Tortured by CIA

[GerryDaypray]

http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/Nat...99202-sun.html


Tortured by CIA, patients seek federal compensation

Thu, January 11, 2007

By DENE MOORE, CP



MONTREAL -- Patients were put in isolation, tied down or drugged, and subjected to hours and hours of taped recordings meant to brainwash them at the behest of the CIA.

They were subjected to electroshocks, experimental drugs and LSD, most of them unwilling and unknowingly part of the U.S. spy agency's experimentation, a Federal Court judge was told yesterday.

Now it's time for the federal government to compensate those victims, lawyer Alan Stein argued.

Stein is seeking court approval for a class-action lawsuit on behalf of his client, Janine Huard, one of the hundreds of patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron to be subjected to the Cold War-era experiments.

"She never knew that she was being subjected to these experiments or that she was being used by Dr. Cameron and his staff as a guinea pig," Stein told the court.

Cameron pioneered "psychic driving," by which he believed he could erase the memories of patients and rebuild their psyches without psychiatric defect.

The idea intrigued the CIA, which recruited Cameron to experiment with mind control techniques beginning in 1950. The experiments carried out at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University were jointly funded by the CIA and the Canadian government.

They were part of a larger CIA program called MK-ULTRA, which also saw LSD administered to U.S. prison inmates and patrons of brothels without their knowledge, according to testimony before a 1977 U.S. Senate committee.

Huard, a petite great-grandmother who will be 79 at the end of the month, was a patient of Cameron three separate times from 1951 to 1962.

She said she was drugged, shocked and forced to listen to recorded messages for hours on end, day after day.

"It was torture," she said outside the court yesterday.

Huard said it left her unable to care for her four children and plagued with migraines and memory loss.

Huard was one of nine Canadian victims who received nearly US$67,000 from the CIA in 1988 to compensate her for her suffering.

But her claim for compensation from the federal government, which jointly funded the experiments, was rejected three times.

Frederic Paquin, lawyer for the federal attorney general, said the government does not contest that Huard underwent the treatments she claims.

"It's in the medical record," Paquin told the court.

But he argued it's too late for a lawsuit, more than four decades after Cameron's death and more than a decade after her claim was rejected.

[genevieve]

I am sorry for those people who had to suffer this but in a sense, what is different from people who are taking psychotropic drugs NOW and dont know that they have not been tested properly? Are they all going to sue the government in 20 years? Millions of people?

I am always amazed at the inability of medicine to learn from its past errors. What I "like" the most is people on a support forum I go to (for depression, anxiety, bipolar). Most people are on 2-3-4 meds (ADs but also lithium, mood stabilisers, antipsychotics) but their doctors dont want to give them a benzo to sleep because "those pills are addictive". I dont know if I should laugh or cry when I hear people tell me that. Zyprexa every day is ok but an ativan every week is not?

[elisa]

Have read several articles on the above subject. Who knows what's going on currently that we don't know about?

What we DO know now is that we are the guineapigs of Big Pharma with the blessings of the governmental agencies.

[Petrucci]

there is the work of psychiatrists again, experiments on humans and destroying their precious lives all for the sake of money and amusement. i never understood why north americans LOVE psychiatry so much and support and agree with them. in other countries in the world psychiatry is very very few.

[Amaya's Nana]

Originally Posted by Petrucci

there is the work of psychiatrists again, experiments on humans and destroying their precious lives all for the sake of money and amusement. i never understood why north americans LOVE psychiatry so much and support and agree with them. in other countries in the world psychiatry is very very few.

Actually, it wasn't psychiatrists. It was the United States federal government who was doing the experiments. Psychiatrists were just the pawns and the patients were the victims.

[LCrawford67]

Lisa's right...this has NOTHING to do with shrinks, this was our own government.

[Petrucci]

its pretty crazy why the government would do that. whats the reason? what does this MKULTRA experiment prove? its probably for their own amusement to torture people. i spit upon that ewen cameron and heinz lehmann's graves.

[LCrawford67]

It was during the cold war. So, the government was using civilians as guinea pigs to find out how they reacted to LSD and how other mind control techniques would work.

It was all spy vs. spy crap.

[Songbird]

I think I saw a movie based on this, called 'The Sleep Room'. The doctor came up with an idea called 'psychic driving' which involved listening to stuff repeated over and over through headphones. At first it was voluntary, but when the patients started trying to leave, the doctor somehow managed to get them held against their will, I guess because they were mental patients and so he could claim whatever he wanted to about them. The CIA got interested because they wanted to find a method of brainwashing people. When the headphones idea turned out not to work very well, they started trying the other things, the drugs and electroconvulsive shock treatment. They basically fried the patient's brains. Of course, this was a movie, which was based on a book, but it was based on the real life events. I found it absolutely shocking and horrifying.

[cmeffa]

A very interesting article. Thanks for posting.

[DuhMentia]

Yeah I kinda figured my post would get deleted, for the life of me I can not understand why though.
Anyways as I had said before I noticed that no one mentioned that Eli Lilly was involved in the MKULTRA project. They did help the CIA develop the LSD and other drugs that the CIA was using to experiment on people with. And they helped with the experiments themselves. Just search for 'Lilly' on the Wikipedia page for MKULTRA. You can also google the search terms 'Lilly's involvement in MKULTRA' and pick a link of your choice, there are tons of them and there is no denying that Lilly was involved in this. I am certain that this sort of experimentation is still going on today.
I think it is also noteworthy and quite curious that George H.W. Bush was not only a former CIA director but also was on the Eli Lilly board of directors immediately after leaving the CIA.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mkultra