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Author Topic: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens  (Read 41177 times)

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City Phase Two
« Reply #15 on: September 05, 2012, 07:32:59 pm »
Dugway tests weigh on former soldier's mind


Edward Bartling stands next to a B-29 bomber parked behind the Hill Air Force Base museum on Wednesday. Laura Seitz, Deseret News

Quote
HILL AIR FORCE BASE — New Jersey native Edward G. Bartling can't shake a few nagging questions when something vaults his memory back to the summer of 1960 and the shadowy military tests he observed then in a remote area of Utah.

Standing next to a B-29 bomber parked behind the Hill Air Force Base museum recently took him back to that time.

It was 48 years ago when Bartling, now 73, was a corporal stationed at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground. Back then, he watched soldiers take part in tests that exposed them to potentially dangerous materials being sprayed from a plane.

Exactly what those materials were, he still can't say for sure. But he is hopeful a new government Web site will provide some answers.

"At that time, we really didn't have an idea of what the heck was going on, nor did we have enough sense to question it," he said. "When you're in the service, you follow orders."

Bartling was drafted into the Army on Feb. 9, 1959. On Feb. 8, 1961, he got out, leaving behind the Army he knew to begin his life with Renee Johanson, with whom he raised six children.

For 30 years, Bartling worked for Alliant Techsystems (formerly Hercules), in the end as a supervisor over workers manufacturing rocket motors in West Valley City. Now, he makes wooden toys for children in his shop at home.

At Dugway, the Army transformed him from a Jersey boy raised on a poultry farm into a young man who would don a gas mask in the middle of the Utah desert. He would record on a clipboard what was happening to fellow soldiers during three tests.

Bartling was assigned to the 45th Chemical Company, 2nd Chemical Battalion. His unit's job was to make smoke, like the kind that covers miles of terrain to mask troop movements. That wouldn't be his only job.

He can remember using a B-29 at Dugway in decontamination exercises, but he's certain the materials used on the plane were inert. That B-29 was eventually disassembled and taken to Hill.

He had heard about all types of animals being used to test protective gear in what he knew as the "dog area" of Dugway's 1,300 square miles.

"Anything you can think of besides elephants and giraffes," Bartling laughed. He didn't see the animal tests nor did he wonder what happened to them afterward.

For the human tests, military officials who ranked higher than Bartling would ask for volunteers. If there weren't enough volunteers, he said, they would simply pick the lower-ranking grunts. Bartling was a corporal at the time, which meant he got to be an observer, with at least some protection.

Bartling said if the winds, air pressure and temperature were just right, everyone would be up by 4 a.m. and assemble on a test grid by dawn. Then a jet would fly in close to the ground and make a run while spraying something over the volunteers.

"We were always told it would never hurt us, that this stuff won't hurt you," Bartling said.


A crewman in a protective rubber suit takes a shower at a filling unit during tests at Dugway. (Deseret News archives)

Human test subjects

Quote
He watched the planes bank left or right and then up after their runs, noticing that the spray valves did not shut off right away. Bartling still wonders who or what was downwind — and what the damage might have been — in areas where the spray was released after the planes exited.

After the planes left, observers would wait and then approach men stationed at least about 30, 50 or 150 yards apart.

"I would talk to them and say, 'Hey, how you feeling? Can you see alright? Are you feeling any pain?"' Bartling said.

He only recorded station numbers, never any names. Their answers weren't always friendly.

"They might tell you, 'Kiss my butt' or 'Give me your damn gas mask' or 'Get the hell out of here, I'm not doing this anymore,"' Bartling said. "That wasn't a fun time."

Bartling can recall one distinct smell out on the test grid after one of the tests: freshly mowed hay. But there were no hay fields. What that smell was, Bartling isn't sure.

Bartling's long-smoldering questions relate to those tests and an infamous incident in 1968, after he was out of the Army, when a nerve-gas accident killed 6,000 sheep in nearby Skull Valley. Some of the more than 2,700 pounds of nerve agent sprayed from a plane in March of that year drifted off base, killing sheep and reportedly harming humans who said that they experienced nervous-system related illnesses.

Bartling wants to know what the test was for that killed the sheep, how many humans might have been harmed and what else, or who, was downwind.

"They didn't do them just for fun," Bartling said about open-air tests at Dugway. As for the dead sheep, he added, "My big question is this: Who was in the test grid or what was in the test grid to do the test spray? They're not going to spray (nerve) agent just for nothing."


A 1961 aerial photo shows the flow of toxic gas in the Dugway Proving Ground test grid area. (Deseret News archives)

Dugway tests weigh on former soldier's mind
By Stephen Speckman, Deseret News
« Last Edit: September 05, 2012, 08:37:42 pm by zorgon »

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City Phase Two
« Reply #16 on: September 05, 2012, 07:50:50 pm »
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« Last Edit: September 05, 2012, 08:39:18 pm by zorgon »

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #17 on: September 05, 2012, 10:05:00 pm »
Project Bacchus

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Project Bacchus was a covert investigation by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency US Defense Department to determine whether it is possible to construct a bioweapons production facility with off-the-shelf equipment.

Revelation to the public

The secret Project Bacchus was revealed to the public in a September 2001 article in The New York Times. Reporters Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad collaborated to write the article. It is presumed that the reporters had knowledge of the program for at least several months; shortly after the article appeared they published a book that detailed the story further. The book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and the article are the only publicly available sources concerning Project Bacchus and its sister projects, Clear Vision and Jefferson.

Project

Bacchus ran from 1999-2000 and investigated whether "would-be" terrorists could build an anthrax production facility and remain undetected. In the two-year simulation, the facility was constructed, and production of anthrax-like bacterium was successfully completed. The participating scientists were able to produce about one kilogram of highly-refined bacterial particles.

Anthrax in Florida and New York "the same strain"
October 2001 by Debora MacKenzie


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The anthrax sent to media offices in New York and Florida was the same strain, US health authorities have announced. It was also milled to fine particles - a process thought to be technically challenging, leading to charges that whoever made it has the backing of a state.

Forty-five people in the US and three in Kenya have so far tested positive to exposure to anthrax. Offices in New York, Washington and Boca Raton, Florida have been hit. On Wednesday, David Fleming, deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, said laboratory analysis showed strains sent to the American Media office in Florida and to NBC's headquarters in New York were the same.

This suggests a single attacker in both incidents. There were also similarities between the letters that carried anthrax to NBC and to Senator Tom Daschle's office in Washington on Monday. But information is not yet available on the strain used in that incident.

Tucker, Jonathan B. "Biological Threat Assessment: Is the Cure Worse Than the Disease?", Arms Control Today, October 2004, accessed January 6, 2009.

"U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits", The New York Times, September 4, 2001, accessed January 6, 2009.





Project Clear Vision

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Project Clear Vision was a covert investigation of Soviet-built biological bomblets conducted by the Battelle Memorial Institute under contract with the CIA. The legality of this project under the Biological Weapons Convention is highly disputed.

Revelation to the public

The secret Project Clear Vision was revealed to the public in a September 2001 article in The New York Times. Reporters Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad collaborated to write the article. It is presumed that the reporters had knowledge of the program for at least several months; shortly after the article appeared they published a book that detailed the story further. The book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and the article are the only publicly available sources concerning Project Clear Vision and its sister projects, Bacchus and Jefferson.

Project

The project was completed from 1997–2000, during the Clinton Administration. The project's stated goal was to assess agent dissemination characteristics of the bomblets. However, program has received criticism due to the suspicions of its findings possibly being used in a covert bioweapons program.

Legality

As part of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the United States committed not to develop bioweapons. Moreover, the United States had not reported the secret projects in its annual confidence-building measure (CBM) declarations. The United States maintained that the program was fully consistent with the BWC and that the projects were defensive in nature.




Project Jefferson

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Project Jefferson was a covert U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency program designed to determine if the current anthrax vaccine was effective against genetically-modified bacteria. The program's legal status under the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention is disputed.

Revelation to the public

The secret Project Jefferson was revealed to the public in a September 4, 2001 article in The New York Times. Reporters Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad collaborated to write the article. It is presumed that the reporters had knowledge of the program for at least several months; shortly after the article appeared they published a book that detailed the story further. The book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, and the article are the only publicly available sources detailing Project Jefferson and its sister projects, Bacchus and Clear Vision.

Project

Project Jefferson began in 1997. Jefferson was designed to reproduce a strain of genetically-modified anthrax isolated by Russian scientists during the 1990s. The goal of the secret project was to determine whether or not the strain was resistant to the commercially available U.S. anthrax vaccine.

Legality

Project Jefferson was operated by the Defense Intelligence Agency and reviewed by lawyers at the Pentagon. Those lawyers determined that Project Jefferson was in line with the international treaty banning the production of bio-weapons, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Despite assertions from the Clinton and Bush administrations that the project, and its sisters, were legal, several international legal scholars disagreed.

