquest of entire continents of non-Christian people by European kingdoms operating under the sanction of so-called papal laws.
http://itccs.org/2012/09/14/the-international-common-law-court-of-justice/
Kevin Annett 15 September 2012 Announcement
Recorded at Freedom Central HQ in Holland, this is an announcement to be released on September 15, 2012, to all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl0GCZQ2ThE
Hidden No Longer: Genocide in Canada, Past and Present – by Kevin D. Annett, M.A., M.Div.
http://hiddennolonger.com/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/86619003/Hidden-No-Longer-Genocide-in-Canada-Past-and-Present-by-Kevin-D-Annett-M-A-M-Div
Convened 15 September, 2012
Under the authority of that Tribunal as well as Common Law and the Natural Land Law Jurisdiction of Sovereign Nations, I declare that as of this day, Saturday, September 15, 2012, a Public International Court of Justice is hereby convened to consider evidence related to charges of crimes against humanity and criminal conspiracy by institutions of church and state, and their fiduciary officers.
The crimes that will be documented and judged in our Court are abominable and almost unimaginable. They span centuries, and range from outright murder to systematic torture, rape, slave labor, germ warfare, medical experimentation, drug testing, involuntary sterilizations, child trafficking, genocide and wars of extermination against peaceful nations. These crimes are all the more heinous by the fact that they were often aimed at children and occurred not randomly by isolated individuals, but historically, systematically, deliberately, and officially, by express command of heads of church and state according to their laws and customs – and by the fact that many of these crimes carry on today against the innocent at the hands of the same authorizing institutions and heads of state.
The enormity of these crimes requires a new approach. For this Court is a unique experiment, in that under existing international law, institutions cannot be brought to trial or account for genocidal or criminal actions, despite the fact that these crimes arise from and are caused by such institutions. There has consequently been no legal recourse for millions of people whose cultures and lives have been destroyed by the deliberate plans and actions of institutions of church and state, such as in the case of the conquest of entire continents of non-Christian people by European kingdoms operating under the sanction of so-called papal laws.
http://itccs.org/2012/09/14/the-international-common-law-court-of-justice/
Kevin Annett 15 September 2012 Announcement
Recorded at Freedom Central HQ in Holland, this is an announcement to be released on September 15, 2012, to all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl0GCZQ2ThE
Hidden No Longer: Genocide in Canada, Past and Present – by Kevin D. Annett, M.A., M.Div.
http://hiddennolonger.com/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/86619003/Hidden-No-Longer-Genocide-in-Canada-Past-and-Present-by-Kevin-D-Annett-M-A-M-Div
Friday, September 7, 2012
MK-ULTRA Violence Or, how McGill pioneered psychological torture
MK-ULTRA Violence Or, how McGill pioneered psychological torture
Features | September 6th, 2012 Written by Juan Camilo Velasquez
Today, many journalists, doctors, and the general public see the Allan Memorial Institute in Royal Victoria Hospital as the cradle of modern torture, a cradle built and rocked by Scottish-born Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. To the patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron, our university was the site of months of seemingly unending torture disguised as medical experimentation –– an experimentation that destroyed their lives and changed the course of psychological torture forever.
Cameron’s experiments, known as MK-ULTRA subproject 68, were partially funded by the CIA and the Canadian government, and are widely known for their use of LSD, barbiturates, and amphetamines on patients. In the media, they were known as the “mind control” studies done at McGill and were reported as a brainwashing conspiracy from the CIA and the Canadian government....
This story begins on June 1, 1951 at a secret meeting in the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Sherbrooke. The purpose of the meeting was to launch a joint American-British-Canadian effort led by the CIA to fund studies on sensory deprivation. In attendance was Dr. Donald Hebb, then director of psychology at McGill University, who received a grant of $10,000 to study sensory deprivation. It would be fifteen years after this meeting at the Ritz that Cameron would disastrously pick up where Hebb left off.
Dr. Hebb paid a group of his own psychology students to remain isolated in a room, deprived of all senses, for an entire day. In an attempt to determine a link between sensory deprivation and the vulnerability of cognitive ability, Hebb also played recordings of voices expressing creationist or generally anti-scientific sentiments – clearly, ideas psychology students would oppose. However, the prolonged period of sensory deprivation made the students overly susceptible to sensory stimulation. Students suddenly became very tolerant of the ideas that they had readily dismissed before. As a history professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Alfred McCoy described in his book, A Question of Torture, that during Hebb’s own experiments “the subject’s very identity had begun to disintegrate.” One can only fathom the cognitive effects of Hebb’s work....
MK-ULTRA Subproject 68
Cameron’s research was based on the ideas of “re-patterning” and “re-mothering” the human mind. He believed that mental illness was a consequence of an individual having learned “incorrect” ways of responding to the world. These “learned responses” created “brain pathways” that led to repetitive abnormal behaviour.
Dr. Cameron wanted to de-pattern patients’ minds with the application of highly disruptive electroshock twice a day, as opposed to the norm of three times a week. According to him, this would break all incorrect brain pathways, thus de-patterning the mind. Some call it brainwashing; Cameron called it re-patterning....
Step 1: To prepare them for the de-patterning treatment, patients would be put into a state of prolonged sleep for about ten days using various drugs, after which they experienced an invasive electroshock therapy that lasted for about 15 days. But patients were not always prepared for re-patterning and sometimes Cameron used extreme forms of sensory deprivation as well....
