Regime prepares path for its own constitutional changes

VIERNES 15 DE OCTUBRE DE 2010 09:39 RED MORAZÁNICA DE INFORMACIÓN

Tegucigalpa, September 8, 2010

The president of the Legislature, Juan Orlando Hermandez, congratulated the head of the continuing coup government, Porfirio Lobo, for "promoting dialogue" and that Lobo  "send (to the Congress) anything that will create the conditions to revise Article 5, so that no one can prevent consultation with the  people."

Hernandez assured Lobo that the revision could  be "ready" before the end of this legislative session in December.

The preceeding congress, under the coup maker, Roberto Micheletti Bain, approved a law governing plebicites and referendums that contained 36 articles and proposed rules for Article 5 of the Constitution through a long list of restrictions. Included in these restrictions is that a call for a plebecite would have to be published three times in two of the newspapers with major circulation in the country; the referendum would have to be published once and it could not be called within six months of the general elections.

The approval of the Special Law of Plebiscite and Referendum had the open intention of impeding the project for the Fourth Urn of President Manuel Zelaya.

That law established that it is not possible to consult the people on any reform of Article 374 of the Constitution of the Republic, which states that, in no instance, can there be any changes to the (constitutional) articles related to the form of government, the national territory, the presidential terms, or to the prohibition of any subsequent election to the presidency of anyone who has occupied that function under any title.

According to this law, it is also impossible to change affairs related to tax questions, public credit, amnesty, national currency, budget, treaties, international agreements and social well-being.

The initiative to convene a plebiscite or referendum can occur with at least 10 members of the National Congress; the President of the Republic with a resolution of the Council of Secretaries of  State; or with 6 percent of the citizens registered with the National Electoral Census, approximately 4.6 million people.

Roberto Micheletti, at that time the president of the Congress, called the law a "great advance for Honduran Democracy".
Later  the Congress which conspired to organize the coup d'etat annulled the Law of Citizen Participation that was sponsored by President Manuel Zelaya and approved in the legislature by Micheletti, who did so with the condition that Zelaya would support him as president of the executive committee of the congress.

This article was translated by VC from Preparan camino a su propia constituyente. Golpismo se mueve acelerado a revisar artículo 5 constitucional para plebiscito y referéndum

Source: http://resistenciahonduras.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1307:regime-prepares-path-for-its-own-constitutional-changes&catid=101:news&Itemid=349

Violence Against Honduran Resistance Movement, Unionists Continues

Monday
October 11
1:41 pm

By Kari Lydersen

Honduran human rights leader Berta Oliva notes that 83 resistance members, including unionists, have been disappeared or killed since January.   (Photo by La Voz de los de Abajo)

The drum beat of violence and assassinations targeting union members and others in the National Resistance Front continues in Honduras, as human rights defender Berta Oliva described during a Chicago visit before receiving the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington D.C. Wednesday on behalf of a coalition of Honduran human rights groups including her group, COFADEH. (The award is named for Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and IPS staffer Ronni Karpen Moffitt, murdered by agents of then-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1976.) 

Just in the last month, numerous acts of violence and intimidation have occurred: a social security unionist and a member of the campesino group MUCA were killed; 22 university union employees were illegally ordered arrested; and an opposition journalist survived an attempted murder. Oliva noted that 83 members of the resistance movement have been murdered or disappeared since current president Pepe Lobo Sosa took office in January.

And on Sept. 17 – National Teachers Day – union secondary school teacher and prominent resistance activist Felix Murillo Lopez was killed in a hit and run many believe to be a murder. He was a member of the COPEMH union.

The organization Education International, of which COPEMH is an affiliate,describes the situation:

His worried family members had reported his disappearance to the police but, because his personal documents were missing, Murillo's body remained unidentified until 24 hours later when his brother visited the morgue. The police have launched an investigation upon suspicion that the crash may well have been intentional. COPEMH President Eulogio Chávez told the press that Murillo had received threats as a consequence of his involvement in protest actions since the military coup in August.

