Thursday, October 17, 2019

Largest dark web child porn marketplace closed, Royal Canadian Mounted Police - sex abuse/harassment, California sex abuse law -thousands of claims, Little to no oversight - 1,700 accused priests


 
- Feds take down the world's 'largest dark web child porn marketplace'
" 200,000 unique videos or almost 8 terabytes of data showing sex acts involving children, toddlers and infants"
 
 - The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a beloved national icon, rocked by sexual abuse and harassment "more than 500 potential class members"
 
- Diocese pays $4.4M in abuse compensation to 57 victims
 
- Without oversight, scores of accused priests commit crimes
"Nearly 1,700 priests and other clergy members that the Roman Catholic Church considers credibly accused of child sexual abuse are living under the radar with little to no oversight from religious authorities or law enforcement"
"These priests, deacons, monks and lay people now teach middle-school math. They counsel survivors of sexual assault. They work as nurses and volunteer at nonprofits aimed at helping at-risk kids. They live next to playgrounds and day care centers. They foster and care for children."
 
 
- California sex abuse law likely to spur thousands of claims
"He predicted 5,000 to 10,000 lawsuits under the new state law....
He said the church paid more than $1.2 billion to hundreds of victims in 2003"
 
 
Feds take down the world's 'largest dark web child porn marketplace'

Prosecutors say the vast online store was run by Jong Woo Son, currently serving a prison sentence in South Korea on charges related to child pornography.
The dark web, a section of the internet that can only be accessed via a Tor browser, is designed to protect users' tracks online and obscure digital footprints
Oct. 16, 2019 By Cyrus Farivar and Andrew Blankstein
 
WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors have filed multiple charges against a 23-year-old South Korean man accused of running what they call the world's "largest dark web child porn marketplace."
The now-shuttered English-language site, called "Welcome to Video," contained more than 200,000 unique videos or almost 8 terabytes of data showing sex acts involving children, toddlers and infants, according to the 18-page criminal indictment unsealed here Wednesday, and processed 7,300 Bitcoin transactions worth more than $730,000.
 
According to prosecutors, the vast online store was run by Jong Woo Son, a South Korean citizen currently serving an 18-month prison sentence in his home country after his conviction on charges related to child pornography. The site operated from June 2015 until it was seized and shut down by U.S. authorities in March 2018.
At a press conference Wednesday morning, U.S. officials said 337 suspected users of the site had been arrested worldwide to date....
 
In addition to Son, more than 300 other suspects have been arrested in South Korea as of Wednesday, while still more suspects were identified in other countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, including a Washington, D.C., man who was caught with the equivalent of 50 years worth of video footage he had downloaded.
 
The website ran solely on the dark web, a section of the internet that can only be accessed via a Tor browser, which is designed to protect users' tracks online and obscure digital footprints. Users could purchase videos using cryptocurrency and an annual membership was priced at 0.03 bitcoins (at current exchange rates, around $300).
 
Members earned points by uploading new and popular videos to the site or by inviting new members. The site sought only child sexual abuse imagery, according to prosecutors — its landing page stated in red bold type: "Do not upload adult porn." Prosecutors have also filed a related civil forfeiture case, seeking to seize Bitcoin assets held across 24 different accounts....

 
Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
South Korean National and Hundreds of Others Charged Worldwide in the Takedown of the Largest Darknet Child Pornography Website, Which was Funded by Bitcoin
Dozens of Minor Victims Who Were Being Actively Abused by the Users of the Site Rescued
 
Jong Woo Son, 23, a South Korean national, was indicted by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia for his operation of Welcome To Video, the largest child sexual exploitation market by volume of content. The nine-count indictment was unsealed today along with a parallel civil forfeiture action. Son has also been charged and convicted in South Korea and is currently in custody serving his sentence in South Korea. An additional 337 site users residing in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington State and Washington, D.C. as well as the United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Brazil and Australia have been arrested and charged....
 
According to the indictment, on March 5, 2018, agents from the IRS-CI, HSI, National Crime Agency in the United Kingdom, and Korean National Police in South Korea arrested Son and seized the server that he used to operate a Darknet market that exclusively advertised child sexual exploitation videos available for download by members of the site. The operation resulted in the seizure of approximately eight terabytes of child sexual exploitation videos, which is one of the largest seizures of its kind. The images, which are currently being analyzed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), contained over 250,000 unique videos, and 45 percent of the videos currently analyzed contain new images that have not been previously known to exist.
 
