Canadian government gag order in CIA brainwashing case

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadian-government-gag-order-mk-ultra-1.4448933

by myth_drannon • 9 years ago

274 125 9 years ago

gtcode4• 9 years ago

Do any modern day entities (governments, corporations, other) perform ostensibly mild versions of such psychological experimentation, possibly at scale, or with the intention of scaling?

This occurred decades after an ancestor of mine was PM of Canada, thankfully.

ShabbosGoy• 9 years ago

Probably not. After all, it’s way easier to kidnap an asset in broad daylight and shove them into a van.

Or they can target the asset’s family members to coerce cooperation. Again, very low hanging fruit compared to mind control. Coercion is the best mind control.

boomboomsubban• 9 years ago

Almost certainly. One of the wider goals of past projects was to influence opinion over large groups of people. It seems likely that the various state forces using social media to sway opinion come from research on influencing opinion.

Additionally, the US torture of alleged terrorist detainees was called "enhanced interrogation" as a link to such testing. As we still have black sites, and a desire for more information, I personally assume there is still testing being done.

jhiska3• 9 years ago

The biggest impediment to a politician who in good-will wants to implement actually crucial policies is public opinion.

The problem is so bad that politicians don't actually talk about the hard work -- hours of reunions, negotiations, high-stake talks, etc --, because being honest and open has a detrimental effect on achieving their goals. Lies or half-lies are more effective, even when they are honestly doing what's best for us, because it's easier to accept an uncomplicated lie or half-lie than a complicated truth.

The problem, I guess, is that we have a representational democracy but representational democracies have operational flaws and that the will of the people sometimes leads to a mass grave for them. Sometimes our representatives are better educated and positioned to call the shots, but are held back by misconceived public opinion -- aggravated by the fact that the truth is never actually told by any side and debates are over who can "sell" the most convincing story based on "established" lies and half-lies.

It's a delicate balance of power. In a way, it is justifiable for the government (a faceless system where the responsibility is diffused to so many people that no one is almost ever truly individually responsible) to want to manipulate public opinion (or influence public opinion, in politically correct terms). In another, it is tipping the balance of power to the already powerful and this can cause problems.

cryoshon5• 9 years ago

one of the MKULTRA programs sought to reduce the ambition of populations using chemicals that could be dispersed in an imperceptible quantity

if you don't believe me, jump down the rabbit hole and you will become a bit jaded

kossTKR• 9 years ago

This theory has always seemed pretty outlandish to me. Do you have any sources or interesting leads?

toomanybeersies• 9 years ago

Facebook performs secret psychological experiments on its users by manipulating their news feed: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...

I would say without their consent, but it's likely there is a clause buried in the user agreement that means that you consent to it.

uiri• 9 years ago

If their users did not read that clause in the user agreement and knowingly consent to the experiments, then they are being carried out without the users' consent.

lostgame3• 9 years ago

Are EULA’s still legally binding? I thought there was a recent case against that.

gruez• 9 years ago

hence why the question should be about informed consent.

pbourke• 9 years ago

The government has tortured its citizens in the past and is covering up that torture in the present. It sounds like a Royal Commission or similarly significant investigation is needed.

gtcode4• 9 years ago

Wasn't there also a conspiracy in Portage La Prairie whereby the government secretly dumped chemicals on its citizens, as part of some experiment?

gtcode4• 9 years ago

For context, that is where my mother is from, I believe she was there during those experiments. Also, my ancestor AM who was PM briefly

wallace_f4• 9 years ago

Quite a few things are a bigger deal than this, but get no attention. For example, the same could be said for our government-funded genocide of Native Americans. I don't know why the denial is allowed to persist.[1] In Germany holocaust-denial can land you prison time. America has the only remaining legitimate government in the world that committed an attempted genocide against its people.

1 - www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california-genocide-20160522-snap-story.html

jhiska3• 9 years ago

Germany lost the war.

