Posted on 04/28/2003 1:08:28 PM PDT by quidnunc
With all of the hand-wringing over Canada's decision not to get involved in the American-led invasion of Iraq, one little detail has almost escaped public notice. By refusing to participate, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has done more to protect Canadians against terrorist attacks than George W. Bush has done for the United States by attacking.
After the Bali nightclub bombing that killed more than 200 people, including 88 Australians, it started to look as though any and all Westerners could be the target of Al-Qa'ida attacks. Now, thanks to our government's decision to stay out of the war, we can be confident that Canadians are much less likely to be selected as targets by Islamist terrorists.
Everyone seems to take it for granted that tourists around the world can sew little Canadian flags on their backpacks and get treated to a much warmer welcome. We sometimes forget that this love of Canadians isn't part of the fabric of the universe. And it's not because we're such nice folks and everyone in the world somehow knows it. The reason people like Canadians so much is that we refused to participate in the Vietnam War. The moral standing that we enjoy in the world today stems almost entirely from this decision.
When the U.S. starts throwing its military weight around, Canada's resistance makes us very popular with the rest of the world. Setting aside the pros and cons of the American invasion of Iraq, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of the world's population opposed it. Canada is very closely associated, in people's minds, with the United States. Thus, the fact that we refused to knuckle under to American pressure greatly improves our moral standing.
So regardless of whether one agrees with Chrétien's decision or not, everyone should recognize that he has, in effect, made the world a much safer place for Canadians. He has helped to ensure that future generations of backpackers will be able to display their little Canadian flags and once again be received with greater kindness by strangers.
Cynical? Maybe, but still true. Our puny military contribution to the war would have had no effect whatsoever upon its outcome. Yet the impact of Chrétien's decision to stay out has been enormous and has done far more to enhance our security. All the footage of tanks and explosions should not lead us to forget that political action can be vastly more influential than military.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at canada.com ...
April 28, 2003
Committed and Abused: Were Quebec's Orphans Used as Guinea Pigs?
By Christine Hahn Special to Freedom
For many people, sitting near a body of water is a relaxing experience. For Clarina Duguay of Quebec, it inspires terrifying memories from her childhood—memories so painful she can scarcely find words to express them more than 50 years later.
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The shy, soft-spoken, 65-year-old Duguay is one of the Canadian province of Quebec’s infamous Duplessis Orphans, a group of more than 5,000 children whose parents handed them over to Catholic orphanages during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, promised their children would receive a “good education.”
Instead, psychiatrists falsely declared them mentally ill or severely retarded and warehoused them in psychiatric hospitals, enabling the Quebec government under former Premier Maurice Duplessis to receive a bounty of federal funding for their care.
To date, investigations into the Duplessis Orphans have focused primarily on actions of Catholic Church officials who managed the orphanages and psychiatric hospitals.
But in an apparent move to stymie any further probing into past crimes or misconduct and those responsible, on September 26, 2001, the Quebec government passed legislation to bar Orphans from taking legal action against the Quebec government or Catholic Church officials, in exchange for a paltry settlement of $10,000 per person. If an Orphan refuses to sign the agreement, he forfeits his right to even that compensation.
As a result, Orphans say, one key group never held accountable for its fundamental role in their abuse may now get away with it too: the psychiatrists who signed bogus orders labeling them “mentally ill”, committing them to a living hell.
Human Guinea Pigs?
The need for further inquiry into the case of the Orphans is apparent, as an investigation supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Washington, D.C., has revealed something even more sinister on the part of psychiatrists than signing away the lives of normal, healthy children as mental misfits, invoking the specter of psychiatric programs under the Nazi regime in Germany.
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The Orphans’ medical records and recollections of the Orphans themselves suggest the children were exploited as human guinea pigs for a new drug, chlorpromazine.
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Chlorpromazine—known today by its trade names of Largactil in Canada and Thorazine in the United States—was synthesized in France before World War II for use as an anesthetic. In the years since, it has been invested with such epithets as the “chemical billy club” or “chemical lobotomy” because of its mental and physical consequences—including a “complication” known as tardive dyskinesia, a central nervous system disorder that includes involuntary, grotesque facial and body movements.
For the children, the drug submerged them in a nightmare from which they could never awaken. The purpose for the drugging and the extent and consequences of testing, including deaths, are continuing to be investigated by Freedom.
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Some of the Orphans interned at St. Jean-de-Dieu Hospital remember being treated by Ewen Cameron, the psychiatrist who conducted appalling and inhuman experiments on human subjects at Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University as part of the notorious “mind-control” programs of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from the late 1940s through the early- to mid-1960s.
Bruno Roy, president of the Duplessis Orphans Committee, examined records of hundreds of Orphans, and said that Cameron’s name, indeed, showed up in children’s records.
