My story is not a secret here on Daily Kos, nor will it be to the nation shortly. Last week we Cold War "test vets" were notified that our federal lawsuit will be proceeding in San Francisco considering the first human experiments were conducted in 1955 and the last in 1975, these veterans have been waiting for more than half a century for "justice".
In many cases it is for medical care and in some cases compensation from the Veterans Affairs Department, in a few cases some of the veterans just want the promised "medals" and an apology.
I have Medicare but I get great care at the VA why go to a local civilian hopsital and see many of the same doctors at a higher cost? Many VA doctors work at local hospitals, when I worked at the Postal Service and I had to choose between VA docs and Blue Cross docs the co-pays made me go to MCG in Augusta as they only charged me a 10 dollar co-pay, to see the same doctor at the VA back then before I was service connected the VA charged me fifty dollars, to see the very same physician. Of course I went to MCG and paid the 10.
But we are now down to seeing the "test vets" attempt to get "justice" the Army and DOD spent decades lying that these "human experiments" never took place. Then they claimed they never caused any medical damage. The EPA superfund site shows 77 toxic substances in the drinking water and soil of Edgewood Arsenal. In all the scientists at Edgewood Arsenal used 254 different substances on the 7120 men and women.
I can't tell you how many letters I have written to Senators and Congressmen and women that sit on the Armed Services Committee or the Veterans Affairs Committee's asking for help.I have written President Bush seeking help with the VA on my personal claim, after I contacted him I was awarded 50%, a year later after contacting VP Cheney and informing him that I knew of his role in approving the human experiments while he was the Chief of Staff for President Ford in 1975 and he had a seat on the National Security Council, the VA awarded me 100% P&T. It seems that then VA Senate Chairman Larry Craig determined the VA had lied to him about my not being used in any experiments in November 2005.
My other battles with the VA regional office have been well documented over ny CAD and hypertension and that the Board of Veteran Appeals granted my claim in April 2009.
I wrote one last letter in an attempt to help my fellow veterans in September 2009, to President Obama, he can still have this mess settled out of court, he can award the medals the men deserve and were promised by the officers that recruited us for this classified program.
Secretary Shinseki can give the veterans category 6 health care as has been done for the Veterans of project SHAD/112 another Cold War classified chemical weapons and biological weapons experiments during the same time period, some people confuse the two programs and think they are the same, they are NOT, just as the Eight Ball at Fort Detrick had nothing to do with either of these other 2 programs, the Army used about 2300 men at Fort Detrick from 1952-1972 until President Nixon signed the Bio-Weapons Treaty.
President Barack Obama,
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington D.C. 20500
Dear Mr. President, 24 September 2009
I find myself writing to you in hopes of finding a solution to a problem that has existed for many decades. It started before either of us was even born, back in 1953, the use of American enlisted men and women in human experiments that violated the Nuremberg Codes of 1947.
It was first authorized by President Eisenhower thru what is now known as the 1953 Wilson memorandum. The experiments were supposed to be approved thru the Surgeon General of the United States Office on a case by case basis, like most government programs, certain agencies found ways to circumvent the rules, and did some of the work in the "dark". The most dark chapter of the this scenario is known as "MKULTRA" which was controlled by Doctor Sidney Gottleib, then head of the Special Operation Division, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, which was a section of the TSS office of the Central Intelligence Agency which Doctor Gottlieb actually was employed by.
As of now your Justice Department and lawyers for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense and the U.S. Army are attempting to have a lawsuit based on these experiments thrown out of court in the 9th Circuit Court of San Francisco. The main assertion is that this case is being brought past the six year statute of limitations, The Feres Doctrine which also prevents military members from suing the government for harm that comes to them from their military service is also being used as one of the reasons.
I understand that you are a constitutional lawyer, and that as a nation we must live by our laws, but there are times when the law is wrong and unjust. I believe that this is one of those times. All of the medical volunteers as we were then called, we call ourselves "test vets", there are 7120 of us that were used from 1955 thru 1975 at Edgewood Arsenal in chemical weapons and drug experiments, in all they used 254 different substances on these men and women, they ranged from mustard agents, Sarin gas, LSD, PCP and anything else they felt might have a military value.
At Fort Detrick, Maryland I understand they used 2300 men in biological experiments, most of these men were from the Seventh Day Adventist church, as objectors to war they answered their nations call from the draft board by volunteering for use as medical volunteers at Fort Detrick.
