Mind Control
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
From the Napa Sentinel, Napa, CA, USA
Copyright FreeAmerica and Harry V. Martin, 1995
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Contents
[This table did not appear in the original text and is for the
reader's convenience.]
Mind Control in California
Prisoners and War
Drugs and the Mafia
LEAA and Funding for Experiments
Reagan Era - Violence Center
More on the Violence Center
More on Drugs
Psychosurgery, black ops
Navy school for assassins
Soviets, U.S. develop techniques
Electronic Weapons
Origins in Nazi Germany
Dachau and the Space Program
Bibliography
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Part One in a Series
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
There was just a small news announcement on the radio in early July
after a short heat wave, three inmates of Vacaville Medical Facility
had died in non-air conditioned cells. Two of those prisoners, the
announcement said, may have died as a result of medical treatment. No
media inquiries were made, no major news stories developed because of
these deaths.
But what was the medical treatment that may have caused their deaths?
The Medical Facility indicates they were mind control or behavior
modification treatments. A deeper probe into the death of these two
inmates unravels a mind-boggling tale of horror that has been part of
California penal history for a long time, and one that caused
national outcries two decades ago.
Mind control experiments have been part of California for decades and
permeate mental institutions and prisons. But, it is not just in the
penal society that mind control measures have been used. Minority
children were subjected to experimentation at abandoned Nike Missile
Sites, veterans who fought for American freedom were also subjected
to the programs. Funding and experimentations of mind control have
been part of the U.S. Health, Education and Welfare Department, the
Department of Veterans Affairs, the Central Intelligence Agency
through the Phoenix Program, the Stanford Research Institute, the
Agency for International Development, the Department of Defense, the
Department of Labor, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the National Science
Foundation.
California has been in the forefront of mind control experimentation.
Government experiments also were conducted in the Haight-Ashbury
District in San Francisco at the height of the Hippy reign. In 1974,
Senator Sam Erwin, of Watergate fame, headed a U.S. Senate
Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights studying the subject
of "Individual rights and the Federal role in behavior modification."
Though little publicity was given to this committee's investigation,
Senator Erwin issued a strong condemnation of the federal role in
mind control. That condemnation, however, did not halt mind control
experiments, they just received more circuitous funding.
Many of the case histories concerning individuals of whom the mind
control experiments were used, show a strange concept in the minds of
those seeking guinea pigs. Those subject to the mind control
experiments would be given indefinite sentences, his freedom was
dependent upon how well the experiment went. One individual, for
example, was arrested for joyriding, given a two-year sentence and
held for mind control experiments. He was held for 18 years.
Here are just a few experiments used in the mind control program:
A naked inmate is strapped down on a board. His wrists and ankles are
cuffed to the board and his head is rigidly held in place by a strap
around his neck and a helmet on his head. He is left in a darkened
cell, unable to remove his body wastes. When a meal is delivered, one
wrist is unlocked so he could feel around in the dark for his food
and attempt to pour liquid down his throat without being able to lift
his head.
Another experiment creates a muscle relaxant. Within 30 to 40 seconds
paralysis begins to invade the small muscles of the fingers, toes,
and eyes and then the inter costal muscles and diaphragm. The heart
slows down to about 60 beats per minute. This condition, together
with respiratory arrests, sets in for as long as two to five minutes
before the drug begins to wear off. The individual remains fully
conscious and is gasping for breath. It is "likened to dying, it is
almost like drowning" the experiment states.
Another drug induces vomiting and was administered to prisoners who
didn't get up on time or caught swearing or lying, or even not
greeting their guards formally. The treatment brings about
uncontrolled vomiting that lasts from 15 minutes to an hour,
accompanied by a temporary cardio vascular effect involving changes
in the blood pressure.
Another deals with creating body rigidness, aching restlessness,
blurred vision, severe muscular pain, trembling and fogged cognition.
The Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the U.S. Army
have admitted mind control experiments. Many deaths have occurred.
In tracing the steps of government mind control experiments, the
trail leads to legal and illegal usages, usage for covert
intelligence operations, and experiments on innocent people who were
unaware that they were being used.
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Second in a Series
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Sentinel commenced a series on mind control in
early August and suspended it until September because of the
extensive research required after additional information was
received.
In July, two inmates died at the Vacaville Medical Facility.
According to prison officials at the time, the two may have died as a
result of medical treatment, that treatment was the use of mind
control or behavior modification drugs. A deeper study into the
deaths of the two inmates has unraveled a mind-boggling tale of
horror that has been part of California penal history for a long
time, and one that caused national outcries years ago.
In the August article, the Sentinel presented a graphic portrait of
some of the mind control experiments that have been allowed to
continue in the United States. On November 1974 a U.S. Senate Sub
committee on Constitutional Rights investigated federally-funded
behavior modification programs, with emphasis on federal involvement
in, and the possible threat to individual constitutional rights of
behavior modification, especially involving inmates in prisons and
mental institutions.
The Senate committee was appalled after reviewing documents from the
following sources:
Neuro-Research Foundation's study entitled The Medical Epidemiology
of Criminals.
The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence from UCLA.
The closed adolescent treatment center.
A national uproar was created by various articles in 1974, which
prompted the Senate investigation. But after all these years, the
news that two inmates at Vacaville may have died from these same
experiments indicates that though a nation was shocked in 1974,
little was done to correct the experimentations. In 1977, a Senate
subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, chaired by Senator
Ted Kennedy, focussed on the CIA's testing of LSD on unwitting
citizens. Only a mere handful of people within the CIA knew about the
scope and details of the program.
To understand the full scope of the problem, it is important to study
its origins. The Kennedy subcommittee learned about the CIA Operation
M.K.-Ultra through the testimony of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. The purpose
of the program, accord ing to his testimony, was to "investigate
whether and how it was possible to modify an individual's behavior by
covert means". Claiming the protection of the National Security Act,
Dr. Gottlieb was unwilling to tell the Senate subcommittee what had
been learned or gained by these experiments.
He did state, however, that the program was initially engendered by a
concern that the Soviets and other enemies of the United States would
get ahead of the U.S. in this field. Through the Freedom of
Information Act, researchers are now able to obtain documents
detailing the M.K.-Ultra program and other CIA behavior modification
projects in a special reading room located on the bottom floor of the
Hyatt Regency in Rosslyn, VA.
The most daring phase of the M.K.-Ultra program involved slipping
unwitting American citizens LSD in real life situations. The idea for
the series of experiments originated in November 1941, when William
Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), the forerunner of the CIA during World War Two. At that time
the intelligence agency invested $5000 for the "truth drug" program.
Experiments with scopolamine and morphine proved both unfruitful and
very dangerous. The program tested scores of other drugs, including
mescaline, barbituates, benzedrine, cannabis indica, to name a few.
The U.S. was highly concerned over the heavy losses of freighters and
other ships in the North Atlantic, all victims of German U-boats.
Information about German U-boat strategy was desperately needed and
it was believed that the information could be obtained through drug-
influenced interrogations of German naval P.O.W.s, in violation of
the Geneva Accords.
Tetrahydrocannabinol acetate, a colorless, odorless marijuana
extract, was used to lace a cigarette or food substance without
detection. Initially, the experiments were done on volunteer U.S.
Army and OSS personnel, and testing was also disguised as a remedy
for shell shock. The volunteers became known as "Donovan's Dreamers".
The experiments were so hush-hush, that only a few top officials knew
about them. President Franklin Roosevelt was aware of the
experiments. The "truth drug" achieved mixed success.
The experiments were halted when a memo was written: "The drug defies
all but the most expert and search analysis, and for all practical
purposes can be considered beyond analysis." The OSS did not,
however, halt the program. In 1943 field tests of the extract were
being con ducted, despite the order to halt them. The most celebrated
test was conducted by Captain George Hunter White, an OSS agent and
ex-law enforcement official, on August Del Grazio, aka Augie Dallas,
aka Dell, aka Little Augie, a New York gangster. Cigarettes laced
with the acetate were offered to Augie without his knowledge of the
content. Augie, who had served time in prison for assault and murder,
had been one of the world's most notorious drug dealers and
smugglers. He operated an opium alkaloid factory in Turkey and he was
a leader in the Italian underworld on the Lower East Side of New
York. Under the influence of the drug, Augie revealed volumes of
information about the under world operations, including the names of
high ranking officials who took bribes from the mob. These
experiments led to the encouragement of Donovan. A new memo was
issued: "Cigarette experiments indicated that we had a mechanism
which offered promise in relaxing prisoners to be interrogated."
When the OSS was disbanded after the war, Captain White continued to
administer behavior modifying drugs. In 1947, the CIA replaced the
OSS. White's service record indicates that he worked with the OSS,
and by 1954 he was a high ranking Federal Narcotics Bureau officer
who had been loaned to the CIA on a part-time basis.
White rented an apartment in Greenwich Village equipped with one-way
mirrors, surveillance gadgets and disguised himself as a seaman.
White drugged his acquaintances with LSD and brought them back to his
apartment. In 1955, the operation shifted to San Francisco. In San
Francisco, "safehouses" were established under the code name
Operation Midnight Climax. Midnight Climax hired prostitute addicts
who lured men from bars back to the safehouses after their drinks had
been spiked with LSD. White filmed the events in the safehouses. The
purpose of these "national security brothels" was to enable the CIA
to experiment with the act of lovemaking for extracting information
from men. The safehouse experiments continued until 1963 until CIA
Inspector General John Earman criticized Richard Helms, the director
of the CIA and father of the M.K.-Ultra project. Earman charged the
new director John McCone had not been fully briefed on the M.K.-Ultra
Project when he took office and that "the concepts involved in
manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and
outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical." He stated
that "the rights and interest of U.S. citizens are placed in
jeopardy". The Inspector General stated that LSD had been tested on
individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and
foreign."
