[THS] Albarelli & Kaye: Cries From the Past: Torture's Ugly Echoes

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.truthout.org/cries-from-past-tortures-ugly-echoes59738

Cries From the Past: Torture's Ugly Echoes

Sunday 23 May 2010

by: H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Report

photo
(Illustration: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t)

In a superb op-ed, written by Leonard S. Rubenstein and Stephen N. Xenakis,
published recently in the New York Times (Doctors Without Morals, March 1, 2010, p.
A23), the issue of holding physicians and psychologists accountable for their ethical
breaches in participating in the conduct of torture is expertly raised, along with a
well-needed call for investigations into such violations and violators. Rubenstein and
Xenakis wrote: "[Despite overwhelming evidence] no agency - not the Pentagon, the
CIA, state licensing boards or professional medical societies - has initiated any action
to investigate, much less discipline, these individuals. They have ignored the gross
and appalling violations by medical personnel. This is an unconscionable disservice to
the thousands of ethical doctors and psychologists in the country's service. It is not
too late to begin investigations. They should start now."

Rubenstein and Xenakis are absolutely correct in their call for action now, as they are
in their accounting of what has gone on historically the past ten years with torture at
Guantanamo and elsewhere. However, their op-ed says nothing about the decades
preceding the terrible events of 9-11. An examination of these well-hidden, past
torture activities might serve well in shedding light on the causes for reluctance and
inaction in holding torturers and their professional cohorts responsible.

Operation Dormouse

Contemporary torture's earliest, deepest and most influential roots are found in the
CIA's Artichoke Project. Indeed, it is Project Artichoke that encapsulates the CIA's real
traveling road show of horrors and atrocities, not MK/ULTRA which, although
responsible for its own acts of mindless cruelty, pales in comparison.

That MK/ULTRA received, and continues to receive, the lion's share of the media's
attention and public outrage over CIA mind control programs was a deliberately
planned outcome on the part of the Agency. This outcome was the central objective
of a never before revealed covert operation launched in 1975 and informally code-
named Dormouse.

Dormouse, operated out of the CIA's Security Research branch, had its genesis in the
1975 Rockefeller Commission report and in the subsequent Congressional hearings
into CIA illegal activities chaired by Senators Frank Church and Teddy Kennedy.
Following the initial revelation of Frank Olson's alleged "suicide" by the Rockefeller
Commission, a number of high-level meetings occurred between President Gerald
Ford's White House and CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston.

Houston, who had served the Agency as its doyen general counsel for over 25 years,
secretly huddled on at least two occasions in June 1975 with Ford's chief of staff,
Donald Rumsfeld, and his chief assistant, Richard Cheney. Houston impressed upon
both men that any prolonged and intense media scrutiny of Project Artichoke would
lead to opening a Pandora's box of legal, institutional, international and public
relations problems that could destroy the CIA.

Houston explained that the Agency's MK/ULTRA program was far less problematic for
the CIA because it had been a research-based program that initiated 153 contracts to
colleges, universities and research institutions nationwide. These contractors, all
stalwart and prestigious institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Tulane Universities,
could serve as viable buffers to any harsh outside attacks.

Houston stressed that deliberate exposure of the MK/ULTRA program by essentially
offering it to the press would serve to placate the brewing feeding frenzy over so-
called mind control projects, and would divert any investigative attempts into the
multi-faceted Artichoke Project.

Houston additionally explained to Rumsfeld and Cheney that, along with the release
of MK/ULTRA details to the media, the names of a few former CIA employees, such
as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, would also be released to the press. Incredibly, when the
subject of possible federal prosecutions of CIA officials for capital crimes and felonies,
such as murder and drug trafficking, came up in their discussion, Houston informed
Rumsfeld and Cheney that there was little cause for concern.

Explained the Agency's General Counsel, since early 1954, following the death of
Army biochemist Frank Olson, a secret agreement between the CIA and the U.S.
Department of Justice had been put in place whereby the violation of "criminal
statutes" by CIA personnel would not result in Department of Justice prosecutions, if
"highly classified and complex covert operations" were threatened with exposure.
The agreement had been struck between Houston and Deputy Attorney General
William P. Rogers in February 1954, not long after Frank Olson's death, and still
remained solidly in place.

