What’s Normal in a Profoundly Abnormal Society?
Wednesday, December 5, 2012 2:52
“What’s Normal in a Profoundly Abnormal Society?”
by James Quinn
“I consider myself a seeker of truth. It isn’t easy finding it in todays’ world. In an alternate version of the famous scene from “A Few Good Men,” I picture myself telling Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner that I want the truth and his angry truthful response: “Son, we live in a world that has Wall Street banks, and those banks have to be guarded by puppet politicians in Washington D.C. with lobbyist written laws and Madison Avenue PR maggots with media propaganda. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Representative Paul? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for the average middle class American family, and you curse the ruling oligarchs. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That the death of the American middle class, while tragic, probably saved the bonuses of thousands of Wall Street bankers. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, increases the wealth of these same bankers who destroyed the worldwide economic system in 2008. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about in the food bank line, you want me on Wall Street, you need me on Wall Street. We use words like derivative, fiscal stimulus, quantitative easing. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent syphoning off the wealth of the nation. You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very debt that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up 1000 shares of Apple, and hope our high frequency trading supercomputers can ramp the market for a while longer. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.”
I find myself more amazed than ever at the ability of those in power to lie, misinform and obfuscate the truth, while millions of Americans willfully choose to be ignorant of the truth and yearn to be misled. It’s a match made in heaven. Acknowledging the truth of our society’s descent from a country of hard working, self-reliant, charitable, civic minded citizens into the abyss of entitled, dependent, greedy, materialistic consumers is unacceptable to the slave owners and the slaves. We can’t handle the truth because that would require critical thought, hard choices, sacrifice, and dealing with the reality of an unsustainable economic and societal model. It’s much easier to believe the big lies that allow us to sleep at night. The concept of lying to the masses and using propaganda techniques to manipulate and form public opinion really took hold in the 1920s and have been perfected by the powerful ruling elite that control the reins of finance, government and mass media.“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” – Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World Revisited”
We are all liars. We lie to friends, family and co-workers. We convince ourselves they are only small lies and just protect others from being hurt. We would rather be lied to than face the blunt truth about our deficiencies, shortcomings and failures. Willfully believing mistruths allows a person to become dependent upon those promulgating the mistruths. It relieves them of their responsibility to act upon the knowledge that something is wrong and must be fixed. It is a cowardly path to ultimate servitude and destruction. The German people chose this path in the 1930s and the American people have chosen a similar and ultimately destructive path today. The United States Office of Strategic Services prepared a psychological profile report during the war describing Adolf Hitler’s method for controlling the minds of the German masses: “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
America’s corruptible politicians, greedy corporate chieftains, criminal banking overlords, and despicable media manipulators all learned the sordid lessons of mass propaganda from the masters. Our willingness to lie and be lied to set us up to be manipulated by those who understood the mass psychology of a nation. Goebbels and Hitler were heavily influenced by the father of propaganda – Edward Bernays. He and his disciples are professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of public foolishness and ignorance, and never allow truth to interfere with a good story. What master manipulators realized is that it is easier to change the attitude of millions than the attitude of one man. By analyzing and understanding the process and motives of how the group mind works, the invisible government has been able to manipulate and regulate the masses according to their will without the masses knowing they are being managed. Bernays described this elitist view of the world in 1928:“Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays, “Propaganda”
The super-rich elite believe they are more intelligent, more capable of managing the affairs of state, masters of the financial world, and chosen to decide what is best for the masses. In reality, they are egocentric, psychotic, power hungry, myopic, self-serving ravenous vultures, feasting upon the carcass of a once great nation. Truth is inconsequential and irritating to their plans for world domination and control. Therefore, no truth will be forthcoming from any organization or person that is associated with the existing political, economic, financial or social order. Every bit of information that is permitted into the public realm has been vetted, manipulated and spun for public consumption. The public does not like bad news. They do not like hard facts. They do not like to think or do math. They want to be spoon fed mindless sound bites and happy talk. The oligarchs need to keep the masses sedated and subservient while they continue to plunder and pillage, so all data is massaged to provide a happy ending.