Indeed, Murillo was active in the Resistance and, as a member of the Committee for Security and Discipline, he often led demonstrations. Murillo was also a key witness to the murder of fellow teacher Roger Vallejo, who was shot in the head during violent repression by police forces in July. At the wake held to honour Vallejo's memory, teacher Martín Florencio Rivera was stabbed to death.

Also on September 17, the president of Section 2 of the Union of Workers of the Honduran Social Security Union was gunned down on the way home from a meeting at union headquarters. “They were in the midst of negotiations,” Oliva said of the social security unionist.

The blog Honduras Resiste, drawing on local reports, describes the assassination:

Juana Bustillo was driving a car with other union members in it after attending a meeting at the IHSS headquarters. Witnesses reported that a gunman walked up to the window of the vehicle and shot Ms. Bustillo and then got into a beige colored car and escaped the scene.

Juana Bustillo was 49 years old, she was a nurse in the IHSS hospital system for 20 years and a union activist for 11 years.

Union teachers and staff in primary and secondary schools and universities have been a mainstay of the resistance movement, and Oliva said in recent weeks the repression against teachers has been especially intense. “Things are very hard for teachers and it’s going to get worse,” she said. She added that divisions within the country’s various teachers unions also make the situation more dangerous.

In September, arrest orders were issued for 22 union employees of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (SITRAUNAH), and police occupied the campus for more than a week. Honduras Resiste described the situation:

At the head of the long list are the top leaders of the union organization, Rene Andino and Marco Antonio Moreno. The capture of the secretary of section number one of the union, Cristian Duron, who has immunity due to his union position, already occurred despite his legal guarantee (of immunity).

Violence against journalists also continues, as on Sept. 16 gunmen attempted to kill Radio Globo reporter Luis Galdámez Álvarez. Radio Globo, a mainstream radio station, was one of few that reported accurately on events unfolding during the coup. It was shut down for a month last fall and Radio Globo reporters have since been targets of harassment and violence.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports:

Radio Globo has also been the target of serious attacks and multiple broadcasting disruptions. On September 28, 2009, during the interim government of Roberto Micheletti, the station was forced off the air after security forces raided their offices and confiscated equipment. It returned to the air on October 20.

The Washington-based Inter-American Commission of Human Rights ordered the Honduran government to provide Galdámez protection in July 2009 after repeated threats. Honduran authorities never enforced the order, the reporter said. "Those orders coming from Inter-American Commission don't mean anything in Honduras," he said.

Oliva said human rights leaders consider it crucial for people outside Honduras – elected officials and even regular citizens – to contact Honduran officials to voice their awareness of and opposition to the ongoing repression and violence. “This is a dictatorship of silence,” she said. “The government has convinced the international community that everything is in order. It’s a matter of language. Order does not mean normalcy.”

Oliva, head of the Honduran human rights group COFADEH, noted that the ongoing government- and United Nations-sponsored “truth commission” is an affront and in fact represents a danger to the large and diverse resistance movement, in that it legitimizes government actors who human rights leaders say are behind a concerted campaign of assassination and repression ongoing since the coup.

The resistance movement has launched its own truth commission, which is investigating ongoing attacks on union members and others; as opposed to the official commission’s mandate to investigate only events immediately surrounding the coup.

She said U.S. and international unions have expressed solidarity with their Honduran cohorts, and Hondurans hope such support will continue even as Honduras drops off the international radar screen and most people think things have returned to “normal.”

Source: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6528/honduras_violence_against_resistance_movement_unionists_continues1/

Chile's Ghosts Are Not Being Rescued

Wednesday 13 October 2010

by: John Pilger, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Chile's indigenous Mapuche population peacefully protest in Santiago, Chile. (Photo: Patricio / Flickr)

The rescue of 33 miners in Chile is an extraordinary drama filled with pathos and heroism. It is also a media windfall for the Chilean government, whose every beneficence is recorded by a forest of cameras. One cannot fail to be impressed. However, like all great media events, it is a facade.

