{"id":30693,"date":"2019-12-02T19:28:08","date_gmt":"2019-12-03T03:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pocketwisdominsights.com\/pwicolab\/?p=30693"},"modified":"2020-03-30T16:37:30","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T23:37:30","slug":"human-experimentation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocketwisdominsights.com\/pwicolab\/education\/education-co-lab\/education-co-lab-blogs\/third-party\/human-experimentation\/","title":{"rendered":"Human Experimentation"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Opening Insights: Poisoner in Chief<\/em> <\/h2>\n

When bad men combine, the good must associate;<\/em>
else they will fall one by one,<\/em>
an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
<\/em>EDMUND BURKE<\/p>\n

In 1971 a social psychologist by the name of Dr. Philip B. Zimibardo put together a unique experiment later referred to as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Volunteer students were randomly assigned the roles of guard or prisoner and put into a situation modeled after a prison. As they took on the persona of their roles the experiment <\/em>became very real for them.<\/p>\n

The interesting thing about the Stanford Prison Experiment was, it only seemed<\/em> real and the human experiment participants were always under the care of a principle investigator, Dr. Zimibardo, who had their safety in mind. After all, he was a professor at the university. Though a harrowing experience for the participants, a set of peer-reviewed academic safeguards was in place to protect them.<\/p>\n

This was not the case with a prolonged set of human experiments conducted by Sidney Gottlieb for the CIA in the 50's and 60's. The following article showcases a book written by Stephen Kinzer that recounts the history of America's Poisoner in Chief.<\/em><\/p>\n

Informational Insights: For National Security<\/h2>\n

The following article was published by The Daily Beast, \"[delivering] award-winning original reporting and sharp opinion in the arena of politics, pop-culture and power.\" It was written by Kevin Canfield, a \"local government reporter for the Tulsa World.\"<\/p>\n

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A new book digs deep into the horrifying career of Sidney Gottlieb, the scientist who ran the CIA's damaging and possibly lethal experiments in drug-induced mind control.
 
Stephen Kinzer has written books about civil wars, terror attacks, and bloody coups, but his latest might be his most alarming. \u201cI\u2019m still in shock,\u201d Kinzer says of what he learned about the appalling experiments<\/a> conducted by a government scientist most Americans have never heard of. \u201cI can\u2019t believe that this happened.\u201d
 
These aren\u2019t the words of an author trying to fire up the hype machine. Though the events recounted in Kinzer\u2019s Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control<\/a><\/em> took place a half-century ago, they\u2019re scandalous in a way that transcends time.
 
For much of his 22-year CIA career, Gottlieb ran mind-control projects designed to help America defeat Communism. In the \u201950s and \u201960s, Kinzer writes, Gottlieb \u201cdirected the application of unknowable quantities and varieties of drugs into\u201d countless people, searching for the narcotic recipe that might allow him to mold his human test subjects\u2019 thoughts and actions.
 
Gottlieb and a network of medical professionals gave LSD and other drugs to prisoners, hospital patients, government employees, and others\u2014many of whom had no idea they were being dosed. A CIA staffer died in highly suspicious fashion after Gottlieb had his drink spiked with LSD. Meanwhile, when his bosses considered killing a foreign leader, Gottlieb developed custom-made poisons. Numerous people were harmed by Gottlieb\u2019s work, but because he destroyed his files on the eve of his 1973 retirement, it\u2019s hard to quantify the carnage he wrought.
 
The broad outlines of Gottlieb\u2019s story have been public for years. Major newspapers ran obituaries when he died in 1999. In 2017, he was portrayed by actor Tim Blake Nelson in Errol Morris\u2019 <\/a>Wormwood<\/a><\/em>. But Kinzer\u2019s book, the first proper Gottlieb biography, includes fascinating new facts about the end of his career and fresh details about disturbing episodes he orchestrated.
 
Poisoner in Chief<\/em> describes Gottlieb\u2019s little-known participation in torture sessions at U.S. military sites in foreign countries and reports that in at least one case a doctor who worked with Gottlieb gave LSD to children. Gottlieb was \u201cthe Josef Mengele of the United States,\u201d Kinzer, a former New York Times<\/em> reporter and the author of many books, told me in a recent interview.
 
How did Gottlieb, the Bronx-born son of Hungarian Jews, become a man who would earn comparisons to a ghoulish Nazi doctor?
 
After getting a doctorate in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, Gottlieb joined the CIA in 1951, a time of fear and uncertainty. Just six years after the end of World War II, American troops were fighting in Korea. Washington was increasingly worried about what many believed was the existential threat posed by the Soviet Union. Gottlieb was on the job for a few weeks, Kinzer writes, when he was tapped \u201cto invigorate\u201d what would be known as the Artichoke project.
 
