Friday, May 29, 2009

Jones on Unethical Medical Experiments

Jones frequently mentions the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. To him, it is just another example that the medical profession is corrupt, that the elite are trying to kill us (particularly minorities), and that science is crazy and evil.

Unethical medical/psychological experimentation is a subject near and dear to me. I have been studying it off and on for about ten years, and I'm well-acquainted with many cases, even the lesser-known ones like the LSD experiments at Kingston Women's Prison in Ontario. At present, I'm trying to figure out if unethical experiments were conducted on First Nations children in my neck of the woods during the '50s and/or '60s, because there are a few indications of that. If my hunch is correct - and I hope that it isn't - there's a possibility the experiments were closely linked (if not directly connected) to the experiments conducted on black male inmates of Pennsylvania's Holmesburg Prison.

So having the truth about medical experimentation on minorities is important to me. I don't want conjecture, rumour, or propaganda. I have no time for stories that have been cooked up by those with ideological or political axes to grind; if you don't have factual information to offer, step off.
I'm not interested in using unethical experiments to defame the medical profession, or a country, or a political party. I know that such experiments have been conducted in nearly every developed nation during the past 70 years, by a small minority of researchers, so using them as a sledgehemmer against the entire healthcare industry or a single country would be absurd.

Alex Jones obviously doesn't feel the same way. And he is not careful in his research. Quelle surprise.

- In his 2006 rant about Zionism and the Israeli lobby, Jones talked about Israel's "ringworm children".
Throughout the '50s and '60s, ringworm was routinely treated with ionizing radiation in all parts of the developed world.
Five years ago, filmmakers David Belhassen and Asher Hemias made unsubstantiated claims that the Israeli ringworm treatments were really unethical radiation experiments funded by the U.S. Army, and that they killed and injured thousands of Sephardic immigrant children. Their documentary, The Ringworm Children, featured several adult "survivors" of the ringworm treatment. The radiation, they claimed, was 35,000 times the recommended dosage.
It doesn't take a radiologist to figure out that this level of radiation would have killed the children within weeks, if not days. They certainly wouldn't have survived into middle age to tell the tale. And they wouldn't have been able to have children, which several of the "survivors" in the documentary did. The claims made in the film are a reprehensible fraud, though where and how they originated isn't clear.

- During his interview of Dr. Boyd Graves (a man who claims he cures AIDS with swimming-pool disinfectant), Jones mentioned that a group of UN workers had actually been caught intentionally infecting Libyan children with HIV.
I knew what he was talking about, and I was more than annoyed - I was furious. Jones got this story so horribly, unashamedly backwards that there are really only a handful of possible explanations for it:
1. He's stupid.
2. He's incredibly lazy.
3. He knows the real story, but chose not to tell it because it didn't fit into his premise that the medical profession and medicine in general are evil.

Stupidity is a forgivable offense. Laziness and obfuscation are not, and those are the explanations I lean towards. Let's face it, Jones is probably of average to slightly above average intelligence. He could sort out fact from fiction, if he really wanted to do it.

What Jones was talking about was the case of the Benghazi Six, just six of the forty medical workers (23 Bulgarians, 11 Libyans) arrested on suspicion of deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV at El Fatih Hospital in 1998. The Six consisted of 5 Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian physician. The nurses had been recruited to work abroad by a Bulgarian company, Expomed. Not one of the forty people arrested represented nor worked with the UN.

The Six confessed to infecting the children. And you would have, too. They were beaten, electrocuted, and threatened continuously throughout their interrogations. One nurse was tortured in the presence of her appointed defense attorney. Another, Ashraf al-Hadjudj, lost an eye and had one hand paralyzed due to his torture.

One of the other Bulgarians arrested, Dr. Zdravko Georgiev, wasn't even in Libya when the kids were infected. He showed up after the arrest of his wife. He was actually put on trial, but found not guilty.

The Six spent a decade in jail. All were sentenced to death twice, before their death sentences were finally overturned in 2007. They gained release only through a deal between the EU and Libya, which may have involved the release of a Lockerbie bombing suspect.

UNESCO conducted a thorough investigation of the tragedy at El Fatih and concluded that the children had probably been infected through unsafe hospital conditions and practices that were in place before the foreign health workers arrived.

