Since World War II, Big Wigs in Government haven't been too concerned about human life -- not even kids'.
For example, during much of the Cold War, American children were used in radiation and other experiments -- without their or their parents' knowledge.
http://www.radiationsurvivors.org/healtheffects.htm When Dorothy Legarreta, a California mother of nine, tried to do something about it, organizing the National Association of Radiation Surivors (NARS), she had a fatal single-car crash into a tree. No accident, reported the priest who said her funeral mass:
From Father Bill O'Donnell:...Dr. Dorothy Legarreta, co-founder of NARS, introduced us. When she died unexpectedly two years later, Father Bill officiated at her funeral Mass, saying she died in a one-car crash. I called him the next day, noting that he had not used the word “accident.” He said, “That’s right. Dorothy was murdered. That was no accident.”
http://www.catholicvoiceoakland.org/Archives/Archive011204L.html Dr. Mrs. Legarreta's "crime" was finding out that someone in the US Government was authorized to experiment on children.
THE RADIATION STORY
NO ONE WOULD TOUCH by Geoffrey Sea
Columbia Journalism Review March/April 1994
Sea is an Oakland-based writer, radiological health physicist, and international activist on radiation issues. He is the founder and director of In Vivo: Radiation Response and the Atomic Reclamation and Conversation Project of the Tides Foundation, and a co-founder of IRIS: International Radiation Injury Survivors.Suddenly, at the close of 1993, the public was bombarded with "news" about the feeding of radioactive substances to pregnant women and mentally retarded students, about the unethical irradiation of workers, soldiers, medical patients, and prison inmates, and about the government's own internal fears that these experiments had "a little of the Buchenwald touch." But the story that appeared in The Albuquerque Tribune (circulation: 35,000) on November 15-17, and was then projected into the national headlines by the forthright admissions and initiatives of Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary, was hardly new.
By 1984, activists and researchers across the country were systematically investigating the human experimentation program and attempting to bring it to public attention. By 1986, documentation of the program was massive, solid, and publicly available.
I am among those who persistently tried to get national media coverage of this outrageous example of government wrongdoing. To say that the media were reluctant to listen would be an understatement. The fact is that, for more than a decade, documentation was ignored and facts were misreported.
SNIP...
In California, Dorothy Legarreta, who had worked on the Manhattan Project as a laboratory technician, organizes the National Association of Radiation Survivors (NARS) and starts to write a book about human experimentation. In 1982, while examining the papers of Joseph Hamilton -- the scientist in charge of radiation experiments at the University of California -- at the library of the University of California at Berkeley, she comes across a 1950 memo written to Shields Warren, then director of the Atomic Energy Commission's Division of biology and medicine. The memo advised that large primates -- chimpanzees, for example -- be substituted for humans in the planned studies on radiation's cognitive effects (the very same program of experimentation that Dr. Saenger was to execute). The use of humans, Hamilton wrote, might leave the AEC open "to considerable criticism," since the experiments as proposed had "a little of the Buchenwald touch."
After Legarreta finds the so-called Buchenwald memo, Hamilton's papers are removed from public access by University of California administrators. Soon after this, Legarreta files a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Energy, asking for all documents concerning experiments in which humans were intentionally exposed to radioactive materials through injection or ingestion. Later that year, NARS receives a two-foot-high carton of documents in response -- documents that, for the first time, expose the widespread human experimentation program of the U.S. governmen
CONTINUED...
http://archives.cjr.org/year/94/2/radiation.asp A "little of the Buchenwald touch," indeed.