21,000 Troops To Become
The Latest Guinea Pigs For Pentagon
by William & Debbie Lewis
http://www.takebackwashington.com/articles/Latest_Guinea_Pigs_For_Pentagon.html
On January 10, 2007, President
Bush unveiled his “New Way Forward in Iraq.” [1] He admitted that the
American people find the present situation in Iraq unacceptable. Yet, in
spite of it all, he has committed another 21,000 plus U.S. troops who will
march off to Iraq to fight a corporate war that many Americans now perceive as
being driven by big oil profits and industrial war profiteers. Bush’s “New
Way Forward” will unavoidably translate to an “Old Way Backward” for soldiers
deployed to the Persian Gulf. By sending additional soldiers to Iraq, the
president of the United States is adding 21,000 names to the list of those
afflicted with depleted uranium poisoning due to simple environmental
contamination. Americans must come to understand that the Pentagon’s use of
radioactive weaponry on the battlefield over the past two decades is
tantamount to officially sponsored involuntary human experimentation.
Human experimentation by the
United States military complex is nothing new. Declassified documents dating
back six decades have exposed hundreds of questionable and illegal programs
sponsored by the Department of Defense. It wasn’t until the summer of 1975
that congressional hearings revealed to the public for the first time that the
C.I.A. and the D.o.D. had conducted experiments on both consenting and
unwitting human subjects as part of an extensive program to influence and
control human behavior through the use of psychoactive drugs. MKULTRA was
just one of about 160 mind control programs that the United States government
was sponsoring in the late 1950’s. [2] These projects were only the tip of
the iceberg. The public would later learn of atomic vets exposed to
radioactive atomic blasts [3]; the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which 64% of
the men “studied” died from syphilis or complications arising thereof [4]; and
open air testing, where U.S. military were allowed to spray large U.S. cities
with biological agents for the purpose of studying infection delivery
patterns.
However, in 1991 the
Department of Defense would take mass experimentation to a whole new level
with the introduction of depleted uranium (DU) munitions on the battlefield.
This bold decision would forever change the meaning of the term “nuclear
war.” It’s important to understand that the Department of Defense was aware
of the deadly effects of radioactive weaponry and clearly recommended its
development as a “poison gas warfare weapon” in a 1943 declassified Army memo
to Brigadier General L. R. Groves, known now simply as the "Groves
Memorandum." This is the earliest known reference to the weapons that would
later become the military’s number one choice for killing tanks in the theatre
of war. [5,6]
For almost two decades, on the
rolling sand dunes of Iraq, among the many strewn and shattered remnants of
destroyed enemy tanks, our troops have continually inhaled air contaminated
with microscopic radioactive dust particles from the reckless and open use of
depleted uranium munitions. Dr. Doug Rokke, a US Army Health Physicist and
Nuclear Medicine Sciences Officer, whose team was in charge of battlefield
decontamination during the first Gulf War, states that his team received
direct memorandums from the Department of the Army and other Department of
Defense Officials, which plainly verified his own research; depleted uranium
munitions were a serious health threat due to contamination. [7]
Because of the Department of
Defense's direct concern over the health and environmental effects of DU, Dr.
Rokke discloses that he was asked to misrepresent his research and falsify an
official report so that uranium munitions could always be used on the
battlefield by U.S. forces. According to his own research, and that performed
by the Army Environmental Policy Institute [8], uranium munitions cannot be
cleaned up. In fact, the United Nations Sub-Commission on Human Rights ruled
that uranium munitions are an illegal weapon because they kill
indiscriminately, they cannot be cleaned up, and they contaminate the
environment for 4.5 billion years. [9]
The intentions of our military
leaders, past and present, are becoming all too clear for those who take the
effort to observe these atrocities with unfiltered eyes and yet Gulf War
exposures do not stop there. On the battlefield of Iraq our service personnel
were exposed to chemical and biological weapons supplied to the Iraqis by the
U.S. military with the full blessing of our Congress. Little known to most
Americans, and almost completely unreported in the mainstream press, is that
chemical and biological exposures from the 1992 demolition of Khamisiyah and
similar massive bunker sites in Iraq have now been determined to have caused
permanent neurological damage in over 300,000 Gulf War veterans, who are now
classified as permanently disabled by the VA. [10]
During the Khamisiyah event,
thousands of U.S. troops were tasked with rigging hundreds of "Wal-Mart sized"
ammunitions bunkers with explosives in order to destroy physical evidence that
countries such as Great Britain, Russia, Jordan, and the United States had
illegally sold weapons of mass destruction to the Iraqis. U.S. servicemen
working inside the bunkers during the initial engineering phase captured
footage of these illegal weapons on videotape. This footage appears in the
award-winning documentary "Beyond Treason" [11] along with an impressive
number of other incriminating documents obtained from the Pentagon under the
Freedom of Information Act, which effectively describe the unlawful mindset
and treasonous actions of some of our highest military leaders.
