How the CIA hid their MKULTRA mind-control program
by Jon Rappoport
Back in the early 1990s, I interviewed John Marks, author of
Search for the Manchurian Candidate. This was the book (1979) that
helped expose the existence and range of the infamous CIA MKULTRA
program.
Marks related the following facts to me. He had originally
filed many Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests for documents
connected to the CIA's mind-control program. He got nothing back.
Finally, as if to play a joke on him, someone at the CIA sent
Marks 10 boxes of financial and accounting records. The attitude was,
"Here, see what you can do with this."
I've seen some of those records. They're very boring reading.
But Marks went through them, and lo and behold, he found he could piece together MKULTRA projects, based on the funding data.
Eventually, he assembled enough information to begin naming
names. He conducted interviews. The shape of MKULTRA swam into view. And
so he wrote his book, Search for the Manchurian Candidate.
He told me that three important books had been written about
MKULTRA, and they all stemmed from those 10 boxes of CIA financial
records. There was his own book; Operation Mind Control by Walter
Bowart; and The Mind Manipulators by Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton.
After publishing his book, Marks continued to press the CIA
for more MKULTRA information. He explained to me what then happened. A
CIA official told him the following: in 1962, after ten years of
mind-control experiments, the whole program had been shifted over to
another internal CIA department, the Office of Research and Development
(ORD).
The ORD had a hundred boxes of information on their MKULTRA
work, and there was no way under the sun, Marks was told, he was ever
going to get his hands on any of that. It was over. It didn't matter how
many FOIA requests Marks filed. He was done. The door was shut.
Goodbye.
The CIA went darker than it ever had before. No leaks of any kind would be permitted.
In case there is any doubt about it, the idea of relying on
the CIA to admit what it has done in the mind-control area, what it is
doing, and what it will do should be put to bed by John Mark's
statements. The CIA always has been, and will continue to be, a rogue
agency.
To give you an idea of how far the CIA, the US military, and
its allied academics will go in MKULTRA "research," here is what I wrote
in 1995 about several human experiments. My information was based on
the three key books I mentioned above, as well as Martin Lee's classic,
Acid Dreams:
"Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University, as early as 1955,
working for the Army, gave patients LSD while he had electrodes
implanted deep inside their brains."
"In the mid-1950's, Paul Hoch, M.D., a man who would become
Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the State of New York, then a laborer
in the field for the CIA, gave a 'pseudoneurotic schizophrenic' patient
mescaline. The patient had a heaven-and-hell journey on the compound.
But Hoch followed this up with a transorbital leucotomy [aka
lobotomy]... Hoch also gave a patient LSD, and a local anesthetic, and
then proceeded to remove pieces of his cerebral cortex, asking at
various moments whether the patient's perceptions were changing."
People need to understand how the history of mind control and
psychiatry are interwoven, and how the madmen and murderers within
these "professions" are content to use torture "in the name of science."
From a naturalnews.com article by the heroic whistleblower,
psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin ("Never again! The real history of
psychiatry"), we get insight into one aspect of that history.
Breggin: "[Before World War 2, in America], organized
psychiatry had been sterilizing tens of thousands of Americans. For a
time in California, you couldn't be discharged from a state hospital
unless you were sterilized. In Virginia the retarded were targeted.
American advocates of sterilization went to Berlin to help the Nazis
plan their sterilization program. These Americans reassured the Germans
that they would meet no opposition from America in sterilizing their
mentally and physically 'unfit' citizens."
"While the murder of mental patients was going full swing in Germany,
knowledgeable American psychiatrists and neurologists didn't want to be
left out. In 1942, the American Psychiatric Association held a debate
about whether to sterilize or to murder low IQ 'retarded' children when
they reached the age of five. Those were the only two alternatives in
the debate: sterilization or death."
"After the debate, the official journal of the American Psychiatric
Association published an editorial in which it chose sides in favor of
murder ("Euthanasia" in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1942, volume
99, pp. 141-143). It said psychiatrists would have to muster their
psychological skills to keep parents from feeling guilty about agreeing
to have their children killed."
The psychiatrists who later went to work for the CIA, in the
MKULTRA program, were devoid of conscience. Any experiment was a good
experiment. Human beings were "useful subjects."
Here is an MKULTRA sub-project you may not have heard of. I wrote about it several years ago---
Some would say the 1940s and 50s were the most vibrant and innovative period in the history of American jazz.