Troubling was the fact that the clandestine program was omitted from BWC confidence-building measure (CBM) declarations.[ These measures were introduced to the BWC in 1986 and 1991 to strengthen the treaty, the U.S. had long been a proponent of their value and these tests damaged American credibility. U.S. desire to keep such programs secret was, according to Bush administration officials, a "significant reason" that the U.S. President rejected a draft agreement signed by 143 nations to strengthen the BWC.

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #18 on: September 05, 2012, 10:26:59 pm »
Project 4.1

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Project 4.1 was the designation for a medical study conducted by the United States of those residents of the Marshall Islands exposed to radioactive fallout from the March 1, 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, which had an unexpectedly large yield. Government and mainstream historical sources point to the study being organized on March 6 or March 7, 1954, six days after the Bravo shot.


The cover to the Project 4.1 Final Report, "Study of Response of Human Beings Accidentally Exposed to Significant Fallout Radiation."

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Project 4.1

In the wake of the Bravo accident, a new research section was added to the Castle Bravo Weapons Effects research section. Program 4, "Biomedical effects," was to include one project, Project 4.1, titled "Study of Response of Human Beings exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation due to Fall-out from High-Yield Weapons." Eugene P. Cronkite of the National Naval Medical Center was designated as Project Officer. Cronkite's instructions stressed the importance of secrecy surrounding the project:

    ...the project is classified SECRET RESTRICTED DATA. Due to possible adverse public reaction, you will specifically instruct all personnel in this project to be particularly careful not to discuss the purpose of this project and its background or findings with any except those who have specific "need to know."

The purpose of the project, as a 1982 Defense Nuclear Agency report explained, was both medical as well as for research purposes:

    The purposes of Project 4.1 were to (1) evaluate the severity of radiation injury to the human beings exposed, (2) provide for all necessary medical care, and (3) conduct a scientific study of radiation injuries to human beings.

As a Department of Energy Committee writing on the human radiation experiments wrote, "It appears to have been almost immediately apparent to the AEC and the Joint Task Force running the Castle series that research on radiation effects could be done in conjunction with the medical treatment of the exposed populations." The DOE report also concluded that "The dual purpose of what is now a DOE medical program has led to a view by the Marshallese that they were being used as 'guinea pigs' in a 'radiation experiment.'"

Organizations involved in the project included the Naval Medical Research Institute, the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, Patrol Squadron 29, the Naval Air Station, Kwajalein, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Applied Fisheries Laboratory at the University of Washington, and Hanford Atomic Power Operations. Three U.S. Navy ships were used in the project: USS Nicholas, USS Renshaw, and USS Philip. The primary study of the Marshallese was terminated around 75 days after the time of exposure. In July 1954 a meeting at the Division of Biology at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission decided to complete 6- and 12-month followup exposure studies, some of which were later written up as addendums to Project 4.1.


Path of nuclear fallout plume after U.S. nuclear weapons test Bravo (yield 15 Mt) on Bikini Atoll. It is the single worst contamination accident in U.S. nuclear history. The test was part of the Operation Castle. The Bravo event was an experimental thermonuclear device surface event. 1954 Chuck Hansen, The Swords of Armageddon: U.S. Nuclear Weapons Development Since 1945 (Sunnyvale, CA: Chukelea Publications, 1995).

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Some Marshallese have alleged that the exposure of the Marshallese was premeditated. In 1972, Micronesian Representative Ataji Balos charged at the Congress of Micronesia that the exposure during Bravo was purposeful so that the AEC could develop medical capabilities for treating those exposed to fallout during nuclear war, and charged that the Marshallese were chosen because of their marginal status in the world at large. According to a U.S. internal transcription of Balos' talk, Balos alleged that "The U.S. chose to make guinea pigs out of our people because they are not white but some brown natives in some remote Pacific islands. Medical treatment that Rongelapese and Utrikese have been receiving is also highly questionable." The AEC issued a staff comment denying these charges.

In 1994, a 1953 Castle Bravo program prospectus was found which included reference to Project 4.1 apparently written before the Bravo shot had occurred. The U.S. government responded that someone had gone back into the project list after the Bravo test to insert Project 4.1; thus the acts were not premeditated. All other U.S. documents point to Project 4.1 having been established after the Bravo test—most sources point to its having been organized on March 7, 1954. The final Project 4.1 report began in its preface with the statement that "Operation CASTLE did not include a biomedical program" (it mentions this in discussing the ad hoc nature by which the project personnel were assembled). All official and mainstream historical accounts of the Bravo test indicate that its high level of fallout was a result of a miscalculation in relation to its design and was not deliberate (see the Castle Bravo article for more information on the accident).

Barton C. Hacker, the official historian of U.S. nuclear testing exposures (who is, in the end, very critical of the U.S. handling of the Bravo incident), characterized the controversy in the following way:

    In March 1954, the AEC had quickly decided that learning how the Marshallese victims of Castle Bravo responded to their accidental exposure could be of immense medical and military value. Immediate action centered on seeing them evacuated and decontaminated, then cared for medically. But studies of their exposures and aftereffects also began. That effort became project 4.1 in the Castle experimental program. This unfortunate choice of terminology may help explain later charges that the AEC had deliberately exposed the Marshallese to observe the effects. Like the American radium dial painters of the 1920s and the Japanese of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Marshallese of 1954 inadvertently were to provide otherwise unobtainable data on the human consequences of high radiation exposures. Findings from project 4.1 soon began to appear in print.


Page 36 from the final report, showing four photographs of exposed Marshallese. Faces were been blotted out for privacy reasons.

Original captions were:

    Plate 3.1: Early hyperpigmented maculopapular neck legions at 15 days. Case 39, age 15, F.
    Plate 3.2: Neck legions at 28 days. Wet desquamation. White color is calamine lotion. Case 78, age 37, F.
    Plate 3.3: Repigmenting superifical neck lesions at 40 days. Hyperpigmented areas not completely desquamated. Case 34, age 15, F.
    Plate 3.4: Healed neck lesions at 77 days showing dusky pigmentation of back of neck. Case 39, age 15, F.


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Controversy continues however, fed by the legacy of mistrust sown by American nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, which involved relocating hundreds of people and rendering several atolls uninhabitable. While most sources do not think that the exposure was intentional, there is no dispute that the United States did carefully study the exposed Marshallese, but never obtained informed consent from the study subjects. This study of the Marshallese was in some cases beneficial for their treatment, and in other cases not. In these ways, the study of the exposed Marshallese reflects the same ethical lapses as were undertaken in other aspects of the secret human radiation experiments conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1940s and 1950s, which came to light only after the end of the Cold War.

According to the Final Project 4.1 report, the Bravo test exposed 239 Marshallese on the Utirik, Rongelap, and Ailinginae Atolls to significant level of radiation, and 28 Americans stationed on the Rongerik Atoll were also exposed. Those on the Rongelap Atoll were the most seriously affected, receiving approximately 175 rads of radiation before they were evacuated. Those on Ailinginae received 69 rads, those on Utirik received 14 rads, and the Americans on Rongerik received an average dose of 78 rads. Most of those exposed did not immediately show signs of radiation sickness, though within a few days other effects of significant radiation exposure manifested: loss of hair and significant skin damage, including "raw, weeping lesions", among the Rongelap and Ailinginae groups. The lesions healed quickly, however, consistent with radiation exposure.

The report abstract concluded that "estimates of total body burden indicate that there is no long term hazard." Additional follow-up checks on the Marshallese studied in Project 4.1 were conducted at regular intervals afterwards every year since 1954. Though the Marshallese experienced far milder immediate effects than the Japanese fishermen exposed to Bravo fallout on the fishing boat Daigo Fukury? Maru, the long-term effects were more pronounced. For the first decade after the test, the effects were ambiguous and statistically difficult to correlate to radiation exposure: miscarriages and stillbirths among exposed Rongelap women doubled in the first five years after the accident, but then returned to normal; some developmental difficulties and impaired growth appeared in children, but in no clear-cut pattern. In the decades that followed, though, the effects were undeniable. Children began to suffer disproportionately from thyroid cancer (due to exposure to radioiodines), and almost a third of those exposed developed neoplasms by 1974.

The results of the original Project 4.1 were published by the study's authors in professional medical journals, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Project 4.1 From Wikipedia

References and Papers

E.P. Cronkite, V.P. Bond, L.E. Browning, W.H. Chapman, S.H. Cohn, R.A. Conard, C.L. Dunham, R.S. Farr, W.S. Hall, R. Sharp, N.R. Shulman, Study of Response of Human Beings Accidentally Exposed to Significant Fallout Radiation, Operation CASTLE, Project 4.1, Naval Medical Research Institute, Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, Defense Atomic Support Agency, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Report #WT-923 (October 1954)

Edwin J. Martin and Richard H. Rowland, "Castle Series, 1951", Defense Nuclear Agency Report DNA 6035F (1 April 1982), p. 186 and 188.