Earman's criticisms were rebuffed by Helms, who warned, "Positive
operation capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of
realistic testing. Tests were necessary to keep up with the Soviets."
But in 1964, Helms had testified before the Warren Commission
investigating the assassination of President John Kennedy,
that "Soviet research has consistently lagged five years behind
Western research".
Upon leaving government service in 1966, Captain White wrote a
startling letter to his superior. In the letter to Dr. Gottlieb,
Captain White reminisced about his work in the safehouses with LSD.
His comments were frightening. "I was a very minor missionary,
actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards
because it was fun, fun, fun," White wrote. "Where else could a red-
blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with
the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"
(NEXT: How the drug experiments helped bring about the rebirth of the
mafia and the French Connection.)
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Part Three in a Series
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
Though the CIA continued to maintain drug experiments in the streets
of America after the program was official cancelled, the United
States reaped tremendous value from it. With George Hunter Whites
connection to underworld figure Little Augie, connections were made
with Mafia king-pin Lucky Luciano, who was in Dannemore Prison.
Luciano wanted freedom, the Mafia wanted drugs, and the United States
wanted Sicily. The date was 1943. Augie was the go-between between
Luciano and the United States War Department.
Luciano was transferred to a less harsh prison and began to be
visited by representatives of the Office of Naval Intelligence and
from underworld figures, such as Meyer Lansky. A strange alliance was
formed between the U.S. Intelligence agencies and the Mafia, who
controlled the West Side docks in New York. Luciano regained active
leadership in organized crime in America.
The U.S. Intelligence community utilized Luciano's underworld
connections in Italy. In July of 1943, Allied forces launched their
invasion of Sicily, the beginning push into occupied Europe. General
George Patton's Seventh Army advanced through hundreds of miles of
territory that was fraught with difficulty, booby trapped roads,
snipers, confusing mountain topography, all within close range of
60,000 hostile Italian troops. All this was accomplished in four
days, a military "miracle" even for Patton.
Senate Estes Kefauver's Senate Sub committee on Organized Crime
asked, in 1951, how all this was possible. The answer was that the
Mafia had helped to protect roads from Italian snipers, served as
guides through treacherous mountain terrain, and provided needed
intelligence to Patton's army. The part of Sicily which Patton's
forces traversed had at one time been completely controlled by the
Sicilian Mafia, until Benito Mussolini smashed it through the use of
police repression.
Just prior to the invasion, it was hardly even able to continue
shaking down farmers and shepherds for protection money. But the
invasion changed all this, and the Mafia went on to play a very
prominent and well-documented role in the American military
occupation of Italy.
The expedience of war opened the doors to American drug traffic and
Mafia domination. This was the beginning of the Mafia-U.S.
Intelligence alliance, an alliance that lasts to this day and helped
to support the covert operations of the CIA, such as the Iran-Contra
operations. In these covert operations, the CIA would obtain drugs
from South America and Southeast Asia, sell them to the Mafia and use
the money for the covert purchase of military equipment. These
operations accelerated when Congress cut off military funding for the
Contras.
One of the Allies top occupation priorities was to liberate as many
of their own soldiers from garrison duties so that they could
participate in the military offensive. In order to accomplish this,
Don Calogero's Mafia were pressed into service, and in July of 1943,
the Civil Affairs Control Office of the U.S. Army appointed him mayor
of Villalba and other Mafia officials as mayors of other towns in
Sicily.
As the northern Italian offensive continued, Allied intelligence
became very concerned over the extent to which the Italian Communists
resistance to Mussolini had driven Italian politics to the left.
Community Party membership had doubled between 1943 and 1944, huge
leftist strikes had shut down factories and the Italian underground
fighting Mussolini had risen to almost 150,000 men. By mid-1944, the
situation came to a head and the U.S. Army terminated arms drops to
the Italian Resistance, and started appointing Mafia officials to
occupation administration posts. Mafia groups broke up leftists
rallies and reactivated black market operations throughout southern
Italy.
Lucky Luciano was released from prison in 1946 and deported to Italy,
where he rebuilt the heroin trade. The court's decision to release
him was made possible by the testimony of intelligence agents at his
hearing, and a letter written by a naval officer reciting what
Luciano had done for the Navy. Luciano was supposed to have served
from 30 to 50 years in prison. Over 100 Mafia members were similarly
deported within a couple of years.
Luciano set up a syndicate which transported morphine base from the
Middle East to Europe, refined it into heroin, and then shipped it
into the United States via Cuba. During the 1950's, Marseilles, in
Southern France, became a major city for the heroin labs and the
Corsican syndicate began to actively cooperate with the Mafia in the
heroin trade. Those became popularly known as the French Connection.
In 1948, Captain White visited Luciano and his narcotics associate
Nick Gentile in Europe. Gentile was a former American gangster who
had worked for the Allied Military Government in Sicily. By this
time, the CIA was already subsidizing Corsican and Italian gangsters
to oust Communist unions from the Port of Marseilles. American
strategic planners saw Italy and southern France as extremely
important for their Naval bases as a counterbalance to the growing
naval forces of the Soviet Union. CIO/AFL organizer Irving Brown
testified that by the time the CIA subsidies were terminated in 1953,
U.S. support was no longer needed because the profits from the heroin
traffic was sufficient to sustain operations.
When Luciano was originally jailed, the U.S. felt it had eliminated
the world's most effective underworld leader and the activities of
the Mafia were seriously damaged. Mussolini had been waging a war
since 1924 to rid the world of the Sicilian Mafia. Thousands of Mafia
members were convicted of crimes and forced to leave the cities and
hide out in the mountains.
Mussolini's reign of terror had virtually eradicated the
international drug syndicates. Combined with the shipping
surveillance during the war years, heroin trafficking had become
almost nil. Drug use in the United States, before Luciano's release
from prison, was on the verge of being entirely wiped out.
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Part Four in a Series
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
The U.S. government has conducted three types of mind-control
experiments:
Real life experiences, such as those used on Little Augie and the LSD
experiments in the safehouses of San Francisco and Greenwich Village.
Experiments on prisoners, such as in the California Medical Facility
at Vacaville.
Experiments conducted in both mental hospitals and the Veterans
Administration hospitals.
Such experimentation requires money, and the United States government
has funnelled funds for drug experiments through different agencies,
both overtly and covertly.
One of the funding agencies to contribute to the experimentation is
the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a unit of the
U.S. Justice Department and one of President Richard Nixon's favorite
pet agencies. The Nixon Administration was, at one time, putting
together a program for detaining youngsters who showed a tendency
toward violence in "concentration" camps. According to the Washington
Post, the plan was authored by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Health,
Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch was told by John
Erlichman, Chief of Staff for the Nixon White House, to implement the
program. He proposed the screening of children of six years of age
for tendencies toward criminality. Those who failed these tests were
to be destined to be sent to the camps. The program was never
implemented.
LEAA came into existence in 1968 with a huge budget to assist various
U.S. law enforcement agencies. Its effectiveness, however, was not
considered too great. After spending $6 billion, the F.B.I. reports
general crime rose 31 percent and violent crime rose 50 percent. But
little accountability was required of LEAA on how it spent its funds.
LEAA's role in the behavior modification research began at a meeting
held in 1970 in Colorado Springs. Attending that meeting were Richard
Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, John Erlichman, H.R. Haldemann
and other White House staffers. They met with Dr. Bertram Brown,
director fo the National Institute of Mental Health, and forged a
close collaboration between LEAA and the Institute. LEAA was a
product of the Justice Department and the Institute was a product of
HEW.
LEAA funded 350 projects involving medical procedures, behavior
modification and drugs for delinquency control. Money from the
Criminal Justice System was being used to fund mental health projects
and vice versa. Eventually, the leadership responsibility and control
of the Institute began to deteriorate and their scientists began to
answer to LEAA alone.
The National Institute of Mental Health went on to become one of the
greatest supporters of behavior modification research. Throughout the
1960's, court calenders became blighted with lawsuits on the part
of "human guinea pigs" who had been experimented upon in prisons and
mental institutions. It was these lawsuits which triggered the Senate
Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights investigation, headed by
Senator Sam Erwin. The subcommittee's harrowing report was virtually
ignored by the news media.
Thirteen behavior modification programs were conducted by the
Department of Defense. The Department of Labor had also conducted
several experiments, as well as the National Science Foundation. The
Veterans' Administration was also deeply involved in behavior
modification and mind control. Each of these agencies, including
LEAA, and the Institute, were named in secret CIA documents as those
who provided research cover for the MK-ULTRA program.
Eventually, LEAA was using much of its budget to fund experiments,
including aversive techniques and psychosurgery, which involved, in
some cases, irreversible brain surgery on normal brain tissue for the
purpose of changing or controlling behavior and/or emotions.
Senator Erwin questioned the head of LEAA concerning ethical
standards of the behavior modification projects which LEAA had been
funding. Erwin was extremely dubious about the idea of the government
spending money on this kind of project without strict guidelines and
reasonable research supervision in order to protect the human
subjects. After Senator Erwin's denunciation of the funding polices,
LEAA announced that it would no longer fund medical research into
behavior modification and psychosurgery. Despite the pledge by LEAA's
director, Donald E. Santarelli, LEAA ended up funding 537 research
projects dealing with behavior modification. There is strong evidence
to indicate psychosurgery was still being used in prisons in the
1980's. Immediately after the funding announcement by LEAA, there
were 50 psychosurgical operations at Atmore State Prison in Alabama.
The inmates became virtual zombies. The operations, according to Dr.
Swan of Fisk University, were done on black prisoners who were
considered politically active.
The Veterans' Administration openly admitted that psychosurgery was a
standard procedure for treatment and not used just in experiments.
The VA Hospitals in Durham, Long Beach, New York, Syracuse and
Minneapolis were known to employ these products on a regular basis.
VA clients could typically be subject to these behavior alteration
procedures against their will. The Erwin subcommittee concluded that
the rights of VA clients had been violated.