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Cameron was known to use chlorpromazine in his experiments, combining drugs, electric shock, lobotomies and other savage incursions on patients.
His associate Heinz Lehmann, who did undergraduate and postgraduate teaching at McGill and became clinical director at Allan Memorial in 1958, is regarded as the psychiatrist who discovered the use of chlorpromazine on psychiatric patients in 1953 (see accompanying story).
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Yet today, evidence reveals the Duplessis Orphans, railroaded into psychiatric hospitals as retarded and mentally ill, were being administered the powerful drug as early as 1947 with debilitating effects.
As defenseless children, unaware of their rights and without a voice, the horrifying truth about their experiences were hidden from public view.
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Wasted Lives
Two years after arriving at her orphanage in 1946, Clarina Duguay was transferred to St. Julien Hospital, an insane asylum more than 1,000 kilometers from her home.
Duguay experienced appalling treatment at St. Julien.
“They would plunge our heads into ice-cold water if we did something wrong,” she said, adding that to this day, water terrifies her. She described being tied to a bed with a collar, and having to scrub floors seemingly without end.
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Duguay was told by the nuns that her mother had become psychotic and had died as a patient in another psychiatric hospital. In fact, her mother died of tuberculosis two years after the nuns claimed she had passed away.
Two weeks after arriving at St. Julien, Duguay vividly recalls being given medicine that the nuns said would make her sleep. The medicine, however, did much more than that.
“It made me into a zombie,” she said. “I had no energy, I was always feeling sleepy, had a hard time getting up. I was getting the drug every night. I have a hard time remembering, which I think is because of the drug.”
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Duguay and other Orphans say that while the province failed to provide them with records from their first years at their institutions, the drug they received was the same one all along, identified as chlorpromazine in later records.
Francois Lantagne was a frightened, 9-year-old boy in 1946 when he was sent to St. Michel Archange psychiatric hospital. Born out of wedlock, his mother did not have enough money to raise him.
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Lantagne was regularly placed in a straitjacket and subjected to ice-cold showers. Like Duguay, he received chlorpromazine every night at bedtime.
Today, Lantagne has been on welfare for 35 years.
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“They have wasted my life,” he said.
Joseph Martin was only 5 1/2 years old in 1938 when his parents placed him in Montreal’s Buisonnet Institute. Shortly after that, he was transferred to St. Jean-De-Dieu Hospital, where he remained until 1956. Martin said he was given a variety of “purple and pink pills” and chlorpromazine.
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Alice Quinton said she started to receive chlorpromazine when she was 13—three times a day by pill and injection.
“I felt sleepy all the time, like when you get operated on,” she said. “When I woke up, I did not know where I was. I was having nightmares and my heart was always beating fast. I felt anxious.”
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The drugging continued behind the walls of St. Julien until Quinton was 23.
Justice Sought
Rod Vienneau, Clarina Duguay’s husband, investigated his wife’s past and said that from the early 1990s, when the Orphans began fighting for justice, they all told the same story: from the time they arrived at the psychiatric facilities until they left, they received chlorpromazine.
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When they requested their medical records, the early ones—during the period the drug would have been undergoing testing—were not provided to them, said Vienneau.
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However, he said, “every one of the Orphans has told the same story. They all say that the drug was the same one they were given all along. They have no reason to lie. Three thousand people cannot all be lying.”
Vienneau said the Orphans have demanded that the psychiatrists involved—some of whom are still living—be charged with crimes against humanity.
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“We would like to see real justice for the thousands of innocent young children and survivors who day after day had to endure unimaginable torture, being used as guinea pigs for experimental drugs at the hands of criminal psychiatrists and religious orders,” said Vienneau.
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Hundreds of Unexplained Deaths
Vienneau compared the cold water plunges and the drug use to experiments performed on children in Nazi-run concentration camps in Europe.
“This has been a conspiracy of silence from the beginning,” he said. “The province of Quebec was just another Auschwitz.”
Michel Lebel, a former Montreal police officer who specialized in investigating cases against children, said the crimes against the Orphans went far beyond drugging and physical abuse. Lebel has discovered unexplained deaths of hundreds of Orphans and many examples of bogus paperwork in their cases.
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When children died, he explained, as yet unidentified persons within the psychiatric system simply came up with phony new identities, fabricating records to replace those deceased so funding could continue. “Some of these kids died and were reborn 10 times,” said Lebel, now a freelance journalist.
Compounding such deception in cases of those who died, he said, is the longtime maltreatment of survivors. According to Lebel, “This was an organized crime against humanity.”
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What Vienneau, Lebel and others point to are parallels between occurrences in Canada and Germany, where orphans were warehoused in psychiatric facilities and victimized as experimental subjects. The parallel is drawn not to Nazi atrocities, but rather to the crimes of German psychiatrists in their institutions. As it is now widely known, the eugenics theories in vogue in Nazi-run Germany were not limited to that country.
