Proceed Case CIA Testing of Electronic Implants, MC

[seemslikeadream]

Vietnam Vets Can Proceed with Case Over CIA Testing of Electronic Implants, Mind Control
By JAMIE ROSS

(CN) - A federal judge in San Francisco has given the green light to an action by Vietnam vets saying the CIA prevented roughly 7,000 human subjects from getting medical care after they were subjected to experiments on mind control, implantation of electronics and the effects of exotic drugs. Federal Judge Claudia Wilken allowed a challenge to the consent forms signed by individual plaintiffs involved in the experiments, to the extent that they required an oath of secrecy.
At the same time, she dismissed the challenge to the legality of the CIA's human testing program of the 1950s and '60s
But the plaintiffs, Vietnam Veterans of America, may seek a declaration concerning the lawfulness of consent forms provided to the individual plaintiffs, since the extent of their potential injuries was not fully disclosed and the forms required them to take a secrecy oath.
Plaintiffs, who also include the group Swords to Plowshares, allege that the oaths cause ongoing harm because they prohibit individuals from seeking treatment and counseling for the harm caused by the experiments.
The court also denied the CIA's motion for judgment that the plaintiffs' claims are time-barred and that the court lacks jurisdiction because the plaintiffs' medical care "has been wrongfully withheld," causing them injury due to the agency's failure to act.
The CIA and the U.S. Army experimented on human subjects in the 1950s. The experiments included exposing subjects to "various chemicals, drugs and/or the implantation of electronic devices" and "developing mind-control methods."
About 7,800 armed services volunteers participated, but were not fully informed of the potential risks of the procedures.
In dismissing that plaintiff's legal challenge to the overall program, Judge Wilken ruled that the plaintiff Vietnam Veterans of America lacked standing to seek "a declaration on the lawfulness of the testing and the associated consent forms" because such relief would not fix their alleged injuries and the individual plaintiffs are no longer members of the armed forces and will not be subjected to experiments by the CIA in the future.
Individual plaintiffs include Bruce Price, Franklin D. Rochelle, Larry Meirow, Eric P. Muth, David C. Dufrane, and Wray C. Forrest.

[Simulist]

Although this story certainly inspires mixed feelings, I am glad to hear that the case by the Vietnam Veterans of America can proceed — even decades later now, even after many victims have suffered horribly and even after some have died.

That said, the lack of evident curiosity in the media (even among the relatively few news outlets who do report stories like this) is terribly disturbing. Although some are willing to acknowledge that human experimentation did, in fact, take place in the 1950s and 1960s (a matter of history which is indisputable, by the way), there is absolutely no evident consideration of the likely possibility that similar activities might still be ongoing! — even in the wake of clear and massive abuses of power by the U.S. Government under the Bush and Obama administrations.

[Nordic]

"He said he had a 'zinging" in his ears"

http://cryptogon.com/?p=13165

It started when his mother died in 2006. “He said he had a ‘zinging’ in his ears. I can’t explain it the way he explained it,” said David Anderson, 54, who worked with Speight and became friendly with him. Anderson said Speight told him that he began seeing a therapist but that it didn’t help much. He had grown worse recently, a change that Anderson and other co-workers attributed to tensions in his house on Snapps Mill Road. “He had gotten quieter in the past six months,” Anderson said.
Something must have been building, Anderson said. On Tuesday, Speight, 39, allegedly shot his sister, his brother-in-law and their two children, along with four family friends, in a rampage that left eight dead. It was the worst mass slaying in Virginia since a single shooter killed 33 people at Virginia Tech in 2007.

[Uncle $cam]

"He said he had a 'zinging" in his ears"

I believe everything in that article until this part:

Although a motive for the shootings remained elusive, friends said Speight had talked of a dispute with his family about ownership of the house and land, which sits off a dirt road in wooded farmland about 200 miles from Washington. Speight’s mother had left the 34-acre property jointly to Speight and his sister, court records show.