There are also approximately 6500 men that were used in chemical weapons and biological experiments at Fort Greeley, Alaska, Deseret Test Center, Utah and the SHAD/112 experiments from the early 1960s thru 1973.
The Department of Defense has attempted to keep using the National Security Act statements we signed decades ago to keep us from discussing the experiments. They recently in September 2006 wrote to us notifying us that we had been identified as test subjects and stated that we could inform doctors of what we had been exposed to, but nothing else, excuse me Sir, but we didn’t know anything else, we were never told what the lethal doses were, or any of the classified data they are worried about. Talk about mushrooms, we were kept in the dark and never told the truth about anything. To this day if you ask about the experiments at Edgewood Arsenal, you are lied to, lied about, told that you were never there, and that no human experimentation ever took place.
The Veterans Administration takes the position that we can’t prove that we were harmed by the exposures, either the intentional experiments, or thru environmental exposures by either contact thru contaminated soil or drinking and bathing in the toxic aquifer. I will add as an attachment the list of 77 toxic materials found by the EPA in 1978, when they immediately ordered the capping of the bases water wells, due to the severity of the contamination. They used bottled water until they could locate and pipe in fresh water from outside sources. Since the War Department created the Chemical Weapons Depot at Edgewood Arsenal in 1917, the contamination of the environment started almost a century ago, they poured chemical directly into open pits, buried wooden barrels that decomposed in the soil, and metal barrels that rusted and spilled their toxic materials into the aquifer and soil of the base. It would be hard to assume that the water and soil only became toxic after human experiments ended in 1975 and before 1978.
The VA takes the position that we can’t prove we were exposed to these toxic materials, on the same vain they can’t prove we weren’t harmed by them either. It would be hard to envision how any person could live on a military base for sixty days and not brush their teeth, bath, drink and water, coffee made from the water taps, kool aid made from the same water sources, etc, the base pool was filled with this water, we showered in it. It was the only water available, no person could go sixty days without coming into contact with it.
The toxins affect every system of the human body, pulmonary, gastrointestinal, cardiac, cause cancers, etc, I am sure the CDC can explain all of the things these chemicals can cause or contribute to.
Sir, I have no idea of the health of the other test programs, but of the Edgewood veterans, the Institute of Medicine has done two health studies under contract from the DOD, one in 1985 used for the 1993 Report Veterans at Risk, and the March 2003 Sarin report, by Doctor William Page.
The data gathered in FY 2000 shows that they could only locate 4022 surviving test subjects, the private contractor was given access to IRS, VA and Social Security databases to locate the 7120 men. Given this set of facts one can only presume the other 3098 men aged 45-65 were already deceased, otherwise men this age are either paying federal taxes, or receiving government benefits. This indicates 40% of these men and women are dead in 2000, of the 4022 survivors located 54% or another 2200 men and women indicated they were disabled, yet Doctor Page’s report ignored the disabilities, when I spoke to him about this, in March 2003, right after I received a copy of the report, he stated that the parameters of the contract from DOD did not allow for these questions to be answered in this report.
At what point does the fact that 74.43% of the "medical volunteers" becoming either dead or disabled before age 65, become a valid question, given that men now normally live to be 78 according to medical data.
Mr. President, beating up the CIA or the Army or the Department of Defense for actions that took place more than 35-55 years ago, is a case similar to beating a dead horse. Yes, there are disabled and deceased veterans, who left survivors behind, who have never been informed that the veterans were used in these experiments, or were exposed to toxic substances either intentionally thru experiments or thru environmental exposures. Either way, the men and women who volunteered there are still harmed.
I have learned that the Veterans Affairs Agency and the department of Defense agreed to allow the veterans of the SHAD/112 experiments to be made Category 6 veterans, in the VA healthcare system, regardless of the veterans income level, they are eligible for full medical care from the VA as if all of their medical problems are covered as if veterans in category 1-5. That would take care of the veterans who do not have healthcare, most are eligible for medicare but a few like myself are still a decade away from eligibility, unless we are totally disabled and determined so by the Social Security Agency.