This is where I deviate from the ideologue one-trick ponies that refuse to see both sides of the issue. The ruling oligarchs are wealthy, influential, psychotic, amoral, and few. The masses are relatively poor, easily influenced, willfully ignorant, and many. The ruling oligarchs are most certainly evil, but the masses are not the hard working, stoic, downtrodden portrayed by liberal ideologues. One just needs to walk down the street in one of our urban enclaves, saunter through a suburban mall, or click on People of Wal-Mart to witness the tattooed, pierced, butt crack showing, slovenly, obese, and ignorant, attached to their electronic iGadgets, to understand how far our society has deteriorated. Every individual born into this world has the capability to become educated, think critically, not follow the herd, live beneath their means, and not be influenced by propaganda. Aldous Huxley understood in 1931 that those in power could use material goods to invoke passivity and egotism among the populace. He feared that truth would be obscured by an avalanche of irrelevance (500 Reality TV shows), cultural trivialities (Lady Gaga, Lindsey Lohan), distractions (Professional sports), and pharmaceutical enhanced escape (Prozac). He saw the possibility that we would grow to love our servitude as the pleasures of life provided by our controllers overwhelmed any desire to think or question authority.
No sane person could honestly say that what has happened to our society over the last forty years, and particularly in the last five years, is normal. But somehow those in power have convinced the masses that $1.2 trillion deficits, 0% interest rates, declining real wages, the highest average gas prices in history, pre-emptive wars, policing the world and buying rubber dog shit produced in China with a credit card is normal and beneficial to our economy. It seems that I and a few million other people in this country are the abnormal ones. We choose not to be led to slaughter by our masters.
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by Zen Gardner
http://youtu.be/DMpguv7st7s
This is becoming more common place all the time. It can be he was put under so much strain and was taking depression drugs that actually make things worse, bad enough in itself, but this is always fishy.
I mean his big stress according friends was missing his family.
I firmly believe these types of high profile offings are meant to not just deal with a potential “problem”, but serve as a serious warning to others in similar circles to “not even think about” being contrary to the plan, or daring to blow any whistles about what’s really going on. This group of people he picked up had “diplomatic immunity” from testifying as to what they saw.
How convenient. Is that fishy enough for you?
When all else fails to explain these unexplainable suicides, think mental manipulation, i.e. mind control. It is well within the power of modern brain wave technology and trauma based mind control to induce behaviors. All it takes is a “trigger” word or phrase to get people to do a pre-programmed act.
From the sounds of it, he could have just been strongarmed over the railing by this arriving crew of who knows who.
Think I’m Kidding About Mind Control?
Watch this and what happens when Diane Sawyer adroitly drops the “spasm” word on an obvious mind control puppet:
Still having problems believing this? Try the DC Sniper episode:
We searched high and low on youtube but the google logarithm is so controlled now a lot of this won’t come up any longer.
NSA Bastards.
Anyway, here’s a transcript of what police Chief Moose was told to say on television to get this mind-controlled sniper to stop after 13 killings, after which they found the sniper asleep in a truck stop.
How convenient.
Better than the censored youtube clip:
Take It or Leave It – But It’ll Catch Up With You Eventually
It’s what’s happening. The overwhelming evidence is there for mind control. Just because the mainstain state media doesn’t publicise or endorse it doesn’t mean bullcrap. You know that.
Investigate mind control if you haven’t already. It’s an x-ray into the perfidy and extent of control we’re being subjected to.
But don’t fear it. When you wake up, your DNA and consciousness activates, the Universe jumps in, and all Heaven breaks loose! Ha!
Love always, Zen
by Paul Joseph Watson
A recent Discovery Channel documentary proved that individuals can be mind controlled into carrying out murder, proving the so-called “conspiracy theory” that it is possible to create brainwashed assassins.
The documentary, part of the Discovery Channel’s Curiosity series, is particularly relevantgiven the recent claim by an alleged inmate of ‘Batman’ shooter James Holmes who contends that Holmes told him he was “programmed” to carry out the Aurora theater massacre by an “evil” psychotherapist.
Entitled Brainwashed, the experiment was overseen by Harvard University’s Dr. Cynthia Meyersburg and Oxford University’s Dr. Mark Stokes. Certified hypnotherapist Tom Silver was called upon to hypnotize dozens of subjects to test the depth of their hypnotic state and how suggestible they were.
36-year-old corrections officer ‘Ivan’ was told that he was no longer needed on the show and was free to leave. However, during an exit interview, Tom Silver hypnotized Ivan and ordered him to assassinate a foreign dignitary outside a hotel. Ivan was then given a fake gun that had the same blast and recoil of a real firearm.
As Ivan was in the hotel lobby preparing to leave, he was given a trigger signal that the hypnotist had created earlier as a command to carry out the assassination.
