It may seem like there is no Nazi connection between what happened in Guatemala and what the Nazis did to the Jews. However, revoltingly, a footnote reference, which Raw Story cites in its write-up on these revealed experiments, explains how experimentation was boosted by what happened with the Nazis:
""Ironically, the biggest boost to such experimentation came as a result of the postwar Nuremberg trial of 20 Nazi doctors, which gave rise to the Nuremberg Code, a set of principles intended to prohibit human experimentation without subjects' consent. When defense lawyers implied that American scientists had conducted wartime research analogous to that of the Nazis, one prosecution witness, Andrew C. Ivy, cited malaria experiments involving Illinois prisoners as an example of "ideal," noncoercive research. Ivy's 1948 publication of his conclusions helped to institutionalize prison experimentation for the next quarter-century."
In other words, Americans made certain future human experimentation was "ideal" and that was how they made their experiments seem different from the Nazi doctors who were clearly responsible for the butchering of human life.
Reverby's article provides details of human experiments in American prisons:
"In 1944 the PHS had done experiments on prophylaxis in gonorrhea at the Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary in the United States. In this prison, the "volunteers" were deliberately injected with gonorrhea (which can be cultured), but the PHS had found it difficult to get the men to exhibit infection and the study was abandoned."
This was often done without the consent of prisoners.
Today, we may think we have abandoned practices of human experimentation that doctors and scientists sought to use to make advancements in medical science. The awful truth is that America has conducted experiments on detainees captured in the "war on terror" and experimented on them to figure out what torture and abuse causes "pain" and what doesn't and how long human beings can tolerate it before permanent damage is done to a human being.
On August 6, it was reported that during interrogations physicians were present to document the effects of torture. They were brought in to determine what the risks of waterboarding were to human beings. They understood that drowning, hypothermia, aspiration pneumonia, or laryngospasm could result from waterboarding but intentionally ignored "clinical experience/research" and assured lawyers "there was no "medical reason' to believe that waterboard [would] lead to physical pain."
The doctors actually went so far as to recommend adding salt to the water so patients would not experience hyponatremia, "a condition of low sodium levels in the blood caused by free water intoxication."
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