Yushui Village in Lijiang, Yunnan, with snow mountain backdrop and cascading waterfalls.
10/04/2010
Obama apologises for Americas evil deeds
by Karin Zeitvogel Karin Zeitvogel – Fri Oct 1, 6:43 pm ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama personally apologized Friday to his Guatemalan counterpart for a US-led study conducted in the 1940s, in which hundreds of people in the Latin American state were deliberately infected with sexually-transmitted diseases.
In a phone conversation with Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom, Obama expressed his deep regret for the experiment conducted by US public health researchers in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948, and apologized "to all those affected."
The US president also vowed that all human medical studies conducted today will be held to exacting US and international legal and ethical standards.
"This is shocking, it's tragic, it's reprehensible," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters, adding to apologies and outrage voiced by the president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other US officials.
Is it really shocking? Robert Gibbs really did not know how reprehensible the Americans were and still is? This is nothing compare to all the genocides of the past and present. Do the Americans really believe that all was well in Guantanamo, in Abu Ghraif, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and elsewhere around the world when the American’s dirty hand is present? This is the true America, the real America that all Americans did not want to know, and neither did the rest of the world. They only want to know the great and charitable and honourable America created in Hollywood. Long live the Empire.
Below are some of the comments from the innocent and naïve in the same article.
"What happened all those years ago is a crime against humanity and the government reserves the right to lodge a formal legal complaint over it," Guatemala President Alvaro Colom said.
Hilary ‘Clinton and Sebelius said in a joint statement Friday that the study was "clearly unethical" and apologized to all those who had been affected by it.’
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the US government body that funded the study, called it "deeply disturbing" and "an appalling example in a dark chapter in the history of medicine."
Senator Robert Menendez, a member of the congressional Hispanic caucus, called the experiments in Guatemala one of the "darkest moments" in US history.
"No innocent fellow human should be treated as a lab rat, no matter your nationality,"
Did the Yakuzas in Japan remember their chemical and biological plant in northern China during WW2 era and how they experimented with Chinese prisoners as guinea pigs not dissimilar and could be worst than what the Ameicans did to the Guatemalans.
What else have they not owned up? Plenty.
ReplyDeleteDrugs is one source. Food is another.
What the big drug manufacturers do, in any information released to the public when new drugs are marketed, is basically a question of what information to release and what to suppress. Needles to say, the pros are highlighted while the cons are left to be discovered by patients developing serious side effects after prolong use. This, we have already been witnessing.
Don't talk about the US Food and Drug Administration being very strict in testing new drugs. That organisation is no better than the Fed, and big corporations are always too big for them to touch, when ethical questions come into the picture.
The same cover up also exist in food production, especially huge corporations like Monsanto, involved in genetically altered food grains like corn. There are plenty of information in cyberspace devoted to the dangers of consuming genetically altered food. Environmentalist and heath specialist howled, but Governments don't care.
All of us know that the meat and chickens we eat are fed on growth hormones which enabled them to grow at twice the speed of normal fed chickens. What is the consequence of us eating such food pumped full of growth hormones in the long term? They never will tell you.
Now they are going or are already producing genetically altered salmons that grow at twice the speed and double the size of natural salmons. What is the consequence of eating such salmon nobody can tell now.
The most disturbing thought is that we may even destroy ourselves eating such food over the long term.
The only good thing about GM food is that we will be so jubilant that we can grow our population to 10m and with enough food to eat.
ReplyDeleteAnd we would not want to look at the down side. We only claim that 10m is good for us, and the way to go.
I think that is irresponsibility.