- In a recent broadcast, Jones mentioned the Huntsville prison experiments. He said that prisoners had been deliberately infected with infectious diseases without their knowledge, and these diseases spread to and killed many of the jail guards.
I was intrigued. I had never heard of this incident. But my searches related to the fascinating history of Huntsville Prison, Texas's oldest state prison, turned up nothing about medical experiments. So of course I Googled "Huntsville prison experiments". Roughly half the results had something to do with mycoplasmas, and this reminded me that a schizophrenic homeless woman of my acquaintance had told me the governments of Canada and the U.S. were deliberately spreading them around via infected mosquitoes, causing upticks in MS, certain cancers, and other diseases.

This was not looking good for Alex Jones so far. And it would only get worse.

Here's what I found: In the early '90s, Drs. Garth and Nancy Nicolson tried to find the cause of a mysterious illness Nancy's daughter had when she returned from the Gulf War. Gulf War Syndrome, in other words. Garth identified a mycoplasma, fermentans incognitus, and treated his stepdaughter successfully with doxycycline. He subsequently found the same mycoplasma in several other Gulf War vets.

M. fermentans incognitus was first identified in 1986, when it was found in the tissues of several AIDS patients. It was identified as a strain of M. fermentans. To date, the role of M. fermentans in HIV/AIDS - or any other disease, for that matter - is not fully understood. Yet Garth Nicolson identified it as the cause of a syndrome that may not even exist.

In 1997, Candace Brown's 10-year-old son became ill with a mysterious disease. His knees could no longer support his weight, so he had to use a wheelchair, and he suffered muscle degeneration. Some doctors thought he had human parvovirus B19; others suspected Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis; a few thought he could be malingering. Desperate for a diagnosis and cure, Brown turned to two doctors who theorize that JRA is caused by mycoplasmas. They both treat it with tetracycline, rather than steroids and anti-inflammatory drugs.

There is no evidence to support the theory that JRA is caused by mycoplasmas. Because rheumatoid arthritis is a form of autoimmunity, its causes are unknown. None of the current theories involve mycoplasmas.

Here's where Huntsville Prison enters the picture. Candace Brown learned that there had been 28 cases of ALS and 68 cases of MS in Huntsville in 1994. As JRA is a form of autoimmunity, she figured it might have some connection to these other autoimmunine disorders. She spoke to Sally Medley, the mother of a 17-year-old Huntsville girl tentatively diagnosed as having ALS. Medley had taken her daughter to Garth Nicolson, who informed her that it was probably a mycoplasmal infection.

Brown contacted Garth Nicolson. He informed her there had been a cluster of M. fermentans incognitius infections among Texas Board of Corrections employees and inmates, possibly because the inmates had been bioweapon test subjects as far back as the '60s. He claimed these experiments continued into the '90s.

Candace Brown and Sally Medley obtained TBOC minutes dating from 1965-1979, and they found numerous references in them to mycoplasma experiments. The Nicolsons had supposedly found evidence of "vaccine trials" conducted on the prisoners by a Houston biotech firm. To them, this confirmed the theory that mycoplasmas cause autoimmune disorders like the ones their children may or may not have been suffering.

In 1999, Brown published their discovery in the first issue of The Journal of Degenerative Diseases (reprinted here). This sounds quite impressive, but this publication is not a peer-reviewed medical journal by any stretch of the imagination. It is a dumping ground for disease-related conspiracy theories. One of its most popular articles branded AIDS an "American bioweapon". The journal is the official publication of the Common Cause Medical Research Foundation of Sudbury, Ontario.

The AIDS director of this foundation is Dr. Boyd Graves.

The Common Cause Medical Research Foundation holds annual conferences. Last year, the main topic was 9/11 as a false flag operation. Dr. Garth Nicolson was one of the speakers. He explained his theory that vaccines are intentionally laced with mycoplasmas, and caused Gulf War Syndrome. He claims that M. fermentans incognitis was patented by the U.S. Army, presumably as a bioweapon. The actual patent, #5,242,820, will tell you otherwise.
You can watch some of Dr. Nicolson's presentation on YouTube. In fact, there a lot of YouTube videos about mycoplasmas as bioweapons, and a great many of them refer to "microplasmas" or "microplasms". One user even claims that the existence of "microplasmas" is being hidden from physicians and the public.

