Truthout
By H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Dr. Jeffrey S. Kaye
August 11, 2010

Bobby is seven years old, but this is not the first time he has been subjected to electroshock. It’s his third time. In all, over the next year, Bobby will experience eight electroshock sessions. Placed on the examining table, he is held down by two male attendants while the physician places a solution on his temples. Bobby struggles with the two men holding him down, but his efforts are useless. He cries out and tries to pull away. One of the attendants tries to force a thick wedge of rubber into his mouth. He turns his head sharply away and cries out, “Let me go, please. I don’t want to be here. Please, let me go.” Bobby’s physician looks irritated and she tells him, “Come on now, Bobby, try to act like a big boy and be still and relax.” Bobby turns his head away from the woman and opens his mouth for the wedge that will prevent him from biting through his tongue. He begins to cry silently, his small shoulders shaking and he stiffens his body against what he knows is coming.

To find out more about psychiatry/
government experiments, watch this
interview with Psychiatrist and Author,
Colin Ross

Mary is only five years old. She sits on a small, straight-backed chair, moving her legs back and forth, humming the same four notes over and over and over. Her head, framed in a tangled mass of golden curls, moves up and down with each note. For the first three years of her life, Mary was thought to be a mostly normal child. Then, after she began behaving oddly, she had been handed off to a foster family. Her father and mother didn’t want her any longer. She had become too strange for her father, whose alcoholism clouded any awareness of his young daughter. Mary’s mother had never wanted her anyway and was happy to have her placed in another home. When the LSD Mary has been given begins to have its effects, she stops moving her head and legs and sits staring at the wall. She doesn’t move at all. After about ten minutes, she looks at the nearby physician observing her, and says, “God isn’t coming back today. He’s too busy. He won’t be back here for weeks.”

From early 1940 to 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected child neuropsychiatrist practicing at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, experimented extensively with electroshock therapy on children who had been diagnosed with “autistic schizophrenia.” In all, it has been reported that Bender administered electroconvulsive therapy to at least 100 children ranging in age from three years old to 12 years, with some reports indicating the total may be twice that number. One source reports that, inclusive of Bender’s work, electroconvulsive treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from 1942 to 1956, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children’s Service from 1956 to 1969. Bender was a confident and dogmatic woman, who bristled at criticism, oftentimes refused to acknowledge reality even when it stood starkly before her.

Despite publicly claiming good results with electroshock treatment, privately Bender said she was seriously disappointed in the aftereffects and results shown by the subject children. Indeed, the condition of some of the children appeared to have only worsened. One six-year-old boy, after being shocked several times, went from being a shy, withdrawn child to acting increasingly aggressive and violent. Another child, a seven-year-old girl, following five electroshock sessions had become nearly catatonic.

Years later, another of Bender’s young patients who became overly aggressive after about 20 treatments, now grown, was convicted in court as a “multiple murderer.” Others, in adulthood, reportedly were in and of trouble and prison for a battery of petty and violent crimes. A 1954 scientific study of about 50 of Bender’s young electroshock patients, conducted by two psychologists, found that nearly all were worse off after the “therapy” and that some had become suicidal after treatment. One of the children studied in 1954 was the son of well-known writer Jacqueline Susann, author of the bestselling novel “Valley of the Dolls.” Susann’s son, Guy, was diagnosed with autism shortly after birth and, when he was three years old, Dr. Bender convinced Susann and her husband that Guy could be successfully treated with electroshock therapy. Guy returned home from Bender’s care a nearly lifeless child. Susann later told people that Bender had “destroyed” her son. Guy has been confined to institutions since his treatment.

To their credit, some of Dr. Bender’s colleagues considered her use of electroshock on children “scandalous,” but few colleagues spoke out against her, a situation still today common among those in the medical profession. Said Dr. Leon Eisenberg, a widely respected physician and true pioneer in the study of autistic children, “[Lauretta Bender] claimed that some of these children recovered [because of her use of shock treatment]. I once wrote a paper in which I referred to several studies by [Dr. E. R.] Clardy. He was at Rockwin State Hospital – the back up to Bellevue – and he described the arrival of these children. He considered them psychotic and perhaps worse off then before the treatment.” (This writer could find no case where any of Bender’s colleagues spoke out against her decidedly racist viewpoints. Bender made it quite clear that she felt that African-Americans were best characterized by their “capacity for laziness” and “ability to dance,” both features, Bender claimed, of the “specific brain impulses” of African-Americans.)

