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FTR#1306 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Experimenting on human beings without their knowledge and/or consent is forbidden by the Nuremburg code. Nonetheless, the U.S. national security establishment has been doing just that as a matter of course in the years since World War II.
Having imported many Nazi Germany’s and Imperial Japan’s war criminals, the U.S. was on track to institutionalize experimenting on unwitting human subjects by the end of the Second World War.
This program documents some of the experiments and the programs which gave rise to such operations:
Points of Discussion and Analysis Include: CIA researched the occult in what Hank Albarelli speculates may have been a research project inspired by the Nazi Ahnenerbe; The agency researched various ways of causing cancer and the effects of various levels of stress on those suffering from the disease; Both the CIA and the Army researched the effects of radiation on human beings in a variety of clandestine experiments; The CIA’s “Human Ecology” research projects embraced a wide variety of experimental projects designed to learn how to control and modify human behavior; Vermont-based doctor Robert Hyde was among the premier researchers to test LSD on human subjects, some in projects the details of which have not been fully disclosed.
1. “The Occult Side of MKULTRA”
2. Cancer and MKULTRA
3. MKULTRA and Radiation Experiments
4. MKULTRA and Human Ecology
A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli; Trine Day [HC]; Copyright 2009 by H.P. Albarelli, Jr.; (ISBN-13) 978–0‑9777953–7‑6. ISBN (10) 0–9777953‑7–3; pp. 296–298.
5. Dr. Robert Hyde and LSD
How big was the US’s secret MK Ultra program? Big in terms of the numbers of people involved, but also big in terms of the ambitions? Those are just some of many disturbing questions raised by the following Truthout article from last month about the ongoing efforts to understand one of the darkest chapters of the MK Ultra program: child experiments. Yep. It turns out kids were targeted by utterly brutal MK Ultra-inspired brainwashing experiments. Large numbers of kids. With many who didn’t survive and ended up in unmarked graves.
It’s a little known chapter of America’s MK Ultra program and we’re still only just learning about it, decades later. That’s thanks to the ongoing legal efforts of a group known as the “Mohawk Mothers”, representing the large number of indigenous Canadians who were one of the main groups of victims in this program. Specifically, indigenous children sent to Canada’s notoriously cruel boarding schools for its indigenous population. A system of schools that was so brutal that a 1907 study found that nearly a quarter of the students didn’t survive until graduation. Flash forward to the 1950s, and that systematically abused Canadian indigenous student population apparently represented an enormous research opportunity. An opportunity to learn about not just the roots of criminal behavior but all behavior disorders.
A program was then set up with McGill University, the Royal Victoria Hospital in Quebec, and the Canadian government to funnel indigenous children into these medical experiments. An important piece of context here is that over 1,300 unmarked graves have been discovered in recent years at five of Canada’s indigenous boarding schools. The Mohawk Mothers have, in turn, successfully sued earlier this year to grant archeologists and cultural monitors permission to begin the process of searching for unmarked graves at the Royal Victoria Hospital.
Unmarked graves that are likely holding the bodies of the victims of these secret experiments developed in partnership with the CIA. That’s the other part of this story. Because it turns out this entire indigenous children mass ‘behavioral modification’ program was developed in partnership with the New York State prison system as part of a program designed to understand recidivism and reduce criminal behavior. But as we’re going to see, the New York prison program went far beyond just trying to avoid recidivism and included the ambitious goal of shedding light on “all behavioral problems” and that it had the potential to “bridge the research gap between juvenile delinquency and adult criminality.”
But as we’re also going to see, the behavioral modification programs set up by New York’s prison system as part of this partnership were focused on population in particular: black prisoners. And as we’re also going to see, the behavioral modification they developed focused specifically on prisoners guilty of “overt acts that incite, agitate, and provoke other inmates to militant, radical, and antisocial activities.” Which sure sounds a lot like they were trying to brainwash prisoners with an penchant for civil rights organizing. Keep in mind that these programs were devised in the late 50s and early 60s, right as the civil rights movement was growing to point where it couldn’t be ignored.
So how extensively did the experimentation US prisoners get? Well, in a hint at another unresolved mega-scandal, the article notes how the Attica prison riot in New York in 1971 included accusations by the prisoners that authorities were surreptitiously drugging them and trying to turn them into ‘zombies.’ A government panel later noted that the program the prisoners were complaining about evoked “the spectre of the resocialization, rethinking, and brainwashing camps of totalitarian societies.”
It was shortly after the Attica riots that the New York prison system’s partnership with McGill seemed to come to an end. Around the same time, the Dannemora State Hospital was rebranded the Adirondack Correctional Treatment Education Center, and became home to a “new” behavior modification initiative called the Prescription (Rx) Program. The head of that program, Walter Dunbar, had recently left the California prison system to become New York’s deputy corrections commissioner. Dunbar’s name subsequently appears multiple times in FIOA-released CIA documents that reveal how the agency discussed agency-sponsored narcotics research on incarcerated people in the Vacaville Medical Facility, a California prison that inspire the New York prison system’s partnership with McGill.
So we have a story involving systematic mass child abuse, child death, and brainwashing, coupled with CIA-sponsored prison experiments seemingly targeting black prisoners with civil rights ambitions. It’s one of those stories that so awful, and with such massive potential implications for today, that we have to expect that it’s going to be systematically ignored. As usual for stories that are too horrific to contemplate:
“Launched in the wake of the Nuremberg Trials, which exposed the extent of Nazi atrocities carried out in the name of science, MK Ultra involved a range of grotesque experiments on unwitting test subjects within and beyond U.S. borders. Newly revealed evidence exposes previously hidden links between MK Ultra experiments on Indigenous children in Canada and imprisoned Black people in the U.S.”
A previously hidden link between the CIA’s MK Ultra experiments and the systematic abuses of indigenous Canadian children and black US prisoners in the 60s and 70s. That sounds like an absoutely explosive story. The kind of story that echoes the kinds of crimes that led up to the Nuremberg trials.
And we’re only really learning about this history now thanks in large part to a series of legal victories by the ‘Mohawk Mothers’ who finally got permission to gain access to the umnmarked graves at the grounds of Royal Victoria Hospital. Grave that are presumably part of the much larger of legacy of brutality inflicted upon Canada’s indigenous children. So brutal that a 1907 survey found nearly a quarter of students in this system didn’t survive until graduation. It was the perfect system for provided medical research subjects who could be experimented on in secret. But as FOIA documents reveal, this wasn’t a Canadian-only scandal. By the 1960s, the CIA’s MK Ultra program was already working in partnership with this secret system of child medical torture under the guise of behavior modification research. Behavior modification research that appears to have been conducted as part of a larger effort to apply MK Ultra research to not just treating criminal behavior but preventing it. It was an MK Ultra program for young developing minds:
And when it comes to the evidence of widespread deaths as a result of these secret experiments, it’s not just the circumstantial evidence of all the unmarked graves. There’s eyewitness accounts, like that of Lana Ponting, who was only 16 when was was involuntarily subjected to this treatment and witnessed an apparent grave digging incident. This was 1958, when many more years of this secret collaboration still to come:
And as we can see in a series of exchanges between Doctor Ewen Cameron and Canadian psychiatrist Bruno Cormier written between 1957 and 1963, part of the ostensible justification for these experiments went well beyond criminal behavior and should included all behavioral problems, in the hopes of “bridge the research gap between juvenile delinquency and adult criminality.” And it just happened to be the case that a large portion of the US prisoners involved with this program were black. So we have this secret experimental collaboration focused indigenous Canadian children and black US prisoners with an agenda of learning about any and all “behavioral problems”, from children to adults:
And if it wasn’t clear that modifying the behavior of the US’s black population was a key goal of this research, note the observations of German physician Ludwig Fink who was involved with these experiments and lamented the “growing number of aggressive, assertive black males” behind prison walls while referencing Malcolm X’s autobiography. Again, this was happening as the civil rights movement in the US was in full swing:
And, finally, we get to another mega-scandal waiting to be exposed here: how all of this relates to the Attica prison riot of 1971. Because as we’ve learned, not only did the prisoners accused the prison authorities of secret druggings but a government panel found that the prison ran a program that evoked “the spectre of the resocialization, rethinking, and brainwashing camps of totalitarian societies.” And it was shortly after the riot that we find the partnership between McGill and the New York Prison system came to an end.
At the same time, the Dannemora State Hospital was rebranded the Adirondack Correctional Treatment Education Center, where a “new” behavior modification initiative called the Prescription (Rx) Program was started. A program that focused on prisoners guilty of “overt acts that incite, agitate, and provoke other inmates to militant, radical, and antisocial activities.” Which is basically the description of a counterinsurgency program, where calls for civil rights was presumably the ‘insurgency’. And, lo and behold, the man behind the new ‘Rx’ program, Walter Dunbar, shows up in CIA documents that discuss CIA-sponsored narcotics research on incarcerated people in a Vacaville Medical Facility that inspired the New York prison system’s partnership with McGill. It’s just one mega-scandal on top of another:
We have all the ingredients for a mega-story. A mega-story about a mega-scandal too big to handle. The kind of mega-scandal that victims’ families will probably have to wage on their own. Because if there’s one thing societies at large don’t do well, it’s self-reflection in the face of their own monstrousness. And the more stones we overturn in this story, the bigger and more monstrous it gets. Especially the stones sitting atop all those unmarked child graves.