James Reeves to Frank D. Peel, "Establishment of Program 4 and Project 4.1 in Castle" (11 March 1954)

Quote is from unclassified telegram DISTAD Palau to SECSTATE Wash. DC, 27 Jan 72, Document 48025, CIC

Castle Bravo nuclear test, 1954

Operation Castle 1954 - Pacific Proving Ground


Operation Castle 1954 - Pacific Proving Ground








Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #19 on: September 06, 2012, 12:22:35 am »
Project CHATTER

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Project CHATTER was a United States Navy program beginning in the fall of 1947 focusing on the identification and testing of drugs in interrogations and the recruitment of agents. Their search included laboratory experiments on both animal and human subjects. The program operated under the direction of Doctor Charles Savage of the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, from 1947 to 1953.

The project was geared to identifying agents both synthetic and natural that were effective during interrogation. The project was centered around, but not restricted to, the use of anabasine (an alkaloid), scopolamine and mescaline. The program ended shortly after the Korean War in 1953, presumably due to limited progress and the success of other projects.

Project CHATTER From Wikipedia

Project CHATTER - FOIA Documents from the Department of the Navy - [PDF][Archived]

Martin A. Lee; Bruce Shlain (1985). Acid dreams: the CIA, LSD, and the sixties rebellion. Grove Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-8021-3062-4. Retrieved 20 September 2011. "Described as an "offensive" program, CHATTER was supposed to devise means of obtaining information from people independent of their volition but without physical duress."




Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond
Martin A. Lee

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #20 on: September 06, 2012, 12:34:13 am »
Project ARTICHOKE

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Project ARTICHOKE (also referred to as Operation ARTICHOKE) was a CIA project that researched interrogation methods and arose from Project BLUEBIRD on August 20, 1951, run by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence. A memorandum by Richard Helms to CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles indicated Artichoke became Project MKULTRA on April 13, 1953.

The project studied hypnosis, forced morphine addiction (and subsequent forced withdrawal), and the use of other chemicals, among other methods, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects.

ARTICHOKE was an offensive program of mind control that gathered information together with the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and FBI. In addition, the scope of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that stated, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?"


Declassified pages of ARTICHOKE-MKULTRA

Project ARTICHOKE From Wikipedia

Ronson, Jon. The Men Who Stare At Goats. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Transcriptions of Declassified Project ARTICHOKE Documents

H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey Kaye: Cries from the Past: Torture's Ugly's Echoes

Church Committee; p. 390 "MKULTRA was approved by the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] on April 13, 1953"

Estabrooks, G.H. Hypnosis comes of age. Science Digest, 44-50, April 1971 - [Text][Archived]




Other Books

Gillmor, D. I Swear By Apollo. Dr. Ewen Cameron and the CIA-Brainwashing Experiments. Montreal: Eden press, 1987.

Scheflin, A.W., & Opton, E.M. The Mind manipulators. New York: Paddington Press, 1978.

Thomas, G. Journey into Madness. The Secret Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse. New York: Bantam, 1989 (paperback 1990).

Weinstein, H. Psychiatry and the CIA: Victims of Mind Control. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1990.

H. P. Albarelli (2009). A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments. Trine Day. pp. 350–58, 490, 581–83, 686–92.
« Last Edit: September 06, 2012, 01:23:26 am by zorgon »

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #21 on: September 06, 2012, 01:13:57 am »
Project MKDELTA

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MKDELTA, and its associated program MKULTRA, were mind control and interrogation operations run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Both MKULTRA and MKDELTA involved the surreptitious use of LSD and other biochemicals in clandestine operations; MKULTRA was a domestic program whose subjects were unwitting Canadian and U.S citizens, whereas MKDELTA was established to govern the surreptitious use of LSD and other biochemicals abroad.

On 26 April 1976, the Church Committee of the United States Senate issued a report, "Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities", In Book I, Chapter XVII, p 389 this report states:

    LSD was one of the materials tested in the MKULTRA program. The final phase of LSD testing involved surreptitious administration to unwitting non-volunteer subjects in normal life settings by undercover officers of the Bureau of Narcotics acting for the CIA.

    A special procedure, designated MKDELTA, was established to govern the use of MKULTRA materials abroad. Such materials were used on a number of occasions. Because MKULTRA records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the operational use of MKULTRA materials by the CIA overseas; it has been determined that the use of these materials abroad began in 1953, and possibly as early as 1950.

    Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKULTRA/MKDELTA materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.


In his 2009 book, A Terrible Mistake, researcher H. P. Albarelli Jr. concludes that CIA operative Frank Olson was murdered because a personal crisis of conscience made it likely he would divulge state secrets concerning several CIA programs, chief among them Project ARTICHOKE and an MKDELTA project code-named Project SPAN. Albarelli presents considerable evidence in support of his theory that Project SPAN involved the contamination of food supplies and the aerosolized spraying of a potent LSD mixture in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France in August, 1951. (The French word "pont" translates to "bridge" in English; a synonym is "span".)

The Pont-Saint-Esprit incident resulted in mass psychosis, 32 commitments to mental institutions, and at least seven deaths. In his work as acting chief of the Special Operations Division, Olson was involved in the development of aerosolized delivery systems; he had been present at Pont-Saint-Esprit in August, 1951; and several months before resigning his position he had witnessed a terminal interrogation conducted in Germany under Project ARTICHOKE. Other researchers have reached conclusions similar to Albarelli's, including John Grant Fuller, author of The Day of Saint Anthony's Fire, a landmark book that originally cited ergot poisoning as responsible for the events at Pont-Saint-Esprit.

Project MKDELTA From Wikipedia


French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment
11 Mar 2010



An American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD

Quote
A 50-year mystery over the 'cursed bread' of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.

In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.

For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.

On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: "I am a plane", before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

Time magazine wrote at the time: "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead."

Eventually, it was determined that the best-known local baker had unwittingly contaminated his flour with ergot, a hallucinogenic mould that infects rye grain. Another theory was the bread had been poisoned with organic mercury.

However, H P Albarelli Jr., an investigative journalist, claims the outbreak resulted from a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the US Army's top-secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Samuel, Henry (2010-03-11). "French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment". The Daily Telegraph (London).

The CIA Inspector General's 1963 report on MKULTRA and MBDELTA

« Last Edit: September 06, 2012, 01:39:30 am by zorgon »

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #22 on: September 06, 2012, 01:50:41 am »
Project MKNAOMI


This is one of the many pages from the MKNAOMI and MKULTRA declassified documents.

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MKNAOMI was the code name for a joint Department of Defense/CIA research program lasting from the 1950s through the 1970s. Unclassified information about the MKNAOMI program and the related Special Operations Division is scarce. It is generally reported to be a successor to the MKDELTA project and to have focused on biological projects including biological warfare agents—specifically, to store materials that could either incapacitate or kill a test subject and to develop devices for the diffusion of such materials.

During the first twenty years of its establishment, the CIA engaged in various projects designed to increase U.S. biological and chemical warfare capabilities. Project MKNAOMI was initiated to provide the CIA with a covert support base to meet its top-secret operational requirements. The purpose was to establish a robust arsenal within the CIA's Technical Services Division (TSD) and of which was to consist of various lethal and incapacitating materials. This would enable the TSD to serve as a highly maintained center for the circulation of biological and chemical materials.

Surveillance, testing, upgrading, and the evaluation of special materials and items were also provided by MKNAOMI so as to ensure that no defects and unwanted contingencies emerged during operational conditions. For these purposes the U.S. Army's Special Operations Command (SOC) was assigned to assist the CIA in the development, testing, and maintenance procedures for the biological agents and delivery systems (1952). Both the CIA and SOC also modified guns that fired special darts coated with biological agents and various poisonous pills. The darts would serve to incapacitate guard dogs, infiltrate the area that the dogs were guarding, and then awaken the dogs upon exiting the facility. In addition, the SOC was also designated to research the potentials for using biological agents against other animals and crops.

A 1967 CIA memo which was uncovered by the Church Committee was confirmed to give evidence of at least three covert techniques for attacking and poisoning crops that have been examined under field conditions. On November 25, 1969, President Richard Nixon abolished any military practice involving biological weapons and Project MKNAOMI was dissolved. On February 14, 1970, a presidential order was given to outlaw all stockpiles of bacteriological weapons and nonliving toxins. However, despite this presidential order, a CIA scientist was able to acquire an estimated 11 grams of deadly shellfish toxin from SOC personnel at Fort Detrick. The toxin was then stored in a CIA laboratory where it remained undetected for over five years.

Project MKNAOMI From Wikipedia

Project MKNAOMI - Results of the 1973 Church Committee Hearings, on CIA misdeeds, and the 1984 Iran/Contra Hearings


« Last Edit: September 06, 2012, 01:53:39 am by zorgon »

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #23 on: September 06, 2012, 02:11:54 am »
Project MKUltra

Quote
Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973. The program used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy. MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.