Lastly, and worth noting here, was a brief adjunct discussion between Houston,
Rumsfeld, and Cheney regarding related concerns about records on former Nazi
scientists who had been secretly imported into the United States in the early Fifties by
the State Department and Army, as part of Project Paperclip. These German
scientists performed highly-classified research at the Army's Fort Detrick and
Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, some of which involved field operations in Europe.

Without doubt, as the extant record clearly reveals, the CIA's Dormouse Operation, as
expressed by Houston, was remarkably effective. Information released on the
Agency's MK/ULTRA program more than sated the media's curiosity for mind control
details, and even a few random Artichoke Program citations in a couple released
documents failed to draw any concerted examination by anyone in the press. For
example: documents revealing that Dr. Frank Olson had been part of the CIA's
ongoing "Artichoke Conference" were near completely overlooked. Within a few short
months, Artichoke was widely believed by the media and public to be but a small,
innocuous project that had been replaced by the MK/ULTRA behemoth. Still today,
numerous publications state that Artichoke was absorbed and replaced by
MK/ULTRA, when actually Artichoke operated independently for nearly 17 years
beyond the dawn of MK/ULTRA.

What Was Project Artichoke?

The CIA initiated Project Artichoke in August 1951 at the direction of CIA director
Walter Bedell Smith and the Agency's Scientific Intelligence Director, Dr. H. Marshall
Chadwell. The code name "Artichoke" was selected with sardonic humor from the
street appendage given to New York City gangster Ciro Terranova, who was referred
to as "the Artichoke King."

Following a brief period of bureaucratic infighting over which CIA department would
have jurisdiction over Artichoke, it was decided that the project would be overseen by
the Agency's Security Research Staff, headed by Paul F. Gaynor, a former Army
Brigadier General, who had extensive experience in wartime interrogations.

Gaynor was notorious among CIA officials for having his staff maintain a systematic
file on every homosexual, and suspected homosexual, among the ranks of Federal
employees, as well as those who worked and served on Washington's Capitol Hill.
Gaynor's secret listing eventually grew to include the names of employees and
elected officials at State government levels, and the siblings and relatives of those on
Capitol Hill.

In early January 1953, State Department employee John C. Montgomery, who
handled considerable classified material, hanged himself in his Georgetown
townhouse after learning of his addition to Gaynor's list. In 1954, U.S. Senator Lester
C. Hunt (D-WY) killed himself in his senate office after he was threatened by
Republicans, using information provided by Gaynor's staff, to publicly expose his
son's homosexuality. By the early 1960s, according to one former Agency employee,
"It was pretty much routine to consult Gaynor's 'fag file' when conducting
background or clearance checks on individuals."

Gaynor's veiled and more despicable activities also extended to racist matters, a
fixation he seemed to share with many of the CIA's early leaders, as well as with
some of the Pentagon's early ranking officials. According to one former CIA official,
Gaynor was once informally cautioned by Allen Dulles concerning his overt support of
former Congressman Hamilton Fish III, a strident Nazi sympathizer, and for
associating, along with fellow CIA official Morse Allen, with John B. Trevor Jr., an
ardent racist, anti-Semite, pro-Nazi, who called for amnesty for Nazi war criminals.
Before the CIA was formed, Gaynor was also associated with Trevor's father, John B.
Trevor Sr., a Harvard-educated attorney who worked with Army intelligence and who
once strongly advocated arming a group of citizens with 6,000 rifles and machine
guns to put down an anticipated Jewish uprising in Manhattan that only took shape
in Trevor's twisted mind.

In 1997, former CIA Technical Services chief, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who had been born
into a Jewish family, said, "Throughout the 1950s, and for some time beyond, the
Agency was less than a welcoming place for Jews and racial minorities. Those who
were actually ever hired or involved in operations learned rather quickly to keep their
heads down when certain matters were discussed or rallied round."