The accident that trapped the miners is not unusual in Chile and is the inevitable consequence of a ruthless economic system that has barely changed since the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Copper is Chile's gold, and the frequency of mining disasters keeps pace with prices and profits. There are, on average, 39 fatal accidents every year in Chile's privatized mines. The San Jose mine, where the trapped men work, became so unsafe in 2007 it had to be closed - but not for long. On 30 July last, a labor department report warned again of "serious safety deficiencies," but the minister took no action. Six days later, the men were entombed.

For all the media circus at the rescue site, contemporary Chile is a country of the unspoken. At the Villa Grimaldi, in the suburbs of the capital Santiago, a sign says: "The forgotten past is full of memory." This was the torture center where hundreds of people were murdered and disappeared for opposing the fascism that General Pinochet and his business allies brought to Chile. Its ghostly presence is overseen by the beauty of the Andes, and the man who unlocks the gate used to live nearby and remembers the screams.

I was taken there one wintry morning in 2006 by Sara De Witt, who was imprisoned as a student activist and now lives in London. She was electrocuted and beaten, yet survived. Later, we drove to the home of Salvador Allende, the great democrat and reformer who perished when Pinochet seized power on 11 September 1973 - Latin America's own 9/11. His house is a silent white building without a sign or a plaque.

Stay informed with free Truthout updates delivered straight to your email inbox. Click here to sign up.

Everywhere, it seems, Allende's name has been eliminated. Only in the lone memorial in the cemetery are the words engraved "Presidente de la Republica" as part of a remembrance of the "ejecutados Politicos": those "executed for political reasons." Allende died by his own hand while Pinochet bombed the presidential palace with British planes as the American ambassador watched.

Today, Chile is a democracy, though many would dispute that, notably those in the barrios forced to scavenge for food and steal electricity. In 1990, Pinochet bequeathed a constitutionally compromised system as a condition of his retirement and the military's withdrawal to the political shadows. This ensures that the broadly reformist parties, known as Concertacion, are permanently divided or drawn into legitimizing the economic designs of the heirs of the dictator. At the last election, the right-wing Coalition for Change, the creation of Pinochet's ideologue Jaime Guzman, took power under President Sebastian Piñera. The bloody extinction of true democracy that began with the death of Allende was, by stealth, complete.

Piñera is a billionaire who controls a slice of the mining, energy and retail industries. He made his fortune in the aftermath of Pinochet's coup and during the free-market "experiments" of the zealots from the University of Chicago, known as the Chicago Boys. His brother and former business partner, Jose Piñera, a labor minister under Pinochet, privatized mining and state pensions and all but destroyed the trade unions. This was applauded in Washington as an "economic miracle," a model of the new cult of neoliberalism that would sweep the continent and ensure control from the north.

Today. Chile is critical to President Barack Obama's rollback of the independent democracies in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela. Piñera's closest ally is Washington's main man, Juan Manuel Santos, the new president of Colombia, home to seven US bases and an infamous human rights record familiar to Chileans who suffered under Pinochet's terror.

Post-Pinochet Chile has kept its own enduring abuses in shadow. The families still attempting to recover from the torture or disappearance of a loved one bear the prejudice of the state and employers. Those not silent are the Mapuche people, the only indigenous nation the Spanish conquistadors could not defeat. In the late 19th century, the European settlers of an independent Chile waged their racist War of Extermination against the Mapuche who were left as impoverished outsiders. During Allende's thousand days in power, this began to change. Some Mapuche lands were returned and a debt of justice was recognized.

