Robert McNamara and 1960s secret biological weapons' testing in US.

[madfloridian]

Senator Bill Nelson was really pushing for an investigation a few years ago, but now I can not find it listed at his website. I had saved the pages from his site from 2002. I have not heard a word recently. There was also a lawsuit by veterans groups, but I have not heard anymore about that.

Here is an article from 2002 with some tie-in to our invading Iraq for their hidden weapons. The article is from Bill Nelson's website, and Max Cleland puts the situation in a dark perspective.

Inquiry into weapons' testing

WASHINGTON -- A Department of Defense investigation and efforts to declassify details of American chemical and biological weapons tests do not appear to include tests conducted in the 1950s throughout the nation and at several sites in Florida, including the Avon Park Air Force Range.

The Defense Department has promised to provide a full accounting of tests conducted on U.S. soil and offshore from 1962 to 1973, but other tests conducted earlier appear not to be on the department's list despite pressure from Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat. Nelson has pressed the department since January for information about "mysterious" activities at a Boca Raton airfield in the 1950s.

Here are the words of Max Cleland from the article:

Nelson is a sponsor of legislation that would require disclosure of military biological and chemical weapons tests. Nelson's complaints came a day after the Defense Department released details about 27 biological and chemical tests that began in the 1960s as part of what is known as Project 112. The department late last year and earlier this year released details of 10 other Project 112 tests.

Personnel Subcommittee Chair Max Cleland, D-Ga., said the military has been too reluctant to declassify information about biological and chemical weapons tests. He noted that such weapons are a chief reason that the United States is considering war against Iraq.

"What an incredible irony that we are here focused on weapons of mass destruction in another country . . . and we're having to pull like teeth from our own government information about what we did to our own people," he said at the hearing.

Yes, indeed. We attacked, invaded, and occupied a country for supposedly doing what we did to our own people.

Another article from Nelson's site in October 2002.

Navy veterans claim U.S. covered up biological and chemical tests

WASHINGTON - A veterans advocacy group and 21 former servicemen who unknowingly were exposed to dangerous chemical and biological toxins during secret Cold War tests filed a class-action lawsuit Tuesday claiming a government cover-up. The Navy veterans, along with the Vietnam Veterans of America, named as a defendant former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who served under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. They allege McNamara "conceived a program of biological and chemical warfare experiments" in the 1960s.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, also named as defendants a former undersecretary of the Army and several current officials of the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. "If Congress can hold people like Ken Lay accountable for his actions, American citizens, particularly veterans, should be able to hold government officials accountable for theirs," said Douglas Rosinski, an attorney for the servicemen. Lay is the former chairman of Enron Corp.

Spokesmen for the VA and Defense Department declined to comment about the lawsuit.

McNamara could not be reached for comment. But in a brief interview in August about the secret tests, he said, "I have absolutely zero recollection of them."

There is much written about chemical weapons testing in the US through the years.

WASHINGTON -- The United States secretly tested chemical and biological weapons on American soil during the 1960s, including experiments at the Avon Park U.S. Air Force Range, newly declassified Pentagon reports show. The tests included releasing deadly nerve agents in Alaska and spraying bacteria over Hawaii, according to the documents obtained Tuesday.

The United States also tested nerve agents in Canada and Britain in conjunction with those two countries, and biological and chemical weapons in at least two other states, Maryland and Florida.

More on that topic.

Sailors Sprayed With Nerve Gas In Cold War Test, Pentagon Says

The Defense Department sprayed live nerve and biological agents on ships and sailors in cold war-era experiments to test the Navy's vulnerability to toxic warfare, the Pentagon revealed today. The Pentagon documents made public today showed that six tests were carried out in the Pacific Ocean from 1964 to 1968. In the experiments, nerve or chemical agents were sprayed on a variety of ships and their crews to gauge how quickly the poisons could be detected and how rapidly they would disperse, as well as to test the effectiveness of protective gear and decontamination procedures in use at the time.

Hundreds of sailors exposed to the poisons in tests conducted in the 1960's could be eligible for health care benefits, and the Department of Veterans Affairs has already begun contacting those who participated in some of the experiments, known as Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense, or SHAD.

Here is more about the Alaska spraying.

In 1961, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara oversaw the development
of secret biological and chemical testing programs, numbered one through
150.

In one of those projects, No. 112, the Defense Department between 1962
and 1973 conducted biological and chemical warfare tests on land off the
Alaska Highway near the Gerstle River, just southeast of Delta Junction.
The military wanted to know how deadly nerve gases such as Sarin and VX
would linger in the arctic environment.

Soldiers in protective suits in military vehicles were also taken
through sprayed areas to see how long the nerve gases stayed in the
field after spraying and to test decontamination practices.

Alaska tests

From an old newspaper clip from 2001, we learn that the government had admitted to such testing.

