The MK-ULTRA iceberg

[Jan Klimkowski]

Ed and Magda - thank you for your efforts in making this document available on DPF.

It's worth remembering that CIA director Richard Helms destroyed all the "MK-ULTRA" (in the broad umbrella sense) documents that his apparatchiks could locate. Many of the surviving MK-ULTRA documents are receipts for contractor work and materials that Helms and Gottlieb forgot about in their mass shredding and burning.

This DoD memo appears to be a briefing based on a strictly limited search to enable the Secretary of State for Defence to say, publicly or privately, that the Pentagon was used primarily as a CIA cutout. Other evidence suggests that this position is a lie.

That said, I snorted with derision when I read, on page 5, discussing human experiments on prisoners and soldiers, that:

"It appears that all of the test subjects were volunteers, and that stringent medical safeguards and followup procedures were used."

Whether a person can ethically "consent" to being a guinea pig for drugs whose clinical effects are unknown, but are believed to incude severe "modification" of human behaviour, and for which no medical treatment or antidotes are known, is highly debatable.

At the very least, the doctors would have to inform the subject that there was no known antidote for the drug he was about to take, for consent to be informed.

When the human subjects are either prisoners or soldiers, both of whom exist in highly authoritarian and rank-driven institutions where automatic obedience is expected, I find it hard to see how consent could ever be judged to be informed and freely given.