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SPEARHEADING SOCIAL REFORM
Exposing Government Abuses
A key area of concern to the Church of Scientology has been the subject of government testing on unwitting human subjects, including experiments with harmful chemicals and other substances. Such investigations have exposed not only how the civil rights of test victims were violated, but how illegal activities by individuals in the responsible agencies were never prosecuted.
Scientologists have campaigned to discover and expose harmful tests with LSD and other substances carried out by government agencies. As a result of this campaign the United States Army announced a program to locate and notify those who had been unknowing participants in these covert mind-control operations. A press wire at the time stated that the “Army’s action followed a concerted campaign by the Church of Scientology, which located a number of veterans who underwent experiments with LSD and hallucinogenic drugs.”
Church investigations of government chemical and biological warfare tests included the 1980 exposure of “Operation Big City,” five consecutive days of covert biological warfare experiments conducted in 1956 by the CIA with the cooperation of US Army personnel.
In 1979, the Church released an analysis of CIA records which revealed that the agency had sponsored biological warfare tests in Florida in 1955. These tests were linked to an outbreak of whooping cough in that state which claimed the lives of twelve people, half of them children under the age of one. Also that year, Freedom magazine was first to break the story of how the CIA had spent more than $150,000 to continue biological warfare work in apparent defiance of a 1969 presidential order. The documents showed that the CIA continued to spend money through 1972 on a project intended for the development and testing of biological warfare “harassment systems” and for the “large-scale production of microorganisms,” despite the 1969 order, which banned the production and stockpiling of biological weapons. Another Freedom article in 1984 revealed that the US Army had conducted secret biological warfare experiments on American citizens.
 
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