Following up on the ongoing lawsuit in Canada over the secret CIA-sponsored experiments carried out on indigenous children in Canada as part of the larger MKUltra program affiliated with Montreal’s McGill University and the Allan Memorial Institute, here’s a pair of articles fleshing out the accusations. Like the fact that they allege the brainwashing experiments actually started in 1943, four years before the creation of the CIA. The suit also alleged that the activities conducted from 1948 to 1964 were indeed part of the CIA’s MK Ultra program. So Canada’s role in the US’s brainwashing experiments apparently predated MK Ultra. That’s part of what makes this particular lawsuit so potentially significant.
At the same time, as we’re also going to see, McGill was just one of 89 known institutions affiliated with the MK Ultra program between 1957 and 1964 alone. So while McGill and its affiliates do appear to be a kind of epicenter for this research, it’s also still just the tip of the iceberg:
“U.S. lawyers argued that foreign states had absolute immunity from lawsuits in Canada between the 1940s and 1960s, when the program took place.”
Absolute immunity. That was the US government’s argument in this lawsuit. An argument that the US government successfully made last August. But with the survivors and their families continuing to appeal the ruling, it’s still possible the US government may ultimately end up having to defend its MKUltra experiments in a Canadian court, depending on how this appeals process plays out:
Of course, the Canadian government is a defendant in this case too, so it’s not like we can expect the Canadian government to cheer this lawsuit on. There’s going to be foot dragging every step of the way.
And note how Dr Cameron’s work was allegedly part of the CIA’s MK Ultra program as early as 1948. Keep in mind the CIA only started in 1947. So this partnership was one of the CIA’s founding programs:
And we still only know a fraction of what is to be learned about this history. A history that, as the following McGill Tribune article notes, started as far back as 1943, when Dr Ewen Cameron apparently first served as the founding director of the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill’s Royal Victoria Hospital. And as the article also notes, McGill was just one of 89 institutions that the CIA funded in its MK Ultra experiments between 1957 and 1964 alone:
“Nearly seven decades later, Charles’s daughter, Julie Tanny, is now the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against McGill, the Royal Victoria Hospital, the Canadian government, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Tanny, along with hundreds of other plaintiffs, alleges that the Allan conducted psychological experimentation on unconsenting patients between 1943 and 1964. ”
The secret CIA-sponsored MKUltra programs allegedly ended in 1964. But note the starting year: 1943, before the CIA even existed and before the end of WWII. It’s the kind of detail that suggests a lot more is hiding under this rock. Also note the scale of the secret experimentation: 89 institutions were funded by the CIA between 1957 and 1964 alone. Keep that in mind as we watch the lawsuit about just one of those institutions play out:
And note the interesting defense McGill used when this lawsuit first hit back in 2019: the university acknowledged the experiments happened by claimed Dr Ewen Cameron was acting independently and not as an employee. It’s the kind of detail that suggests there could be some very interesting additional connections to Dr Cameron to a larger network of military/intelligence brainwashing-related government programs at this time:
Also note part of the dynamic at work here in all the appeals and legal delays: there’s hardly any living survivors left alive. It’s mostly the damaged family members who are remaining:
Finally, in relation to the application of this kind of research for the purpose of creating controllable brainwashed assassins, note one of the consistent long-term effects of this ‘treatment’: the patients became far more violent and angry:
Did any of the experimental, still largely secret research at McGill during this time involve the process of trying to create controllable assassins? Some sort of ‘psychic driving’ process of creating a controlled killer? It sure would be interesting to know the answer.
Also note that it was just a before after this article was published that the Mohwak Mothers struck an agreement with McGill University to allow for the archeological work to be done on the suspected child grave sites at the hospital. Step by step we’re getting closer to learning the truth behind these program. Of course, this the kind of truth society generally lacks the ability to handle. Imagine the Jeffrey Epstein scandal X 1000. So we’ll presumably getting closer and closer, and until somehow something happens that blocks meaningful disclosure and then eventually the survivors and family members get old and die, and society collectively forgets this ever happened and/or is repeatedly told there’s nothing to be worried about and everything is fine. Kind of like a patient in a drug-induced coma. An information coma induced with our best interests in mind, of course.
What do they have to hide? Bodies. The bodies of child victims left in unmarked graves. At least it’s hard not to suspect that’s what McGill University and Société québécoise des infrastructures (SQI), the Quebec government agency that manages infrastructure, after learning about the fiasco that’s emerged in recent weeks at the site of the Royal Victoria hospital where human remains in unmarked graves appear to have been detected. As we’ve seen, those suspected unmarked graves have become the focal point of a legal battle being waged by the ‘Mohawk Mothers’ representing the indigenous families whose children were used in the MKUltra experiments conducted there from the 1940s-1960s, with McGill pushing to build a new hospital on the site, potentially destroying all evidence of the unmarked graves — and horrific experiments that sent them to those graves — in the process.
As we’re going to see, it all seemed like the excavation process all parties agreed to in an April settlement was going smoothly. In June, we got reports that three cadaver dogs all picked up the sent of human remains at a particular Royal Victory location. Ground penetrating radar was brought in an allowed to examine the area. By mid-July, we told the ground-penetrating radar had completed its data collection and a report would be ready in about a month.
And then, a week and a half later on July 25, something very strange happened: a group of Mohawk Mothers were suddenly harassed by the security firm hired by SQI and told to get off the site. and that they weren’t allowed to be there. They were, in fact, allowed to be there by court order. When one of the Mohawk Mothers got their phone out to record to encounter, security staff took the phone and deleted the clip. At that point, another took their phone out and captured the rest of the incident on video, with one security guard telling them “I think you guys need a life...Go get a life. Go get a husband. Go get some kids. Go have some kids.” Keep in mind that this was a group of women between 51 and 83 years old. In the end, the Mohawk Mothers left the site.
So that happened. An apparent psychological attack on the Mohawk Mothers. An attack that worked. And it all happened right when it appeared they were just on the cusp of finding evidence of unmarked graves.
On August 3, McGill and SQI issued statements that both decried the July 25 incicent and also announced that the ground-penetrating radar found nine potential unmarked graves. As we’re going to see, the Mohawk Mothers claim they had no communication about these findings before those announcement were made. Beyond that, they assert that McGill and SQI have unilaterally suspended the panel of expert independent archeologists who were mandated under the court order to oversee the excavation process. That’s particularly notable since, as the Mohawk Mothers point out, that panel advised that a forensic specialist be brought after a woman’s dress and a pair of children’s shoes, something SQI has refused despite the fact that the panels recommendations are considered binding under the settlement. As one researcher put it, “The dress was found just a few inches inside the ground and then put in a plastic bag but it has to be a tamper-proof bag for it to stand in a criminal court. There are many chances that it is possible that this comes to a criminal court and this chain of custody has to be preserved for this prosecution to be successful.” Beyond that, we are told that piles of dirt near where the cadaver dogs detected remains have been left to sit in the rain since that July 25 incident. In other words, even if evidence of human remains is found any investigation into how they go there still might be ‘covered up’ from legal perspective thanks to the botching of this excavation process.
So what does McGill and SQI say in response to these accusations? Well, SQI claims that the archeologist’s panel had the mandate to submit two reports of recommendations, one being submitted on May 8 and the other on July 17. SQI added that they were “very satisfied by and grateful for the work accomplished by the experts.” So that appears to concur with with the Mohawk Mothers are claiming. SQI considers the archeologist panel’s authority to have expired, apparently on July 17. And then we week later we get that bizarre harassment incident and here we are, with evidence rotting in the rain. It’s all a reminder that, no matter how much gets exposed, even exposed human remains, there seems to always be a way to keep the coverup going. Don’t trust your lying eyes. Or the cadaver dogs:
“All dogs signaled that they detected human remains in front of the Hersey Pavillion, which was the site of the old Royal Victoria Hospital’s nurses’ sleeping quarters.”
It was a concurrence of cadaver dogs. All three dogs detected human remains. That was the state of affairs back in the last week of June. The kind of finding that was so significant it triggered a return to the negotiating table to determine how to proceed:
And as part of those negotiations, the Mohawk Mothers note how the panel of archeologists advised that they didn’t have the expertise on how to secure the site given these new findings. It’s a security situation made all the more serious due to the observations that unauthorized persons were apparently disturbing the grounds during this excavation process:
Lastly, note the timeframe issue at work here: the panel of independent historians at Know History who were contracted to advise on archeological works on the proposed New Vic site are only contracted for six months. And the process of handing over archival records on who may have attended the Allan Memorial Institute was “not what it could be.” It’s a reminder that there’s a ‘waiting out the clock’ dynamic at work here:
So that was the state of the excavation process back at the end of June. There were frustrations, but progress too. Progress that continued as the ground-penetrating radar search of the areas where the suspected remains were detected was completed by mid July. Although, as we’ll see, their results weren’t slated to be released for another month:
“The analysis of the data won’t be available for another month or so, said Peter Takacs of Geoscan, the company doing the GPR scans.”
