“Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.”
Edmund Burke
2nd speech on conciliation with America
1775
Imagine having lymphoma and never being told that you have it. Imagine having lymphoma and being told by every one of the dozens of doctors you ever saw in your entire life that you were fine, or being told, whenever any doctor dared admit what any person with five senses could see -- that you weren’t, in fact, fine -- that the lymphoma from which you suffered was a mysterious “syndrome.” Imagine having lymphoma and concomitant illnesses including thyroid problems, so-called auto-immune problems and learning disabilities and being told you have “chronic fatigue.” Imagine having lymphoma and learning that this syndrome was simply fabricated to justify your endless reification. That's what it’s been like having the cancer that researchers at all types of public and private institutions and corporations working under Department of Defense contracts have turned into non-HIV/AIDS since the DoD began researching the human immune system in the 1960s.
Imagine being me -- a bioslave.
My body and my mind belong to the U.S. government and the researchers at academic and private industry corporations that subcontract work from it. These researchers work under the direction of the Pentagon, which administers the money given by Congress to the CDC, the NIH, and, in particular, to the NIAID. These agencies, in turn, award grants from this money to their academic and private industry subcontractors. The NSF operates in the same way. I’ve been an outsourced bioresearch subject of the United States government practically my whole life. I have lots of anecdotes about being abused by doctors and researchers; so-called patient advocacy group leaders; politicians; government bureaucrats; alleged peace, civil and human rights activists; and others charged with ensuring my civil and human rights and safety. I don’t want to be a bioslave -- to have no control over the fact that my body routinely gets sick and gets better with peculiar diseases for which I have no risk factors and, therefore, what I can accomplish with my life. I don't want to be forced to think about the well-established government policies, programs and practices that enable my bioslavery. But I am and I do. I am not alone.
American victims of HIV/AIDS were treated similarly when they were first being murdered with AIDS. They were lied to in the same ways by their doctors and researchers. First, they were told nothing was wrong with them. Then, they were told their disease was a mental illness; "maladjustment to homosexual lifestyle was an actual DSM diagnosis code then. Eventually, government researchers were instructed to tell the victims of HIV/AIDS that their disease was the result of a mysterious viral infection and GRID became an ICD-9 diagnosis code, though the leading researcher of the alleged cause of HIV/AIDS, David Baltimore, had been researching retroviruses for more than a decade.
The very first coalition activists formed to raise awareness of what has become known as HIV/AIDS fought for the rights to accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment because people were dying due to all (and many more) of these lies. These were the first initiatives for which activists fought when Act Up! was formed: diagnosis and treatment on demand. No other group of patients, and no other patient advocacy group, has fought for and received the rights to diagnosis and treatment on demand. For example, diabetics are given accurate diagnosis but not the antiviral treatment that could suppress the viruses researchers now know cause diabetes. It’s doubtful even those constituents of Act Up! who needed them ever received accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment for HIV/AIDS. Many California men sued the state for the right to accept or refuse treatments they felt were either helpful or harmful -- such as antivirals and antiretrovirals, respectively -- and lost. They were forced to take then deadly antiretrovirals and died even more quickly than their infections could kill them. Serious questions still persist today about the collection of retroviruses dubbed "HIV" being the origin of AIDS. Their persistent, seeming insolubility -- like questions about the nature and origin of non-HIV/AIDS -- continue to kill, in particular, African-Americans.
These lies represent a system that is constructed to keep people ignorant of and dependent upon it -- while it perpetuates itself. It is a system of bioslavery and it is an old and very well-established system. Did you know that throughout the 20th century many Department of Defense studies on pathogens that could be used in biowarfare, as well as research on the effects of nuclear weapons, were conducted using American citizens without informing them of their induction into these studies? The infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study -- for which no one who planned or executed it has been arrested or tried as the human rights criminals he or she is -- as well as studies on nuclear radiation and fallout are well-known examples of the bioslavery to which the United States government has subjected its citizens. Both longitudinal studies -- encompassing many decades of research -- used family physicians to interface with bioslaves on behalf of government researchers. In some cases, these family physicians kept separate files for their government handlers. These are well-known facts based on declassified government files.