Here it should be emphasized that inevitably lurking within, near, and around all of
the CIA's early mind-control experiments was a strong element of racism that
generally manifested itself through the Agency's principle objective of establishing
control over the perceived "weaker" and "less intelligent" segments of society. That
the CIA's initial mind control activities show a close kinship with many prominent
characters within the racist and anti-immigration eugenics movement is no
coincidence. Thus comprised was the central leadership of the CIA's Project
Artichoke.

Here it is important to note that the Artichoke Project originated from the CIA's short-
lived Project Bluebird, which operated for about two years, 1949 through summer
1951, and concentrated its efforts on former American POWs returned from the
Korean War. These servicemen were placed in several Army hospitals, including
Valley Forge Hospital, Pennsylvania and the Walter Reed facility in Washington, D.C.
There the former POWs were subjected to various behavioral modification programs,
including the use of experimental drugs, special interrogation methods, all for what
the CIA deemed "offensive objectives."  Joining the CIA in Project Bluebird was the
Army, Navy, and Air Force (the FBI declined to participate in the project).

Reads one April 1951 Bluebird Project report: "The Navy's research efforts in regards
to Bluebird objectives had actually begun in 1947 at Bethesda Naval Hospital. There,
according to the Navy's Bluebird designees, J.H. Alberti and Lt. Cmdr. Hardenburg,
extensive experiments had been conducted using both drugs and medical aids
(polygraph machines, surgical means, hypnotism). Besides Bethesda hospital, the
Office of Naval Research conducted a project in partnership with the University of
Indiana which in essence [was] a search for valid indications of deception other than
the mechanical indicators now being used."

CIA interest in exotic and abusive methods of detecting deception continues to the
present day. In July 2003, the CIA, the Rand Corporation and the American
Psychological Association conducted a series of workshops on detecting deception.
One of these workshops considered the use of truth drugs ("pharmacological agents
are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior") and the use of sensory
overloads. The workshop asked its classified participants, "How might we overload
the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?"



Perhaps one of the best examples of this was the treatment of "enemy combatant"
Jose Padilla, who by the time he entered a U.S. courtroom had suffered
tremendously, and irreversibly, from the abuses of deliberately induced sensory and
systems overload.

In early summer of 1951, just weeks before Bluebird was renamed Artichoke, officials
within the CIA's Security Office - working in tandem with cleared scientists from Camp
Detrick's Special Operations Division, who in turn worked closely with a select group
of scientists from a number of other Army installations, including Edgewood Arsenal -
began a series of ultra-secret experiments with LSD, mescaline, peyote, and a
synthesized substance, sometimes nicknamed "Smasher," which combined an "LSD-
like drug with pharmaceutical amphetamines and other enhancers."

This substance was used in a number of highly classified field experiments, at least
four of which were conducted outside the United States. While details of these
experiments are sketchy, former Fort Detrick biochemists report, "None of the field
experiments produced the type of results desired," and as a result, "ranking Army
Chemical Corps officials elected to focus LSD and other drug experiments on more
narrowly defined groups, as well as individuals." Chief among the field experiments
that failed in the "desired results" category were the horrifying events that took place
in Pont St. Esprit, France in 1951. There in a small, peaceful village one early summer
morning nearly 700 people went stark raving mad with 4 people killing themselves.
(This incident is detailed in my book, "A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank
Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments") This experimental focus remained
in place when Project Artichoke was initiated.

At its inception, the Artichoke Project needed a steady supply of experimental
subjects. Wrote CIA Security Research chief Paul Gaynor in a never before revealed
February 1953 memo: "It is imperative that we move forward more aggressively on
identifying and securing a reliable, ready group, or groups, of human research
subjects for ongoing Artichoke experimentation. There can be no delays in this
extremely important work."

Other CIA reports reveal that the CIA's Security Research Staff was not sitting idly by
while awaiting the securing of ready groups of human subjects. Teams of Agency
officials and contract physicians were traveling frequently to locations in Europe
where, in the isolation of CIA safe houses, enhanced interrogations and behavior
modification experiments were being conducted on various defectors, double-agents,
and kidnapped foreign agents.

