I don't know about most people, but I usually have a lot more to say than I can fit into 500 characters, not words but 500 spaces in an e mail. I am usually just getting warmed up by the time I reach 500 spaces. They need to allow more room for e mail or they should respond with an e mail address that you can send a longer e mail to.
Since I couldn't get it to the White House privately I will post if below, it is not a private e mail, it is part of my continuing advocacy of the veterans used in the Cold War experiments, at Edgewood Arsenal (chemical weapons and drugs) Fort Detrick (biological weapons) and Dugway, Deseret Proving Grounds and the SHAD/112 experiments that were mainly open air biological experiments that were done on land base at Dugway and Deseret and at sea with SHAD/112 althought the records for these experiments were controlled by Dugway, and are maintained there.
The letter is meant for the First Lady Michelle Obama, since she has made it her priority to help military families, Cold War veterans and their families and their widows are military families, many are old and dying, they need help NOW not in another 5 - 20 years or when ever the federal government can get around to it.
Maybe she can help the VA cut thru the red tape and demand help for these widows and the families of these disabled veterans. The needed evidence is listed in the letter and how this can be achieved in a simple matter.
To: TESTVET
Sent: 1/20/2009 11:52:15 A.M. Eastern Standard Time
Subj: some disabled veterans and their widows need your assistance to get heard
Dear Madam First Lady, I have heard that you are very military family oriented. I hope to see if that commitment is deep to all military families, or is it limited to the families of the current active duty troops. This nation has a long history of mistreatment of veterans and their families after military service.
Mrs Obama, I have told you all of this in order that you may understand why when I turned 18, I also enlisted in the US Army, it was part of my family history that the Bailey men served this nation in the uniform of the nation's Army and not of the other branches of service. My two brothers Melvin Jr, and Marvin Eaton Bailey also joined the Army when they turned of age, Melvin Jr went in July 1972, I in October 31, 1973 and Marvin enlisted in 1977.
Now to the real heart of the matter why I have written to you, for years I and other veterans have tried to get the Department of Defense and the Veteran Affairs to care for the enlisted men used in Cold War experimental programs, that were classified secret, and to this day some of the data remains top secret.
On January 7, 2009 six of the veterans and the Vietnam veterans of America filed suit against the CIA, DOD and the Army in an attempt to get the medical care and other benefits they feel they are entitled to. http://www.vawatchdog.org/...
They have created a web site here http://www.edgewoodtestvets.org/
What This Case Is About
Plaintiffs seek declaratory and injunctive relief only – no monetary damages – and Plaintiffs seek redress for 25 years of diabolical experiments followed by over 30 years of neglect, including:
the use of troops to test nerve gas, psychochemical's, and thousands of other toxic chemical or biological substances and perhaps most gruesomely, the insertion of septal implants in the brains of subjects in a ghastly series of mind control experiments that went awry;
the failures to secure informed consent and other widespread failures to follow the precepts of U.S. and international law regarding the use of human subjects, including the 1953 Wilson Directive and the Nuremberg Code;
an almost fanatical refusal to satisfy their legal and moral obligations to locate the victims of their gruesome experiments or to provide health care or compensation to them;
the deliberate destruction of evidence and files documenting their illegal actions, actions which were punctuated by fraud, deception, and a callous disregard for the value of human life.
The Complaint asks the Court to determine that Defendants’ actions were illegal and that Defendants have a duty to notify all victims and to provide them with health care going forward.
Mrs. Obama, I understand these men's frustrations however, I feel this lawsuit is certainly to fail, due to at some point the federal government is going to use the "Feres Act" as a defense to not be held accountable for whatever happened to these men while on active duty.
Mrs Obama, if Justice Sandra Day OConnor felt these men were due compensation due to being abused by these experiments, then I would have to acknowledge that as a human being she got this call right. This is not a liberal issue nor a conservative issue, it a matter of right and wrong. What occurred at Edgewood Arsenal, Fort Detrick and Dugway Proving grounds and on the oceans in the boats of Operation SHAD/112 that these men were not given "informed consent" which is the root of all of this. They were bribed and lied to, in order to get them to sign "consent forms" which we all know now were not credible, nor worth the paper they were written on.
The recruiters for the volunteers were lying to the men when they stated there would be no long term medical problems, because they did not know. They were just following orders from above. They were told to get 50 men for every cycle of experiments, they promised the volunteers, four day work weeks, no extra duties that were normally done back then by lower enlisted men, guard duty, Kitchen Police (KP) Charge of Quarters or Charge of Quarters Runner (E4 and below) that we would have three day passes every week, and we would not be restricted to within 50 miles of base as was normal at that time. Since we were allowed our automobiles we were encouraged to go sightseeing to New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC. We were also paid two dollars a day TDY pay which doesn't sound like a lot of money now, but in 1974 we were making about 200 a month, so the nine days travel pay and per diem both ways and mileage added up to nearly 4000.00 dollars per man from Fort Lewis, there were ten of us selected. That was a huge amount of cash at one time, back then.
In the subsequent years, the Department of Defense has tried to ignore the men used in these experiments, there were no funds budgeted to do follow up heath studies to determine to see if there were any medical problems related to the exposures of the 254 different substances they used on the 7120 men of the Edgewood experiments, the substances ranged from Mustard agents, Sarin,VX, BZ, Scopolomine, Ecstacy, THC and other stronger derivatives of THC.