Elmer Allen was 36 years old when, in 1947 -- just two years after the Allies defeated Hitler’s Nazis and ended what today is still wrongly regarded as the worst human rights crime in history -- American scientists and doctors appropriated Mr. Allen’s body and reified it for tortuous experiments, tracking him for the rest of his life as he moved around the country in an age well before GPS, web-based patient registries, computerized aggregation and dissemination of data, and team surveillance strategies such as cell-control. Beneath Mr. Allen’s name and 1911 date of birth his gravestone bears a poignant inscription:
“CAL-3’
July 18, 1947
June 30, 1991
One of America’s Human Nuclear ‘Guinea Pigs”
Several years before Mr. Allen began his life as CAL-3, the code by which he was known to government researchers, those government researchers had begun what became a massive, world-wide, decades-long program of radiation experimentation on human beings without informing them of these experiments and without obtaining their consents to do it. Elmer Allen lived for forty-four years -- the majority of his life -- as an outsourced bioresearch subject, a bioslave, of the United States government. He was just one of many of the U.S. government’s untold number of bioslaves.
In order to perpetrate this massive, now public though rarely discussed deception on the citizens of the world, U.S. government researchers conducting these experiments -- based at U.S. governmental agencies and academic institutions from coast to coast, including the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- did what to those of us who are not sociopaths consider abominable and unthinkable acts to others, including outrightly lying to their victims, often through family practice or hospital-based doctors, who were instructed to collect urine, blood, feces and tissue samples from these government bioslaves, about the true nature of the medically unnecessary experiments into which the researchers had dragooned them. Decades-long medical record-keeping and tracking of these subjects and their children was done and may still continue to this day; we have no way of knowing whether or not they do. “Body snatching” of dead adults, children and even miscarried fetuses was perpetrated on a massive scale around the world so that researchers could harvest bone, blood, tissue and excreta samples for radioactive tracer, fallout and other testing.
Reporter Eileen Welsome details in The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (2000, Delta) the fate of tens of thousands of the U.S. government bioslaves in the atomic radiation experiments, including Mr. Allen’s, about whom she had discovered a revealing memo in her research: “Somehow [emph. added] Austin Brues, the scientist at the Center for Human Radiobiology, learned that Elmer was in the hospital and sent a memo to David Williams, the physician who had diagnosed Elmer as a paranoid schizophrenic. In a December 12, 1977, memo, he wrote, ‘In the event he should show terminal signs at any time, we would appreciate a collect call to us at Argonne.’” (That is, to Argonne National Laboratory/Cancer Research Center in Chicago.) The U.S. government -- your U.S. government -- tracked their victims and tasked their victims’ primary care physicians with not merely doing the same, but also with falsely diagnosing their victims as mentally unstable in order to disguise the true illness from which their victims suffered and the often harrowing protocols to which they were subjected.
That’s a quick overview of what was done to the citizens of the world -- most, but by no means all, American citizens -- by the U.S. government; the devastating pollution from fallout that occurred to the oceans and land from which we all take our food continues today and will never be ameliorated. Is it really solely from greenhouse gases and human waste that the coral reefs and sea life are dying and mutating? I wonder.
When government records of these horrific “atomic-age” experiments were discovered in 1990, then Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary demanded an investigation, which resulted in the release to the public of tomes of declassified documents on the secret experiments. They are as instructive about the routine surveillance by the FBI of us all and our government’s denial of freedom to ordinary American citizens as they are about U.S. government propaganda-making and the dual-use history of our nation’s nuclear science program. President Clinton convened a panel of experts -- comprised largely of those government personnel who were still alive who had participated in the planning and execution of the experiments and other agency insiders -- and charged them with determining three things: whether these experiments were medically or scientifically justified; whether they were conducted in accordance with generally accepted medical ethics practices; and whether the researchers had treated their subjects as medically required after the experiments.