Reads a November 1956 Artichoke report that could have easily been written today at
Guantanamo, Cuba: "The team physician administered a suppository containing a
small amount of heroin to the subject so as to increase subject's pain threshold." The
physician referred to in this report, a well-known Washington, D.C. psychologist,
made over 90 Artichoke-related trips abroad.

In September 1953, Artichoke Project director Morse Allen, a former Naval
intelligence officer and State Department employee, hand-carried a two-page
memorandum to Paul Gaynor. The memo bears the subject: "Artichoke Research
Program." It reads in part: "[T]here are some four thousand (4,000) American
military men who are serving court martial sentences in the federal prisons at the
present time. These men are scattered through the federal institutions according to
their age - some being at reformatories, others at prisons. It is administratively
possible that the sentences of these men can be reduced by direction of the Adjutant
General's office. Therefore, if these men should be wanted for work on a dangerous
research project, it might be possible to motivate their interest by promising that
recommendations would be made to the Adjutant General's office to have their
sentences appropriately reduced if they co-operated in the experimentation. Also
many offenses of military men were committed in circumstances which might tend to
lessen the feeling of guilt on the part of the individual and such cases might reveal
interesting information."

Allen next suggested that federal prisons "that have hospital setups with doctors on
the permanent staff" be used for experiments. Wrote Allen, "Such things as the size
of the institution and current population would have to be considered but it is a fact
that the federal prisons are not overcrowded as is the case with many state prisons,
thus it would be much easier to obtain working space in a federal institution."
Artichoke teams secretly working in the prisons could be passed off as "coming from
nearby universities or research institutions," explained Allen. About a week later, Allen
amended his September memo to include "federal hospitals and institutions under
the control of the [U.S.] Public Health Service."

Wrote Allen, "There are a large number of USPHS-controlled facilities that can be
used for experiments, these in addition to the facilities recommended in the earlier
memorandum bearing the same subject."

Gaynor promptly approved Allen's recommendations, ordering their immediate
implementation. Within a few weeks, progress reports concerning the conduct of
experiments at three federal prisons, as well as a reformatory in Bordentown, New
Jersey, were submitted to Gaynor. Experiments were also conducted at St. Elizabeth's
Hospital in Washington, D.C., a Veterans Administration hospital in Detroit, Michigan,
and at the Federal Narcotics Farm in Lexington, Kentucky. Experiments at the
Narcotics Farm, somewhat romanticized in some current publications, were
specifically targeted at African-American inmates, who were considered by the
program's director to be inferior to white inmates at the facility.

When the newly created U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW)
was created just weeks later with Nelson A. Rockefeller as Under-Secretary, the CIA
found it remarkably easy to gain HEW's approval for use of Federal medical facilities
as fronts for covert drug and interrogation experiments using unwitting human
subjects. Inevitably, nearly all those unwitting experimental subjects chosen for HEW-
sponsored projects were African-Americans and persons from immigrant groups and
what one Agency document referred to as the "lower classes."

A central Artichoke objective, according to one CIA document, centered on: "The
problem exists of ascertaining whether effective and practical techniques exist, or
could be developed, which could be utilized to render an individual subservient to an
imposed will or control, thereby posing a potential threat to National Security." [Italics
added]

The same document explained that the Agency also wanted to put the same
techniques to their own effective uses in the field offensively. Reads the document:
"We need to also explore the 'subtle' means of making an individual say or do things
he would normally not consider through the use of covertly administered drugs,
'Black Psychiatry'*, hypnosis, and brain damaging processes. Dr. Chadwell feels these
processes may be tried but they are 'elaborate, impractical and unnecessary.'"[Italics
added. Dr. Chadwell was H. Marshall Chadwell, the CIA's director of Scientific
Intelligence.]

A subsequent April 1954 Artichoke Conference meeting, attended by Frank Olson's
Fort Detrick superior, Col. Vincent Ruwet, explored the real nitty-gritty of Artichoke
experimentation. Noted a CIA report on the meeting, "It was also recognized [by
conference participants] that if Morse Allen and his group could produce bodies and
if certain very rough, primitive, and ultimate tests could be carried out then a more
accurate prediction could be made in connection with the ultimate goal of the group
which is the running of selected foreign nationals back into Europe for specific work
for this Agency."