Welcome To Video offered these videos for sale using the cryptocurrency bitcoin. Typically, sites of this kind give users a forum to trade in these depictions. This Darknet website is among the first of its kind to monetize child exploitation videos using bitcoin. In fact, the site itself boasted over one million downloads of child exploitation videos by users. Each user received a unique bitcoin address when the user created an account on the website. An analysis of the server revealed that the website had more than one million bitcoin addresses, signifying that the website had capacity for at least one million users.
 
The agencies have shared data from the seized server with law enforcement around the world to assist in identifying and prosecuting customers of the site. This has resulted in leads sent to 38 countries and yielded arrests of 337 subjects around the world. The operation has resulted in searches of residences and businesses of approximately 92 individuals in the United States. Notably, the operation is responsible for the rescue of at least 23 minor victims residing in the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom, who were being actively abused by the users of the site....

 
Jong Woo Son indictment
SEALED I
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA AUG - 9 2013
Clerk. U.S. District Bankruptcy
Holding a Criminal Term Courts for the District of Columbia
Grand Jury Sworn in May 3, 2018
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
JONG WOO SON, Defendant.
Case: 1:18?cr?00243
Assigned TO Judge McFadden, Trevor N.
Assign. Date 8/9/2018....

 
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a beloved national icon, rocked by sexual abuse and harassment
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Bob Paulson — at a 2016 news conference with Janet Merlo, center, and Linda Davidson, right — apologized to women subject to sexual harassment and abuse. “You came to the RCMP wanting to personally contribute to your community and we failed you,” he said. “We hurt you. For that, I am truly sorry.”
By Amanda Coletta
Oct. 17, 2019
 
Silina Sargis showed up at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police academy in 2010 to start what she hoped would be her dream career. But soon, she says, a sergeant major began harassing and bullying her....
 
Like the maple leaf and the moose, the Mountie with the scarlet tunic and the wide-brimmed Stetson is one of the most widely recognized and beloved symbols of Canada. But now sexual misconduct allegations are rocking the institution.
 
Hundreds of women have come forward to describe the national police force as an old boys’ club, where men boorishly commented on women’s bodies and made unwanted advances. Women report finding sex toys left on their desks and pornographic images in their files. They say men exposed themselves, groped and raped them.
 
The RCMP has set aside $150 million to settle two class-action lawsuits over sexual misconduct — the first in 2016 with female officers, and now, with women who worked or volunteered for the agency in non-policing roles. Federal Judge Michael Phelan held a hearing on the settlement Thursday in Vancouver. He is expected to rule on whether to approve it within the next month.
Women who experienced sexual harassment within the RCMP say they were frightened into silence. When they did complain, they say, they were ostracized or suffered retaliation.... 
 
The settlements cover claims dating to 1974, when women were first permitted to join the RCMP. More than 3,100 applied for the 2016 class-action fund — three times the number expected. But that might represent just a fraction of the complaints. The true number might never be known publicly, because some are settled out of court and subject to nondisclosure agreements.
 
Attorney Angela Bespflug, who represents two of the three lead plaintiffs in the current action, says she has been contacted by more than 500 potential class members. If the court approves the settlement, she says, she expects the number of class members to double....

 

Diocese pays $4.4M in abuse compensation to 57 victims October 17, 2019
GREENSBURG, Pa. (AP) — A Pennsylvania diocese has announced a nearly $4.4 million payout to 57 victims of sexual abuse by its clergy and seminarians.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Greensburg made the announcement Thursday about the payment through the out-of-court compensation program.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that most dioceses in the state set up similar compensation funds in the wake of a 2018 grand jury report that detailed a seven-decade history of allegations of sexual abuse by members of the clergy and subsequent cover-ups by bishops.
The Greensburg diocese says it paid $4,350,000, averaging out to about $75,000 for each claimant....

 
Without oversight, scores of accused priests commit crimes
By CLAUDIA LAUER and MEGHAN HOYER October 5, 2019
 
Nearly 1,700 priests and other clergy members that the Roman Catholic Church considers credibly accused of child sexual abuse are living under the radar with little to no oversight from religious authorities or law enforcement, decades after the first wave of the church abuse scandal roiled U.S. dioceses, an Associated Press investigation has found.
 