Speight thought that his sister and brother-in-law were seeking to force him out of the house and dispossess him of it, Anderson said. Speight said that the couple, who had just moved into the three-bedroom house about a year ago, promised to help him build a home on the property and that they cleared timber for the site — a job for which Speight thought he had done the lion’s share of work. But the house was not built, and Speight confided that he felt as if he had chopped wood mostly to fill the stove, Anderson said.

On Wednesday, Speight, donning a bulletproof vest and camouflage pants, emerged from the Appomattox woods where he had fled after the shootings and turned himself in to a police SWAT team, ending a 20-hour hunt during which he used a high-powered rifle to hold police at bay, authorities said. Police said his well-aimed shots forced a state police helicopter to make an emergency landing after its fuel tank was pierced, and more than 150 law enforcement officials had been combing the woods for him overnight.

After Speight’s arrest, police carefully examined his white-painted home with bomb-sniffing dogs. Technicians recovered seven explosive devices later Wednesday, the state police said.

[American Dream]

..

I hadn't heard anything about electronic implants with regards to this suit. I'll be interested to see what evidence they present with that, as this area is not so well-documented at all.

[elfismiles]

Yes, when this lawsuit came up before it included refs to implants and more...

MKULTRA victims file suit against USG
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=24045

Cold War vets sue over alleged germ experiments
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/v ... hp?t=22295

[American Dream]

..

I hadn't remembered about the septal implants. If those can be proven, it will be huge...

[American Dream]

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/01/25 ... eir-lives/

Justice, is it a word veterans get in their lives?

January 25, 2010 by Mike Bailey


I have been called many things in the past decade, by the Veterans Administration, DRO’s Service Officers of various veterans groups, Congressional aides.

I have been told by a VA psychiatrist that I was making up the story of the human experiments at Edgewood Arsenal, that the United States would NOT treat soldiers in a matter that I described. After all President Bush and VP Cheney took us to war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on the Kurdish people, Iraqi’s all of them. The difference was the Kurfs were trying to kill Saddam, and Saddam was tring to kill the Kurds. After Gulf War One President Bush 41 encouraged the Iraqis to rebel against Saddam and that we the United States would stand with them and aid them, in deposing him. Well, we all know how that turned out, tens of thousands of Iraqi’s died and we did NOT help them.

What is NOT widely reported is that in 1988 President Reagan sent then Special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam and arrange the sale of componets to make chemical weapons, such as Mustard agents and Sarin gas, which the Iraqis loaded into bombs, , missiles, artillery shells etc. We knew he had these weapons as we sold them to him.

In March 1991 we destroyed an ammunition dump in Kamiassayah, Iraq, what was not known by the troops is the bunkers were filled wit these weapons and when Army EOD destroyed them, they sent toxic clouds across the Arabian Peninsula, possibly affecting evertone who came into contact with this cloud. The VA reports that approximately 25% of all Gulf War veterans may be physically harmed by their war service, all of the other previous wars, Vietnam, Korea and WW1 and WW1 average a 9% disability rate. The only difference between those other wars and Gulf War one was the extent of chemical weapons Saddam had, which were provided by Rumsfeld on President Reagans orders.

I and the other Edgewood “test vets” have been used in 2 long term health studies, the first was a report titled ” Veterans at Risk, 1993″ and then a Gulf War specific report by the Institute of Medicine’s William Page, P.H.D. titled “Long-term health effects of exposure to sarin and other anticholinesterase chemical warfare agents”.

The amazing discoveries of this report is that of the 7120 soldiers used in these experiments between 1955 thru 1975, and indicates the majority of these men are aged 45-65 in FY 2000 when this data was gathered. The glaring statistic is the fact that 40% of the veterans can NOT be located despite having access to IRS, VA and Social Security records, if the men were alive the government would HAVE found them for this report.

The report does show in the fine print that of the 4022 men found by the IOM, that 54% of them report some form of disability, yet the government ignores what the disabilities are, why?

