Guardian | Marta Orellana says she was playing with friends at the orphanage when the summons sounded: "Orellana to the infirmary. Orellana to the infirmary."Waiting for her were several doctors she had never seen before. Tall men with fair complexions who spoke what she guessed was English, plus a Guatemalan doctor. They had syringes and little bottles.
They ordered her to lie down and open her legs. Embarrassed, she locked her knees together and shook her head. The Guatemalan medic slapped her cheek and she began to cry. "I did what I was told," she recalls.
Today the nine-year-old girl is a rheumy-eyed 74-year-old great-grandmother, but the anguish of that moment endures. It was how it all began: the pain, the humiliation, the mystery.
It was 1946 and orphans in Guatemala City, along with prisoners, military conscripts and prostitutes, had been selected for a medical experiment which would torment many, and remain secret, for more than six decades.
The US, worried about GIs returning home with sexual diseases, infected an estimated 1,500 Guatemalans with syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid to test an early antibiotic, penicillin.
"They never told me what they were doing, never gave me a chance to say no," Orellana said this week, seated in her ramshackle Guatemala City home. "I've lived almost my whole life without knowing the truth. May God forgive them."
The US government admitted to the experiment in October when the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, issued a joint statement apologising for "such reprehensible research" under the guise of public health. Barack Obama phoned his Guatemalan counterpart, Alvaro Colom, to say sorry too.
Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College in the US, uncovered the experiment while researching the Tuskegee syphilis study in which hundreds of African American men were left untreated for 40 years from the 1930s.
The Guatemalan study went further by deliberately infecting its subjects. Not only did it violate the hippocratic oath to do no harm but it echoed Nazi crimes exposed around the same time at the Nuremberg trials.
The victims remained largely unknown but the Guardian has interviewed the families of the three survivors identified so far by Guatemala. They chronicled lives blighted by illness, neglect and unanswered questions.
"My father didn't know how to read and they treated him like an animal," said Benjamin Ramos, 57, the son of Federico, 87, a former soldier. "This was the devil's experiment."
Mateo Gudiel, 57, said his father, Manuel, 87, another ex-conscript, has syphilis-linked infections, dementia and headaches. "Some of this has been passed on to me, my siblings and our children." Children can inherit congenital syphilis.
More than half of the subjects were low-ranking soldiers delivered by their superiors to US physicians working from a military base in the capital. The Americans initially arranged for infected prostitutes to have sex with prisoners before discovering it was more "efficient" to inject soldiers, psychiatric patients and orphans with the bacterium.
Guatemala's official inquiry, headed by its vice-president, is due to publish its report in June. "What impacted me the most was how little value was given to these human lives. They were seen as things to be experimented on," said Carlos Mejia, a member of the inquiry and head of the Guatemalan College of Physicians.
The US scientists treated 87% of those infected with syphilis and lost track of the other 13%. Of those treated about a tenth suffered recurrences.
48 comments:
Oh my! __ Why wasn't it the Guatemalans coming to the USA and conducting medical experiments on Americans...??
___ Answer: It's the reason *Defense* is No. 1. ___It's why you want to have the strongest military with lots of the latest most modern powerful weapons so that nobody can F with you *ever*... ___ Warsocialism rules, Baby...!!____ It is also why you want a president who understands key responsibility of the office is to protect national sovereignty, and not go around, for example, ass-kissing and bowing to foreign leaders and apologizing for the country. Rather, you want the rest of the world to be afraid to F with you...
Do I get to call for a lifeline?
My pick for line of the month.
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Plus, no news to 90% of readers here,but in what way does the US military protect Americans from medical experimentation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
http://www.autoimmune.com/GWSGen.html
http://www.allaboutrace.com/2008/04/15/your-conspiracy-theory-is-my-blood-and-flesh/
http://www.sludgefacts.org/APSludge.pdf
Seems that Americans who took BD's philosophy to heart would not get the kind of military protection they need by paying taxes.
Though to be fair, I think BD has a point too. People with enough power tend to become psychopathic monsters.
I'd bet in the grand scheme of things, South of the Border, there are way more "abused orphaned children" abused by their own people, than in the USA, or by the USA operating in other countries. Does any of 'em even have a Child Protective Services or the equivalent...?? No mechanisms even exist to root out the problems, e.g. child porn, kiddee prostitution, sweat shops, etc., if Subrealism really wants to get serious about the kids...
... and there BD you have in a nutshell the soft, fuzzy side of our national code of morality, utterly accepted by the mainstream. If you read what I've posted here, you may see that the protection you imagine you enjoy is full of holes.