As the Discovery Channel website for the show explains, “The experiment was a success, and Ivan carried out his instructions: removing the gun from a red backpack, waiting near the velvet rope line and “assassinating” his target.”
The documentary therefore clearly illustrated that individuals can be brainwashed into carrying out an assassination using hypnosis and other mind control techniques.
A similar documentary was also aired on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom last year. Entitled The Assassin, the show revolved around British illusionist Derren Brown’s attempt to turn an ordinary member of the public into a mind controlled assassin via hypnotism and neuro-linguistic programming, and have that person “assassinate” a celebrity in public while retaining no knowledge of the act afterwards.
The man chosen by Brown was successfully mind-controlled to “shoot” actor Stephen Fry in front of a live audience and was later subjected to a polygraph test which revealed he had no memory of the incident. Despite the fact that the show set out to debunk “conspiracy theories” surrounding the notion that Sirhan Sirhan was a mind-controlled assassin, it actually ended up bolstering their veracity.
In a similar vein to Sirhan Sirhan, who many now consider to be a patsy in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the individual involved in the Channel 4 show later recalled that he felt like he was in a “shooting range” while he was carrying out the assassination. ‘Batman’ killer James Holmes similarly described how he felt like he was in a “video game” during the Aurora massacre, according to Stephen Unruh, the inmate who claims he talked with Holmes.
Holmes allegedly told Unruh that the programming was only broken when he returned to his car after the massacre was over. Media reports later emerged confirming that Holmes had no memory of the actual massacre.
Holmes’ behavior in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, including his claim that he couldn’t remember what happened, is identical to that displayed by Sirhan Sirhan as well as the mind-controlled assassins created in the two recent television documentaries.
The fact that Holmes was involved in mind control is not up for debate. During his time at Salk Institute of Biological Studies, Holmes designed a computer program to alter mental states using flicker rates. Suspicion has also surrounded a package which included a notebook full of violent details that Holmes sent to his his psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, who was disciplined in 2004 for prescribing herself and others psychotropic drugs.
Fenton, who formerly worked with the U.S. Air Force, was treating H... via “medication and psychotherapy” at the The University of Colorado before the Aurora massacre. However, the judge in Holmes’ trial ordered defense attorneys to black out this information. CBS News reported that Holmes had been seeing at least three mental health professionals at the University of Colorado prior to the massacre.
The question of whether or not James Holmes was brainwashed or manipulated through hypnosis into carrying out the Aurora massacre remains unknown. However, his behavior both during and after the ‘Batman’ shooting is identical to Sirhan Sirhan as well as the two individuals who were mind-controlled into becoming “assassins” as part of the two television documentaries.
What can be confirmed is the fact that numerous experiments have proven that it is possible to create a mind-controlled assassin, which is precisely what the CIA did across three decades from the 50?s to the 70?s under a program called MKUltra according to the sworn testimony of direct participants given at the 1975 Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations. That testimony went largely unsubstantiated but only because CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed two years previously.
In the summer of 1975, congressional Church Committee reports and the presidential Rockefeller Commission report revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the Department of Defense had conducted experiments on both unwitting and cognizant human subjects as part of an extensive program to influence and control human behavior through the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD and mescaline and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject had died after administration of LSD. Much of what the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission learned about MKUltra was contained in a report, prepared by the Inspector General's office in 1963, that had survived the destruction of records ordered in 1973.[48] However, it contained little detail. Sidney Gottlieb, who had retired from the CIA two years previously, was interviewed by the committee but claimed to have very little recollection of the activities of MKUltra.[10]
The congressional committee investigating the CIA research, chaired by Senator Frank Church, concluded that "[p]rior consent was obviously not obtained from any of the subjects". The committee noted that the "experiments sponsored by these researchers ... call into question the decision by the agencies not to fix guidelines for experiments."
Following the recommendations of the Church Committee, President Gerald Ford in 1976 issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities which, among other things, prohibited "experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject" and in accordance with the guidelines issued by the National Commission. Subsequent orders by Presidents Carter and Reagan expanded the directive to apply to any human experimentation.
In 1977, during a hearing held by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to look further into MKUltra, Admiral Stansfield Turner, then Director of Central Intelligence, revealed that the CIA had found a set of records, consisting of about 20,000 pages,[citation needed] that had survived the 1973 destruction orders because they had been stored at a records center not usually used for such documents.[48] These files dealt with the financing of MKUltra projects and contained few project details, however much more was learned from them than from the Inspector General's 1963 report.
