Original at:
Blog for Arizona
The U.S. government secretly experimented with radioactivity on thousands of Americans. Many have heard of the Tukegee Experiments, but until recently it was not realized how widespread was the experimentation on unwitting and unwilling American citizens by their own government.
These acts are a direct violation of the
Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation. Those still living who participated in planning, authorizing, and conducting these experiments should be tried for crimes against humanity. Those already passed who are known or suspected to have particpated should be considered by a Truth Commission to determine their cuplability. Included in this latter group should be Robert J. Oppenheimer, who is known to have authorized some of this experimentation. The world, and the American people, should know the facts as an important, if painful, part of their nation's history. Unless the moral and legal issues raised by such atrocities are dealt with openly and publicly, becoming a part of our collective conscience and our national identity, these crimes will almost certainly happen again.
There is a connection between the brutal and arrogant interventions in the internal affairs of other nations that our government has endulged in for the past 60 years and the silence and indifference with which these discoveries of medical experimentation are received. America's history of brutal repression of foreign peoples, and recent events in Iraq and in American politics indicate that the belief has not taken root in American culture that some means can never be justified by the ends, no matter how compelling. The lessons which most of the civilized world learned from the atrocities of WWII have somehow failed to penetrate our culture. We still have not learned that to let loose our grip on the ideals of civilization encoded in our own basic laws and those of the international community in order to grasp at even so important a goal as security, is to plunge the world into barbarism, trading the illusory security of strength for the true security of law and solidarity.
One of reasons that has been frequently used to justify the Iraq war are the barbaric crimes against humanity committed by Saddam Hussein and those in his regime, including forced medical experimentation (PDF) on unwilling subjects for his weapons programs. But what separates our own government morally from the Ba'ath regime in light of revelations that we have done the same? From what ethical basis can we judge the crimes of the Ba'ath regime when our own government shares unexpiated guilt for some of the very same crimes? Our government performed forced medical experimentation on its own citizens for its weapons programs, and nobody has paid a price for those crimes; most don't even know of them. This is an example of the lesson we somehow missed. Moral superiority is not founded in beliefs or in words, only in actions.
The Ba'ath regime was condemned for crimes against humanity. The regime was undeniably vile, yet we have engaged in some of the very same crimes the Ba'ath regime is condemned for during this war of 'liberation' and occupation, including torture of prisoners, extra-judicial slayings, and the extra-judicial detention of civilians. How can we claim the moral authority to bring to Iraqis anything but more brutality when act so, despite our fine words? The perception of the world that we a hypocrites is well justified. We sponsored and abetted the Ba'ath regime through much of its history. We engage in abuses against the Iraqi people. Yet we claim the moral authority to lead the Iraqi people to freedom and self-determination. What rational person would believe us when our actions so strongly contradict our words?
Despite our propaganda, first about democracy, now about an amorphous 'liberation', Iraqis, reasonably, only trust what we do, not what we say. And what we have done is monstrous. If the moral lepers of the Bush Administration illegally occupied America, systematically destroying our laws, ruining our economy, and violating the rights of our citizens, wouldn't we fight back and give our lives rather than submit? Oh yeah... they are, and we aren't putting up much of a fight. Perhaps we have less desire for freedom than the Iraqis. But then again, our nightmare under a bloody-handed, barbaric dictator has only just begun, while the Iraqis suffered theirs for 30 years. Naturally, their yearning for freedom is more acute than our own. And therein lies the problem. The Iraqis wanted to believe us, thus the relative quiet of the begining of the occupation. It was only after we had demonstrated our hypocrisy sufficiently that the resistance began to gather force. Now we are faced with a dilemma in which, if we fail to act forcefully, we will lose Iraq, and if we act forcefully, we will simply accelerate the growth of resistance and lose Iraq. This wasn't inevitable if our actions suited our words.
Fundamentally, we are in the same boat as the Iraqis, yet many Americans see them as the enemy, rather than as victims of the same crimes committed against ourselves by the very same criminals. The Iraqi people are us; how we treat them is how we believe we should be treated. For this reason, critique of the Iraq war should not focus on our interests - the billions of dollars, the lives of American soldiers, our security, our prestige - but upon our Iraqi brothers. Until we learn to demand that their rights be respected, we will never stand up for our own. Our moral sensibilities are so calloused by the brutality of our government against people overseas, that we fail to even sense the outrages perpetrated upon ourselves here at home. Until we acknowledge the crimes committed against others, and punish those responsible, we will never demand justice for the crimes that have been, and are being, committed against us.