Adopting Your Enemies' Children

Today's New York Times discusses the use of adoption as an act of war in Argentina during the dictatorship of the 1970s when the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

BUENOS AIRES — Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.

It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.

Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.

He confessed to her what he had done in 2000, Ms. Montenegro said. But it was not until she testified at a trial here last spring that she finally came to grips with her past, shedding once and for all the name that Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife had given her — María Sol — after falsifying her birth records.

The trial, in the final phase of hearing testimony, could prove for the first time that the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

In a new twist to an old adage, "if you can't kill them, adopt them!" Unfortunately for many of these adopted children, their parents were killed and their identities destroyed.

Read the entire story here on the New York Times website.

Express Observation (Florida Reform School Justice)

FL gov't reform school survivors file lawsuit from savage sexual abuse & human rights violations in the 50s & 60s Link

Clinical Trials of NYC Foster Children - NYSDOH Coverup Continues

As I editorialized here in 2005, between 1986 and 2001 hundreds of NYC foster children were involuntarily enrolled in medical experiments. Soon after the story broke in the NYT, NYC commissioned a study by the widely respected Vera Institute for Justice. Almost four years later, that long awaited (forgotten?) study was finally released today.

After interviewing people familiar with the drug trials, reviewing policy documents, and examining the child welfare files of 796 children, Vera staff identified 532 children who were enrolled in 88 clinical trials and observational research studies.


The Vera Report identifies the procedures established to enroll and monitor these children, determines whether the procedures were followed, and discusses children's outcomes. It also includes the recommendations of Vera and its Clinical Trials Advisory Board to help child welfare staff, elected representatives, and community advocates address the concerns raised by some of the findings.


In my opinion, Vera worked hard to keep the process fair and independent. Unlike Harvard Law School's Berkman Center, Vera demanded and got complete access to files and records and the full cooperation of staff; full editorial control over the final report; and
oversight by Vera’s own advisory board.


The most disturbing aspect of the report is the complete lack of cooperation by the NYS Department of Health which engaged in an ongoing cover-up by refusing to release medical records:

Vera reviewers found a significant amount of medical information in the child welfare files. However, citing confidentiality laws, the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) refused multiple requests from Children’s Services that it use its supervisory authority to allow staff from Vera or Children’s Services to review clinical trial research or medical records. This limited Vera’s review in several ways, including the ability to fully document the frequency and severity of toxicity (side effects), the individual outcomes of trial participation for the children in the review, and the existence of valid, signed informed consent documents.

The Vera review found evidence that supported some concerns about the participation of
foster children and their families in clinical trials. This evidence includes violations of state
regulations, Children’s Services’ own policies for clinical trial review and enrollment, and
federal regulations for protecting human subjects.


The NYSDOH has information which it is withholding which might shed additional light on Vera's findings. Perhaps NYSDOH, like Harvard's Berkman Center, is in the pocket of, in this case, the drug industry which sponsored the medical experiments or maybe not. I don't know enough about how NYSDOH and big pharma operates to address this issue. What I do know is that Governor Patterson, Attorney General Cuomo and the NYS Legislature should all conduct their own review of NYSDOH to make sure that NYC's most vulnerable children were not sold by the government to the drug industry in its relentless pursuit of profits.

Ethnic Cleansing in America

Americans don’t have to travel to Bosnia, South Africa or the West Bank to appreciate the legacy of ethnic cleansing, apartheid or aboriginal territorial disputes. Those injustices can be found right here at home in New York state. Yesterday, with barely any notice, the United States Supreme Court ruled that land recently purchased by Oneida Indians for economic development on the long recognized Oneida reservation can never again become sovereign Indian land. Invoking high minded but ultimately hollow legal principles like “laches, acquiescence, and impossibility,” the Court found that the national government’s indifference, the great increase in property values, the predominantly non-Indian population now residing in the area, the impracticability and disruptive practical consequences of returning land to Indian control, the burden on the administration of state and local governments and the adverse affect on neighboring land owners justified stripping the few remaining Oneidas of tribal sovereignty over their land. At the founding of the United States, the Oneida's homeland comprised some six million acres in what is now central New York. By 1920, only 32 acres continued to be held by the Oneidas. The Supreme Court’s current justification for “wrongs which occurred during the early years of the Republic” provide little rectitude for a nation dedicated to righting many of the historical wrongs around the world.