A
alchemy
Guest
Another book recommendation where credit & thanks are due to David McGowan and his Center for an Informed America website. The blurb he has posted on this book is as follows:
A few choice quotes; I think it best to let Mr. Bowart speak for himself. Any bold emphasis added is mine:
We then get into the growth of the CIA and it practices:
I will bypass the in-depth review of JFK, RFK, and MLK, but this interesting tidbit popped up:
Towards the end of the book, the focus is on two areas: the (in)famous Jose Delgado, and a compilation of interviews with former assassins. A few quotes from the latter:
And another:
To wrap up:
Cheers,
John
I would go further than Dave did in his recommendation; this book is both an exposé and a well-documented history of the shenanigans undertaken by the CIA/NSA over the past 60 years. It makes "Journey into Madness" seem truly like a walk in the park, and by the end Mr. Bowart takes a chance with some predictions which, unfortunately, appear to be truly prescient.Dave McGowan said:Walter Bowart Operation Mind Control, Dell Publishing, 1978
One of the most difficult to locate books on the MK-ULTRA program. Bowart's exposé is worth searching for, but expect to pay a premium price for any copy you can locate.
A few choice quotes; I think it best to let Mr. Bowart speak for himself. Any bold emphasis added is mine:
And indeed, this assertion is thoroughly documented and backed up by the evidence.The Manchurian Candidate brought the idea of "brainwashing" to public consciousness. Brainwashing is the use of isolation, deprivation, torture, and indoctrination to break the human will. But what the book actually described was something more than brainwashing. It was mind control: a total takeover of an individual's mind by someone else. The someone else in Condon's version was a mad Chinese psycho-scientist. Always the satirist, Condon brought the Fu Manchu myth up to date. But, ironically, the techniques he described were first perfected and used not by the Chinese or the Communists, but by the United States.
Brainwashing was largely a campaign waged in the United States home press. It served as a sharp-edged propaganda weapon and was aimed at the American people to add the already considerable fear of the Communists. [...] [The American population] were urged as a matter of patriotism to "beat the Communists in the mind-control race".
Later, discussing how what Bowart has now named "the cryptocracy" might cover up any potential flaws in programmed individuals, we come across this 1949 Rand Corporation report:"I can hypnotize a man - without his knowledge or consent - into committing treason against the United States," boasted Dr. George Estabrooks in the early 1940's.
Estabrooks, chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University, was called to Washington by the War Department shortly after Pearl Harbor. Since he was the ranking authority on hypnosis at the time, they wanted his opinion on how the enemy might be planning to use hypnotism.
[...]
"In wartime, the motivation for murder under hypnosis doesn't have to be very strong," Estabrooks warned.
[...]
George Estabrooks had evidence which made him conclude that "one in five of the human race are highly suggestible, at least half are suggestible to a very considerable degree." And he warned, "... mere figures do not tell the story. That one fifth has a power far beyond its numbers; for this type of man, acting under direct suggestion, is no mere average person. He is a fanatic, with all that fanaticism may imply for good or evil ... Can this prospective subject --- this one in five individual --- be hypnotized against his will?"
"The answer to this very vital question," Estabrooks continued, "is 'yes,' though we prefer to say 'without his consent' instead of 'against his will.' We do not need the subject's consent when we wish to hypnotize him for we use 'disguised' technique..."
Remember: this is 1949, the early days of the pathocracy's push towards controlling the entire population. There is still plenty of room for further development, including drugs:The Rand report itself suggested that this trick of hypnotic suggestion might be used on a defendant awaiting trial. The defendant could be "prepared" in a series of hypnotic sessions to accept guilt about a criminal he did not commit, and then, if placed in a hypnotic trance while in the courtroom, the prosecutor's interrogation would elicit a false confession.
To go off on a quick tangent here, there is a reference to a "Percy":The top priority for testing in mind control were those drugs which were found to induce hypnosis. The administration and effects of barbiturates, amobarbital, secobarbital, pentothal, and sodium amytal were studied. Nonbarbiturate sedatives and calmatives such as ethchlorvynol, glutethimide, methprylon, methylparafynol, captodramin, and oxanamide were also tested. A whole range of amphetamines and their derivates were discussed as good tools [...] New drugs such as ritalin, marsilid, and mescaline were thought to hold great promise for mind-control applications.
