GENTECH archive 8.96-97
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NutraPoison (fwd)
- To: sdef! <savage@easynet.co.uk>
- Subject: NutraPoison (fwd)
- From: Betty Martini <betty@noel.pd.org>
- Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 14:16:13 -0400 (EDT)
- cc: gentech@tribe.ping.de
- Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Dear Andy: Here is the article you wanted.
Regards,
Betty
NutraSweet [TM]
The NutraPoison
by Alex Constantine
(Reprinted by with Permission from Prevailing Winds)
I recognized my two selves: a crusading idealist and a cold, granitic
believer in the law of the jungle.
-Edgar Monsanto Queeny, Monsanto chairman, 1943-63,
*The Spirit of Enterprise*, 1934.
The FDA is ever mindful to refer to aspartame, widely known as
NutraSweet, as a "food additive"-never a "drug." A "drug" on the label of a
Diet Coke might discourage the consumer. And because aspartame is classified a
food additive, adverse reactions are not reported to a federal agency, nor is
continued safety monitoring required by law.1 NutraSweet is a non-nutritive
sweetener. The brand name is misnomer. Try Non-NutraSweet.
Food additives seldom cause brain lesions, headaches, mood alterations,
skin polyps, blindness, brain tumors, insomnia and depression, or erode
intelligence and short-term memory. Aspartame, according to some of the most
capable scientists in the country, does. In 1991 the National Institutes of
Health, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, published a
bibliography, *Adverse Effects of Aspartame*, listing not less than 167
reasons to avoid it.2
Aspartame is an rDNA derivative, a combination of two amino acids
(long supplied by a pair of Maryland biotechnology firms: Genex Corp. of
Rockville and Purification Engineering in Baltimore.)3 The Pentagon once
listed it in an inventory of prospective biochemical warfare weapons submitted
to Congress.4 But instead of poisoning enemy populations, the "food additive"
is currently marketed as a sweetening agent in some 1200 food products.
In light of the chemo-warfare implications, the pasts of G.D. Searle and
aspartame are ominous. Established in 1888 on the north side of Chicago, G.D.
Searle has long been a fixture of the medical establishment. The company
manufactures everything from prescription drugs to nuclear imaging optical
equipment.5
Directors of G.D. Searle include such geopolitical heavy-hitters as Andre
M. de Staercke, Reagan's ambassador to Belgium and Reuben Richards, an
executive vice president at Citibank. Also Arthur Wood, the retired CEO of
Sears, Roebuck & C disgorged by the clan of General Robert E. Wood, wartime
chairman of the America First Committee.6 America Firsters, organized by
native Nazis cloaked as isolationists, were quietly financed by the likes of
Sullivan & Cromwell's Allen Dulles and Edwin Webster of Kidder, Peabody.7
Until the acquisition by Monsanto in 1985, the firm's chairman was
William L. Searle, a Harvard graduate, Naval reservist and-a grim irony in
view of aspartame's adverse effects-an officer in the Army Chemical Corps in
the early 1950s, when the same division tested LSD on groups of human subjects
in concert with the CIA.8 The chief of the Chemical Warfare Division at this
time was Dr. Laurence Laird Layton, whose son Larry was convicted for the
murder of Congressman Leo Ryan at Jonestown ("Come to the pavilion! What a
legacy! "). Jonestown, of course, bore a remarkable likeness to a
concentration camp, and kept a full store of pharmaceutical drugs. (The
Jonestown pharmacy was stocked with a variety of behavior control drugs:
qualudes, valium, morphine, demerol and 11,000 doses of thorazine-a better
supply, in fact, than the Guyanese government's own, not to mention a surfeit
of cyanide.9)
Dr. Layton was married to the daughter of Hugo Phillip, a German banker
and stockbroker representing the likes of Siemens & Halske, the makers of
cyanide for the Final Solution, and I.G. Farben, the manufacturer of a lethal
nerve gas put to the same purpose.10 Dr. Layton,a Quaker, developed a form of
purified uranium used to set off the Manhattan Project's first self-sustaining
chain reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942 by his wife's German-born
Uncle, Dr. James Franck. At Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, Dr. Layton
concentrated his efforts, as did I.G. Farben, on the development of nerve
gasses.11
Dr. Layton later defended his participation in the Army's chemical
warfare section: "You can blow people to bits with bombs, you can shoot them
with shells, you can atomize them with atomic bombs, but the same people think
there's something terrible about poisoning the air and letting people breath
it. Anything having to do with gas warfare, chemical warfare, has this taint
of horror on it, even if you only make people vomit."12
Nazis and chemical warfare are recurring themes in the aspartame story.
Currently, the chief patent holder of the sweetener is the Monsanto Co., based
in St. Louis. In 1967, Monsanto entered into a joint venture with I.G.
Farbenfabriken, the aforementioned financial core of the Hitler regime and the
key supplier of poison gas to the Nazi racial extermination program. After the
Holocaust, the German chemical firm joined with American counterparts in the
development of chemical warfare agents and founded the "Chemagrow Corporation"
in Kansas City, Missouri, a front that employed German and American
specialists on behalf of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps.13
Dr. Otto Bayer, I.G.'s research director, had a binding relationship
with Monsanto chemists.14 In the post-war period, Dr. Bayer developed and
tested chemical warfare agents with Dr. Gerhard Schrader, the Nazi concocter
of Tabun, the preferred nerve gas of the SS. Schrader was also an
organophosphate pioneer, and tested the poison on populated areas of West
Germany under the guise of killing insects.15 Schrader's experiments reek
suspiciously of the ongoing aerial application of malathion-developed by Dr.
Schrader, a recruit of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service when Germany
surrendered-in present-day Southern Califonia.16
Another bridge to I.G. Farben was Monsanto's acquisition of American
Viscose, long owned by the England's Courtauld family. As early as 1928, the
U.S. Commerce Department issued a report critical of the Courtauld's ties to
I.G. Farben and the Nazi party.17 Incredibly, George Courtauld was handed an
appointment as director of personnel for England's Special Operations
Executive, the wartime intelligence service, in 1940.18 A year later, with the
exhaustion of British military financial reserves, American Viscose, worth
$120 million was put on the block in New York. The desperate British treasury
received less than half that amount from the sale, brokered by Siegmund
Warburg, among others. 19 Monsanto acquired the company in 1949.20
The Nazi connection to Monsanto crops up again on the board of directors
with John Reed, a former crony of "Putzi" Hanfstangl, a Harvard-bred emigre to
Germany who talked Hitler out of committing suicide in 1924 and contributed to
the financing of *Mein Kampf*. 21 Reed is also chairman of Citibank and long
a confederate of the CIA. According to a lawsuit filed by San Francisco
attorney Melvin Belli, Reed was an instigator, with Ronald Reagan, James Baker
and Margaret Thatcher, of the "Purple Ink Document," a plan to finance CIA
covert operations with wartime Japanese gold stolen from a buried Philippine
hoard.22
Other covert military connections to Monsanto include Dr. Charles Allen
Thomas, chairman of the Monsanto Board, 1965[?]. Dr. Thomas directed a group
of scientists during WW Il in the refinement of plutonium for use in the
atomic bomb. In the postwar period Monsanto operated Tennessee's Oak Ridge
National Laboratories for the Manhattan Project.23 (Manhattan gestated with
the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies, where Lethal doses of radiation
were tested on 200 unwary cancer patients, turning them into "nuclear
calibration devices" gratis the AEC and NASA, until 1974. 24) Nazi scientists
and a 7,000 ton stockpile of uranium were delivered to the Project by its
security and counter-intelligence director, Col. Boris Pash, a G2 designate to
the CIA's Bloodstone program-and the *eminence grise* of PB/7, a clandestine
Nazi unit that, according to State Department records, conducted a regimen of
political assassinations and kidnappings in Europe and the Eastern bloc.25
Monsanto Director William Ruckelshaus was an acting director of the FBI
under Richard Nixon, a period in the Bureau s history marred by COINTELPRO
outrages, including assassinations. Nixon subsequently appointed Ruckelshaus
to the position of EPA director, a nagging irony given his ties to industry
(Browning Ferris and Cummins Engine Co.). CIA counterintelligentsia on the
Monsanto board include Stansfield Turner, a former Director of Central
Intelligence, and Earle H. Harbison, an Agency information specialist for
nineteen years.