See, your unspoken assumption BD is that you* are one of the powerful. You're not. Seen in the correct perspective, you're barely distinguishable from the utterly powerless. (That 'barely there' distinction is where you seem to have drawn your line, though, so maybe you do understand what I'm saying.)
*Not 'Americans,' you may as well admit, but you at least.
Oh, and I almost forgot, this calm, persistent cataloguer of potential atrocities has been pointed out by a local MD, Submariner
http://www.environmentalhealthtrust.org/content/about-dr-davis
Most of her stuff is hitting middle-class white people, in case you feel immune.
Sorry, I got disoriented in the threads, 'you' in the previous message is BD.
Uh oh, the the same catastrophic car crash of an argument,
"Well the Africans sold slaves too" or "The Native Americans had tribal wars and committed ritual sacrifices on each other" or "Saddam killed his own people too"
...or the popular laundry mat talk show tidbit, "But black people get to call themselves nigger"
lol@laundry mat talk show...,
Then where does that leave you and yours BD? http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2011/03/mordor.html
You've already tossed the fat man's salad, and I don't think he even had the basic courtesy to offer you any syrup or jelly...,
Slavery! Glad you brought that up...____*Slavery* is just one more classic example of BD's key point: With suitable strong military, powerful weapons, and the right leadership, you won't ever have to worry about becoming enslaved...
From the point of view of enslaved US citizens in 1862, then, a strong Confederate military was the best bet?
Depends on your POV. It's all in how you select the "right leadership". Some folks just don't understand sovereignty...
Mmmooooooooooo!
Baaaah baaah
Cluck cluck cluck cluck. Cock-a-doodle-dooo!
Ol' Big Don got his one drum and he gonna BEAT IT for all it's worth. You go, caveman... Makes for a damn monotonous drone, tho...
You got ANYTHING beside ignorant gorilla chest-thumping BD, or you just going to stick to that one forever? You really thing that a strong military, and "go take whatever you want anytime," and "drill baby, drill," and cutting taxes are the real answers to what's going on in the US and the world these days? REALLY?
I'll bet you think that there's nothing wrong with breaking the law or taking advantage of others if you get away with it. Just like the rest of the ignorant majority of what remains of the Republican party, not to mention the teabaggers (and don't even get me started on the pantheon of crooks and dirtbags behind the whole thing). You ever stop to think that Dub might have already been the last Republican president? I'm pretty sure the Whigs of the late 1850s thought they'd be having another turn again...
Why do so many of these would-be hard-nosed realists give me the impression that they learned all their worldly wisdom from Heinlein novels. The juvenile novels, not even the ones aimed at adults, but definitely novels.
Alright Big Don.
You've got me.
Help me to understand and appreciate your concept of sovereignty?
Is this the same time period when Chiquita Banana was killing protesters in Guatemala that was mentioned in Part 2 of The Century of Self?
If I'm correct, this is the same time period when Chiquita Banana had the US attack Guatemala? I remember this time period watching the Century of Self Part 2
I don't think so Ed. United Fruit had a loooong and sordid history in Central America, but nothing standout in that history appears to coincide with these atrocities. http://www.unitedfruit.org/chron.htm
Seems almost more like an Operation Paperclip, human experimentation overflow - to me.
What caught my eye on these two stories was the ~ 30 year sinister human livestock experimentation involving the Rockefeller Foundation and the zenith of the 3rd Reich's experimentation and slaughter - for which experimentation their appear to have been global interlocks.
The way sovereignty should work is within the physical boundaries of a country, the leadership/constitution should control what happens. If the populace revolts outsiders shouldn't mess with it. If the leadership/constitution isn't working properly, it's up to that country's citizenry to fix it, one way or another. Example: what if in 1862 some stronger country had said we don't like the bloodshed or political changes occurring in the USA and had come in and put a stop to it? Would y'all still be pickin' cotton?
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_ _
_ _
If a sovereign country does something that threatens another, they can duke it out. It's the necessity for strong defense. If Iraq wouldn't permit the agreed-to WMD inspections or it Afghanistan sheltered the WTC attackers, USA was perfectly justified in attacking. Just should have done it quickly and cheaply with Megatons, however, not with expensive and protracted ground wars that kill/injure so many of your own. Let those MFers know who's boss. You don't tug on Superman's cape...
_ __ __ _
If a country can't defend itself or it's citizens, or leadership doesn't want to (Guatemala), it's that country's problem. If Kuwait couldn't defend itself against Iraq in 1990, tuff luck (Gold bathtubs were more important than a strong military...)
