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My daughter would like me to thank all of you for your
many wonderful topic suggestions for her history paper.
She wants me to save the link for later assignments.
She selected the government radiation experiments
on humans offered by Corarose for this paper-
Read the end and PRAY her teacher is not a freeper!
she goes off on a diatribe about how our government
is covering up "atrocities" even now...Heh-Heh...
She gives me hope for the future.
Here 'tis- thank you CoraRose!
The year was 1987 when reporter Eileen Welsome was looking through a collection of government documents at Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A particular paper on radioactive animal corpses led her to a safe containing a number of reports that were "stiff with age and smelled of dust". The reports were from the U.S. Atomic Weapons Program. They identified human test subjects only by code names. As Welsome read into the descriptions of these experiments further she became horrified. She found that between April 1945 and July 1947, scientists and doctors in charge of testing nuclear substances for war deliberately injected plutonium into eighteen unknowing Americans and watched them, as they died slow and painful deaths.
Samples of their urine and feces were sent to Los Alamos to study. One case involved a black man, known in the report as "CAL-3" but later identified as Elmer Allen, was told that the injection was to help cure the cancer in his leg. He died in 1991 never knowing of the gruesome experiment put upon him. Welsome soon found that these radioactive experiments were part of an even bigger one that involved over 700 Americans, including men, women and even U.S. soldiers. The scandal was reported in a few news sources, such as Mother Jones, Science Trends, and the local Albuquerque Tribune, which Welsome wrote for. Even when it reached the House Subcommittee of Investigations and Oversight, the atrocity was regarded as unimportant. The American media remained unfazed until President Clinton made up a committee to investigate the story further and it soon took its place in mainstream news. In the end, Eileen Welsome was rewarded for her journalism efforts with both a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk.
It is now the year 2003 and the government has only begun to admit that it had an ethical and financial duty to make amends to the victims exposed to cancer-causing radiation. There are many events that are left out of today’s news and our school history books, usually due to the fact that they are considered "unpatriotic", " anti-American", or labeled "unimportant" as was Welsome’s discovery. Newspapers today are filled with a mixture of fear and patriotism, pictures of war heroes and bombed buildings, but rarely ever of the victims shot or bombed by our soldiers. It is important that truth be told, even if it is not something the average American wants to read about or see. All the atrocities committed in our name, by our government and our leaders must but put out for everyone to see, not to scare or disgust people, but to help them learn. To help them take hold of their future and their children’s future. To make sure they do not repeat the same mistakes. Without knowledge, we are doomed to ignorance and therefore repetition of mistakes.
The American Library Association President of 2001, Nancy C. Kranich,
said it best when she stated, "An informed public constitutes the very foundation of a democracy . . . If a free society is to survive, it must ensure the preservation of its records and provide free and open access to this information to all its citizens."
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