Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 2 Num. 99

("Quid coniuratio est?")


I received the following from a CN reader who wishes to remain anonymous. What I plan to do is post the entire document over a period of time, most likely in weekly installments. Here is part 2.

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CONSPIRACY:
THE INVISIBLE SECOND RUNG OF GOVERNMENT

An Investigation and Discussion of that Part of the United States Government Which We Did Not Elect, Which Is Not Accountable, Which Is Unconstitutional, Which Is Engaged In Unlawful and Unconstitutional Activity, and Then Hides Behind the National Security Act of 1947

PART I :
CITATION AND SUMMARY OF SOURCES

(continued)

8. Melnick, David, Air America, Los Angeles, California, Carolco Company/Tristar Pictures, 1990. Summary: The CIA secretly ran drugs for profit during the Vietnam era.

9. Guber, Peter, Lewis, Edward and Mildred, and Peters, Jon, Missing, Universal City, California, Polygram-Universal Pictures, 1982. Summary: An American father sues the CIA and the U.S. Government for the wrongful death of his American son. His son was killed for asking too many questions in a Latin American country during a CIA-sponsored coup. After seven years of litigation, the supreme Court refused to hear the case for fear that it would endanger national security.

10. Robins, Natalie, Alien Ink, New York, New York, William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1992. Natalie Robins is an Edgar award- winning author. Summary: Documents FBI controlling the media and American writers from 1911 through 1992 using intimidation, phone taps, mail searches, character assassination, extortion and entrapment. Surveillance of who reads what by intimidating interrogations of librarians from public libraries documented as late as 1988.

11. Jensen, Carl, Censored: The Project Censored Yearbook - The News that Didn't Make the News And Why, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Shelborne Press, 1993. Carl Jensen is a Sonoma State University professor. The book has an Introduction by Hugh Downs, anchor for the TV program 20/20. Summary: Documents institutionalized censorship in the United States in all media outlets. Jensen has formed a panel of reputable and informed professionals from all over the united States. Annually, the panel evaluates all the stories that were censored by all the news media for that year, and then votes the top ten most important censored stories. Jensen then publishes them with an analysis of each one in this annual book.

12. Moyers, Bill, The Secret Government: The Constitution In Crisis, Cabin John, Maryland, Seven Locks Press, 1988. Moyers is an award-winning journalist and author. Summary: Documents how too much is being hidden from the American people by black bag operations and why secrecy is so dangerous to democracy.

13. Marks, John, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate," New York, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Marks is a former State Department officer and award-winning investigative reporter. "A 'Manchurian Candidate' is an unwilling assassin brainwashed and programmed to kill. In this book...Marks tells the explosive story of the CIA's highly secret program of experiments in mind control. His curiosity first aroused by information on a puzzling suicide, Marks worked from thousands of pages of newly released documents as well as interviews and behavioral science studies, producing a book that 'accomplished what two Senate committees could not' (Senator Edward Kennedy)."

Milton Kline, a psychologist who served as a consultant, says of creating the perfect Manchurian Candidate, "It cannot be done by everyone. It cannot be done consistently, but it can be done."

The year after Marks first book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, was published, Marks went to Saigon on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine. Marks was blacklisted by the CIA and kidnapped by twelve Vietnamese soldiers in the middle of the night, arrested, and expelled from Vietnam, all at the direction of the CIA. Years later the CIA officer who had directed Marks' arrest and expulsion, told Marks that "he was lucky to be alive; the Vietnamese (that is, the CIA) might have put him in Chi Hoa prison in Saigon, in which Americans didn't survive."

The CIA "systematically violated the free will and mental dignity of their subjects," whose existence was considered by the CIA to be less worthy than their own.

Maitland Baldwin was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health in 1955 who "wanted to do terminal-type experiments on the effect of sensory deprivation." Dr. Baldwin had projects involving beaming "radio frequency energy directly at the brain of a chimpanzee and in another cut off one monkey's head and tried to transplant it to the decapitated body of another monkey."

Why would the CIA involve itself in such unethical and illegal situations? The "official answers to these questions were all versions of the schoolboy's all-purpose excuse - the other guys did it first."