LEAA also subsidized the research and development of gadgets and
techniques useful to behavior modification. Much of the technology,
whose perfection LEAA funded, had originally been developed and made
operational for use in the Vietnam War. Companies like Bangor Punta
Corporation and Walter Kidde and Co., through its subsidiary Globe
Security System, adapted these devices to domestic use in the U.S.
ITT was another company that domesticated the warfare technology for
potential use on U.S. citizens. Rand Corporation executive Paul Baran
warned that the influx back to the United State of the Vietnam War
surveillance gadgets alone, not to mention the behavior modification
hardware, could bring about "the most effective, oppressive police
state ever created".
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Fifth in a Series
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
One of the fascinating aspects of the scandals that plague the U.S.
Government is the fact that so often the same names appear from
scandal to scandal. From the origins of Ronald Reagan's political
career, as Governor of California, Dr. Earl Brian and Edward Meese
played key advisory roles.
Dr. Brian's name has been linked to the October Surprise and is a
central figure in the government's theft of PROMIS soft ware from
INSLAW. Brian's role touches from the Cabazon Indian scandals to
United Press International. He is one of those low-profile key
figures.
And, alas, his name appears again in the nation's behavior
modification and mind control experiments. Dr. Brian was Reagan's
Secretary of Health when Reagan was Governor. Dr. Brian was an
advocate of state subsidies for a research center for the study of
violent behavior. The center was to begin operations by mid-1975, and
its research was intended to shed light on why people murder or rape,
or hijack aircraft. The center was to be operated by the University
of California at Los Angeles, and its primary purpose, ac cording to
Dr. Brian, was to unify scattered studies on anti-social violence and
possibly even touch on socially tolerated violence, such as football
or war. Dr. Brian sought $1.3 million for the center.
It certainly was possible that prison inmates might be used as
volunteer subjects at the center to discover the unknowns which
triggered their violent behavior. Dr. Brian's quest for the center
came at the same time Governor Reagan concluded his plans to phase
the state of California out of the mental hospital business by 1982.
Reagan's plan is echoed by Governor Pete Wilson today, to place the
responsibility of rehabilitating young offenders squarely on the
shoulders of local communities.
But as the proposal became known more publicly, a swell of
controversy surrounded it. It ended in a fiasco. The inspiration for
the violence center came from three doctors in 1967, five years
before Dr. Brian and Governor Reagan unveiled their plans. Amidst
urban rioting and civil protest, Doctors Sweet, Mark and Ervin of
Harvard put forward the thesis that individuals who engage in civil
disobedience possess defective or damaged brain cells. If this
conclusion were applied to the American Revolution or the Women's
Rights Movement, a good portion of American society would be labeled
as having brain damage.
In a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, they
stated: "That poverty, unemployment, slum housing, and inadequate
education underlie the nation's urban riots is well known, but the
obviousness of these causes may have blinded us to the more subtle
role of other possible factors, including brain dysfunction in the
rioters who engaged in arson, sniping and physical assault.
"There is evidence from several sources that brain dysfunction
related to a focal lesion plays a significant role in the violent and
assaultive behavior of thoroughly studied patients. Individuals with
electroencephalographic abnormalities in the temporal region have
been found to have a much greater frequency of behavioral
abnormalities (such as poor impulse control, assaultiveness, and
psychosis) than is present in people with a normal brain wave
pattern."
Soon after the publication in the Journal, Dr. Ervin and Dr. Mark
published their book Violence and the Brain, which included the claim
that there were as many as 10 million individuals in the United
States "who suffer from obvious brain disease". They argued that the
data of their book provided a strong reason for starting a program of
mass screening of Americans.
"Our greatest danger no longer comes from famine or communicable
disease. Our greatest danger lies in ourselves and in our fellow
humans...we need to develop an 'early warning test' of limbic brain
function to detect those humans who have a low threshold for
impulsive violence...Violence is a public health problem, and the
major thrust of any program dealing with violence must be toward its
prevention," they wrote.
The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funded the doctors
$108,000 and the National Institute of Mental Health kicked in
another $500,000, under pressure from Congress. They believed that
psychosurgery would inevitably be performed in connection with the
program, and that, since it irreversibly impaired people's emotional
and intellectual capacities, it could be used as an instrument of
repression and social control.
The doctors wanted screening centers established throughout the
nation. In California, the publicity associated with the doctors'
report, aided in the development of The Center for the study and
Reduction of Violence. Both the state and LEAA provided the funding.
The center was to serve as a model for future facilities to be set up
throughout the United States.
The Director of the Neurophyschiatric Institute and chairman of the
Department of Psychiatry at UCLA, Dr. Louis Jolyon West was selected
to run the center. Dr. West is alleged to have been a contract agent
for the CIA, who, as part of a network of doctors and scientists,
gathered intelligence on hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, for the
super-secret MK-ULTRA program. Like Captain White (see part three of
the series), West conducted LSD experiments for the CIA on unwitting
citizens in the safehouses of San Francisco. He achieved notoriety
for his injection of a massive dose of LSD into an elephant at the
Oklahoma Zoo, the elephant died when West tried to revive it by
administering a combination of drugs.
Dr. West was further known as the psychiatrist who was called upon to
examine Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin. It was on the basis
of West's diagnosis that Ruby was compelled to be treated for mental
disorders and put on happy pills. The West examination was ordered
after Ruby began to say that he was part of a right-wing conspiracy
to kill President John Kennedy. Two years after the commencement of
treatment for mental disorder, Ruby died of cancer in prison.
After January 11, 1973, when Governor Reagan announced plans for the
Violence Center, West wrote a letter to the then Director of Health
for California, J. M. Stubblebine.
"Dear Stub:
"I am in possession of confidential in formation that the Army is
prepared to turn over Nike missile bases to state and local agencies
for non-military purposes. They may look with special favor on health-
related applications.
"Such a Nike missile base is located in the Santa Monica Mountains,
within a half-hour's drive of the Neuropsychiatric Institute. It is
accessible, but relatively remote. The site is securely fenced, and
includes various buildings and improvements, making it suitable for
prompt occupancy.
"If this site were made available to the Neurophyschiatric Institute
as a research facility, perhaps initially as an adjunct to the new
Center for the Prevention of Violence, we could put it to very good
use. Comparative studies could be carried out there, in an isolated
but convenient location, of experimental or model programs for the
alteration of undesirable behavior.
"Such programs might include control of drug or alcohol abuse,
modification of chronic anti-social or impulsive aggressiveness, etc.
The site could also accommodate conferences or retreats for
instruction of selected groups of mental-health related professionals
and of others (e.g., law enforcement personnel, parole officers,
special educators) for whom both demonstration and participation
would be effective modes of instruction.
"My understanding is that a direct request by the Governor, or other
appropriate officers of the State, to the Secretary of Defense (or,
of course, the President), could be most likely to produce prompt
results."
Some of the planned areas of study for the Center included:
Studies of violent individuals.
Experiments on prisoners from Vacaville and Atascadero, and
hyperkinetic children.
Experiments with violence-producing and violent inhibiting drugs.
Hormonal aspects of passivity and aggressiveness in boys.
Studies to discover and compare norms of violence among various
ethnic groups.
Studies of pre-delinquent children.
It would also encourage law enforcement to keep computer files on pre-
delinquent children, which would make possible the treatment of
children before they became delinquents.
The purpose of the Violence Center was not just research. The staff
was to include sociologists, lawyers, police officers, clergymen and
probation officers. With the backing of Governor Reagan and Dr.
Brian, West had secured guarantees of prisoner volunteers from
several California correctional institutions, including Vacaville.
Vacaville and Atascadero were chosen as the primary sources for the
human guinea pigs. These institutions had established a reputation,
by that time, of committing some of the worst atrocities in West
Coast history. Some of the experimentations differed little from what
the Nazis did in the death camps.
(NEXT: What happened to the Center?)
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Sixth in a Series
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
Dr. Earl Brian, Governor Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Health, was
adamant about his support for mind control centers in California. He
felt the behavior modification plan of the Violence Control Centers
was important in the prevention of crime.
The Violence Control Center was actually the brain child of William
Herrmann as part of a pacification plan for California. A counter
insurgency expert for Systems Development Corporation and an advisor
to Governor Reagan, Herrmann worked with the Stand Research
Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Hoover Center on Violence.
Herrman was also a CIA agent who is now serving an eight year prison
sentence for his role in a CIA counterfeiting operation. He was also
directly linked with the Iran-Contra affair according to government
records and Herrmann's own testimony.
In 1970, Herrmann worked with Colston Westbrook as his CIA control
officer when Westbrook formed and implemented the Black Cultural
Association at the Vacaville Medical Facility, a facility which in
July experienced the death of three inmates who were forcibly
subjected to behavior modification drugs. The Black Cultural
Association was ostensibly an education program designed to instill
black pride identity in prisons, the Association was really a cover
for an experimental behavior modification pilot project designed to
test the feasibility of programming unstable prisoners to become more
manageable.
Westbrook worked for the CIA in Vietnam as a psychological warfare
expert, and as an advisor to the Korean equivalent of the CIA and for
the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. Between 1966 and 1969, he was an
advisor to the Vietnamese Police Special Branch under the cover of
working as an employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers.
His "firm" contracted the building of the interrogation/torture
centers in every province of South Vietnam as part of the CIA's
Phoenix Program. The program was centered around behavior
modification experiments to learn how to extract information from
prisoners of war, a direct violation of the Geneva Accords.
Westbrook's most prominent client at Vacaville was Donald DeFreeze,
who be tween 1967 and 1969, had worked for the Los Angeles Police
Department's Public Disorder Intelligence unit and later became the
leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Many authorities now
believe that the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville was the
seedling of the SLA. Westbrook even designed the SLA logo, the cobra
with seven heads, and gave De Freeze his African name of Cinque. The
SLA was responsible for the assassination of Marcus Foster,
superintendent of School in Oakland and the kidnapping of Patty
Hearst.