Harbison is also a director of Merrill Lynch, and thus raises the
spectre of CIA drug dealing. ln 1984 President Ronald Reagan's Commission on
Organized Crime concluded that Merrill Lynch employed couriers "observed
transferring enormous amounts of cash through investment houses and banks in
New York City to Italy and Switzerland. Tens of millions of dollars in heroin
sales in this country were transferred over seas." Merrill Lynch invested the
drug proceeds in the New bullion market before making the offshore
transfers. 26
As might be expected in view of Monsanto's Nazi, chemical w are and CIA
ties, NutraSweet is a can of worms unprecedented in the American food
industry. The history of the product is laden with flawed and fabricated
research findings and, when necessary to further the product along, blatant
lies-the basis of FDA approval and the incredulity of independent medical
researchers.
Senator Metzenbaum described the FDA as "the handmaiden'' of the drug
industry in 1985, but she comports under all regimes. In the Clinton
administration for example, Mike Taylor was graced with the position of deputy
director of the FDA. Taylor is a cousin of Tipper Gore, Vice President Albert
Gore's wife, and once an outside counsel to Monsanto. (Gore voted with Senate
conservatives in 1985 against aspartame labelling.)
Under the tutelage of the Clinton administration, one Chicago reporter
quipped, the FDA strictly enforces one "unwritten" violation of law-failure to
bribe.
Granitic Believers
G.D. Sear!e, the pharmaceutical firm that introduced NutraSweet, worked
symbiotically with federal and congressional officials, bribed investigators
when violations of law were exposed, *anything* to move aspartame to market.
As far back as 1969, an internal Searle "strategy memo" concluded the company
must obtain FDA approval to outpace firms competing for the artificial
sweetener market. Another memo in December 1970 urged that FDA officials were
to be "brought into a subconscious spirit of participation" with Searle.27
To that end, with enormous profits at stake, the pharmaceutical house set out
on a long struggle to transform the Pentagon's biochemical warfare agent into
"the taste Mother Nature intended.
The official story is that aspartame was discovered in 1966 by a
scientist developing an ulcer drug (not a "food additive"). Supposedly he
discovered, upon carelessly licking his fingers that they tasted sweet. Thus
was the chemicals industry blessed with a successor to saccharine, the
coal-tar derivative that foundered eight years later under the pressure of
cancer concerns.
Aspartame found early opposition in consumer attorney James Turner,
author of *The Chemical Feast* and a former Nader's Raider. At his own
expense, Turner fought approval for ten years, basing his argument on
aspartame's potential side effects, particularly on children. His concern was
shared by Dr. John Olney, Professor of neuropathology and psychiatry at
Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Olney found that aspartame,
combined with MSG seasoning, increased the odds of brain damage in children.
Other studies have found that children are especially vulnerable to its
toxic effects, a measure of the relation between consumption and body weight.
The FDA determined in 1981, when the sweetener was approved, that the maximum
projected intake of Aspartame is 50 milligrams a day per kilogram of body
weight. A child of 66 pounds would consume about 23 milligrams by imbibing
four cans of Diet Coke. The child might also conceivably down an
aspartame-flavored snack or two, nearing the FDA's projected maximum daily
intake.29 Dr. William Partridge, a professor of neuroendocrine regulation
at MIT, told *Common Cause* in August 1984 that it wouldn't be surprising if a
child-"confronted with aspartame contained in iced tea chocolate milk, milk
shakes, chocolate pudding pie, Jello, ice cream and numerous other products"
-consumed 50 milligrams per kilogram in a day.
Internally, aspartame breaks down into its constituent amino acids and
methanol, which degrades into formaldehyde. The FDA announced in 1984 that
"no evidence" has been found to establish that the methanol byproduct reaches
toxic levels, claiming that "many fruit juices contain higher levels of the
natural compound."30 But the _Medical World News_ had already reported in 1978
that the methanol content of aspartame is 1,000 times greater than most foods
under FDA control.31
NutraSweet, the "good stuff" of sentimental adverts, is a truly insidious
product. According to independent trials, aspartame intake is shown by animal
studies to alter brain chemicals affecting behavior. Aspartame's effects on
the brain led Richard Wurtman, an MIT neuroscientist, to the discovery, as
recorded in _The New England Journal of Medicine_ (No. 309, 1983), that the
sweetener defeats its purpose as a diet aid, since high doses may instill a
craving for calorie-laden carbohydrates. One of his pilot studies found that
the NutraSweet-carbohydrate combination increases the "sweetener's effect on
brain composition." Searle officials denigrated Wurtman 's findings, but the
American Cancer Society has since confirmed the irony-after tracking 80,000
women for six years-that "among women who gained weight, artificial sweetener
users gained more than those who didn't use the products," as reported in
_Medical Self-Care_ (387). (Since his battle with G.D. Searle, Wurtman founded
Interneuron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the producer of a sports drink that
enhances athletic performance, and a weight loss drug marketed in over 40
countries. Wurtman's share of the company, established in 1989, was worth $10
million by 1992. 32
Even more daunting are the findings of Dr. Paul Spiers, a
neuropsychologist at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, that aspartame use can
depress intelligence. For this reason, he selected experimental subjects with
a history of consuming it but unaware that they might be suffering ill
effects. The subjects were given NutraSweet in capsules of the FDA's allowable
limit. Spiers was alarmed to discover that they developed "cognitive
deficits.'' One of the tests required recall of square patterns and
alphabetical sequences, becoming increasingly more difficult. The test is
challenging, but most people improve as they learn how it is done. The
aspartame users, however, did not improve. "Some frankly showed a reverse
pattern," said Spiers."33
Aspartame has been shown to erode short-term memory. At the May, 1985
hearings on NutraSweet, Louisiana Senator Russell Long related a bizarre
anecdote:
SENATOR LONG: I have received a letter recently from a person who is well
known to me and whose word is impeccable, as far as I am concerned.