Not surprisingly, the 925-page report produced by the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments did not address any of these issues, the authors fearing even more lawsuits if they acknowledged any sense of culpability. The documents they kept over the decades, however, do reveal the stark truths about their blameworthiness, as well as one other fact: that these perpetrators whitewashed their own and that of their colleagues’ responsibility for this human rights crime. Exactly that behavior was enough to send the Nazi perpetrators of the “Final Solution” to the gallows at Nuremberg.
No scrutiny of other research programs undertaken at the same time under the same practices of secrecy and enslavement, such as those undertaken in bioweapons development initiatives which, to all outward appearances, seems to have included the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis study, was ever even suggested, a grim and shocking dereliction of duty confirming the lack of will on the part of politicians to protect the most basic constitutional and human rights of Americans and of all human beings against our government. “As the oral histories conducted by the Advisory Committee [organized by President Clinton] show, the radiation experiments were not an anomaly. Unethical human experimentation occurred in many medical fields in the decades following World War II. Money was plentiful and scientists were eager to conduct research, publish scientific papers and climb the academic ladder. [emph. added] It was a time when certain medical doctors acted like predators and viewed their patients as little more than white mice. Although human experimentation is necessary to eradicate disease, there is nevertheless something unsettling about the powerful deciding that the powerless should sacrifice themselves to science,” Ms. Welsome wrote on page 457 of The Plutonium Files.
Clinton announced the findings of his biased committee in the midst of news of another trial that had captured the attention of the country, the murder trial of O.J. Simpson. None of his requests had been fulfilled; no remorse was expressed by any of the people who were responsible for the experiments who were then still alive. No punishment was considered or undertaken. “‘It’s constructed so that you can knowingly do something wrong to someone and not be punished; not only not punished but not even found responsible. Think about applying that to anything else in life!’,” said physician and Brown University professor David Egilman of the report when it was made available after a quiet 1995 ceremony orchestrated by President Clinton, who tacitly endorsed, if not commended, it. (p. 463) Lawsuits ensued which were settled. The researchers who were still alive and called upon to give testimony about their work slipped back into anonymity to enjoy the remainder of their retirements after the irritating work of confessing their crimes with which they had been burdened for a year or so was over. While Welsome’s entire book is shocking for a multitude of reasons, the Epilogue should have produced a chastening effect. Sadly, it has not. In it, she notes that research subjects were not asked for permission to be inducted into radiation studies; that these studies harmed to a degree that is unknown even today its victims -- sometimes, even killing them; that no one has ever been held responsible for them and that those entrusted with the care of these bioslaves -- that is to say, family physicians -- colluded with the fascists who planned and executed these human rights atrocities -- on a nationwide scale that is still ongoing.
Welsome was writing her exposé at the time President Clinton convened his Advisory Committee. She does a brilliant job of demonstrating how the committee members have continued to obscure their roles and downplay their responsibility for this human rights crime by quoting their unconscionable excuses. “‘We don’t want to pass severe moral judgments, particularly because it’s much more important to really look at the present,’ said Jay Katz, a venerable ethicist from Yale University who had escaped Nazi Germany with his family when he was a child.” (p. 459) Indeed. The average person may wonder what exactly is going on today as a legacy of these abominable institutionalized practices of bioslavery, though I, like Elmer Allen and all the other victims of government bioslavery, know all too well.
