{"id":357534,"date":"2023-06-09T18:20:19","date_gmt":"2023-06-09T22:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/?p=357534"},"modified":"2023-06-09T01:47:38","modified_gmt":"2023-06-09T05:47:38","slug":"lie-cheat-and-steal-the-cias-disastrous-scientific-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/2023\/06\/lie-cheat-and-steal-the-cias-disastrous-scientific-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Lie, Cheat, and Steal: The CIA\u2019s Disastrous Scientific Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Owen Marshall, Global Research<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) marks its seventy-fifth anniversary, it has made conspicuous efforts to rebrand itself as a progressive force for scientific and technological change.<\/em><\/p>\n

Facing the retirement of its notoriously \u201cpale, male, and Yale\u201d Baby Boomer cohort, it has awkwardly adopted the language of neurodiversity and intersectionality in an attempt to appeal to the relatively young and tech-savvy Silicon Valley set.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0Through its in-house venture capital fund In-Q-Tel, it has recently made well-publicized investments in CRISPR-based wooly mammoth resurrection research, information-collecting skin care products, and the synthetic biology firm\u2014and alleged \u201ccolossal scam\u201d\u2014Ginkgo Bioworks.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

TRUTH LIVES on at\u00a0https:\/\/sgtreport.tv\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Under the leadership of Gina Haspel, it has also adopted a tech start-up model via its new \u201cCIA Labs,\u201d which entices would-be innovators with lucrative patent opportunities.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0At the same time, it has made well-publicized donations to makerspaces and science education organizations.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0Sympathetic press coverage has cast covert agents not as unaccountable interlopers into publicly funded research, but rather as \u201cspies for planet earth.\u201d<\/span>5\u00a0<\/sup><\/span>The CIA has even started a podcast.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

A brief survey of the Agency\u2019s history, however, suggests that it is one of the last organizations we should expect to provide us with either reliable information or socially beneficial technologies. Since its earliest days, the CIA and the \u201cIntelligence Community\u201d of which it is a part has repeatedly shown a willingness to pursue harmful, illegal, and intentionally misleading research. Indeed, \u201cintelligence\u201d is arguably a misnomer. As author and former CIA agent Ralph McGehee explains,<\/p>\n

\u201cthe CIA is not an intelligence agency, it\u2019s a covert action agency. . . . A part of covert action is disinformation, and the American people, in my estimation, are the primary target audience of the agency\u2019s disinformation operation.\u201d<\/span>7<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

CIA\u2019s Pre-History of Scientific Disinformation<\/strong><\/h2>\n

False scientific claims were the US Intelligence Community\u2019s stock-in-trade even before the CIA was officially founded. In 1944, Lieutenant Thomas J. McFadden, head of Morale Operations (MO) for the\u00a0Office of Strategic Services<\/strong>\u00a0(OSS, the CIA\u2019s WWII-era precursor), requested funds to employ renowned tropical disease expert Dr. Morton Charles Kahn. Dr. Kahn, wrote McFadden, \u201chas been employed by us to write a number of articles containing pseudoscientific material on tropical diseases.\u201d<\/span>8<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

That year, OSS agents prepared a barrage of forged medical documents reporting outbreaks of leprosy, food poisoning, and grisly deaths following blood transfusions contaminated with animal plasma.<\/span>9<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0Like all MO undertakings, these were fabrications designed to attack enemy morale by causing panic and confusion.<\/p>\n

The audience for this sort of \u201cblack propaganda\u201d was not necessarily limited to enemy soldiers. In a subsequent progress report, the MO Branch Chief listed under the heading \u201cAchievements and Commendations\u201d high-profile instances of \u201ccomeback\u201d\u2014meaning the appearance of MO fabrications in reputable English-language news services such as the\u00a0Associated Press<\/em>.<\/span>10<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0In contrast to the more familiar term \u201cblowback,\u201d used to refer to the unintended negative consequences of clandestine operations, \u201ccomeback\u201d was seen as a positive metric\u2014an indication that the government\u2019s lie had been good enough for its own population to \u201cbuy\u201d it.<\/p>\n

Compared to the death and destruction of the Second World War (WWII), scientific disinformation operations of this sort seemed relatively harmless or even humane. In the wake of Japan\u2019s surrender, however, as the WWII-era OSS evolved into the Cold War\u2013era Central Intelligence Agency, the relation between American Intelligence and the scientific community has only become more pathological. Over the course of the Agency\u2019s seventy-five-year existence, it has repeatedly enlisted experts not just to lie about scientific atrocities but to commit them.<\/p>\n

Operation Paperclip<\/strong><\/h2>\n

One of the earliest and most consequential CIA covert actions was its role in Operation Paperclip, a campaign to recruit and whitewash the reputations of over a thousand prominent Nazi scientists. In her authoritative book,\u00a0Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America<\/em>,<\/strong>\u00a0Annie Jacobsen<\/strong>\u00a0details the CIA\u2019s eagerness to take advantage of these<\/p>\n

