Tuskegee Today

Anyone who gets near research involving human subjects has to learn about (and pass written tests on) the notorious, shameful and criminal enterprise known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, but actually entitled the ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male’. This 40-year (1932-72) undertaking of the U.S. Public Health Service involved allowing dozens of poor, rural, black men in Alabama to develop late-stage syphilis and die slow, painful deaths in the interests of Science.

I listened to another run-through on Tuskegee this morning as part of my new research job and could not help but take note of how depressingly timely the story is, specifically, all the direct parallels with what is taking place today on the issue of torturing defenseless prisoners. As we know, a whole lot of people continue to endorse the practice, and probably half the country couldn’t care less. Here they are:

Then: Doctors decided to let the vital organs of these men deteriorate and atrophy—despite the availability of penicilin treatments—in the name of protecting the ‘common good’.

Now: We must torture detainees in Guantámano to extract possible information they may have on future terrorist attacks that will cause harm to the rest of us.

Then: The Nuremberg Principles were passed after the horrors of the Nazi experiments were revealed after World War 2. Despite worldwide revulsion at these practices, U.S. doctors working for the U.S. government ignored the principles because, they argued, that was them, we are us. The Nazis weren’t engaged in medical research, they said. The Nazis were just killers. We’re not.

Now: The many convenants and treaties prohibiting torture, including the Third Geneva Convention and Common Article 3, do not apply to us in this case even if we signed them. Anyone who doesn’t like it can piss off up a rope. U.S. membership in the International Criminal Court, established to prevent war crimes and genocide, couldn’t ram its way through the U.S. Senate on a Harley-Davidson.

Then: Medical personnel, including doctors, nurses, researchers, academics, journal editors, all conspired to continue the study without thinking that they were violating the rights of human beings.

Now: Psychologists and researchers were involved in the original SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) program that purported to prepare U.S. military personnel to resist torture. SERE was then flipped and its techniques applied to Guantánamo detainees, according to multiple published reports on salon.com and The New Yorker magazine. The fingerprints of clinical professionals are all over U.S. torture techniques.

Then: Black men in rural Alabama weren’t really considered to have the same rights as everyone else.

Now: Afghan or Yemeni prisoners fighting for the other side or caught up in sweeps following the multiple U.S. invasions aren’t really considered to have the same rights as everyone else.

Then: The revelations of the Tuskegee abuses generated a storm of controversy, followed by a ‘study commission’ that tried to bury the issue as quickly as possible as detailed in James Jones’s excellent book, Bad Blood. Officials worried that paying too much attention to the case would damage public confidence in research and set back scientific progress.

Now: President Obama wants to ‘look to the future’ and not linger over past unpleasantness. His tentative attempts to air the abuses were met with a storm of outrage because admitting what we had done would ‘endanger American troops’.

No doubt they might. I can attest to the fact that 40 years after the Tuskegee revelations, research is still difficult in some parts of the South because people know what their government is capable of doing to them. That’s the price you pay for committing these heinous acts.

Similarly, 40 years from now representatives of the U.S. government, be they soldiers or well-intentioned aid workers in refugee camps, will still be answering for the Bushite crimes. Not because someone revealed them, but because someone did them.