Official hypocrisy exposed, yet again . . .

I note that after World War II, US authorities tried to locate Dr. Josef Mengele and his assistants, to put them on trial for the barbarous experiments they conducted on concentration camp inmates during that conflict. Mengele avoided detection, and lived out the rest of his days in South America before dying a natural death.

Now comes news that the US government deliberately conducted equally immoral experiments, using the citizens of Guatemala as subjects. The BBC reports:

US government scientists who infected Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhoea as part of a study knew they were violating ethical rules, a US presidential panel has said.

The researchers infected hundreds of prisoners, psychiatric patients and sex workers during the 1940s to study the effects of penicillin.

None of the Guatemalans was informed.

. . .

The Commission said some 5,500 Guatemalans were involved in all the research that took place between 1946 and 1948.

Of these, some 1,300 were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhoea or another sexually transmitted disease, chancroid.

And of that group only about 700 received some sort of treatment.

According to documents the commission had studied, at least 83 of the 5,500 subjects had died by the end of 1953.

The commission was unable to say whether any of those deaths were caused directly or indirectly by the deliberate infections.

But Dr Gutmann lambasted those responsible for the research.

"Those involved in the study failed to show a minimal respect for human rights and morality in the conduct of research," she said in her concluding remarks to the panel.

She said many of the actions were "grievously wrong" and those individuals behind the study were "morally culpable to various degrees".

"Civilisations can be judged by the way they treat their most vulnerable... we failed to keep that covenant," she said.

There's more at the link.

So, tell me . . . if Mengele's experiments were regarded as war crimes, and he would have faced the death penalty if brought to trial, why were the same standards not applied to the doctors who conducted these Guatemalan experiments?


(Listens to crickets in the silence . . . )


This is just the latest chapter in a long and convoluted horror story of US government-authorized unethical experiments against its own citizens and others, both on US territory and elsewhere. There's a long list of them here, complete with supporting references in footnotes. You can read more about one such experiment in this Los Angeles Times article.

"We're from the Government. We're here to help you." Sometimes, those aren't the most reassuring words in the world, are they?

Peter