Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy takes on a terrifying question: How does the Taliban convince children to become suicide bombers? Propaganda footage from a training camp is intercut with her interviews of young camp graduates. A shocking vision.
More than 30 years after it was written, the Pentagon has released a memorandum detailing its involvement in the CIA’s infamous Cold War mind-control experiments.
But a warning to conspiracy theorists on the lookout for new fodder: This isn’t quite Men Who Stare at Goats II.
The 17-page document (.pdf), “Experimentation Programs conducted by the Department of Defense That Had CIA Sponsorship or Participation and That Involved the Administration to Human Subjects of Drugs Intended for Mind-Control or Behavior-Modification Purposes,” was prepared in 1977 by the General Counsel of the Department of Defense and released on May 6 after a Freedom of Information Act request.
Most of the details have been revealed in earlier CIA papers. And if anything, the Pentagon’s recap is a reminder of how little the Department of Defense cops to knowing about the CIA projects.
Still, there are some tantalizing new details. Take the origins of MK-ULTRA, the notorious CIA program that dosed thousands of unwitting participants with hallucinogenic drugs.
Initially funded by the Navy, the project set out to study the effects of brain concussion. Soon after, scientists noted that a blow to the head prompted amnesia, leading to the pursuit of a drug-based technique to “induce brain concussion … without physical trauma.” Shortly thereafter, the project was transferred entirely to the CIA, because it involved “human experiments … not easily justifiable on medical-therapeutic grounds.”
Other programs, described briefly focused on mind control. MK-NAOMI was after “severely incapacitating and lethal materials … [and] gadgetry for their dissemination,” and MK-CHICKWIT was designed to “identify new drug developments in Europe and Asia,” and then “obtain samples.”
Edgewood Laboratories, where many of the programs were carried out, is also identified as having tested an incapacitating chemical on prisoners and military personnel without the agency’s approval. The drug, EA#3167, was “appl[ied] to the skin” of subjects using an adhesive tape.
Another program, MK-OFTEN, started as a study on dopamine. But the scope was soon expanded to evaluate ibogaine, a hallucinogen, and then several more drugs, in hopes of creating “new pharmacologically active drugs affecting the central nervous system [to] modify men’s behavior.”
And the Navy is reported to have “obtain[ed] heroin and marijuana” in an effort to develop speech-inducing drugs for use on defectors and prisoners of war. The drugs were eventually tested on 14 people: six volunteer research assistants, and eight unwitting Soviet defectors.
The report pins most of the nefarious activities on CIA-funded scientists. But that’s hardly the verdict of subsequent government documents, like a 1994 report from the U.S General Accounting Office. In that report, Pentagon officials are said to have “work[ed] directly with the CIA” and dosed “thousands” of military subjects with LSD and other drugs. Eyewitness accounts, like that of psychiatrist James Ketchum, describe outlandish Army efforts at creating hallucinogenic weapons in conjunction with MK-ULTRA.
And the Pentagon’s had plenty of experience in out-there mind control, even without CIA involvement. Troops have been dosed with LSD and cannabis oil, and Pentagon officials were reportedly toying with the idea of psychic spies as recently as 2007.
Not surprisingly, the released report also doesn’t address darker questions that persist about the specifics of the CIA projects. Last year, a group of vets sued the agency for illnesses and trauma caused by the “diabolical and secret [MK-ULTRA] testing program,” which they allege included experiments with nerve gas, psychochemicals, and brain implants.
Source: Wired.com
Earlier this week, a man named Raymond Towler was released from prison after DNA evidence exonerated him. Towler had been convicted in 1981 of raping an 11-year-old girl in a Cleveland park and given a life sentence; he spent nearly 30 years in prison before a group called The Innocent Project took up his case and requested that DNA evidence be re-evaluated.
Towler’s freedom made national news. The judge in the case, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Eileen Gallagher, did not merely free Towler as a formality but left the bench to congratulate Towler at his defense table and gave him an Irish blessing. Towler was also the guest of honor at a Cleveland Cavaliers NBA playoff game.
It’s a tragic story with a bittersweet ending, but there’s an important element that has been largely ignored in the news surrounding Towler’s exoneration: the victim and witnesses identified him as the rapist from a photo. That is, the 11-year-old girl and other eyewitnesses pointed to a photograph of Raymond Towler and told police, “Yes, that is the man who did this.” But Raymond Towler was not the man who did this.