These priests, deacons, monks and lay people now teach middle-school math. They counsel survivors of sexual assault. They work as nurses and volunteer at nonprofits aimed at helping at-risk kids. They live next to playgrounds and day care centers. They foster and care for children.
 
And in their time since leaving the church, dozens have committed crimes, including sexual assault and possessing child pornography, the AP’s analysis found.
A recent push by Roman Catholic dioceses across the U.S. to publish the names of those it considers to be credibly accused has opened a window into the daunting problem of how to monitor and track priests who often were never criminally charged and, in many cases, were removed from or left the church to live as private citizens....
 
The review found hundreds of priests held positions of trust, many with access to children. More than 160 continued working or volunteering in churches, including dozens in Catholic dioceses overseas and some in other denominations. Roughly 190 obtained professional licenses to work in education, medicine, social work and counseling — including 76 who, as of August, still had valid credentials in those fields.....

California sex abuse law likely to spur thousands of claims
By DON THOMPSON October 14, 2019

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Thousands of lawsuits will be filed against alleged child molesters as well as the institutions that employed them under a new California law taking effect next year, attorneys predicted Monday.
The California School Boards Association called the new law an “existential threat” to smaller school districts. Attorneys said the Roman Catholic Church, Boy Scouts of America and other institutions will also face a flood of lawsuits that could force bankruptcies.
 
They are newly possible because the law that Gov. Gavin Newsom approved on Sunday gives victims of childhood sexual abuse until age 40, up from age 26, to file lawsuits. It also gives victims of all ages three years to sue, starting Jan. 1.
 
More than 400 lawsuits were filed in New York state in August on just the first day that state opened a one-year window for victims to sue. New York and New Jersey this year both raised their statutes of limitations to age 55, with New Jersey’s law taking effect in December.
 
About 1,000 lawsuits, the vast majority against the Catholic church, were filed when California lifted the statute of limitations for one year in 2003, recalled John Manly, who represents Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman and other survivors of USA Gymnastics sexual abuse, as well as alleged victims of former University of Southern California gynecologist George Tyndall.
But victims are much more willing to speak up than they were 16 years ago, he said. And the new law allows for triple damages if victims can prove that employers tried to cover up the abuse.
 
“I think you’re going to see organizations that have been essentially engaging in systemic criminality by protecting pedophiles are about to be exposed. It’s not just the Catholic hierarchy, it’s private schools, it’s public schools, it’s physicians,” Manly said. “This could cause some organizations to go bankrupt. It probably will.”
He predicted 5,000 to 10,000 lawsuits under the new state law....
 
He said the church paid more than $1.2 billion to hundreds of victims in 2003, and hundreds of millions of dollars since then for therapy and other services to survivors. Six California dioceses last month began a new private independent compensation program for child victims....
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Monday, October 7, 2019

Recovered Memories and Dissociative Amnesia - Scientific Evidence and Accuracy Rates

Recovered Memories and Dissociative Amnesia - Scientific Evidence and Accuracy Rates

Recovered Memories

Recovered memories have been defined as the phenomenon of partially or fully losing parts of memories of traumatic events, and then later recovering part or all of the memories into conscious awareness. They have also been defined as the recollections of memories that are believed to have been unavailable for a certain period of time. There is very strong scientific evidence that recovered memories exist.This has been shown in many scientific studies. The content of recovered memories have fairly high corroboration rates.

Scientific evidence

There are many studies that have proven that the recovered memories of traumatic events exist. Brown, Scheflin and Hammond found 43 studies that showed recovered memories for traumatic events. The Recovered Memory Project has collected 101 corroborated cases of recovered memories. Hopper's research shows that amnesia for childhood sexual abuse is "beyond dispute." He states that "at least 10% of people sexually abused in childhood will have periods of complete amnesia for their abuse, followed by experiences of delayed recall" In one study of women with previously documented histories of sexual abuse, 38% of the women did not remember the abuse that had happened 17 years before. Most recovered memories either precede therapy or the use of memory recovery techniques. One studied showed that five out of 19 women with histories of familial sexual abuse either forgot specific details or had "blank periods" for these memories. Another study showed that "40% reported a period of forgetting some or all of the abuse". Herman and Harvey's study showed that 16% of abuse survivors had "complete amnesia followed by delayed recall". Corwin's individual case study provides evidence of the existence of recovered memories on videotape.