The combined death and disability rate for these 7120 veterans coes to 74.43%, an extremely high number for any similar type of veterans of the Vietnam War era, then add into the fact that for every man that volunteered for these experiments the recruiters had to choose the best test subject available from 200 men for each slot, there were that many volunteers. They were the healthiest and smartest men the Army had available from 1955 thru 1975.

To be accepted as a “med vol” the soldier had to be in excellent health and have a GT score higher than 110, which was 10 popints higher than the requirements for Officer Candidate school which was 100 at the time.

The volunteers had a lot of “promises” made to them that were not kept, we were given two dollars a day extra pay called TDY pay at a term for the duty, considering we averaged two hundred a month base pay, this was a huge “pay raise” we also received per diem of 35 dollars a day travel pay and mileage from Fort Lewis, Washingtonm and back fro Edgewood Arsenal, the total for the almost three months, 60 days TDY, 10 days each way travel by Privately owned automobiles, each of the ten Fort Lewis soldiers received about 4,000 dollars in September 1974, almost a years extra pay.

The other promises of promotion points, the award of medals such as the Army Commendation Medal or the Soldiers medal were never awarded, they lied to us about these types of recognition. For many of us who had chosen to make the Army a career choice, these broken promises us, harmed us. Given that most of us were infantry MOS’s of 11 B or 11C we only need the minimum points of 450 to be promoted to eith Sergeant or Staff Sergeant, which was pretty simple to obtain if you were breathing. The medals would have affected us when our promotion packages went to the boards for promotion to Sergeant First Class, Master Sergeant and Sergeant Major.

It also would have been proof that we stuck our lives on the line for a hazardous duty assignment, that the results would benefits soldiers of the future Army be creating uniforms and equipment for the battlefields of the future, the arguments the recruiters made to us, in order to get us to volunteer for the “med vol” program.

They never informed of us of the involvement of the 8 German (NAZI) doctors and scientists, whose history was expertise in human experiments at the death camps of WW2 Germany, some of them had worked with Dr Menegele, in all more than 2100 Germans were brought into the US after WW2 in Operation Paperclip by the CIA and primarily a DR Sidney Gottlieb who was the CIA chief of the Special Operations Division, which controlled all of the human experiments at Fort Detrick, Edgewood Arsenal, Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah Hawaii, Puerto Rico, San Francisco, Canada, he was also the American liason with Porton Downs, England where the British were doing similar chemical weapons and drug experiments, were they told their soldiers, they were searching for a cure to to common cold.

The military failed in it’s obligation to protect the soldiers under it’s command, and in turn turned us over to a misguided CIA program to find a way to exert “mind control” over military forces, or possibly spies they would be able to field. People joke about the “Manchurian Candidate” yet that appears to be exactly what DR Gottleib was after.

If anyone had told me in 1973 when I enlisted in the Army, I would end up totally disabled by age 45, by what I believe are causes of the exposures of Edgewood Arsenal, either intentional or accidental thru environmental exposures thru the aquifer or soil of the base. Edgewood Arsenal has 77 toxic substances in the soil of drinking water, which the EPA did not order capped until 1978, 3 years after the human experiments were stopped by order of President Ford, and his Chief of Staff Richard B Cheney and his Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The Veterans Administration is the proper venue for compensation claims for the veterans and or their widows if the medical conditions these veterans, yet the VA denies that the veterans were harmed by any of the exposures, as the Army claims all substances were safe, excuse me, 77 of them are “toxic” how can they be considerereded “safe”?

The nation owes these men and their dependents veterans benefits, it was not my goal to grow up and be totally and permanantly disabled by age 45. I have been service connected for medical issues as a redult of my service, nothing related to Edgewood Arsenal, because the VA refuses to even acknowlege the exposures or the danger I was exposed to. I don’t care if I ever speak to the VA again, but the 7119 other “test vets” and or their widows and children deserve evert benefit this nation has to award them. Even those token medals would be many days late and would go along way towards showing the families what these veterans did was important and heroic, to allow yourself to be exposed to chemical weapons and drugsthat not even the scientists knew would happen to the mena dn women who would take them, either orally, theu a needle, or by inhalation.

