COVERT EXPERIMENTATION AND COVER UPS

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12177&page=185
EXCERPTED FROM ABOVE LINK:

.cal care, ethics, education, and health-related human rights for all people. Otmar Kloiber, WMA secretary general, reported on inquiry7,8 that:
the World Medical Association entrusts it completely to its members to implement and monitor the implementation of WMA policy. The office of the WMA has neither the means nor the task to investigate the application in the countries. With the Declaration of Helsinki the implementation has been fairly successful but yet we don’t have reliable country data. For a country such as Iran we simply don’t know.
That implies that although the DoH has international authority, it is not known how well it is respected or even enforced across the globe. Dr. Kloiber continued: “A very strong role lies in the hand of the publishers of international professional journals. Requirements to give proof of the observation of the DoH certainly help to get those standards accepted.”
That last remark shows that overt research that is submitted for publication to (ideally) peer-reviewed professional journals must meet the highest standards of human research-subject protection as exemplified by the DoH and the CIOMS guidelines. Covert or classified military research findings will probably not be submitted for publication in the international literature, so they will escape the attention of publishers and peer reviewers. Thus, human-subjects protection in this sector of biomedical research cannot be guaranteed or assessed. Military use of advances in biomedical science is extremely difficult to investigate, because of the classified status of most such research. To safeguard their national security, nations that are actively pursuing biotechnology useful to the military are highly unlikely to advertise their accomplishments in the biomedical literature or elsewhere. Moreover, an inverse relationship seems apparent: countries that are most likely to be pursuing neuroscientific and other biotechnological developments for military or intelligence use are least likely to be direct or transparent about such activities.
The international community is concerned about the reactivation of the nuclear program in Iran. The recent visit of the Iranian president to the UN in New York has not relieved any of the fears associated with Iran’s development of nuclear power (Hoge, 2007). And the development of other forms of military technologies, such as neurotechnological devices, to build Iran’s national defense and perhaps even offense remains largely unknown. It poses a threat to international stability, and we are compelled to learn more about ethical regulations for biomedical research in Iran.

7
For this report, representatives of WMA, CIOMS, and the International Association for Bioethics were approached with specific questions about the scope of and international compliance with their guidelines. Only WMA responded to the committee’s request.

8
Otmar Kloiber, WMA, personal communication to committee member Jonathan Moreno on September 18, 2007.