The prologue of Ms. Welsome’s book contains an anecdote about how she uncovered the identity of “CAL-3,” Elmer Allen, the first of the nameless bioslaves about whom she read in then still-secret records stored at the Los Alamos Laboratory. She notes his distinctive appearance -- an African-American man and the only bioslave with an amputation -- and discovers a reference to where he lives, a small town in southeastern Texas. She journeys to the town and begins talking with the first gentleman she sees, another African-American man, who admits to a long friendship with CAL-3, whom she has discovered was named Elmer Allen. Mr. Allen, unfortunately, passed away just a year before Ms. Welsome visited Italy, Texas, where Mr. Allen had lived. She asks the man she met that day if Mr. Allen ever talked about his illnesses. She writes the man confided to her, “Elmer . . . had talked about the doctors who bustled in and out of his hospital room ‘practicing’ to be doctors [during hospital treatment unrelated to the experiments]. ‘He told me they put a germ cancer in his leg. They guinea-pigged him. They didn’t care about him getting well. He told me he would never get well.’” (p. 5)
Ms. Welsome’s exposé is filled with similar anecdotes of people -- government bioslaves -- talking about their strange illnesses to family and friends while shuffling back and forth from doctors’ offices on a routine basis, never receiving empathic care, many of whom, like Elmer Allen, did so for decades. They lived and worked among families, church communities and professional organizations and died bereft of any solace or concern from their communities for their enslavement. Most were labeled paranoiacs or hypochondriacs by family physicians colluding with government researchers. None were listened to with empathy, or aided in their distress, but they are far from ignorant of what is being done to them. “Many had been waiting years to tell their stories of deception and betrayal. Their testimony demonstrated in a dramatic way the breadth of the experimentation program and the deep distrust many Americans felt toward the nuclear weapons complex,” Ms. Welsome writes of victims who were permitted by their oppressors to testify to those same oppressors at hearings in Washington and elsewhere (p. 452).
While Welsome's entire book is shocking for a multitude of reasons, the Epilogue should have produced a chastening effect. Sadly, it has not.
Lawyers for the government did everything possible to justify no or little compensation for human radiation experiment victims, including American servicemen. America -- those of us who could -- moved on. But some of us will never be able to. Scores of African-Americans such as Elmer Allen who have had unusually high incidences of autoimmune disorders have been told for decades they were paranoid whenever they voiced their concerns about being used as bioslaves -- sometimes by those in their own community. Where are we to turn for help?
Welsome writes on page 467, “Despite the hundreds of intentional releases of radioactive material that took place over population centers without the public’s knowledge, the Advisory Committee did not recommend that such releases be banned. . . . Along similar lines, the committee also did not advocate that classified research with human subjects be outlawed. ‘Important national security goals,’ the group wrote, ‘may suffer if human subjects research projects making unique and irreplaceable contributions were foreclosed.’”
It seems certain all of the government-sponsored research on so-called auto-immune disorders such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, myesthenia gravis, "dry eye" syndrome and countless others, including so-called chronic fatigue syndrome, represent government usurpation of the bodies of citizens as well since they, too, have been and are researched in this parallel system of covert, dual-use investigation. What is there to assure us it is not? The Department of Defense began earnest research on the human immune system as soon as it began researching bioweapons.
Why Bioslavery?
The reason should be apparent if you’ve read up to this point, but in case it isn’t, I’ll make the patently obvious declaration: money. These research contracts needed -- and still do need -- research subjects, and as Elmer Allen's case demonstrates, where none exist, government researchers are happy to create them by giving their subjects diseases first.
Writing in Trust Us -- We're Experts! (2001, Jeremy P. Tarcher) researchers and authors Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber trace the growth of military research contracts from the cold war era to the present day, noting that as of 1998, these research contracts represented 53% of our country's GDP. That's an astounding percentage of GDP, one that makes our once great republic look like the bloated bureaucracy of the Roman Empire. Just how much money was spent on only the nuclear radiation research programs? Welsome gives us that answer: "The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project, a four-year research project directed by Stephen Schwartz, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, estimated that the U.S. nuclear weapons program cost taxpayers some $5.5 trillion in 1996 dollars." (p. 421)
Welsome writes of the types of government researchers who committed these human rights crimes as though they no longer exist -- that is to say, in the past tense. She may genuinely believe the day and age when doctors acted like predators is over -- though it's hard to imagine how she can -- but we bioslaves know differently.
All research of this kind -- dual-use research -- must be conducted under the guise of unimpeachable objectives, but, as we can see, the norms of international human rights regarding human research subjects are routinely ignored.
Where is Bioslavery?