The research was undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA would operate through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions would be aware of the CIA's involvement. MKUltra was allocated 6 percent of total CIA funds.

Project MKUltra was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order.

In 1977, a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents relating to project MKUltra, which led to Senate hearings later that same year. In July 2001 most surviving information regarding MKUltra was officially declassified.


This a page from the declassified documents of MKULTRA. Source: Declassified MKULTRA Project Documents, page 1 from New Technologies section of www.michael-robinett.com; the documents were "provided by the Central Intelligence Agency under a subsequent Freedom of Information Act request in 1995."

Background


Dr. Sidney Gottlieb approved of an MKUltra subproject on LSD in this June 9, 1953 letter.
Precursor experiments


Quote
A precursor of the MKUltra program began in 1945 when the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was established and given direct responsibility for Operation Paperclip. The program recruited former Nazi scientists, some of whom studied torture and brainwashing, and several who had been identified and prosecuted as war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials.

Several secret U.S. government projects grew out of Operation Paperclip. These projects included Project CHATTER (established 1947), and Project BLUEBIRD (established 1950), which was renamed Project ARTICHOKE in 1951. Their purpose was to study mind control, interrogation, behavior modification and related topics.

MKUltra

Quote
The project's intentionally oblique CIA cryptonym is made up of the digraph MK, meaning that the project was sponsored by the agency's Technical Services Staff, followed by the word Ultra (which had previously been used to designate the most secret classification of World War II intelligence). Other related cryptonyms include Project MKNAOMI and Project MKDELTA.

Headed by Sidney Gottlieb, the MKUltra project was started on the order of CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles on April 13, 1953. Its remit was to develop mind-controlling drugs for use against the Soviet bloc, largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea. The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives. The CIA was also interested in being able to manipulate foreign leaders with such techniques, and would later invent several schemes to drug Fidel Castro. Experiments were often conducted without the subjects' knowledge or consent. In some cases, academic researchers being funded through grants from CIA front organizations were unaware that their work was being used for these purposes.

In 1964, the project was renamed MKSEARCH. The project attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and generally to explore any other possibilities of mind control. Another MKUltra effort, Subproject 54, was the Navy's top secret "Perfect Concussion" program, which was supposed to use sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory, however the program was never carried out.

Because most MKUltra records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then CIA director Richard Helms, it has been difficult, if not impossible, for investigators to gain a complete understanding of the more than 150 individually funded research sub-projects sponsored by MKUltra and related CIA programs. A member of the CIA claims that not all of the records/chemicals were destroyed. Some were smuggled out and kept in private properties and organizations.

Goals

Quote
The Agency poured millions of dollars into studies examining methods of influencing and controlling the mind, and of enhancing their ability to extract information from resistant subjects during interrogation.

Some historians have asserted that creating a "Manchurian Candidate" subject through "mind control" techniques was a goal of MKUltra and related CIA projects. Alfred McCoy has claimed that the CIA attempted to focus media attention on these sorts of "ridiculous" programs, so that the public would not look at the primary goal of the research, which was developing effective methods of torture and interrogation. Such authors cite as one example that the CIA's KUBARK interrogation manual refers to "studies at McGill University", and that most of the techniques recommended in KUBARK are exactly those that researcher Donald Ewen Cameron used on his test subjects (sensory deprivation, drugs, isolation, etc.).

One 1955 MKUltra document gives an indication of the size and range of the effort; this document refers to the study of an assortment of mind-altering substances described as follows:

        Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.
        Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.
        Materials which will cause the victim to age faster/slower in maturity.
        Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
        Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc.
        Materials will cause temporary/permanent brain damage and loss of memory.
        Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called "brain-washing".
        Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.
        Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.
        Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.
        Substances which will produce a chemical that can cause blisters.
        Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.
        A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.
        Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
        Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.
        A knockout pill which can surreptitiously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.
        A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a person to perform physical activity.

Project MKUltra From Wikipedia

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #24 on: September 06, 2012, 02:14:21 am »
Project MKUltra


1953 experiment record

Experiments

Quote
CIA documents suggest that "chemical, biological and radiological" means were investigated for the purpose of mind control as part of MKUltra. A secretive arrangement granted the MKUltra program a percentage of the CIA budget. The MKUltra director was granted six percent of the CIA operating budget in 1953, without oversight or accounting. An estimated $10 million USD ($80 million adjusted for inflation) or more was spent.

Drugs
LSD


Quote
Early CIA efforts focused on LSD, which later came to dominate many of MKUltra's programs. Technical Services Staff officials understood that LSD distorted a person's sense of reality, and they felt compelled to learn whether it could alter someone's basic loyalties. The CIA wanted to know if they could make Russian spies defect against their will and whether the Russians could do the same to their own operatives.

Once Project MKUltra officially got underway in April, 1953, experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes, "people who could not fight back", as one agency officer put it. In one case LSD was administered to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days. LSD was also administered to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S. agreed to follow after World War II. The aim of this was to find drugs which would irresistibly bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program him or her as "a robot agent".

Efforts to "recruit" subjects were often illegal, even though actual use of LSD was legal in the United States until October 6, 1966. In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several brothels in San Francisco, California to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events. The men were dosed with LSD, the brothels were equipped with one-way mirrors, and the sessions were filmed for later viewing and study. In other experiments where people were given LSD without their knowledge, they were interrogated under bright lights with doctors in the background taking notes. The subjects were told that their "trips" would be extended indefinitely if they refused to reveal their secrets. The people being interrogated this way were CIA employees, U. S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term debilitation and several deaths resulted from this.  Heroin addicts were bribed into taking LSD with offers of more heroin.

The office of Security used LSD in interrogations but Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who directed MKUltra, had other ideas: he thought it could be used in covert operations. Since its effects were temporary, he believed it could be given to high officials and in this way affect the course of important meetings, speeches etc. Since he realized there was a difference in testing the drug in a laboratory and using it in clandestine operations, he initiated a series of experiments where LSD was given to people in "normal" settings without warning. At first, everyone in Technical Services tried it; a typical experiment involved two people in a room where they observed each other for hours and took notes. As the experimentation progressed, a point was reached where outsiders were drugged with no explanation whatsoever and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives.

Adverse reactions often occurred, for example an operative who had received the drug in his morning coffee, became psychotic and ran across Washington, seeing a monster in every car that passed him. Incidents like that reaffirmed that LSD is a dangerous weapon but that only made them more enthusiastic. The experiments continued even after Dr. Frank Olson, an army scientist who had not taken LSD before, went into deep depression after a surprise trip and later fell from a thirteenth story window (it is unclear whether he committed suicide or was murdered before being thrown out of the window).

Some subjects' participation was consensual, and in these cases they appeared to be singled out for even more extreme experiments. In one case, seven volunteers in Kentucky were given LSD for 77 consecutive days.

LSD was eventually dismissed by MKUltra's researchers as too unpredictable in its results.[36] They had given up on the notion that LSD was "the secret that was going to unlock the universe" but it still had a place in the cloak-and-dagger arsenal. However, by 1962, the CIA and the army had developed a series of superhallucinogens such as the highly touted BZ, which was thought to hold greater promise as a mind control weapon. This resulted in the withdrawal of support for many academics and private researchers and LSD research became less of a priority altogether.

Other drugs

Quote
Another technique investigated was connecting a barbiturate IV into one arm and an amphetamine IV into the other. The barbiturates were released into the person first, and as soon as the person began to fall asleep, the amphetamines were released. The person would then begin babbling incoherently, and it was sometimes possible to ask questions and get useful answers.

Other experiments involved drugs such as temazepam (used under code name MKSEARCH), heroin, morphine, MDMA, mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, marijuana, alcohol, sodium pentothal, and ergine (in Subproject 22).

Hypnosis

Quote
Declassified MKUltra documents indicate hypnosis was studied in the early 1950s. Experimental goals included: the creation of "hypnotically induced anxieties," "hypnotically increasing ability to learn and recall complex written matter," studying hypnosis and polygraph examinations, "hypnotically increasing ability to observe and recall complex arrangements of physical objects," and studying "relationship of personality to susceptibility to hypnosis." Experiments were conducted with drug induced hypnosis and with anterograde and retrograde amnesia while under the influence of such drugs.

Canadian experiments


Donald Ewen Cameron c.1967

Quote
The experiments were exported to Canada when the CIA recruited Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, creator of the "psychic driving" concept, which the CIA found particularly interesting. Cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the psyche. He commuted from Albany, New York to Montreal every week to work at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 to carry out MKUltra experiments there. In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions.

His treatments resulted in victims' incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents. His work was inspired and paralleled by the British psychiatrist William Sargant at St Thomas' Hospital, London, and Belmont Hospital, Surrey, who was also involved in the Intelligence Services and who experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.