This person told me that she had been dieting and she had been using diet
drinks with aspartame in it.
She said she found her memory was going. She seemed to be completely
losing her memory. When she would meet people whom she knew intimately, she
could not recall what their name was, or even who they were.
She could not recall a good bit of that which was going on about her to
the extent that she was afraid she was losing her mind. . . In due course,
someone suggested that it might be this NutraSweet, so she stopped
using it and her memory came back and her mind was restored.
Senator Howard Metzenbaum replied that he had received "a number of
letters from doctors reporting similar developments. . . There have been
hundreds of incidents of people who have suffered loss of memory, headaches,
dizziness, and other neurological symptoms which they feel are related to
aspartame."34 Senator Orrin Hatch, a hidebound archconservative and
NutraSweet advocate, downplayed criticism of the sugar substitute. "Some
people have lost their memory after drinking a variety of things," he argued.
''The bottom line is this: The studies supporting aspartame's approval have
been examined and reexamined. More than enough sound, valid studies exist to
demonstrate aspartame's safety."
Hatch of Utah, reports the _Wall Street Journal_, has "given his strong
support of the pharmaceutical industries."35 So have the "Hatchlings." David
Kessler, FDA Commissioner under presidents Bush and Clinton, was once an aide
to Orrin Hatch. Hatch's former campaign manager and aide, C. McClain Haddow,
was sentenced to prison for conflict-of-interest charges arising from his work
as a Reagan administration health official. And Thomas Parry, Hatch's former
chief of staff, has carved a sumptuous life for himself as a Republican
fund-raiser and lobbyist with clients in the pharmaceutical industry. All
told, Parry represents 30 clients, including Eli Lilly, Warner-Lambert, and
Johnson & Johnson, not to mention ranking defense firms and the Bahamas
government. Parry's pharmaceutical clients have enriched Senator Hatch's
campaign coffers, and in turn Hatch lavishes his attentions on them.
By the time Orrin Hatch was stumping for NutraSweet in the U.S. Senate,
the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta had received 600 letters complaining
of NutraSweet's adverse effects. The National Soft Drink Association (NSDA)
had them too. "There have been hundreds of reports from around the country
suggesting a possible relationship between their consumption of NutraSweet and
subsequent symptoms including headaches, aberrational behavior, slurred
speech, etc." FDA Commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes, appointed by Ronald Reagan
in April, 1981 (moving the _New York Times_ to observe that "some industry
officials consider Dr. Hayes more sympathetic to their viewpoints than past
holders of the office"), considered such complaints "anecdotal.''
Of course, like scores of other conservatives roaming the executive
branch in the 1980s, the ethics of Arthur Hull Hayes were entirely
malleable-not only did he approve a product based on studies that were
"scientifically lacking in design and execution," according to a report
issued by _Science Times_ in February 1985, but upon leaving the FDA he took
the post of senior medical consultant for Burson-Marsteller, the public
relations firm retained by G.D. Searle.37
Burson-Marsteller, a huge public relations conglomerate, swelled in the
1980s by leveraging smaller competitors -including Black, Manafort, Stone &
Kelley, a lobbying firm best known for influence peddling along the
Beltway-presently outsizing even the Hill & Knowlton empire. Typical in the
aspartame story are Burson-Marsteller's links to the intelligence community
and rightwing operatives of the GOP. Thomas Devereaux Bell, Jr., an executive
officer of the firm, is the former chairman of the Center for naval Analysis
in Alexandria, Virginia. Bell was also the executive director of Ronald
Reagan's Inaugural Ball Committee (in which capacity he ushered in the likes
of Licio Gelli, head of P2, the notorious Italian secret society). Bell's
career in Washington began in 1971 as a deputy director of Richard Nixon's
Committee to ReElect the President. He went on to serve as an administrative
aide to Senator William Brock and the Reagan transition team.38
At the FDA, Hayes used aspartame as a political statement that the
Reagan administration was embarking on a grand voyage of conservative
"regulatory reform," sluicing through treasonous liberal constraints on "free
enterprise." Despite what one FDA scientist described as 'very serious'
questions concerning pivotal brain tumor tests, Hayes eagerly approved
aspartame for use in dry foods in July 1981.39 Three FDA scientists advised
against the approval of aspartame, citing G.D. Searle's own brain tumor tests,
because there was no proof that "aspartame is safe for use as a food additive
under its intended conditions of use. "40
Hayes has since declined to answer any questions about his decision,
which ignored the recommendations of the FDA's own board of inquiry. He
relied instead on a study conducted by Japan's Ajinomoto, Inc.-a licensee of
G.D. Searle. Hayes acknowledged in his 1981 decision that he had only
consulted a preliminary report of the Japanese evaluation, and only *skimmed*
it. More serious, Hayes violated federal law by basing approval on the test,
as it had not been reviewed by the FDA board.41
Who is Arthur Hull Hayes? He was no disinterested bureaucrat. True to the
biochemical theme of the aspartame story, Dr. Hayes served in the Army
Medical Corps in the 1960s. According to the _Washington Post_, Hayes was
assigned to Edgewood Arsenal at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the Army's chemical
warfare base of operations, "one of a number of doctors who conducted drug
tests for the Army on volunteers . . . to determine the effect of a
mind-disorienting drug called CAR 301,060." According to a declassified 1976
report prepared by the Army Inspector General, Hayes had planned a research
study to develop the mind-altering CAR 301,060 as a *crowd control agent.* In
1972, Hayes left Edgewood Arsenal, and a new plan for the experiments was
drawn up by Edgewood physicians. The 1976 report notes that similar tests had
been conducted before Hayes took charge. 42
Also at the center of the effort to land FDA approval of NutraSweet
stood Donald Rumsfeld-"Rummy" to his friends -chairman of G.D. Searle upon
leaving the Ford administration in 1977. Rumsfeld, the product of a wealthy
Chicago suburb, was a Princeton graduate and a Navy pilot during the Korean
conflict. He entered politics as a Congressional House aide attending night
classes at Georgetown University Law School, which is closely aligned with the
CIA.43
Rumsfeld campaigned ambitiously for Richard Nixon, who drafted him to
direct the Office of Equal Opportunity on May 26,1969. He quickly established
an office to spy on his employees in a holy crusade to flush out
"revolutionaries" said to be granting federal funds to politically subversive
organizations-a throwback to McCarthy's tantrums.44 Rumsfeld also figured in
Nixon's notorious Power Control Group, spearheaded by Charles Colson and John