Since then, a vicious, largely unreported war has been waged against the Mapuche. Forestry corporations have been allowed to take their land, and their resistance has been met with murders, disappearances and arbitrary prosecutions under "anti terrorism" laws enacted by the dictatorship. In their campaigns of civil disobedience, none of the Mapuche has harmed anyone. The mere accusation of a landowner or businessman that the Mapuche "might" trespass on their own ancestral lands is often enough for the police to charge them with offenses that lead to Kafkaesque trials with faceless witnesses and prison sentences of up to 20 years. They are, in effect, political prisoners.

While the world rejoices at the spectacle of the miners' rescue, 38 Mapuche hunger strikers have not been news. They are demanding an end to the Pinochet laws used against them, such as "terrorist arson," and the justice of a real democracy. On 9 October, all but one of the hunger strikers ended their protest after 90 days without food. A young Mapuche, Luis Marileo, says he will go on. On 18 October, President Piñera is due to give a lecture on "current events" at the London School of Economics. He should be reminded of their ordeal and why.

Source: http://www.truth-out.org/chiles-ghosts-are-not-being-rescued64160

Human Rights platform makes a call to stop persecution of Mariana Rios Munguia

DOMINGO 10 DE OCTUBRE DE 2010 12:39 JUAN ALMENDARES

The repressive bodies of the Honduran state have continued since the military coup d'etat, the 28th of June 2009 until the present systematically violating the human rights to muzzle the freedom and dignity of those Hondurans that defend with dignity and courage the respect for life, justice and self determination of our people.

We have been informed by Gilberto Rios, Executive Director of FIAN International that "Mariana Rios Munguia is part of the Analysis Commission of the FNRP and collaborates with the Truth Commission sponsored by the Human Rights Platform. A few months ago, they intruded through a window and stole a laptop in which was kept the documentation of the work of the FNRP and nothing else. Yesterday, the 8th of October, they intruded anew breaking the same balcony window, breaking the glass louvres and following the same pattern, only stole a cellular phone even when they could steal other electronic equipment and other personal belongings of value that are easy to carry.

We condemn these acts perpetrated by the "Machinery of Barbarism" to the detriment of Rosa Mariana Rios Murguia and demand respect for the lives of both her and her family.

We invite together with our CPTRT team to all the national and international community to denounce these acts and provide the necessary solidary to Rosa Mariana Rios Murguia.

9th of October 2010

Source: http://www.resistenciahonduras.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1279:human-rights-platform-makes-a-call-to-stop-persecution-of-mariana-rios-munguia&catid=103:human-rights&Itemid=352

Ecuador: Failed Coup or Institutional Crisis?

Ecuadorian filmmaker Oscar León presents his take on country's history that led to the crisis, Pt. 1/2

This is a special report about the Police Force insurrection and kidnapping of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa on September 30th, 2010. President Correa was held hostage for 11 hours by a large number of armed policemen inside the Quito Regiment. Eventually leading to street battles and a bloody ending that gripped a nation.

My name is Oscar Leon, reporter and documentary filmmaker from Ecuador. Between 2005 and 2007 I created the documentary "Third World Democracy Handbook" about the fall of President Lucio Gutierrez, at that time he was the 3rd President to fall in less than 10 years, had Rafael Correa fell he would have been the 4rd to fall in less than 14 years. Being a reporter in Ecuador during the "Lost Decade" I can bring some insight about what happen that day. Was this a institutional crisis? Or a foreign power's attempt to overthrow him? This infamous day it's being utilized by both political sides. But what is the truth behind it? In order to get a better understanding of what happened on Part 1 we will explain some necessary context. In the Part 2 of this special report we will go over what toke place on September 30th 2010.

Source: http://www.therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5713&updaterx=2010-10-08+13:17:30

About Vargas Llosa receiving the highest imperial award: The Nobel Prize, an instrument of the structures of power to legitimize themselves

The Nobel Committee: "Next year we'll give it [the Nobel Prize for Literature] to Juan Ramón Martínez"


Juan Ramón Martínez, like Mario Vargas Llosa, is a known writer in Honduras and  a "political analyst", whose articles  are published and endorsed by  Honduran corporate media,  in the same way Vargas Llosa's are published by right-wing media in the continent and in Spain(his son's in The Washington Post). He has repeatedly written articles which reveal him as  a staunch defender of the coup regime, the structures of power, and the status quo in Honduras in the same way Vargas Llosa defends the same -neoliberalism-  in the whole continent and will predictably use the  canonization the Nobel Prize Committe has granted him as a platform for him to go on assailing Hugo Chavez, any leftist leader that appears in the continent, and every single tiny trace of left that can be detected on anyone.


