I was suspecting the interest of the CIA and the Bill Clinton (a former CIA member) foundation in circumcision. Here is an interesting article found on Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... 0eeb7572fb
By Richard Cohen
HOW TO BEGIN?
How to begin a column about the CIA's secret study of the effect of circumcision? You see my problem. Youunderstand. Therefore, it will come as no surprise if I begin slowly, sort of backing into the subject, telling you that I firstlearned of the CIA program in The Washington Post. There was a small story of exactly four paragraphs and it was pointed outto me by my wife who said, if I recall correctly, "Look at this." I pretended to be indignant.I read the story. It said that the CIA in the early 1960s "funded" experiments on circumcised children "to determine if theoperation left any emotional after-effects . . . The aim was to determine if circumcision at a significant stage of a child'sdevelopment produced anxieties such as fear of castration . . ." It went on a bit more and ended with the news that theconclusions, if any, were not revealed. I waited.I waited for the other shoe to drop. I waited for some senator or congressman or anybody to yell bloody murder. Nothing, Iwaited for someone to ask for an investigation. Nothing. I waited for an editorial, somebody maybe asking what business it wasof the CIA's to find out anything about circumcision. Nothing. I waited for a press release from the ACLU, pointing out thatthere is nothing in the CIA's charter allowing it to do this kind of research. Nothing.I kept waiting. Surely someone would say something. Surely someone would write something. Surely, this was an outrage - theCIA finally going completly bonkers. I mean, even its wildest programs on mind control had to do, in a loose way, withintelligence. But this - what had this to do with anything? I waited. Nothing.So I started to ask people if they had read the story. I asked because after a while I thought maybe I was the only one who hadseen it. Most people said they didn't see it, but a few said they did. They had nothing to say about it. Every once in a while, Iwould sneak a look at the story, as if reassuring myself that it had really been in the paper. Then one day someone wrotesomething about it. It was James A. Wechsler of the New York Post and he wrote a column.He wrote about how he had seen the same story I had seen, only he had seen it in the New York Times. He wrote how no oneelse had seen it and he, too, kept wondering why nothing was being done - no one saying anything, no calls for a congressionalinvestigation, nothing but a deafening silence. He wrote about how after a while he doubted that he had seen the story, how hesearched his desk for it, how it was suddenly missing. I read that and was yelling in my head. "You read it, Jimmy, you read it.Just you and me. Jimmy, we read it. We know. No one else knows. Just you and me."Anyway, Wechsler's column didn't advance the story any, didn't tell you anything that wasn't in the first newspaper accounts ofthe experiments, and so I continued to wait for someone to give it the full treatment. It never happened, and the more I thoughtabout it, the more I thought that the ball, so to speak, was in my court.I would do a column and in this column I would say that this story about the circumcision experiments was a commentary onour times - a commentary on now blase and jaded we've become about CIA abuses. The story, after all, cmae after several yearsof disclosures about CIA abuses and cockamamy schemes - everything from an attempt to hand Fidel Castro a poison cigar("Have, have one of mine") to enlisting the Mafia in the war on Castro to recent stories about the agency's mind-controlprogram in which it dropped more mickeys into more drinks than Mickey Spillane has done in a life-time of stories. It was ourCIA, after all, that opened a bordello of sorts in San Francisco where, in the name of intelligence, it drugged unsuspecting menand watched through a two-way mirror as they engaged in sex with a presumably patriotic prostitute. After that, a circumcisionstudy pales by comparison.You read that kind of stuff and you can understand how people could become blase, shrug their shoulders at the news. Youcould understand that and you could write a column about that and you would not be wrong. But you would not be telling thetruth, either. For what vexed me more than anything about that original story was that business about the conclusions not beingrevealed. After all, let's face it - it's not a bad question. It's a question debated for generations. I wanted to know the answer.So I called the CIA, acting very reportorial and somber, and I told my business to a woman who answered the phone and shevolunteered that the agency had gotten lots of letters from people who also wanted to know what the CIA had learned aboutcircumcision. Well. I asked slyly, what do you tell them? She giggled. No comment, she said.Then I got a public informationofficer on the phone. Very pleasant. Very nice. He explained that the existence of the program had been deduced from financialrecords but the study and its conclusion, if any, were no longer available. It had been destroyed in 1973. I hung up depressed,but then I thought of something that gave me hope. I mean, you never know anymore.Maybe the Department of Agriculture will get interested.