Ehrlichman.45 Gerald Ford named Rumsfeld executive chief of staff upon the
resignation of Al Haig. In 1986 he was named chairman of the Institute for
Contemporary Studies, a neoconservative "think tank" (read: propaganda mill)
established in 1972 by Edwin Meese and Caspar Weinberger. ICS has sponsored
such opinion-shaping projects as a study of expansions in "entitlement
programs" and their erosive effects on the economy, and a book on the uses of
coercion by Communist regimes.46 Rumsfeld, at 43, became the county's youngest
secretary of defense. For many years he has been a vocal proponent of chemical
weapons.47 He is chairman of the Rand Corp.48 In 1988, he dropped a
presidential bid, and was named a v.p. of Westmark Systems, led by past NSA
Director Bobby Ray Inman. Rumsfeld was one of Westmark's founding directors,
sharing the board with Joseph Amato, a former vice president at TRW (and a
colleague of Inman's at the National Security Agency), and Dale Frey,
chairman of the General Electric Investment Corp.49
Rumsfeld, a veteran political operative, was an adept at the vulgar art
of public relations. He was recruited by G.D. Searle because he had "a Boy
Scout image," according to one company official.50 A house politician was
precisely what Searle needed to compensate for the damage done by independent
researchers concerned about the toxic effects of aspartame. In March 1976, an
FDA task force brought into question *all* of the company's testing procedures
between 1967 and 1975. The task force described "serious deficiencies in
Searle's operations and practices which undermine the basis for reliance on
Searle's integrity." The final report of the FDA task force noted faulty and
fraudulent product testing, knowingly misrepresented findings, and instances
of "irrelevant or unproductive animal research where experiments have been
poorly conceived, carelessly executed or inaccurately analyzed."51
Richard Merrill, the FDA's chief counsel, petitioned Samuel K. Skinner
U.S. Attorney for the northern district of Illinois, for a grand jury
investigation of Searle's "willful and knowing failure" to submit required
test reports, and for "concealing material facts and making false statements"
in reports on aspartame submitted to the agency.52 Yet industry analysts,
interviewed by the _Wall Street Journal_ six months after Rumsfeld's
appointment as chairman, noted a rapid turnabout in Searle's fortunes as a
result of his direction.53
Searle denies that Chairman Rumsfeld ever had any contact with the FDA,
or the Carter and Reagan administrations, to lobby for aspartame.54 But the
_Wall Street Journal_ article reported in 1977 that Rumsfeld "keenly
understands the importance of a public image. So he has been mending fences
with the FDA by personally asking top agency officials what Searle should do
to straighten out its reputation." Westley M. Dixon, Searle's vice chairman,
told the _Journal_ that without Rumsfeld "we wouldn't have gotten approval for
Norpace," a drug investigated by the FDA in 1975.55
The grand jury investigation of Searle disintegrated in January, 1977
when the FDA formally requested that Samuel Skinner, U.S. attorney and a
protege of Illinois Governor James Thompson, investigate the firm for
falsifying and withholding aspartame test data. A month later, Skinner met
with attorneys from Searle's Chicago law firm, Sidley & Austin. Jimmy Carter
ascended to The presidency a few weeks later. He announced that Skinner would
not be asked to remain in office, but the outgoing Republican wasn't found
wanting for employment. He informed reporters that he had already begun
"preliminary discussions" with Sidley & Austin.56
G.D. Searle and Sidley & Austin are Siamese Twins. Edwin Austin, a senior
partner in the law firm, was appointed to the Illinois Supreme Court in 1969.
The Searle family drew upon his services extensively, and he taught Sunday
school in Wilmette, a Chicago suburb, as did Dr. Claude Howard Searle, whose
father cofounded the pharmaceutical house.
The firm is grafted to the beating heart of the Republican party. Morris
Leibman of Sidley & Austin was for many years chairman of the American Bar
Association's "Standing Committee on Law and National Security," a position
that won him Reagan's Medal of Freedom in 1981.57
John E. Robson, head of Sidley & Austin's Washington office, was
appointed executive vice-president of Searle & Co. in 1977, the same year
Skinner was named a partner in the law firm. Robson, too, was active in
Republican politics. He was the first General Counsel of the Department of
Transportation, and at the behest of Gerald Ford in 1975, chairman of the
Civil Aeronautics Board.58 He moved on to Searle, and stayed with the company
until it was bought outright by Monsanto in 1985. Howard Trienens, a law clerk
to the late chief Justice Vinson in the early 1950s, was a G.D. Searle
director and worked for Sidley & Austin since 1949.59 Archconservative
California Governor George Deukmejian joined Sidley & Austin's Los Angeles
branch upon leaving office in 1991, and is reportedly making a "very
comfortable" living. He has a keen "sense" for bringing in corporate clients,
a partner in the firm told the Los Angeles Times, many of them past
contributors to his campaign fund. Deukmejian's business connections have
given him a reputation as a Sidley & Austin "rainmaker," but the L.A. City
Council has questioned his ethics in promoting a contract with Sumitomo Corp.
on a metropolitan railway project.60
Searle aside, Sidley & Austin has served some of the most notorious
special interests in the country. The firm lobbied overtime, for instance, on
behalf of Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings & Loan, and provided counsel on
tax issues and dealing with federal authorities. The firm assisted Keating
when Lincoln was foundering, and curried political favor to keep the S&L
operating despite massive debts. As a result, the firm was forced to settle
with Lincoln depositors in 1991, agreeing to cover an excess of $40 million
in claims.6l Sidley & Austin also represented the AMA when a group of
drugstore chains sued seven drug makers-including Searle-for price fixing and
antitrust violations. The lawsuit, filed in October 1993, amounts to billions
of dollars in compensation.62
Skinner recused himself from the Searle prosecution four months before
leaving offtce-asking, in a memo to subordinates, that the matter be kept
"confidential to avoid any undo embarrassment"-a stall that nearly allowed
the statute of limitations to expire. William Conlon, a senior U.S. attorney,
inherited the case. He eased off, citing case load pressures, and gave a deaf
ear to complaints of delays from the Justice Department, which urged that a
grand jury be convened to prosecute Searle for falsifying NutraSweet test
data. In January, 1979, Conlon too joined Sidley & Austin.63
The 33-page letter from Merrill to Skinner charged Searle with criminal
fraud in its animal test results. In 1984 Common Cause asked Dan Reidy of the
U. S. attorney's office how the investigation had stalled. Reidy replied that
because it was a grand jury investigation, he was "bound by law to secrecy."
A Searle spokesman exploited the demise of the grand July claim that there
was "no validity to the charges, that the company had been "exonerated."