As a counterinsurgency consultant for Systems Development
Corporation, a security firm, Herrmann told the Los Angeles Times
that a good computer intelligence system "would separate out the
activist bent on destroying the system" and then develop a master
plan "to win the hearts and minds of the people". The San Francisco-
based Bay Guardian, recently identified Herrmann as an international
arms dealer working with Iran in 1980, and possibly involved in the
October Surprise. Herrmann is in an English prison for
counterfeiting. He allegedly met with Iranian officials to ascertain
whether the Iranians would trade arms for hostages held in Lebanon.
The London Sunday Telegraph confirmed Herrmann's CIA connections,
tracing them from 1976 to 1986. He also worked for the FBI. This
information was revealed in his London trial.
In the 1970's, Dr. Brian and Herrmann worked together under Governor
Reagan on the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, and
then, a decade later, again worked under Reagan. Both men have been
identified as working for Reagan with the Iranians.
The Violence Center, however, died an agonizing death. Despite the
Ervin Senate Committee investigation and chastation of mind control,
the experiments continued. But when the Watergate scandal broke in
the early 1970's, Washington felt it was too politically risky to
continue to push for mind control centers.
Top doctors began to withdraw from the proposal because they felt
that there were not enough safeguards. Even the Law Enforcement
Assistance Agency, which funded the program, backed out, stating, the
proposal showed "little evidence of established research ability of
the kind of level necessary for a study of this cope".
Eventually it became known that control of the Violence Center was
not going to rest with the University of California, but instead with
the Department of Corrections and other law enforcement officials.
This information was released publicly by the Committee Opposed to
Psychiatric Abuse of Prisoners. The disclosure of the letter resulted
in the main backers of the program bowing out and the eventual demise
of the center.
Dr. Brian's final public statement on the matter was that the
decision to cut off funding represented "a callous disregard for
public safety". Though the Center was not built, the mind control
experiments continue to this day.
(NEXT: What these torturous drugs do.)
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Seventh in a Series
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
The Central Intelligence Agency held two major interests in use of
L.S.D. to alter normal behavior patterns. The first interest centered
around obtaining information from prisoners of war and enemy agents,
in contravention of the Geneva Accords. The second was to deter the
effectiveness of drugs used against the enemy on the battlefield.
The MK-ULTRA program was originally run by a small number of people
within the CIA known as the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Another
CIA department, the Office of Security, also began its own testing
program. Friction arose and then infighting broke out when the Office
of Security commenced to spy on TSS people after it was learned that
LSD was being tested on unwitting Americans.
Not only did the two branches disagree over the issue of testing the
drug on the unwitting, they also disagreed over the issue of how the
drug was actually to be used by the CIA. The office of Security
envisioned the drug as an interrogation weapon. But the TSS group
thought the drug could be used to help destabilize another country,
it could be slipped into the food or beverage of a public official in
order to make him behave foolishly or oddly in public. One CIA
document reveals that L.S.D. could be administered right before an
official was to make a public speech.
Realizing that gaining information about the drug in real life
situations was crucial to exploiting the drug to its fullest, TSS
started conducting experiments on its own people. There was an
extensive amount of self-experimentation. The Office of Security felt
the TSS group was playing with fire, especially when it was learned
that TSS was prepared to spike an annual office Christmas party punch
with LSD, the Christmas party of the CIA. L.S.D. could produce
serious insanity for periods of eight to 18 hours and possibly
longer.
One of the "victims" of the punch was agent Frank Olson. Having never
had drugs before, L.S.D. took its toll on Olson. He reported that,
every automobile that came by was a terrible monster with fantastic
eyes, out to get him personally. Each time a car passed he would
huddle down against a parapet, terribly frightened. Olson began to
behave erratically. The CIA made preparation to treat Olson at
Chestnut Lodge, but before they could, Olson checked into a New York
hotel and threw himself out from his tenth story room. The CIA was
ordered to cease all drug testing.
Mind control drugs and experiments were torturous to the victims. One
of three inmates who died in Vacaville Prison in July was scheduled
to appear in court in an attempt to stop forced administration of a
drug, the very drug that may have played a role in his death.
Joseph Cannata believed he was making progress and did not need
forced dosages of the drug Haldol. The Solano County Coroner's Office
said that Cannata and two other inmates died of hyperthermia,
extremely elevated body temperature. Their bodies all had at least
108 degrees temperature when they died. The psychotropic drugs they
were being forced to take will elevate body temperature.
Dr. Ewen Cameron, working at McGill University in Montreal, used a
variety of experimental techniques, including keeping subjects
unconscious for months at a time, administering huge electroshocks
and continual doses of L.S.D.
Massive lawsuits developed as a result of this testing, and many of
the subjects who suffered trauma had never agreed to participate in
the experiments. Such CIA experiments infringed upon the much-honored
Nuremberg Code concerning medical ethics. Dr. Camron was one of the
members of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
L.S.D. research was also conducted at the Addiction Research Center
of the U.S. Public Health Service in Lexington, Kentucky. This
institution was one of several used by the CIA. The National
Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. Navy funded this operation.
Vast supplies of L.S.D. and other hallucinogenic drugs were required
to keep the experiments going. Dr. Harris Isbell ran the program. He
was a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee
on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulants Drugs. Almost all of the
inmates were black. In many cases, L.S.D. dosage was increased daily
for 75 days.
Some 1500 U.S. soldiers were also victims of drug experimentation.
Some claimed they had agreed to become guinea pigs only through
pressure from their superior officers. Many claimed they suffered
from severe depression and other psychological stress.
One such soldier was Master Sergeant Jim Stanley. L.S.D. was put in
Stanley's drinking water and he freaked out. Stanley's hallucinations
continued even after he returned to his regular duties. His service
record suffered, his marriage went on the rocks and he ended up
beating his wife and children. It wasn't until 17 years later that
Stanley was informed by the military that he had been an L.S.D.
experiment. He sued the government, but the Supreme Court ruled no
soldier could sue the Army for the L.S.D. experiments. Justice
William Brennen disagreed with the Court decision. He
wrote, "Experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and
legally unacceptable."
Private James Thornwell was given L.S.D. in a military test in 1961.
For the next 23 years he lived in a mental fog, eventually drowning
in a Vallejo swimming pool in 1984. Congress had set up a $625,000
trust fund for him. Large scale L.S.D. tests on American soldiers
were conducted at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, Fort Benning,
Georgia, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and
in Europe and the Pacific. The Army conducted a series of L.S.D.
tests at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The purpose of the tests were
to ascertain how well soldiers could perform their tasks on the
battlefield while under the influence of L.S.D. At Fort McClellan,
Alabama, 200 officers in the Chemical Corps were given L.S.D. in
order to familiarize them with the drug's effects. At Edgewood
Arsenal, soldiers were given L.S.D. and then confined to sensory
deprivation chambers and later exposed to a harsh interrogation
sessions by intelligence people. In these sessions, it was discovered
that soldiers would cooperate if promised they would be allowed to
get off the L.S.D.
In Operation Derby Hat, foreign nationals accused of drug trafficking
were given L.S.D. by the Special Purpose Team, with one subject
begging to be killed in order to end his ordeal. Such experiments
were also conducted in Saigon on Viet Cong POWs. One of the most
potent drugs in the U.S. arsenal is called BZ or quinuclidinyl
benzilate. It is a long-lasting drug and brings on a litany of
psychotic experiences and almost completely isolates any person from
his environment. The main effects of BZ last up to 80 hours compared
to eight hours for L.S.D. Negative after-effects may persist for up
to six weeks.
The BZ experiments were conducted on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal for
16 years. Many of the "victims" claim that the drug permanently
affected their lives in a negative way. It so disorientated one
paratrooper that he was found taking a shower in his uniform and
smoking a cigar. BZ was eventually put in hand grenades and a 750
pound cluster bomb. Other configurations were made for mortars,
artillery and missiles. The bomb was tested in Vietnam and CIA
documents indicate it was prepared for use by the U.S. in the event
of large-scale civilian uprisings.
In Vacaville, psychosurgery has long been a policy. In one set of
cases, experimental psychosurgery was conducted on three inmates, a
black, a Chicano and a white person. This involved the procedure of
pushing electrodes deep into the brain in order to determine the
position of defective brain cells, and then shooting enough voltage
into the suspected area to kill the defective cells. One prisoner,
who appeared to be improving after surgery, was released on parole,
but ended up back in prison. The second inmate became violent and
there is no information on the third inmate.
Vacaville also administered a "terror drug" Anectine as a way
of "suppressing hazardous behavior". In small doses, Anectine serves
as a muscle relaxant; in huge does, it produces prolonged seizure of
the respiratory system and a sensation "worse than dying". The drug
goes to work within 30 to 40 seconds by paralyzing the small muscles
of the fingers, toes, and eyes, and then moves into the the
intercostal muscles and the diaphragm. The heart rate subsides to 60
beats per minute, respiratory arrest sets in and the patient remains
completely conscious throughout the ordeal, which lasts two to five
minutes. The experiments were also used at Atascadero.
Several mind altering drugs were originally developed for non-
psychoactive purposes. Some of these drugs are Phenothiazine and
Thorzine. The side effects of these drugs can be a living hell. The
impact includes the feeling of drowsiness, disorientation, shakiness,
dry mouth, blurred vision and an inability to concentrate. Drugs like
Prolixin are described by users as "sheer torture" and "becoming a
zombie".
The Veterans Administration Hospital has been shown by the General
Accounting Office to apply heavy dosages of psychotherapeutic drugs.