Step 2: Following the preparation period and the de-patterning came the process of “psychic driving” or re-patterning, in which Cameron would play messages on tape recorders to his patients. He alternated negative messages about the patients’ lives and personalities with positive ones; these messages could be repeated up to half a million times....
The experiments done at McGill were part of the larger MK-ULTRA project led by Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA. In 1963, the year in which MK-ULTRA ended, the CIA compiled all the research into a torture manual called the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook. Yes, a “torture manual” that would eventually define the agency’s interrogation methods and training programs throughout the developing world....
Following 9/11, the war on terror and the generalized fearmongering that ensued, the Bush administration changed the rules of the game out of concern for homeland security. Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved special practices that included the “use of isolation facility for up to thirty days.” All of a sudden, the U.S. allowed the use of torture methods developed just up University....
Only decades later, in the 1980s, did past victims speak about their experiences, and by the nineties, the lawsuits began to pile up. In response, the Canadian government launched “The Allan Memorial Institute Depatterned Persons Assistance Plan,” which provided $100,000 to each of the former patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron. The compensation came from a recommendation by lawyer George Cooper, in which he clarified that the Canadian government did not have a legal responsibility for what happened, but a moral responsibility.
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2012/09/mk-ultraviolence/
Features | September 6th, 2012 Written by Juan Camilo Velasquez
Today, many journalists, doctors, and the general public see the Allan Memorial Institute in Royal Victoria Hospital as the cradle of modern torture, a cradle built and rocked by Scottish-born Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. To the patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron, our university was the site of months of seemingly unending torture disguised as medical experimentation –– an experimentation that destroyed their lives and changed the course of psychological torture forever.
Cameron’s experiments, known as MK-ULTRA subproject 68, were partially funded by the CIA and the Canadian government, and are widely known for their use of LSD, barbiturates, and amphetamines on patients. In the media, they were known as the “mind control” studies done at McGill and were reported as a brainwashing conspiracy from the CIA and the Canadian government....
This story begins on June 1, 1951 at a secret meeting in the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Sherbrooke. The purpose of the meeting was to launch a joint American-British-Canadian effort led by the CIA to fund studies on sensory deprivation. In attendance was Dr. Donald Hebb, then director of psychology at McGill University, who received a grant of $10,000 to study sensory deprivation. It would be fifteen years after this meeting at the Ritz that Cameron would disastrously pick up where Hebb left off.
Dr. Hebb paid a group of his own psychology students to remain isolated in a room, deprived of all senses, for an entire day. In an attempt to determine a link between sensory deprivation and the vulnerability of cognitive ability, Hebb also played recordings of voices expressing creationist or generally anti-scientific sentiments – clearly, ideas psychology students would oppose. However, the prolonged period of sensory deprivation made the students overly susceptible to sensory stimulation. Students suddenly became very tolerant of the ideas that they had readily dismissed before. As a history professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Alfred McCoy described in his book, A Question of Torture, that during Hebb’s own experiments “the subject’s very identity had begun to disintegrate.” One can only fathom the cognitive effects of Hebb’s work....
MK-ULTRA Subproject 68
Cameron’s research was based on the ideas of “re-patterning” and “re-mothering” the human mind. He believed that mental illness was a consequence of an individual having learned “incorrect” ways of responding to the world. These “learned responses” created “brain pathways” that led to repetitive abnormal behaviour.
Dr. Cameron wanted to de-pattern patients’ minds with the application of highly disruptive electroshock twice a day, as opposed to the norm of three times a week. According to him, this would break all incorrect brain pathways, thus de-patterning the mind. Some call it brainwashing; Cameron called it re-patterning....
Step 1: To prepare them for the de-patterning treatment, patients would be put into a state of prolonged sleep for about ten days using various drugs, after which they experienced an invasive electroshock therapy that lasted for about 15 days. But patients were not always prepared for re-patterning and sometimes Cameron used extreme forms of sensory deprivation as well....
Step 2: Following the preparation period and the de-patterning came the process of “psychic driving” or re-patterning, in which Cameron would play messages on tape recorders to his patients. He alternated negative messages about the patients’ lives and personalities with positive ones; these messages could be repeated up to half a million times....
The experiments done at McGill were part of the larger MK-ULTRA project led by Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA. In 1963, the year in which MK-ULTRA ended, the CIA compiled all the research into a torture manual called the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook. Yes, a “torture manual” that would eventually define the agency’s interrogation methods and training programs throughout the developing world....
Following 9/11, the war on terror and the generalized fearmongering that ensued, the Bush administration changed the rules of the game out of concern for homeland security. Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved special practices that included the “use of isolation facility for up to thirty days.” All of a sudden, the U.S. allowed the use of torture methods developed just up University....
Only decades later, in the 1980s, did past victims speak about their experiences, and by the nineties, the lawsuits began to pile up. In response, the Canadian government launched “The Allan Memorial Institute Depatterned Persons Assistance Plan,” which provided $100,000 to each of the former patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron. The compensation came from a recommendation by lawyer George Cooper, in which he clarified that the Canadian government did not have a legal responsibility for what happened, but a moral responsibility.
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2012/09/mk-ultraviolence/
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