On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:
In Canada, the issue took much longer to surface, becoming widely known in 1984 on a CBC news show, The Fifth Estate. It was learned that not only had the CIA funded Dr. Cameron's efforts, but perhaps even more shockingly, the Canadian government was fully aware of this, and had later provided another $500,000 in funding to continue the experiments. This revelation largely derailed efforts by the victims to sue the CIA as their U.S. counterparts had, and the Canadian government eventually settled out of court for $100,000 to each of the 127 victims. None of Dr. Cameron's personal records of his involvement with MKUltra survive, since his family destroyed them after his death from a heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967.[50]
1984 U.S. General Accounting Office report
The U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report on September 28, 1984, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, DOD and other national security agencies studied thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances.
The quote from the study:[51]
Deaths
Given the CIA's purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MKUltra experiments, including deaths, will never be known.[22][28][51][52]
Several known deaths have been associated with Project MKUltra, most notably that of Frank Olson. Olson, a United States Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in November, 1953, as part of a CIA experiment and died under suspicious circumstances a week later. A CIA doctor assigned to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep in another bed in a New York City hotel room when Olson exited the window and fell thirteen stories to his death. In 1953, Olson's death was described as a suicide that had occurred during a severe psychotic episode. The CIA's own internal investigation concluded that the head of MK ULTRA, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, had conducted the LSD experiment with Olson's prior knowledge, although neither Olson nor the other men taking part in the experiment were informed as to the exact nature of the drug until some 20 minutes after its ingestion. The report further suggested that Gottlieb was nonetheless due a reprimand, as he had failed to take into account Olson's already-diagnosed suicidal tendencies, which might have been exacerbated by the LSD.[53]
The Olson family disputes the official version of events. They maintain that Frank Olson was murdered because, especially in the aftermath of his LSD experience, he had become a security risk who might divulge state secrets associated with highly classified CIA programs, many of which he had direct personal knowledge.[54][dead link] A few days before his death, Frank Olson quit his position as acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick, Maryland (later Fort Detrick) because of a severe moral crisis concerning the nature of his biological weapons research. Among Olson's concerns were the development of assassination materials used by the CIA, the CIA's use of biological warfare materials in covert operations, experimentation with biological weapons in populated areas, collaboration with former Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip, LSD mind-control research, the use of biological weapons (including anthrax) during the Korean War, and the use of psychoactive drugs during "terminal" interrogations under a program code-named Project ARTICHOKE.[55] Later forensic evidence conflicted with the official version of events; when Olson's body was exhumed in 1994, cranial injuries indicated that Olson had been knocked unconscious before he exited the window.[53] The medical examiner termed Olson's death a "homicide".[56] In 1975, Olson's family received a $750,000 settlement from the U.S. government and formal apologies from President Gerald Ford and CIA Director William Colby, though their apologies were limited to informed consent issues concerning Olson's ingestion of LSD.[52][57] On 28 November 2012, the Olson family filed suit against the U.S. federal government for the wrongful death of Frank Olson. [58]
In his 2009 book, A Terrible Mistake, researcher H. P. Albarelli Jr. concurs with the Olson family and concludes that Frank Olson was murdered because a personal crisis of conscience made it likely he would divulge state secrets concerning several CIA programs, chief among them Project ARTICHOKE and an MKDELTA project code-named Project SPAN. Albarelli presents considerable evidence in support of his theory that Project SPAN involved the contamination of food supplies and the aerosolized spraying of a potent LSD mixture in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France in August, 1951. The Pont-Saint-Esprit incident resulted in mass psychosis, 32 commitments to mental institutions, and at least seven deaths. In his work as acting chief of the Special Operations Division, Olson was involved in the development of aerosolized delivery systems; he had been present at Pont-Saint-Esprit in August, 1951; and several months before resigning his position he had witnessed a terminal interrogation conducted in Germany under Project ARTICHOKE. Other researchers have reached conclusions similar to Albarelli's, including John Grant Fuller, author of The Day of Saint Anthony's Fire, a landmark book that originally cited ergot poisoning as responsible for the events at Pont-Saint-Esprit.[52][59]
On April 26, 1976, the Church Committee of the United States Senate issued a report, "Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities",[60] In Book I, Chapter XVII, p 389 this report states:
Another known victim of Project MKUltra was Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player in New York City, who died in January, 1953 as a result of a secret Army experiment involving MDA.[66]
Legal issues involving informed consent
The revelations about the CIA and the Army prompted a number of subjects or their survivors to file lawsuits against the federal government for conducting experiments without informed consent. Although the government aggressively, and sometimes successfully, sought to avoid legal liability, several plaintiffs did receive compensation through court order, out-of-court settlement, or acts of Congress. Frank Olson's family received $750,000 by a special act of Congress, and both President Ford and CIA director William Colby met with Olson's family to publicly apologize.