HEADLINE: U.S. admits secret tests on unwary sailors

Copyright 2001 Chicago Tribune Company
Chicago Tribune

Nerve agents, bacteria sprayed on ships in 1960s

BYLINE: By Mark Pazniokas and Thomas D. Williams, Special to the Tribune. Mark Pazniokas and Thomas D. Williams are staff writers for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune newspaper

He kept the secret for 30 years. The former Navy skipper told no one about the classified tests of Project Shad, how the Marine jets came screaming out of the night off a remote Pacific atoll, spraying a 100-mile-long aerosol cloud over his five tugboats.

Then Jack Alderson's men started getting sick.

"Some of the guys tried to go to the Pentagon or the American Legion and said, 'I did biological warfare testing.' They basically threw them out, told them they were crazy," said Alderson, many of whose former crew complain of chronic respiratory problems. "They told them, 'We didn't do things like that.'"

Now, after seven years of inquiries from veterans, Congress and the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Pentagon has confirmed that thousands of sailors were present during a decadelong series of classified tests to determine the vulnerability of U.S. warships to attack by chemical and biological warfare.

In a series of "fact sheets" given to veterans hospitals and organizations last month, the Pentagon acknowledged that some of the tests involved spraying live biological weapons over U.S. ships, including Alderson's tugs.

These were horrible tests. There were more done in Tampa, Florida, and some in Lakeland, Florida. I have excerpts from the articles, but Nelson's sites do not have the links anymore. There were others as well.

I have this article saved, but the link is dead.

Records show secret open-air tests of chemical and biological agents in 1960s Polk.

WASHINGTON -- The United States secretly tested chemical and biological weapons on American soil during the 1960s, including experiments at the Avon Park U.S. Air Force Range, newly declassified Pentagon reports show. The tests included releasing deadly nerve agents in Alaska and spraying bacteria over Hawaii, according to the documents obtained Tuesday.

The United States also tested nerve agents in Canada and Britain in conjunction with those two countries, and biological and chemical weapons in at least two other states, Maryland and Florida.

Specifics on tests at Avon Park have not been released yet, but an aide in the office of U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat pushing for full disclosure of the experiments, said that it could have involved the same type of low-level biological tests on wheat as previously reported at a Yeehaw Junction site and one near the current Florida Atlantic University site in Boca Raton.

Amazingly, it has taken almost 50 years to start investigations...and I can not seem to find updated stuff on them. As far as I can find the government folks who allowed that weapons testing during McNamara's tenure never were held to account for it.

I remember being very surprised when Robert McNamara, who kept the Vietnam war going even when he knew we could not win....actually spoke out against the Iraq invasion.

From 2004:

It's just wrong what we're doing.

In an exclusive interview, repentant Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara breaks his silence on Iraq: The United States, he says, is making the same mistakes all over again.

No historic figure has put so much effort into self-examination: At the age of 87, he has now written three very detailed and analytical books, and starred in one very good movie, devoted to the fundamental mistakes that led the United States into the most politically costly and least successful war in its history.

What, then, does he think about Iraq? Until now, the former secretary of defence has avoided comment on the actions of that job's current occupant, Donald Rumsfeld. The two are often compared to each other in their autocratic leadership styles and in their technocratic, numbers-driven approaches to war. And their wars, of course, are often likened. But Robert McNamara has insisted in staying out of the fray.

He decided to break his silence on Iraq when I called him up the other day at his Washington office. I told him that his carefully enumerated lists of historic lessons from Vietnam were in danger of being ignored. He agreed, and told me that he was deeply frustrated to see history repeating itself.

"We're misusing our influence," he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. "It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."

Yes, indeed, it was wrong in every way.

So was testing weapons and keeping it secret for all these years.

[madfloridian]

1. I found this from 2003....

I guess they concluded the investigation? Quietly, I guess. It was hard to find this article, and I had not run across it before.

Deseret Test Center Investigation Draws To A Close

June 30, 2003 - WASHINGTON (DeploymentLINK) -- The Department of Defense completed today its nearly three-year investigation of operational tests conducted in the 1960s. These tests were known to some as "Project SHAD," which was in fact a subset of "Project 112." Project 112 tests were conducted under the auspices of the Deseret Test Center, at Fort Douglas, Utah. Investigators have been able to confirm that the Deseret Test Center planned 134 operational tests; 50 are confirmed to have been conducted and 84 were canceled.