CIA Security Research chief Paul Gaynor, attending the same Artichoke Conference
meeting, reminded the gathered Agency and Fort Detrick officials, "All individuals can
be broken under mental and physical assaults and by such techniques as denying
sleep, exhaustion, persuasion, starvation, pain, humiliation, and sickness."

Added Gaynor, "The capacity to endure assaults of all kinds varies in individuals. We
need to teach the Artichoke techniques to medical officers in the field... we also need
to combine these techniques with the work carried on at Edgewood Arsenal and at
Camp Dietrich [sic] ...and the special use of ergots, as well as Lysergic Acid.
Experiments with new ideas, for example the hypo-spray instrument (owned by the
E.R. Squibb Company) using criminals and the criminally insane, have been very
successful."

An italicized and revealing note at the end of the Artichoke meeting report reads:
"Morse Allen and Paul Gaynor emphasized the fact that this type of work must not be
overwhelmed and overburdened in a maze of statistics, technical reports and learned
academic experimentation since previous experiences along these lines clearly
indicate that when this appears the end results are almost always negative."
Reportedly, much of these very same statements and thinking are contained in a
number of the training manuals used today by CIA and Army interrogators.

Project Artichoke Operational Overseas

Beginning in January 1954, following a series of experimental field assignments, the
CIA began to systematically dispatch special assignment Artichoke Teams from the
U.S. to locations throughout Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines.
Team assignments were given by special "EYES ONLY" cables with each assigned a
tracking number. By 1961 the numbers had reached as high as 257 specific
assignments. Nearly all of these assignments would fall under today's definition of
"enhanced interrogations."

Through a number of Project Artichoke documents, obtained through the Freedom of
Information Act, we are able to obtain glimpses into those activities and techniques
employed by the dispatched teams, which appear to have been at least a dozen in
number.

A February 6, 1954 team report, delivered to CIA headquarters by "Diplomatic
Courier," provides partial insight into one seemingly unique Artichoke field
assignment in Europe. The report states: "These two subjects [foreign agents] are
disposal problems, one because of his lack of ability to carry out a mission and the
other because he cannot get along with the chief agent of the project. Both have
extensive information concerning (other) assets and thus are security risks wherever
they are disposed of. Anything that can be done in the Artichoke field to lessen the
security risk will be helpful since the men must be disposed of even at maximum
security risk. The urgency of consideration of this case is due to the fact that one of
the men is already somewhat stir crazy and has tried to escape twice."

Another field report reads: "Subject was given a sedative suppository to increase his
resistance to pain, this in order to intensify his ordeal midway through the planned
session." Another reads in part: "This A [Artichoke] session involved four subjects all
of whom present serious disposal problems after results are produced."

Domestic Artichoke Operations

In February 1954, with over 65 Artichoke Team visits to sites in Europe and the Far
East having already occurred, Paul Gaynor decided to open a new Artichoke Project
front. This front would be located within America's borders despite the fact that many
people in the nation's capital believed that the CIA's founding charter forbade the
organization from conducting domestic operations.  In numerous ways, this new front
gave initial shape and direction for the CIA's still-to-come "rendition" activities that we
witness today.

Gaynor outlined this in a memo sent to the Agency's Technical Services Division,
explaining that Artichoke officials were about to embark on creating "a mechanism
within the United States which will be a ways and means of contacting alien citizens
in the United States" whereby they could be "branded as alien threats and removed
from the United States as 'undesirable aliens.'" The objective of establishing this
mechanism was to facilitate "legal entree" for the contacted aliens so that they might,
following careful "screening and testing," conduct covert missions in targeted foreign
countries.

Gaynor's memo continued, stating the best technique for "contacting these people"
was through the use of "sympathetic fake left-wing organizations" secretly
established by the CIA. Remarkably, the memo went on stating the best process
established by Artichoke officials for identifying those aliens to use involved "selection,
screening, indoctrination and ultimately hypnosis." However, states the memo, "the
sixty-four dollar question is can individuals be commanded under hypnosis to do
things they would not otherwise do because of morals, training, ethics, etc."

