On October 1, 2010, President Barack Obama issued an official apology for secret US medical experiments in the 1940s in which 696 Guatemalan prisoners were infected with syphilis and gonorrhea to test the effectiveness of penicillin. The objective of these experiments, according to Susan Reverby, the Wellesley College medical historian who uncovered documents about this study, was to keep American soldiers safe from sexually transmitted diseases. In a joint statement, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said, “Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health.” On October 14, Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye published an investigative report in Truthout.org that expands public knowledge about a much more recent venture in human experimentation: researching the physical and psychological effects of various torture tactics on “war on terror” prisoners in US custody. No official apology for this unethical and reprehensible research has been forthcoming from the administration, nor, I would speculate with confidence, is anyone busy drafting one.
The legal and scientific regulatory architecture that now prohibits the experimentation on human beings without their consent is the product of the very kinds of practices that are now illegal and unethical. The Nuremberg Code was instituted in 1949 in response to Nazi experiments on human beings, and its first paragraph states:
The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonable to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
In terms of timing and rules, the “reprehensible” Guatemala experiments occurred before the Nuremberg Code, but not before the revelations of Nazi experimentation. As Reverby discovered in one of the documents about the Guatemala program, “The surgeon general says, ‘Well, we couldn`t do this in the United States.’”
The Nuremberg Code became applicable to all US government agencies. Nevertheless, human experimentation continued, notably the Tuskegee medical experimentation on poor black men suffering from syphilis and the CIA’s MKULTRA program which began with brainwashing and evolved into research on psychological torture. Revelations about these programs in the 1970s led to a new set of regulations called the “Common Rule” that govern Institutional Review Boards. IRBs were established in 1981 to provide oversight of all human research.
Leopold and Kaye’s investigative report on the “research” conducted during interrogations of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and in CIA black sites builds on revelations contained in the June 2010 report by Physicians for Human Rights. Leopold and Kay highlight the role played by former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who issued a secret directive on March 25, 2002, loosening the rules against human experimentation. The title of this directive, “Protection of Human Subjects and Adherence to Ethical Standards in DoD-Supported Research,” is misleading; it suggests that ethical standards prevail, but actually was one of the no-crime-without-law semantic games played by the Bush administration vis-à-vis the treatment of prisoners. What Wolfowitz meant was that the US was committed to ethical standards in the treatment of “prisoners of war.” But by the time he issued this directive, the administration had already asserted that prisoners were “unlawful enemy combatants” who were deemed, by virtue of the fact that they were not members of a regular army, to have no rights under the Geneva Conventions or under any US laws. Hence, Wolfowitz’s directive provided legal cover for experiments. “We`re dealing with a special breed of person here,” Wolfowitz said four days before signing the new directive.
The notion that there is such a thing as “a special breed of person”—the kind who can be tortured and experimented on—is anti-historical if one thinks of the rough road the world has traversed over the last 150 years to turn all “people” into “humans,” and to establish universal standards about how humans should be treated. The issue is not that people don`t continue to do horrible things to other human beings, but that those to whom horrible and illegal things are done remain human. Asserting the existence of some “special breed” is, in essence, an effort to roll back the hands of time and redefine the parameters of humanity.
The prisoners who have been experimented on, including Muhammad al-Qahtani—the alleged “20th hijacker” for whom the “special measures” at Guantánamo were originally devised—remain in custody, accessible only to their lawyers who are barred from speaking publicly about aspects of their treatment that the government regards as classified. A change in administration in 2008 has not resolved that problem; if anything, classification and secrecy are more intense under Obama, in keeping with his “looking forward, not backward” commitment to official unaccountability. Thus not only is there no forthcoming apology for the experimentation to which these prisoners were subjected, the full exposure of this aspect of the US torture program is impeded, to put it mildly, by impenetrable secrecy. Perhaps someday some future administration will apologize for the experimentation on prisoners. Or, perhaps, humans will have been so thoroughly recategorized into various “breeds” that no apology will be necessary.