For decades now the Department of Defense and the Department of Veteran Affairs have surpressed help for the veterans and or their widows harmed by these experiments. For many years the veterans themselves said nothing because of statements we signed called "National Security Acts Notices" that basically state if you discuss this you will go to prison not maybe, there is no go pass go collect 200 dollars, it was made quite clear that if we dicussed the experiments the government would prosecute us and put us in Leavenworth Prison for 25 years.
That kind of promise was a good way of keeping people's mouths shut. But like most other things in government things leak out, like the Department of the Army IG Report on Human Experimentation in 1975, the uproar in Congress forced the Army to stop human experiments in the summer of 1975. The Church Committee exposed many of the secrets especially the link between the CIA and the DOD.
Then other government investigations over the years have brought out other aspects of it, The Rockefeller Commission 1994, The National Academies of Science 1993 Report Veterans at Risk, that the veterans of the programs started asking for help with medical problems they feel are related to the experiments. In 1991 CBS had 60 minutes do an expose on the veterans who were ill and the government was not helping them. They made a big deal out of getting DOD (Sec of Defense in 1991 was a man named Richard Cheney) and the acting VA Secretary was named Anthony Principi, they promised Congress they would find the veterans and get them help for their medical problems and or compensation if it was determined that they deserved it.
Well, we can see how far that went, I was out of the country for another war, so I never saw the program or never heard bout it until 2002, I was activated for Desert Storm and was not in the country during that period.
Since becoming disabled in 2002 I started looking for answers to why I was so ill with so many different problems, with the internet, you could find so much of the information about the investigations, news articles etc. I filed a claim with the VA and I wrote a letter to the new VA secretary Anthony Principi (same guy from 1991) about the multiple problems my claims faced Gulf War Issues, PTSD from an attempted murder while in the Army, the Edgewood Experiments, etc. That I expected to have problems with the VA and could his office help.
Back in 2004 Sec of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified to a senate committee that they would not be able to find the veterans exposed to chemical weapons and drugs until 2009. A nice coincidence since Bush/Cheney would be out of office then.
But this other Government agency keeps pushing for answers, it's called the Government Accountability Office (GAO) it writes reports and follow up reports, compared to other government agencies it does it's job. It investigates the governemt Agencies like DOD, IRS, VA etc, and they tell who is doing their job and who isn't.
Today they GAO released another report for Congress telling them that the VA and DOD are not finding the veterans exposed
February 28, 2008
The Honorable Ike Skelton Chairman Committee on Armed Services House of Representatives
The Honorable Vic Snyder Chairman Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Committee on Armed Services House of Representatives
The Honorable Mike Thompson House of Representatives
As we have previously reported, since World War II, tens of thousands of military personnel and civilians have been involved in classified human experimentation and were potentially exposed to chemical and biological substances1 through tests conducted or sponsored by the Department of Defense (DOD).2 Some of these tests and experiments involved the intentional exposure of people to hazardous substances such as blister and nerve agents, biological agents, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and phencyclidine (PCP). In some cases, healthy adults, psychiatric patients, and prison inmates were used in these tests and experiments. According to a 1994 staff report to the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, in some instances, service members who consented to serve as human subjects
found themselves participating in experiments quite different from those described at the time they volunteered.3 These tests and experiments were conducted to support weapon development programs, identify methods to protect the health of military personnel against a variety of diseases and combat conditions, and analyze U.S. defense vulnerabilities. From 1962 through 1974, DOD conducted a series of classified ship-based and land-based chemical and biological warfare tests involving military and civilian personnel as well as, in some cases, foreign personnel observers—both military and civilian. These tests were called Project 112 because in 1962 it was the 112th project of 150 delineated by the Secretary of Defense involving the classified testing of chemical and biological agents.
Precise information on the number of tests, experiments, and participants is not available, and the exact numbers will never be known. However, as a result of questions raised by members of Congress and veterans since 1993, DOD has undertaken three major initiatives to identify individuals potentially exposed to chemical or biological substances during tests it has sponsored or conducted. First, from 1993 to 1997, the former Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Manpower and Personnel within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (OUSD) for Personnel and Readiness (P&R) participated in a working group with the military services and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in response to a January 1993 Institute of Medicine report4 on the exposure of individuals to mustard agents and lewisite.5 The working group identified approximately 6,400 servicemembers and civilians who were exposed to mustard agents and other chemical substances.
Second, in August 2000, the acting Secretary of Veterans Affairs wrote a letter to the Secretary of Defense requesting assistance in obtaining information about a series of then-classified chemical and biological tests under DOD’s Project 112 program. In response to this request and subsequent congressional direction in the Bob Stump National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003,6 the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (OASD) for Health Affairs (HA) within OUSD (P&R) conducted an internal DOD investigation into Project 112.7 In a resulting report issued in 2003, DOD identified 5,842 servicemembers and estimated that 350 civilians had been potentially exposed during Project 112 tests.8 We subsequently evaluated DOD’s efforts, and in May 2004, we reported that DOD appeared to have accurately identified all major chemical and biological tests associated with Project 112, but that there likely were servicemembers and civilian personnel potentially exposed to substances who had not been identified for various reasons.9
Third, and in further response to congressional direction in the Defense Authorization Act for FY 2003, the Office of the Special Assistant for Chemical and Biological Defense and Chemical Demilitarization Programs (hereafter referred to as the chemical and biological defense office) within the OUSD for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (AT&L) issued a task order to a contractor in September 2004 to identify servicemembers and civilian personnel who might have been exposed to chemical and biological substances outside of Project 112 tests.10 The research being done as a result of this task order is ongoing as of December 2007.