Some of the veterans want the government to apologize to them for the duplicity of being used by Nazi doctors while on an American military base in the 50s and 60’s, I am sure if the soldiers had been told that some of the doctors involved in the experiments were medical personnel from Dachau and other German Concentration camps, none of us would have volunteered, this was part of the lack of "informed consent", if you do not have all of the facts when you agree to do something, is it really "informed consent" I would say it isn’t, bottom line we were lied to and deceived by the recruiters to the medical volunteers.
The scientists and doctors from Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick worked with the British researchers at Porton Downs, England and the Canadian researchers at gage town, Canada who were all working on similar experiments and the data was shared among these researchers and doctors. Doctor Frank Olson who was killed in November 1953 was employed at Fort Detrick and spent many days at Porton Downs, as this link will show the extent the Presidents office went to in 1976 to satisfy the Olson family. http://www.whale.to/...
To quote: The 23 pages of documents paint a clear picture of the determination of Cheney and Rumsfeld to keep secret Olson's work and to ensure, as a matter of public policy, it must remain secret that "a drug criminally given him (Olson) cannot as a matter of law be determined he died in the course of his official duties".
"The documents remind us why blind trust in any government official or agency is a bad idea. The cover-up of torture in Iraq today has its roots in a different time - but it's the same culture of cover-up. That cover-up ultimately led to the murder of my father", said Eric Olson.
"After witnessing experiments on prisoners held in secret CIA "safe houses" in Germany, my father was so shocked he was seen as a whistleblower by his superiors. They arranged for him to receive a mind-blowing cocktail of LSD and other drugs. Then a CIA field operative pushed my father out of a hotel window in New York. The CIA said my father had committed suicide due to 'personal reasons'. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld continued to conceal the truth - even after 2003, when President Bush renounced the use of torture and abuse by the CIA", continued Eric.
A California history professor, Kathryn Olmstead discovered the documents in the Gerald Ford library.
Cheney and Rumsfeld were given the task of covering up the details of Frank Olson's death. At the time, Rumsfeld was White House Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford. Dick Cheney was a senior White House assistant to the President.
Frank Olson's family received US $750,000 to settle their claims against the US government in 1976. But the cover-up continued.
Both the offices of Rumsfeld and Cheney have declined comment on their role in covering-up the murder of Frank Olson.
But from his home outside Washington, Eric Olson said the documents involving Rumsfeld and Cheney show they "have questions to answer".
Mr, President, this is just one episode in this ugly mess, and just one family out of the thousands that were affected, granted none of the soldiers who volunteered for this program were murdered either.
But none the less, the experiments have harmed many of us and some to an extreme extent. Both Great Britain and Canada have in just the past few years made settlements with the veterans of their Cold War human experimental programs that used, chemical weapons, drugs and biological substances. In both of these nations they have universal health care, so the veterans and their families, get all medical treatment regardless of the cause of their medical problems.
American veterans instead have our Veterans Administration and Department of Defense denying any harm was done to us, doing incomplete health studies, and distorting the facts when they do gather data. Sir, these men and their families deserve better than this. In 1996 then President Clinton apologized to the nation for the human experiments, all of them from WW2 forward to the present day, the Tuskegee Syphlis Experiments, the Radiation experiments, the Atomic tests, all human experimentation. He did not specify the military experiments, but the apology was rather broad and intended to cover all of our nations sins.
Sir, if you do not keep the PROMISE to the veterans who were used in these experiments, does the apology mean anything, or were they just more useless words?
I do not know any veteran that wants or desires any more than veterans benefits for the medical problems they feel are connected to the toxic substances we were exposed to at these various test centers.
Edgewood Arsenal is one of the most contaminated pieces of real estate the military owns, it makes the Love canal seem like a clean stream.
I am attaching the EPA reports which show which toxic substances are in the water and soil of Edgewood Arsenal. So you can have the experts tell you how dangerous this stuff is and how extensive the medical problems can be that they cause or contribute to.
Mr. President, I am sure you will find this hard to believe but my motivation for writing this letter is my fellow veterans and their surviving families only. I am presently service connected for PTSD at the 100% level with an effective date of December 2003, I am also service connected for Coronary Artery Disease at 60% and hypertension at 10%. I and my family is secure with medical care and financially, I could easily just go fishing and forget about this.