The most significant problem with the Huntsville experiments is that no one aside from the people in this group (Brown, Medley, and the Nicolsons) has ever mentioned anything about medical experiments inside Huntsville Prison. There are no documents, no books, no papers. All online references lead straight back to the Nicolsons. If the experiments took place, there is apparently no reason to suspect that they were unethical. In fact, Candace Brown claims the prisoners gave informed consent.
But there are no "mycoplasma vaccines", because mycoplasmas are bacterial, not viral. Also, even if the experiments did occur and did involve mycoplasmas, there is no clear link between experiments conducted in the '70s and a cluster of autoimmune disorder cases nearly twenty years later.

It isn't difficult to learn about the "medical experiments" mentioned by Alex Jones. Nearly all of the information above came from newspaper articles and research papers referenced in Wikipedia entries on "ringworm children", mycoplasma, autoimmunity, the "Libyan HIV affair", etc., so it's readily available to all but the most severely Google-impaired.

Hint hint, Mr. Jones.

6 comments:

Eugene said...

This is just another reason why Alex Jones & co are dangerous. I have nothing but respect for the medical profession but I accept that sometimes questionable and downright unethical medical decisions are made. Pharmaceutical companies will sometimes put profits ahead of ethics, I don't doubt that either. But people when people like Jones (and Jenny McCarthy) constantly make ludicrous cases against problems that exist only in their imaginations it allows those are are guilty of wrongdoing (or negligence) to just lump everyone with a legitimate concern in with the crazies. These really loud, really nutty fringe groups are making it really difficult for people with legitimate questions and concerns to be heard and taken seriously.

S.M. Elliott said...

Very good point.
It baffles me that anyone would care to invent unethical medical experiments when there are so many real ones from which to choose.

Anonymous said...

Isn't it possible that there is some truth to the idea that mycoplasma was studied as a biological weapon? I believe the defector from the USSR listed it as one bacteria the Russians were studying. It seems POSSIBLE that American soldiers were exposed to mycoplasma while in the first Gulf War. Also, the discovery of mycoplasma fermentans (incognitus strain) was made by a Dr.Lo who found it in six dead bodies he biopsied at the Armed Forces Lab. Mycoplasma incognitus does not seem to be something you want to get. In any case, if you go to a medical library you can look up Lo's studies on mycoplasma, also Dr. Montagnier's. Some think mycoplasma is the bacteria that causes HIV progression. I am sure it is at least one of the co-factors.

S.M. Elliott said...

Sure it's possible. But where's the evidence? Jones didn't say "This possibly happened". He clearly, unequivocally said it did happen.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, it's not only Jones pulling the "unethical experiment" stunt. I know for a fact I'm a victim - my case is still ongoing and I have evidence for some of it. When I went to the internet to find help (to find out what it was even) I found not just muck and disinformation, I also found people who are willfully misleading victims. What is tantamount to epileptic type seizures is called weapons attack (though if someone else is actually attacked by weapons I won't discredit them). What starts out as a stalking situation (I have evidence of the cyberstalking in my case) gets its own label in addition to extra paranoia for already stressed out persons.

It's not that there is no evidence, it's that the justice system won't deal with it. And meanwhile the trolls are out there warping the truth.

I happen to be female and minority (I would have simply been "ethnic" at the time I got placed on the lifetime of grief list). I don't know that I was chosen for those factors - does it matter? The violation of my civil and human rights trumps my minority status. Only if someone could show minorities were picked in a greater proportion could we call it a minority issue.

That being said, I do believe that I was chosen for being female (higher pain tolerance, more likely to be dismissed as "hysterical" when I complain) and minority (less power overall and it is my belief that the researchers are not from my own ethnic group or any other really repressed group).

Why would experimentation continue? Because there has really been no real repercussions for experimenters - a big apology 50 years down the road doesn't cut it.

Now it behooves me to have to waste more productive years of my life to get to a country that actually enforces laws against cruel involuntary experimentation. I'm not going to give up everything I've worked hard for to waste my life on a useless cause here.

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