Previously, the CIA and the Army had actively and successfully sought to withhold incriminating information, even as they secretly provided compensation to the families. One subject of Army drug experimentation, James Stanley, an Army sergeant, brought an important, albeit unsuccessful, suit. The government argued that Stanley was barred from suing under a legal doctrine—known as the Feres doctrine, after a 1950 Supreme Court case, Feres v. United States—that prohibits members of the Armed Forces from suing the government for any harms that were inflicted "incident to service."
In 1987, the Supreme Court affirmed this defense in a 5–4 decision that dismissed Stanley's case: United States v. Stanley.[67] The majority argued that "a test for liability that depends on the extent to which particular suits would call into question military discipline and decision making would itself require judicial inquiry into, and hence intrusion upon, military matters." In dissent, Justice William Brennan argued that the need to preserve military discipline should not protect the government from liability and punishment for serious violations of constitutional rights:
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing a separate dissent, stated:
This is the only Supreme Court case to address the application of the Nuremberg Code to experimentation sponsored by the U.S. government. Although the suit was unsuccessful, dissenting opinions put the Army—and by association the entire government—on notice that use of individuals without their consent is unacceptable. The limited application of the Nuremberg Code in U.S. courts does not detract from the power of the principles it espouses, especially in light of stories of failure to follow these principles that appeared in the media and professional literature during the 1960s and 1970s and the policies eventually adopted in the mid-1970s.
In another law suit, Wayne Ritchie, a former United States Marshal, after hearing about the project's existence in 1990, alleged the CIA laced his food or drink with LSD at a 1957 Christmas party which resulted in his attempting to commit a robbery at a bar and his subsequent arrest. While the government admitted it was, at that time, drugging people without their consent, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel found Ritchie could not prove he was one of the victims of MKUltra or that LSD caused his robbery attempt and dismissed the case in 2007.[68]
Extent of participation
Forty-four American colleges or universities, 15 research foundations or chemical or pharmaceutical companies and the like including Sandoz (now Novartis) and Eli Lilly and Company, 12 hospitals or clinics (in addition to those associated with universities), and three prisons are known to have participated in MKUltra.[69][70]
Notable subjects
Conspiracy theories
MKUltra plays a part in many conspiracy theories given its nature and the destruction of most records.[78]
Lawrence Teeter, attorney for convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan, believed Sirhan was under the influence of hypnosis when he fired his weapon at Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Teeter linked the CIA's MKUltra program to mind control techniques that he claimed were used to control Sirhan.[79][80]
Jonestown, the Guyana location of the Jim Jones cult and Peoples Temple mass suicide, was thought to be a test site for MKUltra medical and mind control experiments after the official end of the program. Congressman Leo Ryan, a known critic of the CIA, was murdered by Peoples Temple members after he personally visited Jonestown to investigate various reported irregularities.[81]
Aftermath
At his retirement in 1972 Gottlieb was to dismiss his entire effort for the CIA as "useless".[82]
Although the CIA insists that MKUltra-type experiments have been abandoned, some CIA observers say there is little reason to believe it does not continue today under a different set of acronyms.[47] 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti specifically called the CIA claim that MKUltra was abandoned a "cover story."[83][84]
See also
Background
Precursor experiments
A precursor of the MKUltra program began in 1945 when the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was established and given direct responsibility for Operation Paperclip. The program recruited former Nazi scientists, some of whom studied torture and brainwashing, and several who had been identified and prosecuted as war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials.[14][15]
Several secret U.S. government projects grew out of Operation Paperclip. These projects included Project CHATTER (established 1947), and Project BLUEBIRD (established 1950), which was renamed Project ARTICHOKE in 1951. Their purpose was to study mind control, interrogation, behavior modification and related topics.
MKUltra
The project's intentionally oblique CIA cryptonym is made up of the digraph MK, meaning that the project was sponsored by the agency's Technical Services Staff, followed by the word Ultra (which had previously been used to designate the most secret classification of World War II intelligence). Other related cryptonyms include Project MKNAOMI and Project MKDELTA.
