The Worst Secret Things the U.S. Government Has Done to the American People

The American government is not lacking in controversial decisions, from starting a war in Iraq based on faulty intelligence, to using drone strikes to kill American citizens overseas. Then there's your occasional conspiracy theory that attempts to pin something absurd on the government, like 9/11 being orchestrated by the Bush Administration. As crazy as that seems, every once in awhile, the truth is crazier than fiction. The U.S. government has done its share of things that test the concept of liberty, and a lot of them—while seemingly impossible today—only happened a few decades ago. For some families, the effects of what the government has done may still ripple into 2015.

While this is by no means a comprehensive list of all the government has done wrong (let's leave what they've done to foreign countries for another day), here are some of the craziest true things that the American government actually has done to Americans. Leave the conspiracy theories at the door.

Back in 1932, the Great Depression was in full effect, and syphilis had become a major problem. In order to find out more how the disease progressed, the U.S. Public Health Service sponsored a study called the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," with the Tuskagee Institute of Alabama. The institute is located in Macon County, where 35 percent of the male population was infected with the disease at the time.

The PHS partnered with the Rosenwald Fund, which promoted the education and healthcare of poor African American farmers, and they sought out male farmers to undergo a six-month study into syphilis treatment, with the original goal of finding a better means of stopping the illness. They got 600 farmers, 399 with syphilis and 201 without, and told them they would get free healthcare, medical exams, meals, and burial insurance. Doesn't sound like a bad deal, right?

But, when it was time for the program to start, the doctors didn't tell the men who had already contracted the disease that they were infected with syphilis. Instead, they told them that the treatment they were receiving was for "bad blood," a colloquial term that meant a number of general diseases, even fatigue. They were never treated for syphilis, and instead were monitored and experimented on like guinea pigs to see how how bad the disease could get. One of the "free treatments" performed on them were painful spinal taps, which weren't even needed.

The program went far past its initial six months, lasting some 40 years, even when penicillin became the accepted treatment for syphilis by the late 1940s—which was never offered to the farmers. It’s estimated that nearly 130 of the farmers died either from the disease or related complications. Nearly 40 women were infected by it from their husbands, and 19 of the farmer's children were born with congenital syphilis. The reason why a group of African American farmers were chosen for the study? According to the lead doctor, Dr. Taliafero Clark, "Negroes are very ignorant and easily influenced by things that would be of minor significance in a more intelligent group.”

The Associated Press broke the story of the experiment in July 1972, and the government publicly acknowledged that it was "ethically unjustified," and shut it down. A year later, families of the farmers filed a class-action lawsuit against the government, and in 1974, they reached a $10 million settlement. For the participants who survived, the government promised lifetime medical benefits and burial services.

It was later found that the government did a similar thing to Guatemalan citizens.

Started in the 1953 and lasting until 1973, Project MKULTRA was a CIA program that illegally experimented on American and Canadian citizens.

For about two decades, the government recruited 80 institutions and 185 private researchers to use biological, chemical, and radiological agents on unsuspecting citizens to develop ways to control their behavior. Because of its reputation for distorting reality, the government used LSD in order to see if it could change a person's loyalties (for example, turning a Russian politician into an American spy). In order to test this, LSD was administered to prisoners, mental patients, prostitutes, and drug addicts—"people who could not fight back,'' as a CIA officer said.

One mental patient in was given LSD for 174 straight days. Men who visited brothels in San Francisco were also slipped LSD in rooms fitted with a two-way mirror so doctors could take notes on the effects (they targeted brothels because the men would be too embarrassed to talk about what happened). LSD was also given to other government agents in order to see if the drug could trigger a confession, or wipe a mind clean. At least one person died. Heroin, marijuana, alcohol, morphine, and other drugs were also used.

MKULTRA also studied drug-induced hypnosis as a means of creating anxiety or increasing intelligence, sleep deprivation, and ways to assassinate people using gas propelled sprays and aerosols.

As a part of subproject 68 within Project MKULTRA, New York doctor Donald Ewen Cameron was paid more than $60,000 by the government in the 1950s to perform mind control experiments in Canada.

Cameron's goal was to find a way to "de-pattern" the human mind by using electroshock on patients twice a day for 15 days after they were put in a 10-day drug-induced coma. In order "re-pattern" the patients, he'd play tapes on a loop. The tapes had both positive and negative messages, and were played up to 500,000 times. In the end, some of his patients forgot how to talk, forgot who their parents were, or developed amnesia. The electroconvulsive therapy was performed at 30 to 40 times the typical power, and left patients, who originally came in for anxiety treatment or other relatively minor things, with more permanent damage.

After spending some $20 million on the program, the government ordered all MKULTRA files destroyed after Watergate, so a lot of what happened in the program has been lost to secrecy. But some of the files survived because they were misplaced, and were discovered in 1977.

Between 2009 and 2011, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives allowed the illegal purchase of guns to known criminals in Arizona with the hopes that the weapons would lead them to Mexican drug cartels as they made their way across the border.

When the government lost track of some 1,700 guns, and weapons showed up in Texas instead of Mexico, the project, dubbed Operation Fast and Furious, was in trouble. But, after one of the AK-47s that was purchased resurfaced at the scene of the murder of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in Arizona during December 2010, the program was officially terminated. While it is unconfirmed, Mexican officials say that 150 Mexican citizens have been killed or wounded by guns trafficked by Fast and Furious.