One patient was taking eight different drugs, three antipsychotic,
two antianxiety, one antidepressant, one sedative and one anti-
Parkinson. Three of these drugs were being given in dosages equal to
the maximum recommended. Another patient was taking seven different
drugs. One report tells of a patient who refused to take the drug. "I
told them I don't want the drug to start with, they grabbed me and
strapped me down and gave me a forced intramuscular shot of Prolixin.
They gave me Artane to counteract the Prolixin and they gave me
Sinequan, which is a kind of tranquilizer to make me calm down, which
over calmed me, so rather than letting up on the medication, they
then gave me Ritalin to pep me up."
Prolixin lasts for two weeks. One patient describes how the drug does
not calm or sedate nerves, but instead attacks from so deep inside
you, you cannot locate the source of the pain. "The drugs turn your
nerves in upon yourself. Against your will, your resistance, your
resolve, are directed at your own tissues, your own muscles,
reflexes, etc.." The patient continues, "The pain grinds into your
fiber, your vision is so blurred you cannot read. You ache with
restlessness, so that you feel you have to walk, to pace. And then as
soon as you start pacing, the opposite occurs to you, you must sit
and rest. Back and forth, up and down, you go in pain you cannot
locate. In such wretched anxiety you are overwhelmed because you
cannot get relief even in breathing."
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Eighth in a Series
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
October 15, 1991
"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our
society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who
deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.
"The individual may think that the most important reality is his own
existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks
historical perspective.
"Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of
liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control
the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by
electric stimulation of the brain." These were the remarks of Dr.
Jose Delgado as they appeared in the February 24, 1974 edition of the
Congressional Record, No. 26., Vol. 118.
Despite Dr. Delgado's outlandish statements before Congress, his work
was financed by grants from the Office of Naval Research, the Air
Force Aero-Medical Research Laboratory, and the Public Health
Foundation of Boston.
Dr. Delgado was a pioneer of the technology of Electrical Stimulation
of the Brain (ESB). The New York Times ran an article on May 17, 1965
entitled Matador With a Radio Stops Wild Bull. The story details Dr.
Delgado's experiments at Yale University School of Medicine and work
in the field at Cordova, Spain. The New York Times stated:
"Afternoon sunlight poured over the high wooden barriers into the
ring, as the brave bull bore down on the unarmed matador, a scientist
who had never faced fighting bull. But the charging animal's horn
never reached the man behind the heavy red cape. Moments before that
could happen, Dr. Delgado pressed a button on a small radio
transmitter in his hand and the bull braked to a halt. Then he
pressed another button on the transmitter, and the bull obediently
turned to the right and trotted away. The bull was obeying commands
in his brain that were being called forth by electrical stimulation
by the radio signals to certain regions in which fine wires had been
painlessly planted the day before."
According to Dr. Delgado, experiments of this type have also been
performed on humans. While giving a lecture on the Brain in 1965, Dr.
Delgado said, "Science has developed a new methodology for the study
and control of cerebral function in animals and humans."
The late L.L. Vasiliev, professor of physiology at the University of
Leningrad wrote in a paper about hypnotism: "As a control of the
subject's condition, when she was outside the laboratory in another
set of experiments, a radio set was used. The results obtained
indicate that the method of using radio signals substantially
enhances the experimental possibilities." The professor continued to
write, "I.F. Tomaschevsky (a Russian physiologist) carried out the
first experiments with this subject at a distance of one or two
rooms, and under conditions that the participant would not know or
suspect that she would be experimented with. In other cases, the
sender was not in the same house, and someone else observed the
subject's behavior. Subsequent experiments at considerable distances
were successful. One such experiment was carried out in a park at a
distance. Mental suggestions to go to sleep were complied with within
a minute."
The Russian experiments in the control of a person's mind through
hypnosis and radio waves were conducted in the 1930s, some 30 years
before Dr. Delgado's bull experiment. Dr. Vasiliev definitely
demonstrated that radio transmission can produce stimulation of the
brain. It is not a complex process. In fact, it need not be implanted
within the skull or be productive of stimulation of the brain,
itself. All that is needed to accomplish the radio control of the
brain is a twitching muscle. The subject becomes hypnotized and a
muscle stimulant is implanted. The subject, while still under
hypnosis, is commanded to respond when the muscle stimulant is
activated, in this case by radio transmission.
Lincoln Lawrence wrote a book entitled Were We Controlled? Lawrance
wrote, "If the subject is placed under hypnosis and mentally
programmed to maintain a determination eventually to perform one
specific act, perhaps to shoot someone, it is suggested thereafter,
each time a particular muscle twitches in a certain manner, which is
then demonstrated by using the transmitter, he will increase this
determination even more strongly. As the hypnotic spell is renewed
again and again, he makes it his life's purpose to carry out this act
until it is finally achieved. Thus are the two complementary aspects
of Radio-Hypnotic Intracerebral Control (RHIC) joined to reinforce
each other, and perpetuate the control, until such time as the
controlled behavior is called for. This is done by a second session
with the hypnotist giving final instructions. These might be
reinforced with radio stimulation in more frequent cycles. They could
even carry over the moments after the act to reassure calm behavior
during the escape period, or to assure that one conspirator would not
indicate that he was aware of the co-conspirator's role, or that he
was even acquainted with him."
RHIC constitutes the joining of two well known tools, the radio part
and the hypnotism part. People have found it difficult to accept that
an individual can be hypnotized to perform an act which is against
his moral principles. Some experiments have been conducted by the
U.S. Army which show that this popular perception is untrue. The
chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University, Dr.
Estabrooks, has stated, "I can hypnotize a man without his knowledge
or consent into committing treason against the United States."
Estabrooks was one of the nation's most authoritative sources in the
hypnotic field. The psychologist told officials in Washington that a
mere 200 well trained hypnotists could develop an army of mind-
controlled sixth columnists in wartime United States. He laid out a
scenario of an enemy doctor placing thousands of patients under
hypnotic mind control, and eventually programming key military
officers to follow his assignment. Through such maneuvers, he said,
the entire U.S. Army could be taken over. Large numbers of saboteurs
could also be created using hypnotism through the work of a doctor
practicing in a neighborhood or foreign born nationals with close
cultural ties with an enemy power.
Dr. Estabrooks actually conducted experiments on U.S. soldiers to
prove his point. Soldiers of low rank and little formal education
were placed under hypnotism and their memories tested. Surprisingly,
hypnotists were able to control the subjects' ability to retain
complicated verbal information. J. G. Watkins followed in Estabrooks
steps and induced soldiers of lower rank to commit acts which
conflicted not only with their moral code, but also the military code
which they had come to accept through their basic training. One of
the experiments involved placing a normal, stable army private in a
deep trance. Watkins was trying to see if he could get the private to
attack a superior officer, a cardinal sin in the military. While the
private was in a deep trance, Watkins told him that the officer
sitting across from him was an enemy soldier who was going to attempt
to kill him. In the private's mind, it was a kill or be killed
situation. The private immediately jumped up and grabbed the officer
by the throat. The experiment was repeated several times, and in one
case the man who was hypnotized and the man who was attacked were
very close friends. The results were always the same. In one
experiment, the hypnotized subject pulled out a knife and nearly
stabbed another person.
Watkins concluded that people could be induced to commit acts
contrary to their morality if their reality was distorted by the
hypnotism. Similar experiments were conducted by Watkins using WACs
exploring the possibility of making military personnel divulge
military secrets. A related experiment had to be discontinued because
a researcher, who had been one of the subjects, was exposing numerous
top-secret projects to his hypnotist, who did not have the proper
security clearance for such information. The information was divulged
before an audience of 200 military personnel.
(NEXT: School for Assassins)
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Ninth in a Series
Mind Control: a Navy school for assassins
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
Tuesday, October 22, 1991
In mans quest to control the behavior of humans, there was a great
breakthrough established by Pavlov, who devised a way to make dogs
salivate on cue. He perfected his conditioning response technique by
cutting holes in the cheeks of dogs and measured the amount they
salivated in response to different stimuli. Pavlov verified
that "quality, rate and frequency of the salivation changed depending
upon the quality, rate and frequency of the stimuli."
Though Pavlov's work falls far short of human mind control, it did
lay the groundwork for future studies in mind and behavior control of
humans. John B. Watson conducted experiments in the United States on
an 11-month-old infant. After allowing the infant to establish a
rapport with a white rat, Watson began to beat on the floor with an
iron bar every time the infant came in contact with the rat. After a
time, the infant made the association between the appearance of the
rat and the frightening sound, and began to cry every time the rat
came into view. Eventually, the infant developed a fear of any type
of small animal. Watson was the founder of the behaviorist school of
psychology.
"Give me the baby, and I'll make it climb and use its hands in
constructing buildings or stone or wood. I'll make it a thief, a
gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction
are almost endless. Even gross differences in anatomical structure
limits are far less than you may think. Make him a deaf mute, and I
will build you a Helen Keller. Men are built, not born," Watson
proclaimed. His psychology did not recognize inner feelings and
thoughts as legitimate objects of scientific study, he was only
interested in overt behavior.
Though Watson's work was the beginning of mans attempts to control
human actions, the real work was done by B.F. Skinner, the high
priest of the behaviorists movement. The key to Skinner's work was
the concept of operant conditioning, which relied on the notion of
reinforcement, all behavior which is learned is rooted in either a
positive or negative response to that action. There are two
corollaries of operant conditioning" Aversion therapy and
desensitization.
Aversion therapy uses unpleasant reinforcement to a response which is
undesirable. This can take the form of electric shock, exposing the
subject to fear producing situations, and the infliction of pain in
general. It has been used as a way of "curing" homosexuality,
alcoholism and stuttering. Desensitization involves forcing the
subject to view disturbing images over and over again until they no
longer produce any anxiety, then moving on to more extreme images,
and repeating the process over again until no anxiety is produced.
Eventually, the subject becomes immune to even the most extreme
images. This technique is typically used to treat people's phobias.