However, I was a Staff Sergeant, I was a Squad Leader and a Platoon Sergeant while in the Army, I served in many infantry units while on active duty from October 1973 thru September 1982. I was at Edgewood Arsenal from June 25 1974 thru 22 August 1974, my med vol number is 6778A or 6778C depending on which document the Army produces about my time at Edgewood. I feel an obligation to the enlisted men that have been denied veterans benefits and have been "left behind". None of my service connected problems are related to Edgewood Arsenal or the experiments, the VA refused to even address the issue from November 2002 thru November 2005, when they were caught lying to then Senate VA Chairman Larry Craig about my service at Edgewood. They then decided the easiest way out was to service connect my PTSD to an incident that occurred at Fort Wainwright, Alaska on February 5, 1975 when 7 fellow soldiers beat me unconscious and robbed me and then left me for dead in a snow bank in 20 below zero weather. They never did address the Edgewood issues, which I can live with, my family is secure and that is all that matters. I want the same for my fellow "test vets" or "Med Vols" whichever term is used.
I have not communicated with the veterans involved in the lawsuit in California nor the attorney, I have no idea if category 6 medical care is even acceptable to them. Some of them are angry over the failure of the Army to keep the promise when we volunteered to award the Army Commendation Medals we were promised for volunteering, in some cases, they were promised the Soldiers Medal, the highest award for putting your own life at risk in peace time. We were told that the experiments would save untold thousands of lives by testing new chemical suits, gas masks, and field equipment for the battlefields of the future.
Personally I could care less about another medal, with it and 2 dollars I can get a cup of coffee at Waffle House. Sir, I understand medals and recognition mean a lot to the people who serve this nation in military service, I did serve from 1973 - 1982 and then joined the Georgia National Guard, Army, I was assigned to the 878th Engineer Battalion, Augusta, Georgia when the First Gulf War became imminent, I voluntarily transferred to the states 48th Infantry Brigade, to help fill the personnel shortages, also if we were going to war, I wanted to go in a job, I was proficient in, as an Infantryman. I was assigned to HHC, 1/121st Infantry, Milledgeville, Ga. I was assigned to a 4.2 mortar platoon. Honoring people for going above and beyond the average duties of similar soldiers, is a tradition that goes back at least to the Civil War. Many soldiers in WW1 and WW2 did not receive their medals as there was a shortage of metal with which to make them, so it became mostly a paper award, with many veterans waiting decades to have the government mail them to the veterans, usually after Congressman made the request of the service agency.
I don’t believe it would be detrimental to good military order or discipline to have the Army award these medals either the Soldiers Medal or the Army Commendation Medals made now 55 35 years after the fact. I do remember being told at the recruiting session in May 1974, that by volunteering we would be saving lives of future soldiers, and that by volunteering we would enhance our own career by being awarded promotion points, they can only be received by being awarded medals or Certificates of Achievement. The Army can tell you that only a Board of Military Corrections can correct this mistake now decades later, I do believe you have the authority to order the Army to keep the "promises" they made between 1955 1975 to the volunteers. It would be inexpensive and go a long ways in making many of these men and women feel better about what they did at Edgewood Arsenal.
I am probably completely out of line in trying to get you to offer a solution to these decades old problems, that the Army and DOD have ignored. I am not authorized to speak for the veterans, despite the fact that my writings over the past seven years, has attracted many of these veteran to contact myself, where I forwarded their names to Eric Muth, one of the plaintiffs in this lawsuit:
http://edgewoodtestvets.org/
http://edgewoodtestvets.org/...
Vietnam Veterans of America, et al. v. Central Intelligence Agency, et al.
Case No. CV-09-0037-CW, U.S.D.C. (N.D. Cal. 2009) all of the plaintiffs include the Attorney General of the United States, Department of Army, the Department of Defense
The lead attorney for the veterans is Gordon Erspamer, of Morrison & Foerster LLP, based in San Francisco, California contact is thru gerspamer@mofo.com or by phone at 415-268-7000.
What This Case Is About
Plaintiffs seek declaratory and injunctive relief only – no monetary damages – and Plaintiffs seek redress for 25 years of diabolical experiments followed by over 30 years of neglect, including:
the use of troops to test nerve gas, psychochemicals, and thousands of other toxic chemical or biological substances and perhaps most gruesomely, the insertion of septal implants in the brains of subjects in a ghastly series of mind control experiments that went awry;
the failures to secure informed consent and other widespread failures to follow the precepts of U.S. and international law regarding the use of human subjects, including the 1953 Wilson Directive and the Nuremberg Code;
an almost fanatical refusal to satisfy their legal and moral obligations to locate the victims of their gruesome experiments or to provide health care or compensation to them;
the deliberate destruction of evidence and files documenting their illegal actions, actions which were punctuated by fraud, deception, and a callous disregard for the value of human life.