Some people might argue that one must separate art/literature from politics(consider how laughable it would be to apply  the same logic to Picasso's Guernica, to name one example), that this award was given to a writer to promote his literary work, not his political views, as if he didn't actually write political and reactionary articles for Spain's most read newspaper, El País, along other widespread Latin American ones. 


Unfortunately, saying that this prize is given to exclusively acknowledge the works of an outstanding novelist would be more than a bit miopic (to be polite and not call it the blatant lie it is), since it is hardly arguable that receiving  the Nobel Prize, the highest award given in the Western World,  legitimizes him as a prolific thinker and intellectual figure, not only as the prolific  writer he is already known to be for some decades now. Hence  people will not only  listen to his thoughts, his political views, but follow them, in view the prize has consolidated his person in the same way it did with Obama and his "peace" mission executing two simultaneous wars in Irak and Afghanistan, installing 7 US military bases in Colombia, and, as if that weren't enough, threatening with another one in Iran, canonizing and ratifying all his actions  into unquestionably peaceful ones, as happened with Henry Kissinger,the Peace Nobel Laureate who was  the principal American architect of the September 11, 1973 Chilean coup d'état against President Salvador Allende, which installed the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.


Ongoing events can't be isolated from their context and it is widely known that most of Latin America has now given a turn to the left for the first time in decades, before Plan Condor was executed to change its course in order to  recover "lost territory" and "to prevent the Cuba model from propagating itself". The Nobel Prize for an outspoken apologist of the right who constantly attacks the left in Latin America at this point in history, where coup d'états have been attempted against ALBA presidents (Hugo Chávez in 2002, Evo Morales in 2008, a successful one  against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, and the most recent attempt in September 30, 2010 against Rafael Correa of Ecuador) is not merely coincidence, but an indispensable action for the falling West, an act of desperation to regain lost territory. 


Furthermore, Mr. Vargas Llosa wrote an article about the coup d'état in Honduras on June 28, 2009 some days after it took place which describes the event as "the masses of the Honduran population declared themselves against turning into a country dependent on Hugo Chávez, that is, into a little populist dictatorship,enfeoffed to the Venezuelan caudillo".  Despite him calling once in the article  the illegal Micheletti regime "the de facto government", the rest of the article is a blatant coup apology with a slight touch of make-up.
He goes on saying,

"Perhaps even more than for the action itself of  assaulting the residence of the Honduran head of state, it would be necessary to reproach the military and the judges who gave the order to do it, that, with such crime, they converted into a victim of democracy and a little less than in a heroe of liberty, an irresponsable demagogue as Mel Zelaya, who in flagrant violation of the Constitution he had sworn to respect, he resolved to carry out a referendum to make himself become reelected, an aspiration that was condemned by the Supreme Court and the Public Prosecutor of the country, and for which the Honduran Congress had initiated a process to remove him from his post as head of State."

