Newsday's nine-part video documentary and story can be found at www.newsday.com For 43 years, doctors at Brookhaven National Laboratory were in charge of the medical care of residents of the remote Marshall Islands in the Pacific who had been exposed to radiation from nuclear bomb blasts set off by the United States during the Cold War. Newsday's investigation shows the lab knowingly allowed hundreds of island residents to live on contaminated islands so that American scientists could study the flow of radioactivity through their bodies for "scientific and military concerns." BNL also convinced some 100 Marshallese residents to have highly questionable thyroid surgery -- paying each person $25000 to secure their cooperation -- often without their fully informed consent. After living on their contaminated islands from 1957 to 1985, the population of Rongelap fled, convinced that they were being lied to by the BNL team. They now live hundreds of miles away from their homeland. Now the Obama adminstration and the US Congress will have to decide whether to pay $1 billion in damages awarded to Rongelap by the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in 2007.
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