Fundamental problem with USA is *overpopulation*. The "Great Society" where parasites are paid cradle-to-grave to go forth and breed more of their useless resource-gobbling selves. And the wimpy liberals bringing in refugees from Cuba, Southeast Asia, Somalia, Soviet collapse, EveryFkgWhere there are any sorry-ass LOOZerz, bring 'em in and give 'em welfare. cellfones, section8, watching Oprah on their flatscreens, etc. Wimpy justice system with death penalty that doesn't work, and pathetic lifers-without that should all be long gone. All of this bleeding resources that could instead be used for technology advancement (energy, electronics, medicine, microbiology/genetics, and Defense) keeping America on top, and emphasizing education of those with real intellectual potential instead of fruitlessly attempting to get equal outcomes for all. Blame dumbass liberals for all of that destruction...gave it all away...
Westphalian sovereignty is all you got? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty
....there I was hoping for summin redolent of the "thousand year bloodline".
summin for a change just a little bit deeper than your typical heavy-handed dousings of slim pickens;
http://youtu.be/bzD-zGIJkbY
blood out of a turnip I suppose....., {you know, there are a lot of mushrooms out in those old-growth forests out your way Don, jes sayyin brah.}
Ignorance is a curable malady BD. Here's a little Ira Katznelson to help you across your present eruption http://forum-network.org/lecture/when-affirmative-action-was-white
But beyond that, the encompassing facts are a bit more complicated than the magical thinking rationalization you've embodied to save yourself the effort of having to genuinely think about the failings of the American political economy.
... and this mishmash is why you hold up Dr. Mengele as an exemplar for us all to follow.
I wonder how the world looks to BD. Not these issues, I mean the whole cognitive ball o' wax. For example, BD goes to the library ...
The epitome of skill in argument is to win without understanding. -- Sun Tzu
Everything should be made as stupid as possible, but no stupider. -- Albert Einstein
BD goes to BD's library - this priceless gem of actual self-disclosure may be a little before your time in these precincts Tom - but best b'lee - this is no joke; http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2008/09/big-dons-library.html
Oh ... boy.
I see he's got his lil Tau Beta Pi thingy proudly displayed. But as from today I'm a charter member of Omega Mu Gamma (OMG).
What these Turner Diaries freaks don't understand is that liberals are not nice people. Not underneath. No more than Japanese folks are Hello Kitty.
If the time ever comes, I know I'll feel terrible about wiping them out. Just terrible. Years of therapy.
One question for you BD, before I reply to your parroting of "Billy O'Reilly's Creed:" Are you open-minded enough to consider other perspectives of reality, or are you just gonna stick with the full menu of c-rap that FauxNews has shoveled down your throat?
Because I really don't waste the time laying things out for you otherwise.
Judging by the books on your library shelf (thanks CNu), you got your engineering degree in the early to mid-1960s and were employed doing just that in the 1970s, which puts you squarely in Fox's target demographic. Am I right?
Guatemala and Tuskegee were a couple of isolated instances, a couple thousand folks (most of whom were not killed) and humanity did apparently benefit significantly from those experiments. If wanton abuse is the concern, BD would expect you to complain about the USA not stepping in when Idi Amin was killing half the population of Uganda to keep the other half in line...??
And add to the list: massive bogus home loans to unproductive poor folks who had no hope of ever making the payments, so they can feel good and be "equal", thereby destroying the banking system...
Early onset senile dementia Don....,
Don't you recall getting schooled in no uncertain terms on this subject just a couple weeks ago?
http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2011/05/bank-foreclosure-holdings-crushing.html#comment-210567167
I lodge my consistent and unitary complaint under the tag "unspeakable" - you know - that unbridgeable philosophical and moral chasm across which you and I glare at one another because I cannot rationalize warsocialism and the war state in order to synthetically and catastrophically puff up what would otherwise be an unworkable "food-powered, make-work, hierarchy"?