Artichoke\u2014the name was essentially meaningless; it might\u2019ve been a CIA boss\u2019 favorite vegetable\u2014gave Gottlieb broad license to carry out mind control projects. Kinzer cites a CIA memo that describes the mission: \u201cthe investigation of drug effects on ego control and volitional activities, i.e., can willfully suppressed information be elicited through drugs affecting higher nervous systems? If so, which agents are better for this purpose?\u201d
 
The CIA aimed to create truth serum to use on prisoners and other compounds that would help wipe away memories of events that would cause trouble for the agency. If all went as planned, intelligence officers would have the ability to program people to carry out missions like those later seen in Richard Condon\u2019s novel The Manchurian Candidate <\/em>and the subsequent movie.
 
Artichoke projects often amounted to \u201cmedical torture,\u201d Kinzer writes. Inspired in part by brutal experiments conducted by the Japanese military and the Nazis in the \u201940s, Artichoke included the \u201cdosing (of) unwilling patients with potent drugs, subjecting them to extremes of temperature and sound (and) strapping them to electroshock machines.\u201d Artichoke squads worked with impunity at American military sites in Europe and Asia. Such projects were closely guarded secrets, but Poisoner in Chief <\/em>contains details that will be new to most readers.
 
For instance, Kinzer notes that when \u201cArtichoke scientists came up with a new drug or other technique they wished to test\u2026 they asked the CIA station in South Korea to supply a batch [of] \u2018expendable\u2019 subjects.\u201d A related CIA memo said the subjects were needed for the testing of an unnamed but \u201cimportant new technique,\u201d adding, \u201cTechnique does not, not require disposal problems after application.\u201d This is ambiguous language, but it suggests that the CIA knew that in some cases, human test subjects might be killed in the process.
 
Gottlieb oversaw a scientific unit at Maryland\u2019s Camp Detrick (since renamed Fort Detrick), where chemists researched the effects of LSD, heroin, and other drugs, sometimes trying the substances themselves. But he was not just a creature of the lab. \u201cWe know that he participated in torture sessions in East Asia,\u201d Kinzer says, speaking from his home in Massachusetts. \u201cWe know that he made repeated visits to Germany, which, like Japan, was under U.S. occupation, so he didn\u2019t have to obey any laws. And he was also active in other parts of Europe.\u201d
 
In time, Gottlieb became intimately familiar with LSD\u2019s mind-altering effects. He admitted that he\u2019d used the drug more than 200 times. \u201cWhen I look at the variety of the projects that he was involved in,\u201d Kinzer says, \u201cfrom hypnotism to electroshock to parapsychology to handwriting analysis, I begin to think that maybe it was while he was on LSD that he was thinking, \u2018I got another idea.\u2019\u201d
 
By 1953, Kinzer writes, \u201cArtichoke had become one of the most violently abusive projects ever sponsored by an agency of the United States government.\u201d That year, Allen Dulles, one of Gottlieb\u2019s ardent backers, got the CIA\u2019s top job. The new boss, Kinzer writes, was among Washington\u2019s leading mind control proponents: \u201cDulles never recoiled from the most extreme implications of \u2018brain warfare.\u2019\u201d Dulles wanted \u201cto intensify and systematize\u201d the work done under Artichoke, Kinzer adds, and he tapped Gottlieb to head a new program: MK-ULTRA, named for the \u201cultra-sensitive\u201d activities it was expected to carry out.
 
With a generous budget and an \u201ceffectively unlimited supply\u201d of LSD\u2014the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly manufactured the hallucinogenic drug for the CIA\u2014Gottlieb became perhaps \u201cthe most powerful unknown American of the 20th century,\u201d Kinzer says.
 
A key MK-ULTRA initiative involved medical professionals who agreed to administer drugs to their patients\u2014often without the patients\u2019 knowledge or consent. For instance, when Gottlieb wanted to know how much LSD a body could withstand, he got in touch with Harris Isbell, a researcher at a Lexington, Kentucky addiction center who had made his curiosity about LSD known in a letter to the CIA.
 
Working with a group of men who \u201cwere not told what sort of drug they would be fed or what its effects might be,\u201d Kinzer writes, Isbell administered large doses of LSD. He reported that the men experienced anxiety, hallucinations, and \u201cchoking.\u201d As always with CIA projects of this kind, it\u2019s tough to say how much damage was done. But Kinzer writes that at least one patient did speak out, saying that \u201cfor the rest of his life he suffered from delusions, paranoia, panic attacks, and suicidal impulses.\u201d
 
Another keen CIA collaborator chaired the pharmacology department at Emory University. \u201cAs subjects,\u201d Kinzer writes, Dr. Carl Pfeiffer \u201cused inmates at the federal prison in Atlanta and at a juvenile detention center in Bordentown, New Jersey,\u201d administering depressants and hallucinogens in volumes that resulted in seizures and hallucinations that lasted for days. One of Pfeiffer\u2019s subjects was James \u201cWhitey\u201d Bulger, who later became a notorious Boston gangland killer. Bulger said that as a young inmate, he was given LSD daily for more than a year.
 
