Page 31 - 200810 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - October 2008

Project MKULTRA & Ewen Cameron 31 Project MKULTRA & Ewen Cameron 31 Mind-Control Part 1: Cameron achieved a worldwide reputation, Cameron’s proposal: Mind-Control Part 1: Canadian and U.S. Canadian and U.S. serving as the first chair of the World #1: He’s going to fry his patients. I can tell you Psychiatric Association, as well as president of Survivors Seek Justice the American and Canadian psychiatric that. Survivors Seek Justice associations. In one barely watchable scene of #2: Well, we won’t worry about the patients. institutional cruelty, Cameron is filmed That’s his problem. I just want to know if he can By Arlene Tyner delivering a speech to psychiatrists about his brainwash them. By Arlene Tyner successes in "curing" mental illness. As he Gripping survivor-centered accounts of drones on, the camera switches to scenes of #1: He just might, you know. He’s right about medical atrocities committed by CIA-funded terrified resisting patients being captured and the memory loss with a shock like that. You mind-control (MC) researchers during the Cold restrained by doctors and nurses, forcibly being couldn’t do that to volunteers. War are rarely found in traditional U.S. media.2 dosed with drugs and high-voltage Neither are they the subject of emotionally electroshock, then put to sleep for weeks at a #2: Well, should we give him the money? powerful TV docu-dramas commonly produced time in a room full of beds equipped with tape for broadcast and cable television. In January recorders and football helmets. #1: What have we got to lose? It’s not like he’s 1998, the Canadian Broadcasting System Winner in 1998 of the Academy of doing it to Americans. (CBC) courageously filled this void, although Canadian Cinema and Television’s Gemini the blackout on government MC history is near- Awards in best picture and other categories, The While the tone is apt, the misleading impression total in the U.S. Sleep Room touched the raw nerves of that neither the CIA nor Cameron were The Sleep Room, a gut-wrenching four- Canadian citizens. Not only did they learn their experimenting on U.S. citizens (witting or hour miniseries, depicts the true story of Dr. government had been the CIA’s junior consort unwitting) during this era is the miniseries’ Ewen Cameron’s secret MKULTRA during the Cold War against Communism, they biggest flaw. According to the March 15, 1995 brainwashing experiments carried out in the late also discovered it had secretly granted $500,000 testimony of Claudia Mullen before the 50s and early 60s at Allan Memorial Institute in to fund the Allan Memorial experiments. The President’s Advisory Commission on Human Montreal. Widespread publicity accompanying CIA had only given Cameron $69,000 from Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), Ewen this major TV event has empowered many other 1957 to 1964. As the lawsuit dragged on Cameron was the high-voltage expert in a secret Canadian survivors of nonconsensual through the Reagan presidency, Rauh was team of CIA doctor-brainwashers. Mullen and brainwashing experiments in hospitals and forced to expose the Canadian government’s Chris DiNicola Ebner told a visibly shaken prisons to come forward and seek justice in the role in helping the CIA derail the lawsuit, in group of scientists that memory-erasing courts.3 complete disregard for pain and lifelong electroshock, among other horrors, was In Part I of the miniseries, gifted actors suffering of its own citizens.6 In 1992 the regularly used on physically healthy American dramatize how vulnerable, trusting hospital Canadian government coughed up $100,000 for children in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.8 patients were transformed into virtual 76 Cameron victims. To date 127 of his patients Unlucky enough to be delivered into vegetables through doses of "electroconvulsive have come forward with their horror stories to CIA/military custody by abusive or uncaring therapy" 30-40 times more powerful than usual, seek compensation. parents, children as young as eight years old sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic and CIA psychologist John Gittinger were subjected to trauma-based mind control paralytic drugs, and other psychological and initiated contact with Cameron after reading his (MC) programming to mold them into physical tortures. Part II grippingly depicts the article on "Psychic Driving" in the January 1956 "Manchurian Candidate" spies, assassins and successful eight-year U.S. lawsuit of nine American Journal of Psychiatry. Gittinger sexual blackmailers.9 ACHRE’s final report survivors, who overcame fear to confront the persuaded Cameron to apply to the Society for documented more than 4000 experiments, and humiliations and frustrating delay tactics of the the Investigation of Human Ecology, a CIA anywhere from 16,000 to 23,000 unwitting CIA lawyers. Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., a legendary front set up in 1955 to disburse funding for what victims!10 The numbers run past 200,000 Washington civil rights attorney, and his partner became a huge MKULTRA network in the U.S., when if one includes the GIs deliberately James C. Turner eventually prevailed for their Canada and overseas (in collaboration with exposed to radiation from atomic bomb clients. In 1988, the U.S. "national security" branches of the U.S. Armed Forces). The testing.11 establishment agreed to an out-of-court Human Ecology Fund (its name was changed in During this same era, U.S. psychiatric settlement of $750,000.4 1961) operated secretly out of Cornell patients were also victimized. Harold Blauer, a This extraordinary CBC drama was University in New York City. patient in the New York Psychiatric Institute, based on Anne Collins’ prize-winning 1989 died in 1953 shortly after being injected with a book In the Sleep Room: The Story of CIA Cameron’s brainwashing grant application highly toxic dose of methyl-diamphetamine Brainwashing Experiments in Canada. Collins proposed to "depattern" patient behavior (MDA), a derivative of mescaline. Blauer had exposed Cameron’s 1930s-1940s history of through the use of mega-doses of electroshock, entered the hospital suffering from depression ethically unsupportable experiments on to reprogram patients’ minds with repetitious after a divorce. He had made progress solely psychiatric patients. Many of the people verbal messages 16 hours a day for six or seven with the talking cure. Blauer did not know that methodically abused by Cameron had entered days, during which time the patient would be his psychiatrist, Paul Hoch, was a CIA the Institute suffering only from mild disorders kept in partial sensory deprivation. Cameron consultant secretly under contract with the such as anxiety and post-partum depression. By called this technique "psychic driving." Army’s Edgewood Arsenal chemical/biological the time they were released from the Sleep Brainwashing would be completed by warfare lab. This contract was negotiated Room torture chamber, many had decades of subjecting patients to drug-enforced continuous through the New York State Department of memory completely wiped out. Some did not sleep, sometimes as long as weeks or even Mental Hygiene, which allowed trusting remember their children and even had to relearn months.7 hospital patients to be used as part of the Army’s bladder and bowel control. The Sleep Room portrays two search for "potential chemical warfare agents." A U.S. citizen since 1941, the Scottish- generations of CIA personnel as equally deadly, born Cameron resided in Albany, New York, i.e., the 1950s Human Ecology bureaucrats who Continued on Page 34 from which he commuted to Montreal each approved the funding for what were considered week. Before taking on the directorship at Allan "terminal" experiments on non-U.S. nationals, Memorial, which is associated with McGill and the 1980s CIA legal lords who maneuvered University, Cameron was chair of psychiatry on grounds of "national security" to withhold and neurology at a medical school in Albany. He evidence of the agency’s negligence and failure worked closely with Alan Gregg, medical- to adhere to the Nuremberg Code. The sciences director of the Rockefeller Foundation, callousness of the CIA scientists is aptly which provided grants to found the Institute in captured in this fictitious dialog, where the 1943.5 As director from 1943 to 1964, scientists are discussing whether to fund