5. PSYCHAITRY AS A TOOL OF THE STATE

PSYCHIATRY AS A WEAPON OF THE STATE

The Scientologists are, in my view, rightly sceptical about most psychiatric drugs. However the ‘medicalization of normality’ and our slide toward accepting the neo con tactics of pharmaceutical companies, intent on increasing profit, will have to wait for other research investigations.

Those who have never been prescribed psychiatric drugs, or known someone who has had to take such a prescription, have no idea how brutal and mind altering drugs like Largactil can be.

The fact that the Russians used many anti-psychotic drugs to warp the minds of wholly sane dissidents, for the so called mental condition of ‘slow-burning schizophrenia,’ should serve as some sort of warning of how these drugs can be used.

Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT), graphically shown in the film ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ is an effective means of brain washing and is still in use today, despite the fact that no one in the psychiatric profession can adequately explain how it works or what it does. What is known is that large segments of a person’s life may be wiped from their memory by the use of ECT.

AN INTRODUCTION TO PHYSICAL TREATMENTS IN PSYCHIATRY was published in 1946 by William Sargeant and Elliott Slater. Sargeant’s subsequent work raises questions about William Sargeant and his links to experimental security service projects into drug influences on behavioural science and should bear far greater scrutiny, if the records could be found. In 1946 the Psychiatrists, Elliott Slater the William Sargeant, advocated: shock treatment, psycho surgery and their work is now judged by their peers to have been the:


‘Epitome of the mindless period of psychiatry during and after the war,’ by a vote of their fellow psychiatrists in 2001 .

Dr William Sargeant pioneered ‘deep sleep therapy.’ He laid down six fundamental guidelines to be followed. They included making sure the patient was able to walk, that he could be easily woken up and that the treatment be stopped immediately if complications set in. However he later admitted that several patients died whilst subjected to this ‘therapy.’

Unfortunately the MK ULTRA experiments largely ignored these strictures. Dr William Sargeant appears to have had some strong links to Security Service experimental psychiatric projects within the UK, in British psychiatric hospitals, which mirrored many of those experiments conducted by MK ULTRA.

A perfectly sane woman whom I know said she had rescued her husband from the Priory Clinic in Roehampton from the clutches of a rather sinister psychiatrist, Dr David Thompson. She said that despite gaining an upper second from Cambridge University, her ability to work at all had been seriously compromised ever since. She had had to cope with drugs in her insulin in 1994 and mobbing by individuals whilst on a camping holiday with her son on the island of Herm in the Channel Isles at the same time. By going without food for a time she realised that her altered state of mind continued whenever she took her insulin. Insulin given to her at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge. When she exchanged the insulin on the island of Guernsey, at an independent pharmacist, she found that all supplies of her brand of insulin had been withdrawn by Novonordisk in the Cambridge area on her return from holiday.

Eventually she tried to bring a case against various individuals in the Courts. ‘This was a libel action and the law demands that actions for libel are decided by a jury.’ Despite this Master Leslie, in the High Court, dismissed the case and ‘almost with a wink’ assured her that she would not suffer further persecution. She added: ‘That was absolute rubbish, these people are adept at wars of attrition and adept at ensuring they have a plausible deniability.’ She struggled to keep a job in call centre for four years, was repeatedly blocked from promotion and eventually sacked, often feeling that her drinks had been spiked at times when she was subjected to outrageous bullying persuaded her that; ‘justice is just not available to those who trip over unpalatable facts of out of control security service shenanigans.’

“The people who perpetrate these shenanigans are often socially inept individuals with a certain lack of intellectual rigour, who are easily lured into working with the security services by means of being over promoted and therefore indentured to a corrupt system that ensures they retain their place in a hierarchy – which in most instances they would never have achieved without the co-operation of the security services.”

‘Those patients who have been treated for psychiatric conditions are often so scared of reverting to their previous paranoid condition that they would rather turn a blind eye to the evils and excesses of an out of control state machinery than admit the possibility of that out of control state. Those who have been ‘treated’ are often so scared of being diagnosed as ‘paranoid’ once again that they will do anything rather than subject themselves to more psychiatric ‘treatment.’ Many patients appear to develop an uncharacteristic patriotism after such treatment.’

