MK-ULTRA Violence Or, how McGill pioneered psychological torture

[childadvocate]

MK-ULTRA Violence Or, how McGill pioneered psychological
torture

Features | September 6th, 2012 Written by Juan Camilo Velasquez


Today, many journalists, doctors, and the general public see the Allan
Memorial Institute in Royal Victoria Hospital as the cradle of modern
torture, a cradle built and rocked by Scottish-born Dr. Donald Ewen
Cameron. To the patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron, our university was the
site of months of seemingly unending torture disguised as medical
experimentation –– an experimentation that destroyed their lives and
changed the course of psychological torture forever.

Cameron’s experiments, known as MK-ULTRA subproject 68, were partially
funded by the CIA and the Canadian government, and are widely known
for their use of LSD, barbiturates, and amphetamines on patients. In
the media, they were known as the “mind control” studies done at
McGill and were reported as a brainwashing conspiracy from the CIA and
the Canadian government....

This story begins on June 1, 1951 at a secret meeting in the Ritz
Carlton Hotel on Sherbrooke. The purpose of the meeting was to launch
a joint American-British-Canadian effort led by the CIA to fund
studies on sensory deprivation. In attendance was Dr. Donald Hebb,
then director of psychology at McGill University, who received a grant
of $10,000 to study sensory deprivation. It would be fifteen years
after this meeting at the Ritz that Cameron would disastrously pick up
where Hebb left off.

Dr. Hebb paid a group of his own psychology students to remain
isolated in a room, deprived of all senses, for an entire day. In an
attempt to determine a link between sensory deprivation and the
vulnerability of cognitive ability, Hebb also played recordings of
voices expressing creationist or generally anti-scientific sentiments
– clearly, ideas psychology students would oppose. However, the
prolonged period of sensory deprivation made the students overly
susceptible to sensory stimulation. Students suddenly became very
tolerant of the ideas that they had readily dismissed before. As a
history professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Alfred
McCoy described in his book, A Question of Torture, that during Hebb’s
own experiments “the subject’s very identity had begun to
disintegrate.” One can only fathom the cognitive effects of Hebb’s
work....

MK-ULTRA Subproject 68

Cameron’s research was based on the ideas of “re-patterning” and “re-
mothering” the human mind. He believed that mental illness was a
consequence of an individual having learned “incorrect” ways of
responding to the world. These “learned responses” created “brain
pathways” that led to repetitive abnormal behaviour.

Dr. Cameron wanted to de-pattern patients’ minds with the application
of highly disruptive electroshock twice a day, as opposed to the norm
of three times a week. According to him, this would break all
incorrect brain pathways, thus de-patterning the mind. Some call it
brainwashing; Cameron called it re-patterning....

Step 1: To prepare them for the de-patterning treatment, patients
would be put into a state of prolonged sleep for about ten days using
various drugs, after which they experienced an invasive electroshock
therapy that lasted for about 15 days. But patients were not always
prepared for re-patterning and sometimes Cameron used extreme forms of
sensory deprivation as well....

Step 2: Following the preparation period and the de-patterning came
the process of “psychic driving” or re-patterning, in which Cameron
would play messages on tape recorders to his patients. He alternated
negative messages about the patients’ lives and personalities with
positive ones; these messages could be repeated up to half a million
times....

The experiments done at McGill were part of the larger MK-ULTRA
project led by Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA. In 1963, the year in which
MK-ULTRA ended, the CIA compiled all the research into a torture
manual called the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook.
Yes, a “torture manual” that would eventually define the agency’s
interrogation methods and training programs throughout the developing
world....

Following 9/11, the war on terror and the generalized fearmongering
that ensued, the Bush administration changed the rules of the game out
of concern for homeland security. Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld approved special practices that included the “use of
isolation facility for up to thirty days.” All of a sudden, the U.S.
allowed the use of torture methods developed just up University....

Only decades later, in the 1980s, did past victims speak about their
experiences, and by the nineties, the lawsuits began to pile up. In
response, the Canadian government launched “The Allan Memorial
Institute Depatterned Persons Assistance Plan,” which provided
$100,000 to each of the former patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron. The
compensation came from a recommendation by lawyer George Cooper, in
which he clarified that the Canadian government did not have a legal
responsibility for what happened, but a moral responsibility.
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2012/09/mk-ultraviolence/