-
- On June 17, the state of Texas put to death by lethal
injection John Stanley Faulder, a Canadian who had been convicted in 1977
of murdering Inez Phillips, an oil heiress. Faulder's case received more
press attention than most executions these days, mainly because the Canadian
government tried to intervene on his behalf and urged Texas governor George
Bush to spare his life. Unmoved by arguments that after his arrest Faulder
had been denied his right to consult with officials from the Canadian embassy,
Bush sent him to the death chamber.
-
- What went entirely unmentioned by the American press
was that 37 years ago Stanley Faulder had been the unwitting victim of
medical experiments partially funded by the CIA. According to Faulder's
sister, Pat Nicholl, who lives in Jaspar, Alberta, "At 15 Stanley
was arrested for stealing a watch and sent to a boys' home for six months.
At 17, another theft got him six months in jail. At 22 he was caught in
a stolen car and sent to jail in New Westminster, B.C. for two years. There,
he asked for psychiatric help and was put in an experimental drug program
which involved doses of LSD".
-
- Faulder was one of hundreds of Canadian prisoners who
were experimented upon by psychiatrists in the 1960s and 1970s. The prison
LSD program was run by Dr. George Scott, a staff psychiatrist for the Canadian
Federal Corrections, who had served as director of the Canadian Army's
psychological rehabilitation department during World War II. After the
war, Scott teamed up with shrinks from Allan Memorial Institute, including
the notorious Ewen Cameron, to launch a variety of drug, electroshock,
sensory deprivation and pain tolerance experiments, using prisoners and
patients at mental hospitals as guinea pigs. The LSD for some of the experiments
as well as funding for the research was provided by the CIA and the Canadian
Defense Department.
-
- Scott, now 84, has been stripped of his license to practice
medicine. The sanction was not for dosing prisoners with psychotropic drugs,
but for emulating Sandor Ferenczi by making passes at female patients.
Even here Scott used drugs and electroshock to aid his seduction. According
to court records, Scott used a technique called "narcoanalysis"
to manipulate one of the women into having sex with him. Narcoanalysis
involves heavy doses of sodium pentathol and Ritalin. Scott used the pentathol,
in combination with electroshock, to take his victim into a near comatose
state, implanted erotic suggestions, and then roused her to consciousness
with shots of ritalin. This continued for a period of five years. Scott
even prescribed birth control pills for the woman.
-
- In 1969, Robert Renaud, an inmate at the Kingston Penitentiary,
claimed that Scott had given him ferocious jolts of electroshock as a punishment
for not cooperating with the doctor. Like Faulder, Renaud was in jail for
theft and was not considered violent. Scott dismissed Renaud's allegation,
though films of the psychiatrist shocking prisoners from that time have
recently surfaced. In response, Scott said he only performed electroshock
once a week on prisoners who "were sick enough".
-
- Scott is being sued by 24 women inmates who say they
were subjected to his LSD experiments. One of the women bringing the suit
is Dorothy Proctor, who was given LSD at the Kingston women's prison in
1961-the same year Faulder was drugged. Proctor was a 17-year-old black
woman, serving a three-year sentence for robbery, when Scott diagnosed
her as a sociopath and put her in his experimental program, which included
sensory deprivation (a 52-day stint in the Hole), electroshock and mega-doses
of LSD.
-
- In a 1998 interview with the CBC program "This Morning"
Proctor vividly described the first time she was offered LSD as she was
in the middle of a long stint in solitary: "The prison psychiatrist
comes down to the Hole, and he has a student with him, a lady psych student
from Queen's University and she's to take notes. He pulls up a chair for
her and him, and they are outside in the hallway section of the cell, talking
through the bars. I am on the floor, no mattress just a blanket. Then I
am taken out of the cell that has a commode. I am now in a cell with a
hole in the floor for my toilet. It had backed up so I am also in my own
waste and stench. So he comes out and presents me with this, you know,
we want to help you so much. We want you to correct yourself and we want
you to rehabilitate yourself. And I am your friend, and you are worth saving.
So just cooperate with me. And I have a pill that just might help you.
I am going to rescue you. That was the LSD. I don't think it was 15 or
20 minutes before Dante's Inferno. It was obvious. I am locked in. I can't
get away. And the walls start to move in on me. And they melt. The bars
turned to snakes and there was an awful vibration in my body. Just awful.
And I just thought I had gone mad."
-
- The women prisoners' suit will go to trial this fall.
Scott has shrugged off the claims, telling the Ottawa Citizen in an interview
two years ago that he has no regrets about his activities. "I am happy
with myself. I don't give a shit."
-
- "Worse Than Benedict Arnold" On July 1 the
Smoking Gun website put up 14 pages from more than 500 FBI transcripts
and memoranda, showing that Leary was volunteering to snitch, then snitching
to the feds about his knowledge of the Weather Underground and almost anyone
else Leary thought the feds might be interested in, including his former
wife Rosemary, his attorneys and the wife of one of his attorneys. This
was 1974 when Leary was in Folsom prison in northeastern California, after
convictions for a number of marijuana busts plus time for his jail break.
-
- It's not entirely fresh news that the late Timothy Leary
was a squealer and a snitch to the FBI. The snitching was well known at
the time. The FBI was eager to leak the fact that Leary, high priest of
LSD and potentate of the counterculture, was singing about his former associates.