None of us ever expected to have to SUE our government to recognize what they did to us, this is the final insult.

http://edgewoodtestvets.org/

Vietnam Veterans of America, et al. v. Central Intelligence Agency, et al.
Case No. CV-09-0037-CW, U.S.D.C. (N.D. Cal. 2009)

What This Case Is About

Plaintiffs seek declaratory and injunctive relief only – no monetary damages – and Plaintiffs seek redress for 25 years of diabolical experiments followed by over 30 years of neglect, including:

■ the use of troops to test nerve gas, psychochemicals, and thousands of other toxic chemical or biological substances and perhaps most gruesomely, the insertion of septal implants in the brains of subjects in a ghastly series of mind control experiments that went awry;

■ the failures to secure informed consent and other widespread failures to follow the precepts of U.S. and international law regarding the use of human subjects, including the 1953 Wilson Directive and the Nuremberg Code;

■ an almost fanatical refusal to satisfy their legal and moral obligations to locate the victims of their gruesome experiments or to provide health care or compensation to them;

■ the deliberate destruction of evidence and files documenting their illegal actions, actions which were punctuated by fraud, deception, and a callous disregard for the value of human life.

The Complaint asks the Court to determine that Defendants’ actions were illegal and that Defendants have a duty to notify all victims and to provide them with health care going forward.

This is not an episode of an X File show, this is happening today in federal court in San Francisco, California, since the Department of Justice were not able to persuade the Judge to dismiss the lawsuit. May they never do this to another soldier.

[American Dream]

http://www.theworldismycountry.org/allp ... imentation

“TEST VET” TELLS STORY OF ILLICIT MIND CONTROL EXPERIMENTATION
6th February 2010


Frank Rochelle holds two pictures of himself at his Onslow County home, one from 1968 on the right, he is in the center with unidentified soldiers at the barracks while at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland at age 20. The picture on the left shows him in 1969 in Oui-nhon, Vietnam at age 21. Rochelle is the leader of a handful of veterans who are suing the DoD for testing drugs on them while they were in the military. (photo: Don Bryan / The Daily News)

“I started seeing animals coming out of walls. People were constantly calling my name, and I’d turn around, and there was no one there.”

For more about the lawsuit mentioned in this article … http://www.vawatchdog.org/10/nf10/nfjan ... 2210-4.htm

A Jacksonville resident who is suing the Department of Defense for using experimental drugs on him during the Vietnam war is one step closer to having his case heard.

In late January, a lawsuit filed by six military veterans, Vietnam Veterans of America, and the organization Swords to Plowshares against the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, and U.S. Army overcame a number of motions to dismiss and won the right to continue with the legal process. The plaintiffs, all of whom were part of government experiments at the Edgewood Arsenal in Edgewood, Md., and other locations between 1950 and 1976, hope to win healthcare for physical damages sustained during that period and freedom from oaths of secrecy that they took about the project.

Jacksonville native Frank Rochelle was 20 in 1968 when he was drafted into the Army. Stationed at Fort Lee, Va., he said he volunteered for a temporary duty assignment in which soldiers were told they would be testing various Army equipment, such as gas masks and boots. Of about 400 applicants for the assignment, Rochelle said he was one of about a dozen chosen, selected for high scores in physical and mental aptitude.

After signing a waiver of confidentiality, Rochelle learned about another task: taking different drugs and allowing the effects to be recorded. But, he said, he was told that he wouldn’t be harmed or be given anything that hadn’t been previously administered to other soldiers. The second drug Rochelle tested, administered through a breathing apparatus, was atropine, an anticholinergic drug with hallucinogenic properties.