As Hannah Arendt observed when commenting on the ‘banality of evil’ which spurs those thoughtless individuals to prop up a sick State:

“… men determined to commit crimes, will
organise them on the vastest, most improbable
scale. Not only because this renders all
punishment provided by the legal system
inadequate and absurd; but because the very
immensity of the crimes guarantees that the
murderers who proclaim their innocence with all
manner of lies will be more readily believed than
the victims who tell the truth.” (Hannah Arendt
– The Origins of Totalitarianism)


The influential, but now much maligned, psychiatrist, R D Laing, argued that it was not schizophrenics who were mad but society. Whilst this generalisation can be dangerous, it has a kernel of truth at its core when one factors in unethical experiments by psychiatrists intent on treating ‘volunteers’ as guinea pigs.

That quote from J Edgar Hoover bears repetition: ‘The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous – he simply cannot believe it exists.’

The MK ULTRA and MK NAOMI Projects have received wide dissemination. Although these experimental projects later resulted in condemnation by the American Government, it is naïve to suppose that was the end of those experimental projects.

MK ULTRA has been well researched and written on quite authoritatively by John Marks, despite the command to trash all records of this experimental project in 1972/73. That ‘Special Relationship’ which the UK enjoys with the USA could well have triggered a symbiotic relationship allowing the continuation of these experiments outside the borders of the USA. The UK Security Services have always felt themselves above the orbit of due legal processes and our own lack of a constitution in the UK would have allowed such experiments to continue unabated. It has not yet been fully disclosed what Sargeant’s contibution to MK Ultra might have been and it should be remembered that one Social Democrat MP, David Owen, trained under Sargeant.

Unethical Nazi experiments were pounced upon, by the Allies, after the Second World War and, despite the fact that our own scientists could not justify their experiments on supposedly ‘other’ beings of ‘lesser’ humanity, as the Nazis did. Many similar experiments were conducted with equal inhumanity by our supposedly victorious and more ethical psychiatric and scientific establishment under the aegis of our Security Services.

To this day I am assured that UK Servicemen have apparently innocuous advertisements in their barracks asking for ‘volunteers’ to submit themselves as guinea pigs, in return for a cash payment. One serviceman I talked to said he never heard of nor saw the ‘volunteers’ again. He also claimed to have delivered medications to the Nissan Hut at Porton Down and seen the security with which these supposed ‘volunteers’ were guarded.

Another man – who claimed to be ex-SAS, and still involved in active service outside the military, on anti-terrorist exercises - claimed that seven floors below a seemingly harmless Nissan Hut at Porton Down human guinea pigs were detained in an abject condition and guarded with the utmost security. When I challenged the ex-SAS man about the ethics of this facility his reply was: ‘Well they shouldn’t have volunteered should they?’ The principle that ‘volunteers’ should have had a full understanding of what they would be subjected to escaped the moral niceties of an ordinary, but semi-literate soldier, who failed to grasp the concept of ‘full and informed consent.’

This appears to be pretty much an open secret, yet those who rock the boat, or take steps to reveal this secret to the wider world, are themselves subjected to mind altering drugs so that they believe themselves to be ‘going mad.’

Two of the aims of MK ULTRA were to:
‘promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient (of a drug) would be discredited in public;’ and to ‘produce shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.’

Before seeking medical or psychiatric help political activists would be wise to restrict their diet quite ruthlessly and monitor their emotional state whilst doing so. Even tap water within the home can be doctored, so it is essential that one rule out mind altering substances before considering the possibility of insanity. Above all it is essential that one does not seek help from a GP, since often the GP himself will be all too ready to diagnose paranoia, rather than conduct blood tests to ascertain the possibility of spiked food or drinks. Furthermore if you and your GP are not informed of what drug you should be tested for, you will not be able to identify all possible drugs.

What is known, and a matter of public record, is that Ronnie Maddison, a serviceman, died of Sarin poisoning in Porton Down in 1953. This was the third biggest ‘conspiracy theory’ until the MoD settled out of court with Maddison’s family in 2008. By settling out of court no enquiry was held. Maddison’s death came under the experimental project MK NAOMI. As each experiment has garnered criticism a simple name change ensures that the continued experiments forge ahead without attracting undue attention. Nor have steps been taken to trace psychiatrists who may have been trained by William Sargeant, Dr David Thompson and their successors.

