Newsday's nine-part video documentary and story can be found at http://www.newsday.com/long-island/li-life/cold-war-fallout-for-brookhaven-na...
For 43 years, doctors at Brookhaven National Laboratory were in charge of the medical care of residents of the remote Marshall Islands in the Pacific who had been exposed to radiation from nuclear bomb blasts set off by the United States during the Cold War. Newsday's investigation shows the lab knowingly allowed hundreds of island residents to live on contaminated islands so that American scientists could study the flow of radioactivity through their bodies for "scientific and military concerns." BNL also convinced some 100 Marshallese residents to have highly questionable thyroid surgery -- paying each person $25,000 to secure their cooperation -- often without their fully informed consent. After living on their contaminated islands from 1957 to 1985, the population of Rongelap fled, convinced that they were being lied to by the BNL team. They now live hundreds of miles away from their homeland. Now the Obama adminstration and the U.S. Congress will have to decide whether to pay $1 billion in damages awarded to Rongelap by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in 2007.
Patricia Worthington, Department of Energy apparatchik, struggles laboriously to offset and deny a dirty and incriminating memo: "I'm not aware of anything that could label that either Brookhaven or DoE did that was wrong but I, I, believe that we are always forward looking and forward thinking about, uh, how we can better um, you know, deliver the services to the people that we've been charged to serve and that we're privileged to serve." Stonewalling this obdurate is truly chilling.
wsxvgy 8 months ago
It is fascinating and very revealing to watch Patricia Worthington at the Department of Energy using carefully calibrated doubletalk to prevent herself (and the US government) conceding the glaring immorality and, indeed, cavalier racism, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in sending the islanders back into such an intensely radioactive environment, as a living community experiment in human exposure to radiation.
And people complain about the inhumanity of Nazi and Soviet experiments!
wsxvgy 8 months ago
THANK YOU CHUCK NORRIS!!!!!!
CHUCK NORRIS HAS THE CURE FOR EVERYTHING..
CHEERS
rangsit2008 9 months ago
Thank you, greatly, for this posting.
johnbarleycornmd 1 year ago