\u201cmen who had everything to lose and were, at the same time, uniquely focused on personal gain. In Operation Paperclip, the CIA found a perfect partner in its quest for scientific intelligence. And it was in the CIA that Operation Paperclip found its strongest supporting partner yet.\u201d<\/span>11<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\"undefined\"<\/p>\n

Kurt H. Debus, a former V-2 rocket scientist who became a NASA director, sitting between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnsonin 1962 at a briefing at Blockhouse 34, Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex (Licensed under the Public Domain)<\/p>\n

The CIA\u2019s Nazi scientists included the chemist Walter Schieber, who specialized in sarin gas production; the similarly-named Walter Schreiber, former \u201csurgeon general of the Third Reich,\u201d who was hired to oversee torture of enemy prisoners of war at the original CIA black site, Camp King; and Friedrich \u201cFritz\u201d Hoffman, a chemical weapons scientist for the Luftwaffe, whom the CIA sent around the world to scout for new and exotic poisons. It was at Camp King that the Agency made its first foray into high-tech torture and mind-control research, developing what Jacobsen describes as \u201c\u2018extreme interrogation\u2019 techniques and \u2018behavior modification programs\u2019 . . . [including] hypnosis, electric shock, chemicals, and illicit street drugs.\u201d<\/span>12<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

MK-ULTRA: Domestic and International Terror in the Name of Science<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Hiring high-ranking Nazis to test new torture methods on prisoners was only the beginning, however. By 1953, CIA scientists like Schreiber and Sidney Gottlieb\u2014the titular character of Stephen Kinzer\u2019s book,\u00a0Poisoner in Chief<\/em>\u2014had initiated a sprawling two-decade campaign of reckless human experimentation best known by the codename MK-ULTRA. A quixotic but well-funded hunt for truth serums, brainwashing drugs, and other mind control techniques, MK-ULTRA scientists subjected countless non-consenting and\/or otherwise vulnerable people to powerful drugs and interrogation techniques.<\/span>13<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0In spite of being subject to three separate government investigations, only a small fraction of the total program has been publicly disclosed since the CIA shredded nearly all relevant documents. What little we do know, however, is horrifying.<\/span>14<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

With the help of OSS veteran and federal narcotics detective George Hunter White, Gottlieb maintained a network of domestic and international \u201csafe houses\u201d where he would administer LSD to unwitting and \u201cexpendable\u201d subjects such as petty criminals and drug users.<\/span>15<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0Sometimes, Gottlieb\u2019s expendable subjects included other scientists, such as bacteriologist Frank Olson, who was dosed with LSD and allegedly murdered by CIA, supposedly because of fears that he would reveal America\u2019s use of chemical and biological weapons (CBW).<\/span>16<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0The Agency has had more than its share of CBW-use allegations beginning in this period, including the open-air testing of aerosolized biological agents in New York City and spreading whooping cough on the coast of Florida in 1955.<\/span>17<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

MK-ULTRA research was also conducted at university laboratories, such as those of Harold Wolff and Louis Jolyon West at Cornell Medical College and the University of Oklahoma, or Donald Ewen Cameron at McGill University in Montreal.<\/p>\n

Between 1957 and 1963, Cameron used CIA money to develop psychological \u201cdepatterning\u201d techniques on approximately one hundred patients. These techniques included placing patients in extended drug-induced comas, LSD dosing for months at a time, electro-shock treatments, and forcing patients to listen to recorded messages such as \u201cmy mother hates me\u201d played on a loop.<\/span>18<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

A multi-million dollar class action lawsuit against McGill, the Canadian government, and the Royal Victoria Hospital on behalf of Cameron\u2019s victims and their families is currently underway.<\/span>19<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0MK-ULTRA later found a home in existing networks set up by scientific institutions and universities in the USA and Canada.<\/p>\n

The Phoenix Program and Beyond<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Years after Cameron finished his work, similar experimentation began to take place in Vietnam. In 1966, a team of CIA researchers conducted brutal and sometimes fatal psychological experiments on Viet so-called mental patients. In an attempt to coerce labor out of his supposedly communist-indoctrinated patients, Dr. Lloyd H. Cotter and his colleagues threatened them with electrical shocks.<\/span>20<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0Female patients, who proved more resistant, were starved into submission.<\/span>21<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Read More @ GlobalResearch.ca<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Owen Marshall, Global Research: As the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) marks its seventy-fifth anniversary, it has made conspicuous efforts to rebrand itself as a progressive force for scientific and technological change. Facing the retirement of its notoriously \u201cpale, male, and Yale\u201d Baby Boomer cohort, it has awkwardly adopted the language of neurodiversity and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[153989,154020,153905,153896,153880,153899,126466],"tags":[156567,156566,156565],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357534"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":357535,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357534\/revisions\/357535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}