About the same time Dr. Bender was conducting her electroshock experiments, she was also widely experimenting on autistic and schizophrenic children with what she termed other “treatment endeavors.” These included use of a wide array of psycho-pharmaceutical agents, several provided to her by the Sandoz Chemical Co. in Basel, Switzerland, as well as Metrazol, sub-shock insulin therapy, amphetamines and anticonvulsants. Metrazol was a trade name for pentylenetetrazol, a drug used as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant. High doses cause convulsions, as discovered in 1934 by the Hungarian-American neurologist and psychiatrist Ladislas J. Meduna.

Read entire article here:  http://www.truth-out.org/the-hidden-tragedy-cias-experiments-children62208

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By CCHR International
May 21, 2010

One of the most controversial proposed disorders for the upcoming revision of psychiatry’s billing bible of mental disorders, (the DSM-5) is Psychosis Risk Syndrome (PRS) a “mental disorder” that, if voted into DSM, would confirm the allegations that psychiatry is manufacturing a Brave New World for itself—heavily backed by Big Pharma—of drugging children before they develop a “mental illness.” Already criticized for the millions of children being needlessly drugged and the lack of scientific criteria to substantiate any mental diagnosis as a legitimate medical condition, some psychiatrists now want the power to pull out their crystal ball and predict the onset of a psychosis and drug it before it has even occurred. And perhaps the strongest proponent is Australian psychiatrist Patrick McGorry.

Even psychiatrist Allen Frances, former chairman of the previous DSM task force expressed alarm over the proposed diagnosis and its repercussions should it be legitimized, stating, PRS “stands out as the most ill-conceived and potentially harmful.” The Syndrome fails badly on all 3 counts, he says:

“1. It would misidentify many teenagers who are not really at risk for psychosis;

2. The treatment they would most often receive (atypical antipsychotic medication) has no proven efficacy; but,

3. It does have definite dangerous complications.”

Frances adds: “Drug company marketing would influence parents and clinicians to be especially alert to any strangeness in teenagers.” False positives could be as high as 70-90 percent.[i] This can only lead to greater numbers of children and adolescents being harmfully drugged—already one of the major criticisms against psychiatry and a point of contention among many psychiatrists today.

Australian psychiatrist Patrick McGorry, speaking at the APA convention in New Orleans, as a cheerleader for “early intervention” (i.e. pre-drugging) is undeterred. Despite the unpredictability and risk of the drugs prescribed to treat PRS, McGorry wants to go full steam ahead, increasing the number of children being placed on extremely dangerous and even lethal drugs. It should come as no surprise that McGorry is a paid consultant for, and has received speaker’s fees from AstraZenecca, Janssen-Cilag, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Sanofi, Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer.[ii]

The theory of PRS wasn’t McGorry’s. He credits Dr. Ewen Cameron, the Canadian psychiatrist who became infamous in the 1980s after it was revealed he had performed cruel and brain-damaging experiments on his patients in the 1950s and 1960s with funding from the CIA.[iii] However, McGorry tested it in a world-first trial. Another study he conducted in 2002 was funded with an unrestricted grant from Janssen-Cilag and supported by pharmaceutical company-funded groups NARSAD and the Stanley Foundation, as well as several Australian agencies. McGorry and colleagues predictably found that risperidone (Risperdal)—made by Janssen—reduced the risk of “transition to psychosis” in young people.[iv] Risperdal has been linked to Type 2 diabetes.

• In Australia, McGorry’s Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Center’s (EPPIC) preventive treatment center for young people, PACE, receives drug company funding from Janssen-Cilag. Much of the policy development embodied in the Australian Clinical Guidelines has come out of EPPIC research programs. As Richard Gosden, Ph.D., a highly respected Australian author and academic stated: “This may have paid off handsomely for the company…. It may not be coincidental that a half page of the Clinical Guidelines is dedicated to dosage recommendations for using risperidone in first-episode psychosis. The Clinical Guidelines do not extend these dosage recommendations to include other schizophrenia drugs and the recommendations for risperidone give the appearance of an official endorsement of the drug.” ^[v]

McGorry’s theory has psychiatry’s skeptics and even psychiatrists aghast:

