The Manchurian Bloviate

In retrospect, I should have called the previous post "And Out Come The Sheep."

I've received another salvo of links and information, most likely in response to my less-than-flowery comments about Russ Dizdar. I don't retract them, by the way.

Most of them deal with the issue of CIA mind control, which is a concurrent theme and supporting element of those who, like Doug Riggs, advance the idea of an international and intergenerational Satanic conspiracy to fracture children's personalities through ritual abuse and turn them into...something to be activated later through a "trigger."

The Central Intelligence Agency most certainly did experiment with mind control during the Cold War. But in order to understand the roots, history, and modern context of these things, we have to look back to 1945.

After the fall of Berlin and Hitler's suicide in the Fuhrerbunker, the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA) established the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which had one purpose: The capturing and patriation of high-level Nazi German scientists. Lest we think this was some off-the-books "black operation," it's worth noting that the JIOA was a subcomittee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which regularly briefed the president.

So why would we want Nazis? Why not just hang them all? The answer is one of pragmatism. Nazi Germany had technologically eclipsed the Allied Powers in several arenas. They had developed and fielded the world's first jet fighter aircraft, the Me-262. They had developed and fielded the world's first intercontinental ballistic missiles, the V-1 and V-2. The United States wanted to take advantage of wealth of scientific experience and information these men possessed. Additionally, it was desired that these men not fall into the hands of the Soviet Union.

In August 1945, President Truman authorized the JIOA to stand up Operation Paperclip: the capture of German scientists designated as having scientific value pursuant to national security. Ironically, his order expressly excluded anyone found "to have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism." This restriction would have effectively disqualified most of the scientists. To get around this restriction, the JIOA independently - and likely illegally - created false employment, political biographies, and expunged all traces of involvement with the Nazi Party from the records of the scientists - thus shoehorning them into eligibility with Truman's directive.

So how did we even know about this list of scientists? As humorous as it may sound, it was crammed in a toilet. During Hitler's ambitious and ultimately failed push to capture Stalingrad, many of Germany's best and brightest Ph.Ds, physicists, and scientists were on the front lines of the Russian Front serving in various combat and support roles. After the series of crushing defeats at the hands of the Red Army, Germany began to find themselves at a serious disadvantage technologically. The head of the Third Reich's Military Research Association, Werner Osenberg, identified these critical scientists, and compiled them in a list, so that they would be recalled and their experience put to use. (The fact that Germany didn't do this at the outset of the conflict speaks volumes to their sometimes-baffling management of resources.) This list, called the Osenberg List, was found by a Polish lab technician crammed into a toilet at the University of Bonn in March 1945. It found its way to the British MI6, and then to American intelligence authorities. The Osenberg List became the "target list" for Operation Paperclip.

The overwhelming majority of these men had nothing to do whatsoever with "mind control." They were by and large, rocketry specialists that ended up at White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico, as well as aeronautical engineers that wound up at Wright Field. There were several notable names that were later associated with their grisly experimentations on concentration camp prisoners: Walter Schreiber, Kurt Blome, and Hubertus Strughold. Of these men, Hubertus Strughold is noted as being the "Father of Space Medicine," a title whose impact is severely lessened considering that the groundwork for his breakthroughs was laid in the Dachau concentration camp.

Several other programs sprang out of the work accomplished through Operation Paperclip:

Project CHATTER: U.S. Navy program begun in 1947 focusing on the identification and testing of drugs during interrogations. Testing performed on both animal and human subjects, including subjecting them to substances such as scopolamine and mescaline. Project disbanded in 1953, due to lack of significant progress.

Project BLUEBIRD: CIA project started in 1950. Program named changed to ARTICHOKE in 1951. Scope of project was interrogation methods through hypnosis, suggestion, morphine addiction (and subsequent withdrawal) in order to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects. Project rolled into MK ULTRA in 1953.

So now we get to the meat of the matter. Project MK ULTRA - the CIA's research into "mind-control." It is important to understand why this project was started up. During the Korean War and the subsequent Cold War, American prisoners of war were subjected to brainwashing and brutal interrogations at the hands of Soviet agents in North Korea and elsewhere. The CIA wanted to better understand and replicate some of these techniques. A common misperception is that MK ULTRA was designed to create "Manchurian Candidates" or to fracture personalities. They were out to find the most effective interrogation methods to extract information out of captured Soviet spies, no matter the cost. Drugs, sleep deprivation, high stress, all of them played a role. Some of the subjects volunteered. Some did not, and were injected with psychoactive substances against their will. In one infamous case, an unwilling subject threw himself out a window to his death in the throes of an LSD overdose.

Perhaps the most heinous of experiments carried out under this program were those of the Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron. Cameron, who had been recruited by the CIA, was interested in correcting schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and programming the psyche. His experiments involved putting subjects in a drug-induced coma for weeks at a time, subjecting them to audio recordings of simple and repetitive statements, and applying electroshock therapy at thirty to forty times the recommended power for ECT. Rather than successfully "reprogramming" the subjects, the observed effects were incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to speak, and confusing research assistants for their own parents. In effect, he created schizophrenia where there was none. He drove them insane. In a sickening irony, Cameron sat on the Nuremberg tribunals where he accused individuals of the very same things he would conduct his entire career.

So what happened to MK ULTRA? Is it still ongoing as some would have you believe?

No.

In December 1974, the New York Times published an expose on CIA human experimentation in th 1960's. This report incensed the public and led to a Congressional investigation in the form of the Church Committee, and also by a separate executive investigative task force, the Rockefeller Commission. In 1975, these two committees revealed to the public for the first time the scope and horror of the CIA's human interrogation experiments.

On the heels of these reports, President Gerald Ford issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities, effectively prohibiting human experimentation without consent. This Executive Order was later expanded by Presidents Carter and Reagan to prohibit any and all human experimentation. Subsequent action by the Inspectors General of the various armed services led to similar rulings across the board for the military.

It is likely that the twisted minds behind the MK ULTRA program saw the writing on the wall prior to their being exposed by the New York Times. In 1973, then-director of the CIA Richard Helms ordered all documents to be destroyed. However, enough of them survived to provide information sufficient enough to expose the program to the public.

In summation, on the basis of the best available historical evidence - NOT personal unsubstantiated anecdotes from people who want to sell books - it becomes clear that the CIA's history of 'mind control' human experimentation ended in 1974. However, there are some files pursuant to MK ULTRA that are still classified, and therefore unavailable through a FOIA request. This does not indicate that the program is still ongoing. It is highly likely that useful information was obtained through the program, and that its notes and research results are still referenced for modern "enhanced interrogation techniques."

So what does all of this mean? Think of a few other things. The Tuskeegee Experiments. My Lai massacre. The prison at Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo Bay. CIA black cites and extraordinary rendition. These, and the MK ULTRA program, are a black stain on the history of our nation. Horrendous and unthinkable "science" done in the name of maintaining parity with Chinese and Soviet interrogation and 'brainwashing.'

However, the fact that these horrendous things occurred in the past is not evidence that they are still going on. For anyone to use the existence of MK ULTRA as an argument for the existence of an international and intergenerational Satanic conspiracy, they must commit multiple logical fallacies and use extremely bad reasoning. That's called confirmation bias, and the more I learn about the world of those who believe in this garbage, the more of it I see.

The best way I know how to sum up MK ULTRA in the context of history is a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche: "He who fights monsters must take care, lest he thereby become a monster."

Seems a particularly salient point considering the whole subject of this website.

-StopDougRiggs