Conceivably, the largest
experiment of all was requiring our servicemen and women to receive the
experimental anthrax vaccine. During the first Gulf War, our service
personnel were inoculated with experimental vaccines containing aluminum
hydroxide, mercury, and squalene. It was done in hast and without proper
approval from the F.D.A.
U.S. Army Reserve Spc. Rachael
Lacy, 22, is a casualty of the Pentagon’s compulsory anthrax vaccination
program. She died in 2003 after receiving the anthrax and smallpox
inoculations. After a coroner ruled that the shots contributed to her death,
the Defense Department was finally forced to admit that two independent panels
of medical experts had concluded that the vaccinations could very well have
caused the illness that killed Specialist Lacy. According to the “Vaccine
Risk Awareness Network,” adverse reactions to the anthrax vaccine range from
40% in men to 70% in women and symptoms can range from severe bone and joint
pain, to loss of vision, severe skin problems, blackouts and loss of
consciousness, grand mal seizures, internal organ problems, ALS, multiple
sclerosis -- and death. [12]
Perhaps the most damaging law
pertaining to experimentation on soldiers without informed consent comes under
the Clinton administration in the form of E.O. 13139. [13] This Executive
Order requires military personnel
to receive experimental vaccines not approved by the F.D.A.
and denies soldiers the right to
refuse experimental vaccines. This law treats U.S. servicemen as if they were
experimental guinea pigs with no more rights than the average lab rat. Past
experiments conducted at Fort Detrick chemical and biological warfare center
in Maryland, showed that nine of the twenty-seven anthrax strains tested
killed 50 percent of the vaccinated subjects.
[14] With those kinds of odds,
would you join the military these days?
To summarize, the U.S. Department of Defense paid for the development and
manufacture of DU weapons, which through their own research was known to be
deadly to the very troops using them on the battlefield. Our troops were
knowingly exposed to deadly chemical and biological weapons in the theatre of
operations during Operation Desert Storm. They are inoculated with drugs that
are known to have serious and deadly side effects, none of which have been
approved by the F.D.A. They are told by the V.A. that they suffer from
posttraumatic stress disorder and prescribed medications that deal solely with
the symptoms and offer no valid treatments for their illnesses. Their spouses
and children are stricken by many of the same debilitating symptoms and health
problems, yet the Department of Defense continues to stonewall and deny.
Now that we have a good
understanding of all the facts, what can we do? Whether we scream this from
the rooftops for all to hear or bury our heads further in the sand is the test
by which all Americans will be measured. Americans must take leadership roles
in transforming this government into one that holds its leaders accountable
for the crimes that they have committed against the people of the United
States and the global community at large. How much longer will the citizens
of this country tolerate the clear and present danger of our U.S. service
personnel at the hands of the U.S. military establishment? One thing is
clear. Officials at the Department of Defense are guilty of no less than
treason and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law to serve as
a warning to all future generations. These actions will not be tolerated.
"That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to
abolish it and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such
principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
– Declaration of Independence
Endnotes:
[1]
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-7.html
[2]
www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/e1950/mkultra/index.htm
[3]
www.naav.com/
[4]
www.cdc.gov/nchstp/od/tuskegee/time.htm
[5]
www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/small/mb03.htm
[6]
www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Trinity/Groves.shtml
[7]
www.traprockpeace.org/depleteduranium.html
[8]
www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/docs/du.html
[9]
http://nucnews.net/2000/du/99du/990831dw.htm
[10]
www.gulflink.osd.mil/khamisiyah_ii/
[11]
www.bridgestonemediagroup.com/beyondtreason.html
[12]
www.vran.org
[13]
www.anthraxvaccine.org/Testimony.pdf
[14]
www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_42_15/ai_57770428