• One respected American research group equated the practice of pre-drugging children to “performing mastectomies on women who are at risk of—but do not have—breast cancer.” [vi]

• Honorary Professor Anthony Pelosi from the Department of Psychiatry, Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride, stated, “So far, evidence from randomized trials does not support the use of psychological therapies or drugs as preventive interventions.”[vii] Further, “After teachers, college counselors, and families were encouraged to refer young people with possibly prodromal [early] symptoms directly to the same clinic for the same care plans…almost 90% were receiving unnecessary ‘preventive’ interventions.” ^[viii]

• Fellow Australian psychiatrist Niall McLaren says the diagnostic criteria for PRS “has no scientific validity whatsoever…it can never be reliable and…will have huge unforeseen consequences.” Essentially, it means “putting large numbers of teenagers and young adults under the long-term supervision and control of psychiatrists” and that “supervision” includes the “aggressive, indefinite prescription of antipsychotic drugs.” It is the “clearest example I know of pseudoscience.  Not since [lobotomies] has psychiatry stumbled so far from the principle of Primum, non nocere. First, do no harm.” ^[ix]

• Dr. Richard Warner, professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, counters the idea that science drives McGorry’s pre-disorder assessment, stating that the screening instrument he uses “is not that accurate in routine use.” Further, “McGorry speculates that a variety of interventions may be effective in preventing schizophrenia in high-risk cases…. Given the expected number of false positives, the potential for harm is significant,” stated Dr. Warner. [x]

• Dr. Jerald Block, a US psychiatrist writing in Bioethics Forum, reported that “preventive pharmacology” (which McGorry, et al. practice) is “ethically questionable territory” because the treatments given “frequently have side effects and complications” and “you are potentially harming people.” The symptoms used to identify them as at risk of schizophrenia are “also remarkably common…adolescence is a period of life that is normally marked by tumultuous changes in personality.” ^[xi]

• Melissa Raven, psychiatric epidemiologist and policy analyst, adjunct lecturer in Public Health at Flinders University, South Australia, and David Webb, board member of the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry and working with the research/policy office with the Australia Federation of Disability Organizations, were published last month, writing: “McGorry’s campaign is part of a wider push to promote the medicalization of mental health (for which psychosocial wellbeing is a better term).” “Further doubts must be raised about McGorry’s agenda when you see the substantial funding his organization (Orygen Youth Health) receives from the pharmaceutical industry and also from the US Stanley Foundation, which is notorious for its particularly aggressive approach to the detention and mandatory treatment of people labeled with psychiatric disorders.” He has “personally received funding from many manufacturers of antipsychotics, frequently reports no conflicts of interest, particularly in his many recent Medical Journal of Australia articles, including a supplement on early intervention that repeatedly advocates the use of antipsychotics.” ^[xii]

Psychosis Risk Syndrome is nothing more than psychiatrists with conflicts of interest drumming up more business at the risk of teenage lives, while increasing the profits for the pharmaceutical industry they serve.

[ii] http://www.mhanet.ca/documents/2008/Research-Colloquium/0920%20-%20Keynote%20MCGORRY.pdf; http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/aug04_1/a695.

[iii] Richard Gosden, Ph.D., “Pre-Psychotic Treatment for Schizophrenia: Preventive Medicine, Social Control, or Drug Marketing Strategy?” Ethical Human Sciences and Services, Vol 1, No. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 165-177, http://sites.google.com/site/richardgosden/ehss.

[iv] Arch Gen Psychiatry, Vol 59, Oct. 2002, http://www.meb.uni-bonn.de/psychiatrie/zebb/literatur/mcgorry.pdf.

[v] Richard Gosden, Ph.D., “Pre-Psychotic Treatment for Schizophrenia: Preventive Medicine, Social Control, or Drug Marketing Strategy?” Ethical Human Sciences and Services, Vol 1, No. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 165-177, http://sites.google.com/site/richardgosden/ehss.

[vi] http://www.ministryoflies.com/pdf-articles/Yale-Lilly.pdf.

[vii] Anthony Pelosi, “Head to Head, Is early intervention in the major psychiatric disorders justified? No,” BMJ 2008;337:a710, http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/aug04_1/a710.

[viii] http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/aug04_1/a710.

[ix] Niall McLaren, M.D., “Psychosis Risk Syndrome (PRS),” 14 May 2010 (soon to be published).

