In WTF News: U.S. Apologizes for Guatemala Syphilis Experiment

According to the NY Times (published October 2, 2010):

American scientists deliberately infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis 60 years ago, a recently unearthed experiment that prompted U.S. officials to apologize Friday and declare outrage over “such reprehensible research.”

The discovery dredges up past wrongs in the name of science — like the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study in this country that has long dampened minority participation in medical research — and could complicate ongoing studies overseas that depend on cooperation from some of the world’s poorest countries to tackle tough-to-treat diseases.

Uncovering it gives “us all a chance to look at this and — even as we are appalled at what was done — to redouble our efforts to make sure something like this could never happen again,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.

The NIH-funded experiment, which ran from 1946 to 1948, was uncovered by a Wellesley College medical historian. It apparently was conducted to test if penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent some sexually transmitted infections. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.

“We are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Friday.

Wellesley College historian Susan Reverby made the discovery while combing the archived records of Dr. John Cutler, a government researcher involved in the Tuskegee study that from 1932 to 1972 tracked 600 black men in Alabama who had syphilis without ever offering them treatment.

She discovered that Cutler also led the Guatemala project that went a step further: A total of 696 men and women were exposed to syphilis or in some cases gonorrhea — through jail visits by prostitutes or, when that didn’t infect enough people, by deliberately inoculating them. They were offered penicillin, but it wasn’t clear how many were infected and how many were successfully treated…

While secretly trying to infect people with serious diseases is abhorrent today, the Guatemalan experiment isn’t the only example from what Collins on Friday called “a dark chapter in the history of medicine.” Forty similar deliberate-infection studies were conducted in the United States during that period, Collins said…

The revelation of abuses by a U.S. medical research program is only the latest chapter in the United States’ troubled history with the impoverished Central American nation, which has a per capita gross domestic product about half of that of the rest of Central America and the Caribbean.

The U.S. helped topple the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and backed several hardline governments during a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996 and cost 200,000 lives.

Read the full article here

Our two cents:
I wonder how Hillary Clinton went about breaking the ice with the Guatemalan government during her  “oops, sorry about the medical experiments” phone call.

But seriously, since the United States has a long, repulsive history of unethical, amoral and down right twisted medical experimentation perpetrated upon African-Americans, the mentally challenged, the powerless and poor people in general, this comes as no surprise. For a better understanding of this issue we highly suggest reading a 2007 book by Harriet A. Washington entitled Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present and/or this handy time-line of American medical experiments from Natural News.

On a side note:
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état so flippantly mentioned in the last line of the article was a covert operation organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the democratically-elected President of Guatemala.

Arbenz’s government put forth a number of new policies that were in direct opposition to U.S.-based multi-national corporation United Fruit Company who then owned most of Guatemala, such as seizing and expropriating unused, unfarmed land that private companies set aside long ago and giving the land to peasants. Through a presidential decree legally owned land would be purchased by the government at the value the owners had declared for property tax purposes. Arbenz attempted to do this because in 1945, it was estimated that 2.2% of the country’s population controlled 70% of all arable land, but only 12% of it was being utilized.

At the behest of lobbyists like Allan Dulles who was both The Director of the CIA at that time and one of United Fruit’s board members, the U.S. government eventually deemed expropriating to be an act of communism that needed to be stopped. So the CIA armed and trained a “Liberation Army” of about 400 fighters under the command of a then-exiled Guatemalan army officer, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, and used them in conjunction with a complex and largely experimental diplomatic, economic, and propaganda campaign that even included running a radio station out of Miami called La Voz de la Liberacion (The Voice of Liberation).

According to Kate Doyle, director of the Mexico Project of National Security Archives and a regular contributor to Americas Program of the Interhemispheric Resource Center, most historians now agree that the military coup in 1954 was the definitive blow to Guatemala’s young democracy. Over the next four decades, the succession of military rulers would wage counter-insurgency warfare, destabilizing Guatemalan society. The violence caused the deaths and disappearances of more than 140,000 Guatemalans, and some human rights activists put the death toll as high as 250,000.

Read more about the U.S.-backed coup, with supporting documents, here. For even further reading we highly suggest reading Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer.

In WTF News: Pentagon Burns Thousands of Copies of Army Officer’s Memoirs

According to Fox News (published September 25, 2010):

The Pentagon  has burned 9,500 copies of Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer’s memoir Operation Dark Heart, his book about going undercover in Afghanistan.

A Department of Defense official tells Fox News that the department purchased copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security.

The U.S. Army originally cleared the book for release.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency attempted to block the book about the tipping point in Afghanistan and a controversial pre-9/11 data mining project called “Able Danger.”

