US Electromagnetic Weapons and Human Rights 4/6

A Study of the History of US Intelligence Community Human Rights Violations and Continuing Research in Electromagnetic Weapons

MK-ULTRA

In terms of mind-control and the breaking down of prisoners for military interrogations, the events at Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo, and in the CIA network of secret prisons dotting the globe, all have their intellectual origin in the work carried out by a network of scientists under the behest of the intelligence community beginning in the World War II period. Mind-control, per se, refers to a well-funded, broad based series of programs designed to explore the furthest reaches of human cognitive ability. The Nazis, as well as the Japanese, had been experimenting on prisoners throughout the war.

Recovery of the records of these experiments led the US to proceed with investigations into new means of interrogations and the building of resistance to interrogations of US personnel..⁵⁵

The CIA, in association with various other agencies, undertook a long series of experiments on unsuspecting prisoners, students, military personnel and others recruited into one of the at least 162 subprojects of what became known as MKULTRA.⁵⁶ Interest was certainly piqued by the case of Cardinal Mindseztny and the reports of brainwashing techniques used on American soldiers in prisoner of war camps in Korea⁵⁷. But even prior to the Korean War the resiliency of the human mind was being tested by researchers on the black budget. These projects reportedly at times violated every conceivable notion of human rights and dignity.⁵⁸

Frank Olson, a mid-level CIA operative, worked on the development of aerosol delivery of drugs and poisons at Ft. Detrick, Maryland. His work, which is still classified, was funded through MKULTRA. Olson took a trip to England where MI6 and the CIA were working together on ways to prevent allied spies and servicemen from yielding to interrogation.

52 Tesla: Life and Legacy, Missing Papers, archived at PBS: http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_mispapers.html. 
53 Tesla: Master of Lightning PBS documentary Dec. 12th, 2000.
54 Box#8 of Declassified CIA documents pertaining to MKULTRA contains the following fragment: The Application of Tesla’s Technology in Today’s World. Obtain, online, through the National Security Archives at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
55 Harris, S. (1994) Factories Of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, And The American Cover-Up. London: Routledge.Tanaka, Y. 1998. Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, Michalczyk, J. J. 1994. Medicine, ethics, and the Third Reich: Historical and Contemporary Issues (METR) Kansas City, Missouri: Sheed & Ward
56 This site provides a selection of memorandum from within the CIA, in which funding is discussed.
http://cryptome.org/mkultra-0003.htm  Digital MK-Ultra files can be found at: http://www.intellnet.org/mkultra/ general note about MK-ULTRA funding)
57 Stephen Budiansky, Erica E. Goode and Ted Gest, “The Cold War Experiments”, U.S News and World Report January 24, 1994.
58 Patricia Greenfield, CIA’s Behavior Caper, APA Monitor, December 1977, pp. 1, 10-11

Olson also traveled to Frankfurt, where the two agencies conducted fatal experiments on prisoners of war and others considered to be “expendable.” Olson had an ethical dilemma with the research and, after voicing his concerns, returned to the United States. On November 28, 1953, Olson was in room 1018ª of the Hotel Statler in New York. At 2 a.m., Olson fell from the 10th floor window of his room to his death on the sidewalk below.

The headline reported his death as an accident or suicide. This report was discredited when, in 1975, another official lie was issued to ease his family’s suffering and deflect public scrutiny. This time Olson was called the victim of an LSD experiment.59 Media reports cited in the New York Times focused on the sensational aspects of LSD use and psychic warfare, but did not dwell on the more egregious violations of human rights and dignity inherent in the programs overseen by the CIA.60

The truth was not revealed until 1994 when his son finally had his body exhumed and examined. The autopsy showed that Olson’s left temple had been fractured before he fell. According to the New York Times Magazine CIA tradecraft books from 1953, that have since been released teach that “one of the surest methods of killing somebody without a trace involves impairing their reflexes with alcohol (or drugs) and then stepping up behind them and stunning them with a blow to the temple.

After that you quickly grab their ankles and in a single motion flip them over a bridge, balcony or out of a window more than 70 feet off of the ground.” ⁶¹ What Olson saw, and what cost him his life and his family their peace of mind for 30 years, was the beginning of a long term strategy to develop means of making individual both resistant to “brainwashing” and to control the actions of individuals.⁶² The cover story that was used to justify the beginning of the project was that there was a “brainwashing gap” with the Koreans.⁶³

59 Thomas O’Toole, “CIA Infiltrated 17 Area Groups, Gave out LSD Suicide Revealed,” front-page story Washington Post, June 11, 1975.
60 Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media: How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up”, Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
61 Michael Ignatieff, “What did the C.I.A. Do to Eric Olson’s Father?” New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2001.
62 ibid. and The Frank Olson Project at http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Contents.html http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Statements/FamilyStatement2002.html. Dr. Eric Olson continues to do what he can to bring to light the truth of his father’s death. At the above website there are memorandum written by Dick Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld in regards to the families lawsuit during the Ford administration in 1975
63 Reported in the New York Times as “Mind Control Studies had Origin in Trial of Mindszenty”, Aug. 2, 1977, p.16.

64 See Athan G. Theoharis, “Researching the Intelligence Agencies: The Problem of Covert Activities”, The Public Historian, 1984 National Council on Public History, University of California Press.

Experimenters used college students, servicemen, mental patients, the poor and, in several instances, children as young as four years old, in attempts to create untraceable assassins, couriers and other operatives. MKULTRA sub-projects involved the services of many notable universities and used a number of false front corporations such as the Foundation for the Study of Human Ecology and think tanks such as RAND, to shield the source of funding from those with ethical “problems.” ⁶⁴ We would still know nothing of these activities had it not been for the release of 16,000 pages of documents in 1977 through the FOIA request filed by the surviving family of Frank Olson.

Unfortunately CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of any MKULTRA records shortly before the order came in to his office⁶⁵, leaving an incomplete picture of a concerted effort by various agencies to create new and better means of controlling the thoughts, emotions and thus behavior, of unsuspecting individuals. - Source: Peter Phillips, Lew Brown and Bridget Thornton, December 2006, Sonoma State University, Project Censored, Media Freedom Foundation, ProjectCensored Website, (READ MORE) #US Electromagnetic Weapons and Human Rights, #electromagneticweapons, #HumanRights, #OSEH, #MindControl, #DEW