Philip Brodsky, an investigator for the FDA, expressed surprise that Searle
hadn't been indicted. "I thought surely they would prosecute them," he said.64
Eleven years later Senator Metzenbaum issued a press release charging
Skinner with stalling the criminal investigation as he prepared to decamp
from office. Metzenbaum and his staff demanded an FBI investigation of
Skinner's mishandling of the case. In December 1988, the conflict-of-interest
bombshell blew up in the face of newly elected George Bush, who was about to
appoint Skinner to the position of Transportation Secretary.65
Like most of the Machiavellians in the NutraSweet story, Samuel Knox
Skinner kept company with hardright Republicans. He entered politics as a
campaign volunteer for Barry Goldwater. 66 In 1975, he was appointed to
Federal Prosecutor in Chicago by President Ford. Sidley & Austin promoted him
to senior partner after only one year with the firm. Skinner was the director
of George Bush's presidential campaign in Illinois. On occasion he was
berated for his involvement with the state's Republican apparatus: In 1987,
for instance, the Chicago SunTimes linked him with a clutch of lawyers close
to Governor Thompson, who were awarded lucrative assignments handling the
affairs of financially crippled insurance companies. Skinner was a leading
light of the Illinois Fraud Prevention Commission -he targeted welfare cheats
(as opposed to white-collar criminals in the drug industry)-and President
Reagan's Commission on Organized Crime. In December 1991, he left
Transportation to take the position of President Bush's Chief of Staff.67
"A Shocking Story"
Had Skinner pressed on with the investigation, aspartame's manufacturer
would have been forced to explain a long history of fabricated laboratory
tests and slippery dealings with federal regulators, not to mention the
public.
Dr. Alexander Schmidt, a former FDA commissioner, said of the original
Aspartame Task Force investigation: "What was discovered was
reprehensible. . .incredibly sloppy science." A 1980 public board of inquiry
opined that the company's testing procedures were "bizarre."68
Searle's decision to market aspartame culminated with the
falsification of test results to obtain FDA approval . In November 1969,
officials of the firm hired Dr. Harry Waisman, a researcher for the University
of Wisconsin, to test for brain damage in rhesus monkeys. Seven monkeys were
fed aspartame for periods up to one year. In the end, though, the evaluation
flopped because the technicians failed to perform the intelligence tests and
autopsies required to determine brain damage. When questioned about the false
data by the FDA, Searle officials claimed to have had no direct control over
the study. But the protocol for the study was written by a Searle pathologist
*after* it had begun. And, according to Dr. Gross, "Frequent high-level
communications took place between Searle executives and Dr. Waisman prior to
and during the study." 69
To make matters worse, Dr. Waisman died in March, 1971, in mid-study.
Searle submitted the toxicity test to the FDA on October 12, 1972. It
bore Dr. Waisman's name as coauthor. Richard Merrill noted: "Dr. Waisman was
the expert in the field and his name would carry great weight," but complained
to Skinner that Searle took "great literary license" in drafting the report,
"which *covers up* the admitted inadequacy of the design, control and
documentation of this study." 70
Searle submitted some 150 test reports, yet Dr. Martha Freeman of the
FDA Bureau of Drugs noted in a 1973 memo, "the information provided is
inadequate to permit an evaluation of the potential toxicity of
aspartame." 71 The FDA task force set up by Dr. Schmidt in 1975 reviewed
25 studies on seven products manufactured by G.D. Searle, a total of 500
pages and 15,000 exhibits.72 Searle was held to be the author of "reports
that the FDA believes contain false information" and "concealed facts
resulting from having drafted Dr. Waisman's 'pilot' monkey study so that it
would *appear* to be a valid, thorough scientific study," and not a forgery.
In 1975 Searle submitted a battery of cancer test results entitled "The
Willigan Report, which contained a statistical table that excluded four
malignant mammary tumors detected by Dr. Willigan and incorporated in his
data. The malignancies were made to appear benign. Searle dismissed the
misrepresentation as a computer "programming error" undetected by supervising
statisticians. Dr. Gross interviewed all concerned with the tests. He
concluded in a statement to Metzenbaum's committee in August, 1985, that "to
accept the Searle explanation is to believe that the unfavorable mammary
malignancy data were innocently omitted from the summary table four separate
times by three different individuals."74
The Waisman and Willigan Reports were prepared by Searle Labs, as were
88% of the safety evaluations conducted by 1981.75 They are typical of the
shoddy documentation upon which FDA Commissioner Hayes based his decision that
aspartame does not constitute a public health risk. Although two members of
the 1975 task force considered the tests to be criminal frauds, Hayes and
Searle declared the results valid. In an appeal to Hayes' decision, James
Turner said: "The entire argument that since the studies are no longer
considered fraudulent *by FDA* they are therefore scientifically valid is an
example of a rhetorical shell game that, if successful, can only bring
discredit and ridicule on the FDA."76
Dr. Gross, the chief scientist on the FDA task force, told the CBS
*Nightly News* staff in January, 1984, that Searle made "*deliberate*
decisions" to cloak the toxic effects of aspartame. "They took great pains to
camouflage these shortcomings of the study,'' Gross said, "as I say, filter
and just present to the FDA what they wished the FDA to know. And they did
other *terrible* things. For instance, animals would develop tumors while they
were under study-well, G.D. Searle would *remove these tumors from the
animals*," surgically masking the cancerous effects of aspartame.77 Yet one
1986 _New England Journal of Medicine_ article claimed that noncompulsive
aspartame intake has "no sinister effects."
Dr. Woodrow Monte told CBS, "Every time a truly impartial team of
scientists have looked at NutraSweet, it has been turned down." Dr. Monte,
director of the nutrition laboratory at Arizona State University, held that
these studies "show *extreme* dangers over the long term."78
Dr. Monte was rewarded for his comments by a fusillade from the press.
On February 23, Dan Dorfman, a business news reporter for WCBS in New York,
broke a story that several CBS employees had invested in options on NutraSweet
that pay off if the stock price drops.79 Dr. Monte and his attorney had
purchased the options as well. It emerged that the CBS staffers had purchased
the options on the advice of stock market newsletters printed prior to the
nightly news report. The investments were not illegal, nor did they reap a
profit. Searle's stock was not affected by the publicity, and the investors
took a loss.
Nevertheless, the _Wall Street Journal_ ran a front-page story condemning
the "inside trading." Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media picked up the cudgel
against Dr. Monte and the CBS employees as if they'd committed a shocking Wall
Street swindle.80 Accuracy in Media, formed in 1969, is an intelligence
operation abetted by the CIA. The rabidly right-wing organization was
co-founded by Bernard Yoh, a counter-insurgency adviser under the notorious
Edward Landsdale in Vietnam, and a fount of CIA funds to military intelligence
units in the Delta region. Board member Elbridge Durbrow was once a foreign
service "diplomat," and advised commanders of Maxwell Air Force Base in
Alabama. Another AIM board member, Frank Trager, has conducted research for
the Pentagon and CIA, and churns out pamphlets on international
business and intelligence operations. Major financial contributors to AIM
include Richard Nixon, "Bebe" Rebozo, Edward Scripps, the wretched Dr. Edward
Teller and former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon.81
Accuracy in Media is a strident advocate of the chemical industry, which
provides it with generous funding. The media "watchdog" has long waged a
campaign on behalf of dioxin, denouncing the "Agent Orange scare" as the
creation of delirious, anti-business liberals. Among the leading manufacturers
of Agent Orange for the Vietnam war effort was Monsanto, preparing-at the
very moment AIM took aim at detractors of NutraSweet[TM]- to buy G.D. Searle.