The effects were immediate.

“I started seeing animals coming out of walls,” Rochelle said. “People were constantly calling my name, and I’d turn around, and there was no one there.”

Although ostensibly under constant observation, Rochelle found a razor while under the drug’s effects and tried to gouge his skin, believing his freckles had turned into living bugs and he needed to cut them out. The hallucinations, he said, lasted two-and-a-half days.

When Rochelle got out of the Army in 1970, he said he had trouble holding a job due to complexes he had developed including authority problems and claustrophobia, Other symptoms that he believes followed him from Edgewood include memory loss, anxiety disorders, breathing disorders and heart problems.

After retirement from a maintenance job at Camp Lejeune in 2009, Rochelle began searching the Internet for others with stories like his. He found nearly 35 veterans on the search that also led him to Gordon Erspamer, senior counsel at the law firm Morrison & Foerster, which agreed to take his case on pro bono.

Erspamer said the law suit, filed in July, has passed its first large hurdle in overcoming motions to dismiss.

“We felt very strongly that what they did to these men was wrong,” Erspamer said. “We also felt very strongly that the secrecy oaths exacted from them under threat of court martial were also wrong.”

Of the 7,200 GIs who participated in drug testing at Edgewood or other facilities, Rochelle estimates 3,500 to 4,000 remain, which gives his quest a note of urgency.

“The government, in my opinion, has been waiting for us to die off,” he said.

The lawsuit still faces a number of obstacles, including document requests, interrogatories, and subpoenas. Erspamer is working in the first quarter of the year to get the veterans certified as a class. But he believes that, ultimately, the suit will be successful.

“The strength of cases more often than not depends on the facts,” Erspamer said. “And the facts of this case are so compelling.”

Officials with DoD and CIA have told media they do not comment on pending litigation.

http://www.vawatchdog.org/10/nf10/nffeb ... 0310-5.htm

[elfismiles]

We have H.P. Albarelli, Jr. with us to talk about Biological Warfare, the CIA’s experimentation with LSD and the murder of microbiologist Dr. Frank Olson. We talk about the U.S. army and Frank Olson who specialized in germ warfare, aero biology and the delivery of deadly viruses and infectious microorganisms through spray’s and aerosol cans. Hank Albarelli works in the legal profession and was a member of the Carter administration. He is the author of “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments”. Join us for a fascinating and informative program about LSD and the origins and experimentation of drugs and mind control. Topics Discussed: Hank’s background, LSD, Spring Groove Hospital, Biological Warfare, Militaries Biological Warfare Research and Development Program, special Operations Division, CIA, Mk-NAOMI, LSD disseminated on University campuses, BZ, Jacob’s Ladder, Vietnam War, L Wilson green, First Earth Battalion, Jim Channon, Jon Ronson, Men Who Stare at Goats, Mk-Ultra, Project Artichoke, Artichoke Committee, Chemtrails, 1952 France, of Pont St. Esprit, Ergot, Albert Hofmann and his relationship to the CIA, Sandoz, Merck, The Death of Frank Olson and more.

Check out the original source here
Red Ice Radio
http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/20 ... 100209.php
http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/20 ... arelli.mp3

Links & Sources to the program

aterriblemistake.com
http://www.aterriblemistake.com

albarelli.net
http://www.albarelli.net

New book uncovers CIA–Cold War intrigue
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.pr ... eId=116258

The Mysterious Death of CIA Scientist Frank Olson
http://www.crimemagazine.com/olson.htm

MI6 pays out over secret LSD mind control tests
http://www.redicecreations.com/specialr ... I6LSD.html

LSD - The Beyond Within (Video)
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=1863


Books:

A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments
http://astore.amazon.com/redicecre-20/detail/0977795373

LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism and Science
http://astore.amazon.com/redicecre-20/detail/0979862221

Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond
http://astore.amazon.com/redicecre-20/detail/0802130623