Everywhere. So are bioslaves. We are here. We exist. We are not malingerers. We are not paranoid. We are not hypochondriacal. We are not social deviants who need extrajudicial, state-sponsored social control because we speak out against our bioslavery. The things we tell you are done to us at the hands of physicians, academics and others have happened -- and do really happen -- to us. We exist now, not fifty years in history when someone steals government documents which are subsequently released to the public that prove our bodies have been usurped and reified by our government. We don’t need the release of our files to validate what we are saying to you even if you may. Those of us who are apparent bioslaves are not experiencing mysterious diseases borne of pathogens researchers don’t already know much about, such as their pathogeneses and how to genetically modify them in order to produce the diseases from which we suffer. The stories that our diseases are mysteries are just that: stories. They are told to cover up the fact that we are bioslaves. Your fear of the same types of things being done to you if you take our pleas for help earnestly will not protect you; none of us did anything to deserve the enslavement with which we have been burdened. Your only chance for freedom from bioslavery is to fight against it with us because eventually, someone may decide -- for reasons that have nothing to do with you -- that you, too, “deserve” to become a bioslave.
We are telling you about our experiences -- risking everything including our lives to do so -- not for ourselves but so that you, too, don’t become a bioslave, or, if you already are, so that the hope of freedom gives you courage to find support and work to help end bioslavery.
Welsome writes, “As the oral histories conducted by the Advisory Committee show, the radiation experiments were not an anomaly. Unethical human experimentation occurred in many medical fields in the decades following World War II. Money was plentiful and scientists were eager to conduct research, publish scientific papers and climb the academic ladder. It was a time when certain medical doctors acted like predators and viewed their patients as little more than white mice. Although human experimentation is necessary to eradicate disease, there is nevertheless something unsettling about the powerful deciding that the powerless should sacrifice themselves to science.” (p. 486-487)
What’s to be Done?
This is fascism -- the same type of fascism practiced by the Nazis. We need to talk about it as such.
We need to talk about bioslavery. It’s no different than the slavery endured by so-called undesirables in Nazi Germany. It is a chief characteristic of American fascism. It’s long past the time we bioslaves were heard -- and heard by those with the power to see that bioslavery ends: you, not the government, our oppressors. To do that, we need a framework for discussing the many aspects of bioslavery that exist. We should start with a definition of it. If I was going to write the Wikipedia definition of bioslavery, I wouldn’t write it in a narrow way. I wouldn’t say only corporations in the healthcare field could be guilty of it, nor would I say that any other corporation couldn’t be. I wouldn’t say governments couldn’t be guilty of it -- even governments that had explicit laws against what, essentially, is bioslavery, such as biowarfare research. My definition would so broadly define bioslavery it would make the heads of lawyers around the world explode, which might not be a bad thing. My definition would be plain, simple and direct -- and it would be inclusive:
“Any entity, whether individual, corporate, governmental, pseudo-governmental or non-governmental, that engages in the usurpation of another person’s or persons’ biological processes, in situ or ex situ, for profit or other purposes and in so doing restricts or limits that person’s or persons’ ability to function free of disease, addiction, depression or any other artificially imposed biological burden, up to and including death, whether motivated by political, commercial, or a combination of both interests, is guilty of bioslavery and subject to all federal and international laws and human rights sanctions. Any such entity engaged, whether directly or indirectly, in the oppression of those seeking to free themselves from the restrictions and limitations of bioslavery is likewise guilty of bioslavery and subject to all federal and international laws and human rights sanctions.” Good-bye, ‘health [destruction] maintenance organizations.’
Whatever the recommendations were that the Clinton administration instituted to strengthen protections of human research subjects which resulted from the work of his Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, they have been quietly filed away. The U.S. Congress had repeatedly rejected attempts by Senator Glenn to do just that. The United States is not a party to the Bioweapons Treaty. Victims of so-called “vaccine injury” who develop patently pathogenic illnesses continue to be told by their family doctors, hospital-based doctors and researchers alike their diseases are all in their heads, first, in order to prevent them from filing vaccine injury claisms. Only after the four-year time period has expired are these bioslaves then told that endless research is required to understand their "mysterious" diseases -- from autism concomitant with respiratory infections which may easily be administered in “needless” vaccines developed since the 1950s to “AIDS,” “MS,” “CFS,” “Gulf War Syndrome,” cancers such as Kaposi’s sarcoma, and the herpes-fungus hybrid, “Morgellan’s disease.” How many more of these epidemics -- and their associated government-sponsored misinformation campaigns -- are we going to endure before we see what we are looking at and stop these Nazi-esque researchers?