The Good Stuff
Dr. Monte cautioned in 1987 that he didn't want to sound like a
"conspiracy theory" hound, but the aspartame chronology clarifies its
commercial emergence. The FDA Board of Inquiry advised against the
sweetener on September 30, 1980. On January21, 1981-the day after Reagan's
inauguration-Searle submitted "ten new studies." Dr. Monte was skeptical.
"It is impossib1e that they could have conducted those studies in four
months," he said. "Obviously they'd previously done those studies but hadn't
officially submitted them, although much of the information in those studies
was informally presented to the board of inquiry." With the "new tests" in
hand, Hayes acted as though critical, overriding evi dence had proven the
safety of aspartame.82
James Turner, representing thc Community Nutrition Institute in
Washington, D.C., said that Arthur Hull Hayes, to arrive at his decision that
aspartame is safe, firewalked apath "through a mass of scientific
mismanagement, improper procedures, wrong conclusions and general scientific
inexactness." Two FDA officials declared in 1985 that Hayes was determined to
clear all obstacles to NutraSweet approval. One FDA bureaucrat reported that
"people at the top" were closed to questions concerning the quality of the
tests submitted by Searle.83
In July, 1984 a broad investigation of NutraSweet's adverse effects was
conducted by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control. Federal health
officials said at the outset that they believed no harm would emerge from the
data to indict aspartame. Robert McQuate, Ph.D., science director of the
National Soft Drink Association, predicted with mystical confidence that the
study would "provide further evidence that aspartame is a safe ingredient."84
Dr. McQuate didn't fret the goring of his biochemical ox. In November
the CDC announced that no "serious, widespread" side effects had been found.85
It was "unlikely," said CDC officials, that "complainers" could establish a
link between NutraSweet and their maladies-the same bromide once tossed to
victims of radiation experiments. The reported side-effects of aspartame fell
into two distinct categories: central nervous system (65%) and
gastrointestinal disorders (24%).86 Yet the CDC claimed erroneously that no
consistent reaction pattern had been found. 87 Robert Shapiro, then president
of Nutrasweet, used the occasion to enthuse that the survey "clearly
established the safety" of the sugar substitute.88 Nevertheless, the CDC
recommended a new set of studies because aspartame users continued to
complain of ill effects.
Based on the ersatz assurances of the CDC report, PepsiCo announced that
it would drop saccharine and begin sweetening its diet drinks entirely with
aspartame. The decision would have been approved by Wayne Calloway, then CEO
of PepsiCo and director of the multinationals Citicorp, General Electric and
Exxon. In 1983 soda bottlers, organized around Pepsi had petitioned the FDA
for a delay in approval of NutraSweet for soft drinks until further evaluation
verified its safety-interpreted by market analysts as a ploy to drive down
the price of the sweetener. They soon abandoned the effort to block approval
(and all health concerns they might have had). "We believe saccharine is
safe," Pepsi USA President Roger Enrico lied, but "we wanted the taste
improvement." PepsiCo, already drawing on a tenth of Searle's 7.5 million
pound annual production of aspartame, signed an agreement with G.D. Searle to
boost purchases 500 percent.89 (Like other corporate pushers of aspartame,
Pepsi has long maintained ties to the intelligence community. One product of
the relationship was a Pepsi plant in Vientiane, Laos with a laboratory
outfitted for heroin production. Alfred McCoy, in *The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia* documents the efforts of Richard Nixon to promote the
plant's construction in 1965, and the CIA's continuing subsidization of the
plant. McCoy complained to Pepsi officials that the facilities were but a
cover for the importation and refinement of morphine, but it continued
to operate unhindered.)
Yet another report was filed by Reagan's General Accounting Office in
July 1987, this one on the FDA's handling of aspartame. The GAO concluded that
the agency had followed proper procedures and conducted valid studies. But the
report noted that the FDA had followed guidelines for food -not drug- testing,
despite the recommendation of the agency's own biologists favoring *drug*
tests, which are considerably more stringent. This recommendation was
overruled by FDA officials.90
Another blemish in the study was bared by Dr. Louis Elsas, director of
medical genetics at Emory University in Atlanta. "They never asked the right
questions about what it does to brain function in humans," he told the
_Washington Post_. Half of the scientists polled expressed reservations about
the safety of NutraSweet. One-fifth reported "major concerns." Monsanto
quibbled in a press release that these critics had themselves never conducted
aspartame research. A score of independent scientists have. They found side
effects.
Senator Metzenbaum berated Searle's flawed and fabricated tests at the
August 1, 1985 Senate hearings. "The FDA," he said, "is content to have the
manufacturer of aspartame, G.D. Searle, conduct these studies. How *absurd*."
He also faulted the AMA:
The _Journal of the American Medical Association_ recently published
a report on aspartame which, with some significant disclaimers, stated it was
safe for most people.
I wish that this report could ease my concerns. It does not. It
merely restates the FDA position which relies solely on the tests conducted by
G.D. Searle. As I have indicated these tests are under a cloud. In addition,
the concerns raised recently by the scientists ... were not even included in
the report.
In defense of the tests, executives of G.D. Searle argued that the
sweetener has been approved by foreign regulatory agencies and the World
Health Organization. But H.J. Roberts, an internal medicine specialist in
West Palm Beach, Florida, reviewed the foreign studies and found that "the
vast majority of these agencies accepted company-sponsored research without
ever having done independent confirmatory studies.''91
Deficiencies in testing were aggravated by a lack of laboratory training
at Searle. One of the pivotal safety studies involved fetal damage, but the
FDA task force found that the medical researcher in charge was "inexperienced
in conducting studies of this nature and yet given full responsibility." They
were appalled to discover that his sole credential was a field study of the
cottontail rabbit for the Illinois Wildlife Service, yet at Searle he'd been
assigned to laboratory training and supervision. When asked about his
*crriculum vitae* in fetal research, he replied that he'd once attended a
seminar on the subject, and the company had provided him with a stack of
reference works.92 (Yet J.D. Searle, in its 1981 Annual Report, billed itself
as "a research based pharmaceutical company.")
Corporate control of NutraSweet testing continues at Monsanto, torturing
the ethics of academic medicine. In August 1987 the University of Illinois, a
recipient of Monsanto's largess, issued a study exonerating aspartame of
causing seizures in laboratory animals. Dave Hattan, a safety regulator for the
FDA, responded that the study only confirmed the need for testing on humans.
At independent labs, he insisted, aspartame provoked seizures.