Two similar programs were overseen by President George W. Bush—Operation Wide Receiver and a 2007 probe.

Starting in the early 1940s, the government exposed unsuspecting citizens to radioactive elements in order to study their effects, as a part of the Manhattan Project. They injected 18 people with plutonium, gave more than 800 pregnant women vitamins that contained radioactive iron, and gave 73 Massachusetts disabled children radioactive oatmeal.

Reporter Eileen Welsome from the Albuquerque Tribune helped discover the names of 18 of those injected back in the early 1990s. While looking up records about radioactive animal dumps at a local air force base, Welsome discovered that the government had injected 18 people with plutonium because it was nestled in a footnote in one of the files. One man, Elmer Allen (codenamed Cal-3), was 36-year-old African American who had his left leg amputated three days after he had plutonium injected into his calf. Even though Allen didn't know exactly what was happening, he knew something was up because all of the doctors who were coming in and out of his room. "They guinea-pigged me," he reportedly said before he died.

The program was to supposed be halted in 1946, but it continued until the end of 1947 when the Atomic Energy Commission recommended that they tell patients they would be injected with a mysterious "new substance" to fight cancer. After some of the patients died, they were dug up for more tests during the following years. When an investigation was conducted in the 1970s, all of the surviving patients were informed of what happened to them, except one. Doctors said she was too emotionally unstable to be told what happened to her.

The Pentagon sponsored a program led by Dr. Eugene L. Saenger of the University of Cincinnati to test the affects of radiation on the human body.

In order to find out how much radiation a soldier could withstand before they become disoriented during a nuclear explosion, Saenger exposed 90 cancer patients at the university to large doses of radiation—many patients had radiation exposed to their entire bodies—from 1960 to 1971. During the tests, Saenger would record their mental and physical responses. It was later discovered that the radiation had reduced the white blood cell count in some of the patients to practically nothing. Twenty-one patients died within a month of their exposure under Saenger's watch. Many were poor, and 60 percent were black.

“What happened here is one of the worst things this government has ever done to its citizens in secret,” Dr. David Egilman of Brown University told the NY Times.

Nearly 2,500 U.S. sailors were exposed to mustard gas as a way to develop protective clothing and masks in case Japan or Germany used the weapon during WWII.

As tests on animals weren't proving sufficient, humans were the next option for the government. Most of the experiments were carried out at the Naval Research Laboratory in Anacostia in Washington, because the Army didn't want to volunteer its own men. Much of it was kept secret because the government threatened to punish the sailors under the Espionage Act. That's until the 1990s, when the survivors starting telling their stories. "Some of the men refused to go into the gas chamber and were given a direct order," Russell O'Berry, who was 17-years old then, told the Independent in 1993. "We were told if we did not go through with it we would get 40 years in Fort Leavensworth in Kansas (the army prison)." He and a group of other men were then led to a room that looked like a bank vault, that could only be opened from the outside, and the yellow mist was pumped in. He felt it burn around his eyes and genitals. "[I] developed blisters as big as hen's eggs on my buttocks," he said. 

A declassified report titled Chamber Tests with Human Subjects, says that, "Occasionally there have been individuals or groups who did not co-operate fully. A short explanatory talk and if necessary a slight verbal 'dressing down' have always proved successful." Mustard gas was was only used once in WWII.

Right after World War II, the U.S. government brought over nearly 1,500 Germans—many who had experimented on Jews and supported the Holocaust—to American soil, giving them new identities, and letting them live freely among citizens in secret.

Those brought over during Operation Paperclip, as it was called, were scientists, doctor, chemists, technicians, and engineers, for the purpose of having them work for America rather than the Soviet Union. While President Harry Truman barred those who were active members of the Nazi Party from being recruited, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which was in charge of the program, made false biographies for Nazi members and wiped them clean of their pasts. Rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was one of the recruits, though he was a known member of the SS, and picked out groups in concentration camps to work for him as slaves.

Dr. Eugen Haagen, once wrote this letter on Nov. 15, 1943: “Of the 100 prisoners you sent me, 18 died in transport... Only 12 are in a condition suitable for my experiments. I therefore request that you send me another 100 prisoners, between 20 and 40 years of age, who are healthy and in a physical condition comparable to soldiers. Heil Hitler.”

Many of those former Nazis helped America in the coming years, have been honored as upstanding American citizens, with their pasts long forgotten.

During Prohibition (of course) the U.S. government was pissed off that so many people were selling alcohol when they weren't supposed to. So how do you stop people from drinking, even after outlawing it? You scare them into it.

Under the direction of the Coolidge Administration, the government poisoned industrial alcohol, an ingredient which was often stolen by bootleggers for their products, and let them unknowingly distribute the tainted drink. The Christmas after the program went into effect in 1926, 100 people died. The newspaper picked up the story of the deaths, and warned people about the risk of consuming alcohol. But people weren't afraid, and they kept drinking. Up to 10,000 people died in the following years, with many more sickened, from the government's poisoned alcohol. "Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes," said Sen. James Reed of Missouri.

The government's plan didn't work, and Prohibition ended in 1933.