Imagine the Horror
Evil: The Same Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow
March 13: On This Day In History
Operation Northwoods
Operation Northwoods memoranda (March 13, 1962).
Operation Northwoods, or Northwoods, was a U.S false flag plan from 1962 as a "preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes" for the agenda of generating U.S. public support for military action against the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The plan says, "The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere." Operation Northwoods was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and signed by the Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, to the Secretary of Defense.
Several proposals were listed. One was to "develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign" against the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. Others were real or simulated actions against various U.S military and civilian targets. Operation Northwoods was part of the U.S. government's Operation Mongoose anti-Castro initiative. It was never officially accepted or executed.
US Irradiated Thousands in Atomic Experiments
During the Cold War, the United States government carried out a vast program of Nazi-like radiation experiments on poor and working-class people. Hundreds of unsuspecting victims were given massive doses of x-rays, injected with radioactive substances, made to eat carcinogenic fallout as scientists observed the deadly effects - yet these tests, some of which have recently been publicized, are only a small part of the US rulers' [the private Nation-State] deliberate subjection of humans to massive doses of radiation in order to study the impact of the bomb's radiation on the human body. The same experiments were undoubtedly carried out within the Soviet Union and the western public would almost expect this due to decades of media vilification. Both sides of the contrived cold war are guilty of crimes against humanity. But the fact of the [enlightened] West conducting these horrors should show beyond any doubt that those in control [the SAGE, ref: MM Addendum 1 MM Addendum 2 (widescreen) or MM Addendum blog home] place themselves above the law, that they operate on a different plane, that there is an agenda where the end justifies any means, that accountability does not enter into the equation, that those who rule are not the elected governments and that agencies and institutions are in place that has usurped the very life and morals of the nation.
These "studies" came in the aftermath of the US incineration of over 200,000 Japanese civilians by dropping A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The SAGE [here, the American establishment] cynically poses as defenders of democracy and human rights, yet the US is the only country to ever use atomic weapons in wartime - and that crime was seen by the US rulers as a prologue to what they had in store for the Soviet Union in their drive against the Russian Revolution of 1917.
As part of the massive effort to develop and test nuclear weapons intended to be used against the Soviet Union, literally hundreds of thousands of US troops were sent into irradiated blast sites within minutes after atomic bombs were set off. In addition, many tens of thousands of atomic weapons industry workers were callously and routinely exposed to deadly radioactive materials as the US sought to build up its nuclear arsenal. Despite all the talk of nuclear weapons simply acting as a "deterrent," Washington was actively pursuing plans for a thermonuclear "first strike" against the USSR. They intended to follow this up by sending in troops to subdue the survivors. That is why they urgently needed to know how much radiation their troops could stand.
Recently (1994), US Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary [in Office: Jan 22, 1993 - Jan 20, 1997] flamboyantly proclaimed an "Openness Initiative," promising to declassify the files on human radiation experiments. After O'Leary gave the go-ahead, suddenly the papers are full of revelations. Many go back to a mid-1980s Congressional study which was ignored at the time, and once the lid was lifted on this horrific subject, more reports began to come in. Universities "discovered" radioactive skeletons in their closets. Thousands have called up government "hot lines" to report secret tests in which they were victims. Suddenly the glare of publicity is thrown onto footnotes in articles for prestigious technical journals detailing how scientists used human beings as guinea pigs for their macabre research.
The inhuman torments practiced on the poor, the infirm, racial minorities, hospital patients, prisoners, and particularly the US' colonial subjects, recall the Nazi "experiments" on the Jews, Gypsies and other inmates of the concentration camps. One of the US researchers, commenting on his own plan to irradiate a group of "adult males past the age of 50," guiltily noted: "admittedly, this would have a little of the Buchenwald touch" (referring to the German concentration camp where hundreds were killed by being infected with typhoid fever). And then there were the effects of nuclear weapons tests. John Gofman, founder of the Biomedical Research Division at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, recalled how in the 1950s he was among those who declared that there was no danger from fallout: "I feel that at least several hundred scientists trained in the biomedical aspect of atomic energy - myself definitely included - are candidates for Nuremberg-type trials for crimes against humanity through our gross negligence and irresponsibility" (cited in Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own (1982)).