It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. Cameron had also been a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946–47.

Naomi Klein argues in her book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron's research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was actually not about mind control and brainwashing, but about designing "a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.' In other words, torture." Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron's experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method."

Revelation


Frank Church headed the Church Committee, an investigation into the practices of the US intelligence agencies.

Quote
n 1973, with the government-wide panic caused by Watergate, the CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed. Pursuant to this order, most CIA documents regarding the project were destroyed, making a full investigation of MKUltra impossible. A cache of some 20,000 documents survived Helms' purge, as they had been incorrectly stored in a financial record building and were discovered following a FOIA request in 1977. These documents were fully investigated during the Senate Hearings of 1977.

In December 1974, The New York Times reported that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. That report prompted investigations by the U.S. Congress, in the form of the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission that looked into domestic activities of the CIA, the FBI, and intelligence-related agencies of the military.

In the summer of 1975, congressional Church Committee reports and the presidential Rockefeller Commission report revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the Department of Defense had conducted experiments on both unwitting and cognizant human subjects as part of an extensive program to influence and control human behavior through the use of psychoactive drugs such as LSD and mescaline and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject had died after administration of LSD. Much of what the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission learned about MKUltra was contained in a report, prepared by the Inspector General's office in 1963, that had survived the destruction of records ordered in 1973. However, it contained little detail. Sidney Gottlieb, who had retired from the CIA two years previously, was interviewed by the committee but claimed to have very little recollection of the activities of MKUltra.

The congressional committee investigating the CIA research, chaired by Senator Frank Church, concluded that "[p]rior consent was obviously not obtained from any of the subjects". The committee noted that the "experiments sponsored by these researchers ... call into question the decision by the agencies not to fix guidelines for experiments."

Following the recommendations of the Church Committee, President Gerald Ford in 1976 issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities which, among other things, prohibited "experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject" and in accordance with the guidelines issued by the National Commission. Subsequent orders by Presidents Carter and Reagan expanded the directive to apply to any human experimentation.



Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research into 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 State Senate, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First Session - [PDF][Archived]
Published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, Stock No. 052-070-04357-1
178pp. 8 August 1977
United States Senate report. Published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, Stock No. 052-070-04357-1

Quote
In 1977, during a hearing held by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to look further into MKUltra, Admiral Stansfield Turner, then Director of Central Intelligence, revealed that the CIA had found a set of records, consisting of about 20,000 pages, that had survived the 1973 destruction orders because they had been stored at a records center not usually used for such documents. These files dealt with the financing of MKUltra projects and contained few project details, however much more was learned from them than from the Inspector General's 1963 report.

On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:

    The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.

In Canada, the issue took much longer to surface, becoming widely known in 1984 on a CBC news show, The Fifth Estate. It was learned that not only had the CIA funded Dr. Cameron's efforts, but perhaps even more shockingly, the Canadian government was fully aware of this, and had later provided another $500,000 in funding to continue the experiments. This revelation largely derailed efforts by the victims to sue the CIA as their U.S. counterparts had, and the Canadian government eventually settled out of court for $100,000 to each of the 127 victims. None of Dr. Cameron's personal records of his involvement with MKUltra survive, since his family destroyed them after his death from a heart attack while mountain climbing in 1967.

Project MKUltra From Wikipedia
« Last Edit: September 06, 2012, 02:38:23 am by zorgon »

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #25 on: September 06, 2012, 02:14:33 am »
Project MKUltra

1984 U.S. General Accounting Office report

Quote
The U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report on September 28, 1984, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, DOD and other national security agencies studied thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances.

The quote from the study:

    Working with the CIA, the Department of Defense gave hallucinogenic drugs to thousands of "volunteer" soldiers in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to LSD, the Army also tested quinuclidinyl benzilate, a hallucinogen code-named BZ. (Note 37) Many of these tests were conducted under the so-called MKUltra program, established to counter perceived Soviet and Chinese advances in brainwashing techniques. Between 1953 and 1964, the program consisted of 149 projects involving drug testing and other studies on unwitting human subjects

Deaths

Quote
Given the CIA's purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MKUltra experiments, including deaths, will never be known.

Several known deaths have been associated with Project MKUltra, most notably that of Frank Olson. Olson, a United States Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in November, 1953, as part of a CIA experiment and died under suspicious circumstances a week later. A CIA doctor assigned to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep in another bed in a New York City hotel room when Olson exited the window and fell thirteen stories to his death. In 1953, Olson's death was described as a suicide that had occurred during a severe psychotic episode.

The CIA's own internal investigation concluded that the head of MK ULTRA, CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, had conducted the LSD experiment with Olson's prior knowledge, although neither Olson nor the other men taking part in the experiment were informed as to the exact nature of the drug until some 20 minutes after its ingestion. The report further suggested that Gottlieb was nonetheless due a reprimand, as he had failed to take into account Olson's already-diagnosed suicidal tendencies, which might have been exacerbated by the LSD.

The Olson family disputes the official version of events. They maintain that Frank Olson was murdered because, especially in the aftermath of his LSD experience, he had become a security risk who might divulge state secrets associated with highly classified CIA programs, many of which he had direct personal knowledge. A few days before his death, Frank Olson quit his position as acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick, Maryland (later Fort Detrick) because of a severe moral crisis concerning the nature of his biological weapons research.

Among Olson's concerns were the development of assassination materials used by the CIA, the CIA's use of biological warfare materials in covert operations, experimentation with biological weapons in populated areas, collaboration with former Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip, LSD mind-control research, the use of biological weapons (including anthrax) during the Korean War, and the use of psychoactive drugs during "terminal" interrogations under a program code-named Project ARTICHOKE.

Later forensic evidence conflicted with the official version of events; when Olson's body was exhumed in 1994, cranial injuries indicated that Olson had been knocked unconscious before he exited the window. The medical examiner termed Olson's death a "homicide". In 1975, Olson's family received a $750,000 settlement from the U.S. government and formal apologies from President Gerald Ford and CIA Director William Colby, though their apologies were limited to informed consent issues concerning Olson's ingestion of LSD.

In his 2009 book, A Terrible Mistake, researcher H. P. Albarelli Jr. concurs with the Olson family and concludes that Frank Olson was murdered because a personal crisis of conscience made it likely he would divulge state secrets concerning several CIA programs, chief among them Project ARTICHOKE and an MKDELTA project code-named Project SPAN. Albarelli presents considerable evidence in support of his theory that Project SPAN involved the contamination of food supplies and the aerosolized spraying of a potent LSD mixture in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France in August, 1951. The Pont-Saint-Esprit incident resulted in mass psychosis, 32 commitments to mental institutions, and at least seven deaths. In his work as acting chief of the Special Operations Division, Olson was involved in the development of aerosolized delivery systems; he had been present at Pont-Saint-Esprit in August, 1951; and several months before resigning his position he had witnessed a terminal interrogation conducted in Germany under Project ARTICHOKE. Other researchers have reached conclusions similar to Albarelli's, including John Grant Fuller, author of The Day of Saint Anthony's Fire, a landmark book that originally cited ergot poisoning as responsible for the events at Pont-Saint-Esprit.

On April 26, 1976, the Church Committee of the United States Senate issued a report, "Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities", In Book I, Chapter XVII, p 389 this report states:

    LSD was one of the materials tested in the MKUltra program. The final phase of LSD testing involved surreptitious administration to unwitting non-volunteer subjects in normal life settings by undercover officers of the Bureau of Narcotics acting for the CIA.

    A special procedure, designated MKDELTA, was established to govern the use of MKUltra materials abroad. Such materials were used on a number of occasions. Because MKUltra records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the operational use of MKUltra materials by the CIA overseas; it has been determined that the use of these materials abroad began in 1953, and possibly as early as 1950.

    Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKUltra/MKDelta materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.


Another known victim of Project MKUltra was Harold Blauer, a professional tennis player in New York City, who died in January, 1953 as a result of a secret Army experiment involving MDA.

Legal issues involving informed consent

Quote
The revelations about the CIA and the Army prompted a number of subjects or their survivors to file lawsuits against the federal government for conducting illegal experiments. Although the government aggressively, and sometimes successfully, sought to avoid legal liability, several plaintiffs did receive compensation through court order, out-of-court settlement, or acts of Congress. Frank Olson's family received $750,000 by a special act of Congress, and both President Ford and CIA director William Colby met with Olson's family to publicly apologize.

Previously, the CIA and the Army had actively and successfully sought to withhold incriminating information, even as they secretly provided compensation to the families. One subject of Army drug experimentation, James Stanley, an Army sergeant, brought an important, albeit unsuccessful, suit. The government argued that Stanley was barred from suing under a legal doctrine—known as the Feres doctrine, after a 1950 Supreme Court case, Feres v. United States—that prohibits members of the Armed Forces from suing the government for any harms that were inflicted "incident to service."