Industrial support tends to contaminate test data. Dr. Elsas, in a 1988
letter to the _New England Journal of Medicine_, advocates unbiased review of
clinical research. "The NutraSweet Co.," he said, "may have had an interest in
protocols that would find that their product had no untoward effects." 94
Monsanto reportedly granted one NutraSweet researcher a $1.3 million
honorarium.95 The same hired gun willing to manipulate lab results will have
no qualms publicly defending a tainted pharmaceutical, like the diabetic
specialist who objected that a Senate hearing on aspartame, which called him
as a witness, might arouse groundless public anxiety.96
Victims and health activists have attempted in the courts to put a stop
to the marketing of NutraSweet, to no avail. In 1985 a coalition of consumer
groups were handed a ruling by the federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia that the FDA had followed proper procedures in approving
aspartame for soft drinks. A year later the _Washington Post_ reported that
the Supreme Court again refused to consider the case "despite critics'
arguments that the product, sold under the brand name NutraSweet, may cause
brain damage."97
Likewise, the medical establishment has thrown up an impenetrable wall to
aspartame critics. Dr. Roberts, author of a brief study,
"Aspartame-Associated Confusion and Memory Loss: A Possible Human Model for
Early Alzheimer's Disease," found it impossible to publish the article in a
peer review medical journal. This was peculiar, he thought, "considering the
increasing magnitude of Alzheimer's disease, and the relevance of my
observations to newer biochemical findings and avenues of research." He can
"personally vouch for the *enormous* difficulty in getting published articles
concerning reactions to aspartame products," a trend in censorship with
"ominous overtones." The options, Dr. Roberts says, are "generally limited to
'burying' the findings in a small-circulation journal (such as the bulletin of
a county medical society), reporting the results as a letter to the editor,
or (unfortunately, most often) discarding the project."98
Silence surrounds the most odious conspiracies.
1. "Sweet Talk," Science and the Citizen column, _Scientific American_,
July, 1987, p. 15.
2. "Adverse Effects of Aspartame-January '86 through December '90,"
Current Bibliography series, National Library of Medicine pamphlet, National
Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1991.
3. "Pepsi Switches Sweeteners-Aspartame Winning Diet Cola Market,"
_Washington Post_, November 2, 1984, p. A-1.
4. Mae Brussell, World Watchers #842, KAZU-FM, Monterey, CA., January 25,
1988.
5. _Moody 's Industrial Manual_, 1975, p 2606
6. G.D. Searle's 1981 _Annual Report_. Also, Arnold Foster and Benjamin R.
Epstein, *Cross-Currents*, Doubleday & Co. (New York: 1956), p. 153.
7. Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, *A Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story
of the Law Firm of Sullivan & Cromwell*, William Morrow (New York: 1988),
pp. 13738, 163.
8. John Marks, *The Search for "The Manchurian Candidate ": The CIA and
Mind Control*, Times Books (New York: 1979), pp.58,67 & 212. Marks writes that
incapacitating "large numbers of people fell to the Army Chemical Corps, which
also tested LSD and even stronger hallucinogens. The CIA concentrated on
individuals."
9. John Peer Nugent, *White Night.- The Untold Story of What Happened
Before-and Beyond-Jonestown*, Rawson, Wade (New York: 1979), pp. 143, 177.
10. Michael Meiers, *Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?A Review of the
Evidence*, Mellen House (Lampeter, UK: 1988) p. 42.
11. Ibid., p. 43.
12. Ibid., pp. 42-43. For a sanitized account of Dr. Layton's career, see
Min S. Yee and Thomas N. Layton, *In My Father 's House: The Story of the
Layton Family and the Reverend Jim Jones*, Holt, Rinehart and Winston
(New York, 1981).
13. National Council of the National Front of Democratic Germany and the
Committee of Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighters of the German Democratic
Republic, *The Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany*, Verlag
Zeit im Bild, 1965, pp. 33-34.
14. Dan J. Forrestal, *Faith, Hope & $5,000: The Story of Monsanto*, Simon
and Schuster (New York: 1977), p. 159.
15. *Brown Book*, p. 34.
16. Tom Bower, *The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi
Scientists*, Little, Brown & Co. (Boston 1987), pp. 93, 95.
17. Howard W. Ambruster, *Treason's Peace: German Dyes and American Dupes*,
Beechhurst Press (New York: 1947), p.144
18. Nigel West, *MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations,
1909-1945*, Random House (New York: 1983), p.92
19. Jaques Attali, *A Man of Influence: The Extraordinary Career of S. G.
Warburg*, Adler & Adler (Bethesda, Maryland: 1987),p. 167.
20. Forrestal, p. 121ff.
21. Anthony Cave Brown, *The Last Hero, Wild Bill Donovan*, Vintage
(New York: 1982), pp. 210211. Also: Ernst Hanfstangl, _Unheard Witness_, J.R.
Lippincott (New York: 1957)
22. "Search for the Tiger's Treasure," _Las Vegas Sun_, December 26, 1993,
p.1.
23. _Moody 's Industrial Manual_, 1968, p. 4080.
24. "Radiation and the Guinea Pigs," _Guardian_, March 3, 1994, p. 3. Also
see, "Nuclear Scientists Irradiated People in Secret Research," _New York
Times_, December 17, 1993, p. Al.
25. Christopher Simpson, *Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its
Effects On the Cold War*, Wiedenfeld & Nicholson (New York: 1988), pp. 26,
152-53. Col. Pash, a former high school gym teacher, was an officer
of the Office of Policy coordination under Frank Wisner. His unit, writes
Simpson, "known as PB/7, was given a written charter that read in part that
'PB/7 will be responsible for assassinations, kidnaping, and such other
functions as from time to time may be given it... by higher authority."' Pash
was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, a veteran of the Russian Civil
War. Monsanto's Clinton Engineering Works in Oak Ridge became the Manhattan
Project's headquarters in 1943, and was "manned almost entirely by
experienced officers and agents of the CIC." See lan Sayer and Douglas
Botting, *America's Secret Army: The Untold Story of the Counter intelligence
Corps*, Franklin Watts (New York: 1989), pp. 71ff.,346.
26. Robin Thomas Naylor, *Hot Money and the Politics of Debt*, Simon &
Schuster (New York, 1987), p.289.
27. "Statement from Adrian Gross, Former FDA Investigator and Scientist,"
_Congressional Record_, August 1, 1985, p. S10835.
28. Florence Graves, "How Safe is Your Diet Soft Drink?" _Common Cause_,
July/August,1984.
29.Ibid.
30. "FDA Finding on Aspartame," _New York Times_, January 14,1984, p. 28.
31. Article in Medical World News,1978, cited in I .N. Love "NutraSweet
Isn't that Sweet," _Gentle Strength Times_, October 1987, p. 3.
32. "Dick Wurtman's Ideas Aren't So Crazy After All," _Business Week_,
December 14, 1992, p. 60.
33 . "A Sour View of Aspartame ," _San Francisco Chronicle_, August 25,
1987.
34. "Amendment No. 60" (debate), _Congressional Record_, May 7, l985,
p. S5516.
35. "Lobbyist's Cozy Ties with Ex-Boss Sen. Hatch Include Client Referrals,
Political Fund-Raising," _Wall Street Journal_, February 18, 1993. Eli Lilly
contributed $17,500 to Hatch's campaign chest between 1985 and 1988. Sen.
Hatch filed a of friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Eli Lilly in a 1989
patent case. Other pharmaceutical houses enjoy his political favors. Lobbyist
Thomas Parry remains a key adviser to Sen. Hatch:- "Nobody gets better care
than his former chief of staff," reports the _Journal_.
