World War II on San Jose Island, December 1997
Number 21, December 1997
World War II on San Jose Island...
GIs Gassed to Test Racial Differences
by Eric Jackson
From The Panama News, August 16-29, 1997
Lately Panamanian scholars, environmentalists and journalists have been poring through old documents about World War II chemical warfare experiments on San Jose Island in Panama's Perlas Archipelago. The main issues are contamination and the prospects for a cleanup. But now a declassified US Army report raises different concerns.
The report notes an August 1944 test to "determine if any difference existed in the sensitivity of Puerto Rican and Continental US troops" to liquid mustard gas. This was one of dozens of San Jose Island experiments in which chemical weapons were used on human subjects, but the only one designed to test a racial hypothesis. The report noted that "no significant difference existed between the two type troops."
The tests were carried out by a joint US, British and Canadian task force commanded by the US Army's Chemical Warfare Service. The project's main purpose was to test the feasiblity of using gas against Japanese jungle fortifications.
"My first reaction," US Ambassador William J. Hughes said in a statement, "was one of concern." He added that "I have asked the Department of Defense to immediately provide me with any and all information relative to the report and the studies the report suggests."
Representative Jose E. Serrano (D-NY) asked Defense Secretary William S. Cohen for information on the units involved in the racial tests and what kind of medical care the soldiers were given. "The implications of this program and its possible effects on the health of Puerto Ricans and Americans who were exposed to this chemical are very serious," Serrano said in a press statement.
It took 50 years for the US Veterans Administration to take such health issues seriously. During and just after World War II, some 60,000 US military personnel were exposed to poisonous gasses-often without their knowledge-in tests at San Jose Island and other gas warfare facilities.
Yet until 1994, the VA routinely rejected all claims by veterans who said that they became sick after exposure to military toxins. Some veterans were even told that because the project was secret, they would be jailed if they told their private doctors that they had been involved in such experiments. The link between mustard gas exposure and lung cancer was documented before World War II by researchers who tracked the health of British soldiers who were gassed in World War I.
In addition to the health issues, the San Jose Project raises ethical questions. "The notion that the US military exposed our own troops to this chemical testing is troublesome and highly objectionable," Representative Serrano said.
"First, from the Christian perspective we recognize the equality of all people," said Father Conrado Sanjur, a Catholic priest who heads the Panamanian People's Human Rights Coordinator (COPODEHUPA). "Second, human life has a fundamental value that doesn't permit experiments that endanger human life or health. It's worse yet if such a test is done to prove racial inequalities-it's one of the worst sins."
The world became sensitive to the ethical problems posed by human experiments five months after the Panama tests, when Soviet troops liberated the Nazis' Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex. About 400,000 camp inmates were dissected or subjected to tests in Auschwitz Block 10, which was headed by Dr. Josef Mengele.
Many of the experiments conducted by Mengele and his colleagues were intended to prove Nazi racial theories, while others aimed to discover practical information, such as how to revive people who drown in cold water.
Revulsion at Nazi experiments was codified into international law in 1946, when the Nuremberg Military Tribunal heard the case of Karl Brandt and other concentration camp doctors. The court's decision imposed a ten-point test, since dubbed the Nuremberg Code, to determine if experiments are legal or criminal. The code's main points are that any human experiment must have the subjects' informed consent and must be designed "to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature."
The US Armed Forces adopted the Nuremberg Code as part of their guidelines for human experiments in 1953. In 1962 the code was superseded by the World Medical Association's more comprehensive Helsinki Declaration, which was last modified in 1975.
While the amendments to the Helsinki Declaration were debated, a number of scandalous US experiments were revealed to the public. These include a study in which black men infected with syphilis were left untreated to chart the disease's progression, the exposure of US troops to atomic bomb fallout and the feeding of radioactive substances to mental patients and other unwitting subjects.
The US government formally apologized to many of the subjects of these unethical experiments, and in some cases paid compensation. The US Code of Federal Regulations now incorporates the Nuremberg Code and the Helsinki Declaration into strict guidelines for all military, government or federally-funded tests on human subjects.
