A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People (2 page)
Authors: Carol Rutz
Tags: #Law, #Constitutional Law, #Human Rights, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Politics & Government, #Specific Topics, #Intelligence & Espionage
• Retarded children at D.C. Children’s Center in Laurel in a section called the District Training School were used as human guinea pigs for both private industry and the government. Among the experiments, was the testing of NeoBazine a diet pill commonly referred to as “rainbow pills.” They contained thyroxin, which caused tremors, nervousness, insomnia, and tachycardia. It was being tested for its safety and efficiency. In October 1964 the FDA found that the drug was not safe for use. In 1962 the children were again used to test a drug for skin diseases, which doctors strongly suspected caused serious side effects to the human liver. More than half the children tested suffered some liver dysfunction. Eight were admitted to D.C. General Hospital for intensive care. That same year, 17 Laurel Center children were used to study thyroid hormone metabolism in children. The children were injected with thyroxin mixed with radioactive iodine to aid doctors in tracing a body process. As you can see, there was a clear pattern of using innocent children who had no way of protecting themselves.
• Alexander Cockburn describes a 1960 Army Chemical Corps experiment where mosquitoes with yellow fever and dengue fever were dispersed in Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida.
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According to Cockburn, “Carver Village, which was exclusively black, was the target for these experiments. Residents at the time reported fevers, bronchitis, typhoid, encephalitis, stillbirths, also mysterious deaths.”
Dr. Alan W. Scheflin, Professor of law at Santa Clara University Law School, and a judicially recognized expert in mind and behavior control states in a letter dated March 9, 1995, that secret government mind control experimentation is ongoing and vastly more expansive than the government authorities are willing to admit. He also is co-author of a nonfiction book entitled
The Mind Manipulators
, which was published in a dozen countries. He says that he has been studying these secret programs since 1975 and it is his conclusion that there are at minimum hundreds, and most likely thousands of American citizens who were used as guinea pigs against their will in government research projects. What he does not say is that most of the children used in these experiments were sold by one of their caretakers in the name of “National Security” and subjected to untold horrors at the hands of their government. In light of so many abuses of power coming before the public in recent years, many adult survivors of these childhood experiments are stepping forward to be heard.
In October 1995 the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments reported that secret radiation experiments on indigent patients and mentally retarded children were not only done, but that these people were deceived about the nature of their treatments. Dr. William Silverman asserted that performing non-therapeutic experiments on children without authorization from parents was part of a broader “ethos of the time” in which “everyone was a draftee” in a national war on disease.
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In most cases the experiments involving radiation, chemical and biological warfare materials were carried out on an unsuspecting public. These are listed in Part II of this book. Government mind control experiments using drugs, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and electric shock were used on adults and children to gain control of their minds. Impossible, you say. I wish it were. We live in such a sheltered little world. It’s much easier to believe that violence and mind control belong to a few scattered cults.
In a decision dated April 16, 1985 Chief Justice Burger of the United States Court of Appeals delivered the opinion of the Court in the case of CIA v. SIMS, 471 U.S. 159. This case focused around the public’s right under the Freedom of Information Act, to have declassified the grant proposals and contracts, and the names of the institutions and individuals who had performed research under the CIA financed research project, code-named MKULTRA.
MKULTRA was established to counter soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing and interrogation techniques and consisted of 149 subprojects contracted out to at least 80 institutions. In 1977 Director of Intelligence Stansfield Turner described in an affidavit, that the program was initiated because the Agency was confronted with “learning the state of the art of behavioral modification at a time when the U.S. Government was concerned about inexplicable behavior of persons behind the ‘iron curtain’ and American prisoners of war who had been subjected to so called brainwashing.”
It began with a proposal from Richard Helms, who outlined a special funding mechanism for highly sensitive Agency research and development projects that would study the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior. Allen Dulles approved MKULTRA on April 13, 1953. Twenty years after the conception of the MKULTRA project, all known files pertaining to it were ordered destroyed by Richard Helms before he retired.
In 1977 through a Freedom of Information Act request by John Marks, 16,000 pages of documents were found, held as part of the Agency’s financial history. Further attempts at declassification resulted in the decision rendered by Chief Justice Burger that the “intelligence sources” who were guaranteed confidentiality at the time of these CIA funded research projects would continue to remain protected and classified.
To those of us who have survived these experiments, this decision means that our stories will continue to lie in the government vaults of classified materials. Most of the important details were conveniently destroyed under orders of Richard Helms to conceal their wrongdoing.
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Think what would have happened if the records of the Holocaust had met the same fate. The disappearance of six million people could have remained a question mark in history.
As a survivor of CIA programs Bluebird/Artichoke and MKULTRA, I began my intense search to document some of the mind control experiments that I was made part of, starting at the tender age of four.
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Through a series of FOIA requests to various departments of the government, I have amassed an incredible amount of material that validates my personal experiences. The CIA bought my services from my grandfather in 1952. Over the next twelve years, I was tested, trained, and used in various ways. Electroshock, drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other types of trauma were used to make me compliant and split my personality.
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The “Manchurian Candidate”, where a programmed alter or personality is created to respond to a post-hypnotic trigger then perform an act and not remember it later, was just one of the operational uses of the mind control scenario by the CIA. A reliable truth serum would be another. In
Bluebird
,
Dr. Colin Ross documents the deliberate creation of Multiple Personality by psychiatrists working under government contracts. Your hard earned tax dollars supported this, as well as experiments on extrasensory perception and remote viewing, all of which I was tested and trained for.