The data was collected, but we weren’t yet ready to hear about their findings, which will take another month. And no matter what they found, further on the ground analysis was going to be required either way:
That was the fairly optimistic sounding update we got several weeks ago. Then, a couple of weeks later, we got a much less optimistic update: the Mohawk Mothers were driven from the excavation site in a bizarre incident involving the security crew hired by SQI, the Quebec government agency that manages infrastructure. And then all the official excavation work at the site ground to a halt:
“But the Mohawk Mothers said any goodwill created by the settlement has been undone by the actions of security personnel contracted by SQI. On the afternoon of July 25, three security guards approached five of the women on the Royal Victoria grounds and told them to leave.”
It was bizarre and unexplained when it happened on July 25, and remains bizarre and unexplained today. What prompted the security personnel hired by SQI — security who obviously knew who they were — to not just harass the Mohawk Mothers, but to do so in a remarkably cruel manner, yelling at them to “Go get a life. Go get a husband. Go get some kids. Go have some kids”:
Was the motive to literally terrorize the Mohawk Mothers so much that they are afraid to return? Because that’s what happened with a number of the older Mothers. Mission accomplished:
Again, what prompted such a seemingly random outburst of cruelty? We never got an explanation, which is part of what makes it all the more suspicious. And that brings us to the another update to this story: both SQL and McGill put out August 3 statements acknowledging that the ground-penetrating radar identified 9 potential grave sites. The next day, we got the follow APTN News report, describing how the Mohawk Mothers are now accusing McGill of actively controlling the whole process in violation of settlement, and potentially operating in a manner that will taint crime scene evidence for use in court:
” Quebec’s infrastructure society, or SQI, and McGill both put out statements on Aug. 3 saying nine potential gravesites were identified through ground penetrating radar, or GPR, without consulting the Kahnistensera.”
It’s not hard to see why McGill and SQI are very unhappy with the Mohawk Mothers. With nine potential gravesites already identified, we can be confident there’s a lot more under this rock. And that’s part of what makes the timing of the apparent unraveling of the settlement agreement with the discovery of these unmarked graves so hard to ignore. As the Mohawk Mothers describe, they didn’t even know about the identification of those nine unmarked graves until McGill and SQI issued those public statements. Beyond that, the archeology panel of experts’ recommendation on appointing a forensic specialist is being ignored too. It’s like the pretense of taking this seriously was suddenly dropped once bodies were found:
Also note how the August 3 communications by McGill and SQI left out details from Geoscan’s ground-penetrating radar report, like the fact they may have seen could be child-size graves:
And then we get to this very disturbing allegation: it’s not clear that the evidence being uncovered is actually being handled in a tamper-proof manner, meaning whatever is uncovered might not be admissible in court. Beyond that, the uncovered dirt piles were just left to sit in the rain ever since July 25, the date of the incident between the security and the Mohawk Mothers. So one of the direct outcomes of that bizarre harassment is that the evidence that we just getting uncovered is potentially now getting destroyed by the elements:
So what do McGill and SQI say about these accusations that they were just ignoring the settlement that requires them to follow the recommendations of the expert panel of archeologists? Well, here’s where it gets extra confusing. The Mohawk Mothers claim that McGill and SQI “unilaterally deemed the panel’s mandate terminated.” And according to SQI, the archeologist’s panel had the mandate to submit two reports of recommendations, one on May 8 and the other on July 17 (a week before the incident with security). The SQI added that they were “very satisfied by and grateful for the work accomplished by the experts.” That sure sounds like SQI is admitting that it no longer views the panel as having any authority over the process:
Finally, note how the Mohawk Mothers are demanding that a Mohawk security firm be hired following that incident before they will return. Something that SQI doesn’t appear ready to do. Again, don’t forget the ‘waiting out the clock’ dynamic at work here. The clock is ticking:
Let’s hope the Mohawk Mothers can regain access to that site as soon as possible. But let’s also accept the reality that the evidence that we being uncovered has probably already been either destroyed or at least tainted to the point where it not longer admissible in court. We may not like to admit it, but that vicious security guard was kind of speaking on behalf of society. The coverup must continue. An increasingly collective coverup, the more we learn.
Following up on the ongoing MK Ultra lawsuits in Canada and the research uncovering related prisoner experiments taking place in New York state prisons during this period, including prisoners at Attica, here’s a pair of stories about prisoner experiments at Attica that flesh out this story. The experiments described in the following articles don’t appear to be part of any MK Ultra program. But much like the MK Ultra experiments, these were NIH funded and conducted with the prisoners’ informed consent. Specifically, experiments involving the leprosy bacteria. Yes, prisoners were exposed to leprosy. And as we’re going to see, that ‘informed consent’ was really ‘barely informed consent’ and it’s not clear at all that prisoners realized what they were getting exposed to as part of this research. It’s a story underscore just how much official backing this ethically compromised research had at the time.
That was all revealed in 2017 thanks to Heather Ann Thompson, the author of the 2016 book “Blood in the Water” about the Attica uprising. That book mentions some sort experiment conducted on prisoners thanks to highly compromised ‘informed consent’. But it wasn’t clear what the experiments were about. Those details were revealed to Thompson in 2017 after a reader discovered a 1972 medical journal article describing the leprosy experiments.
It’s also the kind of story that invites the question of ‘what else is under this rock?’. And that brings us to the twist to this story: New York state prison officials were censoring Thompson’s book from the prison system until 2022, when prison officials relented in the face of Thompson’s lawsuits to get the ban lifted. And while state prison officials ultimately agreed to lift the ban by only removing a two-page map of the prison, it’s worth noting that the book was banned from a number of other New York state prisons too. In other words, it’s very unclear that the big danger posed by this book was really the map of the prison. And that’s part of what this is really one of those, ‘what else is under this rock?’ kinds of stories. Because it sure seems like New York state prison officials know what else is under this rock. And really don’t want to see it turned over:
“As the fine print of that 1972 article read: “We are indebted to the inmates of the Attica Correctional Facility who participated in this study and to the warden and his administration for their help and cooperation.” This esteemed physician, a man working for two of New York’s most respected hospitals and receiving generous research funding from the N.I.H., was indeed conducting leprosy experiments at Attica.”
Secret leprosy experiments on ‘cooperating’ prisoners. Funded by the NIH. That’s what Heather Ann Thompson stumbled upon only after years of researching the prison and even publishing a book on the Attica uprising that mentioned experiments on the prisoners with viruses. It was only after publishing that book in 2016, that a reader contacted her about a 1972 medical journal article that fleshed out that medical experimentation mystery. It wasn’t a virus. It was the leprosy bacteria. And as Thompson had already learned, these leprosy experiments were conducted with prisoner consent that was anything but informed. So we had secret medical experiments on prisoners involving leprosy conducted under a corrupted consent system. And this was all largely kept in the dark for over four decades and only somewhat accidentally spilled out into the public thanks to Thompson’s book and that curious reader:
And while it’s not clear what exactly these experiments may have had to do with the MKUltra-related experimentation that we now know was also taking place at the prison, it’s the kind of anecdote that raises obvious questions about what other kind of ‘consent-lite’ experiments may have been going on at that prison at this time. And that ominous question brings us to this perhaps revealing follow up story on Heather Ann Thompson’s Attica revelations: her book “Blood in the Water” was banned from Attica and multiple other New York State prisons. A ban that was only lifted last year, with prison officials agreeing to distribute the book upon request, although with a two-page map of Attica excised from the book for “security reasons.”
So if the map of the prison was the apparent security risk, what’s the excuse for censoring it from other New York State prisons? That’s unclear, but it’s worth noting that the New York state prison policy regarding giving prisoners access to book is “to encourage inmates to read publications from varied sources if such material does not encourage them to engage in behavior that might be disruptive to orderly facility operations.” Publications should not describe lock-picking techniques, for example, or incite disobedience toward law enforcement personnel. So you have to wonder: was the scandalous content of Thompson’s book deemed too inflammatory for New York’s prisoner population? We never really got an answer. We just know that New York state prison officials were very alarmed by the content of that book:
“The historian Heather Ann Thompson won acclaim for her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Blood in the Water,” a deeply reported investigation into the deadly 1971 Attica uprising and its legacy. But since the book’s publication in 2016, one group had been forbidden from reading it: people incarcerated at the Attica Correctional Facility and other New York state prisons. Ms. Thompson sued in March, seeking to reverse the ban.”
It’s hard to see how this censorship move wasn’t going to illicit some sort of public blow back. Banning Attica’s prison population from reading a book about abuses at Attica is just bad form. And yet, for whatever reason, officials deemed this book to be a big enough threat to security that it had to be banned. And not just banned from Attica:
Were prison officials worried that prisoners at these other facilities were going to send the map of Attica to Attica prisoners? If so, that seems like some insane paranoia, especially since the book is available everywhere else in the world. And if not, then what’s the reason for the censorship at all these other facilities? Concerns about more questions that might get raised? Perhaps questions about prisons beyond Attica? Prison officials aren’t saying. At least not formally. But from an ‘actions speak louder than words’ perspective, they’ve been screaming from the rooftops and demanding the public take another look at this chapter of history.
Book em Danno. Yes, Donald Trump might actually be going to jail. Along with his 18 other co-conspirators thanks to the historic indictment filed on Monday by Fulton County DA Fani Willis over the scheme to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results. And as many have noted, should any of them end up in jail, it’s going to be the rather notorious “Rice Street” jail in Atlanta where they’ll be staying.
