Forced Vaccines Haunt Gulf Vets 

Six months later, University of California at Los Angeles surgeons worked six hours to sever a tumor from the brain of a muscular, 25-year-old ex-Special Forces Ranger and Gulf War veteran. The costly surgery was performed at UCLA, the patient said, because VA doctors denied that the "incidental finding" caused his excruciating, unremitting headaches.

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He blamed Army-administered drugs for the tumor. And his girlfriend said there were other "side effects" of his service in the Gulf, including increased agitation and sperm that "burned."

"We had a third day of shots before we went over (to the Gulf)," said the ex-Ranger, who requested anonymity because his Army Reserve commitment has yet to expire. "Guys in other units only had two, but most Rangers had three. They wouldn't tell us what they were for."

Are this young man and tens of thousands of other veterans suffering from Gulf War sickness victims of coincidences beyond the Pentagon's control? Or are they casualties of a government that trampled both the Nuremberg Code and its own policies against forced medical experimentation?

Ruling in the 1947 trial of 23 Nazi doctors and medical administrators charged with crimes against humanity during World War II, judges of the American Tribunal in Nuremberg set forth 10 conditions for permissible medical experiments.

In a February 1953 directive, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson established what is still the "law of the land" governing such experimentation. Consistent with the Nuremberg Code, the directive's cornerstone is voluntary consent.

"The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential," Wilson wrote, ordering that such consent be given in writing before at least one witness. Wilson also banned use of "force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion" in obtaining consent.

Did the Pentagon obey this directive during the Gulf War?

According to Dr. Jane M. Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, it did not.

The administration of experimental drugs without consent was, Orient said, "the first instance in which an official government agency officially sanctioned the direct violation of the Nuremberg Code."

"The results of our investigation showed a reckless disregard that shocked me," said Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV. "The Pentagon ... threw caution to the winds, ignoring all warnings of potential harm, and gave these (investigational) drugs to hundreds of thousands of soldiers with virtually no warnings and no safeguards.

"If that wasn't bad enough, they administered these drugs and vaccines in such a way that there is a very good chance they wouldn't have even worked for the intended purpose."

The committee also found that consent was not part of the inoculation program.

"In a survey of 150 Persian Gulf War veterans ... 15 of 17 receiving botulinum toxoid were told they could not refuse the vaccination; 54 of 73 receiving pyridostigmine were told they could not refuse," the report stated.

"There is no provision in the Nuremberg Code," the Rockefeller Committee report concluded, "that allows a country to waive informed consent for military personnel or veterans who serve as human subjects in experiments during wartime or in experiments that are conducted because of threat of war."

Responding to the accusations, a Pentagon spokesperson stated: "In all peacetime applications, we believe strongly in informed consent and its ethical foundations.... But military combat is different."

Has the Department of Defense actually obtained the "informed consent" of all the GIs inoculated with questionable drugs since the end of Operation Desert Storm? That's another story.

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More stories written by Elliot Borin