Other researchers state:

Research has shown that traumatized individuals respond by using a variety of psychological mechanisms. One of the most common means of dealing with the pain is to try and push it out of awareness. Some label the phenomenon of the process whereby the mind avoids conscious acknowledgment of traumatic experiences as dissociative amnesia. Others use terms such as repression, dissociative state, traumatic amnesia, psychogenic shock, or motivated forgetting. Semantics aside, there is near-universal scientific acceptance of the fact that the mind is capable of avoiding conscious recall of traumatic experiences.
A body of empirical evidence indicates that it is common for abused children to reach adulthood without conscious awareness of the trauma.

There is scientific evidence in support of the phenomena of dissociation and recovered memory in Holocaust survivors.

Corroboration rates

Many studies show high corroboration rates for recovered memories of traumatic events. These rates vary from 50 - 75%, 64%, 77%, 50%, 75%, 68%,47%, and 70% . One study showed amnesia in 12 murderers, with "objective evidence of severe abuse...obtained in 11 cases". There are also additional studies showing the corroboration of recovered memories.
Brown, Scheflin, & Whitfield. (1999). Recovered Memories: The Current Weight of the Evidence in Science and in the Courts Journal of Psychiatry & Law, 27, 5-156. "Brown, Scheflin and Hammond reviewed 43 studies relevant to the subject of traumatic memory and found that every study that examined the question of dissociative amnesia in traumatized populations demonstrated that a substantial minority partially or completely forget the traumatic event experienced, and later recover memories of the event. By 1999, over 68 studies had been published that document dissociative amnesia after childhood sexual abuse. In fact, no study that has looked for evidence of traumatic or dissociative amnesia after child sexual abuse has failed to find it."
 
110 Corroborated Cases of Recovered Memory:  http://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory/case-archive/ 

Research discussing corroboration and accuracy of recovered memories  https://pages.uoregon.edu/dynamic/jjf/suggestedrefs.html 

Recall of childhood trauma: a prospective study of women's memories of child sexual abuse.

One hundred twenty-nine women with previously documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked detailed questions about their abuse histories to answer the question "Do people actually forget traumatic events such as child sexual abuse, and if so, how common is such forgetting?" A large proportion of the women (38%) did not recall the abuse that had been reported 17 years earlier. Women who were younger at the time of the abuse and those who were molested by someone they knew were more likely to have no recall of the abuse. The implications for research and practice are discussed. Long periods with no memory of abuse should not be regarded as evidence that the abuse did not occur. 
 

Research on the Effect of Trauma on Memory

Research has shown that traumatized individuals respond by using a variety of psychological mechanisms. One of the most common means of dealing with the pain is to try and push it out of awareness. Some label the phenomenon of the process whereby the mind avoids conscious acknowledgment of traumatic experiences as dissociative amnesia .  Others use terms such as repression , dissociative state , traumatic amnesia, psychogenic shock, or motivated forgetting .  Semantics aside, there is near-universal scientific acceptance of the fact that the mind is capable of avoiding conscious recall of traumatic experiences. http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/tm/tm.html 

 

Memory disturbances and dissociative amnesia in Holocaust survivors

The following articles provide compelling scientific evidence in support of the phenomena of dissociation and recovered memory in Holocaust survivors. In addition to supporting the phenomenon in general, these articles also counter the argument that recovered memory is (a) no more than a recent cultural “fad” and (b) specific to false accusers of sexual abuse.  http://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory/scholarly-resources/holocaust/ 
 

Dissociation & the Fragmentary Nature of Traumatic Memories: Overview & Exploratory Study 

"a systematic exploratory study of 46 subjects with PTSD which indicates that traumatic memories are retrieved, at least initially, in the form of dissociated mental imprints of sensory and affective elements of the traumatic experience: as visual, olfactory, affective, auditory and kinesthetic experiences. Over time, subjects reported the gradual emergence of a personal narrative that some believe can be properly referred to as “explicit memory”....Of the 35 subjects with childhood trauma, 15 (43%) had suffered significant, or total amnesia for their trauma at some time of their lives. Twenty seven of the 35 subjects with childhood trauma (77%) reported confirmation of their childhood trauma."http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/vanderk2.php 
 

