Tag: MKULTRA

Originally posted at The Public Record and Truthout

A number of new articles have been published recently that have highlighted evidence of illegal human experimentation on U.S.-held “terrorism” prisoners undergoing torture. These articles followed the release of a “white paper” by Physicians for Human Rights [PHR], Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 Inspector General’s Report.

This report looks at those recent charges, and reveals that experiments by a CIA researcher on human subjects undergoing SERE training went unreported in the legal memos the Bush administration drafted to approve their torture program. It will also connect major military and intelligence figures to the SERE experiments, and tie some of them to major science and “experimental” directorates at the CIA and Special Operations Command.

Two stories from today’s news highlight the hubris of the U.S. executive branch as regards its assumed right to conduct unrestrained surveillance of its citizens, and engage in torture in violation of all laws.

Both Emptywheel at Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com have done a stellar job tracking the Cheneyesque descent (H/T EW) of the Obama Justice Department when it comes to the question of executive privilege over classified material, especially when it comes to the courts. We already have witnessed the spectacle of the U.S. pressuring a British court on the suppression of documents in the Binyam Mohamed case.

In 1973, when the CIA got wind of the revelations that would expose its decades-long program into mind control experiments, then-CIA Director Richard Helms, and Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Agency’s Technical Services Division, got together to destroy all the files they could find on MKULTRA and related programs. These programs consisted of experiments on human subjects on isolation, sensory deprivation, induction of hallucinations and psychosis through drugs, electroshock, hypnosis, physical debility (through hunger, mainly), and other horrifying procedures. Some of you may be familiar with one such sponsored program, if you’ve read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

Helms, who bragged about his destruction of the evidence to Congress, and Gottlieb were never held accountable for their destruction of evidence. (No surprise to those of us fighting to get the incoming Obama administration to hold Bush Administration officials accountable for their crimes on torture and lying the country into war.) Later, when through the efforts of heroic journalists — some of them ex-intelligence officers, like John Marks — some of the programs were exposed, but it was believed much of the CIA’s crimes in this instance would never be known.Vermont State Hospital Implicated in CIA Mind Control Experiments

The story of United States research into and use of biological weapons remains a huge blank spot in the known history of this country. There have been attempts to document this history, but much remains classified or has been destroyed. The use of biological weapons dovetails with U.S. research into drugs and mind control against prisoners, as the revelations about MKULTRA or the Edgewood Arsenal experiments make clear (see this fascinating story by Michael Ignatieff in the New York Times Magazine, April 2001).

This posting is the first in a series I hope to publish over time looking at the controversial question of U.S. use of biological weapons, and its links to MKULTRA and other covert CIA or military programs. It examines the origins of the U.S. program in biological weapons research, as it grew out of the ashes of the horrific program in the same, started by the Japanese Imperial government in the 1930s. It is best known by its bureaucratic moniker: Unit 731.

Martha Davis Ph.D., a Clinical Psychologist and a Visiting Scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, has produced an important new documentary, Interrogation Psychologists: The Making of a Professional Crisis”. The film premiered at a conference entitled “The Interrogation and Torture Controversy: Crisis in Psychology,” held at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Center on Terrorism in New York City on September 12, 2008.

Dr. Davis describes the documentary:

“In 2005 the American Psychological Association endorsed the participation of military psychologists in detainee interrogations. This policy incited a firestorm of protest within the profession and around the world, but APA officials held fast, contending that the involvement of psychologists insured that interrogations were safe, ethical and effective. With interviews of experts and documentation of communications between APA and government officials, “Interrogation Psychologists” traces the origins of the policy and why the APA risked massive defections for it. The search leads to the emerging field of national security psychology, which has far-reaching implications for intelligence gathering operations and U.S. treatment of prisoners of war.”

Following a pivotal article by Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly a few weeks back, today’s Washington Post published an important article today, “Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned.” The story, by Post staff writer Joby Warrick, notes U.S. denials in using drug injections for coercive purposes during interrogations.

Adel al-Nusairi, a Saudi national imprisoned for years at Guanatanmo, and now released without charges, has a different memory:

“I’d fall asleep” after the shot, Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his attorney at the military prison in Cuba, according to notes. After being roused, Nusairi eventually did talk, giving U.S. officials what he later described as a made-up confession to buy some peace.

“I was completely gone,” he remembered. “I said, ‘Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I’m a member of al-Qaeda, I will.'”

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?

Hamlet: Between who?

Sometimes it seems as if it is raining news and analysis. A number of good articles have appeared lately on the subject of U.S. torture. David Goodman’s “The Enablers” over at Mother Jones is one of a number of articles in a special MJ series on torture. Goodman’s article focuses on the fight within the American Psychological Association (APA) over psychologist participation in military and CIA interrogations of “enemy combatants.” It’s very good, fairly up-to-date, and puts the controversy into some historical context.

Another article, by Stephen Soldz and Brad Olson — both psychologists and both active in the APA opposition organization, Psychologists for an Ethical APA — has been published online over at ZNet. Its long title, “A Reaction to the APA Vote on Sealing Up Key Loopholes in the 2007 Resolution on Interrogations,” tips you off that there has been some recent activity in the struggle to change APA policy on psychologists and interrogation. Indeed there has been, as last week APA Council voted to approve a substantial change in their previous language on prohibited interrogation techniques. But will it make a difference in the long run?

I’m sending a letter off to the American Psychological Association (APA) explaining my decision to resign membership from that organization, stimulated by APA’s failure to address the torture issue. The text of the letter follows below (with hypertext links added here to assist the reader with context).

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January 27, 2008

Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D.

President, American Psychological Association

750 First Street, NE

Washington, DC 20002-4232

Dear Dr. Kazdin,

I hereby resign my membership in the American Psychological Association (APA). I have up until now been working with Psychologists for an Ethical APA for an overturn in APA policy on psychologist involvement in national security interrogations, and I greatly respect those who are fighting via a dues boycott to influence APA policy on this matter. I hope to still work with these principled and dedicated professionals, but I cannot do it anymore from a position within APA.