Firstly, to say that the poll to ask the population whether we wanted or not a fourth ballot in the election where Zelaya was not  participating and where Lobo would have resulted elected anyway (but would have been the one responsible to call for the Constituent Assembly, in case both polls resulted successful: if the  first June 28 non-binding poll  resulted successful which would enable the second binding poll that would have taken place during the elections through a fourth ballot, the first ballot is where Lobo was elected ), would have led directly to Zelaya's reelection is not only a strawman argument, ridiculous, but physically impossible and is the same argument the putschists used to justify Zelaya's ouster and second, the Honduran Congress has no faculty to depose a President or to execute the law and the Supreme Court owed him due process. His son hasn't only  echoed his same arguments through articles published by a huge media outlet such as The Washington Post, in particular that  the coup was Zelaya's own fault, but has gone as far as being  one of the main international apologists of the coup to the point of coming to Honduras to earn publicity and  public sympathy for  the de facto government and to support and promote  the illegal militarized elections sponsored by the same criminals who broke constitutional order,  fraudulent elections taking place under numerous human rights abuses by the police and military which have continued with the Lobo Sosa coup government continuation in order to whitewash the coup, even intending to play down their criminal actions by reassuring and intending to confirm their honesty and honor by saying "Nobody in the current government is interested in a fraudulent election, nor is one likely given safeguards that include a widely respected national electoral tribunal and Supreme Court. The authorities seem eager to have the burden of international censure lifted by keeping their promise to hand power over to an elected president.". Unluckily, for Mr. Alvaro Vargas, neither the OAS, the European Union, the United Nations nor any official  international organization came to observe those elections.
While ironically  the Nobel Committee claims to award Vargas Llosa for his "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat"., it is very clear for Vargas Llosa, as  the cartographer of the structures of power that he is, as well as for that Committee, that  the Nobel Prize itself is an integral part, a tool   of that same  machinery of the structures of power to maintain, consolidate, and reassure their place in the world.

Nobel a platform for outspoken Vargas Llosa

AP – Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa attends a news conference Thursday, Oct. 7, 2010, in New York. The …

• Play Video
  

By IAN JAMES, Associated Press Writer – Fri Oct 8, 12:56 pm ET

CARACAS, Venezuela – The Nobel Prize in literature brings a long-awaited accolade to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, and also a new platform for him to assail leftist leaders Hugo Chavez of Venezuelaand Fidel Castro of Cuba.

The 74-year-old writer has been a combative political activist in denouncing what he views as threats to democracy and freedoms in Latin America. As he basked in praise for winning the prize Thursday, he pointedly singled out Venezuela and Cuba during a news conference in New York, saying those two countries represent a step backward for a hemisphere emerging from an era of strongman leaders.

"That trend, which is an authoritarian, anti-democratic trend, is a trend that seems on its way out, for which there is less support all the time,"Vargas Llosa told reporters.

"I'm going to keep defending the ideas I have, the defense of democracy, the defense of freedom ... criticisms of all forms of authoritarianism," he said.

Vargas Llosa has regularly directed barbs at Chavez, denouncing him as autocratic. When the novelist visited Venezuela last year to attend a pro-democracy forum, he was stopped by authorities at the airport for nearly two hours. He said he was questioned and told that as a foreigner he didn't "have the right to make political statements" in Venezuela.

read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101008/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_nobel_prize_vargas_llosa

Guatemalan Research Horrors and US Hypocrisy

CIA's Unethical Research Ignored

Guatemalan Research Horrors and US Hypocrisy

By STEPHEN SOLDZ

According to top US officials, abusing people in the name of research without their permission is awful, truly awful. In fact, it is so awful that it takes twoCabinet officials to apologize. That is, if the abuses were committed a long time ago, by researchers who are not around to be held accountable and if there is a friendly foreign government likely to be outraged about the abuse. However, US officials have so far been totally silent about horrific, unethical research conducted by US government researchers within the last decade.

Recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius profusely apologized for a study conducted by the US Public Health Service in which nearly 700 incarcerated people and soldiers in Guatemala were, without their knowledge, deliberately infected with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in order to test if penicillin could prevent infection. In a statement the two Cabinet secretaries expressed their outrage at "such reprehensible research." In fact, so disturbed is the US government at this research that President Obama reportedly will call the Guatemalan president to apologize again.

