Deseret News
Saturday, January 22, 1994

CHURCH WANTS U.S. TO PAY VICTIMS OF CHEMICAL TESTS

Without compensation, Scientologists say, "justice will remain undone."
_________________________________________________________________

By Lee Davidson, Washington Correspondent

Besides just compensating radiation victims, an international church says the government should also compensate victims of chemical and biological testing.

Thousands of open-air trials of chemical and germ weapons were conducted through the years at Dugway Proving Ground, as well as other public lands in Utah.

The Church of Scientology International - which helped disclose many germ and chemical tests in the 1980s - said Wednesday that such tests may have harmed many more people unknowingly than the radiation tests now in the public spotlight.

"Any comprehensive legislation regarding reparations to victims of secret tests targeting U.S. citizens must also include victims of CBW (chemical-biological warfare) testing," church public affairs director Sylvia Stanard said.

"Otherwise, justice will remain undone, and the federal government's responsibility in the matter will remain unfilled," she said in a letter to Rep. Philip Sharp, D-Ind., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power.

The church, using Freedom of Information Act requests, disclosed in the 1980s that the government spread such toxic substances as deadly whooping cough virus and the herbicide 245-T (which is linked to miscarriages) in major cities including Washington, D.C., New York City and San Francisco.

For example, the Army tested how the potentially dangerous bacillus subtilis germ would spread by breaking light bulbs full of it in New York subways. The CIA dropped whooping cough virus over Florida, which the church contends resulted in several infant deaths.

Deseret News probes through the years have also found several germ and chemical arms tests that could have affected Utahns.

For example, the newspaper last year reported that families that lived near a notorious 1968 nerve gas accident that killed 6,000 sheep in Skull Valley likely suffered related illnesses themselves for years afterward, even though the Army denied any connection.

In 1992, the newspaper reported that volunteers from the Seventh Day Adventist Church were exposed to open-air tests of germ weapons at Dugway - and sickened by them - without full disclosure of what the tests were for or what should be expected. Germ clouds drifted off base in those experiments.

The newspaper in 1991 also reported that Dugway conducted tests that dropped toxic cadmium sulfide over cities throughout the East in the 1950s to determine how germ weapons might spread. Experts say that was unnecessary and could have caused cadmium-related illnesses throughout the area.

The news has also reported through the years that Dugway conducted thousands of open-air trials - some of them off the base on public Utah lands - through the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Some testing with less-dangerous simulants continued afterward.