[x] Richard Warner, MB, DPM, is director of Colorado Recovery in Boulder, Colorado, and professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, “Early intervention in psychosis: Future or fad?” Centre for Addiction and Mental Health website, http://www.camh.net/Publications/Cross_Currents/Winter_2007-08/futureorfad_crcuwinter0708.html.

[xi] http://www.ahrp.org/cms/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=386; http://ww.bioethicsforum.org/ethics-of-preventive-psychopharmacologic-treatments.asp.

[xii] David Webb, Melissa Raven, “McGorry’s ‘early intervention’ in mental health: a prescription for disaster,” Online Opinion, http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10267.

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Huffington Post
By Michael Kaplan
April 13, 2010

When you are going mad, you first notice new, shocking things about the world; you had not previously realized that the pigeon on the windowsill is always the same pigeon, nor that the rhythm of its coos is the rhythm of human speech. Only later does the fear begin, as you sense that even the most intimate and familiar parts of life are infested and undermined by secret forces. In the last phase, everything makes sense again. Your world is not that of other people, but you know what you have to do – whatever the consequences.

This, essentially, was what happened to parts of the US intelligence establishment in the years between 1945 and 1964. America had come late to covert war; victory had arrived before the fledgling OSS had progressed much further than learning how easy it is to be fooled by a clever enemy, when its largest network in Nazi Germany was shown to be irredeemably compromised. The discovery soon after the war that Soviet agents and sympathizers had been working in positions of importance in the US government added the push of fear to the sense of disorientation. When, during the Korean War, American prisoners started coming back from Chinese captivity expressing communist convictions, the CIA (and, to a lesser degree, the Navy and Army) decided that our new enemies had hold of something – a brainwashing technique, a truth drug – that could reshape the human mind. We had to have it, too.

On this date in 1953, the Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, authorized Project MKULTRA. Its purpose was to find “avenues to the control of human behavior… including radiation, electro-shock, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices.” Its scope extended from finding “substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public” to devising “physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time.”

Almost all papers relating to the project were destroyed in 1973 on the orders of one of its prime movers, then CIA director Richard Helms. What little we know with certainty comes from limited congressional investigations and a report of the Inspector General – but even these outline sketches are enough to reveal events both horrible and shameful. Unwitting people were slipped high doses of hallucinogens in public places and left to believe themselves in the grip of psychosis. Others, often unidentified foreign prisoners, were interrogated for months under combinations of drugs that left them permanently damaged. Patients going to reputable clinics to be helped for mild depression received instead electroshock treatment far beyond the medical guidelines, often combined with drug-induced coma and ceaseless suggestion tapes. There were deaths, conveniently ascribed to suicide. Hundred of lives were ruined. The profession of psychiatry was deeply undermined. And nothing substantive came out of it except, perhaps, the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual: the CIA’s first and most influential handbook for torturers.

Read entire article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-kaplan/mkultra-the-perversion-of_b_535231.html

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Nat Hentoff
Times and Democrat
September 21, 2009

The fearlessly independent Physicians for Human Rights — founded in 1986 and sharer of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 — has once again exposed the shameful role of doctors and psychologists throughout the CIA’s torture interrogations, banned by the international Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as well as in the Geneva Conventions and our own statues.

Despite all the attention and furor when the former CIA Inspector General’s 2004 report was finally released through an ACLU lawsuit — to the rage of objectors Dick Cheney and CIA Director Leon Panetta — the continuing debate has yet to focus on, and deal with, the Physicians for Human Rights Aug. 31 report:

“Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 Inspector General’s Report” — with additional incriminating details that “CIA Health Professionals’ Role in Torture Worse Than Previously Known.”

The startling indictment is that “health professionals were involved at every stage in the development, implementation and legitimization of this torture program.” They were as disgracefully complicit as John Yoo and the other Justice Department lawyers who provided torturously manipulated “legal” cover to the CIA and its bosses in the Defense department and the Oval Office.

Read entire article: http://www.timesanddemocrat.com/articles/2009/09/21/opinion/doc4ab472d350295030200859.txt

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Dan Agin
Huffington Post
April 22, 2009

Our current troubles with torture by agencies of our government, and the shock of many that medical doctors stood by or even assisted in such torture, will be with us for a while. There is never too much of knowledge, and usually too little of knowledge of the past, and our present time is apparently an illustration of our public failings.