On a side note here it must be mentioned that in 1975 when the Human experiments were stopped at Edgewood Arsenal that Donald Rumsfeld was being named as the new Secretary of Defense and Richard Cheney was named the Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford. They sat on the National security Council and knew of the human experiments that violated the Nuremberg Codes of 1947 which they had inherited from President Richard Nixon, the "med vol program" at Edgewood Arsenal that I was being used in at the time President Nixon resigned in August 1974. They could have stopped the program voluntarily based on the facts that it was illegal, they chose to keep it going. The following summer the Department of the Army Inspector General released the Report on Human Experimentation and once Congress got their hands on it and the newspapers started publishing it, the program was halted after more than twenty years of experiments.
There were two reports one by the National Institute of Health (NIH) which of course is funded by the American taxpayers, it showed medical problems from cardiovascular problems, pulmonary problems, gastrointestinal problems and neurological issues. This report was published on January 1, 1994 http://www.ehponline.org/...
Mrs Obama there is also this study that was based on more than 30 years of treatment of soldiers by the Doctor who wrote the report, they had been exposed to low levels of Sarin and Mustard Agents while handling weapons for the German Army during WW2, they were Wermacht soldiers, this however does not make the health problems they developed irrelevant, regardless of who they are, they show the long and many medical problems this treating physician found in these men. The report was published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) they are the international agency that oversees the biological weapons treaties the nations of the world have signed, they are the watchdogs, funded by all of the nations that signed the Bio-Weapons Treaty that President Nixon signed in 1972 and that Congress ratified in 1972. Their research is normally accepted thru out the scientific community, except by the Pentagon, why?
http://www.sipri.org/...
We were told that we could not tell anyone about the experiments, not our parents, nor spouses, brothers or sisters, not even doctors that would treat us in the future. Many of the veterans carried this secret to their graves and their families were never told of their volunteering for these tests. DOD has been claiming since 1991 when 60 Minutes of CBS exposed this experimental program that had roots back to WW2 and the MKULTRA LSD experiments that partly took place at Edgewood Arsenal.
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Acting Secretary of the VA Anthony Principi told CBS, that these men would be found and given medical care and or compensation if they deserved it. It never happened. In November 2004 a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, David Zeman reopened the story and he contacted the Secretary of the VA again it was Anthony Principi, he stated to Mr Zeman that he thought that is had been taken care of years ago, but that he would get right on it.
In January 2005 President Bush asked for and was given Sec Principi's resignation and he then appointed Secretary James Nicholson as the VA Secretary. On April 28, 2005 Congresman Lane Evans and Ted Strickland (now Governor of Ohio) had an investigator from the House VA Committee who had all the proper security clearances go to Fort Detrick, Edgewood Arsenal and Dugway to obtain the names of the men used in all of these classified Cold War experiments, they sent the lists to Secretary James Nicholson asking that he use the resources of the VA to locate these men and get them the help they deserved.
On October 5, 2005 he replied to the two Congressman, that their lists were useless and he had sent them to Secretary Rumsfeld at DOD and that the SHAD Office would be put in charge of locating the veterans. They expected it would take until 2011 for them to accomplish this task.
Mrs, Obama, I am already 100% P&T service connected disabled veteran, there is nothing for me to gain by writing you. I am not writing on my behalf. I am writing to ask for your help in getting the Veterans Administration and DOD to help the widows and the disabled veterans, who the government refuse to help, even know 35-55 years later.
From the evidence shown in the Jan 1994 NIH Study on chemical weapons and the 1975 SIPRI study written by Dr Karl Heinz Lohs, that Secretary Shinseki can make the known medical problems presumptive for the men of the Cold War experiments. Since many of the experiments were done as double blind experiments, some were never told what they were being exposed to, and the destruction of much of the CIA documentation regarding the experiments, not all of the information may be available.
What is known at this point:
7120 enlisted men used at Edgewood Arsenal the FY2000 study showed 4022 survivors of the men aged 45-65 at the time, and that 54% of the survivors were disabled. Using IRS, VA and Social Security databases 3098 of the men could not be located, men aged 45-65 are either paying taxes, drawing government benefits either a VA check or a Social Security or SSD check, so one can only assume the 3098 men are deceased.That would be 40% of the volunteers, an excessively high rate for men that aged.
There is very poor or non existent data on the 2300 men of Operation White Coat of Fort Detrick and the same for the 6500 men of Operation SHAD/112.
The one factor that is relevant to all of these men is the fact that the department of defense has been less than forthcoming and honest about the experiments and exposures, getting anything out of them is like pulling teeth.
These veterans and their spouses deserve the benefit of the doubt after years of denial and neglect by the government. The Veterans Administration and DOD have broken promise after promise to these men since at least 1991 and Congress has refused to hold them accountable.
Mrs Obama, you are known for your care and compassion for military families. These spouses deserve the truth at least after all these decades of deceit by the DOD and VA. If they are due DIC benefits and or CHAMPVA medical care, they should be awarded it. The government has saved millions of dollars by ignoring these men and women since 1975 when Congress learned of the classified experiments.
Many of the veterans have died without ever being recognized by their nation for risking their lives in these experiments. The promises of the recruiters for the programs retired or went on to better lives, the volunteers have paid dearly, physically and mentally for decades, when do they get help and from whom?
Mrs Obama, you can get your husband our new President, and the new Secretary of the VA General Shinseki to take care of this matter, by just declaring the medical problems shown in those 2 documents above as presumptive to the Cold War Medical Volunteers. It would right a wrong that should have been taken care of years ago.
Like I stated I have nothing to gain, I am service connected, I am writing this for the widows that have never been told of their husbands sacrifice, because DOD and the VA refuse to notify them.Will you please help them?
I hope the new First Lady will take this matter into her book of things to do, I know there are many widows that deserve to know the truth after all these years.