Earlier, in March 1952, Security Research officials along with CIA Scientific
Intelligence Branch researchers had made a concerted decision to pursue hypnotism
toward the principle objective that, "Two hundred trained [CIA] operators, trained in
the United States, could develop [and command] a unique, dangerous army of
hypnotically controlled agents" who would carry out any instructions they were given
without reservations. Several years later, CIA officials would describe the abilities of
this "unique, dangerous army" as "mildly hair-raising."

Artichoke Evolves into Assassination Project

Perhaps it was inevitable that Project Artichoke would eventually develop an
"executive action" or assassination component. The CIA had been seriously
contemplating such a capacity since its founding. In 1952, one Artichoke official
wrote: "Let's get into the technology of assassination, figure most effective ways to kill
- like Empress Agrippina - do you want your people to be able to get out of the
room? Do you want it traced?"

Other hard evidence of the CIA's leanings toward assassination as a feature of policy
and operations is yet another memorandum by the Agency's Security Office and
Artichoke official Morse Allen. Wrote Allen about Martin Luther King in 1965: "It is
[redacted]'s belief that somehow or other Martin Luther King must be removed from
the leadership of the Negro movement, and his removal must come from within and
not from without. [Redacted] feels that somehow in the Negro movement, at the top,
there must be a Negro leader who is 'clean' who could step into the vacuum and
chaos if Martin Luther King were exposed or assassinated."

Rewriting History and Creating Disinformation

In recent years there has been a concerted effort on the part of some groups and
writers to deliberately disown and downplay the horrors of Project Artichoke. Perhaps
the finest recent example of this is an article written by Charles S. Viar of the
Washington, D.C.-based Center for Intelligence Studies, a private group. Viar's article
entitled PANDORA'S BOX: MKULTRA and the Weaponization of the Human Psyche is
posted on the center's web site.

Viar, who claims to have been a student of James Jesus Angleton in 1986 and 1987,
and an expert on intelligence affairs, erroneously claims in his article that the
Artichoke Project and its techniques had been "developed and successfully refined by
the Soviets, Nazi, and Western intelligence services between 1920 and 1973."  This
rewriting of history appears as nothing short of an amazing effort to distort the truth;
as is well established by the CIA's own records, the term Artichoke was never applied
to any program or techniques prior to 1952, when the Agency first employed the
project codename.

Viar also appears to buy into and promote the cover story invented by Cheney and
Rumsfeld in 1975 that Project Artichoke was, in 1953, replaced by MK/ULTRA.
Additionally, he buys into the "unwitting" dosing of Frank Olson as "part of an
MKULTRA experiment," this despite that Olson was a member of the CIA's Artichoke
Conference and never worked with MK/ULTRA projects. Viar then remarkably writes,
"There is no evidence that either the CIA or the US military operationalized
Artichoke," a statement that is shattered to pieces by the numerous Artichoke
operational reports and records filed by both the CIA and army from 1954 through to
at least 1970. If this is not enough, Viar then states that it was "the Soviets" who
"shared Artichoke with their Arab allies," and then equates Project Artichoke to
"suicide bombers" and "Al Qaeda." Lastly, Viar also writes that the CIA's delving into
parapsychology matters is near completely overlooked by historians, despite the
ample writings and exposure of the Agency's MK/ULTRA subprojects, which
extensively dealt with ESP and other parapsychology matters.

Project Artichoke Today

With today's media reports concerning the CIA and Department of Defense black
sites cropping up all over the world map, and with horrifying reports concerning
alleged "suicides" at US-operated compounds holding "enemy combatants" that
make Frank Olson's suicide-turned-murder case look like a stroll through atrocity
park, readers should be ever mindful that the roots of the CIA's secret mind control
and enhanced interrogation programs are firmly planted in the soil of Project
Artichoke.