For this review, you asked us to examine DOD’s current effort to identify and notify individuals who were potentially exposed during chemical and biological tests conducted or sponsored by DOD, including tests conducted as a part of DOD’s Project 112 program and tests conducted outside of Project 112. Accordingly, this report (1) assesses DOD’s efforts since 2003 to identify individuals who were potentially exposed during chemical or biological tests conducted during Project 112, (2) evaluates DOD’s current effort to identify individuals who were potentially exposed during chemical or biological tests conducted outside of Project 112, and (3) determines the extent to which DOD and VA have taken action to notify individuals who might have been exposed during chemical and biological tests.
To evaluate DOD’s efforts to identify all individuals who were potentially exposed to chemical or biological substances during Project 112 tests and tests outside of Project 112, we interviewed and obtained documentation from cognizant DOD, Institute of Medicine, and contractor officials. To determine how potentially exposed individuals were identified, we visited record repository sites where contractors were conducting research and observed their research and documentation process. To determine the extent to which DOD and VA have taken action to notify servicemembers who might have been exposed during chemical and biological tests, we met with DOD officials to discuss their efforts to provide names of identified servicemembers to VA and with VA officials to describe VA’s notification process. We evaluated the reliability of DOD’s and VA’s databases containing the names of individuals potentially exposed during chemical and biological tests and found that there were potential problems with the quality and reliability of the information. Although we determined that the information was sufficiently reliable for the purposes of our review, this report discusses weaknesses with DOD’s information, and our recommendation to address them. Consequently, the number of individuals whom we report as having been identified and notified is based on information from DOD’s and VA’s databases and is approximate. We also met with representatives from a veterans service organization to gain their perspectives on DOD and VA efforts to identify and notify veterans potentially exposed to chemical and biological substances during DOD tests. Because DOD identified civilians who might have been exposed to chemical or biological substances, we also met with DOD and Department of Labor officials to ascertain their roles and responsibilities in notifying such civilians. Additional information on our scope and methodology appears in appendix I. We conducted this performance audit from June 2007 to February 2008 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.
Page 4 GAO-08-366
Chemical and Biological Defense
The report is lenghty and points to DOD as being uncooperative and basically as having to just quit looking for the veterans since 2003. What the report does not deal with is the facts they don't know, is even the veterans they have been forced to find, like myself, it has not guaranteed that the VA will help them, my file has been on the VA hampster wheel since November 2002 and this is March 2008, basically the entire Bush Presidency, and the VA refuses to address any medical problems related to Edgewood, deny deny deny wait for a hearing.
I find it amusing and disgusting at the same time, that the government claism it cares about the veterans, while at the same time working to ignore the veterans it has already found. It can't be the cost of the thousands of veterans that would be entitled to compensation, the Edgewood vets have obliginaly died off at a fast rate by FY 2000 40% were deceased of the 7120 men used 3098 were dead, and 54% of the survivors are disabled another 2200 men. I imagine the other programs have similar death rates the SHAD/112 veterans, surprisngly the veterans used at Fort Detrick in Operation WhiteCoat are actually doing pretty good, they had a large gathering a few years ago where the Army and their church honored them for their service in the biological experiments.
The majority of volunteers for WhiteCoat were 7th Day Adventist and they avoided combat duty in Vietnam by going to Fort Detrick, most of them due to their religion became medics rather than infantryman and after the Fort Detrick assignment they got to pick their next duty station and most went to bases here in the states or Germany, there were quite a few who still went to Vietnam as medics.
So what is the real reason DOD and the VA refuse to address the medical problems related to the experiments?
Embarassment because of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld being involved in Ford's White House?
The Edgewood veterans can show a link between the 250,000 ill Gulf War veterans chemical weapons exposure if the government looked at the 1994 NIH Report on Chemical Weapons or the 1975 SIPRI report based on german soldiers from WW2
From the SIPRI 1975 report
To conclude this section, the closing observations from Spiegelberg’s monograph
will be cited (these remarks do not refer exclusively to organophosphorus
CW agents) [2]:
A psychiatric delayed-effect syndrome was found as a result of systematic investigations
on former members of CW production and testing stations for the Wehrmacht. In
terms of frequency, two groups of symptoms can be distinguished–each consisting of
four separate symptoms or signs.
(1) The great majority of persons examined showed:
(a) persistently lowered vitality accompanied by marked diminution in drive; I have
(b) defective autonomic regulation leading to cephalalgia, gastrointestinal and I have
cardiovascular symptoms, and premature decline in libido and potency; I have
(c) intolerance symptoms (alcohol, nicotine, medicines);
(d) impression of premature aging. I have
(2) Further, one or more symptoms of the second group were found:
(a) depressive or subdepressive disorders of vital functions;
I have
(b) cerebral vegetative (syncopal) attacks;
(c) slight or moderate amnestic and demential defects; I have
(d) slight organoneurological defects (predominantly microsymptoms and singular
signs of extrapyramidal character).
Our results are a contribution to the general question of psychopathological delayed
and permanent lesions caused by industrial poisoning. On the basis of our studies of
the etiologically different manifestations of toxication, the possibility of a relatively
uniform–though equally unspecific–cerebro-organic delayed effect syndrome is conceivable
I don't know but 250,000 men and women at 100% benefits might get real expensive billions
They just don't care about veterans
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