The Sunshine Project News Release - 3 March 2005  http://www.sunshine-project.org


USAMRIID Rewrites Offensive Biological Weapons History, says Operation Whitecoat is a Model for the Future
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(Austin, 3 March 2005) - A disturbing article, published today in the
Fort Detrick Standard (Frederick, MD) and attributed to the US Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID),
rewrites history from the US offensive biological weapons program and
suggests that the US Army is preparing to renew experiments to
deliberately infect humans with bioweapons agents.

"The historical whitewash in the article is troubling. USAMRIID talks
about programs with offensive goals as if their intent was benign and
suggests that deliberately infecting people with weaponized disease
is ethically and legally acceptable" says Sunshine Project Director
Edward Hammond, "USAMRIID's review of its own past does not
distinguish offense from defense, nor safety testing from deliberate
infection. The article even lauds experiments to determine a 'safe'
dose to cause human infection. There's no such thing as a safe
bioweapons infection."

Titled "USAMRIID celebrates 50-year research tradition" the article
details the Army's "Operation Whitecoat", a series of experiments
that began in the 1950s. In Whitecoat, US weapons developers exposed
thousands of people, mainly Seventh Day Adventists, to a variety of
bioweapons. The experiments took place at Fort Detrick and in the
open air at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The objectives of the
Whitecoat program included maximizing the effectiveness of the US
biological weapons arsenal.

While the ethics of Whitecoat have been debated for years, the Army's
new spin is that human research conducted in Whitecoat is "a model
for the ethical use of human subjects" for the National Interagency
Biodefense Campus. The controversial "campus" includes existing and
new Fort Detrick USAMRIID facilities as well as the Department of
Homeland Security's National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures
Center (NBACC).

"The Army is suggesting that Whitecoat provides an enabling precedent
for Ft. Detrick to experiment on humans in ways that are ethically
and legally unacceptable," says Hammond, "The Army understands there
is a difference between safety trials and exposing humans to
aerosolized disease; but it makes no distinction between the two."

Far from a model, the US Army's history of human experimentation with
bioweapons provide lessons for what should never done at the NBACC
and associated facilities. Says Hammond "Since shortly before the
anthrax letters of 2001, glorifying past bioweaponeering has,
ironically, become all too common. With labs to research biological
weapons agents sprouting up across the country, to have the US Army
losing sight of medical ethics and the differences between offense
and defense is deeply disturbing. The Army knows that what is ethical
and legal is not the same thing as what a person can be convinced to
do. Rather than promoting a revisionist history and an offensive
research model, the Army should squarely acknowledge past failings
and ensure that they never happen again."

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Link: "USAMRIID celebrates 50-year research tradition"
 http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/standard/10_05/local_news/33582-1.html)

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