Government coverups

[Keneke]

In reading the thread on "spotting psuedo science", a very good indicator was the claim that evidence was suppressed or covered up. However, does anyone know of things that actually were covered up? (Verifiable stories, please.) What's the difference between cover-ups and plain and simple national security? How much *should* be left unsaid?

[Tmy]

They covered up the whole "everyone buy a surge protector to keep your computer sfae even though it it was so important it would come with the computer but really these surge protectors are way for the government to track your emials." scandle.

[Segnosaur]

Originally posted by Keneke
In reading the thread on "spotting psuedo science", a very good indicator was the claim that evidence was suppressed or covered up. However, does anyone know of things that actually were covered up?
Well, we can all agree that man really didn't land on the moon, and that fact has been covered up.

[gnome]

Originally posted by Keneke
In reading the thread on "spotting psuedo science", a very good indicator was the claim that evidence was suppressed or covered up. However, does anyone know of things that actually were covered up? (Verifiable stories, please.) What's the difference between cover-ups and plain and simple national security? How much *should* be left unsaid?

IMHO, details of covert operations and strategic information about war plans should certainly be suppressed. However, I believe our goals and policy decisions should be transparent to the public.

Sometimes it's hard to draw the line... though our current system of giving security clearance to some elected representatives seems close to ideal, even if disclosure could be improved on.

[Ladewig]

I. Tuskeegee Experiment
For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. The doctors withheld treatment in order to study the progression of the late stages of the disease.

II. Army Biological Warfare Testing on Civilians
In the 1950's, the U.S. Army tested the spread of contagious diseases by releasing bacteria in the N.Y. City subway and over San Francisco.

III. Military Testing of Radiation Levels on Civilians
From 1945 to the 1970's, scientists at Los Alamos exposed terminally-ill leukemia patients to radiation in order to determine lethal dose levels. The told the patients that they were trying radical experimental treatments. [see book review section Dec 1999 issue of New England Journal of Medicine for more info]

When the government (or branches of it) perform actions such as these, it is not difficult to imagine them doing other equally unethical scientific experiments and keeping the results secret.

[bignickel]

I don't know if this would be a government cover up, per se, but during the 90s I watched an episode of PBS show 'Frontline' (or some other PBS show) where they examined a the Hanford nuclear power facility.

Anyways, there was a project called 'Green Run', where they intentionally released a cloud of radioactive steam to see where the wind would carry it. They felt it wasn't radioactive enough to cause a risk to anyone in it. Needless to say, the wind carried it into the nearby town.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/meet5/brief5/br5j1.txt
http://www.djc.com/special/enviro98/10043971.htm

Edited: (This was probably Rocky Flats) They also got rid of radioactive wastewater by, get this, hooking up hoses to irrigators in the fields outside the plant, and spritzing away the wastewater into the ground thru sprinklers! Yikes!

Another coverup occured at the Rocky Flats plant. Despite scores of violations, the Dept. of Energy did everything it could to hush up any investigations into this facility. It actually got to a point where the FBI raided an business overseen by the Dept. of Energy - possibly the first time the U.S. government ever had to raid itself.

http://bush.tamu.edu/pubman/papers/1999/Rahm99.pdf

Rocky Flats also possesses a devastatingly poor record of intergovernmental relationships best depicted by the FBI raid on Rocky Flats. On June 6, 1989, after months of covert night-time
surveillance, 70 FBI agents entered unannounced through the gates of Rocky Flats to seize records they believed would prove criminal acts taken on the part of officials at the site. This
unprecedented action of the FBI was ordered by the Justice Department after surveillance revealed deliberate violation of environmental laws (McAllister, 1989).

It went to a Grand Jury, where jurors heard about all the bizarreness and unsafe conditions at the plant. Needless to say, the grand jury was ended when the plant made a deal where they paid a fine smaller than their yearly government bonus; meanwhile, the DOE still admitted no mistakes. The jurors were so taken aback by this, after 2 years of listening to testemony, that they actually went to the press: they told the press that while they couldn't discuss anything about what they heard during the grand jury proceedings, they could say that the whole matter needed looking into. "An ongoing criminal enterprise" was how they described Rocky Flats.

The federal prosecutor's reponse: investigate the formers jurors to see if he could get them for contempt of court. :rolleyes:

http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/7719/rockyflats.html

And here's the grand jury report:
http://www.vote.org/flats/

[bignickel]

Another one I just remembered, in my own home town of St. Louis, MO:

During the 50's, the Army put up some boxes around the St. Louis area. They didn't say anything before, during, or after about what these boxes were for. Eventually the boxes were taken down.

It was only in the 90's that Army admitted that they were doing tests to see how weather affects the spread of radioactive material. They claimed that the zinc cadmium sulfide gas intentionally released by the boxes was extremely small, and posed no significant threat to St. Louis residents.

St. Louisians who read about this were not amused.

EDITED to add: dang, I can't find a decent web link for this one. The only one I can find is a list of 'experiments done on citizens' that also includes/implies AIDS is a recent government intentional experimental release. :rolleyes:

The best I can find so far:
http://www.mod.uk/publications/zinc_cadmium/review.htm

[Agammamon]

The problem is we only know of the coverups they've failed to cover up. Iran-Contra anyone. Or of course Watergate.

The Navy has done a lot of CBR testing, most without informed consent. You can checkout info on SHAD (Shipboard Hazards and Defense). This was C/NW countermeasures testing using live agents. The Navy during the late 50's, early 60's did dispersal testing by spraying inert materials off the coast of San Fransisco and monitoring inland, without telling anyone. And if you look at pictures of nuclear weapons detonations at sea you will generally find Navy ships well within the base surge.

[bignickel]

Here's an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch about the St. Louis tests.

http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=SIEGE-BIOWARTESTS-09-20-01&cat=AN

Since the article appeared Sept 20, 2001, it has a different spin on it then if it had been released a month earlier (I would imagine).

[bignickel]

Originally posted by Agammamon
The problem is we only know of the coverups they've failed to cover up. Iran-Contra anyone.

Hey Agammamon, I recommend you take a look at Robert Parry's book "Fooling America". While not the definitive book about the whole scandal, it does cover it from a media point of view, and has a very interesting look at how the media itself helped to cover up the story with 'drive-by reporting'.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0688109276/104-2433554-9099123?vi=glance