In 1987, the Supreme Court affirmed this defense in a 5–4 decision that dismissed Stanley's case: United States v. Stanley.[64] The majority argued that "a test for liability that depends on the extent to which particular suits would call into question military discipline and decision making would itself require judicial inquiry into, and hence intrusion upon, military matters." In dissent, Justice William Brennan argued that the need to preserve military discipline should not protect the government from liability and punishment for serious violations of constitutional rights:

    The medical trials at Nuremberg in 1947 deeply impressed upon the world that experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable. The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human subjects... . n defiance of this principle, military intelligence officials ... began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials, including LSD.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing a separate dissent, stated:

    No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the 'voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential ... to satisfy moral, ethical, and legal concepts.' If this principle is violated, the very least that society can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can be, by the perpetrators.

This is the only Supreme Court case to address the application of the Nuremberg Code to experimentation sponsored by the U.S. government. Although the suit was unsuccessful, dissenting opinions put the Army—and by association the entire government—on notice that use of individuals without their consent is unacceptable. The limited application of the Nuremberg Code in U.S. courts does not detract from the power of the principles it espouses, especially in light of stories of failure to follow these principles that appeared in the media and professional literature during the 1960s and 1970s and the policies eventually adopted in the mid-1970s.

In another law suit, Wayne Ritchie, a former United States Marshal, after hearing about the project's existence in 1990, alleged the CIA laced his food or drink with LSD at a 1957 Christmas party which resulted in his attempting to commit a robbery at a bar and his subsequent arrest. While the government admitted it was, at that time, drugging people without their consent, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel found Ritchie could not prove he was one of the victims of MKUltra or that LSD caused his robbery attempt and dismissed the case in 2007.

Extent of participation

Quote
Forty-four American colleges or universities, 15 research foundations or chemical or pharmaceutical companies and the like including Sandoz (now Novartis) and Eli Lilly and Company, 12 hospitals or clinics (in addition to those associated with universities), and three prisons are known to have participated in MKUltra.

Notable subjects


The author Ken Kesey was a willing participant in the LSD experiments.

Quote
A considerable amount of credible circumstantial evidence suggests that Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, participated in CIA-sponsored MKUltra experiments conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962.[68] During World War II, Henry Murray, the lead researcher in the Harvard experiments, served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was a forerunner of the CIA. Murray applied for a grant funded by the United States Navy, and his Harvard stress experiments strongly resembled those run by the OSS.[68] Beginning at the age of sixteen, Kaczynski participated along with twenty-one other undergraduate students in the Harvard experiments, which have been described as "disturbing" and "ethically indefensible."

Merry Prankster Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, volunteered for MKUltra experiments involving LSD and other psychedelic drugs at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park while he was a student at nearby Stanford University. Kesey's experiences while under the influence of LSD inspired him to promote the drug outside the context of the MKUltra experiments, which influenced the early development of hippie culture.

Robert Hunter is an American lyricist, singer-songwriter, translator, and poet, best known for his association with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. Along with Ken Kesey, Hunter was an early volunteer MKUltra test subject at Stanford University. Stanford test subjects were paid to take LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline, then report on their experiences. These experiences were creatively formative for Hunter:

        Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist...and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell like (must I take you by the hand, every so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells....By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane.

Candy Jones, American fashion model and radio host, claimed to have been a victim of mind control in the 1960s.

Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger volunteered for testing while in prison.

Conspiracy theories

Quote
MKUltra plays a part in many conspiracy theories given its nature and the destruction of most records.

Lawrence Teeter, attorney for convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan, believed Sirhan was under the influence of hypnosis when he fired his weapon at Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Teeter linked the CIA's MKUltra program to mind control techniques that he claimed were used to control Sirhan.

Jonestown, the Guyana location of the Jim Jones cult and Peoples Temple mass suicide, was thought to be a test site for MKUltra medical and mind control experiments after the official end of the program. Congressman Leo Ryan, a known critic of the CIA, was murdered by Peoples Temple members after he personally visited Jonestown to investigate various reported irregularities.

Aftermath

Quote
At his retirement in 1972 Gottlieb was to dismiss his entire effort for the CIA as "useless".

Although the CIA insists that MKUltra-type experiments have been abandoned, many CIA observers say there is little reason to believe it does not continue today under a different set of acronyms. 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti specifically called the CIA claim that MKUltra was abandoned a "cover story."

Project MKUltra From Wikipedia
« Last Edit: September 06, 2012, 02:49:07 am by zorgon »

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #26 on: September 06, 2012, 02:14:50 am »
Project MKUltra

Documentation, Papers and References

For decades conspiracy nuts have been saying these programs exist while the naysayers have been playing Ostrich with their head up their ass :P But if you read nothing else here is the complete summary from the New York Times. It names names... has Senate grilling the participants and mentions that original CIA documents on all this were destroyed in 1973

Quote
n 1977, during a hearing held by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to look further into MKUltra, Admiral Stansfield Turner, then Director of Central Intelligence, revealed that the CIA had found a set of records, consisting of about 20,000 pages, that had survived the 1973 destruction orders because they had been stored at a records center not usually used for such documents. These files dealt with the financing of MKUltra projects and contained few project details, however much more was learned from them than from the Inspector General's 1963 report.

On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:

    The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.



Project MKULTRA Senate Report - [PDF][Archived]




So it was the NAVY who was instrumental in busting MK Ultra and the CIA wide open


Stansfield Turner, former Navy admiral and Director of the CIA. 13 June 1983

Quote
Stansfield M. Turner (born December 1, 1923) is a retired Admiral and former Director of Central Intelligence and President of the Naval War College. He is currently a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park School of Public Policy.

Military career

Following graduation from Highland Park High School, Turner attended Amherst College, entering it in 1941, and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with the Class of 1947 and attained a commission in the United States Navy in June, 1946 (during World War II classes were graduated in three years). He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University while serving in the navy, earning a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1950. During his naval career he served as commanding officer of the Guided Missile Cruiser USS Horne (DLG-30) as well as commander in chief of NATO Southern Flank, headquartered in Naples.

Central Intelligence Agency

Under Turner's direction, the CIA emphasized Technical intelligence (TECHINT) and Signal intelligence (SIGINT) more than Human intelligence (HUMINT). In 1979, Turner eliminated over 800 operational positions in what was called the Halloween Massacre. In a biography published in 2005, Turner expressed regret for the dismissals stating, "In retrospect, I probably should not have effected the reductions of 820 positions at all, and certainly not the last 17.” Turner gave notable testimony to Congress revealing much of the extent of the MKULTRA program, which the CIA ran from the early 1950s to late 1960s. Reform and simplification of the intelligence community's multilayered secrecy system was one of Turner's significant initiatives, but produced no results by the time he left office.

During Turner's term as head of the CIA, he became outraged when former agent Frank Snepp published a book called Decent Interval which exposed incompetence among senior US government personnel during the fall of Saigon. Turner accused Snepp of breaking the secrecy agreement required of all CIA agents, and then later was forced to admit under cross-examination that he had never read the agreement signed by Snepp. Regardless, the CIA ultimately won its case against Snepp at the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court forced Snepp to turn over all his profits from Decent Interval and to seek preclearance of any future writings about intelligence work for the rest of his life. The ultimate irony was that the CIA would later rely on the Snepp legal precedent in forcing Turner to seek preclearance of his own memoirs, which were highly critical of President Ronald Reagan's policies.

During his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence in the early 1980s when asked on an NPR interview program about 'domestic spying', he said, "Americans are not a source of much intelligence."

In the documentary Secrets of the CIA Turner commented on the MK ULTRA project:

"It came to my attention early in my tenure as director, and I felt it was a warning sign that if you're not alert, things can go wrong in this organization."

On 12 March 1980, President Jimmy Carter and Turner presented Antonio J. Mendez (also known as Tony Mendez) with the CIA's Intelligence Star for his role in the exfiltration of six US State Department personnel from Iran on 28 January 1980.

Admiral Stansfield Turner From Wikipedia

During his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence in the early 1980s when asked on an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR interview program about 'domestic spying', he said, "Americans are not a source of much intelligence."

 ::) 8)




« Last Edit: September 06, 2012, 12:23:39 pm by zorgon »

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #27 on: September 06, 2012, 12:21:24 pm »
Project MKUltra

Documentation, Papers and References

Richelson, JT (ed.) (2001-09-10). "Science, Technology and the CIA: A National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book". George Washington University.

"Chapter 3, part 4: Supreme Court Dissents Invoke the Nuremberg Code: CIA and DOD Human Subjects Research Scandals". Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Final Report.

"The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence". Church Committee report, no. 94-755, 94th Cong., 2d Sess.. Washington, D.C..: United States Congress. 1976. p. 392.

