Peeling Back the Veil, One Inch at a Time
Al Gore’s investigation into U.S. radiation experiments failed to turn up much. Photo: Computer History
Exposing the truth about decades of government radiation experiments wasn’t easy.
Starting in the 1970s, journalist Howard Rosenburg published a series of articles built on his Freedom of Information Act filings. The articles, particularly one in a 1981 issue of Mother Jones, finally got some attention.
The House Science and Technology Committee investigated the matter under the leadership of Tennessee Representative Al Gore. Hearings were held in secret, and the names of participants were not disclosed. The committee’s final ruling was that the experiments were, in the words of the report: “satisfactory, but not perfect.”
Sensing that the Gore committee might have been a whitewash, Representative Ed Markey held hearings of his own and demanded that the nearly 700 victims be located, named, and compensated for the crimes committed against them.
Nothing of the sort happened. The Markey report got little news coverage, the Reagan Administration successfully fought declassification, and the story quietly went away.
Representative Ed Markey. Photo: Twitter
While looking into an unrelated matter, Eileen Welsome stumbled across some odd paperwork on an Air Force base in 1987 that referred to irradiated animal carcasses and hinted at data from a few human subjects who were identified only by code names.
Over the next six years, Welsome successfully dug out the names of the 18 Manhattan Project patients and tracked them down for her articles exposing the program for the Albuquerque Tribune. It was this series of high-profile exposures — especially the living, breathing victims who had at last been named through Eileen’s research — that motivated the 1995 presidential committee’s report.
After sifting through over 840,000 pages of material, and ordering the declassification of thousands of documents, the committee finally delivered its findings.
The report acknowledged that “wrongs were committed,” but declined to list any indictable offenses that could be pinned on any living individuals. The experiments involving pregnant women and disabled boys were dismissed as “not harmful” and ignored thereafter. Worse, no structural reforms were suggested to make sure things like this would never happen again in America.
President Clinton expressed his personal sorrow at the misfortune of the victims, but stopped short of offering real relief.
The October 3, 1995 ceremony got little attention. It was scheduled for the day a Los Angeles jury acquitted O.J. Simpson of murder. By the time everybody was done talking about that, news of the committee’s report had quietly died. The issue has not been revisited since.
Next, read about the shocking conspiracies about the US government that are actually true. Then, read up on the horrific experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