Yet today (1994) a major campaign is underway in the corporate press arguing that this hideous record must be "understood" as an unfortunate "excess" - after all, proclaims the "free but responsible" press, only a few hundred people were supposedly involved, medical "ethicists" say that standards at the time were not worked out, the long-term consequences of radiation exposure were "not fully understood," etc. Newsweek contributing editor Gregg Easterbrook, writing in the Los Angeles Times (09 January), declared that "the instant-doomsday aspects of the scandal appear largely hyperbole" because supposedly "hardly any actual harm was done," and besides, "a significant number of Americans exhibit an almost clinical paranoia in believing themselves victims of secret government tests." The Washington Post (09 January) counseled its readers "to temper our judgments; to consider the nature and purpose of the experiments (ie., understanding the effects of nuclear war) as well as the times in which they were conducted."
They were conducted in the times of the Cold War, and the scope of the experimentation exposing humans to radioactive substances is far, far greater than the few cases initially reported. The government and its kept media want to sweep under the rug how the US Army kept people penned up unprotected in the vicinity of blast sites to "study" the deadly effects of the heat and radiation. They don't want you to know that their mapping showed fallout from nuclear tests spreading over most of the country. They try to hide the fact that the gruesome experiments preferentially used racial minorities as their subjects, and even deliberately targeted black people. Press reports don't say how US scientists repeated some of the very same tests performed by Nazi scientists at Auschwitz, nor that Washington protected these fascist experimenters in order to get their data. And they want to bury the fact that all these experiments were necessary for their plans to launch nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
All that is reported below is from published sources - but when you put it together you have the evidence of crimes against humanity that rival those for which Nazi war criminals were tried at Nuremberg. These experiments were approved at the highest levels of the US government, and the officials who ordered them, the scientists who carried them out and the bureaucrats who covered them up were perfectly conscious of what they were doing. Now, as the result of the fall of the Soviet Union and East Europe, Washington would like to turn the page on this chilling legacy of the Cold War. But the racist cruelty, class hatred and utter contempt for the weak and the vulnerable which motivated these "experiments" provide a sinister view of the behind-the-scenes horrors as the establishment arms itself to defend its interests.
Expos and Cover-Up
US Cold War radiation "experiments" became a full-blown scandal late last year when the Albuquerque Tribune (15-17 November 1993) published a 45-page investigative report by Eileen Welsome on 18 hospital patients who, between 1945 and 1947, were injected with radioactive plutonium, one of the most carcinogenic substances known. The victims were given doses ranging from 1.6 to 98 times the level considered at the time as the occupational limit. Referring to a victim who survived a "whopping dose" of plutonium, a former government radiation specialist commented: "they were surprised a black man who had been scheduled to die had walked out of the hospital."
One of the experimenters' subjects was Elmer Allen, a 36-year-old black railroad porter, who had been hospitalized with a broken leg (it had to be amputated three days after it was injected with plutonium). When Allen informed his family doctor that he had been the subject of a government experiment, he was diagnosed as a "paranoid schizophrenic." As with all the other victims, researchers never explained what they had done to him. "He knew he had been a guinea pig, but he wasn't sure exactly how," his daughter later declared, "and for 40 years, he sat around waiting to die."
US Army officials, perfectly aware of the consequences of their actions, tried to engineer a massive cover-up of their grisly experimentation on humans. The Albuquerque Tribune quoted from a letter the Army wrote to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947: "it is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits - documents covering such work should be classified secret."
President Clinton cynically seized on the radiation "experiments" as "a political boon" and "a sure-fire way to expose the wrongs of past administrations," as the Los Angeles Times (10 January) put it. In early January [1994], Clinton set up a "task force" including the departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Justice, Defense and Veterans' Affairs, as well as NASA, the National Security Council, and the Office of Management and Budget. The panel is supposedly going to bring to light all radiation "experiments" and assess the injuries suffered by the victims. But despite all the talk of "openness," today, more than two months after O'Leary's initial announcement, practically no files have been released while Energy Department personnel reportedly comb them to delete any clues to the victims' identities. The reason is obvious: legal suits for damages would run into the billions.
No comments:
Post a Comment