Kluft, RP (1995). The confirmation and disconfirmation of memories of abuse in Dissociative Identity Disorder patients: A naturalistic study. Dissociation 8: 253-8. "Nineteen, or 56%, had instances of the confirmation of recalled abuses. Ten of the 19, or 53%, had always recalled the abuses that were confirmed. However, 13 of the 19, or 68%, obtained documentation of events that were recovered in the course of therapy, usually with the use of hypnosis. Three patients, or 9%, had instances in which the inaccuracy of their recollection could be demonstrated." 
 

Leadership Council Amicus Brief Appellant on Appeal from a Judgment of the Superior Court Brief of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court SJC No. 10382 AC No. 2007-p-0886 Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Appellee V. Paul Shanley, Leadership Council as Amicus Curiae 
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Thursday, October 3, 2019

Children of God cult, Doomsday Cult, MK-ULTRA, CIA, Mind Control


 
- The siblings who escaped the Children of God cult
- Mom Sentenced in Deaths of 2 Girls Banished by Doomsday Cult
- MK-ULTRA, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings
 
The siblings who escaped the Children of God cult
By Mike Farrell BBC Scotland News 3 October 2019
 
Jonathan Watt and Verity Carter's father was the first man to be convicted of sexual abuse linked to the Children of God cult in Scotland.
The cult started in the US in the 1960s but Jonathan and Verity were brought up under its strict teachings in "communes" around Scotland in the 80s and early 90s.

The religious sect, which was also known as The Family, has faced allegations of widespread sexual and physical abuse of children, including sexual violence, incest, and brainwashing.
Last year, Verity and Jonathan's father Alexander Watt was convicted of four charges of sexually abusing his daughter and another child in Renfrewshire and on the east coast of Scotland when they were part of the cult.
 
Following his conviction, Verity, who is now 39, began to speak out about her ordeal but her younger brother has never publicly discussed his upbringing before.
Jonathan told BBC Scotland's The Nine he was not sexually abused but was the subject of "daily beatings" while growing up in the cult.
 
He says: "The only way you can sustain a cult is you've got to have total control. You're living in a world inside a world. You've got no contact with the outside world.
"The only way to stop contact is to kill curiosity, and the only way to do that is basically to drill into you from when you were born that you're useless, you're worthless, you're ugly. Unfortunately with a cult like that, where you are outside of the law, it's a safe haven for some abusive, violent adults."
 
The Children of God began in the United States in the late 1960s and built on the 'free love' philosophy of counter-culture America.
 
Its founder, David Berg, told members that God was love and love was sex, so there should be no limits, regardless of age or relationship.
By the 1970s Berg's cult claimed to have 10,000 full-time members in 130 communities around the world....

 
Mom Sentenced in Deaths of 2 Girls Banished by Doomsday Cult
A Colorado woman has received life in prison without parole in the deaths of her daughters who were banished to a car without food or water by members of a doomsday religious group because the girls were thought to have been impure.
By Associated Press, Wire Service Content Oct. 1, 2019
 
TELLURIDE, Colo. (AP) — A Colorado woman will spend the rest of her life behind bars for killing her two daughters after she and other members of a doomsday religious group banished them to a car without food or water because the girls were thought to have been impure.
Nashika Bramble was sentenced to life in prison without parole Tuesday in the deaths of Makayla Roberts, 10, and Hannah Marshall, 8. She was convicted in July of two counts of first-degree murder.
 
The sisters' bodies were found in September 2017 in a car parked on a farm near Norwood, a town of about 500 people 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of the Telluride ski resort. Heat, dehydration and starvation killed the girls, and they had been dead for several weeks before their bodies were found, authorities said.
Bramble was a member of a religious group that moved to the property earlier that year, court documents say.
 
Investigators say they believe the group's spiritual leader, Madani Ceus of Haiti, declared that the two girls were possessed by unclean spirits during a past life and ordered them kept in a car without food or water for days as the others waited for the apocalypse before the 2017 solar eclipse....
 

