:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 4.13.2010 ::

:: Wired: This Day in Tech ::

April 13, 1953: CIA OKs MK-ULTRA Mind-Control Tests

1953: Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles authorizes the MK-ULTRA project. The agency launches one of its most dubious covert programs ever, turning unsuspecting humans into guinea pigs for its research into mind-altering drugs.

More than a decade before psychologist Timothy Leary advocated the benefits of LSD and urged everyone to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” the CIA’s Technical Services Staff launched the highly classified project to study the mind-control effects of this and other psychedelic drugs, using unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as lab mice.

Dulles wanted to close the “brainwashing gap” that arose after the United States learned that American prisoners of war in Korea were subjected to mind-control techniques by their captors.

Loathe to be outdone by foreign enemies, the CIA sought, through its research, to devise a truth serum to enhance the interrogations of POWs and captured spies. The agency also wanted to develop techniques and drugs — such as “amnesia pills” — to create CIA superagents who would be immune to the mind-control efforts of adversaries.

MK-ULTRA even hoped to create a “Manchurian Candidate”, or programmable assassin, and devise a way to control the minds of pesky despots, like Fidel Castro — giving credence forevermore to claims by the tinfoil-hat contingent that the government is out to control our minds.

In addition to drugs, the program included more than a hundred sub-projects that involved radiological implants, hypnosis and subliminal persuasion, electroshock therapy and isolation techniques. (The MK in the project name referred to the Technical Services Division that oversaw the project, and ULTRA was a security classification applied to top-secret intelligence.)

More than 30 universities and institutions participated in CIA-funded research, though not all were aware the spy agency was their benefactor, because funding was sometimes laundered through shell organizations.

Under the guise of research, LSD, whose psychedelic properties were discovered by a Swiss chemist in 1943, was secretly administered to CIA employees, U.S. soldiers and psychiatric patients, as well as the general public.

One federal drug agent who worked as a “consultant” for the CIA for a project dubbed “Operation Midnight Climax” hired prostitutes to slip the drug to unsuspecting clients, then watched through two-way mirrors as the clients tripped out. He also reportedly slipped the drug to patrons at bars and restaurants.

The CIA ultimately concluded that the drug was too unpredictable for reliable research, but that was too late for Frank Olson.

Olson was a 43-year-old civilian germ-warfare researcher for the U.S. Army who was also a CIA employee and an unwitting recipient of CIA acid. During a 1953 meeting at a mountain retreat with MK-ULTRA head Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and other CIA employees, Olson and four other scientists drank a glass of Cointreau that had been secretly spiked with LSD.

They were told about the drug about 20 minutes after ingesting it. Olson apparently had a severe reaction and left the retreat in an agitated state and later threatened to resign.

The CIA claimed he suffered a sudden bout of extreme paranoia and depression and sent him to a psychiatrist in New York for consultation. He died in a “fall” from the 10th floor of his New York hotel room. A CIA employee who had accompanied him to New York reported that he awoke at 1:30 a.m. to see Olson hurl himself through the closed window.

Olson left a 38-year-old widow and three children under the age of 10. In the absence of other evidence, Olson’s family reluctantly accepted the CIA’s puzzling explanation that the scientist had been suddenly seized by a fatal depression.

When news of the CIA’s secret LSD program finally leaked out 20 years later, the family learned through a congressional inquiry that Olson had been slipped some of the hallucinogen days before his death. The CIA continued to insist that Olson had committed suicide, but at President Gerald Ford’s urging, the family was paid $750,000.

Read more here.

A L S O

From the Wasington Post archives:
Suicide Revealed:
CIA Infiltrated 17 Area Groups, Gave Out LSD
June 11, 1975, page 1

Vets Sue CIA Over Mind Control Tests
Wired

For two decades or more during the Cold War, the CIA and the military allegedly plied the unwitting with acid, weed, and dozens of psychoactive drugs, in a series of zany (and sometimes dangerous) mind-control experiments. Now, the Vietnam Veterans of America are suing the agency and the Pentagon for perceived abuses suffered under the so-called "MK-ULTRA" and other projects.

Six veterans are suffering from all kinds of ailments tied to this
"diabolical and secret testing program," according to a statement from the vets’ lawyers, passed on to SpyTalk’s Jeff Stein.

The experiments allegedly included "the use of troops to test nerve gas, psychochemicals, and thousands of other toxic chemical or biological substances, and … the insertion of septal implants in the brains of subjects in … mind control experiments that went awry, leaving many civilian and military subjects with permanent disabilities." Subjects were tested without their consent, the veterans say. And when the trials were over, the government failed to "provide health care or compensation."

In a book published last year, former military psychiatrist James Ketchum describes an Army project — separate from the CIA’s efforts — that took place at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. There, he saw test subjects "carry on conversations with various invisible people for as long as 2-3 days." Others "salute latrines" and attempt to "revive a gas mask" that they mistake for a woman.

The feds insist that MK-ULTRA ended, when it was exposed during
Congressional hearings. But interest in chemical mind-control lives along, in some corners of the military-intelligence community. In a 2003 memo, then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo suggesting interrogation drugs could be used if their effects were not permanent or profound. Since then, evidence has accumulated that some detainees may have been drugged. "It’s coming back," retired Colonel John Alexander told Sharon.

Read more here.

A N D

The Frank Olson Legacy Project

"My father, Frank Olson, died in November of 1953 under circumstances that remain both obscure and controversial nearly half a century later.

This Internet site is dedicated to exploring those circumstances and the political and ethical issues embedded in them - issues of paramount importance to the maintenance of an open democratic society.

The aim here will be to provide a laboratory for the conversion of the secretive, labyrinthine system that led to my father's death into the expanding, open network of the Web. I think of this site, therefore, as Frank Olson's window."

- Eric Olson

posted by me

:: 11:51:00 PM [+] ::
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:: Hands off the Internet ::

Washington Post
By Robert M. McDowell

A federal appeals court ruled this week that Congress never granted the Federal Communications Commission authority to impose "network management" regulations on Internet service providers and that the FCC's overly "expansive view" of its power did not merely strain the outer limits of its authority but "seeks to shatter them entirely." In real terms, this rebukes the commission for its effort to order high-speed Internet service providers such as Comcast to treat equally all traffic that flows through their pipelines.

Despite this defeat, the FCC might still try to regulate the Internet under century-old rules made for railroads and Ma Bell phone monopolies. This mistaken effort would hinder recent successes in deploying broadband throughout the country.

While the U.S. economy has shrunk substantially over the past two years, the Internet sector has flourished. Increasingly, our commerce and culture ride on the rails of high-speed, or "broadband," Internet access. But this success was not inevitable.

The Clinton administration set today's "hands-off" policy when the Internet was privatized in the mid-1990s.

Read More here.

posted by me

:: 1:28:00 PM [+] ::
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