Although it's not true that the victors always write the history. There are cases where the defeated write books detailing all the injustices committed against them and it gets picked up centuries later after the tides of power have changed again, or so much time has passed that everyone involved is safe or dead -- I guess one can say that's how you know about the Native American version of American history and can talk about it safely.

Want an interesting thought? What in the horrors of hell is being done to Middle-Easterners?

pc863• 9 years ago

Between 1846 and 1870

I don't think anyone in the current government had any role in Indian genocide.

gtcode4• 9 years ago

I'd speculate that, after such an age of barbaric experimentation, new and supposedly more innocuous methods that don't require physically detaining/restraining a subject have long since been conceived, implemented, and tried.

VonGuard• 9 years ago

I don't know, some of the things they were doing up there were just ridiculous and useless. Like putting a woman in a chemically induced coma for a year, and playing high volume affirmations though a headset she wore the whole time. The doctor who started all this up there was just Mengele with a Psych degree and some very stupid ideas.

djsumdog• 9 years ago

Many MKUltra documents were shredded, and even those recovered were of little scientific benefit due to the way the experiments were carried out. So many people had their lives irrevocably destroyed, and for absolutely nothing of value.

AlexCoventry• 9 years ago

According to Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, the purpose of the experiments was to find a reliable way to manipulate people so that they'd stay manipulated. The CIA was having a very hard time establishing reliable agents and informants behind the Iron Curtain, because all they really had to offer was stupendous amounts of money, and people weren't staying bought. Their targets generally didn't buy the ideological angle.

From that (odious) perspective, I don't think the experiments were ridiculous, though they did turn out to be useless. At the time it was pretty common to view breaking a personality down as a viable path to establishing control over it. The Koreans had done similar things to American prisoners, with some minor, temporary effectiveness.

nitrogen• 9 years ago

The best approach of all would be to get people to volunteer and consume all the information you want before they even commit a crime. You could entice them with hard-to-resist benefits like cheaper groceries or a more active dating life.

dannyw2• 9 years ago

FYI, this is just one of the known experiments out of MK-ULTRA. Victim testimonies describe being immovably bound to chairs for all of their waking existence and forced to listen to a short, recorded tape on loop while blindfolded for sensory deprivation.

One victim was unable to recount the message as they suffered PTSD flashbacks and dissociated if they even thought about it. IIRC official records show the tape was something like “I did not kill my mother”, however there were other inclinations that the actual played message was the opposite - “I killed my mother”.

At least hundreds of years of torture were carried out on unwitting Americans and Canadians; on a magnitude that is comparable to human experimentation astrocities of the worst regimes in history; just less in numbers.

More reading: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exqjv4/how-do-you-turn-a-...

christmasity• 9 years ago

Unethical human experimentation was pioneered by the US. We've been experimenting on natives, blacks, minorities a long before the nazis. And we even tested nuclear fallout on pacific islanders long after ww2. I believe the "father" of unethical japanese human experimentation was trained in the US before ww2.

Not sure why canadians got involved in this mess though.

badosu• 9 years ago

A couple of instances pre and post-ww2 of medical human experimentation:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

ivan_ah• 9 years ago

I was reading about this a long time ago, and remember the de-programming research experiments were initially proposed to be done in US, but was rejected based on ethical grounds. So they just took the project up north.

wyck• 9 years ago

Well Donald Ewen Cameron lived in Montreal at the time and had the means, The CIA was interesting in his work on Psychic Driving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_driving .

His move to Montreal was funded by the Rockefellers, he was given Sir Hugh Allan's mansion, and he was endored by the pioneering neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield.

jknoepfler2• 9 years ago

Unethical human experimentation was almost certainly pioneered by the first human civilizations, not the relative late comer from the 18th century.

icelancer• 9 years ago

Unethical human experimentation was pioneered by the US.