Thus, the violence shown on T.V. could be said to have the
unsystematic and unintended effect of desensitization.
Skinnerian behaviorism has been accused of attempting to deprive man
of his free will, his dignity and his autonomy. It is said to be
intolerant of uncertainty in human behavior, and refuses to recognize
the private, the ineffable, and the unpredictable. It sees the
individual merely as a medical, chemical and mechanistic entity which
has no comprehension of its real interests.
Skinner believed that people are going to be manipulated. "I just
want them to be manipulated effectively," he said. He measured his
success by the absence of resistance and counter control on the part
of the person he was manipulating. He thought that his techniques
could be perfected to the point that the subject would not even
suspect that he was being manipulated.
Dr. James V. McConnel, head of the Department of Mental Health
Research at the University of Michigan, said, "The day has come when
we can combine sensory deprivation with the use of drugs, hypnosis,
and the astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain almost
absolute control over an individual's behavior. We want to reshape
our society drastically."
A U.S. Navy psychologist, who claims that the Office of Naval
Intelligence had taken convicted murderers from military prisons,
used behavior modification techniques on them, and then relocated
them in American embassies throughout the world. Just prior to that
time, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee had censured the CIA for
its global political assassination plots, including plots against
Fidel Castro. The Navy psychologist was Lt. Commander Thomas Narut of
the U.S. Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy. The information
was divulged at an Oslo NATO conference of 120 psychologists from the
eleven nation alliance. According to Dr. Narut, the U.S. Navy was an
excellent place for a researcher to find "captive personnel" whom
they could could use as guinea pigs in experiments. The Navy provided
all the funding necessary, according to Narut.
Dr. Narut, in a question and answer session with reporters from many
nations, revealed how the Navy was secretly programming large numbers
of assassins. He said that the men he had worked with for the Navy
were being prepared for commando-type operations, as well as covert
operations in U.S. embassies worldwide. He described the men who went
through his program as "hit men and assassins" who could kill on
command.
Careful screening of the subjects was accomplished by Navy
psychologists through the military records, and those who actually
received assignments where their training could be utilized, were
drawn mainly from submarine crews, the paratroops, and many were
convicted murderers serving military prison sentences. Several men
who had been awarded medals for bravery were drafted into the
program.
The assassins were conditioned through "audio-visual
desensitization". The process involved the showing of films of people
being injured or killed in a variety of ways, starting with very mild
depictions, leading up to the more extreme forms of mayhem.
Eventually, the subjects would be able to detach their feelings even
when viewing the most horrible of films. The conditioning was most
successful when applied to "passive-aggressive" types, and most of
these ended up being able to kill without any regrets. The prime
indicator of violent tendencies was the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory. Dr. Narut knew of two Navy programming
centers, the neuropsychiatric laboratory in San Diego and the U.S.
Regional Medical Center in Italy, where he worked.
During the audio-visual desensitization programming, restraints were
used to force the subject to view the films. A device was used on the
subjects eyelids to prevent him from blinking. Typically, the
preliminary film was on an African youth being ritualistically
circumcised with a dull knife and without any anesthetic. The second
film showed a sawmill scene in which a man accidentally cut off his
fingers.
In addition to the desensitization films, the potential assassins
underwent programming to create prejudicial attitude in the men, to
think of their future enemies, especially the leaders of these
countries, as sub-human. Films and lectures were presented demeaning
the culture and habits of the people of the countries where it had
been decided they would be sent.
After his NATO lecture, Dr. Narut disappeared. He could not be
located. Within a week of so after the lecture, the Pentagon issued
an emphatic denial that the U.S. Navy had "engaged in psychological
training or other types of training of personnel as assassins." They
disavowed the programming centers in San Diego and Naples and stated
they were unable to locate Narut, but did provide confirmation that
he was a staff member of the U.S. Regional Medical Center in Naples.
Dr. Alfred Zitani, an American delegate to the Oslo conference, did
verify Narut's remarks and they were published in the Sunday Times.
Sometime later, Dr. Narut surfaced again in London and recanted his
remarks, stating that he was "talking in theoretical and not
practical terms." Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Naval headquarters in
London issued a statement indicating that Dr. Narut's remarks at the
NATO conference should be discounted because he had "personal
problems". Dr. Narut never made any further public statements about
the program.
During the NATO conference in Oslo, Dr. Narut had remarked that the
reason he was divulging the information was because he believed that
the information was coming out anyway. The doctor was referring to
the disclosure by a Congressional subcommittee which were then
appearing in the press concerning various CIA assassination plots.
However, what Dr. Narut had failed to realize at the time, was that
the Navy's assassination plots were not destined to be revealed to
the public at that time.
(To be continued.)
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Tenth in a Series
Soviets, U.S. both using mind control methods
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
November 5, 1991
There were three scientists who pioneered the work of using an
electromagnetic field to control human behavior. Their work began 25
years ago. These three were Dr. Jose Delgado, psychology professor at
Yale University; Dr. W. Ross Adey, a physiologist at the Brain
Research Institute at UCLA; and Dr. Wilder Penfield, a Canadian.
Dr. Penfield's experiments consisted of the implantation of
electrodes deep into the cortexes of epilepsy patients who were to
undergo surgery; he was able to drastically improve the memories of
these patients through electrical stimulation. Dr. Adey implanted
transmitters in the brains of cats and chimpanzees that could send
signals to a receiver regarding the electrical activity of the brain;
additional radio signals were sent back into the brains of the
animals which modified their behavior at the direction of the doctor.
Dr. Delgado was able to stop and turn a charging bull through the use
of an implanted radio receiver.
Other experiments using platinum, gold and stainless steel electrode
implants enabled researchers to induce total madness in cats, put
monkeys into a stupor, or to set human beings jerking their arms up
and down. Much of Delgado's work was financed by the CIA through
phony funding conduits masking themselves as charitable
organizations.
Following the successes of Delgado's work, the CIA set up their own
research program in the field of electromagnetic behavior
modification under the code name Sleeping Beauty. With the guidance
of Dr. Ivor Browning, a laboratory was set up in New Mexico,
specializing in working with the hypothalamus or "sweet spot" of the
brain. Here it was found that stimulating this area could produce
intense euphoria.
Dr. Browning was able to wire a radio receiver-amplifier into
the "sweet spot" of a donkey which picked up a five-micro-amp signal,
such that he could create intense happiness in the animal. Using the
jolts of happiness as an "electronic carrot", Browning was able to
send the donkey up a 2000 foot New Mexico mountain and back to its
point of origin. When the donkey was proceeding up the path toward
its destination, it was rewarded; when it deviated, the signal
stopped. "You've never seen a donkey so eager to keep on course in
your whole life," Dr. Browning exclaimed.
The CIA utilized the electronic carrot technique in getting trained
pigeons to fly miniature microphone-transmitters to the ledge of a
KGB safe house where the devices monitored conversations for months.
There was a move within the CIA to conduct further experiments on
humans, foreigners and prisoners, but officially the White House
vetoed the idea as being unethical.
In May 1989, it was learned by the CIA that the KGB was subjecting
people undergoing interrogation to electromagnetic fields, which
produced a panic reaction, thereby bringing them closer to breaking
down under questioning. The subjects were not told that they were
being placed under the influence of these beams. A few years earlier,
Dr. Ross Adey released photographs and a fact sheet concerning what
he called the Russian Lida machine. This consisted of a small
transmitter emitting 10-hertz waves which makes the subject
susceptibile to hypnotic suggestion. The device utilized the outmoded
vacuum-tube design. American POWs in Korea have indicated that
similar devices had been used for interrogation purposes in POW
camps.
The general, long term goal of the CIA was to find out whether or not
mind control could be achieved through the use of a precise,
external, electromagnetic beam. The electrical activity of the brain
operates within the range of 100 hertz frequency. This spectrum is
called ELF or Extremely Low Frequency range. ELF waves carry very
little ionizing radiation and very low heat, and therefore do not
manifest gross, observable physical effects on living organisms.
Published Soviet experiments with ELFs reveal that there was a marked
increase in psychiatric and central nervous system disorders and
symptoms of stress for sailors working close to ELF generators.
In the mid-1970s, American interest in combining EMR techniques with
hypnosis was very prominent. Plans were on file to develop these
techniques through experiments on human volunteers. The spoken word
of the hypnotist could be conveyed by modulated electromagnetic
energy directly into the subconscious parts of the human brain
without employing any technical devices for receiving or transacting
the messages and without the person exposed to such influence having
a chance to control the information input consciously.
In California, it was discovered by Dr. Adey that animal brain waves
could be altered directly by ELF fields. It was found that monkey
brains would fall in phase with ELF waves. These waves could easily
pass through the skull, which normally protected the central nervous
system from outside influence.
In San Leandro, Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher, director of Technic Research
Laboratory, has been doing ELF/brain research with human subjects for
some time. One of the frequencies produces nausea for more than an
hour. Another frequency, she calls it the marijuana frequency, gets
people laughing. "Give me the money and three months,"she says, "and
I'll be able to affect the behavior of eighty percent of the people
in this town without their knowing it."
In the past, the Soviet Union has invested large sums of time and
money investigating microwaves. In 1952, while the Cold War was
showing no signs of thawing, there was a secret meeting at the Sandia
Corporation in New Mexico between U.S. and Soviet scientists
involving the exchange of information regarding the biological
hazards and safety levels of EMR. The Soviets possessed the greater
preponderance of information, and the American scientists were
unwilling to take it seriously. In subsequent meetings, the Soviet
scientists continued to stress the seriousness of the risks, while
American scientists downplayed their importance. Shortly after the
last Sandia meeting, the Soviets began directing a microwave beam at
the U.S. embassy in Moscow, using embassy workers as guinea pigs for
low-level EMR experiments. Washington, D.C. was oddly quiescent,
regarding the Moscow embassy bombardment. Discovered in 1962, the
Moscow signal was investigated by the CIA, which hired a consultant,
Milton Zaret, and code named the research Project Pandora. According
to Zaret, the Moscow signal was composed of several frequencies, and
was focussed precisely upon the Ambassador's office. The intensity of
the bombardment was not made public, but when the State Department
finally admitted the existence of the signal, it announced that it
was fairly low.