This page includes information on mk-ultra, the CIA, mind control, Operation Paperclip and the Nazis, the 1995 congressional hearings, the 2010 veterans vs CIA court case,  Artichoke, the CIA Supreme Court cases, Ewen Cameron and the Sleep Room and the MK/Naomi project. https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/mc-documents-links/ 

The Shock Doctrine – by Naomi Klein – Chapter 1 – The Torture Lab – Ewen Cameron, the CIA and the maniacal quest to erase and remake the human mind.
http://books.google.com/books?id=b1uQNYbE8DkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:0805079831#PPA25,M1

1995 U. S. congressional hearing:

MKULTRA Victim Full Testimony (U.S. Mind Control Child Abuse Victims A-C Testimony, U.S. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Public Meeting, Washington DC, March 1995. Valerie Wolf (A), Chris DeNicola Tucson Arizona (B), Claudia Mullen (C): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbhpRmsEq44

1977 Congressional Hearings

Project MKULTRA, The CIA’s Program Of Research In Behavioral Modification
JOINT HEARING BEFORE THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
AND THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON HEALTH AND SCIENTIFIC
RESEARCH OF THE COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES
UNITED STATES SENATE NINETY-FIFTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION
AUGUST 3, 1977 http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/13inmate_ProjectMKULTRA.pdf

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Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

-“Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control”
- The mad scientist behind America’s mind-control quest with LSD
- The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments
 
" Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them."  
 
" They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation — all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it."
The mad scientist behind America’s mind-control quest with LSD
By Larry Getlen September 16, 2019

In his mid-20s, future crime kingpin Whitey Bulger spent time in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for hijacking and armed robbery. While there, he volunteered to be part of a drug experiment that sought to find a cure for schizophrenia.
Or so he was told.
 
In reality, the experiment sought to determine how much LSD the human mind could take before it snapped. Bulger was fed large doses of the drug nearly every day for 15 months without being told what it was.
He later wrote of the horrors he experienced during this time.
 
“Hallucinating. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.”
When Bulger asked to be released from the experiment, he was refused since, he was told, “We are close to finding the cure.”
 
Bulger, who was later convicted of 11 murders, may be an unsympathetic victim, but these same experiments were being conducted on unsuspecting civilians at the behest of one power-mad CIA official.
 
“Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control” 
by Stephen Kinzer tells the story of Gottlieb, a chemist obsessed with finding a way to control the human brain, no matter how many innocent minds he destroyed in the process....
 
Born in The Bronx in 1918, Gottlieb received a doctorate in biochemistry and after working several research jobs for the government, was recruited by the CIA in 1951 by Deputy Director Allen Dulles, who would later lead the agency.
Dulles believed that there were undiscovered methods for controlling the human mind, and that these processes could help the US win wars. He hired Gottlieb to lead the effort into mind-control research, which he named “Artichoke,” by any means necessary.
 
Many in the intelligence community were convinced that the Soviet Union and China had made great advancements in brainwashing, and they sought to perfect the technique themselves. Hypnosis and electroshock were among the methods tested, but Gottlieb became obsessed with the potential of LSD.
 
After sampling the drug himself and feeling “as though I am in a kind of transparent sausage skin that covers my whole body,” he began testing it on military volunteers. Soon after, he stopped caring whether people had volunteered and began administering the drug to unwitting subjects, including CIA trainees.
 
Gottlieb and many around him truly believed that LSD held the secret to controlling minds.
 
“CIA employees were given LSD and then induced to violate oaths and promises,” Kinzer writes. “In one [mock interrogation], a military officer swore never to reveal a secret, revealed it under the influence of LSD, and afterward forgot the entire episode . . . Gottlieb came to believe that [LSD] could be the key to mind control. He was the first acid visionary.”....
 
Gottlieb, given free rein by the CIA, authorized and funded “experiments” like this across the country, victimizing countless innocent people who simply sought relief for medical and psychological issues.
 
“Under Gottlieb’s direction, with Dulles’ encouragement . . . Artichoke had became one of the most violently abusive projects ever sponsored by an agency of the United States government,” Kinzer writes.
 
The eventual breadth of the program, which was rechristened MK-ULTRA and given an even larger budget, was stunning....
 
In time, Gottlieb was running similar safe houses around the world, and his experiments became even more audacious and cruel. When he decided to try to learn just how much LSD the human mind could take, he recruited prison doctors around the country. While Bulger was one victim, most were African American.
 