This research violated the basic ethical principles that were supposed to guide research done on people -- "human subjects research" in the professional lingo -- since World War II. These principles were codified in the Nuremberg Code internationally and in the Common Rule guiding most research on people conducted or funded by US government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services of which the Public Health Service is a part as well as the Defense Department and the CIA. Fundamental to these and all other recent codes of research ethics are two basic principles: informed consent and minimization of harm. Thus, the Nuremberg Code, containing principles developed for the trials of German doctors who conducted horrific experiments in the Nazi concentration camps, begins with the principle of informed consent:

"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."

A little later the Nuremberg Code states the obligation of medical researchers to minimize harm resulting from experimental procedures:

"The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.

"No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects."

The Guatemalan study egregiously violated both these principles and deserves opprobrium. Rather than informed consent, the purpose of the study was deliberately hidden from those infected. These individuals were infected with dangerous, often deadly, illnesses. This research was awful, reprehensible, even horrific, and should never have been contemplated, let alone, conducted. I am glad that it only took a short time since historian Susan M. Reverby of Wellesley College revealed the abuses in a soon-to-be-published paper -- available in preprint form on Reverby's website -- until  US government officials vociferously condemned it.

But the US government does not need to look back nearly 65 years to find horrific research conducted by US government researchers. In June 2010, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) issued a report, Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the “Enhanced” Interrogation Program, that documented research and experimentation conducted in this century by CIA physicians and psychologists related to the abusive techniques used as part of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" torture program.

These researchers observed the torture of CIA prisoners in the so-called "black sites" and recorded the tortured prisoners’ responses. They paid special attention to the possibility that the torture would kill the prisoners. At times they recommended changes in torture techniques, such as the addition of salt to the water used for the partial drowning techniques that have come to be known as "waterboarding" so as to prevent possible death from induced electrolyte imbalance. This change in procedure allowed the prisoners to be waterboarded many dozens of times while preventing their escape into death. As PHR argued, the main reason for this apparent safety-related research was not the protection of prisoners, but to provide legal cover for the torturers and torture policy-makers by allowing them to claim that medical professionals were assuring the prisoners’ safety.

These abuses were reported by PHR in its peer-review report back in June. (I am one of the authors of that report.) Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was notified by letter of these abuses, abuses that violate the same research ethics principles -- informed consent and minimization of harm -- that were violated by the Guatemalan STD research. But, rather than express her outrage at this "reprehensible research," Secretary Sebelius maintained her silence, as did every government official, other than a CIA press spokesman who denied our claims without presenting the slightest bit of evidence. Secretary Sebelius' department referred an official complaint regarding unethical CIA research to the very same CIA that had already publicly denied the charges. So far, no government agency has committed to investigating these CIA abuses, which occurred far more recently than the Guatemalan horrors.

In response to the over 60 year old Guatemalan abuses, the Secretaries of HHS and State announced the creation of a commission that will undertake to assure that all human subjects research conducted by US researchers meets the highest ethical standards. As NBC News reported:

"In addition to the apology, the U.S. is setting up commissions to ensure that human medical research conducted around the globe meets 'rigorous ethical standards.' U.S. officials are also launching investigations to uncover exactly what happened during the experiments."

If the purpose of the commission is really "to ensure that human medical research conducted around the globe meets 'rigorous ethical standards,'" there cannot be a double standard. The same rules must apply to all researchers, everywhere, and to all research subjects, whoever they are. Ethics are there to protect the despised and powerless, not just those deemed deserving. Those researchers aiding CIA or other classified activities cannot get a free pass. We are at an important juncture, either unethical CIA research is investigated and those responsible are held accountable or the whole regime preventing unethical research that has been developed since the world became aware of Nazi horrors will collapse in hypocrisy. We cannot afford to let that happen.

Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He edits the Psyche, Science, and Society blog. He is a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, one of the organizations working to change American Psychological Association policy on participation in abusive interrogations. He is President of Psychologists for Social Responsibility[PsySR] and a Consultant to Physicians for Human Rights. He was a coauthor of PHR’s Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the “Enhanced” Interrogation Program

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/soldz10042010.html