The security of conducting unethical experiments upon patients who submit themselves to ‘treatment’ in the private sector is evident. A private health clinic does not come under the aegis of the NHS, so no Health Minister, Defence Minister or any other Government official has direct responsibility for ‘treatments’ conducted within the private sector. That the MoD and Security Services are responsible for referring sufficient service personnel to the Priory Clinic to make up around 70% of the Clinic’s income is interesting. We are now assured that the Porton Down ‘cold testing facility’ has been closed. Perhaps Porton Down, as a government facility, could be too easily held accountable for such experiments to continue within the government sector and Ministerial responsibility.

Gulf War Syndrome: Soldiers returning from the first Gulf War – when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait – were told that certain injections they had been given were subject to the Official Secrets Act. When many of those soldiers became too ill to climb stairs, or started fathering handicapped or still born babies, having humped 100lb bergens across country for tens of miles, and fathered perfectly healthy children, prior to their ‘vaccinations,’ a Ministry of Defence spokesman assured me that the symptoms were too diverse to be a ‘syndrome.’

Even when the United States began admitting it had used soldiers as experimental guinea pigs with these vaccinations, the British were still in denial. But we in the UK have always had nefarious ways to silence would be whistle blowers – look up Doctor David Kelly – a man who was said to have committed suicide on one third of a co-proxamol tablet and whom paramedics insisted had not lost sufficient blood to have died from slightly slit wrists. Needless to say no coroner’s court examined the evidence and we were only given the assurance of Lord Hutton that he had committed suicide – despite a letter from three top London medical consultants printed on the front page of the Evening Standard, assuring us that the amount of blood loss and co-proxamol ingested would not have killed the average family pet.

Operation MK Ultra began using LSD on anyone it could lay its hands on. Eventually it went one step too far, testing it on a group of high-level military and scientific people one evening. Having doctored their evening aperitif with LSD one member of the group, Fred Olsen, became seriously unnerved and slightly psychotic. In an effort to cover up his ingestion of drinks doctored with LSD, he was left untreated and finally committed suicide a few days later. It was only some years later, with the help of a British Member of Parliament (King), son-in-law of Fred Olsen, that the truth emerged. Fred Olsen, along with a number of other high-ranking people, had been given LSD, with tragic consequences.

LSD is not commonly in use today and carries with it the aura of ‘psychedelic trips’ of the 1960’s amongst the hippie or flower power generation. Who, one can’t help feel, may have been given access to this drug in furtherance of MK Ultra experiments as they rolled out across college campuses.







MKULTRA is one of the
most disturbing instances
of intelligence community
abuse on record.


MKULTRA: CIA Mind Control

by Jon Elliston
Dossier Editor
pscpdocs@aol.com

For many Americans, the 1950s were a docile decade. In U.S. history books, the period is mostly portrayed as a mellow, orderly one, especially in light of the social upheavals that followed in the 1960s. But for the CIA, the "I Like Ike" years were packed with adventure and action, much of it conducted outside of the public's view. Few programs were sheltered with more secrecy than the Agency's mind control experiments, identified together with the code-name MKULTRA.

Concerned about rumors of communist brainwashing of POWs during the Korean war, in April 1953 CIA Director Allen Dulles authorized the MKULTRA program, which would later become notorious for the unusual and sometimes inhumane tests that the CIA financed. Reviewing the experiments five years later, one secrecy-conscious CIA auditor wrote: "Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles."

Though many of the documents related to MKULTRA were destroyed by the CIA in 1972, some records relating to the program have made it into the public domain, and the work of historians, investigative reporters, and various congressional committees has resulted in the release of enough information to make MKULTRA one of the most disturbing instances of intelligence community abuse on record. As writer Mark Zepezauer puts it, "the surviving history is nasty enough."

The most notorious MKULTRA experiments were the CIA's pioneering studies of the drug that would years later feed the heads of millions: lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. The CIA was intrigued by the drug, and harbored hopes that acid or a similar drug could be used to clandestinely disorient and manipulate target foreign leaders. (The Agency would consider several such schemes in its pursuit of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who they wanted to send into a drug-induced stupor or tirade during a public or live radio speech.) LSD was also viewed as a way to loosen tongues in CIA interrogations.

In his thorough book on MKULTRA and similar projects, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate," John Marks reports that most of the CIA researchers tried LSD themselves. In fact, an early phase of the experiments was probably the setting for the first acid trip in the United States -- experienced by a courageous CIA man no less!