Tests were conducted on the open sea in the North Atlantic, open water locations of the Pacific Ocean and near the Marshall Islands, Hawaii, Baker Island, Puerto Rico and the California coast, investigators report. Land-based tests took place in Alaska, Hawaii, Maryland, Florida, Utah, Georgia and in Panama, Canada and the United Kingdom. Investigators have identified 5,842 servicemembers as having been present in one or more of these tests, and their names have been provided to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"This release concludes a significant effort on the part of many people in the Department of Defense to ensure important information was made available to service members and the Department of Veterans Affairs," says Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr. "That effort reflects our individual and collective commitment to veterans and their families. I am pleased that our investigators were able to bring closure to this in-depth investigation, and by replacing speculation and uncertainty with fact, to offer the veterans of these tests some much deserved peace of mind."

More:

Further digging revealed that Project SHAD was a subset of Project 112. In 1961, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara launched 150 management initiatives. The 112th initiative concerned chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Because DoD's knowledge of chemical and biological warfare agents was so limited, a testing program was critical. This testing, done under Project 112, was one component of a far-reaching series of actions by the services to make chemical and biological weapons an effective part of the national defense. To support this effort, the Joint Chiefs of Staff directed the establishment of the Deseret Test Center at Fort Douglas, Utah, in June 1962. Plans were for most tests to be conducted on ships in the Pacific Ocean or on land in Alaska and Hawaii.

...."Veterans who believe they were involved in Deseret Test Center tests and desire medical evaluations should call the VA's Helpline at [phone]. Veterans who have DoD related questions or who are DoD beneficiaries and have medical concerns or questions should call the Deployment Health Support Directorate's contact center at [phone].

At least they could get care then.

[troubledamerican]

5. SV40 and the polio vaccine

http://books.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?WRD=dr.+mary%27s+monkey&box=dr.%20mary%27s%20monke&pos=-1

[madfloridian]

9. More about Project 112

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_112

"Project 112 was a biological and chemical weapons experimentation project conducted by the US Army from 1962 to 1973. The project started under John F. Kennedy's administration, and was authorized by his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, as part of a total review of the US military. The name of the project refers to its number in the review process. Every branch of the armed services contributed funding and staff to the project.

Experiments were planned and conducted by the Deseret Test Center at Fort Douglas, Utah. They were designed to test the effects of biological weapons and chemical weapons on service personnel. They involved unknowing test subjects, and took place on land and at sea via tests conducted upon unwitting US Naval vessels. The existence of the project (along with the related Project SHAD) was categorically denied by the military until May 2000, when a CBS Evening News investigative report produced dramatic revelations about the tests. This report caused the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs to launch an extensive investigation of the experiments, and reveal to the affected personnel their exposure to toxins."

[bvar22]

2. One mystery solved.

The 1962 spraying of Nerve Gas in Alaska explains Sarah Palin.

[madfloridian]

3. It's terrible what gases they sprayed there.

"In one of those projects, No. 112, the Defense Department between 1962
and 1973 conducted biological and chemical warfare tests on land off the
Alaska Highway near the Gerstle River, just southeast of Delta Junction.
The military wanted to know how deadly nerve gases such as Sarin and VX
would linger in the arctic environment."

[KT2000]

4. Civilians were exposed too

Leonard A. Cole, professor at Rutgers has written about this.
Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas, 1990

The Eleventh Plague: The Politics of Biological and Chemical Warfare, 1996

Don't know if he has continued his work because these books are probably out of print.

[madfloridian]

6. And it took all these years to let the secret out so they could get medical care.

tragic.

[Octafish]

7. Dorothy Legarreta worked to stop ''experiments with the touch of Buchenwald.''

Dr. Dorothy Legarreta lost her life for making public information about these illegal government experiments.

Human Radiation Experiments

EXCERPT...

22 Dorothy Legarreta was a graduate
23 student worker who, during the Manhattan Project,
24 smashed contaminated glassware in the laboratory of
25 Joseph Hamilton at the UC/Berkeley Radiation

1 Laboratory. Twenty years later a son died of acute
2 lymphoblastic leukemia, and Dorothy had surgery for a
3 large thyroid tumor.
4 Dorothy founded the National
5 Association of Radiation Survivors, and as the first
6 independent research to examine Hamilton's papers
7 at the Bancroft Library, she discovered the now
8 infamous 1950 memo in which he warned against doing
9 certain whole-body radiation experiments n humans,
10 the very same ones which Eugene Saenger and his team
11 would later conduct, because to do so would, in
12 Hamilton's words, quote, "have a little of the
13 Buchenwald touch," unquote.
14 Dorothy publicized this memo and began
15 to uncover the full extent of the human
16 experimentation program in 1982. Around that time
17 she filed the first the Freedom of Information Act
18 request on human experimentation with the Department
19 of Energy, the response to which I would urge this
20 Committee to obtain, which led more or less directly
21 to the 1986 Markey Report.
22 On November first, 1988, while
23 completing a book about the experimentation program,
24 Dorothy's car mysteriously ran off the road and into
25 a tree just north of here on Highway 101. Her