So with the possibility that Donald Trump, and potentially many other figures in his orbit, will end up behind bars in an Atlanta prison, it’s worth noting some of the notorious history associated with Atlanta prisons. In particular, the history of MKULtra experiments carried out at the Atlanta federal penitentiary in the 1950s and 60s. MKUltra experiments that included none other than Whitey Bulger. And as we’ve seen, not only was Bulger given heavy doses of LSD in over 50 ‘sessions’ as part of this ‘program to understand schizophrenia’, but he was repeated asked questions like “would you ever kill someone?” during these sessions. Sessions that left his brain so damaged that he was unable to to sleep more than a few hours without waking up with nightmares. And that was still the case decades later.
Interestingly, as we’ve also seen, Bulger claimed he had an immunity deal with then-deceased top federal prosecutor, something the US government denied. Interestingly, Bulger’s defense attorneys based his legal defense on that apparent immunity deal, and completely ignored the MK Ultra angle as part of his defense, despite attorneys pointing out that this would have made for an excellent insanity defense.
That’s all part of the history the Atlanta prison system. And sure, it’s only tangentially related to the story of Donald Trump and his co-conspirators potentially having to spend some time at a county jail. But when you have mega-scandals that have been covered up for decades and largely ignored by the public, any reason to bring this story up is a good reason. Especially when it’s directly related to an ongoing lawsuit over covered-up child deaths that were also part of this mega-scandal. So with that in mind, here’s another review of what we know about the MK Ultra program, including the Atlanta federal penitentiary, which was just one of the roughly 80 universities, research institutions, and hospitals known to have played a role in this sprawling research program:
“Another objective that would later appear in operations to make assassination attempts against Fidel Castro included developing a knockout pill that could be surreptitiously administered in food or drink. Early experiments centered on the administration of LSD to witting and unwitting human subjects to examine how it altered behaviors. The CIA later explored other drugs such as barbiturates, morphine, heroin, scopolamine, alcohol, and marijuana. Electric shock, hypnosis, and even magic were other avenues that were researched and tested. Experiments were carried out in multiple phases. By the time the program was shut down, the CIA had implemented 149 subprojects under Project MKUltra.”
149 MKUltra subprojects. What’s under that rock? We’ll never really know, thanks to the destruction of records. But as the piece notes, MKULtra wasn’t even the first program of this nature. Project Bluebird authorized in 1950, renamed Project Artichoke in 1951, had a similar focus. Also recall how the experiments in Canada reportedly started as far back as 1943 when Dr Ewen Cameron was hired by McGill as the founding director of the Allen Memorial Hospital. So when we see that eye-popping 149 subprojects, keep in mind that this was a secret research agenda that had been operating in secret for close to three decades by that point. And spread across a large number of institutions, with approximately 80 universities, research institutions, and now known to have participated. It’s a hint as the level of secrecy and compartmentalization that went into the whole MK Ultra enterprise:
Also note how these experimental programs were reportedly considered top-secret even at the institutions themselves, with only staff involved with the projects being aware of their true purpose. It was a widely distributed yet hyper-compartmentalized project:
The still vast scale of this secret research agenda also underscores the relevance of Frank Olson’s death and the vital need for some sort of public accountability when it comes to the unfolding investigations into child grave in Canada: despite growing evidence of child deaths as a direct consequence of these experiments, the CIA has only ever admitted to a single death. That of Frank Olson’s. It’s an absurd coverup for a horrific mega-crime:
And then we get to this detail about the Atlanta prison systems role in this agenda: prisoners at the Atlanta federal penitentiary were not just used in MK Ultra experiments, but they were apparently rewarded with drugs for their participation:
And that brings us to the following Washington Post article from back in 1982 by Jack Anderson about some of the details we were only learning for the first time at that point about the Atlanta prison MK Ultra program thanks to a lawsuit by four former prisoners. All four claimed to have experienced flashbacks and other symptoms for years following the experiments.
As Anderson notes, this was the first time the CIA had ever been forced to answer questions about MK Ultra program in a judicial proceedings. As a result, some rather shocking admissions were made. Like the fact that the CIA hoped the “psychoactive chemicals” it was testing would work on the victim’s mind and emotions to “release him from the restraint of self-control.” That sure sounds like a program for creating an assassin.
The CIA was also unable to produce any written consent forms, and admitted that no followups were made of the human guinea pigs. It was an interesting admission. On the one hand, it was be just a waste of potential research value NOT to follow up with these patients. On the other hand, if the CIA did admit to following up on its experiments, it would also presumably have to provide some example followup reports. Which may have been filled with reports about the long-term consequences of these experiments like flashbacks and nightmares years later. And that obviously wouldn’t have been great to disclose in this lawsuit. So who knows how exactly to interpret those admissions.
Importantly, as the article notes, it’s not like MK Ultra was the final iteration of this secret experimentation agenda. Successor programs like MK-SEARCH and parallel programs MK-BURN were also set up. It’s a reminder that this was never just an “MKULtra” story. It’s bigger than that:
“Footnate: The CIA refused comment. Gottlieb told my associate Les Whitten the Atlanta project “was in keeping with the kind of experiments being dont at that time.” Pfeiffer “doesn’t ordinarily take calls,” according to a voice at his New Jersey office.”
What happened at the Atlanta federal prisons wasn’t out of the ordinary, at least by the standards of the rest of the MK Ultra experiments taking place during this period. That was the shocking statement made by none other than Sidney Gottlieb in response to this report. In other words, what these four prisoners experienced was typical. Which presumably means the years of horrific PTSD-like symptoms were probably also typical:
And as the CIA had to admit during these proceedings, this isn’t just about MK-ULTRA. There was MK-SEARCH and MK-BURN too. And that’s just what we’ve heard about so far:
And then we get to these chilling details on what exactly they were trying to accomplish: goals like releasing people “from the restraint of self-control” and/or inducing a state of psychosis. Apparently without followups on the experiment subjects. And this was all done under the auspices of ‘curing mental illness’:
Given that the MKUltra program operated out of the Atlanta federal prison system was apparently focused on inducing psychotic out-of-control behavior in patients, it’s worth recalling one of the most notorious subjects of those experiments: Whitey Bulger. And as we’ve learned, Bulger didn’t just claim to have experienced nightmares nightly as a consequences of those LSD experiments conducted on him back in the 1950s. Bulger also claims that they would ask him questions like “would you ever kill someone?” while he was dosed with LSD.
It was the kind of information that defense attorneys argue really should have been used as part of Bulger’s legal defense over charges related to his decades of murder and violence as a mob boss. And yet, for whatever reason, his attorneys never brought it up in trial and instead argued that Bulger was enabled by had benefited from a highly corrupt police force. Intriguingly, Bulger insisted to his dying day that he received criminal immunity from a deceased federal prosecutor who once headed the New England Organized Crime Strike Force.
So we know Bulger was part of those Atlanta federal prison MK Ultra experiments. Experiments that seemed to have the goal of understanding how to create a drug-induced assassin. And then Bulger proceeded to spend decades engaging in murder and violence, possibly with the impression that he had received some sort of criminal immunity. It’s the kind of story that raises some awful questions about what other kinds of ‘build-an-assassin’ spin-off programs did the CIA create that we have yet to learn about:
“Her regret stems from a cache of more than 70 letters Bulger wrote to her from prison. In some, he describes his unwitting participation in a secret CIA experiment with LSD. In a desperate search for a mind control drug in the late 1950s, the agency dosed Bulger with the powerful hallucinogen more than 50 times when he was serving his first stretch in prison — something his lawyers never brought up in his federal trial.”
Over 50 LSD dosing sessions. Very heavy doses of LSD, presumably. The kind of treatment that permanently damaged his mind, leaving Bulger unable to sleep more than a few hours or so. Ever since those experiments in 1957. Don’t forget Sidney Gottlieb’s statements about how the program in Atlanta was typical of what was being done elsewhere. How many people did this program leave with permanent night terrors?
And then we get to this highly alarming detail about these experiments: they kept asking him questions like “would you ever kill anyone?” after giving him these extreme doses of LSD. That doesn’t sound like a program to cure schizophrenia. That’s a program designed to figure out if they can induce a drug-induced state of murderousness:
So why didn’t all this come up as part of Bulger’s legal defense against the crimes of decades of murder and violence? We have no idea. But the fact that his defense attorneys went with the defense that he was enabled by a corrupt police force, and that Bulger does claim he was granted legal immunity, is itself a very interesting detail in this story:
Was an immunity deal actually cut? We’ll probably never get a conclusive answer. Like most of this history.
We’ll see if Donald Trump or any of his co-conspirators end up spending time in the Fulton County jail. Either way, it’s all another reason to bring up this largely forgotten chapter in history. A chapter that, for all we know, is still going under new secret programs. That’s one of the consequences of never really investigating this: we have no idea if it really ended. So let’s hope it’s truly over. But let’s also be thankful Donald Trump was never a part of the original program. The researchers looking to turn prisoners into murderous maniacs would have had a lot to work with.
In light of the unfolding story of the Mohawk Mothers and the pursuit of justice over Canada’s gruesome MKULTRA-affiliated program focused on indigenous children for decades and the quest to have suspected unmarked graves of these victims revealed and examined, it’s worth recalling another unfolding story of gruesome MKULTRA-affiliated experiments on children we’ve been learning more about in recent years. That would be the CIA-affiliated experiments involving Danish orphans. As we saw, while those experiments were ostensibly focused on studying the emergence of schizophrenia, they appear to be much dark experiments in many cases that were attempting to actually induce schizophrenia in these children.