Headed by Sidney Gottlieb, the MKUltra project was started on the order of CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles on April 13, 1953.[16] Its remit was to develop mind-controlling drugs for use against the Soviet bloc, largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea.[17] The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives. The CIA was also interested in being able to manipulate foreign leaders with such techniques,[18] and would later invent several schemes to drug Fidel Castro. Experiments were often conducted without the subjects' knowledge or consent.[19] In some cases, academic researchers being funded through grants from CIA front organizations were unaware that their work was being used for these purposes.[20]
In 1964, the project was renamed MKSEARCH. The project attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and generally to explore any other possibilities of mind control. Another MKUltra effort, Subproject 54, was the Navy's top secret "Perfect Concussion" program, which was supposed to use sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory, however the program was never carried out.[21]
Because most MKUltra records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then CIA director Richard Helms, it has been difficult, if not impossible, for investigators to gain a complete understanding of the more than 150 individually funded research sub-projects sponsored by MKUltra and related CIA programs.[22] A member of the CIA claims that not all of the records/chemicals were destroyed. Some were smuggled out and kept in private properties and organizations.[23]
The project began during a period of what Rupert Cornwell described as "paranoia" at the CIA, when America had lost its nuclear monopoly, and fear of Communism was at its height.[24] James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counter-intelligence, believed that the organization had been penetrated by a mole at the highest levels.[24]
Goals
The Agency poured millions of dollars into studies examining methods of influencing and controlling the mind, and of enhancing their ability to extract information from resistant subjects during interrogation.[25][26]
Some historians have asserted that creating a "Manchurian Candidate" subject through "mind control" techniques was a goal of MKUltra and related CIA projects.[27] Alfred McCoy has claimed that the CIA attempted to focus media attention on these sorts of "ridiculous" programs, so that the public would not look at the primary goal of the research, which was developing effective methods of torture and interrogation. Such authors cite as one example that the CIA's KUBARK interrogation manual refers to "studies at McGill University", and that most of the techniques recommended in KUBARK are exactly those that researcher Donald Ewen Cameron used on his test subjects (sensory deprivation, drugs, isolation, etc.).[25]
One 1955 MKUltra document gives an indication of the size and range of the effort; this document refers to the study of an assortment of mind-altering substances described as follows:[28]
Experiments
CIA documents suggest that "chemical, biological and radiological" means were investigated for the purpose of mind control as part of MKUltra.[29] A secretive arrangement granted the MKUltra program a percentage of the CIA budget. The MKUltra director was granted six percent of the CIA operating budget in 1953, without oversight or accounting.[30] An estimated $10 million USD ($80 million adjusted for inflation) or more was spent.[31]
Drugs
LSD
Early CIA efforts focused on LSD, which later came to dominate many of MKUltra's programs. Technical Services Staff officials understood that LSD distorted a person's sense of reality, and they felt compelled to learn whether it could alter someone's basic loyalties.[32] The CIA wanted to know if they could make Russian spies defect against their will and whether the Russians could do the same to their own operatives.[32]
Once Project MKUltra officially got underway in April, 1953, experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes, "people who could not fight back", as one agency officer put it.[33] In one case LSD was administered to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days.[33] LSD was also administered to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S. agreed to follow after World War II. The aim of this was to find drugs which would irresistibly bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program him or her as "a robot agent".[34]
In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several brothels in San Francisco, California to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events. The men were dosed with LSD, the brothels were equipped with one-way mirrors, and the sessions were filmed for later viewing and study.[35] In other experiments where people were given LSD without their knowledge, they were interrogated under bright lights with doctors in the background taking notes. The subjects were told that their "trips" would be extended indefinitely if they refused to reveal their secrets. The people being interrogated this way were CIA employees, U. S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term debilitation and several deaths resulted from this. [34] Heroin addicts were bribed into taking LSD with offers of more heroin.[11]
The office of Security used LSD in interrogations but Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who directed MKUltra, had other ideas: he thought it could be used in covert operations. Since its effects were temporary, he believed it could be given to high officials and in this way affect the course of important meetings, speeches etc. Since he realized there was a difference in testing the drug in a laboratory and using it in clandestine operations, he initiated a series of experiments where LSD was given to people in "normal" settings without warning. At first, everyone in Technical Services tried it; a typical experiment involved two people in a room where they observed each other for hours and took notes. As the experimentation progressed, a point was reached where outsiders were drugged with no explanation whatsoever and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives. Adverse reactions often occurred, for example an operative who had received the drug in his morning coffee, became psychotic and ran across Washington, seeing a monster in every car that passed him. Incidents like that reaffirmed that LSD is a dangerous weapon but that only made them more enthusiastic. The experiments continued even after Dr. Frank Olson, an army scientist who had not taken LSD before, went into deep depression after a surprise trip and later fell from a thirteenth story window (it is unclear whether he committed suicide or was murdered before being thrown out of the window).[36]