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The practice of removing “undesirables” from Canadian society was already firmly in place before the Duplessis Orphans. In Alberta, starting in 1928, close to 3,000 youth deemed “mentally unfit” were surgically altered without their knowledge or consent under the Sexual Sterilization Act. The sterilizations stopped and the law was repealed in 1972 after the atrocities were exposed by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Canada.
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Peter Breggin, psychiatrist, author and founder of the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology in Bethesda, Maryland, said that “medical murder” found support at the highest levels of Canadian and American psychiatry. He points to examples like influential psychiatrist Foster Kennedy, who at the 1941 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association called for the extermination of retarded children over the age of five.
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Breggin said Kennedy’s goal was to relieve the “utterly unfit” and “nature’s mistakes” of the “agony of living” and to save their parents and the state the cost of caring for them.
These speciously compassionate phrases were virtually the same ones used to describe the Orphans, said Michel Lebel.
A Call for Open Records
University of British Columbia Professor Emeritus Sally Rogow wrote in Hitler’s Unwanted Children that although it has been widely held that Hitler’s regime killed children with actual disabilities, in fact thousands of healthy orphans in Germany were murdered or used for drug experiments.
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In both Quebec and Germany, the truth behind what happened to the children was covered up with phony paperwork and bogus reports to parents by psychiatrists. Children were moved without informing families.
In Germany, wrote Rogow, “Children who were transferred to state institutions from religious homes and schools were moved from place to place without informing their families where they were located. Many parents could not keep track of their children.”
Clarina Duguay’s father, who lived in Cape D’Espoir, Quebec, was not even aware his daughter had been transferred from the orphanage to St. Julien Hospital, a psychiatric facility 1,000 kilometers away, until she escaped several years later.
Rogow also reported that German children were used as guinea pigs in drug experiments.
“Many a doctoral dissertation was based on the experiments performed on living, conscious children. ... Children were injected with drugs, sugar and other chemicals to test their reactions. Generous research grants were given to support this kind of research,” she wrote.
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The Duplessis Orphans were given chlorpromazine starting in the late 1940s and continuing into the 1960s, as well as other drugs.
In Germany, when children died in the euthanasia institutions, grief-stricken parents tried to bring legal action against them. In response, the Nazi government issued a legal decree in 1941 preventing them from doing so.
So the passage of legislation in Quebec on September 26 brings yet another chilling analogy.
“Enforced secrecy is contrary to democracy and the spirit of freedom,” said Bob Dobson-Smith of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.
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In the case of the Duplessis Orphans, he noted, those whom secrecy benefits most are the psychiatrists accountable for confining and treating the Orphans. “What is needed,” he said, “is to open {all} records and find out what happened, who was responsible, who knew about any mistreatment or crimes, and when they knew it. Only then can we bring appropriate parties to justice and finally close this chapter in our history.”
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It was in 1985 that an Air India Flight from Vancouver to New Delhi blew up. A suitcase bomb was aboard. 329 innocent souls died over the Irish Sea.
Flawed thinking here about Canada being protected. If this was followed through logically, the two accused should be set free Now. They are of a huge Sikh community in British Columbia.
They seek a separate state, to secede from India- Khalistan. Following through, one could say, if these terrorists are punished- more bombings will follow. The Canadian Government obviously is determined to crush their OWN domestic terrorism- after all 25 years in jail,which they may get, ain't appeasment.
Yes, cynical is a good word. Craven also. How about just plain yellow?
The author's cowardly assumptions will turn out to be wrong in the long run. The U.S. is demonstrating that if you terrorrize here, you will die. If you support those who terrorize here, you will die. The world is starting to take notice that terror in the U.S. has sever adverse consequences. Canada, on the other hand, through appeasement, has made itself a potential target. It lacks the ability to strike back at terrorism itself, and has stupidly disacossiated itself from the one country who is willing and able to strike back.
There are two ways to avoid being picked on. Be big and strong yourself or have a big and strong best friend. Can Canada call itself our best friend in the war on terrot?
I'm sure Al Queda would go out of their way to make sure they don't kill any Canadians, this is probably what a lot of the French frogs think too. They don't realize they too are infidels.
Only in the short run. It's the equivalent of a hunter tackling a grizzly while several nearby environmentalists run away: if the bear kills the hunter, he isn't going to pass on eating the environmentalists later that afternoon just because they were polite enough not to shoot at him.
By demonstrating extreme cowardice they are hoping if they just let the terrorists transition through Canada on their way to the US then that's OK with them, time to CLOSE the BORDER.
Edmund Burke's famous statement: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" has already been alluded to. Another of my favorite quotations is even more to the point regarding these mealy-mouthed swine and that comes from Dante Alighieri, who said: "The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, remain neutral.
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