1 briefcase, though reported found at the scene,
2 disappeared.
3 Dorothy Troxell, whom we all knew as
4 "Dottie," and again Bruce referred to her before,
5 hired on as a worker at the AEC's Kansas City's plant
6 in 1952. She helped build the components of the
7 first hydrogen bomb, and was later assigned to
8 calibrate radiation detection devices for use at the
9 test sites by holding them up to a Cobalt-60 source.
10 In 1957 a careless accident by a
11 co-worker left that source unshielded. Dottie and
12 her co-worker were exposed to lethal levels of gamma
13 radiation, and over the following days and weeks
14 Dottie developed symptoms of Acute Radiation
15 sickness.
16 It was expected that Dottie would die
17 and become the perfect autopsy specimen, so rather
18 than telling Dottie what had happened to her and was
19 happening to her, her employer at Bendix, and AEC,
20 chose to turn her into a scientific experiment. It
21 was the perfect experiment of opportunity, as you
22 call it, because the exposure had been to a
23 calibration source, so the doses to every organ, if
24 not tissue, could be gauged to perhaps an unmatched
25 degree of precision.

1 Dottie was told that her vaginal
2 hemorrhaging was due to a, the hormonal problem so
3 she would not question the administration of
4 estrogens, which were then under investigation as a
5 potential treatment for radiation injury. She was
6 then sent to Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New
7 Mexico, where again under the pretense of treating
8 some idiopathic dysfunctions, she was given a
9 splenectomy, another experimental treatment developed
10 in the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki
11 bombings, and later was studied at the Argonne
12 National Laboratory and Lovelace.
13 The splenectomy certainly did save
14 Dottie's life, but there was one problem. When
15 Dottie woke up after the surgery she found a scar
16 that ran the length of her torso from her neck to her
17 pubic mound.
18 When she asked what had been done to
19 her, a reasonable question under the circumstances,
20 she was told she could not be told because of, quote,
21 national security, unquote. We never have been able
22 to find out definitely what was done to Dottie at
23 Lovelace.
24 For 30 years Lovelace not only refused
25 to release her medical records, but denied she had

1 ever been a patient there. When I went to Lovelace
2 in 1986 in order to investigate Dottie's case, I was
3 told that not only was there no record of any patient
4 names Dorothea Troxell, but no AEC or contractor
5 employee had ever been treated at Lovelace, period.
6 Only a short time later Lovelace
7 relented and gave Dottie her medical records. These
8 records confirmed the splenectomy, but don't explain
9 the scar.
10 Dottie would joke that she must have
11 had the most enlarged spleen in medical history. But
12 seriously, we both suspected that since Dottie had
13 defiantly escaped the autopsy table, advantage had
14 been taken of her time on the operating table to
15 remove a selection of tissue samples and thereby
16 somehow contribute to this Country's national
17 defense.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/meet7/trsc07b.txt

Inhumane experimentation and secret government are un-American.

We the People aren't safe from these madmen, still.

[madfloridian]

8. Operation Teapot...had ever heard of that one.

"So he was in the military and did
3 receive tests. His unit was permanently stationed at
4 Camp Desert Rock for the duration of the series.
5 He participated in 11 tests doing sound
6 ranging, and was used at times in the observer
7 trenches. There are no radiation records for Camp
8 Desert Rock personnel.
9 He died of massive cancer of the
10 abdomen in 1987. My application to the Veteran's
11 Administration for widow's benefits have been denied
12 and has been on appeal for a number of years.
13 During the process of preparing my
14 appeal I studied the Defense Nuclear Agency's
15 official history of Operation Teapot, 1955.

In that
16 history, on Page 200 of the "Nuclear Test Personnel
17 Review," an example with data is given of a dose
18 reconstruction, but no calculations are shown."

From your link

[upi402]

12. Thank you for this

I often wonder how many similar hidden heroes there are. I wonder often though, about a lot of stuff, for a lot of years.

[Time for change]

10. Our country is so screwed up

One of our priorities needs to be to make it much more difficult for our government to get away with classifying information in a way to keep it secret from the American people. That's a recipe for tyranny, and we've seen the fruits of that in recent years.

[bertman]

11. Error: you can only recommend . . . This is important stuff, Madflo. Thank you for posting

this.

When I was an Army CBR officer back in the late 60's I remember seeing training films about chemical, biological, and radiological warfare tests. They showed the testing grounds out in the western states--I don't remember which ones now. They also showed shots of dead sheep and cattle that had been "downwind" of some of the tests on private land. Years later I remember reading about farmers and ranchers near those test facilities who experienced mass die-offs of their livestock that the military denied being any part of. Of course, over time the truth came out.

It's amazing to me how these situations are only allowed to become public knowledge AFTER the military/civilian officials who oversaw them have retired or died. No accountability at all. Only the occasional "we regret that these things were allowed to happen, but that was before we took command".