"...[T]o excuse everything afterwards is to permit everything in advance. Some things are wrong under any circumstances, and lots of things are wrong when convenience is the real reason for doing them." Secrecy under the guise of national security is a problem. "Information about the government belongs to the people, not to the bureaucrats."

Dr. Sidney Gottlieb presided over projects that involved "devising a scheme to make Castro's beard fall out; amnesia by excessive electroshock; locating deadly poisons for assassinations; hunting "down every conceivable gimmick that might give one person leverage over another's mind," including creating stress and analyzing handwriting.

Harvard psychology professor, Henry Murray, says, "Spying is attractive to loonies. Psychopaths, who are people who spend their lives making up stories, revel in the field."

Richard Helms was the "most important sponsor of mind-control research within the CIA. "Richard Helms, Sid Gottlieb, John Gittinger, George White, and many others...would tamper with many minds and inevitably cause some to be damaged. In the end, they would minimize and hide their deeds, and they would live to see doubts raised about the health of their own minds." Richard Helms lied in his official capacity to other government officials. At the same time that he told Mr. McCone that the Soviet menace was reason enough to do this testing, he also told the Warren Commission that the Soviets lagged five years behind the West in discovering any drug to manipulate a person's free will.

"Sheffield Edwards, a former Army colonel...personally handled joint CIA-Mafia operations."

"An agency officer wrote to his boss, 'If this is supposed to be covered up as a defensive feasibility study, it's pretty damn transparent.'"

A psychiatrist acting as consultant to the CIA reported that electroshock can produce "excruciating pain" that "could be effective as 'a third degree method' to make someone talk," that continued shock will reduce them to a vegetable, and that this cannot be detected unless subject were tested within two weeks with an EEG.

It was proposed that another doctor be hired to develop "neurosurgical techniques" - presumably lobotomy-connected. Treating subjects in such ways (i.e., "holding subjects prisoner, shooting them full of unwanted drugs") would violate professional ethics and would be an indictable crime (i.e., kidnapping, aggravated assault).

Cornell Medical School's Dr. Harold Wolff stated, "We expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of the necessary experiments." Normally such behavior would lead to arrest and professional disgrace. But, the same behavior under the banner of national security presented no legal threat and was hidden from professional colleagues.

Professor Richard Wendt from the University of Rochester participated in a project of "weakening, if not eliminating, free will in others." He studied "barbiturates, amphetamines, alcohol, and heroin," concluding that heroin can be useful [to interrogation] in reverse because of the stresses produced when...withdrawn from those addicted."

Testing drugs on unwitting and unwilling subjects was admitted by Dr. Thompson to be unethical, but "we felt we had to do it for the good of country." When asked what would happen if something went wrong and a subject died, a CIA agent answered, "Disposal of the body would be no problem." To take care of unwitting subjects who might accidentally remember being unwilling subjects of drug experiments, the CIA made sure "some stayed in foreign prisons for long periods of time."

CIA training is that "you can't count on the honesty of your agent to do exactly what you want or to report accurately unless you own him body and soul....'I never gave a thought to legality or morality. Frankly, I did what worked,'" says one CIA agent. "The agency has caused family members to be arrested and mistreated by the local police, given or withheld medical care for a sick child, and, more prosaically, provided scholarships for a relative to study abroad."

Dr. Frank Olson was experimented upon illegally and negligently, the nature of his death hidden for twenty-two years. He jumped out of a tenth floor window after an unwitting bad trip on LSD. What the CIA learned from this was to hide it better.

The CIA chooses "borderline underworld" types as their victims as they would be "powerless to seek any sort of revenge if they ever found out what the CIA had done to them." A CIA agent rented apartments in Greenwich Village, San Francisco, and Marin County, referring to them a "safehouses." He then lured guinea pigs there, slipped them drugs, and reported the results to his superiors. The CIA used prostitutes as guinea pigs and spies. One CIA agent commented on the use of prostitutes, "At first nobody really knew how to use them. How do you train them? How do you work them?" But the CIA did not stick to underworld guinea pigs. Eventually, they tested unwitting victims from "all social levels, high and low." They tried other drugs besides LSD. One CIA agent recalled, "If we were scared enough of a drug not to try it out on ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco." Seldom were physicians present to monitor the victim's health. Dr. James Hamilton, Stanford Medical School's psychiatrist, visited from time to time.

