Radiation Panel Urges New Laws, But No Payments

After a two-year effort to clean out the U.S. government’s musty attic of nuclear secrets, a Clinton administration advisory panel wants new laws to discourage further human rights abuses.

Secret radiation experiments and intentional releases like Hanford’s 1949 Green Run, a deliberate release of a huge cloud of radioactive gas, harmed people and contributed to widespread government distrust, the panel concluded.

But the White House Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments also says there’s no need to compensate or even notify most of the people who took part - many unknowingly - in some 4,000 government-sanctioned Cold War radiation experiments.

Medical follow-ups are unnecessary because the experiments, while flunking today’s ethical standards, pose low long-term health risks, the panel said.

“The damage is not physical injury, although this, too, did occur in some cases, (but) the pain felt by people who believe that they or their loved ones were treated with disrespect,” the report said.

Some activists called the report a cop-out.

“The president of the United States is going to apologize to these people without making an effort to locate them. How can you do that?” said Wally Cummins, an attorney with the Human Experiments Litigation Project, a group of environmental law experts from four East Coast law firms.

The report is only a beginning, said Dan Guttman, the committee’s executive director. “We’ve identified a lot of experiments, and we are setting up a database for citizens to use,” he said.

The 1,000-page report is being given today to President Clinton in a White House ceremony.

A new Task Force on Radiation and Human Rights made up of downwinders and experiment participants has scheduled a series of nine press conferences from Washington, D.C., to Spokane today to critique the report, after receiving advance copies on Monday.

Clinton ordered the human experiments review in December 1993 after Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary condemned a series of 1940s experiments sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission in which 18 seriously ill civilians were injected deliberately with small doses of plutonium.

The plutonium case is one of three where the panel recommended compensation for families of the victims, some of whom lived for many years after the injections.

Others warranting compensation include a person injected with zirconium at about the same time as the plutonium experiments, and an experiment in which individuals were zapped with large doses of radiation over their entire bodies, also in the 1940s.

The government made “deliberate attempts” to hide these experiments “for the declared purpose of avoiding potential liability and public embarrassment,” the panel said.

It called them “assaults on privacy and individual rights.”

The identities of the people in the zirconium and whole-body radiation experiments are not known, the panel said.

Members were more ambivalent about remedies for other experiments.

They recommended an apology, and possibly paying medical bills, for people who got no medical benefit from radiation experiments.

That includes 131 Washington and Oregon prisoners whose testicles were bombarded with X-rays in the 1960s and early 1970s to find the dose that would make them sterile.

The report implies it will be hard for the prisoners in the Atomic Energy Commission-funded experiments to prove damages.

The risk to the prisoners of developing cancer as a result of the experiments is a tiny fraction of the 22 percent overall lifetime risk of dying from cancer, the panel said.

A leader among the Oregon and Washington prisoners is angry the panel saw no need for medical follow-up.

“They weren’t strong enough in offering medical follow-ups. This is something that needs to be dealt with,” said former Oregon State Penitentiary inmate Harold Bibeau of Portland.

Several prisoners say they have suffered pain, perhaps from the biopsies involved in the experiments, Bibeau said.

The committee also called for an apology to those who participated in experiments without being told of the risks, including retarded children fed radiation-laced cereal at a state school in Massachusetts.

People used unwittingly for research “were wronged even if they were not harmed … it is still a moral wrong to use people as a mere means without their consent,” the report says.

One recommendation could help Hanford downwinders.

The panel suggested broadening a 1990 law compensating people living downwind from the Nevada Test Site to include people around other weapons sites - if health studies indicate a comparable cancer risk.

The report calls for sweeping changes in government secrecy policies and an independent agency to prevent the abuses of the past.

“There may be more secrets in the future. There are secrets today.

“You need some independent group holding (government’s) feet to the fire,” Guttman said.

, DataTimes