[...]
In 1953, the CIA made plans to purchase ten kilograms of LSD for use in "drug experiments with animals and human beings." Since there are more than 10,000 doses in a gram, that meant that the CIA wanted 100 million doses. The CIA obviously intended to "corner the market" on LSD so that other countries would not be ahead of the U.S. in their potential "LSD warfare".
[...]
If the government didn't actually "begin" the psychedelic revolution, it was certainly responsible for shutting it down. It did this by controlling the availability and quality of drugs. Underground LSD labs were raided, and it wasn't long before its quality degenerated and the supply dried up. Several studies have shown that when LSD became illegal (October 6, 1966) real LSD ceased to be available on the street. What was sold as LSD was every other kind of chemical, including several forms of veterinary tranquilizers!
Much time is spent on Projects Bluebird, Artichoke, MKUltra, etc. as well, as a prelude to a thorough review of the major assassinations of the 1960's. But to finish the large population drug testing piece:On July 19, 1975 Sen. Charles H Percy, (R. Ill.) released a letter charging that the CIA had the Justice Department drop a drug case to protect its own involvement in drugs. Percy's letter said that the CIA refused to give federal prosecutors evidence in a case against Puttaporn Khramkhruan, a CIA employee, and one other person. Percy complained that "apparently CIA agents are untouchable --- however serious their crime or however much harm is done to society."
A chapter is devoted to expanding the issue surrounding the Candy Jones case, told in Donald Bain's book "The Control of Candy Jones". Has anyone read this book to comment?Experimentation with drugs and behaviour modification became so widespread in prisons and mental institutions that in the middle and late 1960s court dockets became crowded with lawsuits filed on behalf of the "human guinea pigs" who were victims of such research. By 1971 the number of lawsuits had reached such proportions that the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights began an investigation.
We then get into the growth of the CIA and it practices:
In the chill of the Cold War, few Americans remembered that John Foster Dulles had been pro-Nazi before Hitler invaded Poland.
A review of B F Skinner & Pavlov, among others:Eisenhower accurately predicted the course of history. "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
[...]
The cryptocracy is designed to function like a machine. It also has the feelings of a machine --- none at all. But, unlike a machine, it does have ambition. To it, human beings are so much cheap hardware who perform certain set functions which produce certain predetermined results. They are valued relative to cost and efficiency. The cryptocracy is the perfect cybernetic organism -- pure logic at the planning level -- nothing but automatic response in the field.
[...]
The existence of the cryptocracy also depends upon absolute secrecy. Without it they are powerless. Thus the cryptocracy's attempt to control information at its source -- the human mind.
Shades of Gurdjieff?Skinner concluded that every action is determined by the environment and that all behaviour is "shaped and maintained by its consequences." The behaviourists' mechanistic view of man was summed up by Skinner when he said, "If by 'machine' you simply mean any system which behaves in an orderly way, then man and all other animals are machines".
I will bypass the in-depth review of JFK, RFK, and MLK, but this interesting tidbit popped up:
Does this sound vaguely similar to the escalating cinematic, TV and video game violence over the past 40 years? An obvious reference is Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange", but on a much larger scale.In July, 1975 the Sunday Times in London quoted a U.S. Navy psychologist who admitted that U.S. Naval Intelligence had taken convicted murderers from military prisons, conditioned them as political assassins, and then placed them in American embassies around the world.
[...]
The conditioning of ... the assassins was accomplished by audio-visual desensitization, a standard behaviour modification process. These men were "desensitized' to mayhem by being shown films of people being killed or injured in a number of different ways. At first the films would show only mild forms of bloodshed. As the men became acclimated to the scenes of carnage, they would see progressively more violent scenes. The assassin candidates ... would eventually be able to dissociate any feelings they might have from even the goriest scenes they viewed.