Dr. Hamilton ran his own experiments and worked on "everything from psychochemicals to kinky sex to carbon-dioxide inhalation." He also had "access to prisoners at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville." In one six-month period, it is estimated that "he experimented on between 400 to 1000 inmates."

Then "they practiced ways to slip LSD to citizens [in public places like restaurants, bars, and beaches] while buying them a drink or lighting up a cigarette, and then tried to observe the effects when the drug took hold." Occasionally, they "lost an unwitting victim in a crowd - thereby sending a stranger off alone with a head full of LSD." When one of their victims became ill, the CIA "had a vested interest in keeping doctors from finding out what was really wrong, as a 'correct diagnosis' from an outside doctor threatened exposure of their unethical and illegal practices."

Lyman Kirkpatrick, then responsible as Inspector General and who "had personal" knowledge of this whole CIA affair and "never raised any noticeable objection," now states, "I was trying to determine what the tolerable limits were of what I could do and still keep my job." One CIA consultant said, "Something I learned very early in government was not to ask questions."

George White, the CIA agent responsible for running these "'safehouses' wrote an epitaph for his role with the CIA. 'I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highes?"

The CIA sometimes slipped someone drugs to make them seem crazy, thereby damaging their credibility. They used LSD on foreign prisoners and then interrogated these prisoners. They did use physicians to certify that an unwitting victim was "insane" or to prescribe hospitalization or other treatment, only to further devastate the victim. "Anyone blaming his aberrant behavior on a drug or on the CIA gets labeled a hopeless paranoid...."

The CIA "contracted with Parke, Davis, as it did with numerous other drug companies, universities, and government agencies to develop behavioral products and poisons from botanicals." Dr. James Moore from the University of Delaware "soon recognized that the Agency preferred contractors who did not ask questions." When the CIA called in their orders for potent drugs or lethal poisons, he simply whipped up a batch and charged his regular $100 consultation fee. "'Did I ever consider what would have happened if this stuff were given to unwitting people?' Moore asks, reflecting on his CIA days. 'No. Particularly no. Had I been given that information, I think I would have been prepared to accept that....' Dr. Robert Hyde of Butler Health Center "routinely gave Wechsler [Intelligence Tests] to his subjects before plying them with liquor, as part of the Agency's efforts to find out how people react to alcohol." With Agency funds he "built an experimental party room in the hospital...."

"In Kentucky, Dr. Harris Isbell ordered psilocybin injected into nine black inmates at the narcotics prison."

CIA "officials and contractors kept spreading the [use] of drugs by forever pressing new university researchers into the field....When a contractor like Harold Abramson spoke highly of the drug at a new conference or seminar, tens or hundred of scientists, health professionals, and subjects - usually students - would wind up trying LSD." In cities where the CIA ran large testing programs like Boston hospitals connected to Harvard University, "volunteering for an LSD trip became quite popular in academic circles....The intelligence agencies turned to America's finest universities and hospitals to try LSD, which meant that the cream of the country's students and graduate assistants became the test subjects."

"In 1969 the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs published a fascinating little study designed to curb illegal LSD use. The authors wrote that the drug's 'early use was among small groups of intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast universities. It spread to undergraduate students, then to other campuses. Most often, users have been introduced to the drug by persons of higher status. Teachers have influenced students; upperclassmen have influenced lower classmen.' Calling this a 'trickle-down phenomenon,' the authors seem to have correctly analyzed how LSD got around the country. They left out only one vital element, which they had no way of knowing: That somebody had to influence the teachers and that up there at the top of the LSD distribution system could be found the men of [the CIA operation code-named] MKULTRA."

Dr. Leo Hollister tested LSD at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California, giving Ken Kesey his first LSD trip. Dr. Harold Abramson gave "Frank Fremont-Smith, head of the Macy Foundation which passed CIA money to Abramson," his first LSD. Abramson also gave it to Gregory Bateson who in turn gave it to Allen Ginsberg.

The Rockefeller Foundation donated funds that set up the psychiatric facility at McGill University, where Dr. Cameron worked. Dr. Cameron was described as "tense and ill-at-ease," disinterested and ineffective in psychotherapy, a failure at establishing warm personal relations, appearing "to suffer from deep insecurity and has a need for power which he nourishes by maintaining an extraordinary aloofness from his associates." He was elected president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1953. The CIA funded Dr. Cameron's work using prolonged and intense electroshock to create a vegetable with no memory. Frequent screams of his patients nor other patients' horror reactions, such as his dazed patients "groping their way around the hospital and urinating on the floor," daunted Dr. Cameron. The CIA then funded Cameron "to take the 'treatment' beyond this point."