The fact that these experiments took place is remarkable in and of itself, but the story of the CIA's LSD trips approaches the unbelievably bizarre when the cast of characters is considered. In his recent history of the early exploits of the CIA, The Very Best Men, Evan Thomas describes Sidney Gottlieb, the Stranglovian scientist who ran the MKULTRA project: "Born with a clubfoot and a stutter, he compensated by becoming an expert folk dancer and obtaining a Ph.D. from Cal Tech. A pleasant man who lived on a farm with his wife, Gottlieb drank only goat's milk and grew Christmas trees, which he sold at a roadside stand." When he wasn't busy on the farm, Dr. Gottlieb was dosing subjects with LSD-laced drinks, scrutinizing their reactions, and searching for qualities of the drug that would benefit CIA covert actions.

The CIA's LSD experiments were conducted on many unwitting subjects, most often prisoners or patrons of brothels set up and run by the Agency, which had installed two-way mirrors in the establishments to allow for observation of the drug's effects (these studies were referred to as "Operation Midnight Climax"). Some of the MKULTRA subjects who were informed faced even more inhumane treatment: during one experiment in Kentucky, seven volunteers were given LSD for 77 days straight.

One of the experiments probably proved fatal. On November 19, 1953, an Army scientist and germ warfare specialist named Frank Olson, who was working on an MKULTRA project, was slipped a solid dose of LSD in his drink. Then, after spending eight days stumbling about in what many observers described as a paranoid, depressed state, Olson jumped through his hotel window in New York and fell ten stories to his death.

The Agency covered up its role in Olson's demise, and twenty-two years would pass before his family would learn of the events leading up to his death. When the CIA's acid exploits were made public in the mid-1970s, the Agency found itself facing heavy criticism. One Senate committee put it this way in 1975:

"From its beginning in the early 1950s until its termination in 1963, the program of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting non-volunteer human subjects demonstrates a failure of the CIA's leadership to pay adequate attention to the rights of individuals and to provide effective guidance to CIA employees. Though it was known that the testing was dangerous, the lives of subjects were placed in jeopardy and were ignored.... Although it was clear that the laws of the United States were being violated, the testing continued."

Though the most prominently discussed aspect of MKULTRA is the CIA's LSD work, the program included many other unusual investigations relating to the science of mind control. CIA researchers probed the potential of numerous parapsychological phenomena, including hypnosis, telepathy, precognition, photokinesis and "remote viewing."

These studies weren't conducted merely to satisfy the CIA's scientific curiosity -- the Agency was looking for weapons that would give the United States the upper hand in the mind wars. Toward that objective, the Agency poured millions of dollars into studies probing literally dozens of methods of influencing and controlling the mind. One 1955 MKULTRA document gives an indication of the size and range of the effort; the memo refers to the study of an assortment of mind-altering substances which would:
• "promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public"
• "increase the efficiency of mentation and perception"
• "prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol"
• "promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol"
• "produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc."
• "render the indication of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness"
• "enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called 'brainwashing'"
• "produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use"
• "produc[e] shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use"
• "produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc."
• "produce 'pure' euphoria with no subsequent let-down"
• "alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced"
• "cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning"
• "lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts"
• "promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects"
Few of MKULTRA's objectives were realized, but the very conduct of these experiments caused many critics of the CIA to argue that successful or not, CIA scientists shouldn't pry at the doors of perception.


View MKULTRA Documents


Sources:

Gross, Peter, Gentl eman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

Thomas, Evan, The Very Best Men (Simon & Schuster, 1995).

Marks, John, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control (Times Books, 1979).

Mark Zepezauer, The CIA's Greatest Hits (Odionan, 1994).

© Copyright 1996-1999 ParaScope, Inc.






Dr Philip Milln
Dr Milln qualified at St Thomas' Hospital at a time when William Sargeant was there, and then went on to train in psychiatry at St George's Hospital.
He spent some time with the M.R.C. in Epsom doing research into anti-depressants and Lithium before joining the consultant body of the Royal South Hants Hospital, Southampton in 1983. He continues as a member of the board of examiners at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
In 1990, he left the Health Service to join Priory Hospital Marchwood as a staff Consultant and is now, in addition, Deputy Medical Director.


http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg96291.html
Caveat Lector-

Up until now we have only looked at the use of the German scientists in chemical and biological warfare. But in 1949 the work at Edgewood shifted focus and began looking at psychochemicals beginning with LSD in an effort to find the perfect truth serum. The key sources of information were from those that had worked at I.G. Farben. Some were imprisoned but they were released temporarily to work for the Army Chemical Corps. This was the very birth of a much larger CIA operation that became known as MK Ultra. The original operation was Bluebird, which then evolved first into Artichoke before becoming MK-Ultra. Unfortunately CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the CIA records of MK-Ultra destroyed in 1973. Remaining records suggest hundreds if not thousands of people were used as test subjects and involved the collaboration with several universities, mental hospitals, prisons and drug rehab centers.106 The experiments were conducted without the test subjects knowledge and resulted in several deaths including that of Frank Olsen.