And that brings us to another unfolding chapter in this dark history: Denmark’s mysterious brain collection. Nearly 10,000 brains in all, collected between 1945 and 1982. It’s considered to be one of the most valuable collections of brains on the planet thanks, in part, to the fact that it was collected before much modern medical psychiatric methods were developed. Methods that rely heavily on antipsychotic drugs. This collection of brains taken from people suffering a variety of mental ailments — from depression to bipolar disorder — pre-date that drug-intensive period of medical intervention.
And yet, as we’re also going to see, very little has actually been done with this collection in terms of medical research. Or at least that we’ve been told about. The brain collective reportedly faced financial difficulties and stopped the collection of new brains in 1982. But it wasn’t until the 1990s when the Danish public learned about the existence of the collection, triggering a public medical ethics debate that played out for years. That’s part of the story here: the brain collection was a secret for over four decades and we’re told very little was done in terms of research on the brains. Is that accurate? Or was there secret research being done? That’s all part of this still unfolding story.
But it appears much more research is on the way thanks to the fact that the Danish medical establishment has apparently concluded the ethics debate and determined that much can be learned from the collection. As such, the data is going to eventually be made available to researchers, including the affiliated medical records associated with the patients. It’s going to be very interesting to see what kind of scrubbing those records get.
And while we haven’t heard any indication that this brain collection was somehow affiliated with the secret CIA schizophrenia experiments on Danish orphans, it’s hard not to suspect some overlap. What are the odds these secret medical experiments running for decades under the auspices of ‘studying mental illness’ weren’t somehow connected? It’s just one of the many unanswered questions surrounding a chapter in secret medical experimentation that we still only barely understand:
“Thomas Erslev, historian of medical science and research consultant at Aarhus University, estimates that half of all psychiatric patients in Denmark who died between 1945 and 1982 contributed – unknowingly and without consent – their brains. They went to what became known as the Institute of Brain Pathology, connected to the Risskov Psychiatric Hospital in Aarhus, Denmark.”
Half of all psychiatric patients in Denmark who died between 1945 and 1982 had their brains added to this collection. Unknowingly and without consent. Nearly 10,000 in all. An invaluable collection of medical data extracted under highly questionable means. That’s the medical ethics dilemma Denmark faces. A giant collection of brains gathered under such ethically questionable circumstances that no one was sure what the right thing was to do with them:
But then, after years of debate, the Danish national association for mental health (SIND) suddenly arrived at a conclusion: the collection should indeed be studied. And that ended the debate over whether or not the destroy them. They weren’t to be destroyed and instead moved to a new home at Odense:
And then we get to what made this collection so ethically dicey: not only were these brains collected on patients without their consent, but it appears that Denmark had a particularly aggressive history of treating mental illness with the most extreme therapies, with Denmark performing more lobotomies per capita than any other country in the world at this time. Lobotomies that, in the case of the 24 year schizophrenic patient Kristen, happened not long before her unexplained death. How many of the nearly 10,000 collected brains were there collected on patients who died under mysterious or unexplained circumstances?
Interestingly, as the following EuroNews article notes, it’s not just the brains that are going to be made available to researchers. The associated medical records are reportedly going to be made available too. Medical records from a time when psychiatric patients had little to know rights. Which should make for some potentially very interesting records given the circumstances, assuming they aren’t heavily scrubbed in advance of release:
“Work on the collection stopped due to financial reasons in 1982 and was eventually moved to another city, Odense, in 2017.”
The brain collection wasn’t halted due to ethical concerns in 1982. It was financial. The ethical concerns came later, as Denmark came to grips with a system that gave these patients almost no rights in a system with almost no outside oversight. And, finally, it appears that the Danish government is poised to issue a formal, albeit very belated, apology to these psychiatry patients some time this year:
Finally, note how it’s not just the brains that are going to be made available for researchers. The associated medical records are apparently going to be made available too. And while the brains themselves may not hold records of patient abuses — at least beyond lobotomies — the records could end up being very revealing. And that’s why it’s going to be very interesting to see how much scrubbing of those records takes place before their made available:
Were any of these brains taken from the orphans participating in the CIA’s secret experiments that appear to have been focused on inducing schizophrenia? Let’s hope the medical documentation associated with these brains contains that kind of information. We’ll see. Either way, it’s a grim reminder that one of the best ways to learn about these kinds of highly scandalous state secrets is to somehow crack open an overlapping highly scandalous state secret, and go from there. One dark revelation at a time.
What’s under this rock? Yes, there’s another ‘rock’ in the ever-growing list of ethically barren secret government-run Cold War psychological experiments. This time in Denmark. Again.
First, recall the CIA-affiliated experiments involving Danish orphans. As we saw, while those experiments were ostensibly focused on studying the emergence of schizophrenia, they appear to be much dark experiments in many cases that were attempting to actually induce schizophrenia in these children. And then secretly track them for years as adults. Also recall the still mysterious ‘brain vault’ of the brains of mentally ill Danish patients — brains collected between 1945 and 1982 — that underscored how little rights the mentally ill had in Denmark at the time. Finally, recall the ongoing court case involving the ‘Mohawk Mothers’ in Canada and the systematic exploitation of indigenous children for use in CIA-affiliated psychological experiments, with an apparent focus on understanding how to better control minority populations.
Well, we can now add the ‘Greenland orphans’ experiment to the list of ethically questionable Cold War era psychology experiments being conducted by the Danish government. And as we’re going to see, while there’s no clear ties between this experiment and the CIA-affiliated child schizophrenia experiments, it’s hard to ignore the parallels. Parallels that include how few officials answers have been made available. In other words, while we’ve now learned quite a bit about this experiment, it’s still very much a secret program. A secret even to the orphans who participated.
The experiment, started in 1950, was ostensibly about creating a kind of youth intelligentsia among Greenland’s native Inuit population. The idea was to find orphans, bring them to Denmark to give them an education that included teaching them Danish (as opposed to the native Greenland language they all spoke), and then return them to Greenland, where they would hopefully serve as “role models for Greenland”, which was still a Danish colony at this time.
22 children participated in the program. They were taken from Greenland to a Denmark for a year. Initially, they stayed at a Save the Children holiday camp, but were then sent to foster homes. As part of the experiment they were restricted from speaking their native Greenland language. After a couple years in Denmark, they were returned to Greenland where they were raised in an orphanage that was given custody over them. Once back in Greenland, the children, who had already forgotten their native language by this point, were reportedly discourage from interacting with the locals. Over time, they were effectively viewed as outsiders and most eventually returned to Denmark to live out the rest of their lives. Around half the participants ended up developing mental health and substance abuse programs later in life. Many were unemployed and led hard lives. The goal of created “role models for Greenland” was a complete bust. At least assuming that was the goal.
And, of course, it gets worse. It turns out not all of them were orphans. Yes, they had difficulty finding orphans for the program and decided to also recruit kids from single-parent households. And for those children taken from a household, the experiment still involved separating them from their families basically for the rest of their lives. And as the article reminds us, when colonial occupiers ask the people they are occupying to ‘volunteer’ their children, it’s not really a voluntary act. It also sounds like many families didn’t really have an understanding of what they were volunteering their children for, but were instead told they were going to get a good education.
In one account, Helene Thiesen, taken at age 7 to Denmark, was allowed to briefly meet her family upon her return to Greenland a couple years later but found she couldn’t even speak to her family anymore. That traumatic reunion was allowed to last about 10 minutes, at which point she was told she was forced to go to an orphanage were she would be living away from her family during the rest of her time in Greenland. Brief meetings with their biological family members were still allowed periodically, but it was the foster families in Denmark that they were encouraged to maintain ties with over time. These non-orphans were effectively turned into orphans for the purpose of this experiment.
It also turns out that 6 of the 22 children never even returned to Greenland but were instead adopted by their foster families. It’s another detail that raises major questions about what the actual purpose of this experiment was in the first place. An experiment that was kept secret from the kids themselves. As Helene Thiesen describes, she only discovered all of this was part of a social experiment decades later when an acquaintance who learned about it informed her.
So given that we have this bizarre social experiment ostensibly to create a crop of ‘elites’, but carried out in a manner that destroyed these kids’ lives and resulted in mental illnesses in many cases, we have to ask: was this part of that broader ‘MKUltra for kids’ panoply of secret MKULTRA-affiliated experiments taking place at the time?:
“Thiesen was one of 22 Inuit children who were taken from their homes not knowing that they would end up being part of a failed social experiment. Aged between 5 and 9 years old, many of them would never see or live with their families again, becoming forgotten about and marginalized in their native land.”