He then used patients' previously recorded confidences to further humiliate them, combined with electric shocks to their legs as they lay in a vegetative state. Cameron was willing to perform terminal experiments (experimenting to the point of death of the subject) in sensory deprivation on his own patients.

"Cameron died in 1967....The American Journal of Psychiatry published a long and glowing obituary...."

Dr. Harold Wolff of Cornell University ran a project where the CIA funded him almost $85,000 and supplied him with 100 Chinese refugees. Wolff's goal was to "mold these Chinese into people willing to work for the CIA," and remain impervious to hostile interrogations once they returned to China. Dr. Wolff also ran programs "to test LSD and marijuana, wittingly and unwittingly, alone and in combination with hypnosis" on inmates of a mental institution.

Referring to Dr. Wolff, one CIA associate recalled, "From the Agency side, I don't know anyone who wasn't scared of him. He was an autocratic man....talk about mind control! He was one of the controllers."

Establishment figures associated with the Board of Directors of Wolff's organization included Dr. Joseph Hinsey, head of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center; Dr. John Whitehorn, Chairman, Psychiatric Department at Johns Hopkins University; Dr. Carl Rogers of the University of Wisconsin; Dr. Charles Osgood, President of the American Psychological Association in 1963; Adolf Berle, onetime Assistant Secretary of State and chairman of the New York Liberal Party; Leonard Carmichael, head of the Smithsonian Institute; Barnaby Keeney, President of Brown University; and George A. Kelly from Ohio State University.

It was precisely these people's standing in the community that was used to mask the CIA's involvement. Wolff's organization provided funding to other researchers, which in turn allowed CIA access to those researchers and their work. They included B. F. Skinner from Harvard University; Erwin Goffman of the University of Pennsylvania; Dr. H. J. Eysenck of the University of London; and David Saunders of the Educational testing Service, the company that gives the college board exams.

What was violated was "the openness and trust normally associated with academic pursuits," as well as the reputation of American research work and academic freedom. A staff member of the psychological assessment team that advised the CIA states "he had direct knowledge of cases where [their] recommendations led to sexual entrapment operations, both hetero- and homosexual. 'We had women ready - called them a stable,' he says, and they found willing men when they had to."

One such psychological assessment was prepared by the CIA "at the request of the White House. To get raw data for the Agency assessors, John Ehrlichman authorized a break-in at [Daniel] Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in California."

A former CIA psychologist, James Keehner, "pointed out that Agency case officers, many of whom 'got their jollies' from such [sexual entrapment] work, used a hidden camera to get their shots." Keehner left after getting disgusted with so much "planned destructiveness," seeing "if you could destroy a man's marriage," targeting someone's "potential mental instabilities," and then suggesting "ways to break him down...seeing people take pleasure in other people's inadequacies," starting "a minor rumor campaign against" someone, "harass[ing] him constantly...bump[ing] his car in traffic," a "ratchetlike approach" to "break him down."

"In 1963 the CIA's Inspector General gave the [psychological assessment team] high marks. The prime objectives are control, exploitation or neutralization. These objectives are innately anti-ethical rather than therapeutic in their intent." CIA agent Morse Allen, in studying hypnosis as a control tactic, "asked young CIA secretaries to stay after work and ran them through the hypnotic paces - proving to his own satisfaction that he could make them do whatever he wanted. He had secretaries steal SECRET files and pass them on to total strangers, thus violating the most basic CIA security rules. He got them to steal from each other and to start fires. He made one of them report to the bedroom of a strange man and then go into a deep sleep."

Allen "simulated the ultimate experiment in hypnosis: the creation of a 'Manchurian Candidate,' or programmed assassin. Allen's 'victim' was a secretary whom he put into a deep trance and told to keep sleeping until he ordered otherwise. He then hypnotized a second secretary and told her that if she could not wake up her friend, 'her rage would be so great that she would not hesitate to kill.' Allen left a pistol nearby, which the secretary had no way of knowing was unloaded. Even though she had earlier expressed a fear of firearms of any kind, she picked up the gun and 'shot' her sleeping friend. After Allen brought the 'killer' out of her trance, she had apparent amnesia for the event, denying she would ever shoot anyone."