Have to guess the Aztecs and many other civilizations before that had it figured out before us.

naeem• 9 years ago

The unapologetic close-mindedness of Americans, even in the more intelligent parts of the web, never ceases to baffle me. Really? Human experimentation started in the US?

bionoid6• 9 years ago

Jan Irvin at GnosticMedia has done a lot of interesting research on MKULTRA. I learned that Timothy Leary was a CIA agent and basically the counterculture of the 60s was manufactured (see "manufacturing the deadhead" [0]). Personally I find his "unspun" show refreshing, if nothing else it seems like an attempt at honest reporting, which is rare.

edit: and please do read it before judging, the evidence is more convincing than you think.

[0] https://www.gnosticmedia.com/manufacturing-the-deadhead-a-pr...

programmarchy• 9 years ago

I'm also familiar with Jan's work and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of mind control and psychedelics. He's uncovered a lot of interesting history. It has been interesting to see Jan's development from being pro-psychedelics (e.g. his film Pharmacratic Inquisition) to his stance today which place psychedelics and mysticism mostly in the realm of mind control tools. To say the least, there are some very bizarre connections between military intelligence and the formation of the "counter culture". And seemingly, this is nothing new, with these types of links going back to at least classical civilization with Eleusinian cult initiations.

empath75• 9 years ago

His evidence seems ‘strained’, to be polite.

marnett• 9 years ago

Thank you very much for sharing this

dTal2• 9 years ago

One accurate term used for the individuals who were victims of this debasing was "Deadhead," which is an equivocation for a "dead mind" or "a drugged, thoughtless person."

Sorry, this is just too much. "Deadhead" means a fan of the Grateful Dead. Is he just making stuff up?

asymmetric• 9 years ago

I couldn't find any info on his Wikipedia page about him working for the CIA.

Haven't read the linked article, but for a tl;dr, how reliable are the accusations, and what are the sources?

xor12• 9 years ago

Being able to induce disassociation and splitting within trained subjects are what I primarily associate with MK Ultra.

dannyw2• 9 years ago

Aka, BPD? Can you elaborate?

colordrops2• 9 years ago

I appreciate that HN is still a place where we can talk directly and frankly about these topics but I have to wonder how long it will last...

jacquesm2• 9 years ago

Why do you wonder about that? Is there any indication that this is changing?

pmoriarty2• 9 years ago

What boggles my mind is after decades and decades of truly scummy, bottom of the barrel activity (not only in this case, but in the torture they inflicted on prisoners, assassinations, drug running, overthrows of governments, etc), the CIA still manages to recruit people.

They must either be hiring really naive recruits, who are blinded by idealism or really ignorant of the history of the organization they're joining, or they're hiring complete and utter scumbags. Or, perhaps the revelations that have been made public about them are false and they're really the stereotypical "good guys" they try to paint themselves as.

saagarjha• 9 years ago

Or maybe they just pay enough for people to forget about the ethics of what they’re doing.

pmoriarty2• 9 years ago

Payment in blood for some, no doubt. I'm sure they have no problem finding people for whom torture or murder is its own reward.

cryoshon5• 9 years ago

some people believe that "anything is justifiable" in the name of american security

some people will believe MKULTRA is just a conspiracy people

and some people will view such actions as necessary but messy aspects of the brutally realist struggle between countries (critically forgetting that humanity comes before any individual nation or individual)

kridsdale• 9 years ago

You may classify this under idealism, but I bet a lot of them would claim to just have realistic understandings of the brutalities that are a requirement to keep an empire running. They would say that those who would hold back from exploring any means neccissary to defeat their geopolitical adversaries are the idealists.

cryoshon5• 9 years ago

ah yes, the pragmatist's prayer-- "it was necessary even if it was immoral, therefore it was right, even if it was wrong, therefore i am noble, even if i have lost my humanity"

everyone jumps to the question of "does the end justify the means?"

a better question: why jump to the most brutal means before questioning whether the end is worthwhile regardless of the means?

is government mind control something we really want them to be able to do in the context of an intelligence agency? no, it is not; it is the apex of the opposite of human rights.

vidarh• 9 years ago

While at school I had endless debates with more pro-US-government students, and it was mind-boggling to see how they refused to acknowledge even CIA-operations that the CIA itself has declassified, or tried to dismiss interviews with past CIA directors.