A failed social experiment. It’s a rather generous way of describing a program that appeared to be focused on taking orphans and turning them into “little Danes who would become the intelligentsia; role models for Greenland.” An idea they apparently got from the Save the Children charity, which appears to have participated in the actual program itself, with the newly arrived children having been housed at the Save the Children’s holiday camp in Fedgaarden. An experiment in basically tearing orphans out of their native Greenland culture and immersing them in the ‘superior’ Danish culture. And as dark as that experiment sounds on the surface, it gets worse. Because when they couldn’t find enough orphans, they just broadened the search to include single-parent households. In other words, they were separating children from families. And doing so under the implicit coercive threat that comes with a colonial power making demands of their subjects. In other words, they took these children from these families, and kept them apart as part of this experiment:
And while the plan was to return these kids to Greenland after their immersion experience in Denmark, note how 6 of the 22 kids were straight up adopted by their foster families, a complete contradiction of the stated purpose of the experiment in creating a crop of ‘intellectual elites’ for the next generation of Greenlanders. It’s the kind of major deviation from the stated goal of the program that raises questions about what the actual goal was:
And for the 16 children who were allowed to return to Greenland, those with families were allowed to see their families but not actually communicate with them. With no explanation given to the children as to why it was they couldn’t talk with their families anymore. Just brief visits from family members at most. What was the actual experiment here? Because this doesn’t seem like an experiment in creating a new crop of ‘elites’:
And then we get to the long-term aftermath of the experiment: up to half of the group developed mental illness and substance abuse problems later in life. Again, what was the actual experiment here? Because it’s hard to ignore the parallels between this experiment and the extreme interest at the time in studying mental illness using ethically questions experiments affiliated with the MK Ultra-affiliated programs during this period. Ethically question experiments like the CIA-affiliated Danish experiments on children focused on studying schizophrenia. Experiments that involved regularly exposing the kids to stresses that seemed almost like they were intended to potentially induce schizophrenia, along with the secret tracking of these children into their adult lives. And, of course, there’s the secret CIA-affiliated experiments on indigenous children in Canada that remains covered up to this day. All of these ‘experiments’ were happening at the same time. What are the odds that this experiment on indigenous children from Greenland was also part of this larger cluster of CIA-affiliated secret programs?
Intriguingly, it appears that the kids themselves were never actually informed about what they went through, even after growing up. It was only decades later when one of the participants, Helene Thiesen, found out she was part of an experiment. She was 46. Although note that the 1996 date in this article for that revelation is likely a typo or mistake and it was likely 1991 when she learned this since it states that she was 46 at the time and was 77 years old in 2022 when this story was published (implying a 1945-ish year of birth):
Finally, it’s worth noting how this experiment was revealed decades ago, and yet Save the Children only issued an apology in 2015 and the Danish government still has yet to really grapple with its culpability in this. It’s worth recalling that 2015 is the same year Save the Children was kicked out of Pakistan following the US military operation to kill Osama bin Laden. An intelligence operation that involved a CIA agent working in Pakistan who claimed to be with Save the Children. The charity insists that it had no idea about this CIA operation and was used as a cover without its knowledge. Also note that Save the Children’s apology for its role in this experiment happened in August of 2015, two months after it was kicked out of Pakistan under a flurry of accusation that the group was a CIA front. It’s an interesting coincidence that the very belated public apology for the Greenland ‘orphans’ experiment was only released in the wake of all these CIA accusations:
Note that the government of Greenland did indeed agree in March of 2022 to pay the six remaining victims $38k in compensation. $38,000 in compensation for having their lives ruined as part of colonialist experiment. It’s a pretty good deal for Denmark. Especially since the larger the settlement, larger the implicit admission of guilt. And when we look at this experiment as part of a piece of much large collection of secret highly unethical psychological experiments from this period, there’s an abundance of guilt yet to be acknowledged.
We’ve received some disturbing updates from the ‘Mohawk Mothers’: It sounds like the excavation of the unmarked graves at McGill University’s Royal Victoria hospital is still not going according to the court-ordered agreement. This is on top of the disturbing verbal harassment directed at the activists back in July by the security guards at the site. So it appears that McGill and government of Canada are going get their way and have this chapter of the MKUltra history literally swept away without any real investigation.
So with the prospects of that history at McGill remaining covered-up forever only with each passing day, it’s worth taking a look at the following excerpt, published in Counter Punch, from Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the press. by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, that does a good job of putting the research taking place at McGill into the larger context of what the CIA was trying to accomplish during this period with all of these different programs that went well beyond just MKUltra. Programs with a focus on not just mentally breaking suspected spies but creating super-spies with hypnotically-created alternate personas. And programs that could identify a ‘Manchurian candidate’ but also create one. Behavior modification for the purpose of creating assassins. And that’s on top of all of the applications for mass social control — like thwarting civil rights movements by controlling putative civil rights leaders — that was envisioned at this time.
And as the article reminds us, Dr. Ewen Cameron wasn’t the only psychologist working for MKUltra who was involved with directing these kinds of experiments on prisoners. Dr Louis “Jolly” West headed the Violence Project at UCLA where behavior modification research on inmates at the Vacaville state prison. As we saw, it was the behavior modification program at Vacaville that helped inspire the New York State prison’s partnership with McGill. In other words, Dr. Ewen Cameron and Dr. Jolly West were working towards the same goal during this period. A goal breaking human minds and creating people who are so controlled they could be ordered to kill someone and not even remember it. Among other applications.
This is a good time to recall how Dr. West happened to be none other than Jack Ruby’s psychologist. It was West who arrived at the preposterous hypothesis that Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald as part of a brief psychomotor epileptic event in the basement of the Dallas jail. And that’s a reminder that when we’re talking about the secrets currently being buried (or rather, excavated and tossed) at the Royal Victoria hospital in Montreal, we’re not just talking about the systemic abuses of indigenous children, prisoners, and other vulnerable members of society. We’re also talking about the CIA’s secret build-an-assassin program. A program that evidence suggestions may have been involved with a range of untouchable mega-scandals that includes the JFK assassination:
“The CIA memos of the time are filled with complaints about the difficulties of finding suitable human subjects for experimental research. “Human subjects” were evoked in the tactful phrase “unique research material.” At first the CIA experimented mostly on prisoners, drug addicts and terminally sick destitutes. Details are scanty because Helms ordered all CIA records on the programs destroyed, but much of the “unique research material” came in the form of prisoners at California’s Vacaville prison, the Georgia state penitentiary and the Tennessee state prison system.. There was a problem, however. In these instances a certain modicum of informed consent was often required. Prisoners could get reduced sentences for agreeing to participate in the experiments. Drug addicts would get cash, drugs or treatment. Informed consent was often a condition in any treatment of the terminally ill poor. For the CIA researchers any type of informed consent was antithetical to their research task, which was to make unwilling subjects talk and covertly elicit cooperation.”
An urgent need for human test subjects that have no idea they are being tested on and can be disposed of like human refuse if needed. It’s one the consistent themes we see throughout this history. Ethical experimentation simply wasn’t an option, in the minds of the people running this program. Nor was ethical experimentation really seen as a priority, apparently, with a hysterical notion of a brainwashing gap between the US and Soviets underpinning many of the justifications at the time. Incidents like the trial of Hungarian Roman Catholic Cardinal Josef Mindszenty in 1949. Recall how Mindszenty was represented in that trial by Luis Kutner, the human rights lawyer who happened to be close to Jack Ruby.
As we’ve also seen, the narrative about Soviet brainwashing was based heavily on the assertion that US POWs in Korea were being brainwashed into admitting their participation in various war crimes including biological warfare. That’s despite the fact that it does indeed appear that the US was engaged in covert biological warfare involving techniques developed from the work of the many Unit 731 Japanese biological warfare scientists now working for the US, which obviously couldn’t be admitted at the time (or ever, really, to this day). Hence, the need to cover up the US’s biological warfare in Korea became the underlying national security excuse for MKUltra. It was like war crimes on top of war crimes. And as this article describes, the program had the avid backing of Richard Helms — then the deputy director of covert operations — the whole time:
But it wasn’t just a need to test on unsuspecting subjects. The tests themselves were obviously torture and human rights violations. Like electro-shock ‘therapy’ meant to induce excruciating pain or lobotomies. And that brings us to Dr. Ewen Cameron, who came to rely on both of these techniques as staples of his research. Research that included not just prisoners in the US at places like Attica but also indigenous children in Canada. Cameron was head of the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatry Association during this period, with a long relationship with US intelligence. Cameron was even brought to Nuremberg by Allen Dulles to evaluate Nazi war criminals and help craft the Nuremberg Code on medical research.
And note who else we find deeply involved in this of research on prisoners: Dr Louis “Jolly” West. And, lo and behold, it turns out West was Jack Ruby’s psychologist. It was West who asserted that Ruby shot Oswald because he had a brief ‘psychomotor epileptic event’ in the basement of the Dallas jail. So one of the chief MKULtra psychologists — a guy who was focused for years on techniques for developing behavior modification techniques — is the same guy who gave the world the joke cover up excuse for Ruby’s actions. Because of course that’s how this played out:
Finally, in case it wasn’t entirely clear that the creation of involuntary assassins was a major part of this research, note the war crimes committed as a part of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam: implanting electrodes in prisoners in an attempt to see if they could be prompted to kill each other. Followed up with executions. It’s the kind of cold brutality that underscores just how serious of an interest there was in this type of research:
Let’s at least be thankful these grotesque experiments failed. We’d probably all have mandatory chips in our brains by now had they worked *gulp*.
But let’s also be thankful that we even know about these experiments at all. It’s not like the CIA or military wanted to share this with the public. It had to be dragged out into the light. And it’s very hard to imagine that everything that should have been dragged into the light really has by now. The more we learn, the larger this program appears to have actually been at the time, scattered between dozens of institutions around the world. There’s clearly still so much more to learn. That’s part of why it would be a pretty massive shame if this decades-long investigation into what actually happened ultimately ended with the physical destruction of unmarked child-graves at a hospital. A massive shame that would also very on brand for this story.