Allen also used hypnosis to try to create a dissociative split in his subjects, "build it into a separate personality, unknown to the first...and command it to carry out specific deeds about which the main personality would know nothing." Alden Sears while at the University of Minnesota and later at the University of Denver also experimented with methods "to build second identities."

The CIA discussed with foreign police doing a "terminal experiment" to see if a hypnotically induced amnesia would stand up to torture. It is not known whether it was carried out due to the fact that the CIA denied access to the relevant documents under the Freedom of Information suit.

One CIA program had three goals relevant to hypnosis: First, rapid induction in unwitting subjects (a patsy); second, durable amnesia afterward (the patsy wouldn't remember who put him under nor what his orders had been); and third, "to implant durable and operationally useful posthypnotic suggestions" (the patsy would reliably carry out those orders). "Hypnosis expert, Milton Kline, says he could create a patsy in three months; an assassin would take him six."

Although it is not known whether the CIA carried out field experiments in hypnotically creating a patsies or assassins, it would be safe to say they would not be likely to restrain themselves for two reasons. First, finding "expendable" subjects certainly presented no barrier to them in the past. Second, their history indicates a paucity of self-imposed limitation in the name of ethics, particularly "when they felt they were on the verge of a 'breakthrough in clandestine technology.'"

Other CIA projects "dealt with ways to maximize stress on whole societies" in order to destabilize whole countries by destroying their internal integrity.

Top level CIA officers "misled and lied to the top echelon of the Treasury Department about the safehouses" run by CIA Agent George White "and how they were used."

The CIA had a lab run by a former CIA germ expert who gave them "a quick-delivery capability" and "large-scale production of microorganisms."

Dr. Carl Pfeiffer from the University of Illinois Medical School and later from Emory University "tested LSD and other drugs on inmates of the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta," as well as "on the prisoners at the Bordentown reformatory." He was also an intelligence source for the CIA as he sat on the Food and Drug Administration committee.

Dr. Charles Geschickter " tested powerful drugs on mental defectives and terminal cancer patients, apparently at the Georgetown University Hospital." He also tried to "knock out monkeys with radar waves to the head (a technique which worked but risked frying vital parts of the brain)." The CIA struck a deal with the doctor. They gave him $375,000 and he gave them "use of one-sixth of the beds and total space in the facility for their own 'hospital safehouse.' They then would have a ready source of 'human patients and volunteers for experimental use.'"

Just prior to leaving the CIA, Richard "Helms presided over a wholesale destruction of documents and tapes." Dr. Gottlieb "decided to follow Helms into retirement, and the two men mutually agreed to get rid of all documentary traces" of all their CIA .KV??HW?Y also done by the Agency. They had access to prisoners in at least one American penal institution for these experiments. They also worked to develop a drug to help program new memories into their amnesia subjects. One project conducted on the several hundred acre farm in the rural countryside of Massachusetts was "stimulating the pleasure centers of crows' brains in order to control their behavior." Another CIA researcher said they researched gene manipulation, "creating a subservient society was not out of sight." Another "bombarded bacteria with ultraviolet radiation in order to create deviant strains."

The Army helped the CIA "put together a computerized data base for drug testing and supplied military volunteers for some of the experiments." One aim was to isolate "a compound that could simulate a heart attack or a stroke in the targeted individual."

"A free society's best defense against unethical behavior modification is public disclosure and awareness....No matter how pure or defense-oriented the motives of the researchers, once the technology exists, the decision to use it is out of their hands....The technology has already spread to our schools, prisons, and mental hospitals, not to mention the advertising community, and it has also been picked up by police forces around the world."

But public disclosure may not be enough, either. Dr. Cameron read papers about electroshocking his patients to the vegetative state "before meetings of his fellow psychiatrists, and they elected him their president."

[...to be continued...]


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Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt. Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et pauperem. -- Liber Proverbiorum XXXI: 8-9

Brian Francis Redman bigxc@prairienet.org "The Big C"

"Justice" = "Just us" = "History is written by the assassins."