Survivors From The MK Ultra Program Come Together To Sue The Federal Government
By
Richard Enos
Richard Enos
According to this CTV News article,
survivors and families of an MK Ultra brainwashing program run by Dr.
Ewen Cameron at McGill University in Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s
have banded together to bring the horrors of this program more fully
into the public eye.
They are planning a class action lawsuit
against the provincial and federal government, an initiative which
lawyer Alan Stein feels optimistic about:
“I believe we can claim moral damages as a result of the experiments when Dr. Cameron used these people as guinea pigs.”—lawyer Alan Stein
There is reason to take Alan Stein
seriously in this matter. He has successfully represented numerous
survivors who were once patients at the infamous Allan Memorial
Institute at McGill University.
In 1992, then Justice Minister Kim
Campbell compensated 77 former patients of the program, but denied
others a payout because they were deemed not damaged enough. Stein has
handled several lawsuits and out of court settlements since.
Public Apology Is Primary
What is different with this class action
suit is that the primary objective of the victims is a public apology
and an admission of complicity on the part of the government. In
previously successful individual lawsuits, money was paid out based on
the extent of damage—such as the degree to which the victim had reached a
‘childlike state’—and not on the fundamental principal that citizens’
human rights had been egregiously violated.
I will not detail the litany of human rights abuses that were perpetrated by the MK Ultra program here. This episode of the Fifth Estate
might be a good place to start if you are interested in getting more
details about the kind of cruel and subversive treatment victims had to
endure, treatment that often damaged patients for life. Suffice it to
say that none of the patients provided informed consent or knew that
they were being used for Cameron’s CIA and federally funded research.
Instead, they were wrongly told their treatments were medically
necessary and for their own well-being.
Forced Non-Disclosure
Those survivors who were deemed damaged
enough to warrant compensation or the family members who were fighting
on their behalf were forced by the government to sign non-disclosure
agreements. Much of the motivation behind survivors and their families
coming together this time and taking collective action is borne out of
the frustration that the government continues to do everything in its
power to hush up the existence of this program and prevent revelations
of these inhumane acts from becoming part of everyday discourse.
These events, like the holocaust, should
become strongly ingrained into our collective psyches so that we can
heal from them, and also empower ourselves to prevent this abuse of
authority from happening in the future.
What is promising is that more and more
people are rejecting the avenue of getting paid off for their silence,
and are motivated to bring acts of human atrocity to the light of day,
forcing those implicated to take public responsibility. The more the
government resists the processes needed for healing and reconciliation
that are clearly in the interests of its citizens, the deeper their
hidden complicity in these tragedies will appear to those with eyes to
see.
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