-
- The news, the Bureau seemed to have reasoned, would spread
fear and despondency and foster rifts. On April 4, 1974, the Chicago Tribune
ran an FBI-inspired leak, headlined "Leary Will Sing"; and in
the letters that Abbie Hoffman wrote in the mid-1970s, edited by wife Anita,
To America With Love, vitriol was poured on Leary the Snitch. Himself on
the run after his cocaine bust, Abbie wrote, "I'm digesting news of
Herr Doktor Leary, the swine. It's obvious to me he talked his fucking,
demented head off to the Gestapo... God, Leary is disgusting. It's not
just a question of being a squealer, but a question of squealing on people
who helped you. The curses crowd my mouth. Timothy Leary is a name worse
than Benedict Arnold."
-
- Leary's awfulness was somewhat forgotten by the time
he'd become a staple of the Hollywood gossip columns, before his ashes
were fired off into the space that he roamed so freely in his acid-sodden
years. He began his career as a research psychologist at the Kaiser Foundation
in Oakland, where he developed a personality test to help the authorities
classify prisoners, allocating them to various levels of incarceration.
(When Leary himself was convicted, he was handed the very test that he
had devised years earlier, and thus was able to frame answers that put
him in a minimum security facility in San Luis Obispo, from which he was
sprung by the people he later ratted on.)
-
- From Kaiser, Leary went on to become a lecturer at Harvard.
It seems likely that the "Leary Test," as it was known, had attracted
the attention of the chairman of the Dept. of Social Relations, Dr. Henry
Murray, whose experiments on Ted Kaczynski are noted below. Murray's "Thematic
Aptitude Test" was being used by the CIA, which then took up the "Leary
Test," no doubt with handsome fees to Kaiser and to Leary. By the
time Leary got to Harvard Murray already had contracts with the Pentagon
and CIA to test student volunteers (including Kaczynski).
-
- Leary took the drugs to be tested and sallied forth to
the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Concord, a maximum security
prison, where he embarked on experiments designed, so he said, to see if
LSD and psilocybin could be successful agents in behavior modification.
As with all research on prisoners there were certainly other aspects Leary
didn't publicly own up to, such as investigation into the properties of
these psychotropic drugs in interrogation.
-
- The CIA helped spring Leary from his prison in Algeria,
where he'd been consigned by Eldridge Cleaver, who had instantly seen Leary
for what he was.. At the time he put him in jail, the exiled information
minister of the Black Panthers said, "There's something wrong with
Leary's brain. We want people to gather their wits, sober up and get down
to the serious business of destroying the Babylonian empire. To all those
of you who look to Dr. Leary for inspiration and leadership, we want to
say to you that your God is dead, because his mind has been blown by acid."
Leary's wife Rosemary didn't want to deal with the CIA agent who sprang
them from prison in Algeria. For once Leary was on the mark. "He's
liberal CIA," Leary told Rosemary. "And that's the best mafia
you can deal with in the 20th century."
-
- T. Kaczynski: Guinea Pig It turns out that Theodore Kaczynski,
a.k.a. the Unabomber, was a volunteer in mind-control experiments sponsored
by the CIA at Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
-
- Michael Mello, author of the recently published book,
"The United States of America vs. Theodore John Kaczynski," notes
that at some point in his Harvard years--1958 to 1962--Kaczynski agreed
to be the subject of "a psychological experiment". Mello identifies
the chief researcher for these only as a lieutenant colonel in World War
II, working for the CIA's predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic
Services. In fact, the man experimenting on the young Kaczynski was Dr.
Henry Murray, who died in 1988.
-
- Murray became preoccupied by psychoanalysis in the 1920s,
drawn to it through a fascination with Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which
he gave to Sigmund Freud, who duly made the excited diagnosis that the
whale was a father figure. After spending the 1930s developing personality
theory, Murray was recruited to the OSS at the start of the war, applying
his theories to the selection of agents and also presumably to interrogation.
-
- As chairman of the Department of Social Relations at
Harvard, Murray zealously prosecuted the CIA's efforts to carry forward
experiments in mind control conducted by Nazi doctors in the concentration
camps. The overall program was under the control of the late Sidney Gottlieb,
head of the CIA's technical services division. Just as Harvard students
were fed doses of LSD, psilocybin and other potions, so too were prisoners
and many unwitting guinea pigs.
-
- Sometimes the results were disastrous. A dram of LSD
fed by Gottlieb himself to an unwitting U.S. army officer, Frank Olson,
plunged Olson into escalating psychotic episodes, which culminated in Olson's
fatal descent from an upper window in the Statler-Hilton in New York. Gottlieb
was the object of a lawsuit not only by Olson's children but also by the
sister of another man, Stanley Milton Glickman, whose life had disintegrated
into psychosis after being unwittingly given a dose of LSD by Gottlieb.
-
- What did Murray give Kaczynski? Did the experiment's
long-term effects help tilt him into the Unabomber's homicidal rampages?
The CIA's mind experiment program was vast. How many other human time bombs
were thus primed? How many of them have exploded, with the precipating
agent never identified?
-
- CounterPunch 3220 N Street, NW, PMB 346 Washington, DC
20007 1-800-840-3683 email: counterpunch@counterpunch.org
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