Another doctor\u2014a New York allergist named Harold Abramson, who got an $85,000 MK-ULTRA stipend\u2014\u201cdeveloped a special curiosity about the impact of mind-altering drugs on children,\u201d Kinzer writes. \u201cHe closely monitored experiments, including one in which 12 \u2018pre-puberty\u2019 boys were fed psilocybin, and another in which 14 children between the ages of six and 11, diagnosed as schizophrenic, were given 100 micrograms of LSD each day for six weeks.\u201d
 
In Manhattan, meanwhile, Gottlieb helped set up a CIA safe house, where, with the hands-on help of a local narcotics cop, \u201cunsuspecting citizens would be lured and surreptitiously drugged,\u201d their behavior monitored via surveillance equipment in an adjoining apartment.<\/p>\n

It was around this time that Gottlieb attended a retreat with some other CIA men. The colleagues began drinking, and a few minutes later, Kinzer writes, \u201cGottlieb asked if anyone was feeling odd. Several said they were. Gottlieb then told them that their drinks had been spiked with LSD.\u201d The incident triggered an emotional crisis in one of the men, a scientist named Frank Olson. Days later, Olson plunged to his death from the window of a Manhattan hotel. As seen in Morris\u2019 film Wormwood<\/em>, there\u2019s compelling circumstantial evidence that Olson was murdered because the CIA feared he would divulge one of the secret projects he\u2019d worked on.
 
One of Gottlieb\u2019s most remarkable duties involved adversarial foreign heads of state. According to colleagues, he prepared \u201ca pre-poisoned tube of toothpaste\u201d meant for Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba (it went unused) and ran a scientific team that considered a bizarre plot to disgrace Fidel Castro. Believing that the Cuban leader\u2019s charisma was linked to his facial hair, Gottlieb wanted to have thallium salts sprinkled in his boots. \u201cHis beard would then fall out,\u201d Kinzer writes, \u201cleaving him open to ridicule and overthrow.\u201d This, of course, never came to pass.
 
By 1963, MK-ULTRA\u2019s final year, Gottlieb and his colleagues \u201cwere forced to face their cosmic failure,\u201d Kinzer writes. \u201cTheir research had shown them that mind control is a myth\u2014that seizing another person\u2019s mind and reprogramming it is impossible.\u201d
 
Nonetheless, Kinzer believes that Gottlieb left a deeply lamentable imprint on the modern CIA. He says there\u2019s \u201ca direct line between Sidney Gottlieb\u2019s work and techniques that U.S. agents taught to Latin American security services in the 1960s and \u201970s\u2014these techniques were also used in Vietnam\u2014and then later on to the techniques of torture and so-called extreme interrogation that were used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.\u201d
 
Though Gottlieb\u2019s decision to destroy his files means that there\u2019s much we\u2019ll never know, Kinzer appears to be the first journalist to directly tie his departure from the CIA to the scandal that ended Richard Nixon\u2019s presidency. Gottlieb\u2019s team, he reports, \u201cprepared false identity papers for two of\u201d the men who broke into the Democratic National Committee\u2019s offices in the Watergate complex. The break-in set off a chain of events that result in the ouster of CIA Director Richard Helms. \u201cHelms,\u201d Kinzer explains, \u201cwas Gottlieb\u2019s number one promoter and enabler and sponsor for 20 years.\u201d Nixon fired Helms in February 1973. Gottlieb retired four months later.
 
After the CIA, Gottlieb took steps to reinvent himself. The long-married father of four joined an arts council in his Virginia town, acted in local holiday plays and worked with children who had speech problems. \u201cIt definitely seems from the recollections of people that knew him in his last 20 years that he was a very gentle soul, kind of an eco-hippy,\u201d Kinzer says. \u201cNobody had any idea of what he had done in the past, but he was tormented by it.\u201d
 
Gottlieb died in March 1999, and when a cause of death wasn\u2019t announced, at least two observers came to believe that he killed himself to derail intensifying legal inquiries into his actions. Eric Olson\u2014Frank\u2019s son\u2014and Sidney Bender, a lawyer for a man who says his life was ruined by a Gottlieb dosing, had both tried to hold Gottlieb to account while he was alive. Instead, Kinzer writes, \u201cthey drank a toast to the death of a man they considered a monster.\u201d <\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/the-sinister-scientist-behind-the-cias-mind-control-mayhem?ref=home<\/a><\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This article originally appeared in THE DAILY BEAST: <\/em>The Sinister Scientist Behind the CIA\u2019s Mind-Control Mayhem<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Possibilities for Consideration: Government Approved<\/h2>\n

How is it, you may ask, that a country sworn to protect its citizens and to be the very pinnacle of human rights in every policy and foreign relation would be responsible for the deaths of so many Americans on American soil? It kind of makes you wonder what the federal government is up to today under the guise of national security.<\/em><\/p>\n

You may also wonder how they would have received permission from the American people to do what they did. Oh yeah. That's right. The American people had no idea what their government was doing. Perhaps if Americans once again took interest in a by the people for the people<\/em> type of self-governing union, nightmare stories like the Poisoner in Chief <\/em>would just be another work of fiction.<\/p>\n

If you knew this type of experimentation was being conducted by your local government at state level, would you speak up about it? If yes, would you hold the federal government to the same standards?<\/p>\n

Add Your Insight<\/h2>\n

Take a moment and examine\u2026<\/p>\n