Over the past months, new secret black sites prisons have been discovered at
Guantanamo Naval Base and at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. The Guantanamo
site has been linked to the deaths of three prisoners in 2006, while Bagram secret
prison, said to be run by the Defense Intelligence Agency, has been the subject of
investigations by the New York Times, Washington Post, and BBC, exposing
widespread use of beatings, isolation, sleep deprivation, and other techniques
derived from Appendix M of the 2006 Army Field Manual. This portion of the manual
outlines abusive forms of interrogation reserved only for captives that supposedly
don't warrant prisoner-of-war status.

Interest in the use of drugs and mind control techniques in military research and
operations persists to the present day. A November 2006 instruction from the
Secretary of the Navy (3900.39D) informs that the Undersecretary for the Navy would
heretofore be the "Approval Authority for research involving: (a) Severe or unusual
intrusions, either physical or psychological, on human subjects (such as
consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques)."**

A public presentation of the new policy at the Defense Department Training Day in
Washington, D.C. on November 14, 2006, only 16 days after the new policy was
released, deleted the parenthetical remarks on drugs and "mind control," but left
intact the instruction two paragraphs later that the Undersecretary also be
responsible for research of, "Potentially or inherently controversial topics (such as
those likely to attract significant media coverage or that might invite challenge by
interest groups.)"

Like a modern day Ministry of Truth, U.S. government agencies and their partners
are busy trying to erase the evidence of their crimes, whether from sixty years ago,
or six. Most recently, the American Psychological Association (APA) has changed the
web pages that describe their 2003 workshop conducted with the CIA and the Rand
Corporation on deception. One webpage has dropped the link to another page that
described the workshops investigation of sensory overload and truth drugs. The
descriptive page on workshops has been scrubbed entirely, and is only available
through the use of web archives sites. Worth noting is that throughout the 1950s and
1960s the APA worked quite closely with both the CIA and Army on mind control
projects, many of which completely crossed ethical lines, as well as the APA's Code of
Ethics, into areas described by many observers as sheer madness.

Attempts to prevent judicial review of the rendition and torture programs are
moreover an official position of President Obama's administration. On May 12, the
administration filed a brief to the Supreme Court about whether to hear an appeal
from Maher Arar in his lawsuit against former Attorney General Ashcroft and other
Bush administration figures. Arar was kidnapped from New York's JFK Airport and
rendered secretly to Syria, where he was tortured for almost a year. His suit was
dismissed by a federal circuit appeals court. Now, President Obama's Acting Solicitor
General, Neal Katyal, has pronounced the administration's position that further
deliberations on Mr. Arar's suit are "unwarranted." The former Solicitor General,
Elena Kagan, who was involved in U.S. decision-making on the case, is now a
nominee for the Supreme Court.

Finally, the release last year of the CIA's 2004 Inspector General report on the
"enhanced interrogation" program revealed an operation that with its use of doctors
as control agents, its reliance on methods of psychological and physiological torture,
and the experimental nature of the program, led Physicians for Human Rights to
release a white paper that concluded that "possible human experimentation" was
taking place, and emphasized the urgent need for a thorough investigation.

---

*According to one former CIA official: "'Black Psychiatry' refers to psychiatric methods
used by trained and licensed physicians on subjects. These methods may not be in
the best interest of the subject's mental well-being and health." The same official
remarked, "There was no shortage of or problems recruiting psychologists in the
1950s and 1960s who would willfully, and sometimes enthusiastically, practice 'Black
Psychiatry.'" The various methods of 'Black Psychiatry' were provided in a training
setting in the 1950s through to at least the 1970s at the CIA's Butler Health Center
facility in Rhode Island, where many physicians, including Dr. Robert Hyde, worked
for the Agency. The Butler Center also served as the CIA's central site for exposing its
own officials and agents to the effects of LSD and other drugs.

** Recent reports concerning the CIA and Army have both organizations
experimenting on a selected basis with a new mind altering drug whose effects are
described as "incredibly mind altering yet at the same time allowing subjects to
adhere to a sufficient sense of sanity thus allowing better opportunity for truth
inducing techniques..." The drug, described by one former intelligence official as
"ETX," is said to last for "about 48-hours."