Future neuro-cognitive warfare

[Jan Klimkowski]

Because this science is covert, deep black, and often sub-contracted, it is very difficult to get an accurate sense of quite how advanced it is.

My own sense is that the strongest evidence that a breakthrough has been made is when funding for the visible, peer-reviewed, area of science effectively vanishes, and the established foundations, the building blocks of the basic science, are rubbished in MSM or forgotten. Discarded as a historical anomaly.

A classic example of this is research into hypnosis. There was a very strong basic science by the start of WW2. Hypnosis was then weaponized, and used in intelligence operations during that conflict. Much of the visible post-WW2 research was conducted by private individuals, such as therapists, whilst hypnosis itself was reduced to a circus act by MSM.

I have personally interviewed three men who were employed by either the British or American military in the 80s and 90s to use hypnotic techniques in covert ops - both at the operational and debriefing stage - but who were officially described as "psychiatrists". I have no doubt that hypnosis is an incredibly powerful, and much used, tool for achieving certain military or political ends.

Running against this is my judgement that much covert or deep black science is inherently of poor quality or, even, junk. This is precisely because of its secret, constricted nature: lacking peer review, lacking proper clinical trial methodology. Investigations of deep black science suggests that there is usually little or nothing to prevent the "scientists" performing the experiments totally falsifying their results.

In other words, an "MK-ULTRA" research finding may be as close to reality as an Enron or Lehman Bros balance sheet.

When we're dealing with attempts to weaponize the unconscious, often using ancient ritual or occult techniques dragged - kicking and screaming - through a crude scientific perspective, such as behaviourism, or our current understanding of brain function at the neuronal level, then my suspicion is that the experiments will be failures with a huge human cost.

However, some deep black research clearly has been successful.

As a final thought, in my BBC days, I was once allowed to witness some extreme animal experimentation under covert US military funding, performed under the leadership of a genuinely world class scientist. Unlike the haphazard way in which I suspect much deep black science is performed, this was of very high quality in its methodology and execution.

The experiments were based on a particular insight into a potential mechanism dimly visible in, perhaps, half-a-dozen peer reviewed journal papers published over five decades. The first clinical observations, upon which the entire hypothesis being tested was based, were made by a Soviet doctor on the Eastern front as the Red Army was engaged in brutal and bloody battle with the Nazis.

By 1997, that particular area of deep black science was at least 15 years ahead of what was being published in orthodox peer-reviewed medical journals. Possibly more.

I have not yet seen elements of the research, which would have civilian as well as military applications, published in contemporary medical literature.

Which leads to two possible conclusions: the research failed; the research succeeded, and is being kept deep black.