To be clear about my own views, the publicized recent physical and psychological stresses used in the interrogation of prisoners in American hands, from the perspective of medicine, neuroscience, and psychiatry, were indeed torture. Various legal minds apparently twisted the meanings of words and phrases into knots in their attempts to provide cover for the use of terror in interrogations, but my guess is they and everyone around them knew the truth. And now various media hacks sound the same corrupted chant, more out of foolishness than any reasoned argument. It’s an ugly dance, a jig that reminds one of a crazy gavotte in Bedlam.

Maybe the saddest cut of all is that we’ve been here before. Too many people are bemused by the illusion that physicians are incapable of standing by or assisting in the mechanics of torture. Maybe most are, but to say that all are is a public lie — and how many psychiatrists and internist physicians do you need to help turn the rack or rip at the mind with terror? Not many. For the few hundred prisoners at a place like Guantanamo, a handful of assisting psychiatrists and internists would be sufficient, both psychiatrists and internists already on the agency payroll and committed to agency operations.

Physicians of various kinds have always been involved in government interrogations. and it’s a bit silly to pretend otherwise.

Read entire article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-agin/how-it-is-psychiatrists-p_b_189271.html

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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
September 3, 2009

According to a Psychology Today hit piece written by psychologist John Gartner, people prone to thinking that powerful men might actually get together and plan to maintain and advance their power are borderline psychotics who are a danger to society. In reality, hundreds of years of history has taught us that psychologists routinely aid authoritarian regimes in enforcing tyrannical and inhumane policies while helping them crush political opposition by defining suspicion of authorities as a mental illness.

As we highlighted in our article yesterday, psychologists in the Soviet Union were used to stifle free speech by classifying skepticism and political opposition to the state as a mental illness, which is precisely the implication littered throughout Gartner’s crass hit piece.

In the former Soviet Union, psikhushkas — mental hospitals — were used by the state as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. The Soviet state began using mental hospitals to punish dissidents in 1939 under Stalin.

According to official Soviet psychiatry and the Moscow Serbsky Institute at the time, “ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure.” Treatment for this special political schizophrenia included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, electromagnetic torture, radiation torture, lumbar punctures, various drugs — such as narcotics, tranquilizers, and insulin — and beatings. Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, indicates that at least 365 sane people were treated for “politically defined madness,” although she surmises there were many more.

Read entire article:  http://www.infowars.com/why-psychologists-are-infinitely-more-dangerous-than-conspiracy-theorists/

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by Colin A. Ross
Psychiatrist, Author,
The CIA Doctors, Military Mind Control
and Project Bluebird
September 3, 2009

My book, The CIA Doctors,^[i] is based on 15,000 pages of documents I received from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act and dozens of papers published in medical journals.  These papers report the results of research funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Department of the Army, the Office of Naval Research and the CIA.  From 1950 to 1972, the CIA funded TOP SECRET research at many leading universities including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and Stanford.  There was a series of CIA mind control programs including BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA, MKSEARCH and MKNAOMI.

MKULTRA and related programs had several over-lapping purposes.  One was to purchase mind control drugs from suppliers.  Another was to form relationships with researchers who might later be used as consultants at the TOP SECRET level.  The core purpose of these programs was to learn how to enhance interrogations, erase and insert memories, and create and run Manchurian Candidates.  All of this is described clearly and explicitly in the declassified CIA documents, which provide a glimpse into the tip of the iceberg of CIA and military mind control.

The CIA mind control experiments were interwoven with radiation, chemical and biological weapons experiments conducted on children, comatose patients, pregnant women, the general population and other unwitting groups who had no idea they were subjects in secret experiments.  Radiation, bacteria and funguses were released over urban areas.  A large cloud of radiation was released over Spokane during OPERATION GREEN RUN; plutonium was injected into a comatose patient in Boston by Dr. William Sweet, a member of the Harvard brain electrode team; plutonium was placed in the cereal of mentally handicapped children at the Fernald School in New England; 751 pregnant women were injected with plutonium at Vanderbilt University; the bacteria serratia maracens was released into the air in San Francisco, resulting in a series of infections and plutonium was injected into an amputee at the University of Rochester.  All these experiments were conducted without any informed consent or meaningful follow-up.  Hallucinogens, marijuana, amphetamines and other drugs were administered to imprisoned narcotic addicts in Lexington, Kentucky, terminal cancer patients at Georgetown University Hospital, hospitalized sex offenders at Ionia State Hospital in Michigan and johns picked by prostitutes hired by the CIA in San Francisco and New York.