The ability to just flat out deny these things when they don't fit the narrative of the the government (any government) that people want to believe in.

If people think a given government is good, a large portion of them will not take evidence of said government doing something bad and revise their opinion of the government - they'll write off the evidence instead.

Even when said evidence comes from the very same government.

alexandercrohde• 9 years ago

That's a very fair point.

I attribute this to just a lack of education. I never learned in my public education the darker side of American history, and I think to a lot of people some of the crazy things acronym agencies have done sounds like conspiracy theory (bay of pigs, operation sea-spray, mlk suicide letter, MK ultra). And frankly, I get it, some of these things are fucked up enough that they should be fiction.

Except I think with a free encyclopedia being readily available (i.e. wikipedia) finally the average American is slowly having to reconcile their nationalism with their history. Hopefully change will come with that.

mysterydip• 9 years ago

A third option: some people may understand and accept the history, but try to change the org and culture from the inside out. Maybe that’s a different kind of naivety.

jnbiche• 9 years ago

They must be either ... or ... or...

Or, like many things, they're made up of a mixture of good and bad people. Also, the CIA has either changed a great deal since the Black ops days of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, or they've gotten much better at cover ups.

In any case, they've indisputably saved Western lives in the past ~20 years. Even this week, Putin (!!) thanked the CIA for their help stopping a terror attack in Russia.

jahaja• 9 years ago

I think a lot of "normal" people can rationalize away these things to get into positions of status and authority. The shame is that they still somehow have that status is western culture.

baybal2• 9 years ago

What boggles my mind is after decades and decades of truly scummy, bottom of the barrel activity (not only in this case, but in the torture they inflicted on prisoners, assassinations, drug running, overthrows of governments, etc), the CIA still manages to recruit people.

I saw some CIA recruits, they were not bright boys.

Three letter agencies were and are looking for a specific type of personality in recruits, types that are convinced that whatever they do is right, invariably of what they were told to do.

Three letter services are afraid of hiring people with brains, and even if they do hire ones, they favour people who can be said to be "intelligent, but witless"

Google Ryan Fogle.

jacquesm2• 9 years ago

The very worst thing you can do with any adversary is to underestimate them.

vkou2• 9 years ago

What boggles my mind is after decades and decades of truly scummy, bottom of the barrel activity (not only in this case, but in the torture they inflicted on prisoners, assassinations, drug running, overthrows of governments, etc), the CIA still manages to recruit people.

The KGB never had a shortage of willing applicants. Money, power, being part of a secret society, and SERVING THEIR COUNTRY are things that a lot of men and women find incredibly appealing.

afterburner• 9 years ago

It takes a while to understand what's going on in the world. 20-somethings have a simple model with hardly any details filled in. Ambitious people are also purposely ignorant.

anigbrowl• 9 years ago

"They don't want to have to deal with more applications," Stein said of the government's requirement the settlement details be kept confidential and out of the public eye.

Cooperation is complicity. If you're party to a gag order and it's not obviously geared towards protecting the basic (not political) safety of specific persons, then you should consider whether you have an obligation to circumvent it, and how.

Waterluvian• 9 years ago

Academically, yes. But it's easy to say when it's not you.

kelvin0• 9 years ago

How can anyone discount so called 'conspiracies theories' so quickly when accounts of such atrocities are now mainstream knowledge? I am not saying one should suspend critical thinking and logic to accept anything they are told, but clearly there are some instances where history has proven such conspiracies have taken place and harmed many innocent lives.

Splendor• 9 years ago

Because many conspiracy theorists are more interested in selling brain vitamins than finding the truth.

lawlessone• 9 years ago

take your brain force!

wallace_f4• 9 years ago

I used to be of the mind that ideas within the conspiracy theory realm were most likely utter nonsense. After Snowden and the DNC scandal, I've opened up the possibility for a lot more critical thought.

