MKUltra

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

by samaysharma • 2 years ago

97 47 2 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

skilled• 2 years ago

From 5 years ago,

Project MKUltra (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21165137) - Oct 2019 (121 comments)

Stephen Kinzer wrote a book about MKUltra:

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (https://www.amazon.com/Poisoner-Chief-Sidney-Gottlieb-Contro...)

And these two articles talk about the book in brief:

The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief' (https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...)

When the C.I.A. Was Into Mind Control (NYTimes) (https://archive.is/cRmWm)

beaugunderson• 2 years ago

Poisoner in Chief was a great read.

bhaney2• 2 years ago

I'm glad that we learned from this and took measures to prevent the US government from carrying out any more abhorrent secret operations on its own citizens. All the extra accountability and transparency that's been woven into our institutional frameworks since this was discovered makes me much more confident that it won't happen again.

dbspin• 2 years ago

bhaney2• 2 years ago

Naturally

xyst• 2 years ago

The American obsession with torture is wild. Psychological and physical (esp during post-9/11)

XorNot2• 2 years ago

Because most people believe torture works. They believe we shouldn't do it because it's "bad", rather then the reality which is that it's ineffective at information extraction.

Same problem with WMDs: people tend to think there's just tons of chemical and biological weapons which would definitely immediately win wars, and we don't use them because for some reason dying by a bullet is "better" then dying nearly instantly from nerve gas - like that makes a difference.

The reality, again, is that they don't actually work (specifically: they are ineffective against military forces in achieving military objectives, but very effective against civilians who are unlikely to have counter-measures on hand and/or too uncontrollable to be create a useful strategic advantage).

EDIT: Like to drive the point home, in Zero Dark Thirty - which the CIA got to consult on - the line is that a prisoner broke under enhanced interrogation...and while it's true Bin Laden was located by intelligence from a prisoner who was tortured...they didn't get the intelligence from the torture. All the information which was useful was found by regular interrogation before they tortured them.

mschuster914• 2 years ago

From an European POV: America has a cultural problem with violence and generally the concept of them showing dominance over others, plain and simple.

Guns, the amazing fact that bare nipples in a TV show can cause a national scandal while it's no big deal at all if a kids show like the Simpsons can contain absolutely ridiculous amounts of violence, gore and other highly problematic behavior, not just bending but outright stomping over rules being commonplace in virtually all major police (e.g. Law & Order, NCIS, Cold Case) and medical (e.g. Dr. House) shows and movies, "rolling coal" on bicyclists and road rage in general being a thing...

Torture being accepted so widely as well also ties in with what makes the US penal system so unique among Western ones - everyone else has switched their penal system to rehabilitation and prevention (i.e. try your best to make sure that felons don't commit more crimes in the future), whereas in the US you don't just have stuff like ridiculous prison times or being released with no assets, no help, no nothing after a lengthy prison stay, it's widely accepted to the point of being the butt of jokes that you get raped in prison ("don't drop a soap bar") or that you have to deal with massive overcrowding, roaches, mold in food... in any civilized society, the courts would intervene immediately for such reports, but in the US? Nothing has changed there in decades, partially of course because the US political system is dysfunctional, but IMHO more because people accept inhumane treatment of people who "have done something wrong, so deserve it".

And to add on the 9/11 thing: the US is already a deeply traumatized nation at its core. Stuff like MKULTRA, the Vietnam war or the 1st Iraq war never got addressed and dealt with as a country in a healthy way - and completely forget about the even older stuff like slavery or the discrimination of e.g. Japanese-Americans during WW2, there's more than enough politicians in power who do everything they can to repress even teaching about that! 9/11, Afghanistan and the 2nd Iraq War, the multitude of financial crises since then - that also didn't get dealt with.

How can anyone expect healthy attitudes from a society that never allowed itself to heal from its past?

EasyMark• 2 years ago

American GOVERNMENT. 99% of Americans have never tortured anyone at all and don't ever want to, so I'd hardly call it an obsession. I guarantee if Europeans were pulling their own weight in "world defense of democracy" there would be lots of Gitmo and Faluja incidents as well, toxic masculinity is alive and well in ALL militaries and this is what happens when they aren't supervised 24/7 against it, especially when it's mixed with war fatigue.

wopwops• 2 years ago

I think this is sarcasm.

krapp• 2 years ago

If anything we (and by we I mean the CIA) learned how not to mind-control people, and moved on to more effective and subtle means of manipulation through the media.

mikelovenotwar3• 2 years ago

The 'behind the bastards' podcast did a series of episodes on this that are worth checking out.

ted_bunny4• 2 years ago

Not really. I've listened to most of that podcast's episodes and noticed a pattern (AFAICT). He leaves out a lot of relevant information anytime the CIA is involved in a story.

chomskyole2• 2 years ago

What info did they leave out in the MKUltra series?

mikelovenotwar3• 2 years ago

I don't seem to recall that being the case, the CIA are discussed multiple times.

jakeogh• 2 years ago

Is that over? Interesting how we are expected to collectively[0] experience every piece of bad news and pretend humans aren't awesome.

[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/pret...

wheresmyshadow• 2 years ago

Reading through this gave me serious chills. This sounds like something straight out of Josef Mengele laboratory.

faizan-ali• 2 years ago

There is an excellent behind the bastards podcast on this: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5kSz7fsdOV9fzFFC93tdS7?si=U...

MKUltra

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