So what exactly did the CIA’s teams of Phoenix Program psychologists actually learn in those gruesome behavior modification experiments conducted on Vietnamese POWs? Those would be the experiments where they implant electrodes in the brains of prisoners capable of stimulating parts of the brain, then placed them in a room with knives, and waited to see if they could get the prisoners to violently attack each other. We’re told that the experiments were a failure and the CIA simply had the prisoners shot and cremated. And while it’s certainly possible that the experiments really did result in failure, we have to ask: what did they learn? Was it really a complete failure?
Because as the following article reminds us, whatever knowledge the CIA may have been learned about the science of behavior modification via brain stimulation during the course of its MKUltra-related experiments is now on the cusp of become shockingly applicable knowledge. Applicable on a shockingly large scale thanks to the ongoing developments in brain-to-computer-interface (BCI) technology. It’s a technology that’s famously become associated with Elon Musk’s Neuralink. As Musk has tried to spin it, the Neuralink will be like a FitBit for your brain. And while that may be the default consumer application for such technology, it’s important to recognize that Neuralink won’t necessarily just be able to read your brains activities but also stimulate areas of the brain too. It’s genuinely exciting in terms of the range of medical interventions that could become possible. And genuinely terrifying when you consider the possible side effects.
Side effects that medical research has already started seeing in the many brain-stimulation patients that already exist thanks to years of brain-stimulation research. Side effects that can include a loss of sense of self or personal agency. In other words, side effects that sure sounds a lot like the kind of mental effects that the CIA was trying to induce throughout its years of MKUltra build-an-assassin research.
And that’s why we have to ask: so what did the CIA truly learn about the potential behavior modification applications for brain stimulation technologies? Were those experiments really a complete failure? Or did they make discoveries that were so shocking they had to be covered up even more deeply? The kind of questions that underscore one of the extreme dangers of the MKULtra-style secret research programs: we can never really know what was secretly learned. Sure, there might eventually be some sort of belated disclosure. But it’s not like we can really have faith that we learned everything there is to be learned or that the most explosive revelations were shared.
What are the odds that knowledge of how to use brain stimulation to induce violent behavior on unsuspecting individuals would have been shared with the public? It’s a question implicitly raised decades ago when the MKUltra revelations first became public. And left unanswered thanks to the near complete lack of public interest in any of these mega-scandals of years past. And here we are, decades later, with no answers to those questions and lots of new brain stimulation technology for consumers on the way:
“For now BCIs are constrained to the medical domain, but a vast array of nonmedical uses have been proposed for the technology. Research published in 2018 described participants using BCIs to interface with numerous apps on an Android tablet, including typing, messaging, and searching the web just by imagining relevant movements. More speculative applications include playing video games, manipulating virtual reality, or even receiving data inputs like text messages or videos directly, bypassing the need for a monitor. These may sound like science fiction, but the reality is that we’ve reached a point where the cultural and ethical barriers to this kind of tech have begun to outpace technical ones. And despite the fictional nature of “The Terminal Man,” its disastrous turn raises real questions about unintentional effects of BCIs.”
Brain computer interfaces (BCIs) have obvious appeal to sci-fi writers. And industry, now that the technology has caught up with the science fiction. Industries that aren’t simply interested in using BCIs to treat various medical ailments. They are planning on commercializing BCI technology for the masses. A ‘FitBit for your brain’. It’s not just Musk’s vision. And that’s why the sci-fi nightmare scenarios depicted in movies like The Terminal Man are no longer just fiction. They’re warnings of what could come because brain implants that don’t just monitor the brain but actively stimulate areas of the brain are just a matter of time. We had better wrap our heads around the implications of this technology sooner rather than later, but the technology is basically already here. And based on the early results, there really does appear to be a real risk of a loss of a sense of agency or control. It’s the kind of findings the MKUltra researchers of yesteryear would have found to be extremely intriguing:
And, then, of course, there’s the incredible privacy violations inherent in this technology. The way these platforms are going to work, your brain’s activity is effectively going to be recorded and uploaded to a cloud somewhere. Real-time deciphering won’t be required. That data can be data-mined for years to come. The more they study it, the more they’ll learn about what makes you tick:
On top of all of those risks are the implicit risks that come with hyper-capitalist societies where deprivation is the norm: people can become dependent on these devices, only to have them taken away for whatever reason. Just imagine the mass commercialization of this technology in modern America — technology that could become expected by employers someday — when half the populace can barely afford to get by and are in perpetual financial crisis. It’s like a recipe for creating mentally unstable desperate out of control people:
Finally, note that it’s not just Neuralink. The more advanced this technology gets, the more commercial players we can expect, especially when it comes to the mass consumer space where the big profits await:
Who will win the ‘FitBit for you brain’ commercial race? Time will tell, but with the way the world works today it’s hard to imagine a future that doesn’t involve the wide scale commercial adoption of this technology, especially should we achieve non-invasive brain-stimulation technologies. And probably, in many cases, demanded by employers. Directly messing around with our brains on a massive scale is kind of the logical next step for our ‘late stage capitalism’ world. Which, again, is why we have to ask: what did the CIA actually learn in those terrifying experiments? Because whatever was learned is going to have some very widespread potential applications sooner than we might expect. Technology marches on.
As wildly depressing as the story of Mohawk Mothers and the missing children ultimately is, there is one overarching silver lining here: it may be justice delayed, but at least these horrific crimes are finally, belatedly being brought to light. It could be worse.
And then we get updates like the following. Updates that serve as a reminder that it might actually be worse, and justice will likely again be denied. First starters, we got an update a few weeks ago on the legal push to include the US government in the ongoing class action lawsuit. As we saw, the US government has been arguing that it still has immunity despite a 1982 Canadian law that would seem to leave the US culpable in Canada’s courts because the alleged crimes happened earlier. In a 3–9 rulng, the Quebec Court of Appeals found that the US does have immunity. An appeal to the Canadian Supreme Court is still an option.
A week later, we got an update from Kimberly Murray, the independent special interlocutor assigned by Canada’s justice minister in 2022 to monitor the excavation process and ensure that the process agreed upon are being followed. As Murray puts it, “There’s so much to say about the chain of events that have been happening that are misguided. They’ve been done all wrong. I’m angry.” McGill and the Societe quebecoise des infrastructures (SQI) insist everything is going as planned but also that no significant findings have been discovered yet.
So we have the US government winning in court at the same time McGill and the SQI appear to be beating the courts by simply roughly roughshod over the court ordered excavation process and ignoring the mandates. Because of course this is how this is playing out.
Ok, first, here’s an update on the Quebec high court’s ruling on the US government’s immunity. The kind of ruling that suggests any legal battles involving the US government and this case are going to have to be fought and won in US courts:
“In a 3–0 decision rendered Monday, the province’s highest court upheld a lower court decision that said a 1982 Canadian law governing how foreign states can be sued in the country cannot be used retroactively. The appeal was heard in March.”
A 3–0 unanimous ruling. It doesn’t bode well for the families, which could be as many as 300 families still seeking some sort of closure. But it sounds like the legal efforts aren’t entirely exhausted quite yet. There’s still the option of a Canadian Supreme Court appeal:
So we’ll see if the victims’ families have any success or if the US government succeeds once again in keeping this chapter in history covered up from the public. But as we can see from the updates we got a couple weeks ago from the Special Interlocutor tasked with monitoring the excavation process, it’s not clear how much power the courts actually have to ensure the families experience some sort of justice. At least that’s what we can infer from the fact that Kimberly Murray — the independent special interlocutor assigned to this case by then-Justice Minister David Lametti last year — has nothing but anger and frustration to communicate about the treatment she has received and the general handling of the excavation process. Or as Murray put it, “There’s so much to say about the chain of events that have been happening that are misguided. They’ve been done all wrong. I’m angry.”:
““I’m getting frustrated,” said Kimberly Murray, independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian residential schools. “I’m very concerned about what’s going to happen on the site.””
The whole excavation process has relied on independent observers like independent special interlocutor Kimberly Murray to ensure the integrity of process. And it’s been a giant frustrating mess, according to Murray, with no communication. As Murray put it, “There’s so much to say about the chain of events that have been happening that are misguided. They’ve been done all wrong. I’m angry.” At the same time, McGill is pointing to an assessment by a bio-archeologist that dismisses the evidence discovered so far — children’s shoes, and dress, and bones — as insignificant discoveries. This is a good time to recall how cadaver dogs indicated they detected human remains at this location. It’s those dueling narratives that point towards an ongoing coverup:
As we can see, the way this is playing out there’s going to be a very angry independent special interlocutor at the end of this process. Murray already laid this out in her interim report and she’s going to lay it out again in her final report. And despite all that, McGill, the SQI, and the Canadian government appears to be poised to get away with it. Much like the US government is poised to get away with it. Again. It’s a reminder that, for the most protected crimes, the most you can realistically expect to achieve is further confirmation of a giant coverup.