Mind Control Summary The Secrets of Mind Control Based on Three Books by Top Mind Control Researchers

Jo Thomas (03 Sep 1977). "C.I.A Says It Found More Secret Papers on Behavior Control: Senate Panel Puts Off Hearing to Study Data Dozen Witnesses Said To Have Misled Inquiry C.I.A. Tells Of Finding Secret Data". New York Times. - [No Copy Yet]

 "Project MKUltra, The CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification" - [PDF][Archived]

Walker, Andrew (2005-11-21). "UK | Magazine | Project Paperclip: Dark side of the Moon". BBC News.

MKULTRA digital files from IntellNet.org Original 41 TIF images, Zipped: (3.8MB) - [ZIP][Archived]

U.S. Congress: The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence

Declassified MK-Ultra Project Documents:

Price, David (June 2007). "Buying a Piece of Anthropology: Human Ecology and unwitting anthropological research for the CIA" (PDF). Anthropology Today 23 (3): 3–13. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8322.2007.00510.x - [PDF][Archived]

Mind Control and the Secret State by Daniel Brandt - [Text][Archived]

"U.S. Senate: Joint Hearing before The Select Committee on Intelligence and The Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, 95th Cong., 1st Sess. August 3, 1977"

"The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences".

Prepared Statement of Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence. ParaScope. - [Need a Copy]

Stebner, Beth. "The most dangerous drug in the world: 'Devil's Breath' chemical from Colombia can block free will, wipe memory and even kill". Daily Mail (London).

"Documents on Cheney Coverup of Olson Assassination" Voltaire Network - [PDF][Archived]

More References on Wikipedia

« Last Edit: September 06, 2012, 01:07:16 pm by zorgon »

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #28 on: September 06, 2012, 01:36:29 pm »
Operation Midnight Climax


Stephanie signs on to play the role of “June”, a 1950?s prostitute involved in a CIA scandal, in the web series Operation Midnight, written by Ramesh Thadani.




The main player in all of this was an agent named George Hunter White, who dosed unwitting victims with LSD and other drugs, just to see what would happen and report back to the CIA.  It was called “Operation Midnight Climax,” and a book about this specific subject is currently being written by researcher Hank Albarelli Jr., author of Terrible Mistake.

Quote
Operation Midnight Climax was an operation initially established by Sidney Gottlieb and placed under the direction of Narcotics Bureau officer George Hunter White under the alias of Morgan Hall for the CIA as a sub-project of Project MKULTRA, the CIA mind-control research program that began in the 1950s.

The project consisted of a web of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco, Marin, and New York. It was established in order to study the effects of LSD on unconsenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass. Several significant operational techniques were developed in this theater, including extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations.

The safehouses were dramatically scaled back in 1962, following a report by CIA Inspector General John Earman that strongly recommended closing the facility. The San Francisco safehouses were closed in 1965, and the New York City safehouse soon followed in 1966.

MKULTRA came to light in the spring of 1963 during a wide-ranging survey of the CIA's technical services division. John K. Vance, a member of the Central Intelligence Agency inspector general's staff, discovered that the agency was running a research project that included administering LSD and other drugs to unwitting human subjects

Operation Midnight Climax From Wikipedia

Ornes, Stephen (August 2008). "Whatever Happened To... Mind Control?". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2 February 2012.

Holley, Joe (16). "John K. Vance; Uncovered LSD Project at CIA". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2 February 2012.







Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD
By Troy Hooper Wednesday, Mar 14 2012



Illustration by Rick Sealock.

Quote
It's been over 50 years, but Wayne Ritchie says he can still remember how it felt to be dosed with acid.

He was drinking bourbon and soda with other federal officers at a holiday party in 1957 at the U.S. Post Office Building on Seventh and Mission streets. They were cracking jokes and swapping stories when, suddenly, the room began to spin. The red and green lights on the Christmas tree in the corner spiraled wildly. Ritchie's body temperature rose. His gaze fixed on the dizzying colors around him.

The deputy U.S. marshal excused himself and went upstairs to his office, where he sat down and drank a glass of water. He needed to compose himself. But instead he came unglued. Ritchie feared the other marshals didn't want him around anymore. Then he obsessed about the probation officers across the hall and how they didn't like him, either. Everyone was out to get him. Ritchie felt he had to escape.

He fled to his apartment and sought comfort from his live-in girlfriend. It didn't go as planned. His girlfriend was there, but an argument erupted. She told him she was growing tired of San Francisco and wanted to return to New York City. Ritchie couldn't handle the situation. Frantic, he ran away again, this time to the Vagabond Bar where he threw back more bourbon and sodas. From there, he hit a few more bars, further cranking up his buzz. As he drank his way back to Seventh and Mission, Ritchie concocted a plan that would change his life.


Courtesy of Linda Russo Wayne Ritchie with his late wife, Virginia.

Quote
Now in his mid-eighties and living in San Jose, Ritchie may be among the last of the living victims of MK-ULTRA, a Central Intelligence Agency operation that covertly tested lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on unwitting Americans in San Francisco and New York City from 1953 to 1964.

"I remember that night very clearly, yes I do," he said in a recent interview. "I was paranoid. I got down to where I thought everyone was against me. The whole world was against me."

After the day had bled into night on Dec. 20, 1957, Ritchie returned to his office in the Post Office Building and retrieved two service revolvers from his locker. He was going rogue.

"I decided if they want to get rid of me, I'll help them. I'll just go out and get my guns from my office and hold up a bar," Ritchie recalls. "I thought, 'I can get enough money to get my girlfriend an airline ticket back to New York, and I'll turn myself in.' But I was unsuccessful."

Out of his skull on a hallucinogen and alcohol, Ritchie rolled into the Shady Grove in the Fillmore District, and ordered one final bourbon and soda. After swallowing down the final drops, he pointed his revolver at the bartender and demanded money. Before joining the marshals, Ritchie served five years in the Marines and spent a year as an Alcatraz prison guard. But the cop had suddenly become the robber.

It was over in a flash. A waitress came up behind him and asked Ritchie what he was doing. When Ritchie turned around, a patron hit him over the head and knocked him unconscious. He awoke to a pair of police officers standing over him.

Ritchie says he had expected to get caught or killed.

The judge went easy on him and Ritchie avoided prison. He resigned from the Marshals Service, pleaded guilty to attempted armed robbery, paid a $500 fine, and was sentenced to five years' probation.

Ritchie's story is certainly peculiar, but not unique. Other San Franciscans were unsuspecting participants in a strange research program in which the government effectively broke the law in an effort to fight the Cold War.


Credit: Rick Sealock

Rest of article (6 pages)Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD









Movie Scenes











Operation Midnight Climax
Caron Bernstein



Meredith Salenger still from film Operation Midnight Climax

from Brightlighter Productions on Vimeo.




« Last Edit: September 06, 2012, 01:54:23 pm by zorgon »

Offline zorgon

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Re: Operation Big City - Biological Weapons Testing On U.S Citizens
« Reply #29 on: September 06, 2012, 02:31:45 pm »
Project GABRIEL

Quote
Project GABRIEL refers to an investigation by the United States Atomic Energy Commission to gauge the impact of radioactive fallout resulting from nuclear warfare. GABRIEL surmised that radioactive isotope Strontium-90 presented the greatest hazard to life globally. This resulted in the commissioning of Project SUNSHINE, which sought to examine the levels of Sr-90 in human tissues and bones (with a special interest in infants) gathered from around the world.

Project GABRIEL From Wikipedia

"Report on Project GABRIEL". U.S. ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION Division of Biology and Medicine. July 1954. - [Text][Archived]

ACHRE Report:New Ethical Questions for Medical Researchers
"In 1949, the AEC undertook Project Gabriel, a secret effort to study the question of whether the tests could threaten the viability of life on earth. In 1953, Gabriel led to Project Sunshine..."

U.S. Department of Energy, "Report on Project Gabriel", July 1954 - [PDF][Archived]





Project SUNSHINE



Quote
Project SUNSHINE was a series of research studies to ascertain the impact of radioactive fallout on the world's population. Commissioned jointly by the United States Atomic Energy Commission and USAF Project Rand, SUNSHINE sought to examine the long-term effects of nuclear radiation on the biosphere due to repeated nuclear detonations of increasing yield[.