So what happened? Were they lying? Though false rape accusations do occur (as the Tawana Brawley and the Duke University lacrosse team cases show, to name just two high-profile scandals), it seems doubtful that’s what happened in this case. Instead, most likely the eyewitnesses were not lying, nor stupid, nor malicious. They were simply wrong.
Countless cases prove this point. Recently in the District of Columbia, a police sergeant involved in a chase positively identified a 14-year-old boy as the driver of a vehicle involved in a mass shooting. The boy was arrested and charged with four counts of first-degree murder. As the Washington Post noted, “An arrest based on this identification probably struck most people as reasonable, even laudable. After all, the sergeant is a trained, experienced police officer, and he was certain enough of his identification to commit it to a charging document.” Yet despite his positive identification, the trained police sergeant was wrong; other evidence proved that the boy was innocent.
Then there’s the case of the D.C. snipers who killed ten people and badly injured three others in October 2002. Police were baffled by the killings, though an apparent break in the case came when several eyewitnesses described the shooter: A white man driving a late-model white van or box truck. Based on these multiple eyewitness descriptions, police stopped white vans along the Capital Beltway hoping to stop the killer. Yet when the snipers were caught, it was clear that the sincere, believable eyewitnesses with no reason to lie or exaggerate were completely wrong.
Instead of a single white man driving a white box truck, the murders were committed by two Black men driving a dark blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice. In that case, the eyewitness testimony likely cost human lives: Police had in fact noted the Chevrolet at several of the crime scenes but did not stop or check out the car because the police and public were focused on the non-existent white van reported by eyewitnesses.
Eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful conviction in America. Of the more than 200 people exonerated by way of DNA evidence in the US, over 75% were wrongfully convicted because of eyewitness mistakes. Indeed, according to the Innocence Project, “While eyewitness testimony can be persuasive evidence before a judge or jury, 30 years of strong social science research has proven that eyewitness identification is often unreliable. Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene; it must be preserved carefully and retrieved methodically, or it can be contaminated.”
Often in criminal cases there’s a strong and understandable desire to believe the victim. No one wants to question or challenge a person who has obviously undergone a horrible experience—but it must be done. That eyewitness reports are often very unreliable is not news to psychologists or experienced police detectives, but the general public is often unduly impressed with an eyewitness who says, “I know what I saw, and I saw him do it.” Maybe, maybe not.
And it’s not just in crimes: many people who believe in cryptozoological curiosities such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster also put great faith in eyewitness reports—especially sightings by police officers and others in authority. Yet the evidence is clear and uncontested: people are not good eyewitnesses, and often sincerely claim to see things they did not.
Think of how horrible the rape victim who accused Towler must feel, knowing her mistake took 30 years of an innocent man’s life. Those who offer eyewitness evidence against others should heed Oliver Cromwell’s famous plea: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
Source: Discovery.com
| Raymond Towler freed after 29 years in prison for rape he did not commit |
Video from Cleveland Plain Dealer
A 50-year mystery over the ‘cursed bread’ of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.
In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.
For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.
The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.
On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.
One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.
Time magazine wrote at the time: “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead.”
Eventually, it was determined that the best-known local baker had unwittingly contaminated his flour with ergot, a hallucinogenic mould that infects rye grain. Another theory was the bread had been poisoned with organic mercury.
However, H P Albarelli Jr., an investigative journalist, claims the outbreak resulted from a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The scientists who produced both alternative explanations, he writes, worked for the Swiss-based Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the Army and CIA with LSD.
Mr Albarelli came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of Frank Olson, a biochemist working for the SOD who fell from a 13th floor window two years after the Cursed Bread incident. One note transcribes a conversation between a CIA agent and a Sandoz official who mentions the “secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit” and explains that it was not “at all” caused by mould but by diethylamide, the D in LSD.
While compiling his book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, Mr Albarelli spoke to former colleagues of Mr Olson, two of whom told him that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was part of a mind control experiment run by the CIA and US army.
After the Korean War the Americans launched a vast research programme into the mental manipulation of prisoners and enemy troops.
Scientists at Fort Detrick told him that agents had sprayed LSD into the air and also contaminated “local foot products”.