CIA personnel were not opposed to working with Nazi doctors who had proven to be proficient in breaking the mind and rebuilding it. To perform these experiments they also used the expertise and knowledge of doctors at private hospitals with whom they made contractual agreements. In some cases military bases were used to hide these covert activities.
On December 17, 1999 I turned 52 years old. On that day I received three CD ROM’s from the CIA in response to my FOIA request. Forty-eight years after I was first experimented on, I found solid proof of my memories proof that was in the government vaults of the nearly 18,000 pages of declassified documents from the Bluebird/Artichoke and MKULTRA programs. One of the documents specifically stated that experimental studies of the postulated abilities of a few specially gifted subjects would be conducted.
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The document states, “That in working with individual subjects, special attention will be given to disassociative states
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which tend to accompany spontaneous ESP experiences. Such states can be induced and controlled to some extent with hypnosis and drugs... The data used in the study will be obtained from special groups such as psychotics, children and mediums...”
The document continues, “Learning studies will be instituted in which the subject will be rewarded or punished for his overall performance and reinforced in various ways by being told whether he was right, by being told what the target was, with electric shock etc.” The proposal then goes on to say, “In other cases drugs and psychological tricks will be used to modify his attitudes. The experimenters will be particularly interested in disassociative states, from the abaissement de niveau mental,
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to multiple personality in so-called mediums; and an attempt will be made to induce a number of states of this kind, using hypnosis.” The government had finally handed me the validation I had been searching for. To say my heart stopped that day is almost true.
My goal in writing this book is to expose the misuse of power that took place in this country during the Cold War. Thousands of innocent children who have now grown into adults are silently suffering from the effects of the experiments that were done to them by their own government. Many have been diagnosed incorrectly and institutionalized. Some died because they knew too much. Others, like myself, were able to obtain competent medical help, and are struggling to heal from the physical and mental ravages upon our beings.
In recounting some of the incidents that happened to me as part of these experiments, I ask that you remember that I have attempted to be as accurate as possible. Some of these events were remembered during flashbacks and abreactions. During an abreaction, a person feels just like they are reliving the event; accompanied by all the sensory stimulation and original emotional responses. Abreaction is common in soldiers who are having posttraumatic stress syndrome, where they actually feel they are back on the battlefield.
The brain is somewhat like a phonograph record it records the original happening. With Dissociative Identity Disorder, amnesia is created for the traumatic incident to save the young child’s sanity. When the amnesiac barriers are removed, it is like putting the needle back on the track of the record where the original memory is stored.
In my case, post-hypnotic suggestions were used after programming sessions, which also created an amnesiac barrier. When the wall to these memories was broken down and the events relived, I would document them in bits and pieces by journaling, drawing and painting. Some of the things I remembered seemed bizarre, and I oftentimes questioned my own sanity. Only after all the pieces of one memory would come together, would I finally get a true picture of exactly what had been done. This is also when I truly began to heal.
For skeptics, no proof will be enough. For others, like myself, unraveling the bizarre nature of my memories has allowed me to regain control of my life. My greatest gift of healing has been to no longer operate out of fear, but from a rational, logical based reality. Choices to live, love and create that were taken from me through the fragmentation of my mind can now be explored.
Some people have asked, “Why now do you choose to speak out?” I prefer to let an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor of the Mengele Twins experiments speak for me. When asked how she felt while she was being used as a guinea pig she said, “My answer is that emotional scars are so deep that only now, more than 40 years later, are we attempting to face our past and come to terms with it.”
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I ask those same people. How can we envision the future without visiting the past? Will we let this story lay in the shadows forever, or do we have the courage to address these wrongs and give survivors back their voices? You be the judge.
ETHICS, Request to the NIH Bioethics Group, April 5, 1999
In so much as the Inter-Institute Bioethics Interest Group is currently considering research in bioethics, the Advocacy Committee for Human Experimentation Survivors wishes to apprise the group of the passing of the fourth anniversary of the testimony of two survivors, Claudia Mullen and Chris DeNicola Ebner with their therapist, Valerie Wolf, before the Presidents Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments in March, 1995. The President’s Committee recommended further exploration of this testimony which concerned the sadistic experimentation upon children, for the purposes of mind control and other unwitting uses. To date, no such investigation into these claims or others by additional survivors of radiation, chemical and biological experimentation perpetrated upon them as unwitting children, had been initiated.
ACHES requests the aid of this group in the following goals:
The declassification of all government held files, documents, tapes or records relating to any experimentation involving children, prisoners or the mentally incapacitated, particularly those that relate to covertly or privately funded mind control, radiation, chemical or biological programs, both past and present.
The creation of a Presidential Committee to identify all US government sponsored programs, within or outside US borders, including mind control, radiation, chemical, biological or any other type of experimentation upon children, prisoners or the mentally incapacitated.
The determination of the legal, ethical and moral responsibilities of the US government or any other institutions to the survivors of any such experiments, which were perpetrated upon them as unwitting or uncomprehending individuals, and to determine remedies for those found to be physically and psychologically harmed by such experimentation.
