Roots of Rendition (Albarelli & Kaye)

[Jan Klimkowski]

http://www.truthout.org/cries-from-past-...choes59738

Cries From the Past: Torture's Ugly Echoes
Sunday 23 May 2010
by: H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Report

Houston explained that the Agency's MK/ULTRA program was far less problematic for the CIA because it had been a research-based program that initiated 153 contracts to colleges, universities and research institutions nationwide. These contractors, all stalwart and prestigious institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Tulane Universities, could serve as viable buffers to any harsh outside attacks.

Houston stressed that deliberate exposure of the MK/ULTRA program by essentially offering it to the press would serve to placate the brewing feeding frenzy over so-called mind control projects, and would divert any investigative attempts into the multi-faceted Artichoke Project.

Houston additionally explained to Rumsfeld and Cheney that, along with the release of MK/ULTRA details to the media, the names of a few former CIA employees, such as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, would also be released to the press. Incredibly, when the subject of possible federal prosecutions of CIA officials for capital crimes and felonies, such as murder and drug trafficking, came up in their discussion, Houston informed Rumsfeld and Cheney that there was little cause for concern.

This is one of the reasons that I have always explicitly used "MK-ULTRA" in an umbrella sense, as a shorthand for the myriad projects, funded by numerous agencies and cut-outs, working in the field of "research" best known in the popular mind as MK-ULTRA.

Eg see the thread "The MK-ULTRA iceberg" here:
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/....php?t=223

Analagously, even the limited hangout of the "psychic spying" programmes could not disguise the fact that CIA, NSA, DIA, US Army Military Intelligence and ONI had their own "psi spy" programmes. This is in medium part "competition", in small part inter-agency jealousy, and in large part ensuring the tracks get lost in the sweeping sand.

The Houston revelations above provide some corrobation to another of my core convictions, based in part on the experience of researchers who delved into the original sources. Namely that former US State Department employee John D Marks' book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, still regarded by MSM as the "definitive" investigation of US mind control programmes, was itself a strictly limited and demarcated hangout.

Gaynor's veiled and more despicable activities also extended to racist matters, a fixation he seemed to share with many of the CIA's early leaders, as well as with some of the Pentagon's early ranking officials. According to one former CIA official, Gaynor was once informally cautioned by Allen Dulles concerning his overt support of former Congressman Hamilton Fish III, a strident Nazi sympathizer, and for associating, along with fellow CIA official Morse Allen, with John B. Trevor Jr., an ardent racist, anti-Semite, pro-Nazi, who called for amnesty for Nazi war criminals. Before the CIA was formed, Gaynor was also associated with Trevor's father, John B. Trevor Sr., a Harvard-educated attorney who worked with Army intelligence and who once strongly advocated arming a group of citizens with 6,000 rifles and machine guns to put down an anticipated Jewish uprising in Manhattan that only took shape in Trevor's twisted mind.

In 1997, former CIA Technical Services chief, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who had been born into a Jewish family, said, "Throughout the 1950s, and for some time beyond, the Agency was less than a welcoming place for Jews and racial minorities. Those who were actually ever hired or involved in operations learned rather quickly to keep their heads down when certain matters were discussed or rallied round."

Here it should be emphasized that inevitably lurking within, near, and around all of the CIA's early mind-control experiments was a strong element of racism that generally manifested itself through the Agency's principle objective of establishing control over the perceived "weaker" and "less intelligent" segments of society. That the CIA's initial mind control activities show a close kinship with many prominent characters within the racist and anti-immigration eugenics movement is no coincidence. Thus comprised was the central leadership of the CIA's Project Artichoke.

Here it is important to note that the Artichoke Project originated from the CIA's short-lived Project Bluebird, which operated for about two years, 1949 through summer 1951, and concentrated its efforts on former American POWs returned from the Korean War. These servicemen were placed in several Army hospitals, including Valley Forge Hospital, Pennsylvania and the Walter Reed facility in Washington, D.C. There the former POWs were subjected to various behavioral modification programs, including the use of experimental drugs, special interrogation methods, all for what the CIA deemed "offensive objectives." Joining the CIA in Project Bluebird was the Army, Navy, and Air Force (the FBI declined to participate in the project).

Reads one April 1951 Bluebird Project report: "The Navy's research efforts in regards to Bluebird objectives had actually begun in 1947 at Bethesda Naval Hospital. There, according to the Navy's Bluebird designees, J.H. Alberti and Lt. Cmdr. Hardenburg, extensive experiments had been conducted using both drugs and medical aids (polygraph machines, surgical means, hypnotism). Besides Bethesda hospital, the Office of Naval Research conducted a project in partnership with the University of Indiana which in essence [was] a search for valid indications of deception other than the mechanical indicators now being used."

The correct lens through which to investigate this persistent trend in behaviourist and "MK-ULTRA" (in the umbrella sense) research is not racism per se, but EUGENICS.

At its inception, the Artichoke Project needed a steady supply of experimental subjects. Wrote CIA Security Research chief Paul Gaynor in a never before revealed February 1953 memo: "It is imperative that we move forward more aggressively on identifying and securing a reliable, ready group, or groups, of human research subjects for ongoing Artichoke experimentation. There can be no delays in this extremely important work."

Other CIA reports reveal that the CIA's Security Research Staff was not sitting idly by while awaiting the securing of ready groups of human subjects. Teams of Agency officials and contract physicians were traveling frequently to locations in Europe where, in the isolation of CIA safe houses, enhanced interrogations and behavior modification experiments were being conducted on various defectors, double-agents, and kidnapped foreign agents.

Reads a November 1956 Artichoke report that could have easily been written today at Guantanamo, Cuba: "The team physician administered a suppository containing a small amount of heroin to the subject so as to increase subject's pain threshold." The physician referred to in this report, a well-known Washington, D.C. psychologist, made over 90 Artichoke-related trips abroad.

In September 1953, Artichoke Project director Morse Allen, a former Naval intelligence officer and State Department employee, hand-carried a two-page memorandum to Paul Gaynor. The memo bears the subject: "Artichoke Research Program." It reads in part: "[T]here are some four thousand (4,000) American military men who are serving court martial sentences in the federal prisons at the present time. These men are scattered through the federal institutions according to their age - some being at reformatories, others at prisons. It is administratively possible that the sentences of these men can be reduced by direction of the Adjutant General's office. Therefore, if these men should be wanted for work on a dangerous research project, it might be possible to motivate their interest by promising that recommendations would be made to the Adjutant General's office to have their sentences appropriately reduced if they co-operated in the experimentation. Also many offenses of military men were committed in circumstances which might tend to lessen the feeling of guilt on the part of the individual and such cases might reveal interesting information."

Allen next suggested that federal prisons "that have hospital setups with doctors on the permanent staff" be used for experiments. Wrote Allen, "Such things as the size of the institution and current population would have to be considered but it is a fact that the federal prisons are not overcrowded as is the case with many state prisons, thus it would be much easier to obtain working space in a federal institution." Artichoke teams secretly working in the prisons could be passed off as "coming from nearby universities or research institutions," explained Allen. About a week later, Allen amended his September memo to include "federal hospitals and institutions under the control of the [U.S.] Public Health Service."

Wrote Allen, "There are a large number of USPHS-controlled facilities that can be used for experiments, these in addition to the facilities recommended in the earlier memorandum bearing the same subject."

This smells of the 1970s claims of naval psychologist Lt Comdr Thomas Narut to have programmed military assassins, revealed and reported at a NATO conference in Oslo on "Dimensions of Stress and Anxiety." The loose-tongued Narut was then disappeared.

See eg here:
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...stcount=10