Freedom’s ground-breaking investigations into U.S. Army stockpiling of chemical weapons and CIA-military testing of such weapons revealed how unwitting sections of the population had been exposed to bacteria sprayed in subways using specially rigged suitcases.

Freedom of information laws have also been instrumental in discovering unlawful experiments — conducted by government agencies — on unsuspecting citizens and soldiers and in reforming the agencies that carry out such practices. Agencies that conduct “experiments” on segments of the population, placing their health or even their lives at risk, violate Article 1 of the Declaration, granting “the right to life, liberty and security of person.” Through its persistent use of FOI laws in the United States the Church was able to alert the public to past abuses of this article and to safeguard against similar human rights violations in the future. At the time it may not have been “politically correct,” but to keep the information from the public would have been unthinkable.

For example, in 1979, the Church exposed “Operation Big City,” in which the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with the cooperation of U.S. Army personnel, had conducted chemical and biological warfare tests in the New York subway system in 1956. Newsday reported on the New York experiment after it was exposed by the Church: “If there had been scrutiny from the day of the test on, common sense tells you that over time, the mortuary reports would indicate a stack or so of dead.” The newspaper noted that the Church had been first to reveal the information and, even though alone at the time, never shied away from expressing outrage over such experiments.

The Church also discovered that personnel from the U.S. Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division utilised specially modified suitcases in 1964 and 1965 to spray bacteria on unsuspecting passengers in Washington D.C.’s National Airport and Greyhound bus terminal. Those tests, intended to study the consequences of the use of smallpox or other biological agents in public places, employed Bacillus subtilus, a germ since found to cause symptoms of respiratory infections, blood poisoning and food poisoning. Based on tickets sold at the time of the tests, Special Operations Division staff calculated that “infected passengers” transported the bacillus to more than 200 cities.

In 1979 the Church released an analysis of CIA records which revealed that the agency had sponsored biological warfare tests in Florida in 1955. These tests were linked to an outbreak of whooping cough in that state that claimed the lives of twelve people, half of them children under the age of one. That same year, the Church was the first to break the news of how the CIA had spent more than $150,000 to continue biological warfare work in apparent defiance of a 1969 presidential order. The documents showed that the CIA continued to spend money through 1972 on a project intended for the development and testing of biological warfare “harassment systems” and for the “large-scale production of micro organisms,” despite the 1969 decree, which banned the production and stockpiling of biological weapons.

Using Freedom of Information (FOI) and other relevant laws, the Church has documented unethical conduct by government agencies and released the information to the public. To encourage widespread use of FOI legislation, the Church published informative booklets that explain in straightforward language how to use such laws.

The Church’s investigations exposed that nearly 7,000 people had been given various experimental drugs at the US Army’s Edgewood Arsenal from the 1950s to the 1970s, including 2,490 soldiers tested with the powerful hallucinogen BZ, a drug 10 to 100 times more powerful than LSD, and which can cause delirium for days. According to Army records, BZ was so powerful that the amount stored in its inventory — 50 tons at the time of the Church’s investigations in 1979 and 1980 — could kill every person in the United States four times over or incapacitate 10 times the world’s population. The Church shocked the world in 1980 when one of Freedom magazine’s investigative reporters was able to obtain a sample of this drug from the manufacturer through the mail — a sample capable of incapacitating the entire UN General Assembly. An even greater surprise was the discovery of documents revealing that Britain, the then Soviet Union and even Switzerland had also developed and stockpiled BZ. The outcry in the press ran internationally and compelled the governments to begin the destruction of this dangerous chemical. In September 1989, the US Army announced that it had completed destruction of its entire stockpile of BZ.

It is hardly surprising that, given the abuses uncovered by means of FOI laws, the concept of freedom of information has not been without opposition. More than a few government agencies have waged pitched court battles to preserve their secrecy. Yet at the heart of a true democracy and human rights for all is open and honest government. The Church has therefore continued this public interest programme because only through FOI can citizens be guaranteed a curative against the corruption and oppression that emerges when governments are not held accountable for their actions.