I'm just not that big a believer in the hierarchy given what I've personally and directly seen of the psychopathic mediocrities running the show. You on the other hand, appear to have no compunctions whatsoever about cheerleading for the worst American fascist abuses, cause well, you made a paycheck lo these many years from one of the major beneficiaries of all that non-productive warsocialist largesse....,
BD will try and temper this discussion a bit, concerning the main thrust of Subrealism's post on Guatemala:
_
You know, over the years, a lot of bad things have happened to a lot of folks who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, bad things through no choice of their own, bad things they did not deserve, but things that were done mostly in good faith to preserve or improve our standard of living. Consider WW2, Korea & Viet Nam conflicts which occurred with a military draft in place and grabbed thousands of red-blooded American youth and sent them off to horrid fighting conditions where they were killed, or severely injured with major impacts for the remainder of their lives. And there were corresponding disruptions among the impacted families back home that caused major negative social consequences in peoples' lives. It does not make sense to get bent all out of shape trying to second guess any of this stuff years later after the fact. It's however regrettable water under the bridge...
"This was the devil's experiment." The Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X could not have said it better. This is the pathology of the White Supremacy Dynamic. The "gangsters for capitalism" ransack the planet; satisfying their hedonistic drives in the process, then use other people for experiments to cure their exposures to venereal diseases.
[Barack
Obama phoned his Guatemalan counterpart, Alvaro Colom, to say sorry too.] Yeah, they’re always offering these phony,
bullshit apologies. “US
President Barack Obama on Wednesday expressed his "sorrow" to Afghan
President Hamid Karzai over recent civilian casualties.” But, they keep killing; keep experimenting;
keep disregarding the values of lives, except for their own.
When
the chickens come home to they will beg for mercy, but there won’t be any.
BD recommends Turner Diaries as a reference on personal defense for survival when TSHTF, like Rawles TEOTWAWKI/Patriots and many others of that genre (BD has read extensively on this). Lot of great info and scenarios to consider. Anyone who hasn't a plan in place for those kinds of events is showing his/her IQ deficit and normalcy bias...
You have missed the key point of this thread: The need for strong *defense* applies to both your personal situation as well as national sovereignty. Turner Diaries, TEOTWAWKI/Patriots and a host of other post-apocalyptic-TSHTF [what you would call fantasy] fiction describe a wealth of techniques for defending yourself, and your needed survival possessions, against marauding LOOTerz and fascist abusive governments run amok. And if you can jolt your complacent self out of its terminal normalcy bias, you might have noticed an increasing media chatter on the current potential for social disorder and violence. Oppressed folks in the USA are taking notice of how well those protest techniques have worked in Egypt, Tunisia, etc and are fed up here with joblessness, high gasoline prices, TSA perversions, etc. Lot of unrest already, just this week Drudge has highlighted a lot of it: Chicago, San Jose, flash mob criminalality, NYC, Florida, violence erupting on airlines, in restautrants, huge releases of prisoners on the populace in California. It could all go physically viral for *real* overnight. Nationwide Rodney King. Are you CYA prepared to defend yourself and loved ones when/if it happens...???!!
BD takes the best proper engineering approach to what you call "perspectives of reality." That is, when faced with a situation, first step is to gather and digest all the available hard data, wealths of *test* data, and from that synthesize the *truth*. That is what you see on BD's library shelves. It cannot be replaced with esoteric alternative ways of (wishful) thinking...
Fiction.
If I want to prepare for a nuclear meltdown in my vicinity, do I go watch The China Syndrome? Before my child considers enlisting in the military, should I make him watch old John Wayne war movies?
The indigenous peoples of America lacked [again, the whole point of this thread] a strong *DEFENSE*.
_
And if folks don't want themselves and/or loved ones to become "selected" for things like Tuskegee or Guatemala, best to have a strong personal defense in place to protect against that. It would begin with a strong close-knit extended family where any vulnerable members are protected by the others. And you obviously, for starters, don't get that with IQ-75's breeding 70% OOW and associated irresponsible lifestyles....
_
Slavery was just another example of weak defense. Why didn't Africans go to Europe and America and kidnap whitey to do their hunting/gathering...??
_
Strong defense, baby. Name of the game. Any time any person or country is victimized, the root cause can be traced to shortcomings in appropriate defense.
um.., that's not the point of this thread at all BD.
The whole and entire point of this thread is that the "most civilized", "best educated" and "hippocratically sworn to do no harm" exemplars of the american branch of anglospheric civilization - systematically conducted themselves like psychopathic torturers/serial killers instead of like physicians.
The point of this thread is that the unspeakable is all-pervasive and all-corrupting, and no one is immune from succumbing to its demonic influence.
BD: Please elucidate. I do not know to what you refer by "...esoteric alternative ways of (wishful) thinking..."
"...that's not the point of this thread at all BD."
_
Yes it is.. Your thread was hijacked with BD's first comment.
ROTFLMBAO...., whew!!!!!!
http://youtu.be/6IZHR2UB-tI
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