This was written in 1978.The last phase of conditioning ... was to indoctrinate the candidates to think of their potential enemies as inferior forms of life. By this stage, the candidates would have already been selected for assignment to particular countries. They would be shown films and given lectures which portrayed the customs and cultural habits of the foreign countries in a biased fashion. The people of those countries would be portrayed as enemies of the United States and were always spoken of in demeaning terms. They were often presented as if they were "less than human". Their customs were ridiculed, and local leaders were presented as evil demagogues, even if they were legitimate political figures.
From this last statement, I inferred a link between US and Israeli black operations. Nothing was explicitly stated along these lines, and this was the only comment I noticed that might suggest such a link.... it took only a few weeks to indoctrinate susceptible candidates by this process. [...] He said that his busiest time was when a large group of men went through such training towards the end of 1973, at the time of the Yom Kippur war.
Towards the end of the book, the focus is on two areas: the (in)famous Jose Delgado, and a compilation of interviews with former assassins. A few quotes from the latter:
And a last few interesting bits, as this review has gone on probably waaaayyyyy too long:"...Don't kid yourself. This country is controlled by the Pentagon. All the major decisions in this country are made by the military, from my observations on the clandestine side of things."
[...]
(Bowart): "What are you suggesting, that there is an invisible coup d'etat which has occurred in the United States?" I asked.
"OK. There is a group of about eighteen or twenty people running this country. They have not been elected. The elected people are only figureheads for these guys who have a lot more power than even the President of the United States."
[...]
"You have to wonder at American stupidity. How much does it take to get people to wake up to what has happened?
Reference: smoking, and elements of "They Live""Medically", Moore continued, "these radio signals are directed to certain parts of the brain. When a part of your brain receives a tiny electrical impulse from outside sources, such as vision, hearing, etc., an emotion is produced -- anger at the sight of a gang of boys beating an old woman, for example. This same emotion of anger can be created by artificial radio signals sent to your brain by a controller. You could instantly feel the same white hot anger without any apparent reason."
The second part of the process, electronic dissolution of memory (EDOM), Moore said, is more complex. "In the brain is a chemical called acetylcholine, which carries electrical impulses from the eyes, ears, nose, nerve endings, etc., to the part of the brain where memory is located. Memory is nothing more than the recording of these electrical impulses, and acetylcholine is the path (or 'wire') that connects the inner brain to the nerves of your eyes and ears ... By electronically jamming the brain, acetylcholine creates static which blocks out sights and sounds. You would have no memory of what you saw or heard; your mind would be blank.
And another:
Remember, this is 1978 when this is being written -- before HAARP had the notoriety (and disinfo) that it has today. Also remember, we are in the midst of 'perpetual war' today...These and other experiments led the cryptocracy to study the effects of very-low-frequency sound (VLF) --- the opposite of ultrasonics --- as an instrument of war. Research revealed that there is a natural wave guide between the ionosphere and the earth which could be used to propagate very-low-frequency radiation and guide it to selected locations on the earth. Studies showed that this low-frequency sound subtly affected the electrical behaviour of the brain in much the same was that Dr. Adey's study had shown {to alter behaviour, moods and attention of chimpanzees}.
[...]
Pentagon reports apply low-frequency-sound waves to demobilizing the productive capacity of a civilian population in time of war.
To wrap up:
This is not necessarily a hard book to find, but it will come at a price -- as all good information does. I paid $60 for a small Dell paperback, and Abebooks only had 3 or 4 available (quickly escalating in price -- I took the cheapest!). It has been a long-standing curiosity to me that many books like this one, which contain some strong elements of Truth, seem to quickly disappear from bookshelves and become hard to locate, and expensive when they finally are tracked down.
Sprung from the complexity of a technological life, where self-responsibility is largely directed by propaganda and indoctrination, where an ignorant rather than an enlightened public is desired, the majority of responsible actions can result only in cultural disaster. This, in turn, adds to the frustration of the individual, who, weighing all the facts -- or what were presented as facts -- thought he had made the best choice possible. When these decisions, based on false information, are shown to result in negative effects, the frustration of the individual grows. Weariness eventually sets in, and the individual becomes willing to surrender his self-responsibility and eagerly awaits his liberation by some authoritarian figure.
Cheers,
John