If you take a look at the conspiracy sub on reddit, which became popular after the DNC Scandal, while there is some nonsense, the most-upvoted stuff are often quite interesting. In fact, I find the userbase there in some ways more sane and rational than your typical political online forum, often being even quite the opposite of the identity politics seen in those places, ie the #3 most upvoted post this year is exactly that.(1)

1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6twr5k/the_only...

lostgame3• 9 years ago

Not sure why this is downvoted. Upvoted for being pretty on point.

shostack• 9 years ago

" In fact, I find the userbase there in some ways more sane and rational than your typical political online forum"

I'm confused by this statement. /r/conspiracy has been shown to have been heavily used by Russian bots/trolls to spread propaganda and truly fake news.

rhcom2• 9 years ago

That post re enforces my view of /r/conspiracy posters as people who believe their ideas are "deep" but they really just remove all nuance and context.

vkou2• 9 years ago

Because people would rather believe that terrible things happen because of unhappy accidents, as opposed to deliberate, willful, secret misbehavior. They'd rather trust, and not verify.

pasquinelli• 9 years ago

funny, i think people swallow a lot of nonsense because it's nicer to believe the world is orderly and under control -- even if the order is bad and the ones in control are malevolent -- rather than a chain reaction of accidents that no one is in control of.

rhizome• 9 years ago

How can anyone discount so called 'conspiracies theories' so quickly when accounts of such atrocities are now mainstream knowledge?

Conspiracy theories are the sum total of everything that could be true, so consequently the "theory" parts are a dime a dozen.

2bitencryption• 9 years ago

accounts of such atrocities are now mainstream knowledge?

you think of you stopped a random person on the street and asked them about MKULTRA, they would know?

arca_vorago2• 9 years ago

If only places like HN listened to us conspiracy theorists. I'm sure people will use this to talk about how illogical we are or how Hanlons razor is their favorite thing (a logical fallacy on its face), but in the end the red pill is a choice. Now the main problem too many take the red pill but don't have the rational/logical training to approach such deep subjects correctly, and therefor many have given up one half-truth or lie for another. Not to mention active forum tactics are frequently used against conspiracy forums and websites, for example the flat earth movement is a known grass-man used to discredit conspiracy theories in general.

The reality of history is that it is filled with page upon page of conspiracy, and IMHO the conspiratorial view of the world is the correct one. Of course that doesn't mean every presented hypothesis is true either, each case must be weighed with the evidence.

That said, the number one issue otherwise intelligent people have with conspiracy theory is the inability to use the inductive logical approach instead of the deductive one. When we don't have evidence due to coverup, etc, inductive logic is the only tool left in many cases. In most of the well thought out criticisms I see its generally due to the fact that so many expect and want the deductive approach and don't even know there is another.

So to answer your main question, people don't listen to conspiracy theorists because: many conspiracy theorists have week rational skills and adopt views without proper scrutiny, various government and corporate shills actively monitor and attack conspiracy forums, and due to the tribal mentality of desiring superiority, and other factors, people dismiss conspiracy because they have been trained to do so.

Of course there is a lot of plain crazy talk in these types of forums, but oh the diamonds in the rough that can be found.

That's just the meta discussion.

brunoqc2• 9 years ago

I live near Montréal and I never heard about it except from US sources. It's weird that it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Also I'm never sure if the sources are accurate or if it's from some conspiracy nuts.

scott_karana• 9 years ago

Why would you hear about it from Canadian sources, if they're getting gagged?

brunoqc2• 9 years ago

If I understand correctly, the victims are getting gagged. Not the news medias. They can publish stuff and they did in the past, like that The Fifth Estate thing. So I could have heard about it but I didn't. From the news or from people. Maybe the news don't talk about it often enough or that the population don't care.

forapurpose• 9 years ago

Coincidentally, I just saw this review of a film about a similar event:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/movies/wormwood-review-er...

dangero• 9 years ago

It's not hard to imagine that a government organization capable of this is almost certainly testing out all types of brainwashing techniques online today. (not that many others aren't)

Canadian government gag order in CIA brainwashing case

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