A very disturbing chapter in Canada's history may soon be reopened again if a Montreal woman is granted the right to sue the federal government:A Montreal woman who was brainwashed almost 50 years ago is demanding reparations on behalf of herself and hundreds of victims of the CIA-backed mind control experiments during the Cold War.
Janine Huard asked a Canadian federal court this week to authorize a multi-million dollar class action suit against the Canadian government for its alleged complicity in the involuntary tests, her lawyer Alan Stein told AFP.
Ottawa partly funded the research, led by doctor Ewen Cameron at McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal from 1950 to 1965, he said.
Huard was given "experimental drugs and electric shock treatments" and subjected to psychic-driving tests, using electroconvulsive therapy and psychedelic drugs such as LSD in an attempt at mind control, he said.
She was also left in a dark room and forced to listen to recorded messages saying she was a bad mother who neglected her children, for six or seven hours a day for a week.
The treatments were part of Cameron's "depatterning program," Stein said, given Huard following her admission to the hospital for mild depression after giving birth.
"The idea was to erase her memories and re-forge her personality."
Anyone who knows the history or who has read the book or seen the film The Sleep Room* won't soon forget the chilling depictions of the abuse foisted on unwitting Canadians by Dr Cameron - the willing pawn and architect in the CIA's MKULTRA project in this country.
Headed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, MKULTRA was started on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953[5], largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind-control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea.[6] The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives. The CIA was also interested in being able to manipulate foreign leaders with such techniques,[7] and would later invent several schemes to drug Fidel Castro.
In 1964, the project was renamed MKSEARCH. The project attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and generally to explore any other possibilities of mind control.
Because most of the MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of the Director at that time, Richard Helms, it is impossible to have a complete understanding of the more than 150 individually funded research projects sponsored by MKULTRA and related CIA programs.[8]
Experiments were often conducted without the subjects' knowledge or consent.[9]
Experiments
Central Intelligence Agency documents suggest that the agency considered and explored uses of radiation for the purpose of mind control as part of MKULTRA. Other early efforts focused on LSD, which appears to have formed the majority of research as time went on. Experiments included administering the drug to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions, usually without the subject's knowledge.
The experiments often took a sadistic turn. Gottlieb was known to torture victims by locking them in sensory deprivation chambers while under the psychedelic influence of LSD, or to make recordings of psychiatric patients' therapy sessions, and then play a tape loop of the patient's most self-degrading statement over and over through headphones after the patient had been restrained in a straitjacket and dosed with LSD. Gottlieb himself took LSD frequently, locking himself in his office and taking copious notes.
This is how our government took care of the victims - buying them off for only $100,000 each while refusing to admit responsibility:
The Canadian government has denied culpability in the affair, yet offered 70 people who underwent the sadistic tests about 100,000 dollars each in the early 1990s on compassionate grounds.
Another 250 people were refused indemnity because their injuries were deemed mild, Stein said.
Huard received 66,000 dollars from the CIA, but no redress from Canada.
In 2004, a Canadian court forced Ottawa to compensate one of the 250 neglected victims, inspiring Huard to step up her fight on behalf of all forlorn victims, Stein said.
Ms Huard and all of the victims of these cruel experiments who were damaged for life deserve much more respect and justice than they have been shown. And it's quite ironic that some 50 years later, the week of the 5th anniversary of the Gitmo gulag where the US government is still trying to hone its torture techniques, we should all be reminded of just how little has really changed.
Related:
MKULTRA document collection at The Black Vault.
1977 Senate Hearing on MKULTRA
Book: The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control
* Globe & Mail review of The Sleep Room, 1998.
No comments:
Post a Comment