There was consensus among Soviet EMR researchers that a beam such as
the Moscow signal was destined to produced blurred vision and loss of
mental concentration. The Boston Globe reported that the American
ambassador had not only developed a leukemia-like blood disease, but
also suffered from bleeding eyes and chronic headaches. Under the
CIA's Project Pandora, monkeys were brought into the embassy and
exposed to the Moscow signal; they were found to have developed blood
composition anomalies and unusual chromosome counts. Embassy
personnel were found to have a 40 percent higher than average white
blood cell count. While Operation Pandora's data gathering proceeded,
embassy personnel continued working in the facility and were not
informed of the bombardment until 10 years later. Embassy employees
were eventually granted a 20 percent hardship allowance for their
service in an unhealthful post. Throughout the period of bombardment,
the CIA used the opportunity to gather data on psychological and
biological effects of the beam on American personnel.
The U.S. government began to examine the affects of the Moscow
signal. The job was turned over to the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is now developing electromagnetic
weaponry. The man in charge of the DARPA program, Dr. Jack Verona, is
so important and so secretive that he doesn't even return President
George Bush's telephone calls.
(To be continued.)
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Eleventh in a Series
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
Friday, November 8, 1991
The American public was never informed that the military had planned
to develop electromagnetic weapons until 1982, when the revelation
appeared in a technical Air Force magazine.
The magazine article stated, "....specifically generated radio-
frequency radiation (RFR) fields may pose powerful and revolutionary
anti-personnel military trends." The article indicated that that it
would be very easy to use electromagnetic fields to disrupt the human
brain because the brain, itself, was an electrically mediated organ.
Iftfurther indicated that a rapidly scanning RFR system would have a
stunning or killing capability over a large area. The system was
developable.
Navy Captain Dr. Paul E. Taylor read a paper at the Air University
Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education, at Maxwell Air
Force Base, Alabama. Dr. Taylor was responsible for the Navy's
Radiation Laboratory and had been studying radiation effects on
humans. In his paper, Dr. Taylor stated, "The ability of individuals
to function (as soldiers) could be degraded to such a point that
would be combat ineffective." The system was so sophisticated that it
employed microwaves and millimeter waves and was transportable by a
large truck.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the South Bay, are working
on the development of a "brain bomb". A bomb could be dropped in the
middle of a battlefield which would produce microwaves,
incapacitating the minds of soldiers within a circumscribed area.
Applications of microwave technology in espionage were available for
over 25 years. In a meeting in Berkeley of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science as early as 1965, Professor J. Anthony
Deutsch of New York University, provided an important segment of
research in the field of memory control. In layman terms, Professor
Deutsch indicated that the mind is a transmitter and if too much
information is received, like too many vehicles on a crowded freeway,
the brain ceases to transmit. The Professor indicated that an excess
of acetyl choline in the brain can interfere with the memory process
and control. He indicated excess amounts of acetyl choline can be
artificially produced, through both the administration of drugs or
through the use of radio waves. The process is called Electronic
Dissolution of Memory (EDOM). The memory transmission can be stopped
for as long as the radio signal continues.
As a result, the awareness of the person skips over those minutes
during which he is subjected to the radio signal. Memory is
distorted, and time-orientation is destroyed.
According to Lincoln Lawrence, author of Were We Controlled, EDOM is
now operational. "There is already in use a small EDOM
generator/transmitter which can be concealed on the body of the
person. Contact with this person, a casual handshake or even just a
touch, transmits a tiny electronic charge plus an ultra-sonic signal
tone which for a short period will disturb the time-orientation of
the person affected....it can be a potent weapon for hopelessly
confusing evidence in the investigation of a crime."
Thirty years ago, Allen Frey discovered that microwaves of 300 to
3000 megahertz could be "heard" by people, even if they were deaf, if
pulsed at a certain rate. Appearing to be originating just in back of
the head, the sound boomed, clicked, hissed or buzzed, depending upon
the frequency. Later research has shown that the perception of the
waves take place just in front of the ears. The microwaves causes
pressure waves in the brain tissue, and this phenomenon vibrates the
sound receptors in the inner ear through the bone structure. Some
microwaves are capable of directly stimulating the nerve cells of the
auditory pathways. This has been confirmed with experiments with
rats, in which the sound registers 120 decibels, which is equal to
the volume of a nearby jet during takeoff. Aside from having the
capability of causing pain and preventing auditory communication, a
more subtle effect was demonstrated at the Walter Reed Army Institute
of Research by Dr. Joseph C. Sharp. Dr. Sharp, himself, was the
subject of an experiment in which pulsed microwave audiograms, or the
microwave analog of the sound vibrations of spoken words, were
delivered to his brain in such a way that he was able to understand
the words that were spoken. Military and undercover uses of such a
device might include driving a subject crazy with inner voices in
order to discredit him, or conveying undetectable instructions to a
programmed assassin.
But the technology has been carried even a step further. It has been
demonstrated by Dr. Ross Adey that microwaves can be used to directly
bring about changes in the electrical patterns of different parts of
the brain. His experiments showed that he could achieve the same mind
control over animals as Dr. Delgado did in the bull incident. Dr.
Delgado used brain implants in his animals, Dr. Adey used microwave
devices without preconditioning. He made animals act and look like
electronic toys.
(Conclusion next week.)
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Twelfth in a Series
Mind control origins found in Nazi Germany
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
Tuesday, November 19, 1991
At the conclusion of World War Two, American investigators learned
that Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany had
been conducting mind control experiments on inmates. They
experimented with hypnosis and with the drug mescaline.
Mescaline is a quasi-synthetic extract of the peyote cactus, and is
very similar to LSD in the hallucinations which it produces. Though
they did not achieve the degree of success they had desired, the SS
interrogators in conjunction with the Dachau doctors were able to
extract the most intimate secrets from the prisoners when the inmates
were given very high doses of mescaline.
There were fatal mind control experiments conducted at Auschwitz. The
experiments there were described by one informant as "brainwashing
with chemicals". The informant said the Gestapo wasn't satisfied with
extracting information by torture. "So the next question was, why
don't we do it like the Russians, who have been able to get
confessions of guilt at their show trials?" They tried various
barbiturates and morphine derivatives. After prisoners were fed a
coffee-like substance, two of them died in the night and others died
later.
The Dachau mescaline experiments were written up in a lengthy report
issued by the U.S. Naval Technical Mission, whose job it was at the
conclusion of the war to scour all of Europe for every shred of
industrial and scientific material that had been produced by the
Third Reich. It was as a result of this report that the U.S. Navy
became interested in mescaline as an interrogation tool. The Navy
initiated Project Chatter in 1947, the same year the Central
Intelligence Agency was formed. The Chatter format included
developing methods for acquiring information from people against
their will, but without inflicting harm or pain.
At the conclusion of the war, the OSS was designated as the
investigative unit for the International Military Tribunal, which was
to become known as the Nuremberg Trials. The purpose of Nuremberg was
to try the principal Nazi leaders. Some Nazis were on trial for their
experiments, and the U.S. was using its own "truth drugs" on these
principal Nazi prisoners, namely Goring, Ribbentrop, Speer and eight
others. The Justice in charge of the tribunal had given the OSS
permission to use the drugs.
The Dachau doctors who performed the mescaline experiments also were
involved in aviation medicine. The aviation experiments at Dachau
fascinated Heinrich Himmler. Himmler followed the progress of the
tests, studied their findings and often suggested improvements. The
Germans had a keen interest in several medical problems in the field
of flying, they were interested in preventing pilots from slowly
becoming unconscious as a result of breathing the thin air of the
high altitudes and there was interest in enhancing night vision.
The main research in this area was at the Institute of Aviation in
Munich, which had excellent laboratories. The experiments in
relationship to the Institute were conducted at Dachau. Inmates had
been immersed in tubs of ice water with instruments placed in their
orifices in order to monitor their painful deaths. Dr. Hubertus
Strughold, who ran the German aviation medicine team, confirmed that
he had heard humans were used for the Dachau experiments. Hidden in a
cave in Hallein were files recording the Dachau experiments.
On May 15, 1941, Dr. Sigmund Rascher wrote a letter to Himmler
requesting permission to use the Dachau inmates for experiments on
the physiology of high altitudes. Rascher lamented the fact that no
such experiments have been done using human subjects. "The
experiments are very dangerous and we cannot attract volunteers," he
told Himmler. His request was approved.
Dachau was filled with Communists and Social Democrats, Jews,
Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, clergymen, homosexuals, and people
critical of the Nazi government. Upon entering Dachau, prisoners lost
all legal status, their hair was shaved off, all their possessions
confiscated, they were poorly fed, and they were used as slaves for
both the corporations and the government. The SS guards were brutal
and sadistic. The idea to test subjects at Dachau was really the
brain child of Erich Hippke, chief surgeon of the Luftwaffe.
Between March and August of 1942 extensive experiments were conducted
at Dachau regarding the limits of human endurance at high altitudes.