In a letter obtained by Fox News, the DIA says national security could be breached if “Operation Dark Heart” is published in its current form. The agency also attempted to block key portions of the book that claim “Able Danger” successfully identified hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat to the United States before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Specifically, the DIA wanted references to a meeting between Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, the book’s author, and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, removed. In that meeting, which took place in Afghanistan, Shaffer alleges the commission was told about “Able Danger” and the identification of Atta before the attacks. No mention of this was made in the final 9/11 report.

“Dr. Philip Zelikow approached me in the corner of the room. ‘What you said today is very important. I need you to get in touch with me as soon as you return from your deployment here in Afghanistan’,” Shaffer said.

Once back in the U.S., Shaffer says he contacted the commission. Without explanation, the commission was no longer interested. An inspector general report by the Department of Defense concluded there was no evidence to support the claims of Shaffer and others. But Fox News has obtained an unredacted copy of the IG report containing the names of witnesses, who backed up Shaffer’s story when contacted for comment…

Read the full Fox News article here

Just in case you refuse to read anything from Fox News, read CNN’s version of the story here.

Update: The Department of Defense spent more than $47,000 to have 9,500 copies of Dark Heart burned.

Update: A kindle version of the book is available but it has already been redacted.

Our two cents: The Pentagon loves the smell of censorship in the morning.

RIP: Harvey Pekar

According to the The Cleveland Plain Dealer (published July 12, 2010):

Harvey Pekar’s life was not an open book. It was an open comic book.

Pekar chronicled his life and times in the acclaimed autobiographical comic-book series, “American Splendor,” portraying himself as a rumpled, depressed, obsessive-compulsive “flunky file clerk” engaged in a constant battle with loneliness and anxiety.

Pekar, 70, was found dead shortly before 1 a.m. today by his wife, Joyce Brabner, in their Cleveland Heights home, said Powell Caesar, spokesman for Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller. An autopsy will be conducted to determine the cause of death. Pekar and his wife, Joyce Brabner, wrote “Our Cancer Year,” a book-length comic, after Pekar was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1990 and underwent a grueling treatment.

Read the full article here

We highly suggest reading Pekar’s 1986 masterpiece American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar and/or watching the 2003 movie of the same name starring Paul Giamatti.

Watch some of Pekar’s infamous appearances on Letterman here, here and here

Photo File: “The Ruins of Detroit” by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre

Michigan Central Station

Statement:

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the city of Detroit developed rapidly thanks to the automobile industry. Until the 50′s, its population rose to almost 2 million people. Detroit was the fourth most important city in the United States. It was the dazzling symbol of the American Dream City with its monumental skyscrapers and fancy neighborhoods. Increasing segregation and de-industrialization caused violent riots in 1967. The white middle-class exodus from the city accelerated and the suburbs grew. Firms and factories began to close or move to lower-wage states. Slowly, but inexorably downtown high-rise buildings emptied.

Since the 50′s, “Motor City” lost more than half of its population.

Untied Artists Theater

William Livingstone House

Fisher Body 21 Plant

See more photos from this project here

Look for The Ruins of Detroit book out sometime this August via Steidl

posted by: Harold Johns III

Photo File: Andrey Tarkovsky’s Polaroids

From the publisher (Thames and Hudson):

Instant Light is a beautiful, elegiac collection of sixty polaroid photographs by the late, great Soviet film director, Andrey Tarkovsky, best known for densely metaphysical films like Solaris (original), The Mirror, Stalker and Nostalghia.

Composed of sixty luminous polaroids taken by Andrey Tarkovsky in Russia and Italy between 1979 and 1984, this beautifully produced series of cameos from the director’s life reveals him to be a master of the still as much as of the moving image.

“Tarkovsky often reflected on the way that time flies and this is precisely what he wanted: to stop it, even with these quick Polaroid shots … These images leave us with a mysterious and poetic sensation, the melancholy of seeing things for the last time. It is as though Andrey wanted a swift way to pass his own enjoyment to others. They are something to be shared, not only a method of making his own wish to stop time come true. And they feel like a fond farewell” – Tonino Guerra, from the Introduction to Instant Light.

The photos in the first section, taken in Russia, have the radiant melancholy of lengthening shadows and trees looming through misty dawns near Tarkovsky’s country dacha, together with portraits of his wife, son and dog, loaded with nostalgia by quotations from his later diaries. Those taken in Italy portray exquisite still lifes and glimmering ruins. The book concludes with photographs from Tarkovsky’s personal collection.

See more of Tarkovsky’s Polaroids on this Russian website (click on the photo to the right)

Learn even more about Tarkovsky’s life and work here

posted by: Brent Carter