The Complaint asks the Court to determine that Defendants’ actions were illegal and that Defendants have a duty to notify all victims and to provide them with health care going forward.
Needless to say the lawsuit is a ugly statement of our nations past, and it’s poor treatment of the nations veterans who volunteered for what they were told was a safe program, only decades later to learn that we were lied to, plain and simple.
The Veterans Affairs Administration can if Secretary Shinseki were to order it, could make the medical problems linked to the toxic substances attached to this letter, as shown by the CDC as presumptive medical issues, and remove from the VA regional Offices the fight on a case by case basis where the raters chose to ignore the evidence from the EPA and the CDC, claiming that this is nothing more than "internet trash" and has no link on a case by case basis.
Mr. President, I have been labeled a "crusader" by the Veterans Administration, and Congressmen, I had one aide of Congressman Joe Wilson, R of South Carolina’s 2nd District, tell my wife and I, that we needed to learn to take NO as a final answer, this was 2 years ago after I contacted President William J. Clinton asking for his assistance.
His office’s choice was to turn my letter to his office over to the same Congressman Joe Wilson, a retired Army Reserve Colonel, no less, but he has chosen to ignore the plight of the Cold War test veterans. I guess he thought that this might "embarrass him". Given his recent actions, actually standing up for veterans of the Cold War might have enhanced his position, rather than become what he has, fodder for late night comics, due to his outburst last week.
Ignoring these men and women and having the governments attorney ask the court to dismiss this case based on "being filed past the statuette of limitations" which is six years from the date of the incident, given the veterans all were forced to sign National Security Agreements, promising us twenty five years in Leavenworth, if we discussed this program with anyone, family members, spouses, children , parents, brothers or sisters and not even our treating physicians. The majority of these men took this promise of 25 years in prison seriously. How could any of us then have even told this to an attorney to file a lawsuit within six years, without becoming in violation of the National Security Agreements we had signed?
Given that one of the last living Army doctors of the Edgewood Experiments has written a book about this experience at Edgewood Arsenal in the past two years and self published it, how could the government prosecute us asking for the PROMISE to be kept, while allowing Colonel James Ketchum to publish this http://www.forgottensecrets.net/ Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten James S. Ketchum, MD, Author
Written by the physician who played a pivotal role in the psychoactive drug testing of hundreds of volunteers, the story breaks an official silence that has lasted almost fifty years. Dr. James Ketchum may be the only scientist still equal to the task. His book goes a long way toward revealing the contents of once classified documents that still reside in restricted archives.
The author spent most of a decade testing over a dozen potential incapacitating agents including, LSD, BZ and marijuana derivatives. His 380-page narrative, is loaded with both old and recent photographs, and derives from technical reports, memoranda, films, notes and memories. The book is written primarily for the general reader, but is supplemented by a voluminous appendix of graphs and tables for the technically inclined. Dr. Ketchum’s book combines a subjective diary with an objective report of the external events that shaped and eventually terminated the program. Informal and autobiographical in style, it includes numerous amusing anecdotes and personality portraits that make it simultaneously intriguing and informative.
Mr. President, I apologize for the length of this, but I truly do believe a meeting of the minds, rather than a US District Court case, is a better solution for all involved, the veterans, their widows and the CIA, the US Army and the Department of Defense, the federal government as a whole. The various "test vets" from all of the programs should be treated equally, all put their lives on the line in this research, and all deserve medical care for all of their medical problems, that the current SHAD/112 veterans now enjoy.
The other matters, of presumptive status for medical conditions is something only you and General/Secretary Shinseki can decide, the awarding of the promised medals is something within your realm of commanding. Since they are not asking for punitive damages, they can and should be settled as quickly and as quietly as possible, as much as this lawsuit has flown under the news media, I am sure the settlement could be just as quiet.
I want nothing honestly Sir, just a sense of justice for the other "test vets"
Thank you for your time and hopefully your assistance.
Michael G Bailey test vet 6778A June 25 1974 - 22 August 1974
1113 Swannanoa Drive
Springdale, South Carolina 29170