Was Jonestown a CIA medical experiment?

[Jan Klimkowski]

Hmm - back in the 1950s, this means sticking electrodes into living brains to measure EEG patterns.

Jan,

If it is warranted to conclude that, at any given point in the 20th and 21st centuries (at least), publicly acknowledged technology lags at least twenty years -- if not much, much longer -- behind repressed technology, then might mind control techniques in the 1950s have been far more sophisticated than electrode pokes?

Charles - yes. And I share your working assumption that covert (deep black) science is frequently 20 years or more ahead of overt science.

However, whenever I've conducted original investigative research into medical experimentation - whether it be techniques to sterilize humans or trial mind influencing drugs or whatever - I've found that the medical journals of the 1940s to early 1960s frequently contain frank and full details of nonconsensual, unethical and callous human experimentation.

For instance, papers about the experiments of MK-ULTRA electrode and lobotomization specialist Robert G Heath at Tulane routinely contain much gruesome detail.

My considered judgement is that, in the 1940s-early 60s period, it was assumed that scientific papers in medical journals were only going to be read by other medical professionals. Also the notion of "informed consent" was not well developed. Doctors did pretty much what they liked, assumed consent, and assumed what they did was legitimate.

This arrogant attitude is clearly apparent in the writings of such as Ewen Cameron, President of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. And MK-ULTRA electroshock maniac.

By the early to mid-60s, pesky investigative journalists started blowing the whistle on unethical and abusive human experimentation - see eg the SDS and journalistic expose of Jolly West and Gov Reagan's "let's do psychosurgery on blacks in a disused missile base" proposal.

It is also my considered judgement that this increased oversight led to the deliberate use, by intelligence agencies in particular, of three population groups in covert human experimentation: prisoners, orphans and cult members.

NB Soldiers have always been used as human guinea pigs.

i) Prisoners have always been considered expendable, with little access to "respectable news outlets" and unlikely to be believed anyway.

ii) Orphans have noone in loco parentis to protect them. Or rather they are unfortunate enough to have The Man in loco parentis.

iii) Ultimately though, cults were the perfect plausibly deniable solution for major covert human experimentation. The Symbionese Liberation Army were led by convict Donald DeFreeze, who received his Phoenix Program treatment at Vacaville. The People's Temple were given custody of orphans, and recruited ex-prisoners and poor blacks.

On the specific issue of measuring brainwaves and EEG, even allowing for the 20-year covert science lead, I doubt it would have been possible to do this in a non-intrusive fashion in the 1950s. However, I may be wrong.

The wiki EEG article contains some details of the history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeg

In 1947, The American EEG Society was founded and the first International EEG congress was held. In 1953 Aserinsky and Kleitman describe REM sleep.