Some subjects' participation was consensual, and in these cases they appeared to be singled out for even more extreme experiments. In one case, seven volunteers in Kentucky were given LSD for 77 consecutive days.[37]
LSD was eventually dismissed by MKUltra's researchers as too unpredictable in its results.[38] They had given up on the notion that LSD was "the secret that was going to unlock the universe" but it still had a place in the cloak-and-dagger arsenal. However, by 1962, the CIA and the army had developed a series of superhallucinogens such as the highly touted BZ, which was thought to hold greater promise as a mind control weapon. This resulted in the withdrawal of support for many academics and private researchers and LSD research became less of a priority altogether.[36]
Other drugs
Another technique investigated was connecting a barbiturate IV into one arm and an amphetamine IV into the other.[39] The barbiturates were released into the person first, and as soon as the person began to fall asleep, the amphetamines were released. The person would then begin babbling incoherently, and it was sometimes possible to ask questions and get useful answers.
Other experiments involved drugs such as temazepam (used under code name MKSEARCH), heroin, morphine, MDMA, mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, marijuana, alcohol, sodium pentothal, and ergine (in Subproject 22).[40]
Hypnosis
Declassified MKUltra documents indicate hypnosis was studied in the early 1950s. Experimental goals included: the creation of "hypnotically induced anxieties," "hypnotically increasing ability to learn and recall complex written matter," studying hypnosis and polygraph examinations, "hypnotically increasing ability to observe and recall complex arrangements of physical objects," and studying "relationship of personality to susceptibility to hypnosis."[41] Experiments were conducted with drug induced hypnosis and with anterograde and retrograde amnesia while under the influence of such drugs.
Canadian experiments
The experiments were exported to Canada when the CIA recruited Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, creator of the "psychic driving" concept, which the CIA found particularly interesting. Cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the psyche. He commuted from Albany, New York to Montreal every week to work at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 to carry out MKUltra experiments there. In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions.[42] His treatments resulted in victims' incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents.[43] His work was inspired and paralleled by the British psychiatrist William Sargant at St Thomas' Hospital, London, and Belmont Hospital, Surrey, who was also involved in the Intelligence Services and who experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.[44]
It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. Cameron had also been a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946–47.[45]
Naomi Klein argues in her book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron's research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was actually not about mind control and brainwashing, but about designing "a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.' In other words, torture." Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron's experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method."[46]
Revelation
In 1973, with the government-wide panic caused by Watergate, the CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed.[47] Pursuant to this order, most CIA documents regarding the project were destroyed, making a full investigation of MKUltra impossible. A cache of some 20,000 documents survived Helms' purge, as they had been incorrectly stored in a financial record building and were discovered following a FOIA request in 1977. These documents were fully investigated during the Senate Hearings of 1977.[6]
In December 1974, The New York Times alleged that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. That report prompted investigations by the U.S. Congress, in the form of the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission that looked into domestic activities of the CIA, the FBI, and intelligence-related agencies of the military.
Project MKUltra
Project MKUltra was the code name for a covert research operation experimenting in the behavioral engineering of humans through the CIA's Scientific Intelligence Division. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and officially halted in 1973.[1] The program engaged in many illegal activities[2][3][4]; in particular it used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.[5][6][7][8] MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.[9]
The scope of Project MKUltra was broad, with research undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies.[10] The CIA operated through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA's involvement.[11] MKUltra was allocated 6 percent of total CIA funds.[12]
Project MKUltra was first brought to public attention in 1975 by the Church Committee of the U.S. Congress, and a Gerald Ford commission to investigate CIA activities within the United States. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order.[13]
In 1977, a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents relating to project MKUltra, which led to Senate hearings later that same year.[6] In July of 2001 some surviving information regarding MKUltra was officially declassified.
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