The Men Who Stare at Goats
http://astore.amazon.com/redicecre-20/detail/1439181772

The Sacred Mushroom; Key to the Door of Eternity
http://astore.amazon.com/redicecre-20/detail/B0000CKH7I


Films:

Jacob's Ladder
http://astore.amazon.com/redicecre-20/detail/B000IHJ29K

The Men Who Stare At Goats
http://astore.amazon.com/redicecre-20/detail/B002VECMAE

The Beyond Within: The L.S.D. Story
http://astore.amazon.com/redicecre-20/detail/0689100566

[elfismiles]

See also:

MKULTRA victims file suit against USG
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=24045

Veterans sue CIA, Army for experiments at Detrick, Edgewood
Originally published September 09, 2010
By Megan Eckstein / News-Post Staff

A year and a half after a group of veterans sued the CIA, Army and Department of Defense for testing chemicals on troops without consent, the group has asked a judge to penalize the agencies for refusing to cooperate and provide vital records.
According to the veterans, the CIA "exposed thousands of test subjects to hundreds of toxic compounds over the course of many years," states the most recent court document filed in Vietnam Veterans of America v. Central Intelligence Agency.

The veterans claim they were part of experiments that involved psychochemicals, such as LSD, nerve gas and mind control tactics. The veterans never gave informed consent and have not been compensated for health problems they now suffer, they claim.

The focus of the lawsuit is on testing in Army facilities in Maryland under the control of the Chemical Corps in the 1950s to 1970s, but the plaintiffs said similar military experiments took place in universities and hospitals around the country.

"The case has been brought as a class action on behalf of all military personnel exposed to chemical and biological test experiments or mind control research," said Gordon Erspamer, an attorney for the veterans. "This includes, but is not limited to, those exposed at Fort Detrick and the Edgewood Arsenal."

Erspamer said the team of lawyers has not yet filed paperwork to open the lawsuit up to more veterans, but a class-action suit is the ultimate plan for the case. For now, five veterans and three organizations are listed as plaintiffs -- a sixth man had been part of the lawsuit but died last week of cancer, Erspamer said.

The veterans are not seeking punitive damages from the government, only compensation for several medical conditions they've developed that are related to the chemicals they were exposed to, Erspamer said.

To identify more potential plaintiffs, and to identify scientists and government officials involved in the experiments who could be called to testify, the veterans' attorneys have requested that the CIA, Army and Defense produce tens of thousands of pages of records.

The lawyers made their first records request 15 months ago, but they've received only about 16,000 pages -- a fraction of what they requested, they said. Much of the paperwork handed over to the lawyers was redacted, hiding the very names the lawyers sought, according to a recent court document they filed.

The attorneys made two more requests for information but have not received any response at all, Erspamer said.

Because of the pattern of noncompliance, the veterans' attorneys filed a complaint against the defendants and ask that they be penalized for not fulfilling their legal obligations. A judge will consider the complaint on Sept. 29.

Though Fort Detrick was one of the sites of the experiments, spokesman Chuck Gordon said he was not aware of Fort Detrick officials being involved in pulling any records for the lawsuit. Fort Detrick is not specifically named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sectio ... yID=109671

[American Dream]

http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/04/09/45455.htm

Veterans Get Further Discovery in CIA 'Guinea Pig' Drugging Case

By NICK MCCANN

OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) - The Department of Veterans Affairs must disclose certain documents that a class of veterans hopes will prove they were used as guinea pigs by the CIA in Cold War-era drug experiments, a federal judge ruled.

Vietnam Veterans of America filed a class action against the U.S. government in 2009, claiming that at least 7,800 soldiers had been used as guinea pigs in Project Paperclip. The experiments were allegedly conducted at the Baltimore-area Edgewood Arsenal.

Soldiers were allegedly administered at least 250 and as many as 400 types of drugs, among them Sarin, one of the most deadly drugs known, amphetamines, barbiturates, mustard gas, phosgene gas and LSD.