These experiments were conducted for the benefit of the German Air
Force. The experiments took place in a low-pressure chamber in which
altitudes of up to 68,000 feet could be simulated. The subjects were
placed in the chamber and the altitude was raised, many inmates died
as a result. The survivors often suffered serious injury. One witness
at the Nuremberg trails, Anton Pacholegg, who was sent to Dachau in
1942, gave an eyewitness account of the typical pressure test:
"The Luftwaffe delivered a cabinet constructed of wood and metal. It
was possible in the cabinet to either decrease or increase the air
pressure. You could observe through a little window the reaction of
the subject inside the chamber. The purpose of these experiments was
to test human energy and the subject's capacity...to take large
amounts of pure oxygen, and then to test his reaction to a gradual
decrease in oxygen. I have personally seen through the observation
window of the chamber when a prisoner inside would stand a vacuum
until his lungs ruptured. Some experiments gave men such pressure in
their heads that they would go mad and pull out their hair in an
effort to relieve the pressure. They would tear their heads and face
with their fingers and nails in an attempt to maim themselves in
their madness. They would beat the walls with their hands and head
and scream in an effort to relieve pressure in their eardrums. These
cases of extreme vacuums generally ended in the death of the
subjects." The former prisoner also testified, "An extreme experiment
was so certain to result in death that in many instances the chamber
was used for routine execution purposes rather than an experiment." A
minimum 200 prisoners were known to have died in these experiments.
The doctors directly involved with the research held very high
positions: Karl Brandt was Hitler's personal doctor; Oskar Schroeder
was the Chief of the Medical Services of the Luftwaffe; Karl Gebhardt
was Chief Surgeon on the Staff of the Reich Physician SS and Police
and German Red Cross President; Joachim Mrugowsky was Chief of the
Hygienic Institute of the Waffen SS; Helmut Poppendick was a senior
colonel in the SS and Chief of the Personal Staff of the Reich
Physicians SS and Police; Siegfried Ruff was Director of the
Department of Aviation Medicine.
The first human guinea pig was a 37 year old Jew in good health.
Himmler invited 40 top Luftwaffe officers to view a movie of an
inmate dying in the pressure chamber. After the pressure chamber
tests, the cold treatment experiments began. The experiments
consisted of immersing inmates in freezing water while their vital
signs were monitored. The goal was to discover the cause of death.
Heart failure was the answer. An inmate described the procedures:
"The basins were filled with water and ice was added until the water
measured 37.4 F and the experimental subjects were either dressed in
a flying suit or were placed in the water naked. The temperature was
measured rectally and through the stomach. The lowering of the body
temperature to 32 degrees was terrible for experimental subjects. At
32 degrees the subject lost consciousness. They were frozen to 25
degrees. The worst experiment was performed on two Russian officer
POWs. They were placed in the basin naked. Hour after hour passed,
and while usually after a short time, 60 minutes, freezing had set
in, these two Russians were still conscious after two hours. After
the third hour one Russian told the other, 'Comrade, tell that
officer to shoot us.' The other replied, 'Don't expect any mercy from
this Fascist dog.' Then they shook hands and said goodbye. The
experiment lasted at least five hours until death occurred.
Dry freezing experiments were also carried out a Dachau. One subject
was put outdoors on a stretcher at night when it was extremely cold.
While covered with a linen sheet, a bucket of cold water was poured
over him every hour. He was kept outdoors undersub-freezing
conditions. In subsequent experiments, subjects were simply left
outside naked in a court under freezing conditions for hours. Himmler
gave permission to move the experiments to Auschwitz, because it was
more private and because the subjects of the experiment would howl
all night as they froze. The physical pain of freezing was terrible.
The subjects died by inches, heartbeat became totally irregular,
breathing difficulties and lung endema resulted, hands and feet
became frozen white."
As the Germans began to lose the war, the aviation doctors began too
keep their names from appearing in Himmler's files for fear of future
recriminations.
(To be concluded Friday.)
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Last of a Thirteen Part Series
America made it to the moon with Dachau research
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright, Napa Sentinel, 1991
Friday, November 22, 1991
The Nazi doctors who experimented on the inmates of prison camps
during World War Two were tried for murder at the Nuremberg Tribunal.
The accused were educated, trained physicians, they did not kill in
anger or in malice, they were creating a science of death.
Ironically, in 1933, the Nazi's passed a law for the protection of
animals. The law cited the prevention of cruelty and indifference to
animals as one of the highest moral values of a people, animal
experimentation was unthinkable, but human experimentations were
acceptable. The victims of the crime of these doctors numbered into
the thousands.
In 1953, while the Central Intelligence Agency was still conducting
mind control and behavior modification on unwitting humans in this
country, the United States signed the Nuremberg Code, a code born out
of the ashes of war and human suffering. The document was a solemn
promise never to tolerate such human atrocities again. The Code
maintains three fundamental principles:
The subjects of any experimentation must be volunteers who thoroughly
understand the purpose and the dangers of the experiments. They must
be free to give consent and the consent must be without pressure and
they must be free to quit the experiments at any time.
The experiments must be likely to yield knowledge which is valuable
to everyone. The knowledge must be such that it could not be gained
in any other way.
The experiments must be conducted by only the most competent doctors,
and they must exercise extreme care.
The Nazi aviation experiments met none of these conditions. Most
inmates at Dachau knew that the experiments in the pressure chamber
were fatal. From the very beginning, control of the experiments was
largely in the hands of the SS, which was later judged to be a
criminal organization by the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Despite our lessons from Nuremberg and the death camps, the CIA, U.S.
Navy and the U.S. Army Chemical Corps targeted specific groups of
people for experimentation who were not able to resist, prisoners,
mental patients, foreigners, ethnic minorities, sex deviants, the
terminally ill, children and U.S. military personnel and prisoners of
war. They violated the Nuremberg Code for conducting and subsidizing
experiments on unwitting citizens. The CIA began its mind control
projects in 1953, the very year that the U.S. signed the Nuremberg
Code and pledged with the international community of nations to
respect basic human rights and to prohibit experimentation on captive
populations without full and free consent.
Dr. Cameron, a CIA operative, was one of the worst offenders against
the Code, yet he was a member of the Nuremberg Tribunal, with full
knowledge of its testimony. In 1973, a three judge court in Michigan
ruled, "...experimental psychosurgery, which is irreversible and
intrusive, often leads to the blunting of emotions, the deadening of
memory, the reduction of affect, and limits the ability to generate
new ideas. Its potential for injury to the creativity of the
individual is great and can infringe on the right of the individual
to be free from interference with his mental process.
"The state's interest in performing psychosurgery and the legal
ability of the involuntarily detained mental patient to give consent,
must bow to the First Amendment, which protects the generation and
free flow of ideas from unwarranted interference with one's mental
processes." Citing the Nuremberg Code, the court found that "the very
nature of the subject's incarceration diminishes the capacity to
consent to psychosurgery." In 1973, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
enacted regulations which would require informed written consent from
voluntary patients before electroshock treatment could be performed.
Senator Sam Ervin's Committee lashed out bitterly at the mind control
and behavior modification experiments and ordered them discontinued,
they were not. But the New England Journal of Medicine states, that
the consent provisions are "no more than an elaborate ritual." They
called it "a device that when the subject is uneducated and
uncomprehending, confers no more than a semblance of propriety on
human experimentation."
The Nuremberg Tribunal brought to light that some of the most
respected figures in the medical profession were involved in the vast
crime network of the SS. Only 23 persons were charged with criminal
activity in this area, despite the fact that hundreds of medical
personnel were involved. The defendants were charged with crimes
against humanity. They were found guilty of planning and executing
experiments on humans without their consent, in a cruel and brutal
manner which involved severe torture, deliberate murder and with the
full knowledge of the gravity of their deeds. Only seven of the
defendants were sentenced to death and hanged, others received life
sentences. Five who were involved in the experiments were not tried.
Ernest Grawitz committed suicide, Carl Clauberg was tried in the
Soviet Union, Josef Mengele escaped to South America and was later
captured by Israeli agents, Horst Schumann disappeared and Siegmund
Rascher was executed by Himmler.
There were 200 German medical doctors conducting these medical
experiments. Most of these doctors were friends of the United States
before the war, and despite their inhuman experiments, the U.S.
attempted to rebuild a relationship with them after the war. The
knowledge the Germans had accumulated at the expense of human life
and suffering, was considered a "booty of war", by the Americans and
the Russians.The Americans tracked down Dr. Strughold, the aviation
doctor who was in charge of the Dachau experiments. With full
knowledge that the experiments were conducted on captive humans, the
U.S. recruited the doctors to work for them. General Dwight D.
Eisenhower gave his personal approval to exploit the work and
research of the Nazi's in the death camps.
Within weeks of Eisenhower's order, many of these notorious doctors
were working for the U.S. Army at Heidelberg. Army teams scoured
Europe for scientific experimental apparatus such as pressure
chambers, compressors, G-force machines, giant centrifuges, and
electron microscopes. These doctors were wined and dined by the U.S.
Army while most of Germany's post-war citizens virtually starved.
The German doctors were brought to the U.S. and went to work for
Project Paperclip. All these doctors had been insulated against war
crime charges. The Nuremberg prosecutors were shocked that U.S.
authorities were using the German doctors despite their criminal
past.
Under the leadership of Strughold, 34 scientists accepted contracts
from Project Paperclip, and were moved to Randolph Air Force Base at
San Antonio, Texas. The authorization to hire these Nazi scientists
came directly for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The top military brass
stated that they wished to exploit these rare minds. Project
Paperclip, ironically, would use Nazi doctors to develop methods of
interrogating German prisoners of war.
As hostilities began to build after the war between the Americans and
the Russians, the U.S. imported as many as 1000 former Nazi
scientists.
In 1969, Americans landed on the moon, and two groups of scientist in
the control center shared the credit, the rocket team from
Peenemunde, Germany, under the leadership of Werner von Braun, these
men had perfected the V-2s which were built in the Nordhausen caves
where 20,000 slave laborers from prison camp Dora had been worked to
death. The second group were the space doctors, lead by 71-year-old
Dr. Hubertus Strughold, whose work was pioneered in Experimental
Block No. 5 of the Dachau concentration camp and the torture and
death of hundreds of inmates. The torture chambers that was used to
slowly kill the prisoners of the Nazi's were the test beds for the
apparatus that protected Neil Armstrong from harm, from lack of
oxygen, and pressure, when he walked on the moon.
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