With intent to harm: the CIA, schizophrenia and Denmark's children

This has been a delicious revelation in the human rights propaganda wars fed by the Biden Administration in its battles against authoritarian demons and abusive bogeymen. The Chinese Foreign Ministry was delighted in turning the tables on such cant, drawing upon the CIA-Danish project. In January, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian pointedly remarked that the US both apologise and offer compensation to the victims of such "secret experiments".

Such compensation would lead to a hefty bill for the US treasury. For decades, unethical and illegal experiments have been conducted by US authorities upon unsuspecting citizens. In 1932, the Tuskegee Institute, working with the US Public Health Service, commenced work on the natural history of syphilis that would do much to foster perennial suspicion of public health authorities and their ignoble intentions. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male began with 600 Black men, 399 with syphilis, 201 without. Informed consent was not sought, the men being told that they were being treated for "bad blood". Incentives were offered to the participants: free meals, burial insurance, gratis medical exams.

It took four decades before an advisory panel established by the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs found, with few traces of indignation, that the study had been "ethically unjustified," yielding results "disproportionately meager compared with known risks to human subjects involved."

Wishing to be a true international citizen in such matters, the US imperium proceeded to expand such experiments beyond its shores. In 1946, the US government was involved in medical trials affecting at least 5,128 unconsenting and uninformed Guatemalans, including children, orphans, child and adult prostitutes, leprosy patients, prisoners, soldiers, mental patients and Guatemalan Indians.

Of these, some 1,308 were infected with syphilis, gonorrhoea and chancroid. Others had serology tests conducted upon them. "The researchers," write Michael A. Rodriguez and Robert García, "systematically and repeatedly violated profoundly vulnerable individuals, some in the saddest and most despairing states, and grievously aggravated their suffering."

A subsequent report on the experiments by the Guatemalan government, Consentir el Daño: Experimentos Médicos de Estados Unidos en Guatemala (To Agree to the Harm: Medical Experiments by the United States in Guatemala) found that such acts constituted "a crime against humanity". The US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues shied away from such language in its two reports but conceded that the experiments would be "impossible" to conduct under current ethical frameworks.

The response from Washington to the survivors of the CIA-funded program at Copenhagen's Municipal Hospital is unlikely to be much more than a barely audible apology. Wennick and his similarly abused compatriots are probably best-off focusing their interest closer to home, targeting the connivance and complicity of those Danish officials who enabled this sordid enterprise to go ahead in the first place.