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What Are You Nuts - Look What They Did To My Dad
by James Glaser
America will someday get to the point that no one will join the military for fear of being abused by the Department of Defense like their parents and grandparents were. There are hundreds of thousands of young people today that can look at a relative that lost his sight or limb in war to the enemy, but that has been going on ever since wars started, those wounds are badges of honor, and those young people will still sign up to defend their nation. Now there is a very different disabling phenomenon in former American service personal that their offspring are looking at. For the last 60 years the Department of Defense has been using young Americans that signed up to defend this nation as Guinea Pigs to test experimental weapons systems and experimental drugs. This is not some isolated case, but literally hundreds of thousands of service personal have been abused by the very nation that they had such faith in. Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and ten other defendants are named in two first-of-their-kind class action lawsuits. These lawsuits allege covering up medical records without which veterans of Atomic, Biological, and Chemical warfare testing cannot receive needed medical care. These lawsuits point to a White House memo that describes the classification of records as a tactic to minimize public relations risks and ultimately limit the government's liability. The Veterans and their families that have brought suit cite original test documents and reports that record large scale radiation overexposures and medical test procedures that directly contradict government and military statements. There are at least 415,000 Atomic Vets that were exposed to massive doses of radiation to see what the effects would be. Project "SHAD" (Shipboard Hazard and Defense) was the involuntary test of about 10,000 military personal. These veterans were sprayed with various biological and chemical agents to test for results. Although Veterans Affairs has announced that these veterans can now get needed medical care, the names of the veterans, the units they were in, and dates that the tests took place are still classified. A document in the Department of Energy's archive of data on Human Radiation Experiments says that the Nevada Atomic tests were conducted, in part, to "cure" soldiers of the fear of radiation. Two months after these tests many soldiers started to have their gums bleed and the average age of death of all atomic vets is 57 years old. After each test, the test subjects were decontaminated by having the radioactive dust brushed off with a broom. "The Nations leading Gulf war veterans organization on September 27, 2000 called on the Attorney General to immediately appoint an independent counsel to investigate the Pentagon's Anthrax Immunization Program. This request was made after Congressman Jack Metcalf (R-WA) released irrefutable scientific evidence that the Pentagon illegally modified the anthrax vaccine to boost its immunological potency. The list of the abuses of this nations veterans goes on and on. People can argue both sides of each case, but in the end more and more of the offspring of these veterans lose the trust in our armed forces that a person thinking of signing up needs to put their name on that dotted line. There were men in just about every VFW and American Legion Post in this Nation that were suffering the effects of those Atomic Tests that could get no help from their government. Hundreds of thousands of families have had to live with the severe disabilities that overexposure to radiation caused. There are tens of thousands of Gulf War veterans that are sick today and the government denies any responsibility, but it all adds up. At the rate that this distrust in our Department of Defense is growing, America will have a harder and harder time convincing young people that if they join up, they will not be abused with strange involuntary tests that destroy their remaining years.
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