With the conclusion from Project GABRIEL that radioactive isotope Sr-90 represented the most serious threat to human health from nuclear fallout, Project SUNSHINE sought to measure the global dispersion of Sr-90 by measuring its concentration in the tissues and bones of the dead. Of particular interest was tissue from the young, whose developing bones have the highest propensity to accumulate Sr-90 and thus the highest susceptibility to radiation damage. SUNSHINE elicited a great deal of controversy when it was revealed that many of the remains sampled were utilized without prior permission from the deceased or from relatives of the dead

Project SUNSHINE From Wikipedia



"Worldwide Effects of Atomic Weapons: Project SUNSHINE" Rand Corporation August 1953 - [PDF][Archived]

PROJECT SUNSHINE AND THE SLIPPERY SLOPE Centre for Medical Education Dundee University Medical School Sue Rabbitt Roff - [PDF][Archived]




Bethe on SUNSHINE and Fallout (1954)
Posted June 27th, 2012 by Alex Wellerstein


Quote
Project SUNSHINE definitely takes the prize for “most intentionally-misleading title of a government program.” The goal of SUNSHINE (co-sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and RAND) was to figure out what the impact radioactive fallout from American nuclear testing was on the world population. The initial study was started in 1953, and involved checking biological material for the the radioactive fission product Strontium-90, with an attempt to correlate Sr-90 levels with various known nuclear test series. Not exactly what you think of when you hear the term “sunshine,” eh?


Click to view PDF

Quote
t actually gets much creepier than just the confusing name. The “biological material” they were studying was, well, dead organic matter. What kind of organic matter, specifically? The dataset for a “pre-pilot” study on Strontium-90 intake, was a real witches brew:

    “Wisconsin cheese (1 month old)”
    “clam shells (Long Island)”
    “Wisconsin cat bone”
    “Montana cat (6 months, fed on milk from free-range cows)”
    “stillborn, full term baby (Chicago)”
    “rib from a Harvard man”

Pardon me while I count my ribs… and cats… and… well… yuck. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, I can’t, anyway. Here’s your creepy meeting transcript of the week, from the planning of SUNSHINE: “Dr. Libby commented on the difficulty of obtaining human samples, and suggested that stillborn babies, which are often turned over to the physician for disposal, might be a practical source.”
As an aside to an aside, in the full study, they did use samples from corpses — corpses of children in particular seemed of particular interest — in getting their data. It’s a bit gory to read through their data sets as they describe the Sr-90 they found in the ribs or vertebrae of the dead. US scientist Shields Warren in particular seemed to have quite a lot of access to the bones of young children through the Cancer Research Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. Not a job I’d envy.

Anyway — the document I wanted to share had nothing to do with the sample sources, but I got a little distracted while poking around in the SUNSHINE literature, and couldn’t not pass that on.


Hans Bethe and W.F. Libby

Quote
The letter in question comes from 1954, after SUNSHINE had been completed. It’s a request from December 1954 from the well-coifed Hans Bethe to the aforementioned Willard F. Libby, the physical chemist best known as the inventor of radiocarbon dating (for which he would win a Nobel Prize, in 1960), and in 1954 one of the five Commissioners of the AEC. In the letter, Bethe is arguing in favor of SUNSHINE’s declassification — and his justifications are not necessarily what you might expect


Click to view PDF

Quote
Bethe started out by noting that even in the summer of 1953, when SUNSHINE was being finished up, they (it seems that Bethe and Libby were both there) thought that it would “be highly desirable to declassify a large part of project SUNSHINE.” Bethe thought the matter has gotten rather urgent:

    I still feel the same way about this, and I think the arguments for declassification have become far stronger than they were in 1953. There is real unrest both in this country and abroad concerning the long-range as well as short-range radioactivity, and it would, in my opinion, greatly allay the fears of the public if the truth were published.

There’s the kicker: Bethe was convinced that SUNSHINE will show that fallout from testing isn’t as big a problem as people thought it was. Releasing SUNSHINE wouldn’t be a matter of propaganda (and holding it back wasn’t a matter of covering it up), in Bethe’s mind — it would simply be getting the facts out.

And why might people suddenly be getting concerned about nuclear fallout?


Radioactive contamination of water and fish in the western Pacific Ocean by the 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear weapon test at Bikini Atoll. This drawing was produced in 1955 by Y. Nishiwaki for a Japanese government study and reprinted, somewhat simplified, in S. Sevitt, "The Bombs," The Lancet, July 23, 1955, pp. 199-201. It is probably public domain due to origin and age, and its author is unlikely to still be contactable. In any event, I think it qualifies for fair use because it is uniquely informative and its publication 54 years ago in The Lancet gives it authenticity.

Quote
No doubt because of all of the attention that the Castle BRAVO nuclear test had gotten with respects to high amounts of fallout finding its way into all sorts of biological systems far from its source — like the radioactive tuna that was caught for weeks afterwards off the waters of Japan.

Bethe understood, though, that the classification reasons holding back the publication of SUNSHINE were non-trivial. SUNSHINE studies the deposition of fission products following testing, and to make much sense of that, you had to know the fission yields from the tests. If you knew the fission yields, you’d know quite a lot about American nuclear weapons — especially if you knew the fission yield of the Ivy MIKE test, the first H-bomb.

Why? Because knowing the fission component of the first H-bomb test would possibly give away all sorts of information about the Teller-Ulam design. Multi-stage H-bombs have a reasonably large fission trigger that ignites the fusion fuel, which then again induces more fission in a “natural” uranium tamper. In the case of MIKE, 77% of the total 10.4 megaton yield came from the final fission stage. Knowing that would be a good hint as to the composition of the American H-bombs, and was not something they wanted to share with the USSR.

But Bethe thought you could get around this:

    I believe the story of SUNSHINE could be published without giving away any information about our H-bombs: it is merely necessary to put the permissible accumulated yield in terms of fission yield rather than total yield.

In other words, if you just talked of fission yield — and didn’t give the total yield — you wouldn’t be able to figure out how much of the yield was not fission, and thus the high disparity (which would be a big red flag for a weapons designer) would be hidden.

Bethe also thought that they should publish the fallout data from the H-bomb tests (likely including those from the CASTLE series). Bethe didn’t think that information would give away any design information, but it was clear that others were suspicious. Bethe put the question to a test: he asked Philip Morrison to try and figure out how an H-bomb worked from just published stories about the Castle BRAVO fallout accident.


A youngish Philip Morrison, courtesy of the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.

Quote
Morrison at that point had no access to classified information. He had been part of the Manhattan Project, and so knew quite a bit about fission weapons, but had been cut out of the classified world by the time the H-bomb had come along. (More on Morrison’s security clearance another time — lots of interesting stories there.)

Morrison’s conclusions (oddly title “FISSION ENERGY IN IVY,” even though it was about BRAVO) are attached to Bethe’s letter. In many ways it is an analysis typical of a somewhat cocky physicist: things are described as “easy” and conclusions are lead to “clearly” and everything is stated as if it is pretty obvious and pretty straightforward. Morrison concludes that the total fission yield of BRAVO (again, misidentified as IVY) is between 0.2Mt and 0.6Mt, and that most of the fission must have been from the fission primary that started the reactions. In reality, 10Mt of the 15Mt total yield was from fission, which is why it was such a “dirty” shot.

Bethe took this as evidence that indeed, looking at just the fallout alone, you couldn’t figure out how much of the explosion was from fission yield, and thus the design information was safe: “As Morrison’s report shows, it seems to be easy to draw entirely wrong conclusions from the fall-out data.”

Why Morrison got this wrong is a little mysterious to me. Ralph Lapp had managed to conclude, more or less correctly, that there was a third “dirty” fission stage, and had popularized the idea enough that it trickled into  Life magazine in December 1955. But Bethe thought Morrison’s analysis was more or less sound, given his lack of detailed information. It’s a weird thing to conclude, based on one study, that some piece of information is fundamentally unknowable, when you already know what the piece of information is.


ife magazine, 1955: not quite right, not entirely wrong.

Quote
Speaking of speculating based on missing information, part of Bethe’s letter is redacted, for reasons I do not know. His conclusion makes it pretty clear it has to do with this absolute vs. fission yield/fallout issue, though.

Bethe concludes: “I believe it would greatly improve international feeling about our Pacific tests if we were to publish the correct story of SUNSHINE and of fall-out.”

Libby would come around to Bethe’s position and push for declassification. In Libby’s mind, like Bethe’s, SUNSHINE showed that the world wasn’t going to become mutated just because of a little testing in the Pacific. Furthermore, he also came to believe that you could shut down a lot of the anti-nuclear testing demands by just showing people that you were paying close attention to this sort of thing — by the time of Operation Redwing (1956), he felt that this sort of disclosure had already made the international community more friendly to US testing.

It wasn’t until 1956 that the declassification eventually occurred, however, and even then, a lot of things were removed. (The “Amended*” in the RAND report cover page above is because it was “Amended to remove classified data; otherwise the report remains unchanged and represents the 1953 estimate of the fallout problem.”) Of course, by that point it was clear that the Soviets had already figured out how to make an H-bomb work.

Bethe on SUNSHINE and Fallout (1954)
Posted June 27th, 2012 by Alex Wellerstein


"Worldwide Effects of Atomic Weapons: Project SUNSHINE" Rand Corporation August 1953 - [PDF][Archived]

Bethe-to-Libby-Project-SUNSHINE

Castle Bravo From Wikipedia

 


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