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

(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 callfor 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.

OperationDormouse

Contemporary torture's earliest, deepestand 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, andcontinues 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 itsdoyen 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.

Houstonexplained 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 theMK/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 additionallyexplained 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, sinceearly 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 notinghere, 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 clearlyreveals, 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?

TheCIA 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."

Followinga 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 wasnotorious 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 moredespicable 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 itshould 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 thatthe 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).

Readsone 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."

CIAinterest 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 weeksbefore 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 wasused 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 revealthat 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 aNovember 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.

InSeptember 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."

WroteAllen, "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'srecommendations, 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 Artichokeobjective, 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 Agencyalso 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 subsequentApril 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 chiefPaul 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."

AddedGaynor, "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 theend 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 OperationalOverseas

Beginning in January 1954, following aseries 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 ofProject 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 February6, 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: "Subjectwas 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

InFebruary 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 theAgency'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 besttechnique 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 alongwith 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 Evolvesinto Assassination Project

Perhaps it wasinevitable 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?"

Otherhard 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."

RewritingHistory and Creating Disinformation

In recent yearsthere 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, whoclaims 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 promotethe 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 ArtichokeToday

With today's media reports concerning the CIAand 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 blacksites 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 inmilitary 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 newpolicy 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 dayMinistry 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 reviewof 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 2004Inspector 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 Armyhave 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."

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