Apology Not Nearly Enough, Downwinders Say Group Blasts White House Report, Saying Panel Didn’t Have Access To Hanford Documents

President Clinton’s apology for Cold War radiation experiments simply isn’t adequate, a group of Hanford downwinders said Tuesday.

At a Spokane press conference, a dozen people with thyroid disease, cancer and other health problems blasted a new report from a White House advisory panel on the government’s secret human experiments.

The panel didn’t pay enough attention to Hanford victims, the downwinders said.

“We feel outraged by the report. A book has been opened, a page read, and then it’s been closed,” said Brenda Weaver, who grew up in the shadow of Hanford’s reactors.

She recounted gruesome animal malformations, including lambs born without eyes, at her father’s farm seven miles from Hanford in the 1960s - and the later birth of her eyeless daughter, Jamie.

“It’s too much of a coincidence. We still don’t know the full story. Our government is not being accountable to us,” she said.

Hanford officials haven’t fully disclosed details of past radiation experiments and nuclear accidents, said Sonja Anderson, an ICF Kaiser scientist and a prominent Hanford whistleblower.

“The (White House) committee hasn’t been allowed access to a lot of Hanford documents. They were misled,” said Anderson, who holds a top security clearance.

Clinton accepted the advisory panel’s report Tuesday and offered an official apology for 4,000 experiments on thousands of victims, most exposed to toxic and radioactive substances without their knowledge from 1944 to 1974.

The panel didn’t pass judgment on the huge clouds of radiation Hanford routinely released during the 1940s and 1950s while making plutonium for nuclear weapons.

The report said government-funded health studies eventually will determine the risk to Hanford downwinders and whether they should be compensated.

The panel did look at the history of the 1949 Green Run at Hanford, an intentional release of radiation to test the military’s radiation tracking equipment.

It concluded the health risks of the Green Run were probably small, but said that conclusion is “small comfort to downwinders who were put at risk without their knowledge.”

One activist said the main government study estimating radiation doses from past Hanford releases can’t be trusted.

A report that’s highly critical of the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Study has been sealed by a federal judge in the massive downwinder’s lawsuit filed against Hanford contractors in 1990, said Kay Sutherland of Walla Walla.

“The cover-up still goes on,” said Sutherland, who has thyroid disease and has suffered four miscarriages.

Victims’ groups nationwide echoed these concerns at eight other press conferences Tuesday from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco.

It’s “outrageous” that the report recommends compensation for only a limited number of victims while the U.S. Department of Justice is spending millions in taxpayer money to defend against lawsuits brought by the experiment victims, said attorney Raymond Heslin of New York.

Heslin is a member of the Human Experiment Litigation Project, a consortium of law firms suing the institutions and doctors involved in several experiments.

Last week, the group filed a $560 million class action suit on behalf of 141 terminally ill patients against Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and five doctors.

At least 75 patients suffering from fatal brain tumors were used as guinea pigs for clandestine radiation experiments without their consent, the suit alleges.

The group also is suing Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., on behalf of victims of secret plutonium injections that started in the mid-1940s.

, DataTimes