You, too, may be a bioslave. If you have any type of immune or auto-immune system disorder, or a cancer, or even fertility problems, you may also be an outsourced bioresearch subject of the United States government and, as such, you should realize the government is not going to help you. Those two facts should be clear to anyone reading this essay. Generations of doctors, physicians, researchers, senators and representatives knew about and condoned (by funding, in the case of the congresspersons) research on all of these diseases even as those diseases have become more widespread, more diverse in variety and more dependent upon the medicoresearch industry -- not less -- for amelioration, as the quest for their cures would of necessity require. None of the aforementioned groups has done anything to investigate or stop bioresearch done in utter darkness, not even war veterans such as Daniel Inouhe, John McCain and John Kerry, whether or not such research was conducted on American soldiers or civilians. Data from the atomic veterans was still being gathered as recently as 1985, according to Ms. Welsome (The Plutonium Files, p. 312). It's absurd to expect the people who funded these heinous crimes to investigate themselves. What were these senators doing before the records on which Welsome based her book were discovered? Granting money in "black budgets" to government agencies to do this research -- that's what.
Since money fueled the diabolical plots of dozens of governmental agents, departments, councils, and subcontractors in the atomic radiation experiments, and since no one has been held accountable or expressed remorse for committing these human rights crime, and because these people, institutions, agencies and subcontractors are still in business, a moratorium on all research involving human subjects must be initiated. Funding for these studies must stop. Monies given as grants to the CDC, the NIH, the NSF and any other branch or agency that does work on behalf of the Pentagon, particularly work involving human subjects which can in any way be deemed dual-use, must stop. These agencies have to be shut down. Likewise, government contracts to academic institutions, such as Harvard, MIT and UC/Berkeley -- all defendants in lawsuits brought by their former bioslaves -- which are administered by the above agencies must cease. All monies to private for-profit and non-profit corporations -- from Perkin-Elmer to The Whitehead Institute -- must likewise stop. That’s the first step.
We also need to acknowledge that bioslavery doesn't happen only in a doctor's office or research lab. Jeffrey Wigand became one of the most well-known whistleblowers when in 1995 he stepped forward and revealed that, as a scientist for Brown and Williamson, he was responsible for creating a “nicotine delivery system,” a cigarette to which was added addictive levels of nicotine. That’s bioslavery. Anyone who says it isn’t is engaged in misinformation. Brown and Williamson and other cigarette manufacturers were sued by state governments to recoup the costs of providing health care to smokers who were using Medicare benefits to fight and treat the lung cancer and emphysema which results from chronic smoking, but the companies still do business. They still provide “nicotine delivery systems” to consumers world-wide. Have any of these attorneys talked about the bioslavery endured by the victims of Wigand and his employer? No. What this example of bioslavery demonstrates is that our government is not going to willingly confront bioslavery because it profits from it by indirect ways as much as it does by direct ones -- that is, through the tax revenue generated by corporations who engage in it.
Talking about bioslavery is just the first of many, many steps necessary to eradicate it. Decommissioning those agencies whose business it was supposed to have been to protect humans from these types of abuses must happen and in their place patient-inclusive agencies with the ability to investigate and indict perpetrators of bioslavery must be commissioned. New agencies in every city and town should be established to help bioslaves with things uch as reporting incidences of suspected bioassault to appropriate, on-demand treatment. These agencies should include teams of unbiased, international weapons inspectors with the ability to inspect on demand any facility, laboratory or person -- whether governmental or private -- suspected of bioassault and bioslavery. The 13th amendment must be enhanced, as its authors foresaw this necessity, with protections specifically against bioslavery. On-demand social security benefits for suspected victims of bioslavery should be another basic, minimum standard of care. Immediate weapons inspections of all US research facilities -- including the CDC, NIAID and any quasi-governmental organization or private institution -- by unbiased inspectors must begin.
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