Using tactics it often attributed to the Soviet enemy, the U.S. government sought drugs to control human behavior, cause confusion, promote weakness or temporary loss of hearing and vision, induce hypnosis and enhance a person's ability to withstand torture, according to the complaint.

The veterans say that some soldiers died, and others suffered seizures and paranoia.

They say the CIA knew it had to conceal the tests from "enemy forces" and the "American public in general" because the knowledge "would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its mission."

The veterans' claims have changed over the course of discovery, and there are four remaining legal claims against the CIA, Defense Department, Army and Department of Veterans Affairs:

"1) whether the DOD and Army failed to provide adequate notice to test participants including notice of chemicals to which they were exposed and any known health effects; 2) whether the DOD and Army failed to provide medical care to test participants for any conditions arising out of participation in testing programs; 3) whether the Army, DOD, and CIA have failed to release participants from secrecy oaths; and 4) whether the Department of Veterans Affairs is an inherently biased decision-maker."

The veterans are still fighting for access to certain documents that the four agencies have withheld from discovery as privileged.,

The government is required to provide a privilege log explaining the reason why certain documents or information is not available.

In a 17-page order Friday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley found most of the information requests would burden the government, but the Department of Veterans Affairs waived its privilege claim for certain documents.

"In October 2010, DVA identified over 400 documents regarding this subject which it asserted were subject to the deliberative process privilege," Corley wrote. "DVA has now identified over 700 additional documents mostly from the same time period and covering the same subjects over which it asserts deliberative process privilege as well. However, DVA has not provided any specific explanation as to why these documents were not identified the first time around when DVA was searching for responsive discovery and why it took DVA over a year to identify additional documents regarding these subjects on a privilege log." (Italics in original.)

Corley balked at the DVA's claimed that the veterans could not seek production of these documents because they already conducted depositions.
"This argument is not well-taken," she wrote. "Plaintiffs were between a rock and a hard place because of defendants' delayed production."

There is some overlap, however, since DVA has withheld them as being duplicative or protected by attorney-client and work-product privilege.

In addition to those documents, the court deliberative process privilege still shields certain studies and a Government Accountability Office report from 2007-09. But the DVA must produce the GAO report for the court to review in camera.

Corley also called for an in camera review of documents that the Defense Department withheld on the basis of deliberative process privilege.

"Because these documents appear to cover the same time period and many of the same subjects as the DVA documents the court previously reviewed, the documents are likely relevant to plaintiffs' claims," the decision states. "Accordingly, the court will review the documents in camera to determine whether the deliberative process privilege applies to these documents, and if so, whether plaintiffs have demonstrated substantial need sufficient to overcome the privilege."

Veterans can also access an encrypted mailbox that DVA Affairs created to verify test subjects in mustard gas and Edgewood Arsenal experiments, Corley said, but it would be too burdensome for the department to produce 650 veteran claim files related to mustard gas exposure.

"Plaintiffs contend that the government failed to notify tens of thousands of individuals that they had been exposed to mustard gas and lewisite," the decision states. "The contents of the claim files of the 650 individuals who filed claims based on their exposure will shed little if any light on plaintiffs' notice claims."

Early in the case, the CIA produced 17,000 pages of redacted documents related to its LSD tests, but the veterans sought 11 unredacted documents totaling 56 pages.

The court agreed with the CIA that it would be too burdensome for the agency to locate those documents because "they were redacted by hand over thirty years ago and the original archived versions currently occupy eighty linear feet of shelf space."

This week, the veterans are also expected to receive two unclassified magnetic tapes from the 1970s that could contain data about testing at Edgewood Arsenal.

Corley said the veterans can take the depositions of Joe Salvatore and Dr. Kelley Brix because their names came up in newly disclosed documents. The pending production that Corley ordered Friday could also lead the veterans to resume deposition of David Abbott.

The parties must meet and confer on the case schedule and submit a proposed calendar by April 19.