Mr Albarelli said the real “smoking gun” was a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. It contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the “Pont St. Esprit incident.” In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Mr Albarelli claims, the US army also drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between 1953 and 1965.
None of his sources would indicate whether the French secret services were aware of the alleged operation. According to US news reports, French intelligence chiefs have demanded the CIA explain itself following the book’s revelations. French intelligence officially denies this.
Locals in Pont-Saint-Esprit still want to know why they were hit by such apocalyptic scenes. “At the time people brought up the theory of an experiment aimed at controlling a popular revolt,” said Charles Granjoh, 71.
“I almost kicked the bucket,” he told the weekly French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. “I’d like to know why.”
Source: French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment (Telegraph UK)
The Stanford prison experiment was designed to study the psychological effects of being either a prisoner or prison guard. The 1971 experiment was conducted by a team of researchers led by Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Twenty-four students were selected to play the roles of both guards and prisoners. They were to live in a mock prison created in the basement of the psychology building. Their roles were assigned randomly. The students adapted to their roles well beyond what was expected, leading the guards to display authoritarian and even draconian measures. The experiment was scheduled to run for 2 weeks but was abruptly stopped after only six days.
“It became clear that we had to end the study. We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation — a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically.”
In 1481 the Catholic Church charged two Dominican monks, James Sprenger and Henry Kramer, with the task of writing a manual for hunting witches. The manual, Malleus Maleficarum, took 5 years to create.
The Malleus Maleficarum is the best known of the witch-hunt manuals. Originally written in Latin, the title is translated as “The Hammer of Witches”. Used for more than three hundred years, it was the justification for the witch trials in Europe and Colonial America.
The document specified rules of evidence and procedures by which suspected witches should be detected, tortured and put to death.
Buy your own copy of the Malleus Maleficarum or Read the Malleus Maleficarum online.
Witch hunts continue today. In Nigeria, religious leaders in extremist Christian churches are “identifying” some children as witches. The children are then subjected to horrible purifying rituals. Children have been hacked to death, poisoned and buried alive in an attempt to drive out Satan.
‘Child-witches’ of Nigeria Seek Refuge (Telegraph UK)
During my regular web digging today I came across a series of rather disturbing videos. These videos purport to show actual testimony before a US government panel, The President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experimentation, March 15, 1995.
The videos show witness after witness recounting acts of torturous experimentation they experienced as children. Torture including, electrical shock, radiation exposure and attempted mind control are consistent themes in testimony.
Never doubt that men in high places will do whatever they need to do to stay in power!
Read US Government Experiments on Children, An excerpt from “During The Cold War” by Carol Rutz
The testimony:
After reading My Twisted Life as a Scientologist (New York Post 11/15/2009), I thought it would be fun to do a little looking into Scientology’s closet. I gotta tell you, the closet is full.
L. Ron Hubbard, the American science fiction writer, created a self-help system he called Dianetics. First published in 1950, it developed into doctrines and rituals as part of a new religion he dubbed Scientology.
Scientology is legally recognized as a tax-exempt church in the United States. Many countries, however, refuse to grant Scientology the status of a church. Canada, UK, Germany, France Belgium, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg and Mexico do not recognize Scientology as a religion. In Greece, Scientology was banned in 1997, and the Greek government upheld the ban in 2003, rejecting an application for Scientology to be recognized as a religion.
Scientology is often referred to as a cult often accused of financially defrauding members. The teachings of The Church of Scientology are cloaked in secrecy. Most of what is known about the teachings of the church comes to us from ex-members.
An ex-member takes you on a behind the curtain tour
On November 12th Charles Manson, charismatic leader of the “Manson Family,” turned 75. Manson has been a resident of the California Department of Prisons since being convicted of Conspiracy to Commit Murder in 1971.
It seems that Manson still has quite a following despite his years of incarceration. The CNN video shows a 21 year old Manson follower who sounds just like the girls he brainwashed back in the Manson Family/Spahn Ranch days.
After watching the CNN clip and giving his newest webpage a look, I was amazed that his current rants seem to be about the environment, but after viewing the 1976 “Manson Follower” video below, I realized he had been saying this all along. Just not saying it in a very
coherent fashion.
In 1984 the CIA produced a comic book that told the story they would like to become history. They airdropped these comics by the thousands. This was a ploy by the US to have the people of Granada see the United States as liberators as opposed to invaders.