Most of these experiments were conducted by psychiatrists with TOP SECRET clearance.  These included Louis Jolyon West, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma and later at UCLA; Dr. Robert Hyde in Boston; Dr. Carl Rogers at the University of Wisconsin; Dr. Martin Orne at Harvard; Dr. Charles Osgood at the University of Illinois; Dr. James Hamilton at Stanford; Dr. Charles Geschichter at the University of Richmond and Dr. Harold Abramson and Dr. Harold Wolff at Cornell.  Other TOP SECRET-cleared MKULTRA contractors included Dr. Maitland Baldwin, a neurosurgeon at the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, a pharmacologist at Emory.

The CIA doctors violated all medical codes of ethics dating back to Hippocrates, including the Nuremberg Code.  The experimental subjects were not told the real purpose of the experiments, did not give informed consent, were not afforded outside counsel and received no meaningful follow-up.  As described by the psychiatrists in published papers, experiments with LSD and other hallucinogens, combined with sensory deprivation, electroshock and other interrogation techniques, resulted in psychosis and death among other “side effects.”   The purpose of these experiments was to see how easily a person could be put into a psychotic state or controlled.

In a series of MKULTRA projects, the CIA paid a former Bureau of Narcotics officer, George White, to set up safe houses in San Francisco and New York that were decorated like brothels.  George White then hired prostitutes to pick up johns at bars, bring them back to the safe house, give them LSD without their knowledge, and then have sex with them.  The CIA officers watched the sex through one-way mirrors.  The project documents state that the purpose of the experiments was to test the effects of LSD on unwitting subjects under field conditions that mimicked an interrogation of a foreign operative.

In one of the memos contained in the MKULTRA files for these projects, however, another purpose of the safe house operation is revealed.  The CIA was actually testing the performance of “Jekyll-Hyde” identities they had created in the prostitutes.  They wanted to see if they could make female spies or female agents with alternate controllable personalities.  Another purpose of these experiments was to test the CIA’s Manchurian Candidate prostitutes under conditions that mimicked a field operation.  The johns were given LSD as part of the cover for testing the CIA’s female Manchurian Candidates prior to their use in actual operations (the mission being to have sex with and extract information from targets).  The recruitment of street prostitutes provided an additional layer of cover for the testing of the Manchurian Candidates, plus it provided free live pornography for the CIA officers.

In other experiments, conducted by Dr. Jose Delgado at Yale and Drs. Vernon Mark, Frank Ervin and William Sweet at Harvard, brain electrodes were implanted in people and their mental state and behavior was controlled from a remote radio transmitter box.  These experiments were conducted with funding from the Office of Naval Research.  In experiments at Tulane funded by the CIA and the Army, implantation of brain electrodes was combined with injecting mescaline and other substances directly into the experimental subjects’ brains.

BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA were the precursors of present-day enhanced interrogation programs used by the CIA at secret prisons outside the United States.  Water-boarding, electric shock, hooding, prolonged sleep deprivation, death threats and other techniques discussed in the Senate and Congress and in the media, are, in my opinion, elements of a limited hangout, a CIA strategy in which a little bit of the truth is revealed in order to cover up the greater part of the truth.  None of these experiments or operational programs would be possible without the participation of doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists.  The doctors are directly involved in testing the interrogation techniques and monitoring their effects.

The purpose of mind control experiments is controlling human behavior: making enemy combatants open up during interrogation; protecting secret information by erasing memories; making spies more resistant to interrogation because secret information is held by hidden identities and making people more prone to influence, social control and suggestion.  It has nothing to do with medical treatment, easing suffering or curing disease. The mind control experiments and operational programs violate basic human rights and all codes of medical ethics.

Dr. Colin Ross is a psychiatrist, internationally renowned researcher, author and lecturer. In addition to The CIA Doctors and Military Mind Control, he is also author of Project Bluebird, in which he exposes unethical experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new identities, hypnotic access codes, and new memories in the minds of experimental subjects. His research is based on 15,000 pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Dr. Ross is a past president of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. He is the founder and President of the Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma.

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