During those years, it was common knowledge that musicians
who were busted for drug use were shipped, or volunteered to go, to
Lexington, Kentucky. Lex was the first Narcotics Farm and US Health
Dept. drug treatment hospital in the US.
According to diverse sources, here's a partial list of the
reported "hundreds" of jazz musicians who went to Lex: Red Rodney, Sonny
Rollins, Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, Elvin Jones, Zoot
Sims, Lee Morgan, Tadd Dameron, Stan Levey, Jackie McLean.
It's also reported that Ray Charles was there, and William Burroughs, Peter Lorre, and Sammy Davis, Jr.
It was supposed to be a rehab center. A place for drying out.
But it was something else too. Lex was used by the CIA as one of its MKULTRA centers for experimentation on inmates.
The doctor in charge of this mind control program was Harris
Isbell. Isbell was, at the same time, a member of the FDA's Advisory
Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulant Drugs.
Isbell gave LSD and other psychedelics to inmates at Lex.
At Sandoz labs in Switzerland, Dr. Albert Hofmann, the
discoverer of LSD, also synthesized psilocybin from magic mushrooms. The
CIA got some of this new synthetic from Hofmann and gave it to Isbell
so he could try it out on inmates at Lex.
Isbell worked at Lex from the 1940s through 1963. It is
reported that in one experiment, Isbell gave LSD to 7 inmates for 77
consecutive days. At 4 times the normal dosage. That is a chemical
hammer of incredible proportions.
To induce inmates to join these MKULTRA drug experiments,
they were offered the drug of their choice, which in many cases was
heroin. So at a facility dedicated to drying out and rehabbing addicts,
the addicts were subjected to MKULTRA experiments and THEN a
re-establishment of their former habit.
Apparently, as many as 800 different drugs were sent to
Isbell by the CIA or CIA allies to use on patients at Lex. Two of the
allies? The US Navy and the US National Institute of Mental
Health---proof that MKULTRA extended beyond the CIA.
In another MKULTRA experiment at Lex, nine men were strapped
down on tables. They were injected with psilocybin. Bright lights were
beamed at their eyes---a typical mind control component.
During Isbell's tenure, no one knows how many separate experiments he ran on the inmates.
As I say, Lex was the main stop for drying out for NY jazz musicians. How many of them were taken into these MKULTRA programs?
As Martin Lee explains in his book, Acid Dreams, "It became
an open secret...that if the [heroin] supply got tight [on the street],
you could always commit yourself to Lexington, where heroin and morphine
were doled out as payment if you volunteered for Isbell's whacky drug
experiments. (Small wonder Lexington had a return rate of 90%.)"
A June 15, 1999, Counterpunch article by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair, "CIA's Sidney Gottlieb: Pusher, Assassin &
Pimp--- US Official Poisoner Dies," contains these quotes on Dr. Isbell:
"Gottlieb also funded the experiments of Dr. Harris Isbell.
Isbell ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky.
Passing through Isbell's center was a captive group of human guinea pigs
in the form of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. More than 800
different chemical compounds were shipped from Gottlieb to Lexington for
testing on Isbell's patients."
"Perhaps the most infamous experiment came when Isbell gave
LSD to seven black men for seventy-seven straight days. Isbell's
research notes indicates that he gave the men 'quadruple' the 'normal'
dosages. The doctor marveled at the men's apparent tolerance to these
remarkable amounts of LSD. Isbell wrote in his notes that 'this type of
behavior is to be expected in patients of this type'."
"In other Gottlieb-funded experiment at the Center, Isbell
had nine black males strapped to tables, injected them with psylocybin,
inserted rectal thermometers, had lights shown in their eyes to measure
pupil dilation and had their joints whacked to test neural reactions."
If you think these experiments were so extreme they bear no
resemblance to modern psychiatry, think again. Thorazine, the first
so-called anti-psychotic drug, was researched on the basis of its
ability to make humans profoundly quiescent and passive. Electroshock
and lobotomy are straight-out torture techniques that also destroy parts
of the brain. SSRI antidepressants increase violent behavior, including
homicide. Among its many documented effects, Ritalin can induce
hallucinations and paranoia.
Well, all these effects are part and parcel of the original (and ongoing) MKULTRA.
But now the whole population, via psychiatry, is included in the experiment.
Which is one reason why the right to refuse medication must be protected and expanded.
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