Others have reported continuing problems from being test subjects. Others attempted suicide of which some were successful. The army's and CIA's response was to cover up the project. But the operation evolved beyond just the military-intelligence community. The CIA enlisted help with MK-Ultra with a host of university collaborators including the Universities of Delaware, Maryland and a host of others.105

Just as the immigration of Nazis and war criminals into the US involved the use of several projects of which Paperclip is the most widely known such is the case of MK-Ultra. There were 149 sub projects under MK-Ultra. The use of drugs for truth serum and for mind control were conducted under a bewildering list of Project or Operations. Below is a short synopsis of some of those projects.


"MKDELTA: This was apparently the first project established by the CIA in October, 1952, for the use of biochemicals in clandestine operations. It may never have been implemented operationally.

MKULTRA: This was a successor project to MKDELTA established in April, 1953, and terminating some time in the late 1960's probably after 1966. This program considered various means of controlling human behavior. Drugs were only one aspect of this activity.

MKNAOMI: This project began in the 1950's and was terminated at least with respect biological projects, in 1969. This may have been a successor to:

MKDELTA. Its purpose was to stockpile severely incapacitating and lethal materials, and to develop gadgetry for the dissemination of these materials.

MKSEARCH: This was apparently a successor project to

MKULTRA, which began in 1965 and was terminated in 1973. The objective of the project was to develop a capability to manipulate human behavior in a predictable manner through the use of drugs.

MKCHICKWIT: This was apparently a part of the MKSEARCH program. Its objective was to identify new drug developments in Europe and Asia and to obtain information and samples.

MKOFTEN: This was also apparently a part of the MKSEARCH project. Its objective was to test the behavioral and toxicological effects of certain drugs on animals and humans."107

STARGATE: Investigated the use of ESP, paranormal, remote viewing military uses of telekinesis type research that was done from an uncertain start date up until 1984.116

Another aspect of MK-Ultra that is not widely known is that it extended beyond the borders of the US. Experiments were also conducted in Canada by Dr. Ewen Cameron at McGill University's Allain Memorial Institute. At least the Canadian government has compensated the test subjects with almost $7 million dollars.108 Another operation under MK-Ultra was Operation Midnight Climax. This operation was run by the contract agent George Hunter White, a narcotics officer. White hired drug addicted prostitutes to lure customers to a CIA-financed bordello, the customers then given drinks containing LSD. White would then observe the customers through a two-way mirror.109 The following quote will suffice as the final example of the ethical nature of these experiments.


"One particularly odious project was run by Dr Harris Isabel, Director of the Public Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky - a facility specializing in drug abuse. Asked by the CIA to discover a range of 'synthetic' drugs, Isabel began experimenting on captive black inmates. Anxious to please his CIA bosses he daily fed his guinea pigs large doses of LSD, mescaline, marijuana, scopolamine and other substances. In exchange for participating in the experiments, the inmates received injections of high quality morphine, sometimes getting 'shot-up' three times a day, depending on their co-operation. Brought before the Senate subcommittees in 1975, Isabel saw no contradiction in providing hard drugs to the very addicts he was employed to cure. "110

There is one additional area in which Nazi scientists were used in experimentation on human tests subjects by the CIA and the military and that is in the area of radiation. Fortunately there is fairly good documentation as to the extent of these unethical experiments. On January 15, 1994 President Clinton relaxed some of the draconian security measures that prevailed under Reagan and Bush by establishing the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) to investigate unethical experimentation involving radiation. Many of the results of this investigation have been published and they are available on the web at the Department of Energy's site. Once again the investigations show collaboration with a host of universities and research centers. The results also show a selection of test subjects from those least able to defend themselves: the first injection of plutonium was given to a black construction worker, the use of Iodine131 and its relationship to cold weather stress was tested on Eskimos, the feeding of radioactive laced cereals to mentally retarded children.111

It has already been establish how the Nazi-CIA connection affected the relationship between the US and the USSR…