Human Experimentation: a CIA Habit
June 16, 2015
Mocking the Nuremberg Code
Human Experimentation: a CIA Habit
by DAVID SWANSON
The Guardian on Monday made public a CIA document allowing the agencys director to approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research.
Human what?
At Guantanamo, the CIA gave huge doses of the terror-inducing drug mefloquine to prisoners without their consent, as well as the supposed truth serum scopolamine. Former Guantanamo guard Joseph Hickman has documented the CIAs torturing people, sometimes to death, and can find no explanation other than research:
Why were men of little or no value kept under these conditions, and even repeatedly interrogated, months or years after theyd been taken into custody? Even if theyd had any intelligence when they came in, what relevance would it have years later? . . . One answer seemed to lie in the description that Major Generals [Michael] Dunlavey and [Geoffrey] Miller both applied to Gitmo. They called it Americas battle lab.'
Non-consensual experimentation on institutionalized children and adults was common in the United States before, during, and even more so after the U.S. and its allies prosecuted Nazis for the practice in 1947, sentencing many to prison and seven to be hanged. The tribunal created the Nuremberg Code, standards for medical practice that were immediately ignored back home. Some American doctors considered it a good code for barbarians.
The code begins: Required is the voluntary, well-informed, understanding consent of the human subject in a full legal capacity. A similar requirement is included in the CIAs rules, but has not been followed, even as doctors have assisted with such torture techniques as waterboarding.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/16/human-experimentation-a-cia-habit/