From: anonymous@freezone.remailer
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Human Guinea Pigs Are as American as Apple Pie (fwd)
Date: 19 Mar 1995 23:07:29 -0000
Organization: Bull Worldwide Information Systems.
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Sender: daemon@cass.ma02.bull.com
Message-ID: <199503192306.AA15262@bolero.rahul.net>


                  Human Guinea Pigs Are as American as Apple Pie

                               By Samuel Chavkin
                   Author of "The Mind Stealers" (Boston, 1978)

Subjecting people to experiments, in most instances without knowledge of the 
risks involved and without their consent, has been a continuing practice by 
government agencies.  A Jan. 5 news article discusses the difficulty the 
Central Intelligence Agency is having finding records of the experiments.

However, at a Senate hearing on Aug. 3, 1977, Adm. Stansfield Turner, former 
CIA director, disclosed that the agency had been conducting brainwashing 
experiments on countless Americans - prisoners, mentally ill patients, cancer 
patients, and even unwitting patrons at bars in New York, San Francisco and 
other cities.  Some were drugged with LSD and other psychotropic agents.

This was the cold war period, when the focus was on spying and counter-spying.  
Thus, the main objective of this mammoth CIA effort, which cost the taxpayers 
at least $25 million, was to program the experimental subject to do the 
programmer's bidding, even if it would lead to the subject's destruction.

As you reported Aug. 2, 1977, a CIA memorandum of Jan. 25, 1952, asked "whether 
it was possible to get control of an individual to the point where he will do 
our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature 
as self-preservation."

Mind control and behavior modification experiments in this period also became 
the underpinnings for a "medical" approach to stem the rise of social disquiet 
following the murder of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Hundreds of 
thousands of Dr. King's followers were out in the streets throughout the 
United States demanding that their civil rights be recognized and that Dr. 
King's assassins be brought to justice.  Many protests led to violent 
confrontations with the police.

Two physicians from Harvard, Dr. Frank E. Ervin, a neuropsychiatrist, and Dr. 
Vernon H. Mark, a neurosurgeon, in a letter to the Journal of the American 
Medical Association, proposed a surgical strategy to resolve such conflicts.  
In their view, protesters who resisted police control were suffering from 
"brain dysfunction," a condition, they said, that could be remedied by 
psychosurgery.

They proposed implantation of very thin electrodes in the amygdala region of 
the brain where "bad" brain cells, presumed to be associated with violent 
behavior, would be burned out with an electrical charge.

Despite an angry outcry from many physicians who charged that this was in 
effect a return to the discredited lobotomy operations used on shell-shocked 
soldiers following World War II, law enforcement authorities welcomed the 
approach.  Especially impressed with psychosurgery was Ronald Reagan, then 
Governor of California, who was ready to allocate $1 Million to set up a 
"violence-reduction" center.

Without much further ado, psychosurgery got underway in the Vacaville 
penitentiary in California: at Atmoree State Prison in Birmingham, Ala., where 
50 such operations were performed, and in other prisons.  The Veterans 
Administration used psychosurgery in its hospitals in Durham, N.C.; Long 
Beach, Calif., Minneapolis and Syracuse.  As a result, many prisoner guinea 
pigs entered into a semi-vegetable state of mine.

Psychosurgeries were finally halted when civil libertarians and the 
Congressional Black Caucus denounced them as racist, since most of the prison 
population was made up of Afro-Americans and other minorities.

   - from a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times, Jan. 11, 1994


From the Omega Report -- July/August 1994
Published by the Phoenix Foundation
A non-profit Research Institute
P.O. Box 92008
Nashville, TN 37209