36. Ibid.
37. Jane E. Brody, "Sweetener Worries Some Scientists," _Science Times_,
February 5, 1985.
38. _Who 's Who in Industry and Finance_, 97th ed., Macmillian (Wilmette,
IL.) p. 583.
39."Food and Drug Administration Food Additive Approval Process Followed
for Aspartame," GAO Report B223552, June 18,1987.
40. "GAO Investigating NutraSweet Approval," UPI, reprinted in
_Congressional Record_, August 1, 1985,p. S10823.
41. Graves.
42. "Head of FDA Tested Drugs on Volunteers," _Washington Post_, June 26,
1983, p. A4.
43. Austin H. Kiplinger, *Washington Now*, Harper & Row (New York: 1975),
pp. 36-37.
44. Daniel Guttman and Barry Willner, *The Shadow Government: The
Government's Multimillion Dollar Giveaway of its Decision-Making Powers to
Private Management Consultants, ''Experts, " and Think Tanks*, Pantheon,
(New York:1989),p.173.
45. Bruce Oudes, ed., *From: The President-Richard Nixon 's Secret Files*,
Harper & Row (New York: 1989), p. 173.
46. James A Smith, *The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New
Policy Elite*, Free Press (New York: 1991), p.282.
47. Sterling Seagrave, *Yellow Rain: A Journey Through The Terror of
Chemical Warfare*, M. Evans and Co. (New York: 1981), pp. 258 "After a meeting
with President Nixon, Representative Gerald Ford attacks politicians who
criticize the Pentagon CBW efforts, saying the critics seem to favor
'unilateral disarmament."'
48. Christopher Palmeri, "Act Three," _Forbes_, October 26, 1992, p. 88
49. "Westmark Systems Expands Board, Hires 3 New Vice Presidents," _Wall
Street Journal_, February 11,1988, p.33.
50 Graves.
52 "Hon. Samuel K. Skinner," _Congressional Record_, Congressional
Printing Office, Washington, D.C., August 1, 1985, pp. S10827, S10835.
53. Graves.
54. _Congressional Record_, August 1,1985, p. S10823.
55. Graves.
56. "Critics Cause Bush Cabinet Search to Stumble," _Los Angeles Times_,
December 22,1988.
57. Herman Rogan, *Traditions and Challenges: The Story of Sidley &
Austin*, R.R. Donelly & Sons (Chicago: 1983), p.266.
58. *Who's Who in America*, 48th ed., 1994.
59. Ibid.
60. "Deukmejian Thrives in Private Life, Law Work," _Los Angeles Times_,
January 3, 1992, p. Al.
61. "Chicago Law Firm Agrees to Pay Up to $34 Million in Lincoln S&L
Case," _Los Angeles Times_, May 21, 1991, p. D5;and "Sidley & Austin RTC Said
to Reach Pact," _Wall Street Journal_, October 31, 1991, p. B4. The basis of
the suit was a memo written on May 10, 1988 by Margery Waxman, a partner in
Sidley & Austin's Washington office, to Charles Keating. In it, she said
"pressure" had been applied to M. Danny Wall, then chairman of the Home Loan
Bank Board, "to work toward meeting your demands and he has so instructed his
staff."
62. "Suit Accuses 7 Drug Makers of Price-Fixing," _Los Angeles Times_,
October 15, 1993, p. Dl. Other pharmaceutical houses accused of conspiring to
fix prescription drug prices included Smith-Kline-Beecham, Ciba-Geigy Corp.,
American Home Products, Schering-Plough and Glaxo.
63. Ida Honorof, "FDA Coverup of Hazards of Nutra-Sweet," _Report to
Consumers_, Vol. XVIII, No.401, December, 1987. Also, "Two Ex-U.S.
Prosecutors' Roles in Case Against Searle are Questioned in Probe," _Wall
Street Journal_, February 7,1986, p. 4. Ironically, William Conlon won an
appointment to the Illinois State Board of Ethics in 1982 (Kogan, p.359).
64. Graves
65. _Los Angeles Times_, December 22, 1988.
66. "Sam Skinner: A Pragmatist in a Storm," _Wall Street Journal_,
December 6, 1991.
67. "Samuel Knox Skinner," _New York Times_, December 23, 1988.
68. Graves.
69. "Statement from Adrian Gross, Former FDA Investigator and Scientist,"
_Congressional Record_, August 1, 1985, p. S10835.
70. _Congressional Record_, August 1, 1985, p. S 10831, and "Statements
from Adrian Gross," p. S10838.
71. "FDA Handling of Research on NutraSweet is Defended," _New York Times_,
July 18, 1987, p. 50
72. H.J. Roberts, M.D.,*Aspartame (NutraSweet): Is it Safe?*, Charles Press
(Philadelphia: 1990), p. 10.
73. _Congressional Record_, August 1, 1985, p. S108-28.
74. Ibid., p. S108-34.
76. Graves.
77. "Sweet Suspicions," three-part CBS Nightly News series, January 1984.
Transcript reprinted in the _Congressional Record_, August 1, 1985,
p. S108-26.
78. Ibid.
79. Raymond Bonner, "Searle Stock Query Held 'Smokescreen,"' _New York
Times_, February 29, 1984, p. D5
80. William Safire, "Sweet and Sour," _New York Times_, June 1, 1984,
p. A31.
81. Louis Wolf, "Accuracy in Media Rewrites the News and History," _Covert
Action Information Bulletin_, Number 21 (Spring 1984), pp. 24-37.
82. I.N. Love, "NutraSweet Isn't that 'Sweet,"' in _Gentle Strength Times_,
October 1987, p.3.
83. Graves.
84. "Complaints on Aspartame Lead to Nationwide Investigation," _Los
Angeles Times_, July 5, 1984, p. Hl.
85. "Federal Agency Sees Little Risk in Sweetener," _New York Times_,
November 2, 1984, p. A22.
86. _Los Angeles Times_, July 5, 1984.
87. _New York Times_, November 2, 1984.
88 "U.S. Study of Aspartame Finds no Serious Effects," _Washington Post_,
November 2, 1984, p. A18
89. "Pepsi Switches Sweeteners," _Washington Post_, November 2, 1984, p. AI.
90. "Most Scientists in Poll Doubt NutraSweet's Safety," _Washington Post_,
August 17, 1987, p. A23.
91. Roberts, p. 238.
92. _Congressional Report_, May 7, 1987, p. S5500.
93. "New Findings Back Use of Sweetener," _New York Times_, August 1987,
p. 30.
94. "Researchers Differ Over Long Range Effects of Sweetener," _Los
Angeles Times_, November 3, 1988, p. Hl.
95. Roberts, p. 244.
96. Roberts, p. 248.
97. "High Court Rejects Sweetener Review," _Washington Post_, April 23,
1986, p. C.
98. Roberts,p. 246-47.
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$80 you will receive a subscription, the Garrison audio-tape plus a video-tape
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Robert Kennedy Assassination (nominated for best feature length documentary at
the 1975 Golden Globe Awards).
$100 or more you will receive all of the premiums above, plus Crime and
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