The Plutonium Files Read Online Free PDF Page B

monitoring or financial compensation.
    Between meetings, the members exchanged copious e-mail messages. For Faden, a handsome woman with curly, dark hair, chairing the meetings was exhausting work: ten minute breaks, hour lunches, then back to the table for more debate. “Totally draining,” she said after one of the marathon sessions. 7 “You have to be vigilant every single minute. This must be what it feels like if you’re a good judge or a good trial attorney.”
    Faden almost always lived up to her Solomon-like duties. She was courteous to the witnesses and solicitous of her colleagues. But there was an edgy quality to her and she could be extremely abrupt. One of her most important tasks was to keep the committee—a group of congenial, high-powered professionals such as herself—from becoming splintered as it worked in a fishbowl of public scrutiny for eighteen months. The committee’s recommendations would carry more weight if a unanimous report was delivered to President Clinton. Dissenting opinions, which were not infrequent on ethics panels, would weaken the report’s impact.
    Although the committee’s job was to analyze the unethical radiation experiments that had taken place during the Cold War, some of the members seemed uncomfortable when the victims actually appeared before them. The committee members had little knowledge of the nuclear weapons complex or its history, and they were understandably confused when the speakers began talking about atmospheric test series with names like Buster-Jangle, Tumbler-Snapper, and Upshot-Knothole. Oftentimes an embarrassing silence followed the testimony. Faden usually instructed the speakers to leave their records with the staff. Implicit inthe instructions was the promise that the cases would be investigated. But hundreds of thousands of records were already flowing in, and some of the documents, which often had taken the witnesses years to collect, were forwarded without much scrutiny to the National Archives when the committee was disbanded eighteen months later.

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A P RESIDENTIAL A POLOGY
    President Clinton formally accepted the Advisory Committee’s final report in a quiet ceremony at the White House on the morning of October 3, 1995. Hoisting the heavy blue volume into the air, he said, “This report I received today is a monumental document in more ways than one. 1 It is a very, very important piece of America’s history.”
    The president then condemned the experiments in straightforward language, leaving out all the caveats that muddied the committee’s report. He admitted that thousands of government-sponsored radiation experiments took place at hospitals, universities, and military bases throughout the United States during the Cold War. “While most of the tests were ethical by any standards, some were unethical, not only by today’s standards, but by the standards of the time in which they were conducted. They failed both the test of our national values and the test of humanity.”
    Many of the experiments were performed on the atomic veterans and on the sick and the poor, he admitted, without their having any idea of what was being done to them. “Informed consent means your doctor tells you the risk of the treatment you are about to undergo. In too many cases, informed consent was withheld. Americans were kept in the dark about the effects of what was being done to them. The deception extended beyond the test subjects themselves to encompass their families and the American people as a whole, for these experiments were kept secret. And they were shrouded not for a compelling reason of national security, but for the simple fear of embarrassment, and that was wrong.”
    The president acknowledged that the subterfuge used during theCold War had added to the mistrust many Americans feel toward their government. “Because of stonewalling and evasions in the past, times when a family member or a neighbor suffered an injustice and had nowhere to turn