The Mohawk Mothers are a group of unhinged activist making outrageous demands. Or they are a group of concerned relatives running into an official coverup after trying to get to bottom of a decades old mega-scandal. It’s that kind of either/or situation. And either way, it’s increasingly looking the Mohawk Mothers are going to remain thwarted in their attempts to get answers to the question of what happened to their relatives. Which sure feels like a coverup
At least that’s how it looks now that the Mohawk Mothers are again trying to get a court injunction to block the ongoing excavation of the Royal Crown Victoria Hospital grounds. Unfortunately, it’s following a September 14 legal action by the Mohawk Mothers that was struck down by a Quebec Superior Court judge who ruled that the excavation could continue because the Mohawk Mothers “have not proved that drilling in zone 11 will disturb any unmarked graves nor that excavation will be conducted in other zones before the plaintiffs’ application for a safeguard order is argued at the end of October.”
The Mohawk Mothers were back in court last week for their hearing, arguing a range of violations by McGill and SQI, including evidence of human remains that is being disregarded and a refusal to hand over GeoScan data. For their part, McGill and SQI basically deny all these allegations and insist that the ongoing excavation process is following the court ordered process. This is a good time to recall that interview last month of the court-assigned independent special interlocutor Kmberly Murray, who characterized the who process as deeply flawed. As Murray put it, “There’s so much to say about the chain of events that have been happening that are misguided. They’ve been done all wrong. I’m angry.”
And here we are, in the first week of November, waiting to see how the judge rules on an emergency motion filed last week to put a halt to an excavation process that could be actively destroying evidence of unmarked graves after they lost their last appeal back in September. It doesn’t bode well:
“On Sept. 14, the Mohawk Mothers took legal action to stop the drilling and excavation at the site. However, their motion was denied by a Quebec Superior Court judge, ruling that work at the former hospital site in Montreal could proceed..”
The clock is ticking. But more importantly, the construction teams are drilling and excavating, despite the September 14 legal action brought by the Mohawk Mothers thanks to a Quebec Superior Court judge who ruled that the Mohawk Mothers “have not proved that drilling in zone 11 will disturb any unmarked graves nor that excavation will be conducted in other zones before the plaintiffs’ application for a safeguard order is argued at the end of October.” It doesn’t exactly point towards an investigation conducted with integrity:
And that brings us to the new legal challenges brought by the Mohawk Mothers, who assert that evidence of human remains does in fact exist. Beyond that, McGill and SQL apparently refused to share GeoScan data, have blocked access to the site, and unilaterally fired a three person panel of experts. It’s a catch 22 situation: the Mohawk Mothers have to prove that the excavation process would disturbed unmarked graves without the sharing of the relevant data that could actually provide that proof:
And yet the statements for SQI basically ignore the allegations of Mohawk Mothers and insist that, no, nothing is being mishandled and everything is going according to the court ordered process:
Are the Mohawk Mothers going to receive another legal defeat? We’ll find out soon. But based on the manner McGill and the SQI have been allowed to get away with seemingly destroying the evidence for months now, it’s not hard imagine this ending with another frustrating ruling. In other words, the only closure we can reasonably expect for the Mohawk Mothers at this point in the closure on any sort of hope for justice they may have had going into this process.
Dave,
Why aren’t you talking about the ongoing holocaust in Palestine, leaving 10,000 (Zionist figure) or 20,000 (Palestinian figure) dead and many tens of thousands wounded, maimed, and dying? Give me a good reason I shouldn’t drop my Patreon support for you. Can you really be THAT soft on the State of “Israel”(sic)?
I have covered the Israeli Palestinian conflict on the Patreon site.
I have been dealing with a serious, painful, restrictive, though non-life threatening medical crisis and have not produced a new program since 10/13.
I will continue to cover the Israeli-Palestinian crisis on the Patreon site.
When I resume the weekly broadcasts, I may comment on it, but will probably limit coverage to the Patreon site, for the most part.
After I am deceased, you will probably be asking the same myopic, narcisistic questions: “How come you haven’t . . . .”
Cheers,
Dave Emory
Hello Dave,
Sorry to hear you are in pain and unwell.
I’ve been listening to your programs since I was about 17. I’m now 53.
As a poor “minority” kid, I learned really quick that the world popular mass media informed us on was much more complex and corrupt than they portrayed.
Your show was and is an intelligent, honest source for domestic and international history and news.
Thanks for your life’s work!
Sid
I’m also very sorry to hear about your poor health and wish you a speedy recovery. There is a very good book that helps provide interesting perspective on the current conflict in Gaza entitled, The Arabs and the Holocaust by Gilbert Achcar (Metropolitan Books, 2009). Its title doesn’t do the book justice and is rather like Loftus’s Secret War Against the Jews in that regard. One particularly interesting quotation explores the link between the ‘forgotten’ Mufti, the Moslem Brotherhood and Hamas from page 163: “Since the 1987 intifada, the irresistible rise of Hamas in Palestine in the wake of the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the region has led to production of a few hagiographic texts about the mufti. By and large, however, events have confirmed a situation that Elpeleg (an Israeli biographer of the mufti) observes in his biography: the sharp contrast between the embarrassed silence surrounding the memory of Amin al-Husseini and the glorification of such ‘heroes’ or ‘martyrs’ of the struggle for Palestine as Abdul-Qadir al-Hussseini or Iz-ul-Din al-Qassam, not the mufti, who serves Hamas as its ‘positive hero’–a circumstance the more striking in that the Muslim Brothers, from whose Palestinian branch Hamas emerged, steadfastly supported the mufti during his lifetime, treating him as the legitimate leader of the anti-Zionist struggle.” There is also good discussion of Qassam after whom the miltary wing of Hamas was named. He died in an explosion in 1935. The current leader of that wing is Yahya Sinwar and there is a good background article today on the CBC website. Achcar gives particular emphasis to the mufti’s rejection of the partition and two state solution in 1947 by the UN. Many thanks for all your great work over the years, Dave!
Here’s one of those stories where the biggest part of the story is the parts that have yet to be told: Politico just published a piece about a particularly grim chapter of Cold War history and the systematic moral crimes waged in the name of ‘anti-communism’. And while the story doesn’t have anything directly to do with the history of MKUltra and the secret programs designed to explore the possibilities of mind control for ‘problem’ populations, it’s certainly an adjacent chapter of history. The story focuses on the experiences of a single Greek family, torn apart by the Western-backed right-wing Greek government during Greece’s civil war, when suspected communists were jailed, tortured, and killed, creating large numbers of orphans in the process. These orphans weren’t just seen as children now in need of families. They were viewed as having been infected with the illness of communism and in need of ‘reeducation’ in proper conservative homes.
As part of this ‘reeducation’ process, the histories of these children, and the fates of their parents, was systematically scrubbed. Instead of being told that their biological parents were jailed or killed communists, adoptive families were typically told the children came from parents who abandoned them or didn’t want them.
And so as Greece’s orphanages swelled with the children of jailed and killed communists, the country became an abundant source of desired white babies for families in the United States. But beyond that, the Greek baby trade become a blueprint for Cold War international adoption that was used around the world, including South Korea. That’s a big part of the context of this story. It’s peek at a chapter of Cold War history that hasn’t been adequate told or understood and that started in Greece but didn’t end there.
But it wasn’t just ideology driving this baby trade. As researcher Gonda Van Steen discovered, the export of Greek babies provided Greece with something quite important for the poor country: a valuable exportable good with diplomatic value, with American families getting charged as much as $2,800 per adoption (about $30,000 today). In fact, in 1953, after Greece and the US signed bilateral agreements prioritizing American investment and security presence in the country, Greece was expected to also provide a steady stream of adoptable children, and Greek politicians understood these children could become an excellent diplomatic relations tool. As Van Steel wrote, “Greek children became part of the exchange of goods and services that the Marshall Plan had initiated.”
It’s a remarkable chapter of Cold War history, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it’s still not really understood what happened. In fact, to this day, the majority of Greek children adopted by American families still have no idea who their biological parents really were. All done in the name of expunging these children of the ‘illness’ of communism...and also to make the Greek state some fast cash:
“David’s mother Joan’s adoption was not a one-off, but part of a larger phenomenon that took place after the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949. Although not as well-known as the Vietnamese or Korean wars, it is considered the first proxy conflict of the Cold War. The U.S. and U.K. backed a right-wing royalist government, and communist states supported leftist guerrilla fighters.”
It’s a chilling chapter of Cold War anti-communist extremism. And also just an early example of a much larger Cold War phenomena. The children of communists were to be torn from their families and effectively ‘reeducated’ from their communist ‘illness’. And not just Greek communists. This was a much larger ideological campaign. A still under-recognized global campaign focused on snuffing out communism by literally tearing apart communist families. But it wasn’t just an ideological motive behind this. There was the logistical reality that communists were to be jailed or killed by the Western backed right-wing governments, inevitably creating large numbers of orphans in the process:
But it wasn’t just ideological. Greek children, seen as adoptable white babies in the West, had commercial value as an export. As researcher Gonda Van Steen discovered, “Greek children became part of the exchange of goods and services that the Marshall Plan had initiated.” So in addition to a pro-capitalist ideological fervor, the export of Greek babies was also driven by raw economics:
It’s hard not to notice the disturbing alignment of a lucrative illicit baby trade with an ideological drive to purge these children of communist sentiments. But that’s how it is. Money makes the world go round. At least that’s the case for a world where capitalism is the only allowable ideology under the threat of imprisonment, torture, and execution.