He also got more doctors and hospitals around the country involved, funneling the money through front groups to hide the CIA’s involvement.
 
At the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, “hundreds of students from Harvard, Emerson and MIT were paid $15 to drink a little vial of a clear, colorless, odorless liquid that might produce an altered state.” It was later found that “none of those involved in the experiments had the proper training or understanding to guide participants . . . [and] several [students] had negative reactions. One hanged herself in a clinic bathroom.”
 
In experiments conducted by a New York allergist named Harold Abramson, who received $85,000 from Gottlieb, Kinzer writes that “12 ‘pre-puberty’ boys were fed psilocybin, and 14 children between the ages of 6 and 11, diagnosed as schizophrenic, were given 100 micrograms of LSD each day for six weeks.”....
 
Gottlieb continued on at the CIA, working on more conventional spy-craft devices like rocket launchers and bomb sensors to help the Vietnam War effort.
He retired in 1973 after 22 years with the agency, destroying all the MK-ULTRA files (or so he thought) before he left.
 
When another secret CIA program was exposed by reporter Seymour Hersh in 1974, it ignited a slew of investigations into the CIA, and Gottlieb’s name was made public in regard to the LSD experiments in 1975. He eventually testified before Congress several times, but only after being granted immunity from prosecution.
 
By the end of his life, he was working as a speech pathologist for children. He died in 1999, and never paid for his cruelty....

 

The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments
Today, it’s a cutting-edge lab. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the U.S. government’s darkest experiments.
By STEPHEN KINZER September 15, 2019
 
In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them “double, triple and quadruple” doses of LSD for 77 days straight. No one knows what became of the victims. They may have died without knowing they were part of the CIA’s highly secretive program to develop ways to control minds—a program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, Fort Detrick.
 
Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. Seventy-six years ago, however, when the Army selected Detrick as the place to develop its super-secret plans to wage germ warfare, the area around the base looked much different. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. That’s because Detrick, still thriving today as the Army’s principal base for biological research and now encompassing nearly 600 buildings on 13,000 acres, was for years the nerve center of the CIA’s hidden chemical and mind control empire.
 
....For decades, though, much of what went on at the base was a closely held secret. Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973. Some of its secrets have been revealed in declassified documents, through interviews and as a result of congressional investigations. Together, those sources reveal Detrick’s central role in MK-ULTRA and in the manufacture of poisons intended to kill foreign leaders....
 
Allen Dulles, who ran the CIA’s covert-operations directorate and would soon be promoted to direct the agency, considered his mind control project—first named Bluebird, then Artichoke, then MK-ULTRA—to be of supreme importance, the difference between the survival and extinction of the United States.
 
In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control. The man he chose, Sidney Gottlieb, was not part of the silver-spoon aristocracy from which most officers of the early CIA were recruited....
 
Gottlieb searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted in their place. He tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electroshock or sensory deprivation. In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky.
 
In Europe and East Asia, Gottlieb’s victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. One of those centers, built in the basement of a former villa in the German town of Kronberg, might have been the first secret CIA prison. While CIA scientists and their former Nazi comrades sat before a stone fireplace discussing the techniques of mind control, prisoners in basement cells were being prepared as subjects in brutal and sometimes fatal experiments.
These were the most gruesome experiments the U.S. government ever conducted on human beings. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. In another, captured North Koreans were given depressant drugs, then dosed with potent stimulants and exposed to intense heat and electroshock while they were in the weakened state of transition. These experiments destroyed many minds and caused an unknown number of deaths. Many of the potions, pills and aerosols administered to victims were created at Detrick.
 
One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. The CIA called it suicide. Olson’s family believes he was thrown from the window to prevent him from revealing what was brewing inside Camp Detrick....
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/15/cia-fort-detrick-stephen-kinzer-228109

 

The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'
September 9, 2019 Heard on Fresh Air Terry Gross


....On the CIA hiring Nazi doctors and Japanese torturers to learn methods
The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps.
Stephen Kinzer, author of 'Poisoner in Chief'
 
The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.
 
For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them.
 
Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Detrick in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin.
 
On the more extreme experiments Gottlieb conducted overseas
Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early '50s, and therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements in these places. ...
CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called "expendable." They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation — all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it....
 
 
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