Ethics? What Ethics?

While the Nazis were using Jews, we were using Guatamalans (and American black men) to conduct our medical experiments.

The US research project in which government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates and mental patients with syphilis in the 1940s has been described as an "institutional failure" by a US presidential commission.

Nearly 5,500 people were subjected to diagnostic testing and more than 1,300 were exposed to venereal diseases by human contact or inoculations in research meant to test the drug penicillin, the commission said on Monday.

Within that group, "we believe that there were 83 deaths," said Stephen Hauser, a member of the commission which has poured over 125,000 documents linked to the episode since being set up by President Barack Obama last November.

However, Hauser said not enough evidence existed to confirm that the procedures the people endured during the study was what had killed them.

alJazeera

However? I hope you don’t mean to imply it would have been okay had they lived? More likely, and just as inappropriately, you probably mean to imply that their relatives should be barred from compensation.

Like the “doctors” who ran the fake program to help Pakistani children in order to sniff out Obama’s family, the knowledge about these monsters has just set medical aid to foreign countries back. We’ll have to go back to using our own citizens when other countries refuse us admittance.

BTW, unsurprisingly, the same man in charge of this hideous “research program” was involved with the Tuskegee program to infect black men in Alabama between 1932 and 1972.

That’s a long time to be running a program like that unhindered by law or morality.Particularly while you are ostensibly fighting a war against an inhumane regime that, among other things, performs medical experiments on human beings against their will.

Obama personally apologized to Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom in October before ordering a thorough review of what happened. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the experiments as "clearly unethical."

Raw Story

Clearly Hillary is familiar with the lack of ethics, and President #Compromise is going to be pilloried for that apology.

The Guatemalan president has called the 1946-1948 experiments conducted by the US National Institutes of Health "crimes against humanity" and ordered his own investigation.

[Clinton's] sentiment was clearly expressed by the commission, which said US government researchers must have known they were contravening ethical standards by deliberately infecting mental patients with syphilis.

Well, I think that’s a given. Unless they didn’t know what they were injecting. Somebody knew, though.

Commission president Amy Gutmann called it an "historic injustice," and said the inquiry aimed to "honor the victims and make sure it never happens again."

But not compensate anyone.

I have an idea to make sure it never happens again: when a person is elected to Congress, he or she must sign an agreement to be used in whatever medical research is being conducted.

And another idea: when any Congress person votes to authorize a war, he or she must serve a minimum of three years on the front.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.